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The Bounty Trilogy

by Charles Nordhoff, James Norman Hall

Other authors: See the other authors section.

Series: The Bounty Trilogy (1-3)

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7641328,959 (4.15)15
The Wyeth edition of the three tales of the Bounty.
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» See also 15 mentions

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Showing 1-5 of 12 (next | show all)
Great historical fiction about the mutiny on the Bounty in the Tahiti area and William Bligh's long boat voyage of survival. The old copy I read had some great illustrations. ( )
  kslade | Dec 8, 2022 |
More tense and sad than suspenseful and exciting, and while I enjoyed the authors' attention to characterization, especially in the first and third books, that didn't make up for their storytelling deficiencies. ( )
  slimikin | Mar 27, 2022 |
My second time through Mutiny on the Bounty, still didn't get to either of the sequels. Pretty much all I remembered from the first time around was that the Bounty was transporting breadfruit trees and there was, of course, a mutiny.

The mutiny itself is nearly over in an instant, but it is the luck and misfortune which befalls the crew afterward which makes it such an extraordinary tale. ( )
  Pascale1812 | Apr 16, 2020 |
These three books tell the story of the mutiny on the Bounty & what happened to the people who were involved. This tells how God took care of all of them! ( )
  CAFinNY | Apr 26, 2019 |
https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2927397.html

The three books are pretty distinct. The first, Mutiny on the Bounty, is narrated by Byam, the fictional midshipman played by Franchot Tone in the film; the Bligh of the book is if anything even more monstrous than the Bligh of the film, and the confusion of the mutiny itself - a ten-minute spurt of late-night impulse which had long-lasting effects - better conveyed. The Tahitians are referred to invariably as "Indians", but otherwise treated as a dignified culture which the English sailors disrupt by their presence; the only cannibal joke is directed against the cheapskate purveyors of Portsmouth, who allegedly look out for black sailors to add to their mix.

However, it's an anti-Semitic novel - an aspect completely dropped from the film. At Spithead, when we first encounter the Bounty, "sharp-faced Jews, in their wherries, hovered alongside, eager to lend money at interest against pay day, or to sell on credit the worthless trinkets on their trays" and the second in command declares that "I'd like to sink the lot of those Jews". Samuel, Bligh's clerk, is described as "a smug, tight-lipped little man, of a Jewish cast of countenance" and later explicitly as "a London Jew". In fact, the real Samuel appears to have been from Edinburgh, where a George Samuel was a burgess in 1699; so this anti-Semitism is entirely gratuitously introduced to the historical record by Nordhoff and Hall. (As indeed are many of Bligh's portrayed acts of tyranny.)

Given what is said about so many historical characters, it's a bit odd that Nordhoff and Hall chose to disguise the real midshipman Peter Heywood as the fictional Alexander Byam.

One of the shock moments in the film is that when the Pandora comes to Tahiti to arrest the mutineers, it turns out that Bligh is in command. In the book, as in history, he was by then on another assignment elsewhere. Otherwise the film sticks pretty closely to the book.

I read Men Against the Sea during a particularly insomniac night; it's the shortest of the three books, told in the voice of the (historical) surgeon's mate of the Bounty, Thomas Ledward, explaining the epic 41-day, 6,500 km journey taken by Bligh and 18 others in an 7-metre long open boat from the site of the mutiny (near Tofua, one of the Tonga islands) to Kupang at the western end of Timor, avoiding the potentially hostile shores of Australia and other islands - one man was killed at the very beginning, on Tofua. It is an extraordinary feat of navigation, and Nordhoff and Hall succeed in spinning it out; the internal tensions among the 18 survivors are easy to imagine and well portrayed. The impact of their ordeal on the men's digestive systems also is a disturbing but reasonable detail. Interestingly, Samuel is portrayed here as just another crew member; the previous book's anti-Semitism has disappeared. The book ends with Ledward taking his leave of Bligh, who is on his way back to London. In real life, Ledward was one of the five crewmen who died very soon after they reached Batavia (where they all went shortly after arriving in Timor).

Pitcairn's Island, unlike the other two volumes, has no narrator, apart from the last three chapters which are told by Alexander Smith aka John Adams. Of the fifteen men (nine English and six Tahitians) who landed at Pitcairn in 1789, he was the only survivor when the island was eventually discovered by the American ship Topaz in 1808; Smith/Adams himself gave several different accounts of what had happened during the remaining two decades of his life, and one of the women who moved there in 1789 eventually returned to Tahiti and gave her own account. It's a messy story of violence, alcoholism, and sexual confusion, in an earthly paradise - Pitcairn has the natural resources to support a couple of hundred inhabitants, but even so the small settlement disintegrated fatally.

Nordhoff and Hall dramatise some parts - Fletcher Christian here lives for a few agonising days after the inevitable killing starts, whereas most historical accounts agree that he was one of the first to die - and undersell others - I would very much like someone to write the story from the Tahitian women's perspective, given that they outnumbered the men by three to one after the first spate of killings, and by twelve to one from 1800 when the second last mutineer died. It's also striking that the society was a very young one - Fletcher Christian was 24 when the mutiny took place, and 28 when he was killed; the other mutineers (and presumably the Tahitian men and women they brought with them to Pitcairn) must have been mostly the same age or even younger. Nordhoff and Hall fall back on the clichés of the veteran tars, the unsophisticated "Indians" or "Maori", and their statesmanlike leader, rather than the possible truth of the confused young men and women in an extraordinary situation. But the moment of discovery of the island by the Topaz is particularly well done, and is almost worth the read in itself. ( )
  nwhyte | Dec 14, 2017 |
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Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
Nordhoff, Charlesprimary authorall editionsconfirmed
Hall, James Normanmain authorall editionsconfirmed
Wyeth, N. C.Illustratorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
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The Bounty Trilogy is comprised of the three novels Mutiny on the Bounty, Men Against the Sea, and Pitcairn's Island. Please do not combine any of the individual novels with this, the whole Trilogy. Thanks.
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The Wyeth edition of the three tales of the Bounty.

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