Sea-faring fans and film buffs in Torquay welcomed a special nautical visitor to the town at the weekend. The tall ship used in the 1960s Marlon Brando movie ‘Mutiny on the Bounty’ berthed at Princess Quay.

The 47-year-old three-masted vessel is a replica of the ship famous for the 1789 mutiny in the South Pacific between Captain Bligh and Master Mate Fletcher Christian.

The current vessel was built for the 1962 MGM blockbuster remake of Mutiny on the Bounty, starring Marlon Brando as Fletcher Christian and Trevor Howard as the notorious Captain Bligh. It was also used in two of the recent Disney ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ films as the Edinburgh Trader.

Other big screen credits for the current vessel include Sponge Bob, Square Pants, the Movie and the 1990 version of Treasure Island starring Charlton Heston and Christian Bale.

The ship is currently touring the country to raise money for the Cutty Sark Conservation Appeal. Torquay is one of four ports being visited as part of a tour to promote the appeal to repair the Cutty Sark, which was severely damaged by fire at Greenwich, in London, in May. The Cutty Sark, launched in 1869, remains the only tea clipper still in existence, and is the focal point of a World Heritage Site highlighting maritime history at Greenwich.

Visitors got a chance to board the HMS Bounty, a replica of the Bethia, a merchant vessel built in Hull in 1784. The Bethia was renamed HMS Bounty after being commandeered by the Royal Navy in 1787. The original Bounty sailed under the command of Captain William Bligh who took it to Tahiti to gather cheap food for plantation workers.

The replica ship stands at over 100ft. It was built in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, in 1960 by MGM studios to star in the film Mutiny On The Bounty. The ship has just completed a £1.5m restoration and is made up of 400,000ft of lumber, 112 tons of screw bolts, 14 tons of bar iron, 1,200 lbs of putty, 10 miles of line for rigging and over 10,000 square feet of hand-sewn canvas for the sails.

HMS Bounty left Torquay on 26 August 2007 to appear in Hull and at the Southampton Boat Show, before embarking on a re-run of her 1962 world tour, via South Africa and New Zealand to Pitcairn and Tahiti.