The Bounty Trilogy: Nordhoff and Hall’s Mutiny on the Bounty, Men Against the Sea and Pitcairn’s Island
This story, based on real events, took place at the end of the eighteenth century, when the crew of HMS Bounty sailed from England with no idea of what lay ahead. The book is divided into three parts: Mutiny on the Bounty, Men Against the Sea and Pitcairn’s Island.
Authors: Charles Nordhoff (1887–1947) and James Norman Hall (1887–1951)
Title: The Bounty Trilogy (novels published 1932–1934)
Format: English paperback (Little, Brown), 704 pages
Scope: Historical novels based on the 1789 mutiny
Amazon: www.amazon.es/dp/0316611662 (ASIN 0316611662)
Mutiny on the Bounty
In the first part, Captain Bligh’s authoritarian command wears out much of the crew, who can barely stand his excessively harsh rule. The sea is a hard place, and the Royal Navy of the time was rigidly hierarchical. The widespread discontent leads to a mutiny, in which a few remain loyal to Bligh and others are glad to set him adrift in the ship’s launch. Later comes the court-martial, from which some emerge unscathed and others fare much worse.
Men Against the Sea
The second part tells of the open-boat voyage to the island of Timor, where Bligh and the loyal men finally reach safety after facing storms and the roughest seas: a feat the mutineers would only learn of later.
Pitcairn’s Island
In the third part, a witness to everything that happens after the Bounty is burned at Pitcairn tells the true story, with its lights and shadows. At first the Englishmen and the Polynesians treat each other as equals, but as time passes the Englishmen come to believe they have the right to exploit them, and the division of the land breeds growing mistrust and rivalry, until violence breaks out and former friends kill one another. After the massacre, the women and children live apart, frightened. The men who remain take to distilling spirits, and that life leads them to ruin: some take their own lives, others go mad.
Two Americans in Tahiti
Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall met as pilots in the Lafayette Flying Corps, the American volunteers who flew for France in the First World War. After the war both settled in Tahiti, where they wrote together for many years. Living in the South Seas gave them an intimate knowledge of the islands, the people and the sea, and their Bounty novels, published between 1932 and 1934, remain the most famous fictional account of the mutiny.
Fact and Fiction
The mutiny itself took place on 28 April 1789, when Fletcher Christian and part of the crew seized the ship and set Bligh adrift in an open launch with eighteen loyal men. Bligh’s voyage of some 3,600 nautical miles to Timor, which forms the second novel, is one of the greatest feats of seamanship ever recorded. In the first novel, the authors tell the story through Roger Byam, a fictional midshipman partly modelled on the real Peter Heywood, who was tried and pardoned after the mutiny.
On Screen
Mutiny on the Bounty was filmed in 1935, with Charles Laughton as Bligh and Clark Gable as Christian, and won the Academy Award for Best Picture; a second version followed in 1962, with Trevor Howard and Marlon Brando. Both films shaped the popular image of Bligh as a tyrant, a picture many historians now consider unfair.
Hope After the Massacre
The narrator manages to give up drink and begins the hard road to sobriety. Little by little he climbs out of the hole and renews his contact with the women and children, finding a glimmer of hope in the young ones. The women decide never to speak of the past to the children and begin a new way of life. When all seems calm, Quintal reappears, wild and violent, and his companion has to kill him to protect everyone else, a death the narrator will carry on his conscience for many years, until he finds a path of repentance and peace at the end of the story.
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