Captain William Bligh at 33 years of age, had made a name for himself as an excellent navigator on the voyages of the celebrated explorer James Cook. His Bounty mission sounded far less glorious: to collect breadfruit plants in remote Tahiti and transport them to the Caribbean as a cheap food source for British slave trade.

The voyage went smoothly for a while. The crew enjoyed an idyllic stay on the Polynesian islands of Tahiti and Moorea. But shortly after the Bounty set sail for the Caribbean, disaster struck: on 28 April 1789, the disaffected officer Fletcher Christian led the mutiny. Captain Bligh — portrayed as a monstrous slave-driver in three major Hollywood adaptations — was set adrift in a longboat with a handful of loyalists, equipped with only the most basic navigation tools.

Bligh and his longboat crew survived the ordeal, sailing all the way to the Dutch trading post of Batavia in Indonesia before making their way back to England. The mutiny was brought to court martial, and the judges relied heavily on Bligh’s logbook — which he had continued to keep even aboard the longboat. The logbooks were later held at the Mitchell Library in Sydney, as Bligh went on to serve as Governor of the New South Wales colony. The mutineers, meanwhile, had found refuge on the remote, barely charted island of Pitcairn. Some of their descendants live there to this day.

It was not until 2006, when Bligh’s original logbooks were sent for restoration to specialists in Adelaide, that conservator Antony Zammit made a sensational discovery. Zammit found that Bligh had swapped several pages, neatly trimmed to fit seamlessly. But what exactly had he changed — and why? What drove a man who presented himself as the victim to falsify his own account? And why, of all the entries to alter, did he target the days around the mutiny itself?