HMS Briton (1812) crew that had seized HMS "Bounty" from its captain Lieutenant William Bligh during the 1789 mutiny aboard the ship. With the coming of the Pax Britannica in 1815, "Briton" undertook various voyages before she was broken up in 1860. At the time of HMS "Briton"s launch, the United Kingdom was at war with the United States and France such that vessels of either country were considered legitimate prizes of war. As a result, on 1 December 1812 "Briton" recaptured , which the American privateer "Grand Turk" had captured a few weeks earlier as "Wolfe's Cove" was sailing from Quebec to
Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), based on the popular namesake novel by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall, and starring Charles Laughton and Clark Gable as Bligh and Christian, respectively. The film's story was presented, says Dening, as "the classic conflict between tyranny and a just cause"; Laughton's portrayal became in the public mind the definitive Bligh, "a byword for sadistic tyranny". The two subsequent major films, "Mutiny on the Bounty" (1962) with Trevor Howard and Marlon Brando, and "The Bounty" (1984) with Anthony Hopkins and Mel Gibson, largely perpetuated this image of Bligh and that of Christian as tragic hero. The latter film