CAPTAIN BLIGH’S FACEBOOK FANTASY
If Lieutenant William Bligh had access to Facebook how might he have designed his Profile? This steampunk caricature may well have triggered Bligh’s weird alter ego. Someone once opened a Facebook account in my own name and threw in a hundred incognito Friends to boot. Facebook eventually, reluctantly, took it down, yet so much around us is fakeness: fake news, fake money, fake science, fake medicine, fake history. A politically nice term for fake history is pseudohistory, or more perversely, intellectual spuriousness. Authors of Bountiana are not entirely to blame for their pseudohistorical re-interpretations. Here the parable of the ‘blind men and an elephant’ comes to mind. Bligh wrote his Bounty journals with a public audience in mind and some chunks of his journals were erroneous while other chunks are just not there; these lies by omission are despicable.
On the eve of the “legendary” mutiny, some 233 years ago, there were three protagonists aboard HMAV Bounty: William Bligh, Fletcher Christian, and the head gardener, David Nelson. Somehow Nelson got himself frozen in the middle between two daemons of misinformation. Seen through this prism of fiends — Bligh and Christian — the former, vertically challenged, with State backing, but lacking marines, and the latter a tall charismatic leader emboldened by the State’s parsimony and encouraged by enamored men, it was a rapid switch of elite despots rather than a bloodless mutiny that allowed Bligh to use a well-equipped launch and escape from a voyage he knew was doomed to fail.
Reflecting on the vast bulk of Bountiana, a cacophony of Blighophile and Christian proponent authors, each aiming to drown the other out, when surprised by the metaphorical ‘elephant in the room’, their reaction has been to obfuscate, throw into doubt, or lie, in an effort to diminish the strengths of any fresh evidence pertaining to the mutiny on HMAV Bounty: I dub this classic Bountiana as pseudohistory gone rogue. So what does the analogous ‘elephant’ look like; why does it require a separate fresh bibliography of its own, and why has a new based-on-book feature film progressed to the final table of a major French producer? I am ever tempted to say read-the-book titled Conspiracy on the Bounty — Bligh’s Convenient Mutiny but, though people still read books, sadly, nowadays, they read less of them, especially if the book includes 366 pages, 25 colour and 24 black & white illustrations, supplementary notes, appendix, bibliography/s, and an index.
Given the deluge of Bligh/Bounty narratives, to un-cram one’s life, many readers have turned away from books in favor of short stories. So if you like short reads and are drawn to Bligh and his escapades I invite you to open this website and in the menu, press the News button and unfurl an anthology of snippets on the controversy.
[Illustration credit: GM Luttrell, Steampunk Airship Captain collection]
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