The Mutiny on the Bounty

In April 1789, HMS Bounty sailed through the South Pacific under Captain William Bligh. The crew had spent five months in Tahiti, living in paradise — warm breezes, abundant fruit, no labor beyond tending breadfruit seedlings. They had everything they needed and one clear obligation: follow their captain's orders and complete the voyage home.

But Fletcher Christian began to listen to a different voice. The whisper was simple and ancient: why should Bligh have authority over you? Surely you deserve to be your own master. The restraint felt unbearable, even though the mission was good and the destination was England. Christian convinced himself — and eighteen others — that the one boundary placed on them was the one thing they could not tolerate.

On April 28, they seized the ship. And in that moment of supposed liberation, everything unraveled. The mutineers eventually settled on Pitcairn Island, where jealousy, violence, and murder consumed them. Within four years, most were dead by each other's hands. The paradise they grasped turned to ash.

Genesis tells us the Almighty placed Adam and Eve in a garden of staggering abundance with one boundary — a single tree. The serpent's whisper was the same one Fletcher Christian heard: that the restriction was the real problem, that disobedience was freedom. But as the mutineers discovered on Pitcairn, and as our first parents learned east of Eden, the moment we seize what God has withheld, the freedom we expected becomes a prison of our own making.