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BLIGH: William Bligh in the South Seas
In Bligh , the story of the most notorious of all Pacific explorers is told through a new lens as a key episode in the history of the world, rather than simply of the West. Award-winning anthropologist Anne Salmond recounts with a fresh perspective the triumphs and disasters of William Bligh’s life in a riveting narrative that for the first time portrays the Pacific islanders as players. Beginning in 1777, when Bligh, at twenty-two, first arrived in Tahiti with Captain Cook, Salmond charts Bligh’s three Pacific voyages―and tells how they transformed lives on the islands as well as on board the ships and back in Europe. She sheds new insight into the mutiny aboard the Bounty―and on Bligh’s remarkable 3,000-mile journey across the Pacific in a small boat―through revelations from the raw, unguarded letters between him and his wife Betsy. This beautifully told story reveals Bligh for the first time, as an important ethnographer adding to the paradoxical legacy of this famed seaman, and it captures more definitively than ever the excitement, drama, and terror of these events.
528 pages, Hardcover
First published August 1, 2011
About the author
Anne Salmond
28 books17 followersDame Mary Anne Salmond DBE (née Thorpe, born 16 November 1945) is a New Zealand anthropologist, environmentalist and writer.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
June 24, 2017
Amid all the tales for drama and daring-do that Empire tells itself about the European exploration and colonisation of the Pacific, few grabbed the contemporary public consciousness or have had public/popular longevity as 1789’s mutiny on the Bounty. There have been books galore, Hollywood films featuring such actors as Charles Laughton and Clark Gable (1935), Marlon Brando and Trevor Howard (1962) and Mel Gibson and Anthony Hopkins (1984). Almost all reiterate the popular vision of a tyrannical Captain William Bligh and the rebellious but of-the-people Fletcher Christian who over-threw the tyrant to set up an outpost of civilisation on the uninhabited Pitcairn Island.
Bligh’s reputation is a poor one, with scholarly analyses suggesting Christian’s is not much better, but the image of the Manichean struggle between good and evil persists, despite the impact of such powerful revisionist analyses as Greg Dening’s outstanding Mr Bligh’s Bad Language (1992). It is, of course, impossible to read Anne Salmond’s superb biography of Bligh without seeing it against the backdrop of the popular image, of the place of the mutiny in his life story (most of us know nothing else about him) and, for me, against the theatrical and performance analysis that underpins Dening’s story of the mutiny. But, of course, Salmond’s is much more than a retelling of the mutiny, even though that has a major part in her presentation of his life.
Bligh doesn’t come across as all that likeable, not because he was a tyrant, but because he had ambition and with it an unwarranted degree of arrogance. He seems resentful, but then it is arguable (as Salmond seems sympathetic to) that he was badly treated by the Admiralty – and her case that the design of the Bounty contributed to the disquiet producing the mutiny is compelling.
The 1789/90 voyage to Tahiti was not Bligh’s first; he’d visited with James Cook in the crew of the Resolution in 1777, knew the place and the people so was welcomed back as a returning visitor. The Bounty’s voyage itself was one of several attempts to collect breadfruit for transportation to the slave colonies of the West Indies in an attempt to shore up the food supply in the islands increasingly turned over to mono-cropping and Britain (and France’s) major source of wealth: slave produced sugar. This was not a humanitarian venture, but one designed to sustain the sugar element of emerging European capitalism, the wealth of the Atlantic triangle underpinning Britain’s industrial investment and growth and the enslavement of peoples of African descent.
He may have been not-all-that-likeable, but Bligh was a scholar with significant ethnographic interest in Tahiti, with a working understanding of the language and a willingness to intervene in local politics if sought – and for much of his time there he managed to read the political developments and forces quite well – but they were shifting as he left, which had profound effects in the wake of the mutiny and the return of the mutineers to the region of Tahiti.
As good as Salmond is on the British and naval aspects of Bligh’s life, it is in her discussion of the Tahitian aspects of his story that she excels. The book is a spin off from her previous Aphrodite’s Islands examining early European engagement with Tahiti. From that, and her ethnographic sensibilities, she is able to paint a rich and complex picture of indigenous Tahitian life with a historian’s detailed knowledge of individuals within their familial networks and descent lines (here her ethnographic skills come to the fore) meaning also that she is able to read between and behind the explorers’ and visitors’ accounts the present a view of Tahiti that is to a large degree only implicit in those sources.
