Captain Bligh’s Portable Nightmare by John Toohey 1998 , 214pg

Captain Bligh was an importand part of British Naval History.  26/8/17

With the Mutiny of the bounty Captain Bligh was forced into a boat 1789. They had come from Tahiti where they got breadfruit plants to take to the slave islands
Now we read about Bligh’s experience background that he was ships Master under Captain Cook because he was an excellent cartographer.  Up till then many exploration ships had gone out and few had returned till Cook took out the Discovery.  On the Bounty was a 23 feet long sloop for research into rivers designed to carry 10 but the mutineers put all 19 that they did not like.  To measure the boats speed you through out a log with a knotted string thus the terms log and knots. On this launch was the most skilled part of the crew. They calculated to get to their destination it would take 42 days. Plain sailing can be at the equator where the world map is square between longitude and latitude but further north or south the quadrants have a different shape. They travelled from Tofoa to Timor 3400 miles past the Great Barrier Reef.
John Ruskin painted a portrait of Bligh. He had a wife and 4 daughters, and was not interested in the free women on the islands. Cook was of Scottish background he and Bligh were connected to the great thinkers of the time like Bentham.
The diet in England was so bad as well as alcoholism, so that when sailors were only a few days on the ships they suffered scurvy. The 18 survivors had had a healthy diet and were not suffering from bad nutrition only hunger. Much of the journey it rained which was better than being dry as they had water. By soaking cloths in sea water it dries out quicker. When a big bird landed on their mast and they caught it the captain divided it up in equal portions, one person faces away and allocates the pieces blindly to each person so that nobody can argue that they lost out.   They stopped at an island where they were able to replenish their water and found mussels and birds that they ate and left it before the warring natives arrived. They eventually arrived at Timor where Bligh met the Dutch governor who was dying of tropical disease and in a worse state than him. They took a ship to Batavia (Jacarta today) and waited for a Dutch convey of ships who travelled through the pirate infested strait and returned to Europe. A few of the survivors died of tropical diseases in Batavia.
Very few other men at he time had the skill to navigate and survive a journey like this.  This was a period when there were a number of mutinies in the British Navy and at the time of the French Revolution.
On the 2nd breadfruit voyage Mathew Flinders learned from Bligh and he followed up developing cartography of Tasmania. The breadfruit projects failed.
1810 Flinders wrote the Voyage of Terra Australis .
1801 Bligh later commanded a ship at the Battle of Copenhagen against Norway/Denmark
1806 was governor of New South Wales to clean up the rum trade. The Bounty story is very much part of the history of the British Navy and of exploration of he world.