Nordhoff and Hall · 1932 · sea

Nordhoff and Hall's 1932 novel of the most famous mutiny at sea. The Bounty sails for Tahiti to collect breadfruit, fails to round Cape Horn and goes the long way about, spends five months in Matavai Bay, and is seized three weeks out - and Bligh is put into a launch with eighteen men and navigates it thirty-six hundred miles to Timor.

1. 1
   Spithead

   The Bounty sails from Spithead in December 1787, a small ship converted to carry breadfruit plants, overcrowded, with no marines aboard and a commander who is an outstanding navigator and an impossible superior.

2. 2
   Tenerife

   South by the Canaries, and the pattern of the voyage sets in: floggings, quarrels over rations, and a captain whose tongue does more damage over ten months than any punishment book records.

3. 3
   Cape Town

   A month of trying to beat round Cape Horn fails, and Bligh turns east instead - down to the Cape and across the whole Indian Ocean and Southern Pacific, adding half a world to a voyage already too long.

4. 4
   Tahiti

   Five months in Matavai Bay collecting and potting a thousand breadfruit plants, in a place the crew find pleasanter than anywhere they have been - and several of them form attachments they have no intention of leaving.

5. 5
   Tofua

   Three weeks out from Tahiti, off Tofua in the Friendly Islands, Fletcher Christian takes the ship at dawn - and Bligh and eighteen loyal men are put into the twenty-three foot launch with a sextant, no chart and five days' food.

6. 6
   Timor

   Bligh navigates the open launch thirty-six hundred miles west to Coupang in Timor in forty-seven days, losing one man - a feat of seamanship performed by the man everybody had just mutinied against.