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Fateful Voyage

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Revised Jun 10 2021

Bounty Logbook Remarks
with Google Maps

This is my abridgement of Bligh's official log. It contains only the remarks and I have expanded most abbreviations except compass bearings, ordinal numbers and common abbreviations. It covers the dates from December 1, 1787, to August 20, 1789, and includes the voyage in the launch and the stay at Coupang, Timor. Each date has its own page and map and some of Bligh's extended remarks have their own page as well.

1787

1788

1789

A Short Course on Bearings

First, the compass is divided into 32 named points, as in the compass rose at the bottom of this page. Each of these points is divided into quarter points. In these pages you will see such bearings as NNE¼E and NW½N. The first is a quarter point east of north-northeast. The second is two quarter points north of northwest. The first intials are the named compass point or the origin, then the fractional point from the origin, and finally the direction from the origin. Similarly, there are quadrant bearings such as N62°E and W30°S. Again, the first is one of the four cardinal points, N, S, E, and W, then a number of degrees from 1 to 89, and finally a direction. N62°E is 62° east of north and W30°S is 30° south of west. If you see something like N.52W, the '.' is a period for the N and not a decimal point. The keeper of the log, whether Mr. Bligh or Mr. Samuel, was never consistent. Sometimes there are periods and sometimes not, sometimes there is a ° and sometimes not.

Compass Rose

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