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Brandon Presser is the author of The Far Land: 200 Years of Murder, Mania, and Mutiny in the South Pacific.
In the beginning, God created the heavens and Earth, and shortly thereafter came Adam and Eve who ruined things for the rest of us when they were cast out of Eden – their idyllic garden – and forced to roam wilderness as punishment for wilfully forfeiting their innocence. We have, ever since, been trying to return to paradise, only nowadays that looks something more like the sandy beach in a Corona beer commercial than it does a thicket with a fruit-bearing tree.
So how is it then that our Instagram feeds have come to peddle turquoise waters and palm-fringed dunes as our idea of vacation perfection when there are no mentions of tropical islands in the Bible, let alone the entirety of the Judeo-Christian canon?
Sir Thomas More deserves partial credit. In the early 16th century, the Oxford-educated scholar and politician penned Utopia, a philosophical work exploring the eponymous, fictitious island; a flawless society free of lawyers, for example, as laws were forged and obeyed using common sense instead of desperate power plays. Pure bliss. (Later, More was tried for high treason and beheaded at the Tower of London.)
But it wasn’t until 200 years later – in the mid-18th century – that the notion of tropical islands as paradise really came into being. Both the French and British Imperial fleets had found Tahiti and its islands at the bottom of the world, and in their logs, the explorers detailed an exciting and upside-down realm relative to their own back in Europe.
The warm Tahitian sun and cool lagoon breezes soothed their sea-addled bodies, and fresh fruit could be plucked from practically every branch without care or consequence. Louis Antoine de Bougainville – the French contemporary of Captain Cook – dubbed Tahiti “New Cythera,” after the birthplace of Aphrodite, and wrote what was essentially an erotic tale of a pristine realm, bare-breasted women and all.
Cook and de Bougainville’s accounts, along with many others, beguiled the upper classes back in Europe. In London, polite society began throwing not-so-polite Polynesian-themed parties where a very un-Christian view of love and sex were readily embraced.
The exoticism of Tahiti begat the rampant collection of totems from the tropical world as well; pineapples, for example, were worth much more than gold. The sweet tropical fruit became such an important status symbol that, for many years, it was used only for display at parties – even rented out to poorer families to showcase in their homes for an evening or two – before being devoured by its owner when it had all but withered and rotten.
Then in 1789, word reached the Old World that a group of young sailors were so enamoured by their extended time in Tahiti that they chucked their captain over the side of his ship in a desperate attempt to stay in Polynesia forever. They were the infamous mutineers of the HM Armed Vessel Bounty, which was on a special assignment for the British Crown to retrieve another much-prized fruit – breadfruit – and cart hundreds of its seedlings and cuttings across the globe to the West Indies where it would be introduced to the plantation slaves of Jamaica as an affordable source of sustenance.
Bad weather had turned the Bounty’s initial voyage to the Blue Continent into a miserable year-long journey, and once the seamen arrived, few wanted to return home. So when their captain, lieutenant William Bligh, ordered the raising of the Bounty’s anchor, he was cast out into the night in a dinghy. Fletcher Christian, the lead mutineer, took control of the vessel and eventually charted a course to find a new, uninhabited island where he, his comrades, and their Tahitian companions could live out the rest of their days in peace and quiet.
The story of the Bounty’s seizure continued to rivet audiences for years as each successive plot twist made front-page headlines the planet over. Miraculously, Bligh managed to survive, and made it all the way back to England, where a campaign was launched to find Christian and his men – for a time, the mutineers were the most wanted and notorious criminals in the entirety of the British Empire. But like all yarns spun through the loom of the news cycle, the story of the Bounty and its men eventually faded to grey as other dark tales of the industrializing world soon spread across the globe.
The treachery aboard Bounty would remain largely forgotten for the better part of a century until a gloomy afternoon in 1918 when an American fighter pilot bought a copy of William Bligh’s Bounty logbook from a dusty antiquities shop in downtown London.
The First World War was over; the pilot, James Norman Hall, had spent much of the year in a German prisoner of war camp after being gunned down behind enemy lines as part of an Army Air Service mission. While locked away he had befriended fellow inmate Charles Nordhoff, and after their release – Hall dreading the return to the tedium of his native Iowa – the two men moved to Tahiti, inspired by the grand adventure to the far side of the world that Bligh had detailed in his log.
Nordhoff and Hall became writing partners and in 1932, they co-authored the first in a trilogy of novels (fictional retellings of true events) that would catapult their bylines to international success: Mutiny on the Bounty.
Like any good novelist, Nordhoff and Hall dialled up the interpersonal drama between the leading characters on board, recasting Bligh as a sadistic and maniacal dictator instead of the petty navigator that he truly was. While a court-marshalling in the 18th century had absolved Bligh of wrongdoing, Nordhoff and Hall’s retooling of the mutiny narrative positioned Christian as the unequivocal hero, moved to commandeer the British vessel in order to reunite with his Tahitian lover, Maimiti – a romance now depicted as a grandiose affair between star-crossed lovers, responsible for the Bounty’s undoing.
