Author’s Note

I first met Captain William Bligh when I was seven years old, the same age he was when he stepped aboard HMS Monmouth as a young cadet. My Monmouth was a small wooden packing case I’d rigged with a broomstick for a mast and an old roll-up window blind for a sail. My ocean was the backyard lawn at home, and I would sit out there aboard my ship on windy days with the sail straining and the horizon on my mind. I had learned about the captain at school in what I would later realise was a somewhat narrow and biased version of a much larger nautical life.

Now I have the chance to tell my story of a man too often misunderstood. First and foremost, my Bligh is the story of a bloody great sailor – one of the best: a master mariner, brilliant marine cartographer and navigator, and a fearless leader of men in battle.

I’m a sailor and a writer, but not an historian, and my research of the era and the man stands on the shoulders of the work of the many erudite authors, historians and even novelists who have gone before me. For a sense of Bligh’s motivations and preoccupations, I have relied on the many expressive letters he wrote and received during his lifetime. I have also dramatised many moments in Bligh’s story, blending my own experience of sailing the waters he traversed into the action and narrative.

My Bligh is by no means the definitive account of his life. Instead, it is a tribute to an extraordinary life spent at sea on magnificent ships, and in particular the incredible 3,600-nautical-mile open-boat voyage in the Pacific during which Bligh saved the lives of seventeen men. Accordingly, I have not dwelt on the politics of the Bounty mutiny or the tough time he had as the fourth governor of New South Wales, both very big stories in themselves and the subject of many dedicated and excellent works.

This is the biography of a sailor.

I dips m’lid to Captain Bligh.

– Rob Mundle