The Fortunate Adversities of William Bligh

William Bligh is best remembered for the 1789 mutiny on the Bounty. He lived to repeat the experience. In 1797 mutineers took over his ship, Director. A little more than ten years later, when he was the governor of the British colony in Australia, the New South Wales Corps rebelled and kept Bligh locked in Government House for over a year. Yet when the man died in 1817 at age 63, he was William Bligh, esquire, Fellow of the Royal Society and Vice-Admiral of the White in the British Navy. How was it possible for someone who was in serious difficulty so often to rise as far as he did? If ever there was a person who learned to profit from adversity, it was William Bligh.