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 Blighs 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 Blighs three Pacific voyagesand 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 Bountyand on Blighs remarkable 3 000-mile journey across the Pacific in a small boatthrough 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.