With the global success of Nordhoff and Hall’s first Bounty novel, a legion of historians and academics felt inspired to delve back into Bligh’s logs and the journals kept and saved from the ship’s seizure by the other officers on board, including James Morrison, the boatswain’s mate, and young Peter Heywood, Christian’s protégé, to more properly decipher what exactly had happened in the deep of the South Pacific shortly after Tahiti’s green peaks had drifted out of view.
How could Christian have inspired such a rebellion – a crime punishable by death – among so many of his comrades if this was merely a love story?
Academics soon found new evidence that Bligh had quietly lent Christian some money during one of their many layovers en route to Tahiti, which had caused an ever-growing rift in their camaraderie. Some historians speculated that the two men had become lovers and tensions flared when Christian sought out relations with several Polynesian women. But it was Nordhoff and Hall’s romanticized version of the events on board – narrated by a fictitious crewman named Roger Byam (based on Christian’s protégé Peter Heywood) – that would remain the foundation of what most Bounty enthusiasts know today: a spat between Bligh and Christian over stolen coconuts that would send the young lieutenant over the proverbial edge, forever wrecking his naval career that was once so full of promise.
Nordhoff and Hall’s legacy – and the Bounty’s popularity – would continue to ascend well after their respective deaths (Nordhoff in 1947 and Hall in 1951) when, in the early 1960s, Hollywood eyed Mutiny on the Bounty as the source material for its next blockbuster movie, casting Marlon Brando as the lead. Although it was the fourth film to immortalize this most famous of nautical events, the Brando version, made by MGM, managed to add yet another layer to the mythos with its over-the-top production budget (the biggest in the industry at the time, lavished on an exact replica of the ship) that became even more bloated when the shooting schedule was hampered by severe rain delays. Like the real Christian, Brando began a widely publicized courtship with a Tahitian – Tarita Teri’ipaia, the actor who played Maimiti. And, again like Christian, he would remain in the South Pacific after his turn aboard the Bounty to embrace the castaway lifestyle as well – Mr. Brando and Ms. Teri’ipaia eventually married and had children.
The biggest impact of Mr. Brando’s Bounty, however, was its lasting effect on Tahiti’s tourism. The purpose-built complex that housed MGM’s production crew was later turned into the island’s very first resort, and the panoramic vistas captured on celluloid entreated audiences to come visit at a time when commercial air travel was really taking off, so to speak. Tales of Polynesia’s majesty had followed American soldiers home from the Pacific theatre after the Second World War, and a surge of interest in tiki culture swelled with Hawaii’s statehood in 1959. This confluence of factors permanently positioned Tahiti as the ultimate tropical fantasy; the depictions of lush beachscapes and wind-tussled fronds jotted down in 18th-century logbooks were now the road map used by other tropical destinations to lure prospective leisure travellers as long-haul flights began to shuttle passengers across oceans with ease. Southern California even jumped on the bandwagon, importing thousands of nonendemic palms – a veritable emblem of tropical paradise, like the pineapple long ago – in an effort to entice easterners to settle in the west. The Bounty’s legacy began to crop up in more unconventional ways as well: Samuel Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner – the “water, water everywhere” poem – was inspired by Fletcher Christian; the original Star Trek’s Leonard (Bones) McCoy was named after one of Christian’s fellow mutineers; and the Mars chocolate company had a Bounty candy bar with coconut palm motif on the wrapper.
Later, in the 1980s, Mel Gibson took a turn playing Christian in a fifth movie about the Bounty, but today, the legend of the ill-fated breadfruit ship has largely faded from our collective memory once more. Those log details of old Imperial captains, however – tales of scantily clad beachgoers, bronzed bodies, swaying palm trees, and turquoise water – are still the hallmarks of our modern version of paradise.
Not all depictions of tropical islands are of course idyllic – there are a few proverbial snakes in the garden. Both William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and Alex Garland’s The Beach depict dystopian places where the darkness of humanity has its lease, far from the watchful eye of civilization. But perhaps the most poignant reminder that not all tropical islands are paradise is the reality game show Survivor, on which contestants are pummelled by the equatorial elements plus a lack of food and sleep as they are forced to vote each other off the island one by one – a fate not dissimilar to that of the Bounty’s mutineers.
In case you were wondering, Christian and his comrades did in fact find their way back to paradise in the end – an uninhabited island incorrectly plotted on an old nautical chart, named Pitcairn for the 15-year-old deckhand that had spotted it years prior. They even managed to evade the search party sent by the British Crown that rounded up some of the straggler mutineers who chose to remain behind on Tahiti. But when their hideaway was accidentally discovered 18 years later by an American merchant vessel only one of the mutineers remained – the others were “swept away by desperate contentions,” the sole Survivor explained to the captain of the American ship. But perhaps most horrifying of all – more than the grisly murders of the Bounty’s men – was that the island no longer looked like the tropical fantasy Christian had longed for. Over the course of their two decades of isolation, the mutineers had felled Pitcairn’s palms and cleared its jungles, creating not the idyllic islets we find on Instagram today, but a series of wooden cottage and rutty roads befitting the English countryside instead. And, at the centre of the fledgling community, was a garden.
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