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By Root 460 0

the films and read many of the books, this is all very interesting, but what actually happened on the Bounty? Here Dening can take us only so far because, he says, at bottom history is nothing more than an echo of the historian’s times, an “illusion,” he calls it, of a past that can only ever be a reflection of our present. Dening, in fact, tells his students: “History is something we make rather than something we learn. . . . I want to persuade them that any history they make will be fiction.” But the mutiny was no fiction, and one cannot write a nonfiction work without offering some causal thesis, of which Dening’s is Bligh’s bad language. Well shiver me timbers and blow me down mates! Imagine that—a sailor using bad language.

By language, however, Dening means something more than obscenities. He means Bligh’s use of language as a means of communicating his intentions, a shortcoming of which so disrupted the hierarchical relationships on the ship that it led to mutiny. (An editorial cartoon lampooning this thesis shows Bligh drifting away in the Bounty’s launch, shouting, “So, Mr. Christian! You propose to unceremoniously cast me adrift?” The caption reads: “The crew can no longer tolerate Captain Bligh’s ruthless splitting of infinitives.”) Bligh, Dening says, “found it difficult to grasp the metaphors of being a captain, how it could mean something different to those being captained,” and “tended not to hear the good intentions or catch the circumstances and context in the language of others but demanded that others hear them in his.”

Dening is on to something here, because his thesis taps into the psychology of status and hierarchy, which we shall consider below. But it strikes me as supremely ironic to note that if we were to employ Dening’s historiographical methods to his own work we would have to note that he very much reflects his own postmodern, deconstructionist culture of the 1980s and 1990s, in which textual analysis and theories of language specify how we should “read” history. This is precisely what Dening does in laying the blame on Bligh’s language. Of course, Dening says history is nothing more than a reflection of the historian’s culture, so we should not be surprised that he has taken this approach. But here Dening has a problem. In order to convince the reader that his methodology is superior to others’, he must reject the earlier theories about the mutiny and prove that his is correct. To do so he presents objective evidence, such as the number of floggings. In other words, Dening must temporarily abandon his own theory of history in order to support it. So much for postmodern historiography, which leads to such positions as Dening’s, who confesses: “Debate on why there was a mutiny on the Bounty has been long. Who can—who would want to—end it? Not I. I am a coward for causes.”

Fortunately for history, scientists are champions for causes, of which there are two types: (1) proximate (historical) and (2) ultimate (evolutionary).

Proximate Causes

The Bounty was originally called the Bethia, a 215-ton merchant ship, 90 feet 10 inches long, 24 feet 3 inches wide, with a total crew of only fifteen men. For Bligh’s mission the little ship was refitted and renamed, with the great cabin and other spaces converted into storage spaces for the breadfruit plants. To procure, maintain, and deliver the cargo, the crew was expanded threefold to forty-five, all volunteers (unusual for the British navy of the time, for which most sailors were pressed into service). With even less crew space than the Bethia provided, the result was extreme overcrowding, adding to the tensions already building from other causes. Despite the crew expansion, the ship lacked the customary marine guards to protect the captain, and although Bligh was the Bounty’s commander, he was not promoted to captain because the British admiralty determined that the ships diminutive size did not warrant it, a decision that would cause Bligh to push himself and his charges harder than he might have had his confidence in his authority on board,