Britain's Bligh

THE LIFE OF VICE-ADMIRAL WILLIAM BLIGH -- George Mackaness -- Farrar & Rinehart ($5).

Most U. S. novel readers and cinemaddicts picture Vice-Admiral William Bligh, captain of H.M.S. Bounty, as a brave, cruel, stingy Briton who looked like Charles Laughton, lost his ship in a mutiny and steered a small open boat over 3,618 miles of unknown sea. But Bligh was a significant figure in the history of the British navy, with many distinctions besides his romantic misadventures.

Last week Dr. George Mackaness, professor at the University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia, offered U. S. readers a ponderous, highly-documented life of the vice-admiral that ran to 717 pages, seemed likely to fix Bligh's place in history for a long time to come. A partisan of his hero, Dr. Mackaness has had the advantage of new discoveries of Bligh's personal writing in drawing his portrait, studiously refutes writers who have charged Bligh with inhumanity and tyranny, but not those who have called him hot-tempered, tactless, shortsighted, rough.

Born to an old Cornish landowning family in 1754, Bligh went to sea at the age of 7, was sailing-master for Captain Cook at 22. On Cook's last voyage he acquitted himself well when that great explorer was killed by savages, had gained considerable reputation for his courage and swift decisions by 1787, when he was given command of the Bounty for her ill-fated voyage transporting breadfruit trees from the South Seas to the West Indies. Although Dr. Mackaness roundly insists that Bligh was considerate of his men. quotes heretofore unpublished material to prove it, trouble soon broke out among officers and crew. Bligh's only remedy was a traditional dozen lashes for each offender. Little of the drama of the Bounty's seizure makes its way through Dr. Mackaness' professorial prose. But the great story of Mate Fletcher Christian's attack on his captain, the subsequent travels of Bligh, the mutineers, the vessels searching for the Bounty, appears all the more astonishing when supported by charts of the voyages, detailed records of the fate of each outlaw, and accounts of the state of contemporary knowledge of the geography of the South Seas.

For most readers, Bligh's story ends after he had been placed in an open boat with 18 men, "150 lb. of bread, 16 pieces of pork, each weighing 2 lb., 6 quarts of rum, 6 bottles of wine ... 28 gallons of water" and set adrift. Actually his career was only beginning when he reached the island of Timor 41 days later. A popular hero on his return to London, after "a voyage of the most extraordinary nature that ever happened in the world," he sailed again to the South Seas, fought in the battle of Camperdown, was driven off his ship in the mutiny at the Nore in 1797. In 1806 Bligh was made governor of New South Wales, was deposed in a queer, involved insurrection two years later. At this point Dr. Mackaness records his gravest charge against his hero. After devoting twelve pages to the evidence as to how Bligh received news of his arrest, the biographer says sadly, "We can only repeat our reasoned conclusion that in the time of crisis, he funked the issue, and hid under or behind a bed."

Bligh journeyed to London, had the satisfaction of seeing his deposers deposed. He died, probably of cancer, in 1817. Never admitting the slightest selfcriticism, he could not understand the new order of things that followed the French Revolution and the mutiny at the Nore.

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