HMS Bounty

Type

Full-rigged Ship

Period

18th Century

Nation

Great Britain

Overview: HMS Bounty (originally the collier Bethia) was a small Royal Navy vessel purchased in 1787 to transport breadfruit saplings from Tahiti to the British West Indies as a cheap food source for enslaved plantation workers. She is remembered chiefly for the 1789 mutiny led by Fletcher Christian against Lieutenant William Bligh, one of the most famous incidents in naval history. Specifications: Built in 1784 at the Blaydes Yard, Hull, and purchased by the Navy for £1,950, she was three-masted and full-rigged, registering about 215–230 tons burthen. Her dimensions were roughly 90 ft 10 in on deck by 24 ft 4 in beam, with 11 ft 4 in depth of hold, and she carried four 4-pounder carriage guns plus ten half-pounder swivel guns and a complement of around 44–46 officers and men. Although rigged as a full three-masted ship, the Admiralty officially rated her as a cutter — the smallest warship category — meaning her sole commissioned officer was a lieutenant rather than a post-captain, and she carried no Royal Marine detachment. Service History: HMS Bounty was a small merchant vessel that the Royal Navy purchased in 1787 for a botanical mission, sent to the South Pacific under William Bligh to acquire breadfruit plants and transport them to the British West Indies, a mission never completed owing to the 1789 mutiny led by acting lieutenant Fletcher Christian. The mutineers later burned Bounty while she was moored at Pitcairn Island in the Southern Pacific Ocean in 1790. An American adventurer helped land several remains of Bounty in 1957. Notable Facts: For scale modelers, the ship's small size and heavy conversion for the breadfruit mission (her great cabin was gutted and fitted with pots for hundreds of saplings) make her an unusual subject compared to typical warships of the era. Several later "HMS Bounty" replicas were built for film, most notably a 1960 vessel constructed in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia for the 1962 MGM film, which was roughly 25% larger than the original and was ultimately lost off North Carolina during Hurricane Sandy in 2012 — modelers should take care not to confuse plans or photos of that replica with the original 18th-century ship.