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.