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
{"title":"Contextualising the Bounty in Pacific Maritime Culture","authors":"Jean-Claude Teriierooiterai","doi":"10.22459/bb.10.2018.01","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22459/bb.10.2018.01","url":null,"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","PeriodicalId":70308,"journal":{"name":"跨语言文化研究","volume":"01 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-10-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88332416","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
On 15 October 1789, Lieutenant William Bligh wrote a damning letter to the British Admiralty in which he described the physical characteristics of the mutinous so-called pirates who cast him and 18 others adrift from the HMAV Bounty in a 7-metre open boat. Bligh and his launch crew covered nearly 4,000 nautical miles between Tofua and Coupang (now known as Kupang), in Timor, South-East Asia, in what is widely considered to be one of the most impressive and inspirational episodes in open-boat sea survival. They arrived at Coupang, weak and exhausted after six weeks at sea, on 14 June, ‘perhaps a more miserable set of beings were never seen’ who could ‘not have existed a week or a day longer’.1 Remarkably, only one of their number had died, not from the rigours of the journey but from an attack by Islanders on the shores of Tofua, a small island where they had briefly found respite from their voyage (see Teriierooiterai, Chapter 1). A further four members died of disease in the ports of Coupang and Batavia (Jakarta). In the weeks and months after Bligh and his crew arrived in port, he was alight with indignation and penned a series of letters, both to the families of those mutineers
{"title":"Reading the Bodies of the Bounty Mutineers","authors":"R. Utting","doi":"10.22459/bb.10.2018.03","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22459/bb.10.2018.03","url":null,"abstract":"On 15 October 1789, Lieutenant William Bligh wrote a damning letter to the British Admiralty in which he described the physical characteristics of the mutinous so-called pirates who cast him and 18 others adrift from the HMAV Bounty in a 7-metre open boat. Bligh and his launch crew covered nearly 4,000 nautical miles between Tofua and Coupang (now known as Kupang), in Timor, South-East Asia, in what is widely considered to be one of the most impressive and inspirational episodes in open-boat sea survival. They arrived at Coupang, weak and exhausted after six weeks at sea, on 14 June, ‘perhaps a more miserable set of beings were never seen’ who could ‘not have existed a week or a day longer’.1 Remarkably, only one of their number had died, not from the rigours of the journey but from an attack by Islanders on the shores of Tofua, a small island where they had briefly found respite from their voyage (see Teriierooiterai, Chapter 1). A further four members died of disease in the ports of Coupang and Batavia (Jakarta). In the weeks and months after Bligh and his crew arrived in port, he was alight with indignation and penned a series of letters, both to the families of those mutineers","PeriodicalId":70308,"journal":{"name":"跨语言文化研究","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-10-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89958448","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
A major writer never sails away alone, without any reference or book at hand. Even at the far end of the world, there is always a literary reminiscence, the trace of a volume, a library of sorts, in his cabin, guiding him on his way, like the wake of a ship. When sailing up the Congo River, André Gide had quite naturally Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) in mind, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel The Master of Ballantrae in his luggage:1 his Voyage au Congo (1926–27) is dedicated to ‘the memory of Joseph Conrad’ and includes, on the same page, a quotation from John Keats: ‘Better be imprudent moveables than prudent fixtures’, which may serve as a motto for adventure. This was also the case with Jack London when he left San Francisco and the devastation caused by earthquake (18 April 1906), sailing away on board his ketch the Snark on 23 April 1907: he was embarking on a cruise ‘in the wake of ’ such famous literary predecessors as Herman Melville, Mark Twain and Robert
{"title":"A Ship is Burning: Jack London’s ‘The Seed of McCoy’ (Tales of the Pacific, 1911), or Sailing Away from Pitcairn","authors":"Jean-Pierre Naugrette","doi":"10.22459/bb.10.2018.05","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22459/bb.10.2018.05","url":null,"abstract":"A major writer never sails away alone, without any reference or book at hand. Even at the far end of the world, there is always a literary reminiscence, the trace of a volume, a library of sorts, in his cabin, guiding him on his way, like the wake of a ship. When sailing up the Congo River, André Gide had quite naturally Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) in mind, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel The Master of Ballantrae in his luggage:1 his Voyage au Congo (1926–27) is dedicated to ‘the memory of Joseph Conrad’ and includes, on the same page, a quotation from John Keats: ‘Better be imprudent moveables than prudent fixtures’, which may serve as a motto for adventure. This was also the case with Jack London when he left San Francisco and the devastation caused by earthquake (18 April 1906), sailing away on board his ketch the Snark on 23 April 1907: he was embarking on a cruise ‘in the wake of ’ such famous literary predecessors as Herman Melville, Mark Twain and Robert","PeriodicalId":70308,"journal":{"name":"跨语言文化研究","volume":"6 1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-10-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83763715","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Bounty Relics: Trading in the Legacy of Myth and Mutiny","authors":"A. Young","doi":"10.22459/bb.10.2018.07","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22459/bb.10.2018.07","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":70308,"journal":{"name":"跨语言文化研究","volume":"52 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-10-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85883046","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Various Bounty narratives emerged as early as 1790. Today, prominent among them are one 20th-century novel and three Hollywood movies. The novel, Mutiny on the Bounty (1932), was written by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall, two American writers who had ‘crossed the beach’1 and settled in Tahiti. Mutiny on the Bounty2 is the first volume of their Bounty Trilogy (1936) – which also includes Men against the Sea (1934), the narrative of Bligh’s open-boat voyage, and Pitcairn’s Island (1934), the tale of the mutineers’ final Pacific settlement. The novel was first serialised in the Saturday Evening Post before going on to sell 25 million copies3 and being translated into 35 languages. It was so successful that it inspired the scripts of three Hollywood hits; Nordhoff and Hall’s Mutiny strongly contributed to substantiating the enduring
