This article explores the origins of the Fugitive Offenders Act 1881, which regulated the surrender or ‘rendition’ of fugitives between British territories until 1967. Notable as the precursor to modern laws regulating extradition between independent Commonwealth nations – laws that still exist today – the 1881 Act was enacted after a mutiny on the Satsuma, a British merchant ship, in 1874. The story of this mutiny and its legal context has never been told. Recorded in court depositions, newspaper reports, and official correspondence, the Satsuma case involved five seamen who, after mutinying at sea, fled to Melbourne, London, and Hong Kong. Imperial and colonial officials struggled to bring the mutineers to justice, as the case exposed the inadequacies of existing laws for arresting and trying fugitives who crossed the many internal borders of the nineteenth-century British Empire. Earlier attempts to reform the law had failed owing to official inaction, parochialism, and deference to the imperial repugnancy doctrine. Where those attempts failed, the Fugitive Offenders Act succeeded in creating a new rendition regime, anchoring the imperial history of international criminal law.