The Eventful History of the Mutiny and Piratical Seizure of H.M.S. Bounty: Its Cause and Consequences (1831) by Sir John Barrow is viewed as the classic example of the mutiny on the Bounty. It incorporates a description of the island of Tahiti, and a story of events from the embarkation of the Bounty in 1787 through to the trail of a portion of the mutineers in 1792 and the endurance of others on Pitcairn Island. The story is told with the help of the first reports for the case, which Borrow critically evaluates.It was first published in 1831 by John Murray as the 25th volume in their Family Library series. An American release followed under the title A Description of Pitcairn's island and its Inhabitants: The many later reissues incorporate a 1936 Oxford World's Works Classics edition.
Sir John Barrow, born on 19 June 1764 was an English geographer, language specialist, writer, and government worker. He was the only child of Roger Barrow, a leather expert in the town of Dragley Beck, in the ward of Ulverston, Lancashire. Barrow became a clerk at an iron foundry when he was 16 years old, and by his 20s he was teaching mathematics. In 1797, Barrow went with Lord Macartney as a private secretary on his mission to settle the public authority of the newly acquired state of the Cape of Good Hope. Borrow depended on the task of accommodating the Boer settlers and the local Black population and of writing about the country on the inside. He accumulated plentiful notes and portrays the wide-open countryside. The result of his journey was a map that, regardless of its various blunders, was the first published present-day map of South Africa. Barrow was selected as Second Secretary to the Admiralty by Viscount in 1804. He died on 23 November 1848, shortly after resigning from public life in 1845. A monument to him was built in his honor in his hometown of Ulverston in 1850.
