Mutiny on the Bounty Mutiny on the Bounty The mutiny on the Royal Navy vessel occurred in the south Pacific on 28 April 1789. Disaffected crewmen, led by Acting Lieutenant Fletcher Christian, seized control of the ship from their captain Lieutenant William Bligh and set him and 18 loyalists adrift in the ship's open launch. The mutineers variously settled on Tahiti or on Pitcairn Island. Bligh meanwhile completed a voyage of more than in the launch to reach safety, and began the process of bringing the mutineers to justice. "Bounty" had left England in 1787 on a mission to collect and transport breadfruit plants
Bounty jumper purpose of capturing the bounty jumpers. One bounty jumper became particularly famous. Adam Worth became an international thief, with the theft of Thomas Gainsborough's painting "Duchess" being his most famous crime. He would become known as the "Napoleon of Crime", a label Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would borrow when creating the character Professor Moriarty, whom Doyle loosely based on Worth. According to William Pinkerton, Worth did actually fight once, for the Union in the Battle of the Wilderness, and once collected a $30 Confederate bounty, only to eventually fight for the Union. Pinkerton further said that Worth did what he