Status Updates From Captain Bligh and Mr. Chris...

Ending reference to Othello, comparing Ned Young to Iago, is poignant and a fitting closure to the maelstrom.

Hard to make the case that Bligh was well-meaning, profoundly unlucky navigator when he was constantly embroiled in court martials, mutinies and arresting naval officers for the rest of his career. The trip to NSW is as dramatic as many other parts of the story, but ends up a footnote because so much happens.

The two men realised that Quintal had lost his reason, just as
McKoy had done, from the alcohol of the tee root, and that he was
as likely to take their lives as McKoy had taken his own. So, with
an axe, they battered in the head of the man who burnt the Bounty
while he was lying in his house in a drunken stupor.

He had evidently bound his own hands and feet and tied a weight about
his neck before leaping to his death.
The death of McKoy had a fearful effect on Mat Quintal. He, too,
drank as heavily as ever and led a life separated from the rest with
his wife Sarah, whom he beat mercilessly. One day, in 1799, Sarah,
too, was found dead at the bottom of the cliffs.

At least in this account, Ned Young is clearly the villain.

Suddenly they began to understand the high scale of value placed on products of Western civilisation by the Polynesians.

Molesworth Phillips is probably the only heroic figure in this story and I'm still convinced that would change if we knew everything he did throughout the voyage.

The next moment there was the sound of a shot, and the native
toppled overboard, dead, into the water. His body was retrieved
and the natives paddled hastily away, crying out their grief.
The shooting was clearly a mistake. But as Christian made a rapid
departure, he was more than ever determined that their island must
be completely uninhabited, for there would always be misunderstandings and conflicts...

The movie adaptation cleaned this part of the story up for good reason, aside from brutalizing and slaughtering hostile natives on other island, Fletcher returns twice to Tahiti, where the residents have learned from another ship that Cook was dead and had been for ten years, both Bligh and all his crew had been lying, and ultimately that the story about Bligh's current whereabouts was another lie. Hard to sympathize

But also among this company from Tahiti were seven women who, at the last minute, were tricked into remaining on board when the ship sailed.

Christian had ordered the Bounty's four-pounders to be loaded with grape-shot. He waited until the attackers were within point blank range, and then gave the order to fire, with barrels at maximum depression, straight down into the packed canoes. The result was devastating. The men screamed and fled, joined by the girls and the pillagers. A dozen had died in the attack and many more had been wounded.

It was a repetition in miniature of the situation in Tahiti, with Bligh absenting himself as far as possible from the activities of his men, appearing only occasionally and then to upbraid them for slackness and theft.