Product Description

Has history been wrong for 200 years?

More than two centuries after Master’s Mate Fletcher Christian led a mutiny against Lieutenant William Bligh on a small, armed transport vessel called Bounty, the true story of this enthralling adventure has become obscured by the legend. Combining vivid characterization and deft storytelling, Caroline Alexander shatters the centuries-old myths surrounding this story. She brilliantly shows how, in a desperate attempt to save one man from the gallows and another from ignominy, two powerful families came together and began to create the version of history we know today. The true story of the mutiny on the Bounty is an epic of duty and heroism, pride and power, and the assassination of a brave man’s honor at the dawn of the Romantic age.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2154354 in Books
• Published on: 2003-09-16
• Released on: 2003-09-16
• Format: Audiobook
• Original language: English
• Binding: Audio Cassette

From Amazon.co.uk
Few episodes in the history of British sea-faring are as gripping and sensational as The Bounty--an account of a mutiny of 1789. While the French were having a revolution in Paris, in the South Pacific a very English coup took place when Master's mate Fletcher Christian deposed Captain Bligh, the ruler of his ship, and set off with his fellow mutineers for a new life in the paradise of Tahiti. The tale has all the ingredients of an adventure--Robinson Crusoe, Captain Cook, Robert Louis Stevenson and Lord of the Flies all rolled into one. And, as Caroline Alexander points out, myth and legend have often got in the way of the real truth of why the mutiny took place. She sets out to find out what really happened, and does so by not only reconstructing the fateful voyage of the ship, but also by focusing in on all the principal and minor characters in the drama.

The trouble with this book is that there seems to be too many different tales to tell and the author struggles to keep up with her narrative. Like a lost ship we set sail in one direction only to back-track and recover the same course over again. The promised treasure--why Christian really did it--is never found. Readers wanting a clearer and simpler chart might be better advised to read Captain Bligh's own famous account, and Edward Christian's defence of his brother The Bounty Mutiny and then follow-up with Greg Dening's book, Mr Bligh's Bad Language. --Miles Taylor

Books in Canada
Caroline Alexander’s book Endurance became a surprise bestseller six years ago and started a revival of interest in the Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton-one that grew to include books about the leadership lessons that executives can supposedly gain by studying him. In fact, the success of Endurance launched the publishing craze for books about the age of exploration generally. Alexander herself now returns to the field with The Bounty, a much more impressive work that will have a different effect. No one is ever going to write a book called Management Secrets of Captain Bligh.
People have been doing books about the Bounty for more than 200 years, and many previous writers, though none with Alexander’s access to the multitudes, have tried to defend William Bligh’s reputation and make guesses about Fletcher Christian’s reasons for leading the revolt against him. The strength of her book is her use of primary sources (all of them known) in making a neat narrative that’s well considered and carefully written. One of these original documents in particular fully captures the drama of the event.

“I have lost the Bounty,” Bligh wrote, at the first opportunity, to his frail, nervous wife back home. “On the 28th. April [1789] at day light in the morning Christian having the morning watch [...] with several others came into my Cabbin while I was a Sleep, and seizing me, holding naked Bayonets at my Breast, tied my Hands behind my back, and threatened instant destruction if I uttered a word [...] I demanded of Christian the cause of such a violent act, & severely degraded him for his Villainy but he could only answer-‘not a word Sir or you are Dead.’ I dared him to the act & endeavoured to rally some one to a sense of their duty but to no effect.”

