Mutiny On The Bounty - in Popular Culture

In Popular Culture

The story of the mutiny has been adapted numerous times to the page, the screen, and the stage.

Although William Bligh has frequently been portrayed as a middle-aged man in stage and screen productions about the Bounty, he was thirty-four years old at the time of the mutiny, having been born in 1754. This may be accurate as far as his appearance went, however, since people aged more quickly at the time.

• Mary Russell Mitford wrote her poem "Christina, the Maid of the South Seas" in 1811, following the 1810 publication of Captain Mayhew Folger's rediscovery of Pitcairn.

• Pitcairn's Island: A New Melo Dramatic Ballet of Action, opened in Drury Lane in April 1816, following publication in the Naval Chronicle of an account of the 1814 visit to Pitcairn of Captain Sir Thomas Staines, of the Briton, and Captain Philip Pipon, of the Tagus.

• Lord Byron published his poem The Island in 1823.

• Sir John Barrow's 1831 book, The Eventful History of the Mutiny and Piratical Seizure of H.M.S. Bounty: Its Cause and Consequences, ensured the enduring fame of the Bounty and her people.

• Mark Twain describes the mutiny as background to his story "The Great Revolution in Pitcairn" (1879).

• Les révoltés de la Bounty by Jules Verne in 1879, based on a work by Gabriel Marcel.

• R. M. Ballantyne wrote a novel about the mutineers on the Bounty called The Lonely Island in 1880.

• A first movie (The Mutiny of the Bounty) was made in Australia in 1916.

• A trilogy of novels, (Mutiny on the 'Bounty' (1932), Men Against the Sea, and Pitcairn's Island) by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall (also published in one volume as The Bounty Trilogy), as well as the movies and television shows based on them, relate fictionalized versions of the mutiny.

• The second movie version was the Australian film In the Wake of the Bounty (1933), starring Errol Flynn as Fletcher Christian.

• The next movie was Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), which won the Oscar for Best Picture that year. It starred Charles Laughton as Bligh and Clark Gable as Christian.

• Another Mutiny on the Bounty film was released in 1962, starring Trevor Howard as Bligh and Marlon Brando as Christian. The 1962 movie is generally considered the least accurate, with such historical errors as Christian and Bligh's meeting (and subsequently hating) each other at the first sailing of the Bounty, the mutiny's occurring in the middle of the day sparked by Bligh's order to let a sailor die of ingested saltwater poisoning rather than be given water set aside for the breadfruits, and Fletcher Christian's dying from injuries sustained in the fire aboard Bounty while trying to save the ship.

• Bengt Danielsson, a Kon-Tiki crew member, wrote What Happened on the Bounty in 1962.

• In the novel 2010: Odyssey Two (1982) by Arthur C. Clarke, the Russian and American crew of Soviet spacecraft Alexei Leonov watch one of the movies based on the mutiny. After that, their captain Tatiana Orlova (Tanya) lightheartedly tells her crew, 'You'll hang for this, you mutinous dogs!'.

• A fifth film, The Bounty (1984), starred Anthony Hopkins as William Bligh and Mel Gibson as Fletcher Christian. This film is generally considered the most historically accurate with some of the scenes reenacted directly from William Bligh's own log.

• In Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986), McCoy names the Klingon vessel captured in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock HMS Bounty, after being summoned back to Earth along with several other crew members for stealing and ultimately destroying the USS Enterprise.

• The English post-punk band The Mekons included a song about the mutineers, "(Sometimes I Feel Like) Fletcher Christian", on their 1988 album So Good It Hurts.

• Queensland Museum marine archaeology curator Peter Gesner wrote Pandora, an archaeological perspective in 1991 (Qld. Museum Press, Brisbane). A revised and updated edition was published by the Qld. Museum in 2000.

• BBC Radio 4 broadcast an adaptation of the Nordhoff-Hall novel in three parts by Bert Coules in 1996, starring Oliver Reed as William Bligh, Roger Daltrey as Fletcher Christian, Lionel Jeffries, and Linus Roach.

• Australian author Peter Corris wrote a novel called The Journal of Fletcher Christian in 2005.

• The Wettest Stories Ever Told, a 2006 episode of the animated series The Simpsons, features a story based on the mutiny on the Bounty.

• Val McDermid explores the fate of Fletcher Christian in her novel The Grave Tattoo (2007).

• Rasputina wrote the double album Oh Perilous World in 2007 as faux 1930s musical theater about Pitcairnian mutineer life, with thinly veiled, anti-neoconservative allegory.

• John Boyne wrote a novel called Mutiny: A Novel of the Bounty, published in 2008, about the voyage of the Bounty and the mutiny from the perspective of Captain Bligh's young personal valet, John Jacob Turnstile.

• The event was referenced in Volume 3 of the manga series Highschool of the Dead, when the Takagi Safehouse was compared to Tahiti, and the bickering band of survivors was likened to the mutineers.

• The comic strip "On the Bounty" re-enacts the mutiny with each new installment, each time focusing on a different theme or subject.