Charles Nordhoff & James Norman Hall: The Bounty Trilogy: Comprising the Three Volumes Mutiny on the Bounty; Men Against the Sea; Pitcairn’s Island. 1932, 1933, 1934, 1936. Illustrated by N. C. Wyeth. 1940. An Atlantic Monthly Press Book. Boston & Toronto: Little, Brown & Company, 1982.
Date: 28th April, 1789. Place: the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The most famous mutiny in history is about to break out.
The storming of the Bastille in Paris would not take place until July 14th of that year, but stormclouds were already looming over the Bourbon monarchy. Or, as William Blake put it in his projected seven-part epic The French Revolution (1791):
The dead brood over Europe, the cloud and vision descends overNor would the rest of the British navy be exempt from the shockwaves of these great events. Less than a decade after the Bounty mutiny, the fleet would endure two of the worst uprisings in their history: at Spithead (April to May 1797) and the Nore (May to June 1797).
chearful France ...
Both of these mutinies involved multiple ships and men. At the Nore, Richard Parker, the self-styled President of the "Floating Republic", made no secret of his admiration for the French Revolution and for its declared principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity - ideas taken straight from Tom Paine's The Rights of Man (1791).
The crew of Bligh's ship, HMS Director, put him ashore - like most of their other commanding officers - during the Nore rebellion. There's no evidence that he was treated more harshly than anyone else on that occasion. It was, nevertheless, the second of three mutinies against his leadership during his long career.
So it's probably fair to say that a spirit of radicalism was beginning to pervade the British navy even before the crew of the Bounty, and their ringleader, Fletcher Christian, were (or so the story goes) seduced by the comforts of "Aphrodite's Island", Tahiti.
Anne Salmond. Aphrodite's Island: The European Discovery of Tahiti. Viking. Auckland: Penguin Group (NZ), 2009.
Whatever the causes of the Bounty mutiny - whether or not Captain Bligh actually was the foaming, flogging monster of legend, or just a firm-but-fair, by-the-book commander, as various revisionist historians have claimed - it's been written about and dramatised almost continuously since.
The fact that Bligh was yet again deposed as Governor of New South Wales by rebellious officers in 1808 makes him seem, at the very least, somewhat misguided in his methods of governance. Or, to paraphrase Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest:
To lose one command, Captain Bligh, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose three looks like carelessness.In any case, I was happy to find a copy of Charles Nordhoff & James Norman Hall's classic Bounty trilogy in Devonport the other day. I read my father's scruffy paperback copies of the three books many years ago, as a teenager, and they made a deep impression on me.
- Nordhoff, Charles, & James Norman Hall. Mutiny on the Bounty. 1932. Four Square Books. London: New English Library / Sydney: Horwitz Publications, 1961.
- Nordhoff, Charles, & James Norman Hall. Men Against the Sea. 1933. Fontana Books. London: Collins, 1956.
- Nordhoff, Charles, & James Norman Hall. Pitcairn’s Island. 1934. New York: Pocket Books, 1976.
In any case, I thought it might be interesting to list here the main accounts - and dramatisations - of the Bounty mutiny which I've collected over the years. There are quite a few of them, though I'd have to stress that this collection is in no way exhaustive: a complete Bounty bibliography would no doubt stretch to many pages.
Books I own are marked in bold:
- William Bligh. The Mutiny on Board H.M.S. Bounty. 1790. Afterword by Milton Rugoff. A Signet Classic. New York: New American Library, 1961.
- Lord Byron. "The Island". The Poetical Works. Ed. Frederick Page. 1904. Rev. ed. 1945. Oxford Standard Authors. London: Oxford University Press, 1959. 349-66.
- Sir John Barrow. The Eventful History of the Mutiny and Piratical Seizure of HMS BOUNTY its Causes and Consequences. 1831. Ed. Captain Stephen W. Roskill. London: The Folio Society, 1976.
- Charles Nordhoff & James Norman Hall: The Bounty Trilogy: Comprising the Three Volumes Mutiny on the Bounty; Men Against the Sea; Pitcairn’s Island. 1932, 1933, 1934, 1936. Illustrated by N. C. Wyeth. 1940. An Atlantic Monthly Press Book. Boston & Toronto: Little, Brown & Company, 1982.
- In the Wake of the Bounty, directed & written by Charles Chauvel; starring Arthur Greenaway, Mayne Lynton, Errol Flynn, Victor Gouriet, & John Warwick (Australia, 1933)
- Mutiny on the Bounty, dir. Frank Lloyd, written by Talbot Jennings, Jules Furthman, Carey Wilson, & John Farrow; based on Mutiny on the Bounty (1932) & Men Against the Sea (1933), by Charles Nordhoff & James Norman Hall; starring Charles Laughton, Clark Gable, Franchot Tone, Movita Castaneda, & Mamo Clark (USA, 1935)
- George Mackaness, ed. A Book of the 'Bounty' and Selections from Bligh's Writings. 1790, 1792, 1794. Everyman's Library, 1950. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd. / New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc., 1938.
