‘It’s sacred to us’: register of Bounty mutineer’s descendants returns to South Pacific

An illustration depicts the mutineers sending Commander William Bligh and the crew still loyal to him away from the Bounty. Photograph: Tina Warner/National Maritime Museum, London

It is a book that records the 19th-century descendants of some of the most notorious troublemakers in naval history: the sailors responsible for the mutiny on the Bounty.

Now, the Pitcairn Register – a handwritten volume that registered the births, marriages and deaths of the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the mutineers and the Tahitian women they enslaved – is finally returning home to the South Pacific.