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 Gordon Talge wrote
>
>I think Pitcarin Island was remote and mischarted and that is why the
>British ( or any ship for that matter ) didn't sight island for years
>leaving the mutineers to their own devices.
>
and Peter Fogg added-

>It certainly was and is remote. While the Bounty mutineers were floundering
>about in mid Pacific, looking for another refuge (their first choice didn't
>turn out too well) someone remembered this little speck of land to the east.
>They had a position but no reason to put too much store in the longitude, so
>sailed along the latitude until it popped up on the horizon.

====================

Comment from George-

I think that it's a more complex matter than that. I'm not sure how and why
the Bounty mutineers chose and found Pitcairn, and I wonder if anyone
understands just what happened.

Here are some facts.

The only previous recorded sighting of Pitcairn was made by Philip
Carteret, in Swallow, without landing, on 2 July 1767. He recorded the
position as S25 deg 02', W133 1/2 deg. The modern position is S 25 deg 04',
W130 deg 16', so his latitude was good (as it should have been) but his
longitude was too far West by 2 deg 14'.

Hawkesworth noted Carteret's discovery of Pitcairn in his "Voyages", but
mis-transcribed the latitude, putting it too far North by all of 5 degrees,
at S 20 deg 02'. There was a copy of Hawkesworth in Bligh's on-board
library, to which which Christian had access after the mutiny.

So to anyone using Hawkesworth's position as a reference (such as
Christian, presumably) Pitcairn would indeed be hard to find, as it would
be 300 miles further South than expected. Because longitudes were always so
uncertain, the process of rediscovering any isolated island would be by
latitude sailing: that is, sticking to the known latitude while covering a
range of longitudes until it turns up. Using this technique, Carteret's
error of 2deg 14' in longitude would not have caused any great difficulty.
But a latitude error of 300 miles would have caused such a scan of
longitude to be made over quite the wrong part of the Pacific Ocean.

Presumably Christian had no way of knowing that Hawkesworth's account of
Pitcairn's latitude was so much in error. So how on Earth did he manage to
find the island? Or was his rediscovery of it nothing more than a fortunate
accident?

I suppose that the Admiralty, if they had been intent on re-finding
Pitcairn, didn't need to rely on Hawkesworth for its latitude, but had
access to Carteret's journal which stated the latitude correctly.

Does anyone have more information, to resolve this puzzle?

My information has come from Vol 1 of "Carteret's voyage around the world",
edited by Helen Wallis, published by the Hakluyt Society in 1965.

George.

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