The Posthumous Misfortune of Captain Bligh of the “Bounty”: Hypoglycemia from Blighia

Abstract

The career of William Bligh (1754-1817) was beset by some difficulty in troubled times. He is chiefly remembered for a mutiny on his ship, the Bounty, in the South Seas in 1789. This story is too well known, at least to those who have seen the movies, to require an anecdote. It is less well known that, in 1791, he set out again for Tahiti with another ship and crew and eventually succeeded in landing a cargo of bread-fruit trees, Artocarpus, in the West Indies. As captain of the Director in 1797, he was put ashore when his ship's crew joined the mutiny at the Nore; however, he commanded that ship with distinction at the battle of Camperdown that year, as he did the Glatton at Copenhagen (1801).