Bloomsday: Ulysses

Bloomsday is June 16. That is the day, in 1904, that James Joyce went out with the love of his life, Nora Barnacle. That is the day Joyce immortalized in Ulysses, the odyssey of an ordinary man’s daily round in Dublin.
In 1954, certain Irish publicists decided to have a 50th anniversary celebration and Bloomsday, as an event, was born. For many years there have been attempts to celebrate this day but many were thwarted by Stephen Joyce, grandson and legal representative of James Joyce’s copyrights.

Stephen was a twat. I use the past tense because he may have reformed, oh, yesterday, or an hour ago, or something, and I don’t want to imply that the man is forever damned because he was, for years, a twat. This is Catholic country and forgiveness for all, including child molesters and twats, is possible.
At one point Stephen used his control of copyright to bar public readings from his grand-dad’s work – unless he was paid a hefty fee — but now Joyce’s work is in the public domain and Dublin rejoices (so to speak).
This Bloomsday began yesterday (by my time) with an internationally broadcast reading of Ulysses and will continue until all participants are so thoroughly soused that they cannot perform any longer. Stephen must be shitting bricks thinking of the lost revenues.
Well, but that is now and next year may be different — who knows what crap the copyrighters will throw at us. Why, I might be forced to delete this post.
Meanwhile, for those who are interested, I recommend the comic Ulysses Seen by Throwaway Horse, a publisher that specializes in comic versions of important stuff — like Eliot’s “The Wasteland” or an account of the Trojan War. Throwaway Horse has recently teamed with Dublin’s Joyce Centre to reproduce Ulysses Seen.

This comic reproduces Joyce’s words and illustrates them. It is an excellent introduction to Ulysses for those who want to know how to read the book. I found the illustrations for Part One very illuminating — I did not know of a Martello Tower before, much less that it was the location where stately, plump Buck Mulligan invoked divinity, just as Homer had invoked the Goddess. There are copious notes and explantions for every page. The Tower in question is the site of other Bloomsday activities.

Part of the descriptive page for the opening caption. (Screen grab, links do not work — go to first page of comic for the full monty.

There is another entire section, “Calypso”, Part Four of Ulysses that is illustrated on the site and includes interesting interpretations of Bloom’s visit to the privy (with a copy of a paper that prints a rejected Joyce manuscript to wipe his ass) and the painting over Molly’s bed. More is said to follow, though don’t hold your breath: this is a long term project. (part of Section Two, “Nestor” and Section Five, “Lotus [sic] Eaters” are available.)

“The Kreutzer Sonata” and The Moonlight, part 1

A group of strangers meet in a Russian railway carriage. It is 1889 and the conversation turns to the decline of marriage. An old man states that this is all because of too much education: people have become too learned and there is no more fear. Women should fear their husbands, then there would be fewer divorces. A woman shakes her head:

“Oh, that, my little father, that is ended.”

“No, madam, that cannot end. As she, Eve, the woman, was taken from man’s ribs, so she will remain unto the end of the world,” said the old man, shaking his head so triumphantly and so severely that the clerk, deciding that the victory was on his side, burst into a loud laugh.

“Yes, you men think so,” replied the lady, without surrendering, and turning toward us. “You have given yourself liberty. As for woman, you wish to keep her in the seraglio. To you, everything is permissible. Is it not so?”

“Oh, man, –that’s another affair.”

Double standard? The old man says, No. He says that men, too, have received the Law, but that it is not so bad for them to break it as it is for women. Double standard, yes.

The old man gets off the train and the others continue chatting about marriage and the status of women, all except one passenger who keeps to himself and avoids eye contact with the others. Finally, he is drawn into the conversation and begins talking wildly about love, which he denounces. One of the other passengers mentions the Posdnicheff case, where a man murdered his wife. “I see that you have recognized me,” says the man who does not believe in love and reveals himself as Posdnicheff.

At the next stop all of the passengers leave the carriage except Posdnicheff and the narrator. “Love, marriage, family, — all lies, lies, lies,” says Posdnicheff and then he tells the narrator the story of how he came to murder his wife.

“The Kreutzer Sonata”, painting by Prinet, 1901, inspired by Tolstoy’s work but illustrating something that never happens in the story — except, perhaps, in one man’s fevered imagination. This painting was used in an advertisement for Tabu perfume and was well-known enough in the 1950s to be parodied in Mad.

Thus begins Leo Tolstoy’s “The Kreutzer Sonata”, a work disliked by pretty much everyone who has read it. But Tolstoy had serious purpose in writing the story and put a lot into it over the years. “The Kreutzer Sonata” incorporated much of his own thinking on sex, marriage, and the relations between the sexes. This is not to say that Posdnicheff is Tolstoy’s double — Tolstoy never murdered anyone — but his words often reflect Tolstoy’s opinions.

Posdnicheff tells the narrator that he comes from a wealthy family and that he did not marry until he was thirty. Before that time he lived, he says, a life of debauchery, having sex with prostitutes. Eventually, though, he is persuaded that he should marry and decides on a young woman from a family fallen on hard times. Before their wedding he shows his bride-to-be his diary, which describes his various sexual adventures, one of which he wants her to know about before she hears of it through gossip.

Now this last bit also happens in Anna Karenin, when Levin shows Kitty his diary. And, in fact, Tolstoy also showed his diary to Sophia before he married her, particularly because he wanted her to know about a liason with a woman that she knew. All three of these women — Sophia, Kitty, and Posdnicheff’s fiancée — were terribly embarrassed by this action, though Tolstoy would have it that they were horrified rather than mortified.

“The Kreutzer Sonata” by Joseph deCamp, about 1913.

Anyway, the Posdnicheff wedding proceeds. The marriage is not a success. The couple quarrel often and then make up and have sex. Then they quarrel again. Posdnicheff is convinced that they quarrel because, once their sexual desire is satisfied, that they are not interested in one another. They hate each other, says Posdnicheff, and their hate grows because neither is able to find a reason for this hatred. Of course, he is ascribing thoughts and feelings to his bride that she is unable to refute and, over the course of the story, the reader may come to see Posdnicheff as a very unreliable narrator. Certainly, by this point, most readers will find him unlikeable, cold and distant, though he believes himself a creature controlled by passion.

