Born on 9 September 1754, William Bligh rose to Vice-Admiral of the Blue and served as Governor of New South Wales from 1806 to 1808, but he is remembered above all for surviving not one but two uprisings against his command.
The first came on 28 April 1789 aboard HMAV Bounty, when Master’s Mate Fletcher Christian led a mutiny in the South Pacific. Bligh and 18 loyal crew were cast adrift in a 23-foot open launch so overloaded its gunwales sat only inches above the water, given four cutlasses and barely a week’s food, with a compass and quadrant but no charts. The ship’s clerk, Samuel, defied threats from the mutineers to smuggle aboard vital navigation instruments, while the gunner’s own pocket watch became the only means of keeping time. Fleeing hostile islanders at Tofua, the party lost quartermaster John Norton, killed on the beach, before Bligh navigated the tiny boat some 3,618 nautical miles to safety at Timor.
Nearly two decades later, as governor of Sydney, Bligh faced a second rebellion when officers of the NSW Corps deposed him in the colony’s Rum Rebellion, a rare case of a British officer surviving both a shipboard mutiny and a colonial military coup.
