Mutiny of the Bounty and Other Narratives

In 1789, Lieutenant William Bligh commanded the HMS Bounty on a routine breadfruit expedition in the South Pacific. What happened next became legend. In his own urgent, unstinting prose, Bligh recounts the mutiny that stripped him of his ship and the extraordinary 47-day open-boat voyage that followed. Cast adrift with eighteen loyal men in a twenty-three-foot launch, Bligh navigated 3,618 nautical miles across some of the world's most treacherous waters to reach Timor. It remains one of the greatest small-boat voyages in history. This volume also includes Bligh's autobiographical 'Life of a Sailor Boy' and the adventure narrative 'The Sunken Treasure', offering a fuller portrait of a man who rose from humble origins to command HM ships and whose name would forever be synonymous with maritime disaster and survival. Bligh is unrepentant, undiplomatic, and utterly certain of his own correctness: reading him is to hear the voice of a man who believed himself wronged and never quite got over it.