The marriage staggers on. There are children — at least five, maybe seven, possibly two died — and Posdnicheff names two of them, the boy that he uses as a weapon against his mother and the girl that she enlists as an ally against him. The couple fight and screw and propagate until a “rascally” doctor explains birth control to Mrs. Posdnicheff. Now she blossoms, becoming plumper and prettier. Of course, Posdnicheff hates this. When his wife becomes interested in performing music with a male violinist, he becomes jealous. They perform Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata for Piano and Violin, No.9 in A Major (Opus 47), a work that greatly disturbs Posdnicheff. His jealousy and hatred grows until he tells his wife that he wishes she were dead. She attempts suicide; they reconcile, briefly, then back to the old routine of quarrel/hate/screw; he suggests divorce, but only if she initiates it. Finally, in a fit of jealous rage, Posdnicheff stabs his wife, right through her corset, inflicting a wound that turns out to be fatal. The story ends by quoting Matthew 5:28, “…whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery…” and goes on to say that this includes a husband looking lustfully on his own wife.

A couple of notes are due here: Posdnicheff never actually discovers that his wife is unfaithful — there’s that unreliable narrator trick — and it is only when she is dying that Posdnicheff sees his wife as a human being, that is, a real individual person as opposed to a Wife, a Mother, a Woman; throughout his tale, he never once uses her name. Along the way in this story, we are treated to various rants: against contraception — which is a terrible evil; against pretty dresses and hairdos — traps to catch men; about love — which does not exist; about music — which is so disturbing that it should be controlled by the state; about the fact that all women care about is entrapping a husband; and the fact that women actually run the world by being totally in control of men all the time, even though they exercise this control from a condition of slavery. By now the reader’s brain is shouting the word “misogyny”.

Clandestine copy of “The Kreutzer Sonata” circulated in 1889. [British Library] The Library says that this is a hectograph rather than a mimeograph. That is, a special carbon paper proof was imprinted on a sheet of gelatin, then paper copies were pulled from the jello plate. Maybe fifty good copies could be made before the sheet became unusable. This was a method used up to half a century ago to print ‘zines.

“The Kreutzer Sonata” was circulated in a mimeographed form for a while. Tolstoy rightly thought that the Czarist government would block its publication but perhaps he did not forsee that an enterprising Berlin publisher would release versions in four different languages. After the English version was released, the United States Post Office made it illegal to send it through the mail. The US Attorney-General backed this action and President Roosevelt called Tolstoy a “sexual moral pervert”. Of course, Teddy might have been just getting back at a guy who disapproved of hunting. The case went to the courts after some newspaper vendors excitedly offered “Suppressed!” copies for sale. In the end, Philadelphia’s Justice Thayer struck down the ban. Tolstoy might hold some absurd ideas, he said, but the work was not an “obscene libel”. In the first place, it wasn’t obscene and, after all, the anti-sex ideals expressed in it were a commonplace in Christian thought.

G.K.Chesterton, who held a jaundiced view of Tolstoy’s “simplicity”, said:

The emotion to which Tolstoy has again and again given a really fine expression is an emotion of pity for the plain affairs of men. He pities the masses of men for the things they really endure — the tedium and the trivial cruelty. But it is just here, unfortunately, that his great mistake comes in; the mistake that renders practically useless the philosophy of Tolstoy… Tolstoy is not content with pitying humanity for its pains: such as poverty and prisons. He also pities humanity for its pleasures, such as music and patriotism. He weeps at the thought of hatred; but in “The Kreutzer Sonata” he weeps almost as much at the thought of love.

Isabel Hapgood, who had translated and championed Tolstoy’s work for Americans, refused to translate “The Kreutzer Sonata”. She said:

The whole book is a violent and roughly worded attack upon the evils of animal passion. In that sense, it is moral. Translation, even with copious excisions, is impossible, in my opinion, and also inadvisable. The men against whom it is directed will not mend their ways from the reading of it, even if they fully grasp the idea that unhappiness and mad jealousy and crime are the outcome of their ways, as Pozdnisheff is made to say in terms as plain as the language will admit of, and in terms much plainer than are usually employed in polite society.
On the other hand, the book can, I am sure, do no good to the people at whom it is not launched. It is decidedly a case where ignorance is bliss…

This bit of peck-sniffery makes me almost sympathize with Tolstoy. (I say, fuck “polite society”! And “Stay ignorant, blissful fools,” is elitist bullshit. [rant rant rave rave]) But there is an interesting bit in Hapgood’s essay:

Count Tolstoi one day praised the Shakers in this manner [i.e., for the same reason that Posdnicheff praised them, because they were committed to non-reproduction] before a table full of people. I was afraid to ask him his meaning, lest he should explain in detail, so I questioned his wife in private as to whether this new departure was not somewhat inconsistent with his previously advocated views on woman’s vocation.
She replied: “Probably it is inconsistent; but my husband changes his opinions every two years, you know.”

I like that she didn’t ask what he meant, “lest he should explain in detail” which says quite a bit about Count Tolstoy and his imperious verbosity. I also like the interchange with Sophia Tolstoy that confirms many men’s suspicions that all women are in league and constantly plotting together against the master sex.

Sophia and Leo. Photos from around the time of their wedding in 1862.

That brings up the question of the Tolstoy marriage. In brief: it was troubled. Leo was thirty-four, a little older than Posdnicheff when he married. Sophia was nineteen, about the same age (so far as I can tell) as Posdnicheff’s bride. The Tolstoys had thirteen children; nine survived infancy. They began arguing early on but Sophia was not shy with her opinions. She acted as Tolstoy’s editor and transcribed his manuscripts over all the years of their marriage. When she didn’t like a work — and she hated “The Kreutzer Sonata” — she let him know. When Leo leapt into appealing new systems of thought, she tried to restrain him. They certainly fought. Sometimes, like many battling couples, their fights were ridiculous to outsiders. But Leo’s lofty foolishness could be forgiven as idealism gone off the rails; Sophia’s actions appeared neurotic and mad.

Sophia spied on her own house through binoculars, sizing up the situation. She hated cats and banned them from the Tolstoy estate at Yasnaya Polyana; then, to counter the vermin problem, brought in snakes. The symbolism here, of Eve investing a would-be Paradise with swarms of serpents, cannot have been lost on either Tolstoy. And Sophia was a temptress, always trying to turn Leo away from a multitude of notions. Their daughter Aleksandra cited a letter:

“You are harassing and killing yourself,” [Sophia] wrote him on April 19, 1889, to Yasnaya Polyana. “I…have been thinking: he does not eat meat, nor smoke, he works beyond his strength, his brain is not nourished, hence the drowsiness and weakness. How stupid vegetarianism is….Kill life in yourself, kill all impulses of the flesh, all its needs — why not kill yourself altogether? After all you are committing yourself to *slow* death, what’s the difference?”

Yeah, dude, why not just kill yourself? Which is what Posdnicheff says to his wife and which she promptly attempts to do. And it was Sophia who actually attempted suicide, several times, so often that it seems to have become a ritual. Sophia’s diary also castigates Leo for his coldness which he interrupts only in fits of sexual desire. So the real life drama is close to the story. Well, except for one thing: it wasn’t sex that the Tolstoys fought about, mostly it was money.