Even those who believe Bligh was a martinet have never questioned his seamanship. When he and eighteen others were set adrift in a 23-foot open boat, Bligh, over the next 48 days, sailed it 3,618 miles to Timor in what were the Dutch East Indies and eventually arrived back in Britain “in a blaze of triumph and white-hot anger....” The Admiralty sent an expedition to round up the mutineers, who were easily found on Tahiti-all but Christian and eight others, who had taken the ship and vanished.
The animating character in the Bounty story is Sir Joseph Banks, the botanist and president of the Royal Society. He had the idea to take breadfruit plants from Tahiti, a place he had explored on one of James Cook’s voyages, and cultivate them in Jamaica as cheap food for slaves. He shoehorned Bligh, whom he would continue to champion from then on, into command of the expedition and its vessel, the Bounty.
Strictly speaking, the ship was never HMS Bounty, for it wasn’t even a sloop-of-war but a mere cutter, designated HMT-His Majesty’s Transport. It was only 85 1/2 feet in length but had a complement of 54, all of them volunteers eager to see the delights of Otaheite, as Tahiti was spelled. This total included many who, like the sailmaker, Lawrence Labogue from Nova Scotia, had served under Bligh on previous occasions.
Bligh was grateful to his patron but disappointed in the Navy. In his glory days, he had been paid £50 a year. Now he was to be compensated based on the rating of the ship-little more than £18 per annum. He was a captain only in the sense of being in command. Lieutenant was his rank, the same one he had held on his first Pacific voyage as sailing master under Cook. He was the Bounty’s only commissioned officer.
When the appointment came through, Bligh, then on half-pay, was living on the Isle of Man, where prices were lower. The Christian family from Cumberland was living there too, and thus Bligh chose Fletcher Christian, 23 years of age, as one of the master’s mates. Like Bligh, Christian had come to the navy from service aboard merchant ships. He once told a relative that “it was very easy to make one’s self beloved and respected on board a ship; one had only to be always ready to obey one’s superior officer, and to be kind to the common men.”
Before departing on the Bounty, Christian told his brother, “I delight to set the Men an Example. I not only can do every part of a common Sailor’s Duty, but am proud upon a par with a principal part of the Officers.’” The brother, Charles, was awaiting judgement for his part in a mutiny of his own. The incident arose, he explained, “from a sudden ebullition of passion springing from sympathy at seeing cruel usage exercised towards one who deserved far different treatment....” Bligh was optimistic as the Bounty crossed the Atlantic, writing in the ship’s log: “My Men all active good fellows, & what has given me much pleasure is that I have not yet been obliged to punish any one.” Yet he seems to have been a person who didn’t always think before speaking. “Busily intent on his many burdensome responsibilities, Bligh was unlikely,” Alexander writes, “to have taken note of his men’s practiced and scrutinizing gazes.”
The trouble began when despite repeated attempts the Bounty was unable to make it round Cape Horn and Bligh decided to recross the ocean and approach Tahiti from the other direction, via the Cape of Good Hope. This added 10,000 miles to the voyage. While in southern Africa making repairs, Bligh criticized the work of a ship’s carpenter who had gone ashore to cut wood. The sailor accused Bligh of having left the ship “on purpose of finding fault.” Bligh decided not to punish him because “I could not bear the loss of an able Working and healthy Man.” And also because, as Alexander comments, he “had no commissioned officer to turn to for authority and moral support-and no marines to back him up.” The carpenter continued to foment trouble.
Having experienced the delights of Tahiti-climatic, culinary and sexual-the men were reluctant to leave once the plants were loaded. When they were forced to do so, resentment grew. But what led them to revolt cannot be known. Bligh put it down to one factor: “Insanity.” Alexander is less sure and more poetic: “a night of drinking and a proud man’s pride, a low moment on one gray dawn, a momentary and fatal slip in a gentleman’s code of discipline-and then the rush of consequences to be lived out for a lifetime.”
Christian took the Bounty back to Tahiti, where the majority of the rebels elected to stay. They were soon captured and taken to England to face court-martial and, some of them, the gallows-those who survived heartless confinement on the homeward voyage aboard a ship that was wrecked along the way. By that time, the larger party had quarrelled with Christian’s group, which kidnapped a number of Tahitian women (and Tahitian men as well), reboarded the Bounty and began searching for a hiding place of their own.
They found it in Pitcairn Island, which for the past generation had been misplaced on the Admiralty chart by 180 miles. Once there, they beached the ship and burned it, after taking off anything of possible use (except the cannon). Christian had been in command of the vessel only about five months.
Sexual jealousies ran high and the women were mistreated. Violence erupted between women and men on the one hand and between the Tahitians and the English on the other. In the first of three outbreaks, in 1793, Christian was shot in the back and killed while digging in his yam patch. The killer, a “black” man as the sailors said, was himself soon murdered.
The last mutineer left on the island, discovered in 1808 and left unmolested, was John Adams (formerly Alexander Smith). He related how Christian, in his telling a sullen fellow, had “by many acts of cruelty and inhumanity, brought on himself the hatred and detestation of his companions....”
As for Bligh, he was given a second (and bigger) ship to complete the assignment with the breadfruit, but the species once taken to the Caribbean proved unsuited to conditions there. He returned to London just as England and France were going to war again and was thus passed over for glory. In 1797, he was involved in what some call his “second mutiny” but was actually more of a job-action. Still, he fought under Lord Nelson at Copenhagen.
A few years later, in 1808, Sir Joseph Banks got him appointed governor of New South Wales, but he was deposed in a kind of political coup. He died in 1817, age 64. There Alexander’s fluent narrative, just the right mix of the serious and the popular, ends. I kept waiting for the story told by Charles Laughton (who told it to Peter Ustinov, who’s now told everyone else).
When Laughton was going to Hollywood to star as Bligh, opposite Clark Gable as Fletcher Christian in the MGM film Mutiny on the Bounty, he stopped at Gieves, the famous military and naval tailor’s in London, to have his uniforms made. The tailor who was measuring him asked, by way of up-chat, what the garments were needed for. Laughton told him-and was met with incredulous cries of “Oh no, Mr. Laughton. Oh no, sir, I don’t think so.” Before Laughton could become fully offended, however, the shopkeeper had gone to the cellar and produced the mannequin of the real William Bligh-who was obviously a short small-boned man, rather the opposite of Laughton.
As for Christian, who was never painted in life, he has been portrayed in movies not only by Gable but also by Errol Flynn (who claimed descent from one of the mutineers), Marlon Brando and Mel Gibson. He looked like none of them. Bligh remembered him as “Dark & very swarthy [with] Blackish or very dark brown [hair.] Standing about five foot nine, he was strongly built [although his] knees stands a little out and may be called bow legged.”
This is an uncannily accurate description of Christian’s great-great-great-grandson, Tom Christian, with whom I once spent a day at Pitcairn, where he is the island’s patriarch. The last British colony in the Pacific, with a population given variously between 35 and 50, Pitcairn is now beset by a terrible scandal: charges of longstanding sexual abuse brought against the majority of the adult male population. In this sense, it seems, little has changed there.
George Fetherling (Books in Canada)

