Cover blurb

`Everyone, Professor Kennedy begins, knows the truth about William Bligh. He was the tyrannical Captain of HMS Bounty who drove his crew to mutiny in the South Seas and was turned adrift by the noble Fletcher Christian. Surviving by a miracle, he then mobilised the power of the Royal Navy to have his revenge, from which Christian escaped only by leading his men to the remote fastness of Pitcairn, where he, they and their Tahitian wives created an island paradise.

Almost everything in this story, as the author goes on to show, is false. Christian was not a hero. Pitcairn was not a paradise. Bligh's escape was not a miracle but an extraordinary feat of seamanship. And he was certainly not a tyrant, not at least in a navy where the qualification to the title was set fairly high. He was, nevertheless, a very peculiar man...' Sunday Telegraph

`Gavin Kennedy's book is based on an extraordinary range of primary sources which build up three well-told narratives; Bligh's career leading up to the mutiny, the mutiny itself and the fate of the mutineers, and Bligh's career — which included two further mutinies — from the moment he was cast adrift in an open boat. This is history on the human scale, depicting a reality of squalid motivation and psychological inadequacy... takes us as close to the reality of Bligh as we are ever likely to get' Scotsman
`The background causes and aftermath of the 1789 mutiny on the Bounty make compulsive reading; a shattering tale that highlights the hellish conditions of life in the 18th century Royal Navy... A vast amount of meticulous research has come to rest in these pages, a true summation of the current state of Bligh scholarship' The Times

Illustration:Graham Humphreys

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