William Bligh, born in 1754 and entered on Royal Navy books at age seven, was handpicked in 1776 by James Cook as sailing master for the third Pacific voyage. After Cook was killed in Hawaii and his successor Charles Clerke also died, Bligh helped bring the crew home in 1780. In 1787 he took command of HMS Bounty to carry breadfruit from Tahiti to feed enslaved workers on Caribbean plantations. The Admiralty rated the ship a cutter, which meant no extra officers and no Royal Marines. A month of failed attempts at Cape Horn forced the long route around Africa, and the late arrival kept the crew in Tahiti five months waiting for plants. On April 28, 1789, Fletcher Christian and 18 others seized the ship without bloodshed and set Bligh and 18 loyal men adrift in a 23 foot launch.

With a quadrant, compass, and pocket watch but no chronometer or charts, and after a man was killed on Tofua, Bligh steered 3,600 nautical miles to Timor in 47 days, rationing bread by weighing it against a pistol ball and charting the northern Australian coast along the way. Ship logs show he flogged less than most captains and fought scurvy with sauerkraut and exercise, but his vicious verbal abuse and grudges drove men to hate him. Exonerated, he completed the breadfruit mission in 1791 to 1793, lost his ship again in the 1797 Spithead and Nore mutinies, where the fleet called him That Bounty Bastard, then fought well at Camperdown and at Copenhagen under Nelson. As governor of New South Wales from 1806 he attacked the rum monopoly of the New South Wales Corps and John Macarthur until 400 soldiers arrested him in January 1808.

• Enslaved workers in the Caribbean refused to eat the breadfruit he delivered.
• The ackee fruit was named Blighia sapida in his honor.
• At Copenhagen he kept Nelson’s signal to continue fighting flying instead of the retreat order.
• His enemies spread a cartoon claiming he hid under a servant’s bed during the Rum Rebellion.
• He was promoted to vice admiral, surveyed Dublin Bay, and died of cancer in London in 1817.