Don’t blame Brando, blame the historians

Turning it over with my bare toes, it had the look and feel of finely ground coffee, typical of the island’s volcanic black beaches. I could not help but smile to myself: even the white coral sand was a myth.

As a youngster, I fell in love with a 1930s book series called The Bounty Trilogy, by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall.  They introduced me to the greatest true story ever told.  The narrative is swift and vibrant, the characterisation sublime.  The book inspired the 1935 Oscar-winning film starring Charles Laughton and Clark Gable, and the 1962 remake, with Trevor Howard and Marlon Brando. But Nordhoff & Hall, by their own admission, were not bound by historical truth. Like countless plays and books before them, they made most of it up.  The books are fiction and so are the films of Laughton and Brando. A love so dashed became an obsession for the truth. Six years ago to the day it took me to Matavai Bay in Tahiti, where the Bounty anchored alongside the black sand shore; and to Mo’orea, whose silky white coral beaches you see in the films.

A revisionist movement has grown up since the 1970s. Caroline Alexander’s The Bounty (2003) is the most complete narrative, whilst Greg Dening’s Mr Bligh’s Bad Language (1992) and Diana Souhami’s Coconut Chaos (2009) are the most inventive (the former a postmodern ethnography; the latter predicated on chaos theory). Richard Hough’s Captain Bligh and Mr. Christian (1972), one of the first books to vindicate Bligh (though Lord Byron had attempted to do so in 1823), inspired the film The Bounty (1984), starring Anthony Hopkins and Mel Gibson. It is by far the most accurate film (it even insists on pronouncing ‘lieutenant’ the proper way, how the Americans do now and how Englishmen did then) but when I ask anyone about the Bounty it is still Marlon Brando that they mention. The Bounty myths are seemingly too entrenched.

The mutiny happened at the dawn of the Romantic age. Authors and dramatists wanted dashing heroes and dastardly villains.  Fletcher Christian, a hunted criminal, became one of those romantic heroes; his old patron, William Bligh, the tyrannical flogger who drove his protégé to mutiny. Why weren’t the lies overturned?  Historians need documents and sources to do their work. We have Bligh’s Narrative (1792) and the court martial transcripts as the main sources of the mutiny but the latter said nothing about causality, only asking who committed mutiny, not why.  Nor do we have any record of Christian’s side of the story. His family, better connected than Bligh, waged a spiteful propaganda campaign to pin blame on the Bounty’s commander. On top of that, the disappearance of the mutineers remained a mystery for fifteen years. Even on their discovery, the oral history was unreliable as John Adams, the sole survivor, changed his testimony with every telling. The deafening silences in the historical record are, writes Trevor Lummis, author of Life & Death in Eden (1999), ‘more puzzling and disquieting than the contradictions’. To whom do historians ask questions if there is no one to answer them?

Whilst historians are reliant on sources, dramatists, poets and authors can get to work immediately using only shreds of information as inspiration, leaving the rest to their imagination. The first play, The Pirates: Or, The Calamities of Capt. Bligh, begun showing at the Royal Theatre even before Bligh’s Narrative hit the press. These early productions sowed the seeds for future falsehoods before more truthful narrators could even till their soil.

Some historians like George Mackaness (1931) and Ian Ball (1973) have been waspishly critical of the fantasists for dressing myth up as history. They insist that historians must be strictly empirical only report what can be proven. Of course, historians must not pass off rumour as truth. But by failing to deal convincingly with gaps in the record, we leave them open to other writers to, as Ball wrote, ‘sail great and splendid clipper ships of make-believe’. Ball also claimed that ‘serious students’ would immediately spot the lies but he speaks of a minority of determined enthusiasts.

The Bounty needed a definitive historical account before the film industry had spun its yarns, after which the damage had been done. Despite the honest efforts of revisionist historians in recent decades, the myths have proved too strong.

Historians should never forget that in order to inform the reader’s imagination, first one must capture it. Or else someone less scrupulous might.