A famous Bligh signature, and one of only a handful of manuscript items known to have been signed by him while he was in command of the Bounty. Although only a partial document, the details are clear, and Bligh's signature is complete in his familiar rather fine hand.

A famous Bligh signature, and one of only a handful of manuscript items known to have been signed by him while he was in command of the Bounty. Although only a partial document, the details are clear, and Bligh's signature is complete in his familiar rather fine hand.

The original document was clearly some sort of requisition or order and would have been drafted by Bligh's clerk John Samuel. It is addressed to "Mr. John Fryer Master, Mr. Cole Boatswain, and two of the Master's Mates of His Majesty's Armed Vessel Bounty". Otherwise, there is a tantalising fragment of text reading "…under your hands your…", before it is signed off "Given under my hand on board the said Ship at Sea the 29th Decr. 1787 - Wm. Bligh".

The Bounty had only just sailed at the time this was written, as Bligh had been held up at Spithead and the Isle of Wight by bad weather and the necessity to replace a worn bower cable. These problems only compounded Bligh's frustration at what he would later criticise as the cavalier attitude of the Admiralty towards his expedition, as delays before sailing were responsible for him arriving at Cape Horn too late in the season, forcing him to make the longer voyage east instead. The Bounty had finally taken a pilot on board on 23 December 1787 in order to negotiate the Needles at the west end of the Isle of Wight. The voyage proper had begun, but was marked by a continued run of poor luck, as the ship was pounded by a fierce Atlantic gale for some three days: "we were an entire Sea on Deck", he noted in his log for 27 December. The day that this fragment was written, the 29th, saw the weather continue to abate, and Bligh was much occupied in ordering repairs to any damage to the Bounty and especially to their small boats, and was disappointed that quantities of bread had been irreparably damaged.

There are, of course, many important manuscript sources for the story of Bligh and the Bounty, but they are tucked safely into important international collections (with a high number in the Mitchell Library collection, for instance). As a result, Bligh manuscript material dating from this turbulent period is of the greatest rarity, and this is one of only a few such fragments from the actual Bounty voyage known to have been offered in several decades. This piece has an excellent provenance, having been sold as part of Dame Mabel Brookes' collection in Melbourne in 1968.