The Bounty Trilogy
THE BOUNTY TRILOGY is one book containing not only the MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY story, but also MEN AGAINST THE SEA, and PITCAIRN'S ISLAND, three historic events related to the men aboard the English transport BOUNTY, in the late 1700s. His Majesty's ship was sent to Tahiti to transfer young breadfruit trees to the West Indies. There were 45 men on board, but the captain and 18 others were set adrift by the mutineers in a 23 foot launch. The BOUNTY then returned to Tahiti where some of the crew elected to stay. But they were captured later and taken to England for trial. The 9 remaining on the BOUNTY were joined by 18 Tahitian men and women and left Tahiti to settle on Pitcairn's Island.
Captain Bligh's temper, his flogging of men for minor offenses and his obsession over discontent and thievery by his crew, finally led Fletcher Christian, his master's mate, to resort to mutiny. The narrator, Roger Byam, a midshipman who Sir Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society, assigned to study the Tahitian language, was later captured at Tahiti as one of the mutineers and spent 15 long months in irons returning to England. He was later acquitted by the English court, but 3 others were executed after being found guilty of taking part in the mutiny.
But in MEN AGAINST THE SEE, Captain Bligh became a different man who made it known that "I'll ask no one to do what I fear to do myself." In 41 days, he successfully navigated the open launch 3600 miles across the South Pacific to safety. He had advised his men to think of how far they've come, not how far they've yet to go. When he got to England, he filed charges of mutiny in the British court.
Fletcher Christian, with a group of English seamen and Indian men and women, finally anchored the BOUNTY at Pitcairn's Island, in hopes that they'd never be found. Still, as their leader, Christian couldn't stop some of the seamen from treating the Indians as their slaves. In several years, this caused an Indian revolt, and in the end 16 people died, and 15 by violence. After Christian was killed, his Tahitian wife grieved that "It is not often the land that is to blame; it is those who come." When Pitcairn's Island was discovered by an American ship nearly 15 years later, only one white man, most all of the Indian women, and numerous children of mixed blood were to be found alive and well.
A circumstance which made THE BOUNTY TRILOGY more intriguing as history was that Sir Joseph Banks, Captain Bligh, and several others on the BOUNTY had been with Captain Cook during his famous voyages years before.
In the end, the social heritage of whites and Indians falters. Fletcher Christian, a gentleman by birth, even "...better born than Captain Bligh..." is respected by the common seamen but is replaced by the last surviving man, an orphan with little education. It is also ironic that the Tahitian women became the strength and wisdom on Pitcairn's Island, even though the Indians believed their men to be holy, while their women were common.
The research Nordhoff and Hall did in the 1930s to create this trilogy makes it perhaps the finest historical novel of the 1900s.