{"title":"Nordhoff and Hall’s Mutiny on the Bounty: A Piece of Colonial Historical Fiction","authors":"Sylvie Largeaud-Ortéga","doi":"10.22459/bb.10.2018.04","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22459/bb.10.2018.04","url":null,"abstract":"Various Bounty narratives emerged as early as 1790. Today, prominent among them are one 20th-century novel and three Hollywood movies. The novel, Mutiny on the Bounty (1932), was written by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall, two American writers who had ‘crossed the beach’1 and settled in Tahiti. Mutiny on the Bounty2 is the first volume of their Bounty Trilogy (1936) – which also includes Men against the Sea (1934), the narrative of Bligh’s open-boat voyage, and Pitcairn’s Island (1934), the tale of the mutineers’ final Pacific settlement. The novel was first serialised in the Saturday Evening Post before going on to sell 25 million copies3 and being translated into 35 languages. It was so successful that it inspired the scripts of three Hollywood hits; Nordhoff and Hall’s Mutiny strongly contributed to substantiating the enduring","PeriodicalId":70308,"journal":{"name":"跨语言文化研究","volume":"171 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-10-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79415358","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Film studio MGM’s 1962 film Mutiny on the Bounty (hereafter 1962) accords with no one’s assumptions about the events that occurred on HMAV Bounty in 1787–89, and Marlon Brando is nobody’s idea of Fletcher Christian. This may be why the film is impossible to see at the cinema, why it never gets shown on television, and why the DVD version is harder to find in libraries than MGM’s earlier film of the same title, which was released in 1935 (hereafter 1935). That film, starring Clark Gable as Christian and Charles Laughton as William Bligh, won the 1936 Academy Award for Best Picture, and remains the canonical cinematic version of the mutiny on the Bounty. The 1962 film (with Trevor Howard as Bligh) was nominated for seven Academy Awards at the 1963 Oscars, but was blown out of the water by David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia. Like another contentious epic, John Milton’s Paradise Lost, 1962 was delayed by ‘long choosing, and beginning late’.1 Its production spanned two years and went through several writers and directors, including the uncredited Carol Reed. Although it did reasonably well at the box office, the film failed to recover its costs – a failure for which Brando (whose contract
{"title":"Brando on the Bounty","authors":"R. Jolly, S. Petch","doi":"10.22459/BB.10.2018.06","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22459/BB.10.2018.06","url":null,"abstract":"Film studio MGM’s 1962 film Mutiny on the Bounty (hereafter 1962) accords with no one’s assumptions about the events that occurred on HMAV Bounty in 1787–89, and Marlon Brando is nobody’s idea of Fletcher Christian. This may be why the film is impossible to see at the cinema, why it never gets shown on television, and why the DVD version is harder to find in libraries than MGM’s earlier film of the same title, which was released in 1935 (hereafter 1935). That film, starring Clark Gable as Christian and Charles Laughton as William Bligh, won the 1936 Academy Award for Best Picture, and remains the canonical cinematic version of the mutiny on the Bounty. The 1962 film (with Trevor Howard as Bligh) was nominated for seven Academy Awards at the 1963 Oscars, but was blown out of the water by David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia. Like another contentious epic, John Milton’s Paradise Lost, 1962 was delayed by ‘long choosing, and beginning late’.1 Its production spanned two years and went through several writers and directors, including the uncredited Carol Reed. Although it did reasonably well at the box office, the film failed to recover its costs – a failure for which Brando (whose contract","PeriodicalId":70308,"journal":{"name":"跨语言文化研究","volume":"496 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72546392","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The myth of Pitcairn, building on the destiny of the Bounty mutineers, focuses on the recent history of this island as the epitome of marginality and isolation. Human occupation of the island, however, occurred long before the Bounty settlement, and Pitcairn provides a fascinating example of Polynesian sustainability that is little known to the general public. Located at the eastern fringe of Central Eastern Polynesia, the Pitcairn group includes the volcanic island of Pitcairn (4.5 square kilometres), the elevated limestone island of Henderson (37.2 square kilometres) and the two small atolls of Oeno and Ducie (Figure 2.1). Situated approximately 400 kilometres east of the Gambier Islands and 1,700 kilometres west of Rapa Nui/Easter Island, this island group is one of the world’s most geographically isolated.
{"title":"Pitcairn before the Mutineers: Revisiting the Isolation of a Polynesian Island","authors":"G. Molle, Aymeric Hermann","doi":"10.22459/BB.10.2018.02","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22459/BB.10.2018.02","url":null,"abstract":"The myth of Pitcairn, building on the destiny of the Bounty mutineers, focuses on the recent history of this island as the epitome of marginality and isolation. Human occupation of the island, however, occurred long before the Bounty settlement, and Pitcairn provides a fascinating example of Polynesian sustainability that is little known to the general public. Located at the eastern fringe of Central Eastern Polynesia, the Pitcairn group includes the volcanic island of Pitcairn (4.5 square kilometres), the elevated limestone island of Henderson (37.2 square kilometres) and the two small atolls of Oeno and Ducie (Figure 2.1). Situated approximately 400 kilometres east of the Gambier Islands and 1,700 kilometres west of Rapa Nui/Easter Island, this island group is one of the world’s most geographically isolated.","PeriodicalId":70308,"journal":{"name":"跨语言文化研究","volume":"63 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86464182","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}