Bligh
William Bligh in the South Seas
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- $27.99
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- $27.99
Publisher Description
In Bligh, the story of the most notorious of all Pacific explorers is told through a new lens as a significant episode in the history of the world, not simply of the West.
Award-winning anthropologist Anne Salmond recounts the triumphs and disasters of William Bligh's life and career in a riveting narrative that for the first time portrays the Pacific islanders as key players. From 1777, Salmond charts Bligh's three Pacific voyages – with Captain James Cook in the Resolution, on board the Bounty, and as commander of the Providence.
Salmond offers new insights into the mutiny aboard the Bounty – and on Bligh's extraordinary 3000-mile journey across the Pacific in a small boat – through new revelations from unguarded letters between him and his wife Betsy. We learn of their passionate relationship, and her unstinting loyalty throughout the trials of his turbulent career and his fight to clear his name.
This beautifully told story reveals Bligh as an important ethnographer, adding to the paradoxical legacy of the famed seaman. For the first time, we hear how Bligh and his men were changed by their experiences in the South Seas, and how in turn they changed that island world forever.
'Remarkable . . . The mutiny has inspired some marvellous books, of which this is possibly the finest.'
--Jim Eagles, New Zealand Herald
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
For dramatic tension and tragic heroism, few tales of the high seas can match the mutiny on the Bounty. Novelists and screenwriters have kept busy for two centuries imagining and reimagining the fateful showdown between William Bligh, the tyrannical captain, and Fletcher Christian, his long-suffering lieutenant that occurred in 1789 in the middle of the South Pacific. In this engrossing cultural biography, Salmond (Aphrodite's Island: The European Discovery of Tahiti) agrees with the scholarly consensus that Bligh has been badly misrepresented in popular culture. A passionate man subject to what fellow sailor George Tobin called "violent tornados of temper," he was nobody's ideal of an enlightened executive, but neither was he worse than the average sea captain of his day. Fletcher Christian far from the tortured victim portrayed by Clark Gable or Marlon Brando appears here as a petty schemer who preferred whiling his time away on Tahitian beaches to obeying the harsh discipline of the British navy. A professor of Maori Studies in New Zealand, Salmond's real concern, however, is not to retrace these familiar narratives but to "illuminate the Island world" of Tahitian politics and culture that had previously served merely as an exotic backdrop to the main story. "This is an episode in the history of the world, not simply the history of the West;" she writes, "and the Pacific protagonists were as real as their British counterparts, helping to shape what happened." Maps and illus.
