Books: Villain to Hero

MEN AGAINST THE SEA—Charles Nordhoff & James Norman Hall—Little, Brown ($2).

Truth, notoriously less neat than fiction, occasionally turns up art readymade. Such a made-to-order true story is the tale of the Bounty, 18th Century British brig whose voyage to Tahiti and back was cut short in the Pacific by mutiny. In Mutiny on the Bounty (TIME, Oct. 17, 1932) Authors Nordhoff & Hall told the first part of the tale. Men against the Sea is a straightforward but circumstantial account of what happened to Captain Bligh and his men when the mutineers cast them off in an open boat in the mid-Pacific. (The final part, Pitcairn's Island, will be published this autumn.) Though Daniel Defoe still has a long lead, Authors Nordhoff & Hall are worthy followers of his tradition.

In Mutiny on the Bounty Captain Bligh was pictured as a villainous slavedriver. Men against the Sea shows him every inch a hero. The transformation is made plausible because this time the narrator is one of Bligh's most loyal followers. When at dawn on April 28, 1789, two-thirds of the Bounty's crew mutinied and put Captain Bligh and 18 men adrift in a ship's boat, with no firearms and scant provisions, it looked like the end for them. Their problem was to get to the nearest European settlement, in Java, 3,600 miles away. Prevailing easterly winds made a return to Tahiti impossible. The boat was only 23 feet long, so heavily laden that there was less than nine inches of freeboard amidships. They had to bail almost continually to keep afloat.

Bligh soon proved his mettle. Rigidly keeping to his share of the starvation rations, he did much more than his share of the work, again & again saved them from foundering by skillful seamanship. When they landed at the island of Tofoa to replenish their water and food, the natives soon saw they were helpless and attacked. Only one of their men was lost in the getaway. Thereafter, from fear of savages, they gave many an inviting island a wide berth. As starvation knuckled down on them, mutinous voices muttered, but Bligh always silenced them, kept on. Cannibalism was never even suggested but when they were lucky enough to knock down an inquisitive sea bird, the weakest were given the blood to drink. When they got a fish they ate it raw, entrails and all.

Forty-one days they huddled on the thwarts or lay half-conscious in the bilge. At last they reached the Great Barrier Reef and, with no chart but Bligh's memory of a voyage with Captain Cook, found a passage through. In a happier dawn than the one that saw their hopeless start they sailed into the harbor of Coupang, with Bligh still at the tiller and none of them quite dead.