1789 - Crime

Crime

Sailors aboard H.M.S. Bounty bound for the West Indies with breadfruit plants mutiny April 28 in protest against being deprived of water that is being lavished on the plants (see agriculture, 1787). Having spent 23 idyllic weeks on Tahiti, the mutineers, led by master's mate Fletcher Christian, 25, cast Captain Bligh adrift with only a few provisions in a 22-foot, six-oared open boat with 18 men near the island of Tofau, return to Tahiti for native brides, and establish a colony on the desolate 1.75-square-mile Pitcairn Island southeast of Tahiti at the southeastern extreme of Polynesia, where the sole survivor of nine mutineers, six Tahitian men, and 13 women will be discovered by a Nantucket sealing captain in 1808. Lieutenant Bligh reaches Timor in the East Indies June 14 after a 45-day voyage across 3,600 miles of open sea in which he has used dead reckoning to navigate his course and lost seven of his 18 men (see agriculture, 1791). The mutineers will burn the Bounty on January 23 of next year, and when a U.S. whaler anchors off Pitcairn's island 18 years later only one mutineer will be left, along with nine women and 23 children.

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Captain Bligh ran the Bounty so callously that his men mutinied, but he survived to plant breadfruit in the Caribbean islands.

Roman authorities arrest Allesandro, conti di Cagliostro, who is tried and sentenced to death (see 1786). His wife, Serafina, has denounced him to the Inquisition as a heretic, conjurer, magician, and Freemason, but his sentence will be commuted to life imprisonment and he will live until 1795.