HMS Bounty on 23 January 1790 in what is now called Bounty Bay. The mutineers remained undetected on Pitcairn until February 1808, when sole remaining mutineer John Adams and the surviving Tahitian women and their children were discovered by the Boston sealer "Topaz", commanded by Captain Mayhew Folger of Nantucket, Massachusetts. Seventeen years later, in 1825, , on a voyage of exploration under Captain Frederick William Beechey, arrived on Christmas Day off Pitcairn and spent 19 days there. Captain Beechey later recorded this in his 1831 published account of the voyage, as did one of his crew, John Bechervaise, in his 1839
Mutiny on the Bounty and Valentine—19 men were crowded into the launch, leaving it dangerously low in the water with only seven inches of freeboard. The 25 men remaining on "Bounty" included the committed mutineers who had taken up arms, the loyalists detained against their will, and others for whom there was no room in the launch. At around 10:00 the line holding the launch to the ship was cut; a little later, Bligh ordered a sail to be raised. Their immediate destination was the nearby island of Tofua, clearly marked on the horizon by the plume of smoke rising from its volcano. Bligh