After months of tension during a breadfruit-collecting voyage, mutineers under Fletcher Christian seized control of the Bounty near Tofua. Bligh and eighteen loyal crew were set adrift in an open launch; Bligh navigated it over 3,600 nautical miles to Timor, a feat of seamanship, while the mutineers eventually settled on remote Pitcairn Island.
The Bounty had spent five months in Tahiti collecting breadfruit saplings intended as cheap food for enslaved workers in the Caribbean, and the crew grew accustomed to the island's relaxed pleasures. When the ship finally resumed its voyage, discipline frayed. Bligh was a skilled navigator but a harsh and unpredictable commander, prone to public tirades over trivial matters like missing coconuts.
Before dawn on April 28, Fletcher Christian and a group of mutineers stormed Bligh's cabin, bound him, and forced him and eighteen loyalists into the ship's 23-foot launch with minimal provisions and no charts. Most historians believe Christian intended it as a death sentence.
Bligh instead pulled off one of the era's great feats of navigation, sailing the overloaded, leaking boat across open ocean without maps for 47 days to reach the Dutch port of Coupang in Timor, losing only one man to a hostile encounter along the way. Christian and eight mutineers, along with Tahitian companions, eventually settled on uninhabited Pitcairn Island, where their descendants remain to this day, and where the wreck of the Bounty, burned to prevent detection, still lies in the harbor.