The wooden ship that portrayed the Bounty on screen carried a strangely fatal arc of its own. Built in 1882 as the Lily by the Dickie Brothers of San Francisco, the vessel turned up in film work as early as 1920 — when a then‑unknown production was even permitted to burn her decks while moored in San Francisco. MGM purchased the ship in 1927, used her again, then reacquired and extensively refitted her by June 1934 to represent the famous eighteenth‑century frigate for the 1935 picture. Rather than an immortal screen prop, the vessel’s later life reads like a slow‑motion shipwreck: by the late 1930s the replica Bounty and the Pandora were moored and neglected at Long Beach; by 1946 the Bounty had been sold, restored to a fishing rig, and then, after dragging anchor in a storm sometime before August 1950, battered herself against the breakwater and sank. The Pandora replica was stripped of masts, converted into a motor freighter and simply vanished from Lloyd’s register by 1960. The sequence of burning, neglect, wreck and disappearance gave the vessels a post‑production mythos — a bitter coda to the film’s epic sea imagery and a cautionary tale about the physical toll exacted on large wooden props and the people who sailed them.
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AI concept artworkArchive Record · 1930s
The 'Bounty' Replica: From Hollywood Icon to Smashed, Sunken Relic — A Maritime Curse of a Movie Set
The replica ship used as the Bounty (originally the 1882 Lily) / 1930s
The wooden ship that portrayed the Bounty on screen carried a strangely fatal arc of its own. Built in 1882 as the Lily by the Dickie Brothers of San Francisco, the vessel turned up in film work as early as 1920 — when a then‑unknown production was even permitted to burn her decks while moored in San Francisco. MGM purchased the ship in 1927, used her again, then reacquired and extensively refitted her by June 1934 to represent the famous eighteenth‑century frigate for the 1935 picture. Rather than an immortal screen prop, the vessel’s later life reads like a slow‑motion shipwreck: by the late 1930s the replica Bounty and the Pandora were moored and neglected at Long Beach; by 1946 the Bounty had been sold, restored to a fishing rig, and then, after dragging anchor in a storm sometime before August 1950, battered herself against the breakwater and sank. The Pandora replica was stripped of masts, converted into a motor freighter and simply vanished from Lloyd’s register by 1960. The sequence of burning, neglect, wreck and disappearance gave the vessels a post‑production mythos — a bitter coda to the film’s epic sea imagery and a cautionary tale about the physical toll exacted on large wooden props and the people who sailed them.
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