Helen Watson White
Bligh: William Bligh in the South Seas, by Anne Salmond (Penguin/Viking, 2011), 528 pp., $65.
Anne Salmond’s Bligh is not just about the legendary British naval commander of the Bounty, who in 1789 lost his ship to mutineers. It is about the fabled ‘South Seas’ through which they were sailing, and about other European explorers who preceded them there; the nature of their vessels and of the people they met, whether hospitable or (much less often) hostile; the cultures and internal politics of a number of Pacific Islands, especially Tahiti; the cultures and internal politics of the British Isles from which they came, and of the British Navy; and the revolutionary climate in Europe at the time. Above all, we meet a great many individuals in these different settings, including Bligh’s Tahitian friends, his wife and family waiting at home, his sponsors and critics, the sailors who were loyal to him as well as the mutineers.
Since her 1975 book Hui: A Study of Maori Ceremonial Gatherings, Salmond – now a Distinguished Professor at the University of Auckland – has made a point of having her subjects and their traditions represented as much as possible in their own words. Eruera: The Teachings of a Maori Elder, which won the Goodman Fielder Wattie Book Award in 1981, indeed was co-written with Eruera Stirling, with his name being cited first. A companion volume, Amiria: The Life Story of a Maori Woman made the further point that both halves of a marriage partnership might be worthy of a book of their own. Then Salmond’s groundbreaking Two Worlds: First Meetings between Maori and Europeans 1642–1772, followed by Between Worlds: Early Exchanges between Maori and Europeans 1773-1815, extended that equality to her treatment of all parties in historic cross-cultural encounters.
In her preface to The Trial of the Cannibal Dog: Captain Cook in the South Seas (2003), Salmond reveals how pioneers in this equality of treatment (itself a concept produced out of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment) faced the irony that Western disciplines like anthropology originated in a culture of hierarchy and dominance, typified by the rigour with which eighteenth-century explorers classified and collected ‘plants, animals, insects and people’, bringing the ‘savages and barbarians’ at humanity’s margins ‘under the calm, controlling gaze of Enlightenment science’. Cook’s Pacific voyages, she says, provoke reflection on the impartiality of history: ‘Tales of the European discovery of the world are still shaped by imperial attitudes; and accounts of the great voyages of exploration are often written as epics in which only the Europeans are real.’
This preface heralds an important trilogy of revisionist histories. After The Trial of the Cannibal Dog came, in 2009, Aphrodite’s Island: The European Discovery of Tahiti, and finally a third ‘South Seas’ epic (the only term adequate to these sprawling books, each over 500 pages), detailing the voyages of Captain Bligh. All three volumes fulfil the promise of Two Worlds, identified by one critic as showing ‘what scholars now need to do to write two-sided anthropological history’.
Captain Cook figures centrally in all the books of the trilogy: all three of his Pacific voyages are covered in the first, and mainly his relations with the Tahitians treated in the second, while in Bligh his third and last expedition – on which the 22-year-old William Bligh was the master of his ship Resolution – is revisited. Cook and Bligh are summed up in portraits by the expedition’s artist, John Webber, the picture of Captain Cook gathering significance after he left the island, becoming almost as revered as the man himself.
The mana of Captain James Cook in Polynesian eyes can hardly be overstated, even up to his fatal last visit to Hawai’i; to Bligh, also, the great commander was both model and mentor, working closely alongside him on coastal surveys and charts. In 1777 when Bligh arrived with Cook in Tahiti to a joyful welcome from the people, the rapture was partly because Cook was returning the Tahitian youth Ma’i (or Omai) home after his trip to Britain. Ma’i’s tales of the powers of King George III – horses, cannons like thunder and fireworks like lightning – added to Cook’s power as the royal representative.
Ten years later, returning with his own ship the Bounty, Captain Bligh inherited some of that mana when the Tahitians were told he was Cook’s ‘son’. Bligh was also adopted as taio (bond friend) of Tahitian chieftain Tu, who had awarded Cook that honour in 1777: ‘Standing beside Webber’s portrait of Captain Cook (a gift from Cook to Tu), he was showered with gifts and hailed as a high chief. Like Cook, Bligh adored his time in Tahiti, exclaiming in his journal: “This is certainly the Paradise of the world …”’
From this sort of height, there’s bound to be a fall – which happens in two ways. Firstly there is Cook’s death in Hawai’i in 1779: a tale told in great detail, and with stunning effect, in the first chapter of Bligh. Secondly, there is Bligh’s own disaster story, which he survives: the build-up to mutiny on the Bounty, then the treasonable actions of Fletcher Christian’s group in overturning Bligh’s authority and placing him and his loyalists in the Bounty’s launch, in which they set off on a 3,000-mile journey westwards to eventual safety.
Salmond’s ‘two-sided’ view of events means that Bligh’s own conduct is minutely examined to determine whether he brought himself down. Records of the exact number of lashes different officers gave out for shipboard or land-based crimes reveal Bligh’s punishments were usually less severe than Cook’s. His angry rages were frequent, but Cook was prone to ‘paroxysms of passion’ too.
Salmond recognises that among the causes of the mutiny there was much that was out of Bligh’s control. The ship was carrying supplies, including goats, pigs and sheep, on the journey out, and on return, breadfruit plants intended to feed the slaves on West Indian plantations. Before departure, the Great Cabin was converted to a greenhouse, forcing the captain, and his officers and crew into ‘cramped, difficult’ quarters; on the small ship, the crew was also inadequate, with no armed marines to keep order. Delays in leaving Britain meant sailing into bad weather and arriving in the Season of Scarcity; delays in leaving Tahiti were problematic too.
Bligh always blamed the lures of Tahiti for turning the minds of the sailors who, having made strong social and sexual bonds over five months, did not want to leave. There had been desertions before because of ‘female connections’ on the island; but although the Navy took such offences seriously, ‘as a lieutenant Bligh could not order the appropriate punishments, but had to wait for a court martial’, which could only take place after the return to Britain.
Although Bligh was treated like royalty in Tahiti — indeed, as one of Tu’s family — Tu was greatly angered on discovering Bligh lied when he told him Cook was still alive in Britain. Likewise, Bligh breached his own culture’s code of honour by insulting Christian in front of his men. In an incident in Tonga, ‘in refusing to let his men take revenge’ for islanders’ threats, thefts or attacks on them, Bligh was following Cook’s Hawai’ian precedent, which had led to his murder at Kealakekua Bay.
A majority of the many books on Bligh might have dealt with these sorts of issues. Few, however, will have covered in such fascinating detail the variations between different officers’ logs, journals, and letters as to the ‘spin’ they put on events, including the extraordinary intricacies of Tahitian religion and royal custom, and ways of warfare, entertainment and hospitality. Major events are replicated in each volume of Salmond’s trilogy, but seen from a different perspective each time. While this book, like the other two, can be enjoyed for itself, the whole is unmistakeably a prodigious piece of work.
HELEN WATSON WHITE has degrees in English and theology from Otago University, and for five years was sole editor at University of Otago Press. A former university tutor and lecturer, she is currently a freelance editor, writer, arts reviewer and photographer.
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