My name is Ian Martin and I'm one of Hull Maritime's tour guides
As part of our tour we visit Blaydes House down the High Street.
The Blaydes family were rich merchants but they also built ships at their nearby shipyard. They built ships for the Royal Navy and also Merchant ships. One of those ships was called the Bethia but she was renamed the Bounty after she was requisitioned by the Navy for a special mission to Tahiti.
The Bounty was to travel to Tahiti to pick up a cargo of Bread Fruit and then transport the Bread Fruit to the West Indies hoping that it could be grown there as a cheap source of food for the enslaved people working on the plantations.
Whilst in Tahiti the crew of the Bounty were allowed to live ashore and many of them fell in love with the lifestyle and the women!
Consequently when the time came to leave the Island five months later the crew were reluctant to leave and the famous Mutiny on the Bounty occurred. When I became a Merchant Seamen in the 1960's, I sailed on all types of vessels but in 1966 I was a Junior Ordinary Seaman on a special vessel called the Northern Star, together with her sister ship the Southern Cross they had been specifically built to carry emigrants to Australia and New Zealand. Having sailed through the Panama Canal and across the Pacific our first port of call was Tahiti.
I knew about the Mutiny on the Bounty having seen the Marlon Brando film which had been filmed in Tahiti just a couple of years earlier. The Island still looked pretty much as it must have done to the mutineers as we sailed through the coral reef and the palm tree lined white sanded beach lay before us.
The Islanders came out in dug out log canoes to greet us and Hula Hula girls danced for the passengers on the single wooden quayside. We stayed there for a couple of days and we were allowed ashore to explore the sites.
Over the next few years I visited the Island several times and could well understand how the crew of the Bounty were reluctant to leave.
If you would like to know more, please join us on one of our tours which run throughout the Spring and Summer. Here is more info.
