On December 20, exactly one month after the whale attack, and within hours of the crew beginning to die of thirst, the boats landed on uninhabited Henderson Island, a small uplifted coral atoll within the modern-day British territory of the Pitcairn Islands. The men incorrectly believed that they had landed on Ducie Island, a similar atoll to the east. Had they landed on Pitcairn Island itself, to the southwest, they might have received help; the descendants of the survivors of HMS "Bounty", who had famously mutinied in 1789, still lived there.