I came away from the project with a great admiration for William Bligh, who is surely one of the more grievously wronged-by-history men in the history of the British Empire.

Here’s the introduction and about half of the (very long) first chapter of The Bounty Mutiny: From the Court Case to the Movie.

And, of course, a link to where you can buy it on Amazon!

***

Introduction

Boom!

The single cannon shot from HMS Duke rang out over the choppy gray water of England’s Portsmouth Harbor. It was 8 A.M. on Wednesday, September 12, 1792, and the Duke had just hoisted a flag indicating that a court martial was in process.

Thirty minutes later, ten prisoners were led from the gun room of HMS Hector and loaded aboard one of the Hector’s boats. British Marines in bright red uniform jackets stood at attention as the boat’s crew dipped their oars and began the journey to the Duke, moored in the outer harbor.

More than an hour later, with the Marines still standing at attention, the boat reached the Duke. The prisoners were formally taken aboard, and then led into the captain’s great cabin at the very stern of the ship to face the twelve captains who would serve as their judges and the Judge Advocate who would run the court. Also present were the prisoners’ counselors, and various witnesses.

The Judge Advocate, Moses Greetham, began reading from the “Circumstantial letter” which laid out the details of the case: the ten men were accused of mutiny, a crime punishable by death.

Specifically, they were accused of the most famous mutiny of all time: the mutiny on His Majesty’s Armed Vessel Bounty, the ship once commanded by Lieutenant William Bligh.

For more than two centuries now, that mutiny has captured the imagination of the world, inspiring histories, plays, novels, at least one stage musical, and five motion pictures.

Oddly enough, it all started with breadfruit.

Chapter 1: The Voyage of the Bounty

In 1688, while sailing around the world, a naturalist (and occasional pirate) named William Dampier noted an interesting new fruit from the island of Guam:

“The bread-fruit (as we call it) grows on a large tree…The fruit…is of a round shape and has a thick tough rind. When the fruit is ripe it is yellow and soft; and the taste is sweet and pleasant. The natives of this island use it for bread: they gather it when full grown while it is green and hard; then they bake it in an oven…the inside is soft, tender, and white.”[i]

Later explorers, including Captain Cook (the first European to visit Hawaii and Australia) also extolled the virtues of the breadfruit. The fruit was so much like bread that sailors actually preferred it to their own bread. (That’s not surprising, since the bread served in the middle of a long voyage was a kind of cracker made of flour, water, and salt known as “hardtack” or “ship’s biscuit.” Ship’s biscuit was so hard it often had to be soaked before it could be eaten. It was also occasionally infested by the worm-like larvae of beetles.)

As early as 1775, the Society for West India Merchants saw the potential in breadfruit as a source of food for slave on the sugar plantations in the Caribbean. The Society offered a hundred pounds to the first person who could bring living breadfruit trees to England.

A Passion for Botany

Among those with businesses interests in the West Indies was Joseph Banks. Born in 1743, Banks was independently wealthy and passionately interested in natural history—particularly botany, the study of plants. When he was twenty-one he collected numerous never-before-seen specimens of plants along the coasts of Labrador and Newfoundland. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society, England’s top scientific society, when he was just twenty-three.

He next joined Captain James Cook aboard the Endeavour when he set sail in August 1768 to carry British astronomers to Tahiti to observe the planet Venus crossing the disk of the sun.

The ship’s visit to Tahiti seized the public’s imagination upon the Endeavour’s return to England in 1771, even though the island had first been reached by an English ship four years earlier. Banks had a lot to do with the public’s sudden interest. He returned with thousands of specimens, drawings and paintings.

In 1778, after a final voyage to Iceland, Banks was elected president of the Royal Society. For decades, very few expeditions of science or exploration were undertaken without his consultation.

Banks wrote and received tens of thousands of letters from all over the world, full of questions and scientific observations. More than a few urged that the breadfruit tree be imported as a new food source for the West Indies.

