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of the excessive time spent getting to Tahiti, while on the island Bligh was lenient with his charges. When he delegated orders, he did not always follow up to confirm that they were executed. The ship was not taken out for routine tune-up trips, an anchor line broke, and the sails began to rot in the heat and humidity. On January 5, 1789, three crew members deserted—William Muspratt, John Millward, and Charles Churchill—stealing the ship’s launch along with muskets. Thomas Hayward was officer of the watch, who claimed he was asleep when it happened. Bligh had him confined in irons, then set out to capture the deserters, which took him three weeks. Churchill received a dozen lashes; the other two got two dozen each; pace the draconian Bligh myth, all were let off easy since the recommended punishment for desertion was death by hanging.

As for Bligh’s infamous temper—he called his officers “scoundrels, damned rascals, hounds, hell-hounds, beasts and infamous wretches”—one of his defenders, George Tobin, who sailed with Bligh on the Providence in 1790, observed: “Those violent tornados of temper when he lost himself were upsetting, and “Once or twice, indeed, I felt the unbridled license of his power of speech, yet never without soon receiving something like a plaister to heal the wound . . . when all, in his opinion, was right, who could be a man more placid and interesting.”

Bligh was walking a narrow plank between enforcing the strict rules of the British navy—refined over the centuries for maintaining discipline among young men stuck in tight quarters for long periods at sea—and earning the respect of his men through a fair and humanitarian command. His temper was a by-product of the struggle to find this balance, along with fulfilling his own personal ambition. In 1805, in another court-martial trial for “unofficerlike conduct and ungentlemanly behavior,” Bligh admitted that his “high sense of professional duty” made him “sometimes too particular in the execution of it.” In fact, Bligh’s harsh temperament was directed not to the lower-ranking men but at his commissioned, warrant, and petty officers—those responsible for the rank and file, and from which his hierarchy was dependent down the chain of command. For example, Bligh snapped at a lieutenant: “What, Sir, you damn’d scoundrel, never was a man troubled with such a lot of blackguards as I am. Take care, Sir, I am looking out for you.” To the court-martial judges he explained the context and motives for such comments:

I candidly and without reserve avow that I am not a tame and indifferent observer of the manner in which officers placed under my orders conduct themselves in the performance of their several duties. A signal or any communication from a commanding officer has ever been to me an indication for exertion and alacrity to carry into effect the purport thereof and peradventure I may occasionally have appeared to some of these officers as unnecessarily anxious for its execution by exhibiting an action or gesture peculiar to myself to such.

Let’s not forget the status and hierarchy of the other major player in this drama, Fletcher Christian. Born in Cumberland on September 15, 1764, Christian was ten years younger than Bligh, a last born whose older brothers, John and Edward, were well educated at Peterhouse and St. John’s College, Cambridge. Edward became a professor of law at Cambridge (Bligh called him “a sixpenny Professor”). Like Bligh before him, Fletcher first went to sea at age sixteen, and two years later he sailed under Bligh on the HMS Cambridge. At five feet nine inches, he was tall, and was sometimes described as “swashbuckling,” “a slack disciplinarian,” and “a ladies man” who was conceited but mild, generous, and open. In recounting the mutineers in his narrative, Bligh described Christian as “master’s mate, aged twenty-four years, five feet nine inches high, blackish, or very dark brown complexion, dark brown hair, strong made, a star tattooed on his left breast, tattooed on his backside; his knees stand a little out, and he may