The mutiny aboard the British Royal Navy ship HMS Bounty occurs in the south Pacific on April 28, 789.

Led by Acting Lieutenant Fletcher Christian, disaffected crewmen seized control of the ship from their captain, Lieutenant William Bligh, and set him and eighteen loyalists adrift in the ship's open launch.

The mutineers variously settle on Tahiti or on Pitcairn Island.

Bligh meanwhile completes a voyage of more than thirty-five hundred nautical miles (sixty-five hundred kilometers; four thousand miles) in the launch to reach safety, and begins the process of bringing the mutineers to justice.

Bounty had left England in 1787 on a mission to collect and transport breadfruit plants from Tahiti to the West Indies.

A five-month layover in Tahiti, during which many of the men live ashore and form relationships with native Polynesians, proves harmful to discipline.

Relations between Bligh and his crew deteriorate after he begins handing out increasingly harsh punishments, criticism and abuse, Christian being a particular target.

After three weeks back at sea, Christian and others force Bligh from the ship.

Twenty-five men remain on board afterwards, including loyalists held against their will and others for whom there is no room in the launch.

Bligh reaches England in April 1790, whereupon the Admiralty dispatches HMS Pandora to apprehend the mutineers.

Fourteen are captured in Tahiti and imprisoned on board Pandora, which then searches without success for Christian's party that has hidden on Pitcairn Island.

After turning back toward England, Pandora runs aground on the Great Barrier Reef, with the loss of thirty-one crew and four prisoners from Bounty.

The ten surviving detainees reach England in June 1792 and are court martialed; four are acquitted, three are pardoned, and three are hanged.

Christian's group remains undiscovered on Pitcairn until 1808, by which time only one mutineer, John Adams, remains alive.

Almost all his fellow mutineers (including Christian), and their male Polynesian companions, have killed each other over time in varying conflicts.

The only survivors of these conflicts are Adams and Ned Young, who subsequently dies of asthma in 1800.

No action is taken against Adams.

Descendants of the mutineers and their Tahitian consorts live on Pitcairn into the twenty-first century.

The generally accepted view of Bligh as an overbearing monster and Christian as a tragic victim of circumstances, as depicted in well-known film accounts, has been challenged by late twentieth- and twenty-first-century historians from whom a more sympathetic picture of Bligh, and a more critical one of Christian, has emerged.