Captain Bligh's Portable Nightmare
From the Bounty to Safety—4,162 Miles across the Pacific in a Rowing Boat
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4.3 • 4 Ratings
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- $1.99
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- $1.99
Publisher Description
At dawn on April 28, 1789, Captain William Bligh and eighteen men from HMS Bounty were herded onto a twenty-three-foot launch and abandoned in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Thus began their extraordinary journey to Java. Covering 4,162 miles, the small boat was battered by continuous storms, and the men on board suffered crippling illness, near starvation, and attacks by islanders. The journey was one of the greatest achievements in the history of European seafaring and a personal triumph for a man who has been misjudged by history.
Captain Bligh's Portable Nightmare reveals Bligh's great mapmaking skills, used to particular effect while he was exploring with Captain Cook. We discover his guilt over Cook's death at Kealakekua Bay. We learn of the failure of the Bounty expedition and the myths that surround the mutiny led by Lieutenant Fletcher Christian, the trials and retributions that followed Bligh's return to England, his successes as a navigator and as a vice admiral fighting next to Nelson at the Battle of Copenhagen.
Combining extensive research with dazzling storytelling, John Toohey tells a gripping tale of seafaring, exploration, and mutiny on the high seas, while also dismissing the black legend of the cruel and foulmouthed Captain William Bligh and reinstating him not just as a man of his times but as a true hero.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Instead of rehashing the tale of the famed 1789 mutiny on the HMS Bounty (as done by so many historians, novelists and filmmakers), Australian historian Toohey tells the story of what happened to Capt. William Bligh after the mutiny was over. After his ejection from the Bounty, Bligh traveled halfway across the Pacific (to Java) on a cramped 23-foot launch with 18 crew members. Drawing heavily on survivors' accounts and other contemporary sources, Toohey recounts the dramatic tale of this voyage in an almost novelistic narrative, reconstructing conversations and interior monologues and capturing the terror and cunning of men facing slow death on the high seas. Like other "pro-Bligh" historians, Toohey implies that the mutiny occurred largely because Bligh's spoiled crew had trouble readjusting to navy discipline and rations after spending six months eating, sunning themselves, and having sex on Tahiti. Bligh, he argues, was not the abusive tyrant of Hollywood epics but a misunderstood perfectionist, a brilliant navigator and explorer, a family man and an empathetic personal friend to at least some men on the launch. He often seems to forget that Bligh was also an imperialist--his mission was to transport breadfruit plants from Tahiti to feed West Indies slaves; he sets Bligh's saga, only offhandedly, in the context of Britain's expanding empire, James Cook's fatal 1776 voyage to the Pacific (on which Bligh served as cartographer) and European rivalries. Still, this fiercely lyrical, stylish chronicle is likely to resurrect debate over the mutiny, Bligh's character and his place in history. B&w illus., maps.
