William Bligh of the Bounty has become a stock figure of the many films, books and documentaries on his famous voyage in 1789. The stereotype is of a tyrannical disciplinarian and petty tyrant; alternatively, he has been portrayed as an enlightened autocrat who aided scientific research and was largely a victim of circumstances. Both views are defensible, yet Bligh himself defies any obvious categorising. He was not a nice man or an easy colleague, but neither was he a villain or a vicious, sadistic martinet. What seems indisputable is that he was a superb seaman and navigator, who unfortunately could not get on with others over a reasonable period of time.
Bligh was 22 when he took part in Captain Cook's third voyage to the Pacific in 1776 as a ship's master. From the start he showed a genius as a cartographer - a very important skill at the time, when at least three-quarters of the globe was virtually uncharted territory. However, a question-mark formed about him and his professional judgment during Cook's last voyage, when he seems to have been the first man to open fire on the Tahitians who showed hostility to Cook's return to their island. This short temper and lack of tact or pragmatism were to surface in his command of the Bounty a decade later.
To a large extent this voyage was a scientific experiment aimed at proving that the breadfruit, like the potato, was a potentially marketable and popular form of food. The famous mutiny itself is an ill-defined affair, in which Bligh's share of blame is not easy to allot - he was tactless and irritable, a poor man-manager, a skinflint and penny-pincher, yet his crew and his officers were in general rather an inferior lot. When eventually he and 17 other men were cast off by the mutineers in a launch of little over 20 feet long, he proved his mettle as a seaman. From the middle of the Pacific, beset by storms and with limited provisions, he navigated his small ship's company over 4,000 miles to Java - one of the outstanding achievements in small-boat history. This may sound as if he sailed through vast, unpopulated seas, though in fact he did not do so for much of the voyage. The Bounty survivors passed many islands, but Bligh considered that the natives of most of these would kill and eat himself and his men, as Cook had been a decade before. To convince his crew of this was hard, and even when they did go ashore, they sometimes ate semi-poisonous berries and plants, while Bligh himself almost died of eating the entrails of a fish they had caught.
At times his self-control cracked, and he was always ready to abuse and vilify his crew - his chronic fault, which had helped to touch off the original mutiny. Yet in the end it was mainly thanks to him and his sheer professionalism that they came to land in Dutch-occupied territory, from where Bligh returned to England. The ensuing court-martial indicted the mutineers, cleared him and his chosen few, but left a certain cloud over his character; plainly, a more tactful and balanced captain might not have provoked mutiny in the first place.
THIS book is told in quasi-novelistic style, which makes for extra vividness and directness but lessens historical objectivity. Bligh was a brilliant cartographer and navigator (he charted Dublin Bay, a fact which is not mentioned here) and a man whose scientific mentality was in advance of its time, at least in the British Navy. Later he fought at Copenhagen in 1801, when young Admiral Nelson first displayed his touch by ignoring his superiors, and he had a reasonably distinguished career, though his family life was either unhappy or unfortunate.
On the whole, Bligh was an odd, self-centred, sometimes paranoid, yet capable officer of the British Navy who might otherwise have been almost forgotten except for the fact that his crew - led by his familiar, Fletcher Christian - rebelled against him and forced him to make one of the most remarkable small-boat voyages in history. It is mainly this episode which John Toohey recreates, ably and circumstantially, to make a book which holds you to the end.
Brian Fallon is a writer and critic