MUTINY WITH CHANNEL 4
“How different it would be to the final few days of the voyage as we neared Timor. Becalmed, just a few hundred miles from Kupang where Bligh eventually made landfall. Our bodies ravaged by the sun resembled nothing more than skeletons. We’d each loss between 3-4 stone after surviving on just 400 calories each day, but the real killer was water. As we drifted slowly towards Timor, our water barrels had all but run dry. We’d been surviving on less than half a litre each per day over the previous week as we hoped for a change in the wind conditions that would carry us to Timor. The high pressure system showed little sign of abating and eventually we would require an intervention from our support boat. It felt like a failure, we’d got so close and yet, without water we would not have survived the ordeal.”
“All of Bligh’s men survived to reach Timor, but within weeks most had died from malnutrition. As we pulled up onto the beach, just a hundred miles to the east of Kupang we realised just how incredible Bligh’s feat of navigation and survival had been. Perhaps we knew better than most and for us Bligh was certainly our hero.”