Contextualising the Bounty in Pacific Maritime Culture

Abstract

As described in the Introduction, there have been many narratives – written and filmed – about the Bounty. Historical sources are mainly British, and events have been presented mostly from a British perspective. This chapter1 sheds a somewhat different light on Bounty narratives, coming from the perspective of indigenous Pacific Islanders – the perspective of those who stand on ‘the other side of the beach’, as Greg Dening famously put it. It examines the interactions between European explorers and Pacific Islanders since first contact and, through a close study of late 18th-century Pacific maritime culture and heritage, compares British and Polynesian maritime cultures around the time of the Bounty. The aim is to contextualise the Bounty from a Polynesian perspective and to give voice to the Pacific Islanders of the past: to those who have long been thought of as ‘little’.2