On a day late in December, in the year of 1789, while the earth turned
steadily on its course, a moment came when the sunlight illuminated San
Roque, easternmost cape of the three Americas. Moving swiftly westward, a
thousand miles each hour, the light swept over the jungle of the Amazon,
and glittered along the icy summits of the Andes. Presently the level
rays brought day to the Peruvian coast and moved on, across a vast
stretch of lonely sea.

In all that desert of wrinkled blue there was no sail, nor any land till
the light touched the windy downs of Easter Island, where the statues of
Rapa Nui's old kings kept watch along the cliffs. An hour passed as the
dawn sped westward another thousand miles, to a lone rock rising from the
sea, tall, ridged, foam-fringed at its base, with innumerable sea fowl
hovering along the cliffs. A boat's crew might have pulled around this
fragment of land in two hours or less, but the fronds of scattered
coconut palms rose above rich vegetation in the valleys and on the upper
slopes, and at one place a slender cascade fell into the sea. Peace,
beauty, and utter loneliness were here, in a little world set in the
midst of the widest of oceans--the peace of the deep sea, and of nature
hidden from the world of men. The brown people who had once lived here
were long since gone. Moss covered the rude paving of their temples, and
the images of their gods, on the cliffs above, were roosting places for
gannet and frigate bird.

The horizon to the east was cloudless, and, as the sun rose, flock after
flock of birds swung away toward their fishing grounds offshore. The
fledglings, in the dizzy nests where they had been hatched, settled
themselves for the long hours of waiting, to doze, and twitch, and sprawl
in the sun. The new day was like a million other mornings in the past,
but away to the east and still below the horizon a vessel--the only ship
in all that vast region--was approaching the land.

His Majesty's armed transport _Bounty_ had set sail from Spithead,
two years before, bound for Tahiti in the South Sea. Her errand was an
unusual one: to procure on that remote island a thousand or more young
plants of the breadfruit tree, and to convey them to the British
plantations in the West Indies, where it was hoped that they might
provide a supply of cheap food for the slaves. When her mission on Tahiti
had been accomplished and she was westward bound, among the islands of
the Tongan Group, Fletcher Christian, second-in-command of the vessel,
raised the men in revolt against Captain William Bligh, whose conduct he
considered cruel and insupportable. The mutiny was suddenly planned and
carried swiftly into execution, on the morning of April 28, 1789. Captain
Bligh was set adrift in the ship's launch, with eighteen loyal men, and
the mutineers saw them no more. After a disastrous attempt to settle on
the island of Tupuai, the _Bounty_ returned to Tahiti, where some of
the mutineers, as well as a number of innocent men who had been compelled
to remain with the ship, were allowed to establish themselves on shore.

The _Bounty_ was a little ship, of about two hundred tons burthen,
stoutly rigged and built strongly of English oak. Her sails were patched
and weather-beaten, her copper sheathing grown over with trailing weed,
and the paint on her sides, once a smart black, was now a scaling, rusty
brown. She was on the starboard tack, with the light southwesterly Wind
abaft the beam. Only nine mutineers were now on board, including Fletcher
Christian and Midshipman Edward Young. With the six Polynesian men and
twelve women whom they had persuaded to accompany them, they were
searching for a permanent refuge: an island so little known, so remote,
that even the long arm of the Admiralty would never reach them.

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