Sophia and Leo, around 1905.

Tolstoy, in a bout of spiritual fervor, decided to leave his entire estate to some noble purpose or other. Sophia wanted the money to go to their children. This was the cause of the great combat between them at the end of their lives. Tolstoy was assisted by a number of fervent Tolstoyians. Some he employed as secretaries. One of these, Vladimir Chertkov, helped Leo determine how to distribute his fortune in his will and it was Chertkov that Sophia was most worried about; this was the guy she was looking for with binoculars. She had heard that there was a secret will signed by Tolstoy in 1909 and was determined to fight it. In 1910, Leo and Sophia quarrelled and he stalked out of the house, attended by an acolyte. He was persuaded not to try to walk to wherever it was he had chosen as a destination and instead took up refuge in a series of railway stations, headed somewhere else. Tolstoy succumbed to pneumonia in one of these stations and died at the age of 83. Sophia was not allowed to see him; she hovered nearby, in a railway car, talking about hiring a private detective to follow Leo and find the secret will. A decade later, everything became moot as the Bolshevik Revolution wiped out the Tolstoy property values.

Sophia, trying to get entry to the place where Leo is dying, 1910.

But there is still the question of how much Posdnicheff’s views reflect those of Leo Tolstoy. Well, Posdnicheff’s views on sexy clothing had already been stated by Tolstoy both in other works and in rants to his listeners. He was horrified by the sight of a naked shoulder. Or perhaps he was filled with lust, which is much the same thing, right? And, this was the fault of the shoulder-barer — at least to a egocentric like Tolstoy. Then there is the stuff about music: Posdnicheff says, “…a terrible thing is music in general. What is it? Why does it do what it does? They say that music stirs the soul. Stupidity! A lie! It acts, it acts frightfully.” Tolstoy once told Rachmaninoff that he could not stand Beethoven, “Is such music needed by anyone? I must tell you how I dislike it all. Beethoven is nonsense.” Stefan Zweig said that Tolstoy distrusted both women and music because they unleashed his passions. But let’s go directly to Tolstoy’s own defense of “The Kreutzer Sonata” in which he explains his thinking:

…it is necessary for the view in regard to carnal love to change. Men and women ought to be educated in their homes and by public opinion to look, before and after marriage, on infatuation and the carnal love connected with it, not as upon a poetical and exalted condition, such as it is now considered to be, but as upon an animal condition, degrading to man…

It is not good to use means preventive of childbirth, in the first place, because people are thus relieved of cares and labours in regard to children, who serve as a redemption of carnal love, and, in the second, because it comes very near to the act which is most repulsive to a human conscience, to murder. Nor is non- continence during pregnancy and nursing good, because it is destructive of the physical, and still more of the mental, powers of woman.

…the attainment of the aim of being united in wedlock or of being outside of wedlock with the object of love, however much extolled by poetry it may be, is unworthy of man, just as the aim of obtaining sweet and superabundant food, which presents itself to many as the highest good, is unworthy of man.

And so on. Tolstoy proceeds from principles which he says everyone agrees with — the value of chastity, for instance — and he cites the New Testament as a basis for his thinking — hence the quotation that ends “The Kreutzer Sonata”. Tolstoy thinks it is best not to have sex – procreation is not an issue for him, better not to breed — but he recognizes that complete celibacy is difficult if not impossible. So, try for the chaste ideal but if continence is the best you can manage, so be it. There are echoes here of Paul’s notion that it is better to marry than to burn. Marriage is an accomodation with sin. Although Tolstoy claims to believe in the equality of the sexes, his argument is based on unstated premises of female subservience. The old man in “The Kreutzer Sonata” who proclaims that obedience is a wife’s duty is saying something that Tolstoy accepts as obvious.

Still from a 2008 movie version of “The Kreutzer Sonata” that has the action in current times. That sound you hear is Leo Tolstoy doing cartwheels in his coffin.

Sophia Tolstoy took over responsibility for publishing her husband’s work in 1886 and performed this duty very well. She disliked the crowds that called at Yasnaya Polanya, thinking that many of the Tolstoy-worshippers were “lunatics” and the women “hysterics”. But mostly she regretted the loss of her husband as he took on the role of living saint. From Sophia’s journal, 1903:

I went to [my husband's] room this evening as he was getting ready for bed, and realised I never hear a single word of comfort or kindness from him nowadays.

What I predicted indeed has come true: my passionate husband has died, and since he was never a friend to me, how could he be one to me now? This life is not for me. There is nowhere for me to put my energy and passion for life; no contact with people, no art, no work – nothing but total loneliness all day.

That, I think, is the authentic voice of Posdnicheff’s wife. Posdnicheff himself says that he murdered his wife, not when he stuck a knife in her, but when he married her. Perhaps that’s what Tolstoy thought about Sophia. One last thing: as Tolstoy’s publisher, it was Sophia who demanded that the czar lift the ban on Russian publication of “The Kreutzer Sonata” in 1891. She was successful.

[Part 2 will discuss a riposte to Tolstoy also titled from a Beethoven sonata, Joyce Cary's The Moonlight.]

Notes:

The full text of “The Kreutzer Sonata” is here and in other places on the Net. I have kept Posdnicheff’s name as the anonymous translator has it, though you can find it spelled at least three other ways in the various pages I have linked.
Tolstoy’s Epilogue, his explanation of “The Kreutzer Sonata”, was published in English in 1904.

Besides her anti-Kreutzer essay linked above, Isabel Hapgood wrote a long account of visiting the Tolstoys in 1890. There she gives another version of the Shaker/celibacy business mentioned above.

This is a marvelous account of visiting Yasnaya Polnaya by Elif Batumen which has quite a bit to say about “The Kreutzer Sonata” and the Tolstoy marriage.

Many adaptations have been made of “The Kreutzer Sonata” for stage, screen, and television. None (that I have seen) are particularly good since they all follow the action of the narrative, so you get a drama about a neurotic, jealous wife-murderer with none of the surrounding rationale. You can see the same thing on many TV crime shows. But there is one movie of interest: The Last Station starring Helen Mirren, Christopher Plummer, and Paul Giametti as the scummy Chertkov, which looks at the final days of the Tolstoy marriage.

Lynd Ward

The story goes that when Lynd Ward, as a child, discovered that his name spelled backwards was “draw”, he determined to become an artist.

Ward self-portrait from the 1930s

God’s Man, the first of six pictorial narratives that Ward completed, was published in 1929 and became a best-seller. The story is that of an artist who signs a contract with a mysterious stranger who gives him a magic brush. Using this tool, the artist creates paintings that win him wealth and fame. [The first ten pages of God's Man are reproduced here.] But the artist becomes disenchanted with the emptiness of his fame and the falsity of the things offered him. He strikes out, is arrested, breaks free, and escapes the city.

