Captain William Bligh, 33 years old, had made himself a name as the much praised navigator of the famous discoverer James Cook. His Bounty mission sounded less exciting: Collecting bread-fruit trees in remote Tahiti, and taking the trees to the Carribean as a cheap source of food for the British slaves there.

The voyage went alright for a while.The crew had a great time in paradise-like polynesian islands of Tahiti and Moorea. But right after they Bounty embarked for their trip for the Carribean destinations, desaster struck: On the 28th of April 1789 the smart but unhappy officer Fletcher Christian started the mutiny. Captain Bligh, portrayed as a montrous slave-driver in 3 big Hollywood adaptations of the real story, was put into a longboat, along with some loyalists. The doomed passengers of the nutshell were set adrift, only supplied with the very basic tools of navigation.

Yet, Bligh and his longboat crew made it all the way to the trade missions of Indonesia, and were rescued. Back in England the mutiny was brought to court. The judges mainly trusted in Bligh’s logbook, which he continued to write even when they were sailing in the longboat. The logbooks later were stored in the Mitchell Library in Sydney, since Bligh was later in his career appointed Gouvernor of the New South Wales province of Australia. The mutineers however reached the hardly charted, isolated island of Pitcairn. Some of their decendants live there to the date.

Only in 2006, when Blighs original logbooks were given to restoration to specialists in Adelaide, the restorer Antony Zammit made a sensational discovery. Zammit realized that Bligh must have swapped a few of the pages afterwards, neatly trimmed to fit in perfectly seemless. What informations did Bligh, who appeared to be the villain in the Hollywood movies, change by his fabrication of some of the pages of the original book. What made him cheat on his own narrative of the things that happened on board? And why, of all days, just around the date of the mutiny?