Banks could see the fruit’s potential. He convinced the British government to mount an official expedition, announced in February 1787, to bring back specimens of the plant.

A former merchant ship called the Bethia, approved by Banks, was purchased and renamed His Majesty’s Armed Vessel (HMAV) Bounty. (The Bounty was too small to qualify for the designation His Majesty’s Ship [HMS]).

Command of The Bounty was awarded to Lieutenant William Bligh.

Enter William Bligh

William Bligh, born September 9, 1754, was the son of Francis Bligh, customs officer at Plymouth, and Jane Pearce, a widow Francis had married just ten months earlier.

Reality vs. the Movie: A Cabin Boy at Age Seven?

Throughout this book, we’ll be comparing real-life events to the way they were described or depicted in the 1984 movie The Bounty, produced by Dino de Laurentiis. In that movie, Bligh (Anthony Hopkins) tells Fletcher Christian (Mel Gibson) that he has been at sea since he was twelve.

In fact, William Bligh first appears in naval records as a ship’s servant on the Monmouth at the age of seven—but it’s unlikely he actually went to sea at that age.

In the 1700s, Royal Navy captains would often enter youngsters from well-connected families onto the books, providing them with valuable “sea time.” Sea time was important because, to become a lieutenant, a young man had to appear on a ship’s roster for six years, and serve as a midshipman or master’s mate for at least two years of the six.[ii] Appearing on a ship’s roster at a young age allowed the boy to step straight into a midshipman’s position and take his lieutenant’s exam sooner.

Bligh probably first went to sea for real at age sixteen, shortly after his mother died.

In 1770 Bligh signed on to the Hunter as an able seaman. This was a typical classification for potential officers on ships where all the positions for midshipmen—officers in training—were filled. Six months later a midshipman’s position opened up, and Bligh was promoted.

From ages seventeen to twenty Bligh served as a midshipman on the Crescent, sailing to Tenerife and the West Indies. In 1774 he joined the Ranger, temporarily reduced to able seaman again, as she hunted smugglers in the Irish Sea.

At age twenty-one, Bligh learned that Captain Cook had selected him as sailing master of the Resolution for Cook’s third expedition. Cook must have heard a good report of Bligh’s navigational capabilities. He may also have known of Bligh’s talent for drawing. Cook wanted all his officers to be able to construct charts and accurately sketch the various places in which the ship might anchor.[iii]

Sailing with Captain Cook

With Cook, Bligh sailed to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), New Zealand, Tahiti, and various Pacific islands. Cook also sailed up the west coast of North America in a failed search for the Northwest Passage (a more direct route from Europe to the Pacific that would avoid the stormy seas around Cape Horn, at the southern tip of South America).

Bligh must have paid close attention to Cook’s methods for keeping his crew healthy on long voyages, because he later implemented some of those methods on the Bounty. Second to Cook himself, he was responsible for creating charts and surveys, and also drew accurate sketches of birds, animals, and landscapes.

On February 14, 1779, at Kealakekua Bay, Hawaii, Bligh witnessed the murder of Captain Cook by natives. In Bligh’s view, the murder happened because the Marines guarding Cook did not do their duty.[iv] The tragedy affected Bligh not only personally but professionally. Bligh’s family connections were just good enough to get him into the Navy as a midshipman, but he had been counting on Cook’s influence to help further his career. (In the Royal Navy in that era, who you knew was often more important than what you knew.)

In February 1781, Bligh married Elizabeth Betham on the Isle of Man. After serving on a variety of ships for a few months near the end of the American Revolution, Bligh ended up on the Isle of Man with his wife and new daughter. In the scaled-back peacetime Navy, no officer’s berths were available.

The peacetime Navy paid only two shillings a day, so Bligh had to find work. The Navy granted his request for permission to sail on merchant ships. From mid-1783 until he was appointed commander of the Bounty, he commanded ships belonging to his wife’s wealthy uncle, Duncan Campbell, carrying goods from England to the West Indies and returning with rum and sugar.

