In this way, with now and then a little interrupted sleep, about a thousand long and anxious hours were consumed in pain and peril, and a space of sea passed over equal to four thousand five hundred miles, being at the rate of four and one-fifth miles an hour, or one hundred miles a day.
Lieutenant Bligh has expressed his conviction, that the six days spent among the coral islands, off the coast of New Holland, were the salvation of the whole party, by the refreshing sleep they here procured, by the exercise of walking about, and, above all, by the nutriment derived from the oysters and clams, the beans and berries, they procured while there; for that such, he says, was the exhausted condition of all on their arrival at the 'barrier reef,' that a few days more at sea must have terminated the existence of many of them.

This stoppage, however, had likewise been nearly productive of fatal consequences to the whole party.

In fact, another mutiny was within an ace of breaking out, which, if not checked at the moment, could only, in their desperate situation, have ended in irretrievable and total destruction.

Bligh mentions, in his printed narrative, the mutinous conduct of a person to whom he gave a cutlass to defend himself.

This affair, as stated in his original manuscript journal, wears a far more serious aspect.
'The carpenter (Purcell) began to be insolent to a high degree, and at last told me, with a mutinous aspect, he was as good a man as I was.