Most of us know about Captain Bligh and his reputation for being a bully which landed him in troubles with the crew of the Bounty. What most of us aren’t told about is the early years of his career which saw him busy navigating his way around the sountern end of Tasmanian in company with Captain Cook. William Bligh was only a young Lieutenant when he was given the command of the Resolution.Cook was captain of the Adventure and together they were on their way to collect breadfruit from Tahiti in the Pacific and take it to plantations in the West Indies. On the way to Tahiti they stopped in at Adventure Bay on the east coast of Bruny Island, Tasmania. The search for breadfruit in Tahiti all came to nothing, as Captain Cook was killed before they could finish their task. From Adventure Bay, Bligh couldn’t see Mount Wellington due to cloud cover, but years later – in August 1788 – he came back via Adventure Bay as captain of the Bounty on his way – again – heading to Tahiti for breadfruit plants. Happily the sky was clear that day (we get LOTS of sunny days in winter in Hobart!) and while the crew were on Bruny Island collecting timber and water he spotted a high flat mountain to the north and made a record of it in his log book. This was the same trip which turned out so disastrously, when they crew mutinied on their way to the Pacific. Luckily Bligh had the sense to hang on to his log book when he was evicted from the ship so we can know about his sighting of Mt Wellington. Bligh survived, and came back AGAIN in February 1792 – on his way to Tahiti once again in hopes of collecting breadfruit from there – and stopped again at Adventure Bay and gave the mountain its first name: Table Hill. He then set off for Tahiti. Two weeks later the French arrived in Adventure Bay and they set about naming land forms and rivers – from which we get Bruny Island, Recherche Bay, and D’Entrecasteaux Channel. (So, tip for today: if you get there first, give it your own names. It would have been much better to have named it after himself so we could have Bligh Channel and saved ourselves lots of trouble with bad French pronounciation.) From there, it took another 12 years before the British sent a contingent of government officers, military, settlers and convicts to set up home at the foot of Mount Wellington. Maybe if Captain Bligh had the opportunity to walk on Mount Wellington he wouldn’t have been so uptight and cranky, and could well have saved himself some stress and headaches of having to navigate 5,822 km on the open sea in a small open row boat which was his fate when his crew mutinied on 28 April 1789 – a story that was made famous in Mutiny on the Bounty. . So just consider next time you are feeling cross and hot tempered, chill out, go for a walk on Mount Wellington and avoid the fate of Captain Bligh.