Books: Bounty Salvaged

PITCAIRN’S ISLAND—Charles Nordhoff & James Norman Hall—Little, Brown ($2.50).

By the law of the sea, wrecks belong to the salvager. Few readers of 1954 would protest the claim of Salvagers Nordhoff & Hall to the Bounty, beached by mutineers on Pitcairn’s Island in 1789. Others had been there before them, but Authors Nordhoff & Hall did more than strip the wreck of what was left. Bit by bit they salvaged or reconstructed every piece of the Bounty’s history. Last week they finished the long job: in Pitcairn’s Island they gave the third and final chapter of this magnificent true story of the sea. (Others: Mutiny on the Bounty—TIME, Oct. 17, 1932; Men Against the Sea—TIME, Jan. 15.)

In December 1789, eight of the Bounty mutineers, under their leader, Fletcher Christian, with 18 Polynesian natives, landed on Pitcairn’s Island. Tiny (two miles by one) but isolated and fertile, it looked like a safe refuge from the long arm of the British Government. Safe in that respect it proved to be but at the end of ten years only one man and ten women were left alive; “of the sixteen dead, fifteen had come to violent ends.” Principal causes of dissension were women and liquor. There were not enough women to go around; when one of the colony made a successful still, there was too much liquor. First death was a woman’s suicide, in protest at her man’s unfaithfulness. When the native men, justifiably angered at the whites, started a surprise massacre, all the native men were killed, most of the whites. For a time after this civil war the remaining men lived in a stupor of alcohol and unbridled miscegenation; then the women turned against them, cornered the supply of muskets and shut themselves into a stockade. The male survivor of this Lysistratian war was finally reconciled, became the patriarch-consort of the island. When a Yankee ship put in to Pitcairn’s Island in 1808, the little colony was Godfearing, sober, prolific. They had never heard of the French Revolution or the Napoleonic Wars, but most of them were happy.