From Publishers Weekly
A contributor to the New Yorker, Granta, Cond‚ Nast Traveler and National Geographic, Alexander brings the past to life with travel narratives spanning continents and centuries. Alexander (The Endurance) again recreates a high seas voyage, retelling a familiar story-of the South Pacific misadventures of the small British naval vessel the Bounty-yet taking a fresh look at the drama. Commanded by William Bligh, the Bounty left England in December 1787 to transport breadfruit trees from Tahiti to the West Indies. During the 1789 mutiny, Bligh and crew members were set adrift in an open boat and eventually returned to England. Bligh-who up until now has been viewed as a tyrant-was praised at the time, Alexander finds, since "no feat of seamanship was deemed to surpass Bligh's navigation and command of The Bounty's 23-foot-long launch, and few feats of survival compared with his men's forty-eight-day ordeal on starvation rations." Alexander's reconstruction of the mutiny and its aftermath (thanks to her exhaustive research through books, reports, newspapers, correspondence, historical societies and archives) is almost as remarkable as Bligh's feat. She details daily events during the captured mutineers' court-martial, expanding on court transcripts. Separating facts from falsehoods and myths in the closing chapters, she finally turns to the life of the mutineers on Pitcairn Island, noting "this fantastic tale of escape to paradise at the far end of the world had the allure of something epic." Alexander's work is destined to become the definitive, enthralling history of a great seafaring adventure. Maps and illus. not seen by PW.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.