- Mutiny on the Bounty, directed by Lewis Milestone; written by Charles Lederer; based on Mutiny on the Bounty (1932) by Charles Nordhoff & James Norman Hall; starring Marlon Brando; Trevor Howard; Richard Harris; Hugh Griffith; Richard Haydn; Tarita (USA, 1962)
- Richard Hough: Captain Bligh and Mr Christian: The Men and the Mutiny. 1972. London: Arrow Books, 1974.
- The Bounty, directed by Roger Donaldson, written by Robert Bolt; based on Captain Bligh and Mr. Christian (1972), by Richard Hough; starring Mel Gibson, Anthony Hopkins, Edward Fox, Laurence Olivier (UK, 1984)
- Anne Salmond. Bligh: William Bligh in the South Seas. Viking. Auckland: Penguin Group (NZ), 2011.
It's generally best to get your own version of events out there first. Bligh's account is perhaps more notable for what it doesn't say than what it does. Despite the huge gaps in his story, though, what he chooses to tell us seems to be reasonably accurate.
There the whole matter might have rested if it hadn't been for the rediscovery of Pitcairn island - colonised in 1790 by nine Bounty mutineers, together with eighteen Tahitian men and women - by the American sealing ship Topaz, under Mayhew Folger, in February 1808.
Folger's report, which mentioned the presence there of the last surviving mutineer, John Adams, was forwarded to the Admiralty, together with a more accurate location for the island.
None of this was, however, known to Sir Thomas Staines of the Royal Navy, whose two ships visited Pitcairn on 17 September 1814. As a result, John Adams, now the patriarch of the small community, was pardoned for his part in the mutiny, and the rest of the islanders were left in peace.
Lord Byron's long narrative poem "The Island; or, Christian and His Comrades" is one of the last pieces he wrote before leaving for Greece in July 1823. He died there of fever less than a year later.
His poem has received rather mixed reviews. It lacks the humour and zest of his late masterpiece Don Juan (1819-24), but also fails to rekindle the revolutionary passion of early works such as Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812-18).
On the one hand, his completely fictionalised picture of life on the island is clearly inspired by Rousseau's idea of the Noble Savage; on the other hand, his revulsion from politics makes it impossible for him to endorse the radical, levelling ideas of the original mutineers.
His poem seems, in many ways, more inspired by a desire to assert kinship with his seagoing grandfather "Foul-Weather Jack" Byron, who survived a terrifying shipwreck as a young midshipman in the 1740s, and subsequently circumnavigated the globe in the 1760s (a few years before Captain Cook), than by any real sympathy for Christian and his comrades.
This is widely considered to be the classic account of the mutiny and its aftermath. It begins with an account of the island of Tahiti, and concludes with a full discussion of events on Pitcairn. The narrative is based firmly on the surviving documentary record.
Its author, Sir John Barrow, is discussed in detail in the 1998 book Barrow's Boys, by Fergus Fleming. His zeal for exploration in general - particularly Arctic expeditions - was vital in maintaining public interest in the voyages of discovery by such luminaries as Sir John Ross, Sir William Edward Parry, Sir James Clark Ross, and Sir John Franklin. The Barrow Strait in the Canadian Arctic, as well as Point Barrow and the city of Barrow in Alaska are named after him.
Barrow was what would now be called a career civil servant, working for successive administrations as Permanent Secretary to the Admiralty. It was his forty-year incumbency of this post which allowed him to exert such a strong influence on the direction of nineteenth century British exploration. He was not, by most accounts, particularly susceptible to correction: an Establishment man through and through.
Nordhoff and Hall made friends during the First World War. They were both members of the famous Lafayette Escadrille, and their first collaboration was on a history of the squadron and its wartime exploits.
It was Nordhoff who suggested that the two of them move to Tahiti and work on more books about life in the South Seas. After a few false starts, their first big success came with the novel Mutiny on the Bounty and its two sequels. The Hurricane (1936) is probably the only other one of their novels to strike a nerve with the public.
As with The Hurricane, it was the film adaptation of Mutiny on the Bounty which has kept it in print ever since. Which is a pity, as it's a far better book than one might assume.
The two men's paths diverged in 1936, when Nordhoff left Tahiti. He died, an embittered alcoholic, in California in 1947. James Norman Hall, by contrast, stayed on in Tahiti, with his part-Polynesian wife Sarah (Lala) Winchester. They had two children, Nancy and Conrad, the latter of whom became the Academy-award winning cinematographer of such fims as In Cold Blood (1967), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), and American Beauty (1999).
This is the first of four major feature films inspired by the Bounty story. It also marked the screen debut of Tasmanian-born actor Errol Flynn, the first of the bankable Hollywood stars (the others are Clark Gable, Marlon Brando, and Mel Gibson) to have taken on the role of Fletcher Christian. It's important, however, to note - for patriotic reasons if no others - that there was at least one film on the topic before this:The Mutiny of the Bounty is a 1916 Australian-New Zealand silent film directed by Raymond Longford ... It is the first known cinematic dramatisation of this story and is considered a lost film.I have to confess to not having seen either of these two films. The first remains unavailable, and the second, made in Australia in the early days of sound, is - by all accounts - a fairly stilted affair.
