I’m not sure what to make of A Bounty of Science; it tries to “scientifically” explain the mutiny on the Bounty:
A count of every lash British sailors received from 1765 through 1793 while serving on 15 naval vessels in the Pacific shows that Bligh was not overly abusive compared with contemporaries who did not suffer mutiny. Greg Dening’s Mr. Bligh’s Bad Language computed the average percentage of sailors flogged from information in ships’ logs at 21.5. Bligh’s was 19 percent, lower than James Cook’s 20, 26 and 37 percent, respectively, on his three voyages, and less than half that of George Vancouver’s 45 percent. Vancouver averaged 21 lashes per man, compared with the overall mean of five and Bligh’s 1.5.If unusually harsh punishment didn’t cause the mutiny, what did? Although Bligh preceded Charles Darwin by nearly a century, the ship commander comes closest to capturing the ultimate cause: ‘I can only conjecture that they have Idealy assured themselves of a more happy life among the Otaheitians than they could possibly have in England, which joined to some Female connections has most likely been the leading cause of the whole business.’
Indeed, crews consisted of young men in the prime of sexual life, shaped by evolution to bond in serial monogamy with women of reproductive age. Of the crews who sailed into the Pacific from 1765 through 1793, 82.1 percent were between the ages of 12 and 30, and another 14.3 percent were between 30 and 40. When the men arrived in the South Pacific, the results, from an evolutionary point of view, were not surprising. Of the 1,556 sailors, 437 (28 percent) got the ‘venereals.’ The Bounty’s infection rate was among the highest, at 39 percent.