We braved the crowds, made it onto Bounty today and picked up cool info you can use to impress your kids, and innocent bystanders, when line up to see her in Tacoma.

Given her origins, Bounty is the last ship you’d think would be the site of a legendary mutiny. She started out hauling coal around Britain, for crying out loud.

Shipwrights at Deptford Naval Yards built her as a collier in 1784. Her owners christened her “Bethia” and fitted her out with an uncharacteristically modest figurehead. This woman of wood is so corseted and overdressed, it would take a forklift to give her a wardrobe malfunction.

The figurehead, which William Bligh described as “a handsome woman in a riding habit. Well carved,” stayed put when new economic interests steered Bethia out of the coal business and renamed her Bounty.

The sugar cane and indigo businesses were booming in the Indies, and the plantation owners were looking for ways to reduce the food costs on their employees. Breadfruit seemed like a natural. It’s fast-growing and nourishing. A person might even develop a taste for it.

In 1787, Bounty was converted into a pea patch.

The owners hired Bligh and a botanist to sail her to Tahiti, dig up a lot of breadfruit plants and make haste to get them back into the ground in the West Indies.

Things did not go smoothly. Fletcher Christian and the crew voted Bligh off the show at Pitcairn Island. They sank Bounty.

The rest is history made for the movies, notably one starring Marlon Brando, Trevor Howard and this ship in 1962. MGM studios had it built in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, 30 percent bigger than the original. They needed room for the cameras and cast to move around. Also, the movie folk were bigger than Bounty’s first crew. Especially Marlon Brando, who pretty much ate everything on the location shoot. The guy split 50-plus pairs of expensive costume pants.

Feel better about that shave ice now?

Bounty looks big and bulky, but she’s fun to sail, said crew member Carolyn Moss, 23, of Detroit.

When you take the helm on this ship, you’re touching history. The MGM prop masters bought a ship’s wheel from the 1830s at auction. It still works just fine.

Should you be called upon to swab the deck or polish the rail, you would be getting your daily dose of hand-me-down glamour. Kiera Knightley did those very jobs aboard Bounty when they both starred in the second and third versions of Pirates of the Carribbean.

Though Spongebob Squarepants has also co-starred with Bounty in a movie, he was safely off the boat when Kiera got down to scrubbing.

Rene Linares has a bit of advice for downtown Tacoma merchants looking to profit from Tall Ships: Extend your hours.

Linares, an assistant manager at Lush, a trendy bath and body products store on Government Street, has been enjoying the Tall Ships glow the vessels have cast over downtown Victoria.

“Everyone is happy,” he said.

It could be the ships, or the significant amount of grog and grub selling at restaurants near the harbor. The places are packed.

Everyone may be happy, but not enough to turn over wads of cash for chunks of rustic soap.

It could be timing. It’s hot here. It’s in the 80s, maybe the 90s. People don’t want to be carrying much more than a water bottle. And the big crowds stay down around the harbor as long as there’s a boat to board.

“It’s a little slow during the day,” Linares said. “There are more people in the streets when Tall Ships closes down.”

Unfortunately, Lush and the ships close around the same time.

It’s been slow, too, at Souvenir Liquidation, a long-time vendor of fleeces, sweats, T-shirts and shot glasses. Could be the weather, which is not whispering “better get a nice warm top.”

Or it could be the economy, from the price of gas to the fact that a dollar bill and a loonie are worth about the same.

“I haven’t seen as many people in the square this summer,” said Mary Swift, director of the Maritime Museum of British Columbia on Bastion Square.

From what she’s heard, the weak dollar, the high cost of fuel and more complicated border crossings have slowed Victoria’s tourism economy. But Tall Ships is boom time for the museum, which helped organize the original festival and is woven into this one. The museum is running the pirate school and has heritage displays in the festival’s Cultural Mosaic area. Crews have free admission to the museum, and the captains gathered there for a formal dinner Saturday night.

Walk-through traffic has been way up throughout the ship fest, she said.

Walk-by traffic has been up outside Munro’s, Victoria’s legendary book store, said bookseller Jessica Paul.

“You don’t see it reflected in the store,” she said, despite the maritime books on display in the window. “I’ve had regular customers complain about the difficulty of getting to the store because of all the closed streets.”

If the people strolling past are from the U.S, they might be put off by the fact that publishers price books higher in Canada than in the U.S. It’s a practice that made sense when the dollar was stronger. Now, Canadians see it as punitive.

If they wanted their book budgets plundered, they’d call a pirate. They happen to have a few dozen handy.

Saturday afternoon I peered down the hatch and into Lynx’s stateroom with its paneled bulkheads and plush curtained berths.

There, sitting on the floor amid squares of tin foil and piles of black powder, were Saul Lipton, 25, of Chicago, and Melissa Witmer, 30, from Lancaster, Pa.

They were making the ammo for that evening’s battle sail with Lady Washington, Amazing Grace and Hawaiian Chieftain. And they were just a notch too happy.

“We just figured out a way to pack them tighter in the gun, which makes them louder,” Saul said.

Louder is better, much, much better, on a battle sail. In the absence of deadly bits of metal, it’s volume, quantity, spirit and snappy maneuvering that determine the winner. So the two were manufacturing faux ammo as fast as possible.

“Here I am,” Witmer said, “a Mennonite from Lancaster, rolling shot on a Tall Ship.”

But did their big bang theory work?

That evening, we found the longest line in Victoria. We strolled down to the houseboats for dinner at Barb’s Fish and Chips take-out and waited an hour to place our order and another 30 minutes to pick it up. (Yes, it was worth it.)

That gave us plenty of time to listen to the exchange of black powder courtesies going on during the battle sail. It went like this: “Pow. Wham. Bam. WHOMPA.”

Score for Lipton and Witmer’s sound track.

As the ships sailed back into harbor, we stood at the end of the docks, waving and cheering for them.

“Fire on us!” we called to Lynx’s crew.

“Can’t!” they hailed us back. “We’re out of shot!”

Then they taught us a neat trick.

“Bang!” they yelled at us in unison.

“Bang!” we all yelled back.

Remember that, if you should find yourself on Ruston Way without a cannon during Thursday’s Parade of Sail.

You can bet Lipton and Witmer will have plenty of tightly packed shot at hand, and they’ll take aim at any provocateurs ashore.

Embedded in Victoria’s Tall Ships throngs, we’ve gotten a crash course in navigating the paths and docks and fair ways of the festival.

You might think you know how to walk with 10,000 or so other people around you, but historic sailing vessels change the rules.

So here’s a new set:

1. Be vigilant for photo hazards. Apparently, everyone wants a clear shot of a loved one standing in front of a ship. To get it, the subject stands by the ship and the shooter backs up until the framing is just right. Your challenge is twofold: Avoid being backed into, and stop dead before you end up stored in someone’s digital camera.

2. React quickly to sudden random stops. The person in front of you may halt without warning to avoid a photo hazard. The overheated parent may suddenly realize that one of the over-stimulated kids has run off to be a pirate. The cluster of teens may sense an immediate need for shave ice. Your job: Swerve, halt, or end up with your $6 ice cream cone on your shirt.

3. Maintain your infrastructure. Wear comfy shoes and clothes. Pack twice as much water as you think you’ll need, because once you’re inside the grounds, water doubles in price. Slather up with sunscreen. Pack moist wipes to deal with ice cream hazards.

4. Be alert to the rigging. Nothing stops a Tall Ships crowd faster than the sight of a nimble crew member waltzing out on a yardarm to adjust a halyard, or whatever it is they do 40 feet in the air without a net. Stop, too, and forgive the person who bumps into you.