His careful drawings and proven navigational skills probably recommended him to the Admiralty as commander of Sir Joseph Banks’s breadfruit expedition. Navigational skills were important because, once he’d retrieved breadfruit from Tahiti, the Admiralty wanted him to chart the Endeavour Straits, a narrow, dangerous passage separating Australia (then called New Holland) and New Guinea).[v] Cook had run aground there. The Admiralty hoped Cook’s sailing master might do better.

There’s no evidence Banks ever met Bligh. But Bligh, knowing the career value of a powerful patron, thanked Banks profusely for command of the Bounty, and wrote: “I can only assure you I shall endeavour, and I hope succeed, in deserving such a trust…”[vi]

HMAV Bounty

The Bounty was a three-masted merchant vessel, built just 2 1/2 years earlier. She was 85 feet, 1 1/2 inches long on the upper deck and 24 feet 4 inches wide. At just 220 tons, she was much smaller than any of Cook’s ships had been.

Because she was so small, she was rated as a cutter. That mattered because a cutter did not rate a captain or a commander as a commanding officer, but only a lieutenant. That, in turn, meant Bligh would not be getting a promotion, as he had hoped.

On a voyage expected to last at least two years, the difference between a lieutenant’s and commander’s pay was considerable. Bligh would earn just £70 a year. (As a merchant captain under Duncan Campbell, he’d been earning £500.) All the Navy offered was the assurance that that he would be promoted upon his return.[vii]

The Bounty was unusual in other ways, thanks to modifications Joseph Banks had insisted upon. All that mattered to Banks was the return of breadfruit, and, he wrote, “…the Master & Crew of her must not think it a grievance to give up the best part of her accommodations for that purpose.”[viii]

The most notable modification from Bligh’s point of view must have been the loss of the great cabin, the commanding officer’s private quarters. Normally the great cabin was as wide as the ship and extended from the stern almost to the main mast, with windows on three sides providing plenty of light. But on the Bounty, the great cabin had been turned into a breadfruit nursery. It was filled with shelves, cut with holes to receive 629 pots. It had special ventilation, a stove for warmth, a drainage system that caught and recycled excess water, and more. Bligh had to make do with a windowless cabin, eight by seven feet. He would eat in a small, cramped pantry.

The Bounty’s small size meant a smallish crew. Bligh would be the only commissioned officer. Warrant officers would include a master, boatswain, carpenter, gunner and surgeon. Bligh decided not to hire a purser, who normally bought provisions from the Navy Board, tracked them and doled them out on the voyage, and sold back unused ones at the end. Instead, Bligh would look after the disbursement of stores himself.

Most fatefully, the ship would not carry any Marines, who on most Navy ships served as the captain’s security and police force.

 Free of the watersuit and its exoskeleton, his shape was nothing bipedal at all; his almost globular, iridescent body, from which writhed six locomotive tentacles and six manipulators, moved through the water with boneless grace, gill-slits pulsating below the fringe of feeding-tentacles that encircled his beak.  It seemed odd to hear perfect home-planet S’sinn emerging from that alien mouth.

For all intents and purposes, then, Lost in Translation did indeed feature a talking squid in outer space. Which means a) I really shouldn’t bad-mouth Margaret Atwood’s definition, and b) Margaret Atwood reads my stuff!

What Atwood did not mention, and perhaps few people realize, is that everything is improved with the addition of squid. As my daughter and I have discovered: take any title, replace a word with “squid,” and the result is instant merriment!

