Authorship and Authority in Sir John Barrow’s Narrative of the Mutiny on HMS Bounty

This article interrogates the practices of authorship by John Barrow in his anonymously published narrative The Eventful History of the Mutiny and Piratical Seizure of HMS Bounty: Its Cause and Consequences (1831). Sources documenting the publication of The Eventful History demonstrate both Barrow’s motivations for anonymity and the strategies used to maintain the work’s authority. Authority was achieved by offering a fresh analysis of the mutiny from a well-informed author; by releasing the work under the aegis of an established series of titles and a respected publisher; and by using and naming a diverse range of sources, both published and unpublished.