God’s Man: Arrest, Imprisonment, Escape, Pursuers gloat after the Artist falls from a cliff.

Outside the city, the artist finds artistic completion, love, and family in a wilderness paradise. One day, the mysterious stranger returns and asks the artist to fulfill the contract by painting his portrait. The artist complies but when the stranger removes his mask, he is revealed as Death and the artist dies.

God’s Man : block and print.

Susan Sontag called God’s Man kitsch and Art Spiegelman, though sympathetic to Ward’s work, has said that he finds the depiction of the wilderness idyll unconvincing. Part of the problem is the nature of Ward’s medium, wood engraved prints. The printed images are stark black and white and the carved blocks leave little scope for individual nuance — the images are direct and symbolic, the pictorial language is dramatic by its nature. The artist’s eye has been influenced by silent movies, which in turn were influenced by histrionic stage drama styles of the late 19th Century. Gestures are exaggerated and every pose exudes meaning. German Expressionist cinema further developed, but refined, this kind of vision.

Frans Masreel from The City.

Ward engraved his images in the dense endgrain of maple blocks, an exacting process that, as Spiegelman has pointed out, often results in bloody fingers. Still, it was a process that Ward loved, even though he was also proficient in other techniques. Ward spent a year in Germany, 1926-27, studying the work of Flemish master Frans Masreel and others who had pioneered wood-cut stories. This work was largely unknown in the United States and God’s Man became a bestseller, popular enough so that, a year later, Milt Gross published a parody, He Done Her Wrong, which was called the second American all-graphic novel.

Milt Gross parody of Ward in He Done Her Wrong

Ward’s second novel told in woodcuts was Madman’s Drum, [many illustrations here] an incredibly ambitious undertaking that sought to examine the corrupting influence of accumulated wealth over time. The story opens with a man stealing a magic drum in Africa. He uses the drum to enslave people and these slaves are the foundation of his wealth.

Two pages from Madman’s Drum. As I understand it, the woman is reading of Justice but sees that, applied to her family, Justice = Death.

We see the family’s history over three generations as its members disintegrate. But it is not the drum itself that is the agent of this family’s difficulties, rather it is profiting from enslaving and exploiting other human beings that corrupts them. The great problem with Madman’s Drum is that the limits of wood-cut mean that it is difficult to tell the characters apart over three generations. Ward’s art was better suited to symbolic narratives where the main character was The Artist or The Woman or some other typed person, rather than an individual with nuanced personality.

Wild Pilgrimage The lynching.

Ward returned to this concept with Wild Pilgrimage, where a young man escapes the city and the crushing demands of industrial society. He wanders into the idyllic countryside and is kneeling to pick a flower when he witnesses a lynching. Ward’s is not a simplistic back-to-nature story. The title is derived from a quote from Arturo Giovannitti, poet and activist, organizer of the 1912 Lawrence Textile Strike:

…thinking things that cannot be chained and cannot be locked, but that wander far away in the sunlit world, each in a wild pilgrimage after a destined goal.

Wild Pilgrimage: The Young Man is introduced to political theory; he thinks that he is pulled from the pit of ignorance; he sees the cause of all injustice (echoing the lynch scene);he and the Philosopher will change the world!

The man runs away and, after a clumsy attempt at love, stumbles onto the farm of a backwoods philosopher who introduces him to leftist thinking. The young man, now full of ideas to shape his passion, returns to the city, meaning to effect change. He is drawn into a confrontation between police and strikers that becomes a riot. At one point he grabs a policeman by the throat and is strangling him but he sees the man’s face as his own and suddenly recognizes their shared humanity. Too late! He is killed in the riot and we close with a view of his corpse.

Wild Pilgrimage: The Young Man sees the factory floor as Hell; company police break up a workers’ meeting; the Young Man realizes that he is assaulting his own humanity.

One innovation Ward tried in this book was printing some pages in red that show the thinking of the main character. He sees a young woman and imagines them making love in the moonlight, but in black-printed reality, she pushes him away and he runs from rape charges. Factory life becomes a scene in Hell presided over by a whip-wielding demon foreman, after the young man (or The Young Man) reads a bit of socialist literature. The scenes of urban industrial life as Hell inspired Allen Ginsberg’s notion of Moloch in “Howl”. In 1978, a reprint of “Howl” was illustrated with a brand new Lynd Ward woodcut.

Ward’s illustration for the 1978 reprint of Ginsberg’s “Howl”

Ward had similar political beliefs to those of his father, Harry F. Ward, a Methodist minister in the days when Methodism was deeply involved in social issues. Harry Ward was leader of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1920 until he resigned in 1940 because the organization banned communists.

Ward’s hand with graver. Photo from The Complete Printmaker by Romano et al. All of the wood engraving photos in ths manual were of Ward and his work. (For a look at Ward wielding his graver see the film trailer for <em>O Brother Man</em>).

After Wild Pilgrimage, Ward created two graphic novels not meant for a general readership. Prelude to a Million Years was a collection of thirty woodcuts that showed Ward’s more developed ideas about art and artists since God’s Man. It was printed directly from woodblock onto rag paper and hand-bound in a very small printing.

Prelude to a Thousand Years: A bitter commentary on the ephemeral nature of art? Perhaps.

In 1936, Ward and many other people could see that the future looked grim. Lynd and his wife, May McNeer, were debating whether to have another child. This is the old “how can I bring a child into existence in a world like this?” problem. So Ward did a series of twenty-one blocks that showed one woman facing the prospect of death and destruction as she considers having a child. The blocks were published as Song Without Words. In the end, life triumphs over death, as always, and a child is born. The Wards’ child was their daughter Robin, who has become a keeper of her father’s legacy.

Song Without Words: The Woman desires a child; but the future seems terrible; life triumphs over fear.

In 1940 Ward published his last completed novel in woodcuts, Vertigo, [sixteen examples plus a bit of synopsis here] where he attempted to apply all the lessons he had learned over a decade. There are three main characters: A Boy, A Girl, An Old Man. There are three time periods, shown in periods of years, months, and days: in the first, we see The Girl, a violinist, sacrificing herself to care for her father while The Boy yearns for her; in the second, The Girl takes up with The Old Man, a capitalist who is presented in terms quite different from the top-hatted, pot-bellied stereotypes of Ward’s earlier work — here he is simply old and lonely, with no purpose other than clipping his stock coupons; then, The Old Man is out of the picture, The Boy and The Girl are reunited and we are left to wonder how successful their union will be. Spiegelman considers this the best of Ward’s Novels in Woodcuts, though personally, I prefer Wild Pilgrimage.

