Lieutenant Bligh’s Imperial Breadfruit.
Extract: “1787 was a time when freedom for Jamaican slaves was still some years away, an epoch of struggle confronted abolitionists, sugar planters owed their prosperity to humans under bondage, and China teas were being sweetened but at a bitter human cost. For those who connived to keep the trade acceptable, slave news was bad press, liberation news attracted adverse publicity and was best avoided, but if it couldn’t, then blessed was a ship laden with gifts for slaves, a ship that wore a flag of philanthropy, a King’s generosity so demonstratively revealed with a balm of British breadfruit. If that much was fact, then Bligh’s breadfruit voyages were, by demonstration, a part of the evil slave trade. Yet, as Conspiracy on the Bounty has shown, the voyages were also part of a bold strategic plan.”
The mutiny on HMAV Bounty, a popularized segment of maritime history, has been locked in two gears between two protagonists and their proponents — all this has changed. “Conspiracy on the Bounty — Bligh’s Convenient Mutiny” is a seminal work that enlarges the contemporary narrative. It confronts staid imageries, inserts new reasoning, tables fresh material: some which was previously unknown, some that was withheld by Vice Admiral William Bligh and his patron Sir Joseph Banks. We are not just talking about a faded letter found in an old wooden box, instead over fifty folios of reference material, enough to add a whole new section to bibliographies found in conservative Bountiana.
Image: “Bounty Departs Portsmouth — This atmospheric work shows Bounty disappearing into the distance of the Spithead, on her way to Tahiti.” Credit: John Hagan’s Bounty oil paintings.
Comments are closed.