Don’t believe me?  Consider this list of titles, the top 25 movies in the list of the top 250 movies of all time as voted on by users of the Internet Movie Database:

The Squidshank Redemption

The Squidfather

The Squidfather: Part II

The Good, the Bad and the Squid

Squid Fiction

Schindler’s Squid

12 Angry Squid

Squidception

One Flew Over the Squid’s Nest

The Dark Squid

Squid Wars: Episode V – The Squid Strikes Back

The Lord of the Squid: The Return of the Squid

Seven Squid

Squid Club

Squid Wars: Episode IV – A New Squid

Squidfellas

Casasquida

City of Squid

The Lord of the Squid: The Fellowship of the Squid

Once Upon a Squid in the West

Rear Squid

Raiders of the Lost Squid

The Squidrix

Squidcho

The Usual Squid

Best of all, this even (or especially) works with the titles of Margaret Atwood novels, like so:

The Edible Squid

Squidding

Lady Squid

Life Before Squid

Bodily Squid

The Handsquid’s Tale

Squid’s Eye

The Robber Squid

Alias Squid

The Blind Squid

Oryx and Squid

The Squidiad

The Year of the Squid

See what I mean? So infallible is this method of amusing oneself (if one is me, anyway, or my nine-year-old daughter), that I have become convinced that “squid” is the funniest word in the English language.

Squid! It’s not just for breakfast any more.

(The photo: Not a squid, but a jellyfish, at the Vancouver Aquarium.)

The much-diminished caravan of Freefolk Clan Diannan had only been on the road for an hour the next morning when the attack came.

Words today: 2,277

Words thus far: 42,652

A good morning’s work. I’m getting close to 200 manuscript pages on this story. I think it’s going to need considerable pruning when I get to rewriting, but the plot is advancing well.

I spent the mid-day wearing my editor-of-Fine-Lifestyles-Regina hat, then turned into Lee Arthur Chane in the afternoon and worked on Magebane. I’m still (again) rewriting more than writing, but I really think I’ve got my plot demons licked this time. (Sounds like a fantasy-novel curse, actually. “Oh, go lick a demon!”) So good progress there, too.

Tonight I watched The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl (or is it the other way around?) with my daughter, then we played Barbies before bed. (Major Daddy brownie points! Score!) The movie, by the way, wasn’t half bad. I’d have adored it as a 10-year-old. My daughter liked it.

Science column tomorrow, otherwise it’ll be a rinse-and-repeat of today.

Today’s photo: a decorative lamp. Because it was there, that’s why.

I devoured these classic space operas as a kid. The scale of, well, everything was enormous: ships the size of moons (long before the Death Star–Star Wars is small potatoes compared to Lensmen series, although there are a lot of similarities). Psychic abilities magnified by mysterious Lenses created by an incredibly advanced race to help in the battle against an equally advanced but EEEVIL race…men in space armor battling it out in hand-to-hand combat in boarding actions that took place in the open space between ships and on the ship’s hulls.

I doodled this stuff, and lived this stuff, and those who detect a faint whiff of pulpy space opera goodness about my own books have “Doc” Smith to thank (or blame) as much as Heinlein, Asimov and Clarke.

Man, I hope this movie gets made!*

*As long as, you know, it doesn’t suck.

Halfway through the second half of the Regina Symphony Orchestra’s 10th annual The RSO Goes to the Oscars movie-music concert, Maestro Victor Sawa commented on the versatility of movie composers, who may find themselves writing theme music for sharks in one movie and mood music for superheroes in the next.

But it wasn’t just the composers’ versatility on display Saturday night — the RSO once again proved that it can tackle any style of music with verve.

It may have helped that superheroes Batman (on timpani) and Iron Man (on viola) were lending a hand, on a night that also saw a family dressed as characters from The Wizard of Oz win the costume competition at intermission.

Here’s a bit from the middle:

For Sawa, switching from symphonies to soundtracks is natural.

In a strange way, he says, “we owe a debt of gratitude to the Nazis. Oscar Hammerstein, Max Steiner, Eric Korngold, Bernard Hermann, Franz Waxman — they all came over because they were being persecuted in Europe.

“The entire Hollywood sound was created by the classical composers of Europe.

“When we talk about classical music and how it survived the second half of the 20th century, everyone was going to the movies, they were listening to classical music.

“The snob factor is missing when you go to the movies.”