The strength and brilliance of this biography then is that it allows us to have several different perspectives on Bligh and on the mutineers. Her grasp of the source material means that we have multiple reading and viewing positions presented or opened up to us to make sense of Bligh’s family and professional lives including relations with Cook and with the Admiralty, of his extended kin group and of the relations within and between his crew – mutineers and ‘loyalists’. More importantly, and what makes this biography distinctive, is that Salmond’s knowledge and engagement with Tahiti and Tahitian perspectives means that we also have a kind of post-colonial Bligh, we have Bligh the ethnographer who while maintaining his belief in the correctness of the ways-British is also aware that to work and function in Tahiti he must be somewhat more relativist and sympathetic to Tahitian ways of being and doing than many other explorers had been.
Salmond also sets out to in part rehabilitate Bligh: part of his reputation as a violent Captain rests on his alleged propensity to use the whip as a disciplining tool, yet she shows that he use the whip less than the ‘humanitarian’ Cook. She also shows how contractual issues, problems of the loss of ships logs and other constraints meant that Bligh was later than other in publishing the book of the journey (including the heroic several thousand mile journey in a long boat from the site of the mutiny, via Tonga and the Australian (now Queensland) coast to Timor) meaning that others set the narrative and Bligh’s image suffered. She is as good on the mutineers’ experiences after the event as she is on Bligh’s and his loyal crew members. Crucially, although the mutiny is the big event of his life (and our memory of him) is accounts for well less than half the book, is superbly contextualised in wider aspects of the protagonists’ lives and shows evidence of close reading of individual motivations.
Bligh emerges from this biography as a complex, contradictory, subtle, well-rounded fairly humanitarian intellectual with real sympathy for the indigenous peoples of Tahiti at least. For those of us who cannot escape the image of Charles Laughton’s and Trevor Howard’s tyrant (and that view is deeply embedded in popular culture), this is an unsettling and refreshing view. Equally, if not more, importantly Salmond has given us a model of historical scholarship for the pre- and colonial eras, including the ‘era of exploration’, showing how knowledge if and empathy for all parties as well as subtle and nuanced ethnographic insight enriches and enhances biographical and historical investigation and understanding.
This should be seen as the new, definitive biography of a key figure in historical consciousness influencing not just our views of the era of exploration but also of image of the Royal Navy.
Bligh’s reputation is a poor one, with scholarly analyses suggesting Christian’s is not much better, but the image of the Manichean struggle between good and evil persists, despite the impact of such powerful revisionist analyses as Greg Dening’s outstanding Mr Bligh’s Bad Language (1992). It is, of course, impossible to read Anne Salmond’s superb biography of Bligh without seeing it against the backdrop of the popular image, of the place of the mutiny in his life story (most of us know nothing else about him) and, for me, against the theatrical and performance analysis that underpins Dening’s story of the mutiny. But, of course, Salmond’s is much more than a retelling of the mutiny, even though that has a major part in her presentation of his life.
Bligh doesn’t come across as all that likeable, not because he was a tyrant, but because he had ambition and with it an unwarranted degree of arrogance. He seems resentful, but then it is arguable (as Salmond seems sympathetic to) that he was badly treated by the Admiralty – and her case that the design of the Bounty contributed to the disquiet producing the mutiny is compelling.
The 1789/90 voyage to Tahiti was not Bligh’s first; he’d visited with James Cook in the crew of the Resolution in 1777, knew the place and the people so was welcomed back as a returning visitor. The Bounty’s voyage itself was one of several attempts to collect breadfruit for transportation to the slave colonies of the West Indies in an attempt to shore up the food supply in the islands increasingly turned over to mono-cropping and Britain (and France’s) major source of wealth: slave produced sugar. This was not a humanitarian venture, but one designed to sustain the sugar element of emerging European capitalism, the wealth of the Atlantic triangle underpinning Britain’s industrial investment and growth and the enslavement of peoples of African descent.
He may have been not-all-that-likeable, but Bligh was a scholar with significant ethnographic interest in Tahiti, with a working understanding of the language and a willingness to intervene in local politics if sought – and for much of his time there he managed to read the political developments and forces quite well – but they were shifting as he left, which had profound effects in the wake of the mutiny and the return of the mutineers to the region of Tahiti.
As good as Salmond is on the British and naval aspects of Bligh’s life, it is in her discussion of the Tahitian aspects of his story that she excels. The book is a spin off from her previous Aphrodite’s Islands examining early European engagement with Tahiti. From that, and her ethnographic sensibilities, she is able to paint a rich and complex picture of indigenous Tahitian life with a historian’s detailed knowledge of individuals within their familial networks and descent lines (here her ethnographic skills come to the fore) meaning also that she is able to read between and behind the explorers’ and visitors’ accounts the present a view of Tahiti that is to a large degree only implicit in those sources.
