The conflict that was déjà vu all over again.
It was a mutiny. There was no other word for it. It happened in New South Wales, a British penal colony in Australia. A new governor had been sent from London, a man with a quick temper and a keen sense of duty. He soon came into conflict with the colony’s officer corps.
The governor considered his officers inept and corrupt, and moved to shut down the thriving rum trafficking ring that they controlled. The officers claimed he was a tyrant and was acting outside of the law. Eventually they decided to depose him. In what later become known as the “Rum Rebellion,” three hundred soldiers surrounded his house. They captured him at gunpoint and held him prisoner for more than a year.
Eventually, a dramatic public court-martial in London convicted the mutineers and vindicated the governor.
It was an experience that would have tested any man, but especially one who must have felt that history was repeating itself in a manner most cruel. For the governor of New South Wales was a British naval officer who was discovering that lightning could indeed strike twice.
He was William Bligh, the ship captain famously deprived of his command nearly twenty years before . . . in the mutiny on the Bounty.
Bligh was at dinner when he got word that the mutineers were coming to arrest him. He hid out in a small servant’s room, hoping to escape. The soldiers who found him claimed he was hiding under a bed, which led to much taunting and accusations of cowardice that seem to have stung Bligh more deeply than the rebellion itself.
The mutiny on the HMS Bounty took place in 1789. Set adrift in a small boat with a handful of loyal seamen and limited supplies, Bligh successfully navigated more than four thousand miles to safety.