And today’s movie composers are just as good as those early ones, Sawa says.

“The modern-day ones learned from the best.”

“Hokey” isn’t the result of a story point, “hokey” is the result of the execution of the story point, something “Notorious” proves definitively.

Why have we allowed ourselves to buy into the idea that uplifting endings are old-fashioned and “hokey?” Nihilism may never be hokey, but it sure can be lazy. Ending a film on a downer and calling it complicated and nuanced requires almost no work compared to crafting a climax that lifts the human spirit.

“Notorious” ends on an emotional triumph that requires a genius for mature filmmaking that’s all but vanished. Irony and nihilism have their place but too often they’re a refuge for mediocrity.

I think his points apply equally well to fiction. High school students trying to be deep write ironic stories with nihilistic endings. Mature writers should be capable of more.

We who write such stuff are occasionally asked (and occasionally wonder) if our works can continue to compete in a media universe in which “science fiction” and “fantasy” conjure up for most people Hollywood special-effects extravaganzas first, and the written word second (if at all).

I was therefore heartened to read of a recent scientific study that indicates that books are every bit as good at stirring emotions as movies.

(Alas, the particular emotion being studied was disgust, which is one most writers–Stephen King perhaps being the exception–only occasionally wish to invoke for fear the disgust will spill over from specific scenes to the entire work…but the study probably holds true for other emotions, as well.)

Mbemba Jabbi, Jojanneke Bastiaansen and Christian Keysers at the Social Brain Lab (love that name) at the BCN NeuroImaging Center of the University Medical Center in Groningen, The Netherlands, conducted the study, published in the online science journal PLoS one.

In the abstract, the authors point out that scientists already know that the same parts of the brain light up whether we, say, kick a ball ourselves, watch someone else kick a ball, or simply imagine kicking a ball. They wondered if the same thing held true for emotions.

They chose to study disgust because it’s pretty easy to generate within the artificial confines of a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine, which measures blood flow to various areas of the brain, an indication of the amount of activity occurring in those areas.

Their twelve volunteers, evenly divided between men and women, were each scanned while the researchers induced disgust in three different ways: by showing the subjects a three-second clip of actors tasting the contents of a cup and looking disgusted, having them taste a disgustingly bitter liquid, and having them read and imagine scenarios involving disgust.

How disgusting a scenario? Keysers, quoted in an article on the LiveScience website, gives an example: “Walking along a street, bumping into a reeking, drunken man, who then starts to retch, and realizing that some of his vomit had ended up in your own mouth.”

If that scenario disgusts you (and if it doesn’t, I don’t want to know, because that alone would be disgusting), then a portion of your brain called the anterior insula just became active, and would have lit up the screen of an fMRI machine, if you happened to be sitting in one as you read it.

At least, that’s what the Dutch researchers found: no matter how the disgust was generated, the same region of the brain lit up.

There’s additional evidence that the anterior insula is home of the feeling of disgust: people with brain damage in that area lose the capacity to feel disgusted–they can happily drink sour milk.

In evolutionary terms, disgust helps us survive: many of the things that disgust us could make us ill if we ate them. Our ability to feel disgust second-hand also provides a survival benefit: if we feel just as disgusted watching someone else spit out something they find disgusting–and therefore possibly hazardous–as if we’d tasted it ourselves, we’re less likely to taste it ourselves, which might just possibly save our lives.

Which is wonderful from the point of view of survival of the species (and individual members of it), but I’m more concerned about the survival of that peculiar subspecies known as the fiction writer (and, indeed, one particular individual member of that subspecies, me), and thus for me the most fascinating thing about this study is that indicates that a good book can still move people just as much as a movie can.

As Keysers puts it, “Whether we see a movie or read a story…we activate our bodily representations of what it feels like to be disgusted. And that is why reading a book and viewing a movie can both make us feel as if we literally feel what the protagonist is going through.”

So can books continue to compete with movies?

Absolutely. Scientists say so.