Its one major selling point at the time was the chance to see some documentary-style footage of life on Pitcairn Island, complete with Polynesian dancers and some footage of "an underwater shipwreck, filmed with a glass bottomed boat, which [Chauvel] believed was the Bounty but was probably not."
I doubt that it's a picture that anyone can ever erase from their minds: Charles Laughton mopping and mowing and generally biting the scenery as that epitome of all tyrants, Captain Bligh.
How dare this limey mountebank hassle the king of cool, Clark Gable, at the apex of his screen popularity!
If the official line on the mutiny - that it was the work of a few disaffected malcontents, and undertaken against the will of most of the crew - had more or less prevailed up to this point, this film achieved an almost complete paradigm shift.
From now on it was clear that Fletcher Christian was - in spirit if not in fact - an honorary American, whereas Captain Bligh was a true-blue, beef-guzzling Englishman. They might as well have been labelled "Thomas Jefferson" and "King George" in the way they were portrayed.
The Empire always does its best to strike back, however. The Book of the Bounty is a balanced and judicious attempt to set the record straight by returning to the remaining documentary evidence.
For the most part it's an edition of all of the writings of Captain Bligh on the subject - not just the book listed at the top of this post.
As well as this, Mackaness, an Australian bibliophile and antiquarian, has included transcripts of the original court martial and other useful witness accounts.
But try setting this rather dry-as-dust approach against the brilliance of the 1935 MGM epic - not to mention the powerful and very readable novels that inspired it - and see how far you get!
Times change, however, and - probably for as much for copyright reasons as any others - MGM decided that it might be wise to revisit their property 25 years after the first film was released.
In an age of excessively overblown budgets and unprecedented interference by stars, however, Brando's turn to play Christian was an entirely different matter from Errol Flynn's or Clark Gable's.
It was, for a brief time, the most expensive film ever made - until it was supplanted by Liz Taylor's Cleopatra a year or so later. Filming on location is always costly, and the original director, Carol Reed, was forced to leave three months into the shoot. His successor, Lewis Milestone, was unable to communicate with Brando, who was described by a New Yorker critic as playing "Fletcher Christian as a sort of seagoing Hamlet."Indeed, we tend to sympathize with the wicked Captain Bligh, well played by Trevor Howard. No wonder he behaved badly, with that highborn young fop provoking him at every turn!Ouch! The film did do quite well at the box office, and the beauty of the setting was undeniable, but the cost overruns were such that it would have had to do unprecedented business to get out of the red.
My father swore by this book. In fact, every time the subject came up, he would ask: "Have you read Captain Bligh and Mr Christian?"
It is, indeed, quite a revolutionary restatement of the original context of this much misunderstood event. The fact of Bligh and Christian's previous friendship, and a host of other details ignored by previous writers, put the mutiny in a completely different light.
Many of these revelations have been revised or expanded on since, but it remains an indispensable source of information on the historiography of the Bounty, as well as the actual events associated with the mutiny.
As an abject fan of David Lean's movies, the news that he was working on a pair of films about the Bounty mutiny during the long hiatus between Ryan's Daughter (1970) and A Passage to India (1984) was pretty thrilling.
A replica Bounty was built, but the mechanics of the project could never be settled, so all that actually resulted from Lean's extensive preparations was the documentary Lost and Found: The Story of Cook's Anchor (NZ, 1979).
Instead, the Bounty film ended up in the blander but probably more business-like hands of Australian / NZ filmmaker Roger Donaldson.
Once again, casting was everything: Mel Gibson had the right New World credentials to play an old-school rebellious Fletcher Christian (a kind of pallid forerunner of his immortal William Wallace). Anthony Hopkins, by contrast, tried to dial back any suggestions of Charles Laughton in favour of a quieter portrayal: a kind of Hannibal-Lecter-in-waiting, one might say.
The script had finally morphed from the Nordhoff-Hall version to Richard Hough's revisionist account, and the results must be said to be richly entertaining - if a little thin in parts. Certainly it's not much of a substitute for what the two David Lean films might have been.
I conclude with the latest major contribution to the Bounty story. Having written about Captain Cook in The Trial of the Cannibal Dog, and Tahiti in Aphrodite's Island, Pacific historian and anthropologist Anne Salmond felt ready to take on the equally formidable subject of Captain Bligh.
If the result isn't quite so satisfactory as her two previous histories, that's perhaps because her methods seem less surprising here than they were in (particularly) the Captain Cook book.
It's hard to know what remains to be said on the subject. It was all a long time ago. It cast a long shadow over everyone involved - and the horrific 2004 sex scandals on Pitcairn Island unfortunately revealed that life there is no more idyllic now than it was in the immediate aftermath of the Mutiny.
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