Vertigo The young couple.

During the years that Ward did his woodcut novels, he also did other work — a lot of other work. He illustrated Alec Waugh’s Book of Women… and Hot Countries, a series of ghost stories, and Frankenstein [all of the Frankenstein illustrations here] in woodcut but he also did other kinds of illustrations for work like Beowulf. And, like many illustrators of the era, he worked on children’s books.

Illustration for Waugh’s Most Women…. Note the incredible textures produced by Ward’s graver. [via thomas shahan 3's photostream on flickr.com]

“Sanctuary”, 1939. The ivory tower above the fray. An artist is one of the residents.

from Beowulf

“The Beast with Five Fingers”

from The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Grey Bridge

Lynn Ward’s children’s books deserve a post or two all by themselves. Over the years he illustrated books by his wife, May McNeer, his daughters, and himself as well as those of other people. He won numerous Newbery Awards and finally a Caldecott for his own book, The Biggest Bear. In all, he had six Newbery Honor Award books and two Newbery Award books besides the Caldecott award books that he illustrated. No other illustrator has matched this record.

The Biggest Bear

Ward was working on a new Novel in Woodcuts. The Silver Pony, when he died in 1985 at the age of 80. The extant prints were issued as a limited edition to a lucky few. Robin Ward has collaborated in a documentary on her father’s work, O Brother Man, the title taken from a Whittier poem later set to music as a hymn:

O brother man! fold to thy heart thy brother;
Where pity dwells, the peace of God is there;
To worship rightly is to love each other,
Each smile a hymn, each kindly deed a prayer.

If you can’t find it at your local theater, O Brother Man; The Life and Work of Lynd Ward will probably turn up on PBS’ American Masters. And that is a fitting title for Lynd Ward.

More:

The Library of America has issued Lynd Ward: Six Novels in Woodcut with an introduction by Art Spiegelman.
If you can find it, the Out of Print Storyteller Without Words has the same six novels, a few extra illustrations, plus intros by Ward (also in the LoA version).
Dover has reprinted Gods’ Man: A Novel in Woodcuts, Mad Man’s Drum: A Novel in Woodcuts, Wild Pilgrimage: A Novel in Woodcuts, Prelude to a Million Years and Song Without Words: Two Graphic Novels, and Vertigo: A Novel in Woodcuts at rather cheap prices.
The illustrations for the unfinished The Silver Pony: A Story in Pictures is available. Also, the illustrated versions of Frankenstein: The Lynd Ward Illustrated Edition and numerous children’s have been reprinted.
If you are an aficionado, you may find original printings of God’s Man or Wild Pilgrimage at your local used book dealer. Other titles are more expensive.
A Lynd Ward bio.
A very good essay here.
Art Spiegelman on the Wordless Book.
Chris Lanier blogs on the artists featured in the exhibition “Silent Witness”
As always, for more Ward picyures Google Image Search anf Flickr.com are your friends.

Heaven’s Maps

Sibusiso Mthembu, who lives near Durban, South Africa, has drawn a map of the way to heaven on the wall of his home. Pilgrims troop by to view this marvel and newspapers are reporting this as yet another weird event, something to chuckle over. But maps of heaven have been common throughout human existence and they are usually quite serious affairs.

Sibusiso Mthembu in front of his map to Heaven.

Heaven is not necessarilly Paradise; it may be simply the Land of the Dead, the place human beings go after death. Still, it is a place and places are located by maps. Sibusio Mthembu is unusual, though, in that he has managed to return from Heaven. Usually this is a place that people only glimpse in dreams.

“Journey of the Dead to Dhuwa”, Land of the Dead for the Jiridja Australians, by Binyinyuwuy, 1948.

Humans have made maps for thousands of years but one culture’s version may be unreadable by other humans from other cultures. Maps derive from concepts of the World and people’s place in it. Medieval European maps used to place Jerusalem in the center and the known continents were arranged around it. The medieval concept of Heaven has to do with concentric rings of spheres of existence. Heaven is in the outermost sphere.

A map of Existence according to Dante. [via Kinkanon]

As Western concepts have become more technical, so Heavenly maps have become more diagrammatic:

Chart of Heaven by Clarence Larkin, about 1895.

But ecstatic visions still occur and are recorded by those who do not fear social judgment.Brenda Davis paints what she dreams. “I can’t help it. God knows I can’t read or write, so he tells me the stories.” Here is her “Map to Heaven”:

The most exact maps to Heaven are possibly those made by Athapaskan tribes in northeastern British Columbia. Hugh Brody has written of this in his great Maps And Dreams. Hunters, some of them, would dream of the hunt they would have and the game they would take. This was a special gift of a few. Amongst these, some would also dream of Heaven and the way to get there. The maps that are made from dreams are very special and not to be seen except on special occasions, such as when the Beaver people were trying to convince certain bureaucrats that they did indeed understand their area in geographic terms and had mapped it. They brought a moosehide bundle into the meeting place:

…they untied the bundle’s thongs and began very carefully to pull back the cover. …the contents seemed to be a thick layer of hide, pressed tightly together. With great care, Aggan took this hide from its cover and began to open the layers. It was a magnificent dream map.
The dream map was as large as the table top, and had been folded tightly for many years. It was covered with thousands of short, firm, and variously colored markings. …Up here is heaven; this is the trail that must be followed; here is a wrong direction; this is where it would be worst of all to go; and over there are all the animals….all of this had been discovered in dreams.
…it was wrong to unpack a dream map except for very special reasons. But…the hearing was important. Everyone must look at the map now. …They should realize, however, that intricate routes and meanings of a dream map are not easy to follow. There was not time to explain them all. The visitors crowded around the table, amazed and confused.
A corner of the map was missing…someone had died who would not easilly find his way to heaven, so the owner of the map had cut a piece of it and buried it with the body. With the aid of even a fragment…the dead man would probably find the correct trail, and when the owner of the map died, it would all be buried with him. His dreams of the trail to heaven would then serve him well.

But the bureaucrats did not understand the map nor the Beaver people’s claim to the land. Their mindset was biased toward the geological survey maps being used by the companies who wanted to build a pipeline through Beaver territory. So it is: we are unable to understand the maps of others and we lose our way to heaven.

Good Books: How to Lie with Statistics, Darrell Huff

I think I was in fifth grade when I discovered a copy of this book on my school library shelves. I was enthralled and How To Lie With Statistics became one of the most influential books I have ever read. It taught me to be a skeptic.