As a science fiction writer, that’s good enough for me.

Such is the case of Dr. Marinus Bicknell Willett, the family physician of Charles Dexter Ward, and ultimately the hero of H.P. Lovecraft’s novella The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. (The image at right is of the late actor Frank Maxwell, who portrayed Dr. Willett in Roger Corman’s 1963 movie version of the story, The Haunted Palace (he took the title from an Edgar Allan Poe story, but the main inspiration for the film was definitely Lovecraft).

Wikipedia has more about the novella here, including this note on the good Dr. Willett:

An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia compares Willett’s character to other “valiant counterweight[s]” in Lovecraft such as Thomas Malone in “The Horror at Red Hook” (1925)[8] and Henry Armitage in “The Dunwich Horror“; like Willett, Armitage “defeats the ‘villains’ by incantations, and he is susceptible to the same flaws–pomposity, arrogance, self-importance–that can be seen in Willett.”[9]

“Wait a minute!” I hear you cry (if I happen to be sitting behind you as you read this, creeping up on you, breathing down your neck, about to…Ha! Made you look!). “What does all this stuff about Hitchcock, and your rather lame attempt to capture some of the Hitchcockian spirit in the first half of this paragraph, have to do with science? Have I stumbled upon a new film criticism column by mistake?”

Nay, dear reader. I have not strayed from my allotted subject matter in the slightest: science, you see, has just measured what goes on inside the brains of audience members when they watch certain kinds of film–and in the process, provided empirical evidence that Vermiere knew what he was writing about nine years ago in Boston.

Neuroscientists at New York University used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and a technique called inter-subject correlation (ISC) to examine the brain activity of multiple subjects as they watched the same films, and figure out which responses were similar from viewer to viewer.

“Some films lead most viewers through a similar sequence of perceptual, emotional and cognitive states,” the researchers wrote in their study, published in Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind (a journal I had no idea existed until I read about this study). Films with such a tight grip on their viewers’ minds, in other words, produce a high ISC. Other films, either deliberately or by accident, exercise less control, and thus produce a low ISC.

The researchers showed three thirty-minute film clips to stimulate their subjects’ brain activity: one from Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (I apologize for having now planted that movie’s famous whistled theme in your head for the rest of the day), an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents entitled “Bang! You’re Dead,” and an episode of Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm.

As a control, subjects also watched a 10-minute, unedited video shot during a concert in New York City’s Washington Square Park.

Hitchcock’s reputation for being a master of audience manipulation was born out by the results: “Bang! You’re Dead” evoked similar responses across all of the viewers in more than 65 percent of the neocortex, the portion of the brain responsible for perception and cognition.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly wasn’t quite as involving, but still evoked similar responses in more than 45 percent of the neocortex.

Curb Your Enthusiasm had a much lower ISC, at 18 percent, and the Washington Square Park video, a.k.a. “unstructured reality,” had an ISC of less than five percent.

What this also means is that, if its content, editing and directing style all line up properly, a movie can exert a considerable amount of control over an audience’s brain activity, and get most of those present to experience it in pretty much the same way.

Possibly fearing a backlash from the makers of Curb Your Enthusiasm (or worse, the Creator of “unstructured reality”), the researchers hasten to add that just because a film clip results in a low ISC doesn’t mean it’s not an engaging piece of work. Some art films, the researcher say by way of example, may elicit intense brain activity, but it differs from person to person depending on their own interpretation of what they’re seeing.

The researchers weren’t just interested in proving that Hitchcock made films that successfully manipulated audiences (Psycho alone proved that). They believe that their technique can lead to more “neurocinematic” studies, allowing other researchers and those in the film industry to better judge a film’s effect on an audience.

Or, if you’re paranoid, to create films and commercials and political ads scientifically designed to suck you in and make you turn off your critical facilities.

Well, at least that last thought drove that spaghetti-western theme music out of my head.

For some reason all I can hear now is the opening to The Twilight Zone.