I have a question.
Why did Christian sail east from Tahiti. Why not west to Australia? It is a continent. He and his men could have simply melted into the countryside and vanished. Life might have been rough in the wilds of of Australia, but why choose a rock island in the South Pacific?
Australia was a new colony, the British were all over it.
captain bligh even went to sydney and lived and worked there for a number of years as governor.
for christian, he wanted somewhere where they would not be found. pitcairns was not on any british maps at the time , so he figured it was the closest bet.
also they didnt want to go to a place where people already were.
new zealand, australia , south america etc.
pit cairns wasnt a good choice, it's not a very nice place, people still live there today desendants from the mutineers.
I think booze is still illegal on that island because of the fallout from the mutinies.
Spoiler alert for them spoil sports out there! Y'all like spoiled milk, stop crying over it!
Are you having a laugh?
At the time Australia was just discovered and slowly being settled. Only Sydney had a reasonable White population. The interiors and coasts were controlled by savage Aborigines who killed anyone treading there.
The only places in Australia that were survivable back then were where there were already colonies. That meant the Royal Navy would learn where they were.
Personally, I'd have tried to take the Bounty to the United States. They could've gotten to the Atlantic via Cape Good Hope before the Royal Navy came looking for them. They could even have tried to go around Cape Horn if they'd waited for the right weather (i.e. December/January when it was summer there).
One great benefit is that the Royal Navy would NEVER have expected them to head for the Atlantic. Once around the Horn, they could've proceeded up the coast of South America, past the Caribbean until they reached American waters. There, they could've easily found a deserted stretch of shoreline, gone ashore with anything useful from the ship and burned it there. The wreck might've been discovered at some point, but by that time Christian and his followers would've dispersed inland, in a country where Britain currently didn't have the smoothest of relations with (as they'd recently fought the Revolutionary War with).
Lucky he didnt listen to you - Sailing through the Atlantic would have been a disaster -
A) because of Pirates and B) because said pirates were being chased around the Caribbean by the Royal Navy - in order to enter the US from the S Atlantic they would have to traverse these 2 entities, not to mention Spanish or Portuguese galleons finding them first.
Plus Mel already has the accent so....
In all seriousness, life in Australia would've been hard, ever wonder why the Polynesians didn't settle there, but would go to the America's instead?
Because 1) Australia was an English colony and they would have been subject to arrest and trial there, and 2) nobody in the party would have been able to survive there. And they didn't want to live in such a place, what every one of those men and women wanted was something as close to the island paradise of Tahiti as they could get - but all the most paradisical island had people already living there. Pitcairn was the best they could do.
As to whether they might have headed for the Americas... no. For one thing it was too far, and if they traveled in the usual shipping lanes they'd probably have been identified, and if they traveled outside the normal shipping lanes there was a risk of a disaster at sea. And all the coast of the Americas were settled, almost entirely by citizens of nations who had armies and navies of their own, and who wouldn't want any members of their own armies or navies to get the idea that mutiny was a good idea. No, if the mutineers had been identified by the authorities of any nation in that region, even one that was hostile to the British, they'd have been imprisoned or hanged for their crimes. So yeah... Pitcairn really was the best they could do.
Something to consider is they were mutineers meaning they would have had low morale already and trying to keep order over them would have been a huge task.
Plus they would have been tired and more than likely happy enough to make the most of it on Pitcairn.
Had they got to America I suppose they would have been given asylum- but would they have been able to get there?
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