New York Times Bestselling Author Just before sunrise on the morning of April 18, 1789, in the far reaches of the south pacific, Master's Mate Fletcher Christian and three other men, armed with cutlasses, bayonets and a musket, apprehended Lieutenant William Bligh and placed him and eighteen officers and crewmen in a small boat. This mutiny on board His Majesty's armed transport Bounty impelled every man on a fateful course -- bligh and his loyalists on a historic boat voyage, Christian and his followers on their restless ...
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New York Times Bestselling Author Just before sunrise on the morning of April 18, 1789, in the far reaches of the south pacific, Master's Mate Fletcher Christian and three other men, armed with cutlasses, bayonets and a musket, apprehended Lieutenant William Bligh and placed him and eighteen officers and crewmen in a small boat. This mutiny on board His Majesty's armed transport Bounty impelled every man on a fateful course -- bligh and his loyalists on a historic boat voyage, Christian and his followers on their restless exile.
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Nice to know what actually happened before watching the three Hollywood treatments of the incident, some of them classics. This book is terrific for about the first ~200 pages which take us through the preparation, the voyage itself, the mutiny and the experience at sea of all parties subsequent to it, including of course Bligh's epic feat of navigation in an overcrowded, under provisioned, open launch.
But the book does bog down a bit when it returns ashore to Britain for the subsequent court martial(s). The rest is fine scholarship but casual readers will probably quit after the first half or so.
aphil
Mar 26, 2008
Very Disappointing
I have read a number of books about The Mutiny on the Bounty, and this one was advertized along with the one I was buying, "The Bounty Trilogy", as giving an opposite view of Captan Bligh's character. It seemed to make sense to read the two at the same time, but I ought to have paid more attention to the low price asked. Alexander manages to make this most interesting piece of history seem boring! The long quotes from original documents are not well melded into the narrative. And the narrative fails to give a plausible picture of life on a ship of the British Navy. The insertion of occasional nautical terms does not seem to help; when they are wrongly used they make things worse. No-one should doubt that Bligh was a splendid navigator, but there is no convincing argument here that his treatment of his crew was no worse than normal for the time. It was much worse.
