The Bounty: History Lost At Sea

The Bounty: History Lost At Sea

Built in 1960, the Bounty (popularly known as the HMS Bounty) was an enlarged reproduction of the original 1787 Royal Navy sailing tall ship HMS Bounty.

Bounty was commissioned by the MGM film studio for the 1962 film “Mutiny on the Bounty.” It was the first large vessel built from scratch for a film using historical sources. Unlike the fanciful conversion of existing vessels used in other movies, the Bounty was built to the original ship’s drawings from files in the British Admiralty archives, and in the traditional manner at the Smith and Rhuland shipyard in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia.

Bounty’s beam was increased and her waterline length was lengthened from the original 86 feet to 120 feet to assist in film-making and carry production staff. Launched on August 27, 1960 and crewed by Lunenburg fishermen and film staff, the vessel sailed via the Panama Canal to Tahiti for filming.

Bounty was scheduled to be burned at the end of the film, but it has been said that actor Marlon Brando protested, so MGM kept the vessel in service. After filming and a worldwide promotional tour, the ship was berthed at the pier in St. Petersburg, Florida as a permanent tourist attraction, where it stayed until the mid-1980s just outside the Museum of History’s back door.

In 1986, Ted Turner acquired the MGM film library and Bounty with it. The ship was used for promotion and entertainment, and for the filming of “Treasure Island” with Charlton Heston and Christian Bale in 1989. Bounty would return to the pier as a seasonal attraction in the mid-1990s.

Initially heading on an easterly course to avoid Hurricane Sandy, the vessel left New London, Connecticut on October 25, 2012 heading for St. Petersburg. On October 29, 2012, the ship’s master had reported Bounty was taking on water off the coast of North Carolina, about 160 miles from the storm, and the crew of sixteen were preparing to abandon ship.

The United States Coast Guard reported the ship had sunk and fourteen people had been rescued from life rafts by two rescue helicopters. The storm had washed the captain and two crew overboard—one of the latter had made it to a life raft, but the other two were missing.

They wore orange survival suits complete with strobe lights, thereby giving rescuers some hope of finding them alive. Claudene Christian, one of the two missing crew members was found by the Coast Guard. She was unresponsive and rushed to a hospital where she was pronounced dead. The other missing crew member was long-time captain, and St. Petersburg, resident, Robin Walbridge. Search efforts for Captain Walbridge continued covering an area of 12,000 square nautical miles until they were suspended on November 1, 2012.

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