Darrell Huff had been an editor for several mainstream magazines before he returned to free lance writing. In 1954 he published How to Lie with Statistics which was the single biggest success he ever had in his writing life. I saw the book a year or two after it was first published and it was already into its 8th (as I recall) printing. I believe it had fifty or more reprintings — more than a half million copies sold — before it was re-packaged by Norton in 1993 into the volume that is still selling today. It has been translated into many languages — the Chinese version was published 2003 — and called the most widely-read book on statistics ever published, which might be true.

The first four chapters introduce concepts familiar to most statistics students — biased or inadequate sampling, distorted use of the average as opposed to the mean, and so on. Later, Huff writes about “correlation not meaning causation” and the post hoc fallacy. All of this is common street knowledge now, less so in the 1950s. So statistics-smart people sometimes pooh-pooh this book — unless they teach an introductory course and then they are hoping that their students will get as much out of a semester as Huff presents in less than 140 pages. The concepts are illustrated with examples taken from advertising or promotional material and by sharp caricatures by Irving Geis.

So we learn that an organization wishing to appear progressive may hype its average salary, but in a company where the pay rates range from $2000 to $45000 a year, the average doesn’t mean much. Note how Huff/Geis illustrates the concepts of average/median/mode:

That item brings another criticism that I have seen often about this book, that it is too old and people can no longer relate to the examples from the 1940s and ’50s used by Huff. After all, no one expects only $2000 a year wages any more. These critics, obviously, are very limited thinkers.

The chapters that excited me as a kid were the ones about using graphics to lie. For instance:

Same data, different charts.

Besides charts, Huff also pointed out how pictures were used to distort fact. One of the figures below is twice the other, but the illustration for the larger has been doubled in height, which means that it is four times larger than the smaller.

There was more of this, a lot of information in a short book, but the last chapter has a valuable set of tests to apply to claims and propositions:

1. Ask “Who Says So?”
2. How Does He Know?
3. What’s Missing?
4. Did Somebody Change the Subject? (…[W]atch for a switch somewhere between the raw figures and the conclusion.”)
5. Does It Make Sense?

I probably apply these rules to stuff I read ten or twenty times a day. Huff taught me to be skeptical. But there’s a dark side to that.

In 1965, Huff appeared before a US Congressional Committe investigating the 1964 Surgeon-General’s Report linking smoking to cancer. Huff was being paid by the tobacco lobby and he pointed out to the Committee, in entertaining fashion, that correlation does not equal causation and that post hoc does not mean propter hoc. Afterwards Huff picked up some money to write a book, How to Lie about Smoking Statistics, from the tobacco companies but it was never published. Some suggest that this was because Huff sabotaged his own manuscript or that he recognized that the evidence was against him, but I doubt it. In the last analysis, Huff was a hack, a freelance writer trying to make a buck — a Mad Man, if that is meaningful for you.

So here is the thing: skepticism is fine, but you have to remember that Holocaust deniers, climate change skeptics, and tobacco apologists all use Huff’s methods to bolster lies. The point is not to be skeptical so much, as it is to assess the evidence as well as you can. You have to be skeptical about everything, even your own analysis.

 

The End Is Nigh, Philosophize!

Mayan priests celebrating the beginning of new 5000 year cycle, December 19. [Moises Castillo/AP]

Well, somehow it seems like we escaped oblivion yet again. I say again, because this has occurred many times before and certainly will repeat. Now, recognizing that our existence will continue for a while longer, now is the time to sit back with a glass of something or other and ruminate on the notion of the End of the World. But if that’s too much work, then drain your glass while reading Brillat-Savarin’s meditation on the subject from The Physiology of Taste: or Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy published in 1825:

Meditation 10

The End of the World

…Indubitable signs teach us that this globe has already undergone several complete changes, which have been in effect ends of the world; and I do not know what instinct it is that warns us that there will be still more of them.

Often before now we have believed these revolutions ready to happen, and there are many people still living who once hurried to confess their sins because of the watery comet predicted by the good Jerome Lalande.

According to what has been written on the subject, we seem only too eager to surround such a catastrophe with avenging fury, with destructive angels and the sound of trumpets, and other no less horrifying accompaniments.

Alas, we do not need such histrionics to be destroyed; we are not worth a funeral display, and if God wishes it he can change the whole surface of the globe without such exertion on his part.

Let us suppose, for instance, that one of those wandering stars, whose paths and purposes are unknown to any of us, and whose appearance is always accompanied by a legendary fear, let us suppose, I say, that such a comet flies near enough to the sun to be charged with a terrible excess of heat, and that it then comes near enough to us to cause a six-month period of a general temperature of about 170 degrees Fahrenheit (twice as hot as that of the comet of 1811).

At the end of this murderous period, all animal and vegetable life will have perished, and all sounds have died away, the earth will turn silently until other circumstances have developed other germs of creation on it; and still the cause of out disaster will lie lost in the vast halls of outer space, and we shall have passed no nearer to it than a few million leagues.

This happening is as possible as any other, and it has always been for me a tempting thing to dream upon, and one I have never shunned.

It is a strange experience to follow, in spirit, this unearthly heat, to try to predict the effects of it and its development and the way it acts and then to ask:

What happens during the first day of it, and the second, and so on until the last one?
What about the air, the earth, the waters on the earth, and the forming and mixing and exploding of all the gases?
What happens to mankind, according to age, sex,and strength or weakness?
What about man’s obedience to law, his submission to authority, his respect of other people and the property of his fellows?
What does he do about trying to escape from the situation?
What happens to the ties of love, of friendship and of kinship, of selfishness and devotion to others?
What about religious sentiments, faith, resignation, hope, et cetera, et cetera?

History can supply us with a few facts about the moral reactions; for the end of the world has already been predicted more than once, and even fixed on a certain date.

I really feel ashamed about not telling my readers how I myself have decided all these questions; but I do not wish to deprive them of the pleasure of doing it for themselves. It can eliminate a few insomniac hours for them, and even pave the way for some daytime siestas.

Real danger tears down all social ties. For instance, in the epidemic of yellow fever which struck Philadelphia in 1792 or thereabouts, husbands closed doors against wives who shared their homes, children abandoned their fathers, and other such phenomena were common.

Quod a nobis Deus avertat! [God keep that from us!]

[translated by M.F.K. Fisher]

Thus Brillat-Savarin laid out the conflicts that we are all familiar with when confronted by the question, How do we deal with survival and other people during or after nuclear holocaust? Killer meteor strike? Total climate collapse? Flesh-eating zombie apocalypse? Actually, Brillat-Savarin might have a few more words to say about the last, since his book is about food. I can visualize a chapter on the preparation of brains for example.

