The commander of the _Bounty_ was in no mood to carry it off with a high hand. He implored the master’s mate to forego the mad enterprise, and pledged his honor that if the men would return to duty he would make no report of it in England. He spoke of his own wife and children and the mercy due on their account, but Fletcher Christian cut him short and cried: “I say no, no, Captain Bligh. If you had any honor or manly feeling in your breast, things had not come to this. Your wife and family! Had you any regard for them, you would have thought of them before now and not behaved so like a villain. I have been used like a dog all this voyage and am determined to bear it no longer. On you must rest the consequences.” This ended the argument, and the boat was soon cast adrift, while the mutineers shouted a cheery farewell, and then roared out “Huzza for Tahiti!” while the _Bounty_ swung off and filled away with a pleasant breeze. Lieutenant Bligh assumed that it was the deliberate intent to leave him to perish, because dead men tell no tales; but if this were true, the mutineers would not have been so careful to stock the boat with food and water and stores to last the party at least a fortnight without severe hardship. They were within easy sailing distance of peopled islands, on some of which they might hope to find a friendly reception. By drowning them, Fletcher Christian could have obliterated all traces of the mutiny, and the _Bounty_ would have vanished from human ken, gone to the port of missing ships. So infrequented were the islands of the South Seas that the mutineers might have lived and died there unmolested and unsought. Fletcher Christian was too humane a man for such a deed, the most upright and pious outlaw that ever risked the gallows. The tale of the _Bounty_ and of the tragic fate which overtook these rash and childlike wanderers in search of Elysium had been familiar to later generations, but the wonderful voyage of Lieutenant Bligh and his exiles in the open boat has been forgotten and unsung. Even to this day it deserves to be called one of the prodigious adventures of seafaring history. A man disgraced and humiliated beyond expression by the ridiculously easy manner in which his ship had been taken from him, Bligh superbly redeemed himself and wiped the stain from his record by keeping his open boat afloat and his men alive through a voyage and an experience unequaled before or since.