Mutiny

There's an old saying,

when ships were made of wood, men were made of steel.

Come on boys!

Come on!

Two hundred and thirty years ago,

the crew of a British navy ship

rose up and overthrew its captain.

He and a few loyal men were bundled into a tiny boat

and abandoned in the middle of the Pacific.

They should have died.

Instead they managed to navigate 4,000 miles to safety.

Wave! Wave!

It remains one of the greatest survival feats

of all time.

Start moving now, I'm serious.

Now, for the first time,

nine men are following the same route

in an identical boat, facing the same conditions...

to measure themselves against history.

Back then, those guys were hard as nails.

Can the modern day man endure such hardships?

Can't see shit.

When I'm on my deathbed,

I wanna look back and say I did something amazing.

There's nothing normal about being here.

Nothing.

Your trouble is, you don't like the truth.

There should be a bit more to life than working really hard

and then getting smashed.

Chris! Stop jumping off of there!

It's dangerous.

Don't tell me what to do!

Come on lads, bail.

If we make it through I think it's a huge triumph.

My god!

It's a shark!

We return, victors.

If we make one mistake...

- Look, look, look, look! - Whoa!

It's utter, utter disaster.

If we end up in the water, it's not a game,

it's not a joke.

The Pacific is just a beast.

It's vast.

You don't have a clue,

don't have a clue what is down there

and that's scary.

It's a surreal place.

It's as close as we can ever get on this planet

to being out in space.

It's the hardest environment

to survive in.

This task is immense, it's huge.

The length of the journey, you imagine,

4000 miles on a rowing boat.

Just saying it should put the fear of god into you.

In April 1789, HMS Bounty

was sailing from Tahiti to the West Indies.

A poisonous rift

had been brewing between the crew

and its tough young captain, William Bligh.

Sixteen months into the voyage, rebellion broke out.

I am now to relate

one of the most atrocious acts of piracy ever committed.

At dawn of day, several men came into my cabin

and while I was asleep,

seized and tied my hands behind my back

and took the Bounty from me.

It would go down in History

as the mutiny on the Bounty.

Captain Bligh and a handful of loyal crew

were cast adrift in an open boat

in the middle of the Pacific ocean.

The nearest friendly port was 4000 miles away

across some of the world's most unforgiving seas.

How they got there is the stuff of legend.

Now these men are being abandoned

in the same place as Bligh and his crew

in the middle of nowhere.

Alright guys, start switching on now.

We're by ourselves.

This is it. Look around you.

This is us for the next 60 days.

When Captain Bligh was tossed off the Bounty,

they had no charts.

They basically had one week's worth of food,

week's worth of water.

I'm pretty sure most of the guys on that boat knew that was it,

they were dead.

This is real now guys, let's go.

Prepare to hoist the sails.

We've been left for dead.

Crew of nine strangers.

And now we all have to survive basically.

Ready to raise the jib?

Lee ho!

Stepping into Captain Bligh's shoes

is Ant Middleton,

a veteran of the Special Boat Service,

who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The journey's gonna be tougher for me than it was for Bligh.

You know, Bligh's men were hardened sailors.

So for me as a leader,

can I take the modern day man and recreate Bligh's voyage?

Can I do it? In my head I can do it

but it's gonna push me to my limits.

Are we port or starboard?

- Starboard. - Starboard, yeah.

Inside?

Wait, hang one second boys.

I think the logistics of all the ropes and stuff,

you sort of get... there's a lot of ropes essentially.

Ben, watch yourself. Ben!

Ben, you just fucked everything up there, didn't you?

- Yep. - Ben, your end goes up.

- This end goes up? - Yeah.

Fuck.

The men bring skills

that mirror those of Bligh's crew.

Being earmarked as the carpenter of the boat is quite a weird one

because I've got oddly quite a lot in common

with the original carpenter of the boat.

He's named William Purcell,

he's 27, he's from South London as well.

Eerily like we were born within two miles of each other and,

and I've definitely been walking down the same roads as him.

I wanna grow up kind of thing.

I want to not just be that guy that

drank 20 pints and did a load of shots

and was a legend for one night.

I wanna be a bit more and be a better story for my family.

This is all pretty much ancient 18th century style tools

that I've been given to repair the ship.

If there's a real serious issue with the boat

I'm gonna be up shit creek.

Ben, we need the other med kit.

Should be a black bag with a cross on it.

I am a doctor.

I'm not a sailor at all.

I'm quite scared of sharks.

I'm scared of getting sun burnt.

But by all accounts Bligh's doctor

was a sort of overweight alcoholic

so hopefully I can bring a lot more than he did.

Their boat is an exact replica of Bligh's,

built for this voyage.

They'll be filming themselves

and carrying the same rations Bligh's crew were left with.

They have no toilets, no shelter

and in such a tiny boat, no privacy.

I'm trying to find out whether this is sleepable.

Mate, this is...

I don't know.

I have to sleep here.

Bligh's first act was to make for the nearest land,

the tiny island of Tofua,

35 miles away,

to try and supplement his meagre rations.

The crew set a course northwest hoping to do the same.

Their constant companion during the coming weeks

will be Captain Bligh himself.

He kept a detailed journal

that remarkably survived the voyage.

We bore away across a sea

where the navigation is but little known,

in a small boat, 23ft long from stem to stern,

deep laden with men.

I can see land,

or am I imagining it? Yeah.

Hurray! Hey!

After a day's sailing

Tofua's craggy outline appears on the horizon.

Just thinking about

how hard the challenge is gonna be.

It's all good and well at the moment in,

you know, first day, everyone's morale is boosted,

but let's see what it's like by day 20.

That was really when Bligh said

his men really started to suffer.

Okay, so I'm just gonna read

a little bit of Bligh's journal.

"My first determination

was to seek supply of breadfruit and water

from Tofua

where I expected to land.

But the shore proved to be so steep and rocky

that I was obliged to give up all thoughts of it

and keep the boat under the lee of the island

for there was no anchorage.

It's kind of strange after you read that, you know,

you can see the steepness of the cliffs

exactly how he described them.

I am from the great maritime city of Liverpool

and this is my yacht, Roma, where I live.

When I was 25, I really screwed up my life

and I ended up going to prison.

I'm not proud of that fact at all,

I'm actually quite ashamed about it.

But I do believe now that it was meant to happen

because it's put me on this path now.