Immediately after his miraculous arrival home, the English feted Captain William Bligh as a hero.
“The distresses he has undergone entitle him to every reward. In navigating his little skiff through so dangerous a sea, his seamanship appears as matchless, as the undertaking seems beyond the verge or probability,” crowed the London Chronicle.
Fletcher Christian and the other mutineers were painted as treacherous and degenerate outlaws. “I was run down by my own dogs,” Bligh told everyone contemptuously.
Three days after his arrival back in London, Bligh presented the King with his written version of events. It was quickly published by the Admiralty for all to read. By October a mandatory court martial process exonerated Bligh for the loss of the Bounty. He was then quickly promoted to Master and Commander; then Post Captain, despite lacking the suitable experience required. He was given command of Medea and sent off to complete his acquisition of breadfruit trees for Caribbean slaves.
This time Bligh returned successfully. But in the three years that had passed, fortune had turned against him.
Pandora, the ship sent in pursuit of the Bounty soon after Bligh’s return, had encountered the mutiny deserters left in Tahiti. The account they gave of Bligh at their own court martial painted him in a very different light from the one he had painted for himself. They described him as a foul-tempered bully who had grievously oppressed his crew.
When the court also learned that Pandora’s Captain Edwards had failed to release some of the mutineers from confinement when Pandora began to sink, it created some public sympathy towards the plight of these men and the tyrannical culture of their captains.
The Lords of Admiralty began to refuse to receive Captain Bligh. They also denied him the usual rewards for accomplishing a difficult voyage.
Then in 1794, Edward Christian – Fletcher Christian’s brother – published his own examination of the Bounty mutiny. It painted his brother in a far more favourable light and Captain Bligh in a far worse one.
The narrative of the mutiny on the Bounty began to shift away from the heroic captain’s survival towards the destruction of Fletcher Christian’s promising life by Bligh’s excessive tyranny.
Bligh tried to stem the damage by publishing a rebuttal, to no avail. Ultimately, he became a victim of what is called today “call-out culture”.
It did not help his situation that he never changed his prideful character and his bombastic treatment of subordinates. Officers who sailed with him on Providence years later found that ‘the very high opinion he has of himself makes him hold every one of our profession with contempt, perhaps envy.’
By the time he commanded Monarch in 1801, ‘his manners and disposition were not pleasant… and he held general disgust to the Officers.’
He was eventually brought to court martial again for his ‘tyrannical, oppressive and unofficerlike behaviour.’ Forced into a humiliating backdown, Bligh managed to save his career with a very rare moment of concession along the lines of ‘I’m sorry you are offended by me’.
By 1806, he became governor of the colony of New South Wales. He argued with everyone there and within two years, other commanding officers hated him so much they orchestrated a coup against him.
At the end of his life, Bligh undertook some cartography work around Ireland and died in 1817 of cancer. His published obituary consisted of a handful of short lines.
Meanwhile across the world on Pitcairn Island, things were going from very bad to worse for the Bounty mutineers.