A free download of The Physiology of Taste is here, but I recommend the M.F.K. Fisher translation, because Ms. Fisher, a pre-eminent writer about food, lards the book with her own observations on cuisine: The Physiology of Taste: or Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy

Appleknockers

Danish author Peter Knudsen has been publishing eBooks through Apple’s iStore. His latest, Hippie 2, is full of photos of naked people from the 60s. Apple objected to the nudity, so Knudsen covered up the naughty bits with… apples! At first that worked but after a week someone at Apple with no sense of humor (could have been anyone) removed the book from the iStore. Now it’s a news item.

One of Knudsen’s censored photos. [via cultofmac.com]

Obviously Apple was upset that Knudsen was taking the piss. So let this be a lesson to would-be eAuthors: don’t mock with apples! Use some other fruit.
[via Cult of Mac]

The End Is Nigh, Find The High Ground

As everyone knows by now, the world is coming to an end in about a month. The Mayans say so. People everywhere are looking for a viable escape plan. Many believe that a mountain in France, Pic de Bugarach, where UFOs have been sighted, is really a kind of dome covering a huge flying saucer hangar that will open up on Doomsday to reveal a giant spaceship that will take all its passengers to another world. The French government is concerned that legions of idiots will converge on the mountain and create difficulties before dying of hunger, thirst, accident, or suicide; so the area will be closed off.

Pic de Bugarach [Wikimedia Commons]

This is not the first time that the world has ended and believers have sought the high ground — in fact, this has been a fairly common event over the centuries. One such doomsday was prophesized in Chicago in 1954 by Dorothy Martin who was receiving messages from an alien being named Sananda. Most of humanity was to be wiped out by a huge flood on December 21 and those who would be saved needed to build a special altar on a mountain top where a flying saucer would land and carry them away. A group of believers formed around Martin and the mountain idea was abandoned. The altar became Martin’s sun porch where the group would wait for the saucers to carry them away. Among the people joining the group were students of a sociologist named Leon Festinger. These were not believers, these were skeptics who wanted to study the group’s dynamics when the great deluge did not materialize.

Festinger published his findings as When Prophecy Fails and it is regarded as a classic by social scientists. The members of the Chicago group have their names changed — Dorothy Martin became Marian Keech, for example — and the locale was shifted to an imaginary city in Michigan.

Many of the group are from a nearby college. Some are students and some employed by the school. The other members have disparate backgrounds. One, called Bob Eastman in the book, has led a “rough” life after leaving the military and sounds somewhat like the Joaquin Phoenix character in The Master. The group appears to do him some good — he gives up alcohol and tobacco and settles down a bit; he has direction and purpose. What the group members have in common is a desire to find a spiritual path for themselves. They called themselves “Seekers”.

Festinger thought that the dissonance of having their beliefs shown to be false — at least in terms of the prophecy — might lead to several possible outcomes. One of these would be a shift to trying to convince others to join them. Festinger references similar groups throughout history and very specifically mentions Christianity. At any rate, the group of seekers had been very cautious about bringing in new members and rigorously examined anyone wanting to join. But when the alien spaceships did not arrive, the group members began attempting to convert others to their beliefs. Dorothy Martin went on to found a group called the Association of Sananda which is still active today.

Dorothy Martin after she became Sister Thedra, leader of Sanandra Organization. [wolflodge.org]

It is easy enough to laugh at the delusions of people seeking spiritual comfort but the book avoids that. Certainly there is some pathos:

The Armstrongs’ son, who had never believed firmly but who was committed to the ideology by his parents’ actions, awoke on the morning of the 21st to listen to the news and then returned to bed where he remained, face to the wall and uncommunicative for almost the rest of the day.

So the lesson is, after December 21 there will be a host of people trying to convince you that the Mayan prophecy was the real deal, just misinterpreted. They will have groups and texts and websites. Before you react to them remember this: December 21 is when the sun dies. Thus it has been for millennia and humans have often felt called upon to assist the solar rebirth – sometimes with human sacrifice. UFOs are a far more genial form of delusion and I don’t want to mock them too much for fear that seekers will find a darker path.

More:

After the Prophecy
Apocalypse Oak Park
Field Guide A personal take on the Festinger book
Apocalypse 2011

Good Books: The Bounty Trilogy by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall

In 1787, HMS Bounty left England on a voyage to the South Seas to gather breadfruit plants that were to provide food for the slaves on sugar plantations in the West Indies. On the return voyage, Fletcher Christian mutinied and set Captain Bligh and eighteen others adrift in the Bounty’s launch. The mutineers sailed back to Tahiti where some remained, the others going on to establish a colony on Pitcairn’s Island. The story is well-known and has been the subject of several movies. In popular imagination, Captain Bligh has become a symbol of tyranny and Fletcher Christian, one of romantic resistance. Christian’s role has been played by handsome leading male actors of the day — Errol Flynn, Clark Gable, Marlon Brando, Mel Gibson — while Bligh has been portrayed by Charles Laughton, Trevor Howard, and a pre-Hannibal Lecter Anthony Hopkins. All of this derives from the trilogy by Nordhoff and Hall, published between 1932 and 1936. But the three Bounty books are more than just an adventure story, or a tale of resistance to tyranny; they are an exercise in political philosophy and a discussion of the nature of human society.

Each of the three books  has a different point of view. The first, Mutiny on the Bounty, is narrated by Roger Byam, who served as a midshipman on the Bounty‘s voyage. Now the Bounty‘s roster is a matter of record and the authors decided to create Byam, a fictional character, around the experiences of Peter Heywood who actually did serve on the Bounty. There are at least two reasons to fictionalize this narrator: first, Peter Heywood was only fifteen when the Bounty sailed, and, second, his role in the mutiny is rather ambiguous and there is no ambiguity about the character Roger Byam in Nordhoff and Hall’s novel. Byam is about eighteen. He has no part in the mutiny but is believed to be one of the mutineers. He suffers the injustice of the law and Injustice is what the first book describes.

The trilogy’s major theme is broached early on, when Bligh has dinner with Byam and his mother.

“Roger and I,” observed my mother, “have been studying the ideas of J.J.Rousseau. As you know, he believes that true happiness can only be enjoyed by man in a state of nature.”
Bligh nodded. “…if a rough seaman may express an opinion on a subject more suited to a philosopher, I believe that true happiness can only be enjoyed by a disciplined and enlightened people.”

And that is the question to be examined: discipline or state of nature?

