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 on a British warship, , and arrived at Portsmouth on 19 June. There they were transferred to the guardship to await trial. The prisoners included the three detained loyalists—Coleman, McIntosh and Norman—to whom Bligh had promised justice, the blind fiddler Michael Byrne (or "Byrn"), Heywood, Morrison, and four active mutineers: Thomas Burkett, John Millward, Thomas Ellison and William Muspratt. Bligh, who had been given command of HMS "Providence" for a second breadfruit expedition, had left England in August 1791, and thus would be absent from the pending court martial proceedings. The court martial opened on 12 September 1792 on in