Could You Survive the Bounty?

On the day before the mutiny, William Bligh accused every officer and
man in his ship of stealing his coconuts. He never mentioned it in either
book he published about it.

At dawn on 28 April 1789, four men come into your cabin. Two of them put
their hands on your chest and tell you to lie down.

You are John Fryer, master of His Majesty's armed vessel Bounty. You
navigate her, you stow her, and you answer for everything in her hold. There
is one commissioned officer aboard and he is not you. Over the next two hours
the ship will be taken, and you will be put into a boat twenty-three feet long
with eighteen other men and about a week of food.

Forty-seven days later you will step ashore on Timor. Three years after
that a court will ask you, under oath, what happened, and your answers will
not be the same as the book your commander printed.

Fifty times in this book, somebody asks you what you do next.

• Bligh sailed as commander and as purser both, which means he owned the
  food he was issuing, and every surviving grievance from that ship is about
  weight and not one of them is about the lash


• Nine days after losing his ship over a quantity he could not prove, he
  built a pair of scales out of two coconut shells and weighed bread against a
  pistol ball for six weeks


• Four men were held in the Bounty against their will, said so, were
  believed by Bligh in print, and were still put in irons in a cage on a
  frigate's quarterdeck for eleven months


• The man whose ship it was gave no evidence at the trial of the men who
  took it, because he was eight thousand miles away on the other side of the
  world


• The court asked two questions about why the mutiny happened, got two
  answers, and moved on

Two documents describe this voyage and they do not agree. One is the
book Bligh published while Fletcher Christian was still alive and at large.
The other is the minutes of the court martial held aboard His Majesty's Ship
Duke at Portsmouth in September 1792, taken down as the words were spoken.
This book prints them under each other and lets you decide.

Could You Survive the Bounty? is the tenth book from Second
Person Press, after Ancient Rome, Medieval Europe, the Klondike,
the Blitz, the French Revolution, the Endurance, the Titanic, the Salem
Witch Trials and Apollo 13.