Steve Braunias reviews a new account of the mutiny on the Bounty
Once again with the story of the mutiny on the Bounty, this time from a direct descendant of Fletcher Christian, that complex revolutionary who toppled a form of royal household at sea and established one of the strangest and most fragile bicultural civilisations in the history of the South Pacific. This story never gets old. It's so wild, so weird. The problem is that it never gets new, either.
Harrison Christian briskly details his family tree in the Introduction to his book Men Without Country. His father was born in Auckland, his grandfather was born on Norfolk Island, his fourth great-grandfather left Pitcairn Island for Norfolk Island in 1856, his fifth great-grandfather was one of three children fathered by Fletcher Christian after he arrived on Pitcairn in 1789. "My relation to Fletcher has no doubt coloured the contents of these pages, but I hope it hasn’t disqualified me from writing a balanced account," he writes. "My trade is journalism, and I have applied a journalistic method to the story."
As a former Stuff journalist – he's now fished up in San Francisco – Christian was one of the more talented writers in New Zealand media. His profile of Murray Wilson, mythologised as the Beast of Blenheim but in reality just a piece of shit wherever he went, was a tour-de-force, at once horrified and keenly observed. For all his stock journalese – "he fumed", "Indeed", etc – he doesn't write a bad page in Men Without Country. It's fair to Captain Bligh, so often caricatured as a bully and a tyrant. It stays close to the known facts and his various speculations are neither idle or worthless. It’s impersonal, which is no bad thing. Easy enough to have cast it as a voyage of personal discovery, something that another descendant, Glynn Christian, plays at in his book Fragile Paradise (1982): "I discovered that I have more than the blood of Fletcher Christian. I know his weaknesses and his strengths are mine. And I am certain I would have done as Fletcher Christian did." God almighty.
Fragile Paradise, though, has a distinct advantage over Men Without Country. The author actually set foot on Pitcairn. He writes about it intimately and with real feeling. Not so Harrison Christian. In his afterword, he notes that he worked on his book under lockdown in the US, meaning he was desk-bound, and restricted to whatever online archives. This is journalism peering into e-books and https addresses. It doesn’t matter too much. To write history is to read it. The story – a mutiny, a new civilisation, hangings, drownings, Coleridge's ode to it all immortalised in "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" – is there waiting, and it’s told with skill and judgment.
But it lacks a fresh angle. That matters quite a bit. As an extended piece of feature writing, the book is a tidy and readable synthesis of what's come before.
Inevitably, one of its major sources is Anne Salmond's biography Bligh (2011), the third in her magnificent Pacific trilogy that began, and was never bettered, with The Trial of the Cannibal Dog. That great book dealt with Cook's three voyages. William Bligh was onboard the final, fatal voyage on the Resolution. "I did not expect to become riveted by Bligh, but that is exactly what happened," she writes. Her biography revealed "a pioneering ethnographer, who made major contributions to our knowledge of Polynesia during the early contact period". Her reading of his character is sympathetic. It's helped to overthrow the old image of Bligh the monster at sea, set in place ever since Fletcher Christian's brother published an Appendix in 1794 that argued Bligh himself was responsible for the mutiny on the Bounty.
Harrison Christian blames neither his ancestor or Bligh in Men Without Country. Patiently, and placing it in context of shipboard conditions, and the curious dynamic between Bligh and Fletcher Christian (in Fragile Paradise, Glynn Christian idly speculates the two were lovers: "Passions...bound and comforted these men across the world's great oceans"), he describes the events that led to Christian bursting into Bligh's cabin and holding a cutlass to his throat on April 28, 1789. It's an exciting account but Salmond is funnier. She writes, "Christian led Captain Bligh up on deck, bare-arsed in his nightshirt."
Christian was 24, handsome, strong; Bligh was 34, very white-skinned, short. "We were cast adrift in the open ocean," Bligh writes piteously in his 1790 document, An Account of the Mutiny on HMS Bounty. Harrison Christian treats it somewhat lightly. "But he [Fletcher Christian] hadn’t necessarily handed Bligh a death sentence: it was assumed the lieutenant would sail to the Tongan island of Tongatapu, where he could wait for an English ship." As he acknowledges, though, Bligh and his crew of 25 endured 46 days at sea of misery and deprivation. "Soon Bligh's men were suffering from the dizzy spells, constipation and abdominal pains of starvation…When a seabird was caught, its blood was divided among the worst affected crew members." An entry in Bligh's journal on May 21 is not atypical of their sufferings: "At dawn of day some of my people seemed half-dead; our appearances were horrible…All the afternoon, we were so covered with rain and salt water, that we could scarcely see. We suffered extreme cold, and everyone dreaded the approach of night…About two o'clock in the morning we were overwhelmed with a deluge of rain. It fell so heavy that we were afraid it would fill the boat, and were obliged to bale with all our might."
As for the crew who remained on the Bounty, a few of the fugitives elected to risk capture by living sensually and well in Tahiti. They duly surrendered to the frigate Pandora when it anchored in Matavai Bay. Harrison Christian retells the appalling fate of some of the prisoners when the Pandora was shipwrecked. He also furnishes his best sentence in the entire book: "The master, sent to visit the wreck, returned with little more than an angry cat, which he found clinging to a broken masthead."
Those who stayed on the Bounty put their faith in Fletcher Christian. He discovered a perfect refuge, distant from passing traffic - Pitcairn Island. Men Without Country takes up the story of their attempts to build a new life. Alone among narratives of European settlement in Pacific territories, the Pitcairn story has little do with colonialism. There wasn't anyone already on the island to colonise. All the same, issues of race were central in the settlers quest for power. The population of Pitcairn were white men from the Bounty, and Polynesian men and women. There was an unequal distribution of sex: there weren't enough women to go around, and it was among the factors that led to slaughter.
In her biography of Bligh, Salmond confidently reports the death of Fletcher Christian at the hands of the Tupua'i chief Tetahiti: "He shot him in the back, smashing in his head with an axe and leaving his body on the ground." She leaves him there, and moves on. Harrison Christian chooses to conclude Men Without Country by paying attention to the rumours that his ancestor actually returned in one piece to England. "It was said that he was sometimes seen wandering the wooded paths and byways in the Lake District", etc. This is feature journalism ("It was said"), alert to crazy puzzles and half-cooked bunkum. Fletcher Christian - mutineer without a cause, who went to school with William Wordsworth, taught mathematics and languages to crew on the Bounty, and "was subject", Harrison Christian quotes Bligh, "to violent perspirations, particularly in his hands, so that he soils anything he touches" – as a kind of Elvis, sighted for many years after his death. The myth is always more interesting but less poignant than reality. He was clearing his yam plantation when he was killed.
Men Without Country: The true story of exploration and rebellion in the South Seas by Harrison Christian (Ultimo Press, $39.99) is available in bookstores nationwide.
