NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
"The Bounty II"
From: Doug Royer
Date: 2004 May 27, 18:09 -0700
From: Doug Royer
Date: 2004 May 27, 18:09 -0700
Just a follow-up on this morning's post about this affair. George Huxtable was correct when he stated Bligh's open ocean transit was a lesson in seamanship,charactor and management of men and material.But Lt. Bligh also knew his way around the most modern navigation equipement and theories of the day and was very proficiant in it. I also meant to and didn't include Bligh's dedication to training and cross-training the men under his command throuhout his naval carrer.Especially the Bounty Expedition as he had a very small ship and ship's company and deemed it prudent to do so in case of accident. He was a member of the 3rd Cook Expedition and many of his later traits and habits of command stem from this experiance.It was shown Cook became not deranged but off-balanced during this final expedition and did things that were not the gentleman's norm such as hanging in gibbets his own men,kidnapping,holding for ransome and executeing natives to make his point. It is also worth noteing that one of Bligh's mid-shipmen,Mr. Hayward,survived not only only this open ocean emergency transit but another equally as long when the "Pandora" ran aground on the homeward leg of the expedition to capture the mutineers. Allow me to post a paragraph from Ms. Alexander's book that to me captures the essance of the times.It is written as Bligh comes home after his 2nd breadfruit expedition is a success and the courts marshal is over. "It was Lt. Bligh's ill luck to have his own great adventure coincide exactly with the dawn of this new era,which saw devotion to a code of duty and established authority as less honorable than the celebration of individual passions and liberty.Coleridge's Ancient Mariner was a crude forerunner of the full-blown Romantic hero to be glamorized by Byron;but Fletcher Christian was the forerunner of them all.And in the clumsy,erratic testimonies of his "Appendix"Edward Christisn had unleashed the most irresistable elements of the story now known as "the mutiny on the bounty."