The strength and brilliance of this biography then is that it allows us to have several different perspectives on Bligh and on the mutineers. Her grasp of the source material means that we have multiple reading and viewing positions presented or opened up to us to make sense of Bligh’s family and professional lives including relations with Cook and with the Admiralty, of his extended kin group and of the relations within and between his crew – mutineers and ‘loyalists’. More importantly, and what makes this biography distinctive, is that Salmond’s knowledge and engagement with Tahiti and Tahitian perspectives means that we also have a kind of post-colonial Bligh, we have Bligh the ethnographer who while maintaining his belief in the correctness of the ways-British is also aware that to work and function in Tahiti he must be somewhat more relativist and sympathetic to Tahitian ways of being and doing than many other explorers had been.
Salmond also sets out to in part rehabilitate Bligh: part of his reputation as a violent Captain rests on his alleged propensity to use the whip as a disciplining tool, yet she shows that he use the whip less than the ‘humanitarian’ Cook. She also shows how contractual issues, problems of the loss of ships logs and other constraints meant that Bligh was later than other in publishing the book of the journey (including the heroic several thousand mile journey in a long boat from the site of the mutiny, via Tonga and the Australian (now Queensland) coast to Timor) meaning that others set the narrative and Bligh’s image suffered. She is as good on the mutineers’ experiences after the event as she is on Bligh’s and his loyal crew members. Crucially, although the mutiny is the big event of his life (and our memory of him) is accounts for well less than half the book, is superbly contextualised in wider aspects of the protagonists’ lives and shows evidence of close reading of individual motivations.
Bligh emerges from this biography as a complex, contradictory, subtle, well-rounded fairly humanitarian intellectual with real sympathy for the indigenous peoples of Tahiti at least. For those of us who cannot escape the image of Charles Laughton’s and Trevor Howard’s tyrant (and that view is deeply embedded in popular culture), this is an unsettling and refreshing view. Equally, if not more, importantly Salmond has given us a model of historical scholarship for the pre- and colonial eras, including the ‘era of exploration’, showing how knowledge if and empathy for all parties as well as subtle and nuanced ethnographic insight enriches and enhances biographical and historical investigation and understanding.
This should be seen as the new, definitive biography of a key figure in historical consciousness influencing not just our views of the era of exploration but also of image of the Royal Navy.
October 14, 2025
I found Anne Salmond’s biography of William Bligh very interesting and only regret she did not delve more into Bligh’s time outside of his south seas service. Several years ago I visited Sidney, Australia, where I saw a statue of William Bligh as governor of NSW. This peaked my interest into Bligh. I had read Nordhoff and Hall’s outstanding Bounty trilogy (Mutiny on the Bounty, Men Against the Sea, & Pitcairn’s Island) decades ago and want to learn more about Bligh, then recently I read Hampton Sides’ The Wide, Wide Sea, about James Cook’s last voyage, which is loaded with references to William Bligh when he was ships Master at the young age of 23. I had high hopes Salmond’s biography of Bligh would fill in the gaps (which it did to a certain extent). The biography has short section on Bligh’s early life, and extensive rendering on his south seas adventures with Cook on the Resolution, and subsequently as Captain of the Bounty and Providence, But little of his years between Voyages as a ships captain on merchant ships in the Caribbean, or is naval duty as captain of frigates during the war with the French in the 1790’s and early 1800’s, or his time as Governor of NSW and it’s aftermath.
Be prepare to wade through minutiae during the chapters on Tahiti, otherwise, very informative and entertaining.
Be prepare to wade through minutiae during the chapters on Tahiti, otherwise, very informative and entertaining.
January 11, 2020
Provides immense detail into the life Captain Bligh's naval career; from the third of Captain James Cook through to the Bounty voyage and subsequent mutiny, followed by his extraordinary cutter voyage to Batavia, court martial and eventual second breadfruit voyage on the Providence. There is a great deal of insight of the shipboard dynamics between Bligh and his crews, as well as his relationship with the Tahitian people. Taking off from where she left off in Aphrodite's Island (2010), Salmond provides intriguing insight into the cross-cultural relationship and alliances between Europeans, detailing for example the lives of certain Bounty mutineers who adapted and integrated into Tahitian society. Encompassing the death of Captain Cook, the infamous mutiny, the wreck of the Pandora, the building of the first European style vessel in Polynesia and the providence's successful journey to the West Indies, this book is a must read for anyone interested in European exploration of the Pacific and early cross-cultural exchanges between Europeans and Polynesians.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews