In April 1789, after the mutiny on the Bounty, William Bligh and eighteen men were set adrift in a 23-foot open boat. This is what those weeks at sea were like, told slowly for sleep.

After the mutiny on the Bounty: a calm, sourced bedtime history of the forty-odd days William Bligh and eighteen men spent in a 23-foot open boat, from Tofua in Tonga, past Fiji, the Banks Islands and inside the Great Barrier Reef, to Kupang on Timor in June 1789.

We follow the boat the way Bligh wrote it down, day by day. The launch is pushed off from the ship at dawn on 28 April, so deep in the water that the sea is a hand's length from the gunwale. A cove on Tofua comes next, then the promise of one ounce of bread a day, weighed on coconut-shell scales against a pistol ball. Then come sixteen days of rain, the white line of the reef, oysters on the rocks at Ma'alpiku (Restoration Island), the islands of the Torres Strait, the long run across the Arafura Sea, and the lontar palms of Timor. The story ends at Kupang, the Dutch East India Company's small fort, where the men are taken in. Gentle narration, quotations from Bligh's own Narrative, disputed points flagged, no verdicts on the mutiny: just the boat, the weather and the places it passed.

CHAPTERS
00:00 Cold open: An open boat at dawn
01:15 Chapter 1: The Morning of the Twenty-Eighth
10:56 Chapter 2: Tofua
20:15 Chapter 3: A Sacred Promise
30:11 Chapter 4: Sixteen Days of Rain
38:41 Chapter 5: Inside the Reef
48:39 Chapter 6: The Arafura Sea and Kupang
59:07 Fade: The harbour at Kupang

A NOTE ON PLACE
Ma'alpiku (Restoration Island) is on Kuuku Ya'u Country. Out of respect, no Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people, and no cultural sites, are shown in this video.

Positions of some small islands along the reef are approximate, worked from Bligh's latitudes, and the maps mark them so. The distance is usually given as 3,618 nautical miles. Bligh's character, and the causes of the mutiny, are argued over to this day; this episode leaves that argument alone.

SOURCES
Bligh's own Narrative (1790) and A Voyage to the South Sea (1792), Project Gutenberg #20337 and #15411. Full source and image list in the YouTube description.

The script was researched and written from the sources listed. Images are public-domain museum works, route maps and painted illustrations.

New sea stories every week.
Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5r4DtW0oqI

True voyages to India, the Spice Islands and Australia — calm history for sleep, told from the travellers' own journals.

How ancient Rome reached India: a calm, sourced bedtime history of a Roman pepper voyage around the year 60, from Alexandria to the Malabar coast and home again.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/AmGRhXSSUis

We follow a cargo the way it really travelled: up the Nile on the north wind, twelve nights across the Eastern Desert by camel to the Red Sea port of Berenike, thirty days down the Red Sea, and forty days across the open ocean on the south-west monsoon to Muziris on the Kerala coast, then home on the winter wind. Told from the merchants' own handbook, the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, with Pliny the Elder and Strabo. Gentle narration, disputed points flagged, no verdicts.

Chapters: 00:00 Cold open: Berenike harbour. 01:07 The River Road. 09:16 Twelve Nights in the Desert. 18:26 Down the Red Sea. 26:59 The Wind Called Hippalus. 37:04 Muziris. 48:54 Home on the Winter Wind. 55:54 A jar of pepper at Berenike.

Sources: Periplus of the Erythraean Sea (trans. W. H. Schoff, 1912); Pliny the Elder, Natural History (trans. Bostock and Riley, 1855); Strabo, Geography (trans. Hamilton and Falconer, 1854-57). Full source list in the YouTube description.

Narration is AI-generated from a script researched and written from the sources listed. Images are public-domain museum works, route maps and AI-generated painted illustrations.

True voyages to India, the Spice Islands and Australia — calm history for sleep, told from the travellers' own journals.

In 1333 a traveller from Tangier reached Delhi, and he kept going: to the Maldives, Sri Lanka and beyond. This is what it was like to travel with Ibn Battuta, told slowly for sleep.

Ibn Battuta for sleep: a calm, sourced bedtime history of his years in India and on the Indian Ocean, around 1330 to 1347.

We sail with the monsoon down the coast of East Africa, from Zeila and Mogadishu to the wooden town and coral ruins of Kilwa. We cross the Indus under the new moon, wait at Multan for the sultan's permission, and arrive in the Delhi of Muhammad bin Tughluq, where he served as a qazi beneath the Qutb Minar. We follow the sultan's embassy down to Calicut, where thirteen Chinese junks lay at anchor with their sails left flying, and stay for the storm that changed his plans. Then the Maldives and their cowrie money, Adam's Peak in Ceylon, the rice fields of Bengal, and the port of Samudra in Sumatra.

Gentle narration, disputed dates flagged, no verdicts. Just ships, winds and the pages of an old book.

Main source: Voyages d'Ibn Batoutah, Arabic text and French translation by C. Defrémery and B. R. Sanguinetti (1853–58, public domain). Quotations are our own English translations. Full source list on the Slow Caravan YouTube channel.

The script was researched and written from the sources listed.

Slow Caravan tells the journeys of the Indian Ocean world.