'HMS Bounty' gun goes under the hammer in Dumfries
- Published
The naval gun is set to go up for auction in southern Scotland this weekend
A naval gun believed to be from HMS Bounty will be sold at auction in Dumfries on Saturday.
The Bounty is one of the world's most famous historical ships because of a mutiny in 1798.
Fletcher Christian led disaffected crewmen to overthrow the captain William Bligh whose authoritarian command they were unhappy with.
They cast Bligh and his loyalists adrift in an open boat and sailed the Bounty to Pitcairn Island.
The story of the Bounty and its mutiny is one of the most famous in naval history
Many of the mutineers settled on Pitcairn and on nearby Norfolk Island.
The Bounty eventually sank off Pitcairn in what became known as Bounty Bay.
When she went down, the ship was armed with four four-pounder guns which were later recovered.
Four guns were recovered after the ship sank and one of them is thought to have ended up in Scotland
Three of them are still in Pitcairn and Norfolk but the fourth is believed to have been in Scotland for the past 105 years.
It was gifted to the captain of another British ship, the Orealla, which called at Pitcairn in 1898.
It came with a letter purporting to authenticate its links to the Bounty signed by the island's president JR McCoy, a great-grandson of one of the original mutineers.
The Orealla belonged to a Liverpool-based shipping company whose owner bought Little Cumbrae island in the Firth of Clyde in 1913 and took the gun there.
A letter purports to authenticate the weapon's links to the Bounty
Little Cumbrae changed hands again in 1960 when it was bought by businessman Peter Kaye.
He relocated the gun to his retirement home at Borgue in Dumfries and Galloway. Mr Kaye died last year and his possessions are now being sold.
Mr Kaye's former personal assistant Susan Foster is his executor. She hopes the gun will find a new home near the sea.
"It started off its life on the sea; it spent a big chunk of its life in the sea; and since it was raised it's never been more than half a mile from the sea," she said.
Susan Foster hopes the gun will find a new home by the sea
The gun will come under the hammer at the Thomson Roddick saleroom in Dumfries on Saturday morning.
Managing director Sybelle Thomson says she is "as satisfied as she can be" with the gun's provenance.
The auction house has conducted additional research to compare the gun's dimensions with those still in the South Pacific and to compare the signature on the letter with those on other documents.
Ms Thomson says it has attracted considerable interest and is hoped to fetch between £5,000 to £10,000.
- Published29 October 2012
