Mutiny on the Bounty (novel) Mutiny on the Bounty (novel) Mutiny on the Bounty is the title of the 1932 novel by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall, based on the mutiny against Lieutenant William Bligh, commanding officer of the "Bounty" in 1789. It has been made into several films and a musical. It was the first of what became "The Bounty Trilogy", which continues with "Men Against the Sea", and concludes with "Pitcairn's Island". The novel tells the story through a fictional first-person narrator by the name of Roger Byam, based on a crew member Peter Heywood. Byam, although not one of the mutineers,
Mutiny on the Bounty officers. These signed the ship's roster as able seamen, but were quartered with the midshipmen and treated on equal terms with them. Most of "Bounty"'s crew were chosen by Bligh or were recommended to him by influential patrons. William Peckover the gunner and Joseph Coleman the armourer had been with Cook and Bligh on HMS "Resolution"; several others had sailed under Bligh more recently on the "Britannia". Among these was the 23-year-old Fletcher Christian, who came from a wealthy Cumberland family descended from Manx gentry. Christian had chosen a life at sea rather than the legal career envisaged by his