In December 1787, the Bounty sailed from Spithead for the South Seas. In April 1789, her crew mutinied near the Friendly Islands and set the commander, William Bligh, and several companions adrift on the ocean in an open boat. The mutineers took Tahitian wives and settled on an uninhabited and virtually unknown island where twenty years later one survivor and many of their descendents were discovered. Bligh, himself, safely navigated his boat-load of starving shipmates thousands of miles across the ocean to Timor. Published to coincide with the bicentenary of the mutiny of the Bounty, this classic of maritime history, which first appeared in 1831, records the intriguing story of adventure and discovery, in full. Based on his research of unpublished documents and the papers of Captain Peter Heywood--a midshipman on the Bounty--Sir John Barrow answers the two crucial questions raised by the incident: why the crew of the Bounty mutinied in the first place, and why an officer prompted and led the mutiny.