The Bounty Mutiny

Nineteen men crowded into a twenty-three-foot open boat with the Pacific in every direction, and the commander in the stern kept writing it down, down to the pistol ball he balanced against each ration of bread so no man got a crumb more than his share. William Bligh brought them 3,600 miles to Timor in forty-seven days, and his narrative of it is the more astonishing for refusing to plead, for reading like a ledger kept by a man too busy to be afraid.