MovieChat Forums > The Bounty (1984) Discussion > The fate of the ship.

The fate of the ship.

posted 3 years ago by helba (65)
2 replies | jump to latest

I've heard it asked before why they burned the ship, which is fairly obvious considering the Royal Navy would be looking for them... but why didn't they completely dismantle it instead? They were colonizing an uninhabited island. Surely all of that lumber, nails, and likely other material that was burned could have been used for construction as they're starting out. They would have had plenty of time to carefully dismantle the ship piece by piece and find a way to recycle everything before the British returned as well. So I'm not sure why their thought process went directly to "incinerate everything."

[–] [deleted] 3 years ago

For one thing, to get rid of it quickly. The voyage of the Bounty from the time of the mutiny to the crew landing on Pitcairn isn't as straight forward as the movie makes it seem. In fact, Blight actually reached land months before the Bounty got to Pitcairn.

The ship was originally taken on April 28th, 1789.
Bligh got to Timor on June 14th, 1789.
The Bounty landed at Pitcairn on January 15th, 1790
The Bounty burnt on January 23rd, 1790.

And the Bounty was partially stripped but not to any great extent. Pitcairn's appeal was that it was hard for a ship to harbor there. So doing an extensive breakdown of the boat would likely have been very difficult and time consuming.

Another bit of the history of the ship is that there is no official explanation of why it was set on fire or who did it.

[–] helba (65) 3 years ago

Thank you for breaking that down. That makes more sense considering the facts.