Books: Sure Fire

MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY—Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall—Little, Brown ($2.50).

Iron men and wooden ships—the cat-o’-nine-taiis—South Sea paradise—mutiny— shipwreck—open boats—a trial for piracy, with perjury and missing witnesses—unjust sentence—happy ending—these are the time-honored ingredients of Authors Nordhoff & Hall’s surefire seafaring tale.

Founded on fact. Mutiny on the Bounty, though fictionalized and given a narrator-hero, still reads like an actual account.

On Dec. 23, 1787, H. M. S. Bounty, left England for Tahiti. She never came back.

The tale of what happened to her is told by one of her midshipmen. Roger Byam.

The Bounty’s voyage, as planned, looked almost like a two-year pleasure trip: she was to call at Tahiti by way of Cape Horn, take on a supply of breadfruit trees for the West Indies, and come home again.

But Bligh, commander of the Bounty, was a man of ungovernable temper and crazy severity. He had his men flogged at the slightest excuse, short-changed them on their miserable rations, got himself mur-derously hated. Trouble was brewing all the long voyage out, but nothing broke till the Bounty had left Tahiti. Then one night two-thirds of the crew mutinied, put Bligh and his supporters in a dangerously crowded open boat and let them take a chance on reaching land. Narrator Byam was one of several non-mutineers who had to stay with the ship. The Bounty then returned to Tahiti, where the innocent sailors settled down to wait for a British vessel, while the mutineers sailed off, self-condemned never to see England again, to find an unknown island where they might be safe from pursuit.

Byam married a native girl, lived in Tahiti happily 18 months. As soon as a British ship appeared, he and his pals went trustingly to greet it were much surprised to be clapped in irons, treated like mutineers and pirates. Bligh and his open boat had gone 2,000 miles to land, thence shipped to England, and had denounced all the men who had not accompanied him in the boat as mutineers. On the voyage home Byam’s ship was wrecked, some of the prisoners drowned.

Byam. knowing he was innocent, was sure he would be acquitted, but the navy court-martial condemned him to be hanged.

Luckily a missing witness turned up. and almost at the last minute Byam was reprieved. Years later, still in His Majesty’s service and still non-mutinous, he went to Tahiti again. His wife was dead, his half-caste daughter married. On Pitcairn Island he found the descendants and a few survivors of the Bounty’s mutineers.

The Authors. Nordhoff. from southern California, and Hill, from Iowa, met in the Lafayette Flying Corps in 1917.

Both were 30. After the War they settled in Tahiti, married (Author Nordhoff to a native Tahitian) and have lived there ever since. No glorified beachcombers, they have worked hard & seriously, have produced between them a dozen books, three of them collaborations.

Methodical Author Nordhoff writes for the market every day from seven till noon, fishes for the market from two till seven. Other collaborations: Falcons of France, Faery Lands of the South Sea, The Lafayette Flying Corps.