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Revised 2010-02-23

The Complete Official Bounty Logbook

I have redone the logbook pages to more closely resemble the originals and to include various observations that I had previously left out. Nothing is omitted from these pages, they are complete.

The logbook is actually comprised of three volumes, the first two covering the voyage of the Bounty up to the Mutiny, and the third the voyage in the Bounty's launch. The pages of the first two volumes were hand numbered, the third not. The left facing page was numbered in the upper left hand corner, the right facing page in the upper right hand corner, and are shown here thusly:
xxx)

(xxx

However, these webpages are organized by date and logic rather than by logbook pages, so that a webpage may contain either a single page, several pages, or even part of a page.

Below are links to every page by date, but first here are links to siginificant entry points.

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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