Bligh had to do double duty as both CO and purser. As purser he was like the person doling out the office supplies that everyone hates.
As CO he was a sarcastic smart ass. This made him a bad leader of men, but a nerdtastic navigator.
As a governor in Australia he was overthrown by a rebellion too, whatever his good qualities the man evidently was not a good leader/politician.
Legend: Napoleon III dined off an aluminium plate, while his guests were served on mere gold plates.
It is certainly true that for a period of a few decades aluminium was more precious than gold.
But there is no truth to the Napoleon story.
The Peter Principle should have been named after William Bligh. He was a brilliant sailing master, navigator, logistics manager, and overall sailor. But he didn’t have a clue about how to lead or inspire other men.
Vikings didn’t wear horned helmets.
Not a historian, this one I’m not sure about. The Irish potato famine was more about British landlords exporting food out of Ireland. There was plenty of food. It just wasn’t for the Irish. The potato blight was real, but it’s not like the Irish ate potatoes for breakfast lunch and dinner.
Also, he wasn’t the cruel tyrant as seen in the various movies. He was well-meaning, and had the well-being of his crew at heart. Acting upon the best medical advice of the time, he insisted that the crew drink lime juice every day. But it tasted foul, and the sailors resented it. Acting on the best medical advice, he knew that the sailors needed regular exercise. So he had then dance hornpipes daily. It’s actually a pretty good way of taking exercise in a limited space, but the sailors didn’t like it. He wanted to avoid the use if the lash, and give a tongue-lashing instead. The sailors hated the way he shouted at them. Basically a good person, who just couldn’t get on with anyone else.
My point exactly. He may not have been an inspiring leader, but he didn’t deserve the reputation for being a cruel tyrant that history foisted upon him, to the extent that any mean boss or general all-around tyrant was for years, maybe even to this day, often referred to as “a real Captain Bligh”.
They should have added it to their daily grog ration-- seems like it would have made for a decent after-work cocktail. I’m not even kidding-- this was actually done on some ships, sometimes even with added sugar if the sailors purchased it themselves.
I’m not a historian either, but my understanding is that potatoes were one of the few crops the Irish were allowed to keep for themselves, which is why the blight had such a major impact. But yeah, in American schools the famine was basically taught as “The Irish stupidly relied on only one crop, and were screwed when it failed,” which is pretty much a myth. They raised plenty of other crops besides potatoes. Those crops, as you say, just weren’t for the Irish, and to the extent that they did depend on potatoes, that wasn’t really their choice.
Yep, I agree. Apparently he was rather verbally abusive to Fletcher , but otherwise a damn good seaman.
Many did. However, you are correct, the greedy British landlords shipped out most of the grain, getting higher prices that way. .
Not Lime juice- sauerkraut. He did try lemon and orange juice- concentrated. Sadly, in order to keep them from spoiling, they were boiled, removing most of the Vitamin C. He also insisted on having a clean ship and bilge. He did have some scurvy, but no crew died because of it. That was rather remarkable.
Lemon juice was a great idea, but later the Royal Navy switched to lime juice as limes were grown in the UK, Sadly limes are not a very good source of Vit C.
Later, they did just that, making “grog”.
Sorta a myth, since for the poor, they raised potatoes for their own use, and couldnt buy grain, since their landlords got a better price selling it off the Island.
Water and rum alone was called ‘grog’ before they thought to add lime juice to it.
True.
The same thing applies to Ford. The Model T wasn’t the first car ever made. There were lots of them before that, but the Model T was the first car that was affordable for the masses. It was clunky and poorly built (checking fuel level meant raising the seat and looking at a dipstick, and NO way to check the oil other than opening the drain plug), but it sold in the hundreds of thousands and made Ford a very rich man.
Huh? You can’t reliably grow lemons or limes outside in the UK. In fact, lemons tend to do slightly better in our climate. Both need to be bought inside to survive the winter and both have only ever been a tiny niche crop grown for novelty. They would have been imported from the colonies.
Regarding potatoes, it wasn’t that the Irish weren’t allowed to keep the crops they were growing except potatoes, it was that most of the land was owned by large landowners who were growing for export. The people working the land only had tiny patches of land to grow food for themselves, and potatoes are about the only way it’s even faintly possible to get enough calories from that much land in that climate. Wheat stores much better and easier, so it’s much better as a cash crop, but potatoes were actually pretty revolutionary as a crop for how high the usable yield is for the land. The cultivar most widely grown in Ireland at the time, ‘Lumpers’, doesn’t even taste good but (in the absence of blight) it was the most productive. So yes, a lot of poor people were eating almost nothing but potatoes, same as some very poor subsistence farmers eat almost entirely rice and get deficiencies.
As a plant pathologist, I do have to point out that blight was actually completely unknown in Europe until that one huge outbreak swept through Europe, including Ireland.
In fact, until then, now only was the pathogen unknown, but all plant pathogens were unknown. The prevailing theory at the time was that plant diseases were caused by some kind of soil deficiency causing plants to sicken. The first huge potato blight outbreak was the first time a disease was actually proven to pass from one plant to another. No-one had grown clonal crops on that scale before, so it was something completely new to science at the time.
I’m not excusing the landowners hogging the productive land and exporting all the food who created the conditions one step above famine, especially as they kept exporting food despite the full-blown famine, but that outbreak was actually how people discovered the dangers of excessive monocultures.
Actual lime juice from limes started becoming the more popular option after 1800, thanks in part to the relative ease of sourcing West Indian limes. British sailors were first being referred to as “lime-juicers” and it was Americans who shortened the expression to “limeys,” according to the book.
Not to mention the British Isles have gotten a bit warmed in the last 200 years. And the British Empire/UK has gotten a LOT smaller.
https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history-magazine/2021/february/finding-cure-scurvy
From 1795 onward, three-quarters of an ounce of lemon juice per day was mandated to be given to every sailor serving throughout the Royal Navy, nearly banishing scurvy at a stroke. Blane ordered that it be mixed into grog to guarantee its consumption. But the measure came with considerable logistical challenges. In 1804, for example, the Navy Board had to source 50,000 gallons of lemon juice, which typically came from Spanish fruit—and Britain was at war with Spain at the time. As a result, the board switched to lime juice, which could be obtained from British possessions in the Caribbean.
Not to mention, potatoes are more of a complete food than wheat.. Good points here.
Irish farmland produced enough food to feed everyone in Ireland. The whole potato blight thing is an excuse for the British landlords.
He used “UK” when he meant “British Empire”, evidently.
The swallow may fly south with the sun, or the house martin or the plover may seek warmer climes in winter, yet these are not strangers to our land.
Are you suggesting lemons and limes migrate? 
Sure.
Limes are a perfectly fine source of vitamin C. Not as much a lemons but still enough.