Quote:
All wooden vessels are rotten, to some degree or another, and all of them leak. Nature of the beast. Bounty would have been less rotten and would have leaked less had more hundreds of thousands of dollars been poured into her. It's easy to for us to say from our armchairs how "preventable and stupid" the tragedy was -- sure, just get out the checkbook, no problem. But the reality of managing a vessel like that is a bit more complicated.
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The original Bounty, when purchased by the Royal
Navy and fitted out for the
Tahiti expedition, was only three years old. In that day, the expected life span of a ship was about 15 years before the cost of maintaining the ship exceeded the amount of profit she might bring and it became cheaper to actually build a whole new ship. Warships were a bit of an exception and some very old line-of-battle ships saw action--HMS Victory for instance, being 40 years old when Nelson sailed in her to fight the French and Spanish at Trafalgar; even in her case, she had been due to be paid off and hulked, but received a new
lease on life, and a thorough
refit and rebuilding, when the Napoleonic Wars engulfed
Europe.
The modern Bounty, though, was well over 50 years old and outlived the majority of the actors who played the original crew (Brando, Trevor Howard, Richard Harris, Percy Herbert, et. al). At better than half a century old, she was well beyond the life expectancy of a wooden merchant ship of the original Bounty's era. In all probability she would have been scrapped for her iron and copper fittings, or tied up at some wharf or other as a floating storeship or lighter until she fell apart and sank at her moorings. Unfortunately, the modern Bounty did not attract the necessary funds to maintain her after the fashion of such national treasures as Victory (1765), Constitution (1797), or Constellation (1854).