Naval officer, commander of the Bounty, and for a time a Manx son-in-law.

He was not a Manxman by birth, but he served on the Island before he was famous, based there in a revenue cutter intercepting smugglers. On 4 February 1781 he married Elizabeth Betham at Kirk Onchan. Her father Richard Betham was Collector of Customs for the Island.

The Manx connection ran on into his career. Duncan Campbell, whose family the Bethams had married into, gave him command of the Britannia on the Jamaica run from 1783 to 1787, and Bligh wrote to Campbell from the Britannia at Jamaica on 11 June 1787. The two families stayed close. Bligh visited Campbell's son Dugald at Salt Spring in 1793 on his way back to Jamaica in the Providence, and was the principal witness to Dugald Campbell's will, drawn in London in 1813.

The Bounty was fitted out by government under the care of Sir Joseph Banks, to carry the breadfruit and other plants from Otaheite to the West Indies, and sailed from Spithead on 23 December 1787 under Bligh's command. Three of those aboard had Manx connections: Bligh himself by marriage, Fletcher Christian, and the midshipman Peter Heywood, whom Bligh had come to know through the Heywood family on the Island.

After the mutiny he is reported to have said that he had reason to curse the day he ever knew a Christian, a Heywood, or any Manxman.