Boothbay Harbor’s Windjammer Emporium down on Pier 1 now features an exhibit on the 1960s-era HMS Bounty rebuild. The ship ported at Boothbay Harbor Shipyard three times for repairs – in 2002, 2006 and 2012 – before sinking in 2012’s Hurricane Sandy.

Emporium owner Mark Gimbel said he got the idea earlier this year and posted a request for Bounty artifacts on Facebook just to see if it would pan out. Out of a few responses, Gimbel said he had one that proved especially bountiful.

“The one guy replied, 'Yeah, as a matter of fact I've got a bunch of stuff sitting out on my yard.' He goes out to his yard, pulls the tarp back and takes a picture of the stuff. I had no idea what was there, but … I said, 'If it came from the Bounty, then it's good enough for me.’”

The man had no interest in loaning the pieces, so Gimbel bought the pile for $500. He said he did not give a second thought to the man’s insistence the artifacts would need a large pickup truck for retrieval, so he hired Knickerbocker Property Management to pick them up and deliver them while he was away for the winter.

“They dropped it off and just left it here. I got back in the spring and it was way larger than I thought it was. I thought it was going to be little stuff.”

The 7-foot x 8-foot portion of decking from the ship weighed in around 400 pounds and the knees 100 pounds each. Gimbel said there were two more knees in the pile, but they were far too deteriorated to put on display. Knickerbocker Group helped hang the deck vertically to use as a backdrop for the rest of the installation. Front and center in the display is a television with a looped, seven-minute documentary put together by local filmmaker and former Boothbay Register reporter Ryan Leighton. The video features two sea shanties, one chosen by Gimbel and the other by Leighton, and clips from the construction of the ship, some of the films the ship has been in and the rescue operation from its sinking.

The Bounty was a 1960 replica of the one built in 1784, bought by the British Navy in 1787 and burned and sunk off Tahiti in 1790 by mutineers. The replica was commissioned for use in the 1962 film “Mutiny on the Bounty” starring Marlon Brando, Richard Harris and Trevor Howard. According to Bounty’s now defunct website, the ship was scheduled to be burned after the film was released, but cast members including Brando protested the production company Metro Goldwyn Mayer to keep it.

After about a decade as a permanent tourist attraction in St. Petersburg, Florida, the ship also appeared in 1983's “Yellowbeard” starring most of the Monty Python cast and several other A-listers at the time; the 1989 version of “Treasure Island” starring Charlton Heston, Christian Bale and Christopher Lee; two of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” films; “SpongeBob Squarepants: The Movie”; and the sultry film, “Pirates.”

The Bounty’s last visit in 2012 and final cycle of repairs at Boothbay Harbor Shipyard concluded less than a week before its demise; the ship sank in the Outer Banks off North Carolina, caught in Hurricane Sandy, en route from New London, Connecticut to St. Petersburg. According to cnn.com, the body of crew member Claudene Christian, a descendent of the 1790 mutiny leader, Fletcher Christian, was recovered; a four-day search did not yield the body of Captain Robin Walbridge; the rest of the crew survived.

“We didn't want to focus on the sinking,” Gimbel said. “We wanted to focus on the whole exciting life cycle of the ship, you know, because it's pretty cool.”