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Sometimes, the movies have a lot to answer for. Shortly before Christmas 1787, a naval frigate left Portsmouth, travelling south-westward with the intention of rounding Cape Horn and continuing on towards the Pacific island of Otaheite. Its mission may not have been an honourable one – they were to fill the ship’s cargo bay with breadfruit seedlings which could then be transported to the West Indies as a cheap method for feeding slaves – but its captain, Lieutenant William Bligh, was a principled and moral man who braved treacherous conditions at the tips of both South America and Africa before finally making it to the island almost a year later. When they arrived, he would have been entitled to feel proud of himself, for the ship, the Bounty, had the best disciplinary record of any vessel in naval history. Throughout the entire voyage he had been forced to flog only one sailor.

Fast-forward a couple of hundred years and three Hollywood adaptations of the story have left us with a very different view of William Bligh, that of a tyrannical, half-mad sadist who deserved to be set adrift in the open sea by the mutineers after his cruel and despicable behaviour. Like I say, the movies have a lot to answer for.

I began writing Mutiny on the Bounty in mid-2006, shortly after my fourth novel, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, was published. For much of that year and the one that followed, I found myself travelling the world, speaking about the book at literary festivals, and would return to my hotel room to transcripts of the trials that followed the capture of some of the mutineers. And the more I read, the more the story changed; ironically, it seemed as if my novel, which by its very nature was intended as a work of fiction, was becoming more truthful than any of the accounts of the Bounty that had previously been attempted.

After the success of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, it’s inevitable that the two novels will be compared and there are connections which can be identified. Both take a young boy as their central character: in Pyjamas, it’s Bruno, the nine-year-old child brought from his happy home in Berlin to a place he calls Out-With, a desolate area surrounded by fences. He’s miserable there until he finds one person who understands him, someone who reaches out to be his friend, a nine-year-old Jewish boy on the other side of the fence called Shmuel.

The story of the Bounty is told by 14-year-old John Jacob Turnstile, a Portsmouth pickpocket who, through a series of misadventures, finds himself installed as personal valet to Captain Bligh only minutes before the ship is due to set sail. He knows no one on board, is completely unfamiliar with the ways of sailors, and finds it almost impossible to become an integrated member of the crew. Fortunately, there is one person who is willing to take him under his wing and turn the journey into both an exciting adventure and a great education and that’s the captain himself, William Bligh.

There’s something about viewing the world from a youthful, innocent perspective that appeals greatly to me as a writer. In my second novel, The Congress of Rough Riders, I followed the story of William Cody, a fictional great-grandson of Buffalo Bill, from the innocence of childhood to the murder of his wife 30 years later. Pyjamas concerns itself with Bruno’s gradual realisation that the father he loves and admires may not be quite the hero he believes him to be. And now, in Mutiny on the Bounty, Turnstile is a boy who begins his journey believing that he knows it all – he’s grown up fending for himself on the streets of Portsmouth, after all, with no one to look after him but the dubious Mr Lewis at his Establishment for Boys – and thinks that he can use the voyage to create a new life for himself. The life he finds is not quite the one he expected. Two years at sea, learning the ways of men, changes him in ways he could never have predicted.

The challenge in writing this novel came in finding a fresh way to approach a story which is already familiar to many. Perhaps the greatest surprise I had while planning the book was realising that the most interesting way to solve this problem would be simply to tell the truth. Having read many books about Bligh, as well as all his writings and the court transcripts, I was able to form my own image of who the man was and what took place on board that fateful ship.

The same with Mr Christian. He had an able defender in his brother Edward, who wrote widely about Fletcher after the facts of the mutiny came to light. Indeed, it was he who began the process of re-shaping and twisting events so that the hero and villain of the piece would have their roles reversed. It’s often forgotten – particularly in his portrayals by matinée idols Clark Gable, Marlon Brando and Mel Gibson – that Fletcher Christian committed an act of mutiny and put his captain to sea in a small launch with 18 other men, a death sentence in itself. Is that the action of a hero? And Mr Bligh, in the greatest feat of navigation that had yet been seen by the world, found his way home. Are these the exploits of a villain?

Novels often turn out to be completely different from your original intention. And so what started as an epic, rollicking tale gradually became something much darker: a story of an unfulfilled man who finds it difficult to function on dry land, of an officer who will do whatever it takes to seek advancement and sensual pleasures, and of a young boy, filled with energy and enthusiasm, who is nevertheless hiding painful secrets that he can scarcely confide in himself, let alone in others. And a ship that houses them and 40 others that is as much a character in the novel as anyone else.

I remain drawn to the idea of re-creating historical figures in fiction and representing them in a new light. As well as the connections with The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas in terms of its youthful protagonists, the novel is a companion piece to my third novel, Crippen, in which the events surrounding the murder at Hilldrop Crescent in 1910 were recreated. Both characters – Dr Crippen and Captain Bligh – have been ill-served by history, large portions of both novels take place on board ships, and both feature the character of Matthieu Zéla, the narrator of my debut novel The Thief of Time, in a secondary role.

Since writing The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, I have been continually asked whether I intend to write other books for children. Although that novel was first published for children, I’ve stopped viewing it in that light and hope that it’s a book which can reach out to any audience. Indeed, in many of the countries in which the novel is published, it appears as an adult novel, in some as a children’s novel, and in some as both. Categorisation no longer interests me. (After The Thief of Time, I was called a historical novelist; after Crippen and Next of Kin, a crime writer.) My hope is that Mutiny on the Bounty will be read and enjoyed by people of all ages; often the excitement of writing novels set during a historical period is the manner in which one can scatter contemporary themes and concerns throughout. Certainly the life lived by the narrator, Turnstile, and the troubles he endures at a young age are as relevant to children’s lives today as they were in the 18th century. And I’m looking forward to the release this year of the Miramax film adaptation of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. I don’t know whether my new novel will ever be adapted for the cinema but if it is I’d like to think that the film-makers will allow Captain Bligh a little more humanity than usual and Mr Christian a little more deviousness.

Further reading...

Mutiny on the Bounty
by John Boyne
Doubleday
Buy now