Barrow, John, Sir, 1764-1848.

The eventful history of the mutiny and piratical seizure of H.M.S. Bounty : its cause and consequences / illustrated by six etchings from original drawings by Lieut.-Colonel Batty. (London : John Murray, 1831)

The Bounty under Captain William Bligh was sent to the South Seas in 1787 to collect bread-fruit for transport to the West Indies. The stayed in Tahiti from October 1788 to April 1789. After they set sail for Cape Horn en route to the West Indies, the crew became restless. They had enjoyed the idyllic life in the islands and were reluctant to go to sea again. On the morning of 28^th April twenty-five of the crew, under the Mate, Fletcher Christian, mutinied. They set Bligh and the remaining crew members adrift in a small boat. Bligh managed to reach Timor, 3,600 miles away, on 14^th June 1789. In 1806 he became Governor of New South Wales, only to be deposed in the “Rum Rebellion” of 1808.

The mutineers returned to Tahiti, and Christian, with eight others and some Tahitian wives and manservants, eventually landed, in 1790, at Pitcairn Island, 1,350 miles south-east of Tahiti. Pitcairn was uninhabited until Fletcher Christian and his party settled there. They remained undisturbed until 1808 when Captain Folger, of the American ship the Topaz, landed. He found only one of the mutineers alive, John Adams, though he now called himself Alexander Smith. There had been an uprising by the Tahitian men, who killed all of the white men, except Adams, who was severely wounded. According to Adams/Smith’s account the bereaved women then killed the Tahitian men. Adams was left as the only man on the island with “eight or nine women and several small children.” By the time Folger arrived there was a population of thirty-five. Apparently Christian had gone insane shortly after arriving at Pitcairn and threw himself off the rocks into the sea. (p. 283-284) Though other accounts have him as one who fell during the uprising of the Tahitians.

The frontispiece shows “George Young and his wife, (Hannah Adams) of Pitcairn’s Island.”

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