Science Friction_ Where the Known Meets the Unknown - Michael Shermer [69]
The Myth of the Mutiny
The most common explanation for the mutiny on the Bounty, which arose about a decade after the event and is still the one most often cited, pits an oppressive William Bligh against a humane Fletcher Christian. In the name of justice, the myth holds, Christian reluctantly rebelled against Bligh’s totalitarian regime, casting him adrift after countless tirades and undeserved floggings, and returning his tortured men to the freedom offered in the South Pacific. Bligh survived the voyage home, while Christian and the mutineers lived out their lives in peace on Pitcairn Island, thousands of miles from nowhere.
The myth busting begins at the top with the tyrannical William Bligh who, as it turns out under closer inspection, wasn’t. The Australian historian Greg Dening, in his 1992 narrative history, Mr. Bligh’s Bad Language, undertook a complete count of every lash British sailors received on fifteen naval vessels that sailed into the Pacific from 1765 to 1793. Of the 1,556 sailors, 21.5 percent were flogged. The celebrated Captain James Cook, for example, flogged 20, 26, and 37 percent respectively on his three voyages; the distinguished explorer Captain George Vancouver (of Vancouver Island fame) flogged 45 percent of his charges; Bligh comes in at 19 percent on the Bounty, and only 8 percent of his subsequent Providence voyage. Dening computes a mean of 5 lashes for every sailor in the cohort. By comparison, Vancouver’s mean was 21 lashes, Bligh’s Bounty mean a measly 1.5 lashes.
If draconian punishment was not the cause of the mutiny, then what was? The most recent revisionist explanation is Caroline Alexander’s 2003 book, The Bounty (subtitled, in pre-postmodern style, “The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty’). Alexander’s book is a comprehensive narrative that utilizes such primary documents as the court-martial trial transcripts and some of the mutineers’ private diaries and letters. In the process, she identifies the source of the tyranny myth with the families of two of the mutineers, who spin-doctored Bligh into the foaming-at-the-mouth character so portrayed by Charles Laughton in the 1935 film interpretation. In Alexander’s account, Fletcher Christian was the Bounty antihero, not Bligh, who emerges in her telling as one of the greatest seafaring commanders in naval history. Yet, after four hundred pages of gripping narrative, Alexander wonders “what caused the mutiny,” hints that it might have had something to do with “the seductions of Tahiti” and “Bligh’s harsh tongue,” but then concludes that it was “a night of drinking and a proud man’s pride, a low moment on one gray dawn, a momentary and fatal slip in a gentleman’s code of discipline.” That is the extent of her causal analysis.
Figure 8.1. William Bligh
Figure 8.2. Fletcher Christian
Cowards and Causes
Dening also blanches when it comes to the search for ultimate causes, even retreating from the quantitative science he employed so effectively in debunking the harsh-Bligh myth. In its stead he turns to literary analysis. According to Dening, the numerous retellings of the mutiny on the Bounty in literature and film say more about the cultures of the authors and the filmmakers than they do about the actual mutiny. Charles Laughton’s Bligh and Clark Gable’s Christian in the 1935 film presented a tale of class conflict and of tyranny versus justice, allegedly reflecting 1930s America. The 1962 film, with Trevor Howard as Bligh and Marlon Brando as Christian, presented the mutinous conflict as one of naked profit-seeking versus humane and liberal values, supposedly mirroring the changing morals in the transition from the conservative 1950s to the liberated 1960s. The 1984 film purportedly flirts with a homosexual theme, with Anthony Hopkins’s Bligh at once attracted to but outraged by Mel Gibson’s Christian, who does not return his affections.
To one who has seen all