Bligh: William Bligh in the South Seas

For dramatic tension and tragic heroism, few tales of the high seas can match the mutiny on the Bounty. Novelists and screenwriters have kept busy for two centuries imagining and reimagining the fateful showdown%E2%80%94between William Bligh, the tyrannical captain, and Fletcher Christian, his long-suffering lieutenant%E2%80%94that occurred in 1789 in the middle of the South Pacific. In this engrossing cultural biography, Salmond (Aphrodite's Island: The European Discovery of Tahiti) agrees with the scholarly consensus that Bligh has been badly misrepresented in popular culture. A passionate man subject to what fellow sailor George Tobin called "violent tornados of temper," he was nobody's ideal of an enlightened executive, but neither was he worse than the average sea captain of his day. Fletcher Christian%E2%80%94far from the tortured victim portrayed by Clark Gable or Marlon Brando%E2%80%94appears here as a petty schemer who preferred whiling his time away on Tahitian beaches to obeying the harsh discipline of the British navy. A professor of Maori Studies in New Zealand, Salmond's real concern, however, is not to retrace these familiar narratives but to "illuminate the Island world" of Tahitian politics and culture that had previously served merely as an exotic backdrop to the main story. "This is an episode in the history of the world, not simply the history of the West;" she writes, "and the Pacific protagonists were as real as their British counterparts, helping to shape what happened." Maps and illus. (Oct.)