Fletcher Christian, leader of the most famous mutiny in maritime history, was born in 1764 in Cumberland, England, into Manx gentry whose ancestors served as Deemsters on the Isle of Man. His father died when he was a toddler, and his mother Anne ran up debts equal to nearly a million pounds in modern terms, lost the Moorland Close estate, and fled to the Isle of Man to escape English creditors. He attended the Cockermouth school that William Wordsworth also attended, then entered the Royal Navy at 17, late by the standards of the day. William Bligh became his patron, rating him second mate on the merchant ship Britannia and later, after the Navy Board appointed John Fryer as master of HMS Bounty, promoting him to acting lieutenant mid-voyage. The Bounty was sent to carry breadfruit from Tahiti to the West Indies as cheap food for enslaved people.

Bligh flogged less than James Cook but humiliated his officers with a volatile tongue, and after five months in Tahiti, where Christian effectively married Maimiti, the crew was ordered back to sea. On April 28, 1789, near Tonga, Christian used his 4 a.m. watch to arm sympathizers, and Bligh and 18 loyal men were set adrift in a 23 foot launch that Bligh sailed over 3,500 miles to Timor. Christian took eight mutineers, six Tahitian men, and 11 Tahitian women to Pitcairn Island and burned the Bounty. The British men seized the land and the women and worked the Tahitian men as laborers until an uprising killed almost all the men, Christian among them.

• Bligh described Christian as bow-legged, dark, tattooed with a star, and sweating so heavily that he soiled anything he handled.
• The American sealer Topaz reached Pitcairn in 1808 and found only one surviving mutineer, John Adams.
• Adams gave conflicting accounts of Christian’s death, while a woman named Jenny said in 1817 that he was shot while working his yam plot.
• Robert Southey believed he saw Christian in Plymouth in 1803, and such rumors may have fed Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
• His son Thursday October Christian, born in 1790, began a line whose descendants live on Pitcairn and Norfolk Island today.