Byam is introduced to discipline before he ever leaves England. A man is being flogged through the fleet; that is, he is taken from one to another of the vessels at anchor and flogged with a cat, a vicious whip designed to tear flesh from men’s backs. So Byam and Bligh are guests aboard another ship when the man is rowed around for punishment: “From neck to waist the cat-o’-nine-tails had laid the bones bare, and the flesh hung in blackened, tattered strips.” A doctor examines the man and declares that he is dead. “Lucky devil!” exclaims the captain whose ship Byam and Bligh are visiting, then he orders his boatswain’s mate to lay two dozen lashes on the corpse. As the Articles of War are read the captain doffs his hat and “…every man on the ship uncovered in respect to the King’s commandments”. This uncovering at the reading of “the King’s commandments” will be seen several more times in this book. The boatswain’s mate is reluctant to perform the whipping but follows orders. Byam, “giddy and sick”, counts the strokes as they fall, each cracking like a pistol shot, on the dead man’s back.

Back at their interrupted dinner, the captain complains that his soup has grown cold during the punishment, then he and Bligh fall to talking about old times together. Then they come back around to the scene they have witnessed and Bligh asks about the man’s crime. He struck a superior officer, says the captain. “By God!” says Bligh, “He deserved all he got, and more! No laws are more just than those governing the conduct of men at sea.” Byam cannot contain himself: “Is there any need of such cruelty? …Why not just hang the poor fellow and have done with it?” The two older men laugh at the callow youth: “Discipline must be preserved.”

William Bligh from his book A Voyage to the South Seas available from gutenberg.org

Back on the Bounty, Byam becomes familiar with his shipmates. He is one of six midshipmen — essentially young men training to be officers. There are two divisions amongst the crew: one is that between officers and seamen and the other is between gentlemen and commoners. The midshipmen are gentlemen and, even though they have an inferior rank, might sometimes order about a seaman or warrant officer with a higher rating. (see Wikipedia for a very good breakdown of this system on the Bounty) This class division is accepted by Byam (and others) as the natural order of things, as Nordhoff and Hall subtly but surely make you recognize. In fact, Byam is a middle class prig, which doesn’t mean he is unlikeable. Still, contemporary readers may get a shock when Byam refers to all the “sharp-faced Jews” swarming about the ship trying to peddle articles to the seamen. Later, when he says that Samuel, Bligh’s clerk, has a Jewish look, suspicions are confirmed. Only in Byam’s narration occur these anti-semitic remarks, which may or may not be typical of the day.

It is interesting to compare Byam’s characterizations of the men around him with those given in the following books. Byam dislikes Hallet, a fellow midshipman, fifteen years old, and remarks on his “weak, peevish mouth”. At one point he accuses him (retrospectively, in the narrative) of being a sneak and an informer. When the mutiny occurs he claims that Hallet begged and pleaded not to be put on the launch with Bligh, but in Men Against the Sea, the narrator Ledward says that Hallet did his duty like a man. Most interesting is Byam’s description of Ned Young, who is one of the pivotal characters in Pitcairn’s Island. According to Byam, Young, another midshipman and assistant to the botanist, is seen as “a stout salty-looking fellow, with a handsome face marred by the loss of nearly all his front teeth”. Later, in Tahiti, Young gets tattoos of coconut palms, one each on the back of his calves, and a tattooed breadfruit tree all across his back. This contrasts with the thoughtful, troubled man we see on Pitcairn’s Island, not stout but physically weak, who is Fletcher Christian’s close friend.

Nordhoff and Hall began their writing by putting together biographies of all the characters. That amounts to about fifty (I haven’t done a precise count) people. Some of these folks occupy only a line or two out of the three novels but each of these peripheral characters is given weight that goes beyond a certain oddity of appearance or personal idiosyncrasy that is usually the mechanism authors utilize to make a bit player memorable.

The Bounty arrives in Tahiti.

The Bounty finally arrives in Tahiti. There have been a few problems along the way but nothing too terrible — a flogging or two, what’s that? Byam goes to his work, which is to make a thorough dictionary of the Polynesian language. The Bounty is in Tahiti more than five months and here is where her troubles truly begin. The men of the Bounty are all volunteers (the 1935 Clark Gable film wrongly has them being impressed) and some were already familiar with the South Seas and wanted to return. Tahiti is still a new, glorious, place; no one has to work very hard, at least by 18th Century British standards, and there are many beautiful women willing to spend some time with a sailor. This is indeed Rousseau’s natural paradise. Several times characters remark that the common English seaman would find Tahiti much more preferable than England as a place to live. Still, when the breadfruit are finally loaded, the Bounty sails with all hands.

Bligh has become troublesome to his immediate inferiors. He berates them and insults them in front of common seamen. And he is accused of avarice. Bligh is acting purser (something the real life Bligh had tried to avoid) and responsible for the Bounty‘s economy. Samuel is his clerk. So Bligh and Samuel take from the men items they had purchased or been given on shore — food such as pigs, for instance. The crucial dispute is over coconuts — Bligh says some were stolen and publicly accuses Christian of taking them. Christian is wounded by the accusation. Ironically, it is young Tinkler who confesses to Byam that he had stolen a coconut — this shortly before Tinkler joins Bligh in the launch after the mutiny.

Fletcher Christian and Maimiti. Illustration by N. C. Wyeth for The Bounty Trilogy

Roger Byam sees Christian as a romantic revolutionary, but an aristocrat, therefore admirable:

Fletcher Christian was at that time in his twenty-fourth year, — a fine figure of a seaman in his plain blue, gold-buttoned frock — handsomely and strongly built, with thick dark brown hair and a complexion naturally dark… His mouth and chin expressed great resolution of character , and his eyes, black, deep-set, and brilliant, had something of hypnotic power in their far-away gaze…. Christian was what women call a romantic-looking man ; his moods of gaiety alternated with fits of black depression, and he possessed a fiery temper which he controlled by efforts that brought a sweat to his brow. Though only a master’s mate, a step above a midshipman, he was of gentle birth — better born than Bligh and a gentleman in manner and speech.

You can try to lay it off on the women, Byam, but I think you are terribly attracted to this guy. But there is more to be said about Christian later. For now it is enough to say that Christian had fallen in love with Maimiti, a Tahitian woman whose light skin, Byam informs us, means that she is, like Christian, of a higher class. Others also made liasons on Tahiti. When the Bounty sailed, a cutter was almost cut free, only a small bit of line holding her. Nordhoff and Hall say that this was part of of a plot to allow some seamen to jump ship; Captain Bligh also came to think so, though at first he believed otherwise. Barrow (see below) says that the line scraped on the rocks. This is an example of the kind of evidence Nordhoff and Hall try to juice for the facts that underlie their fiction.

One character well-depicted by Nordhoff and Hall is the alcoholic ship’s doctor, Thomas Huggan, aka Old Bacchus. The old scoundrel has gallons and and gallons of booze aboard and usually has a snootfull — not that it makes him a worse doctor, understand. In fact, Bacchus is one of the best-loved of the Bounty‘s crew. He often has Byam, other midshipmen, and various seamen up to his cabin where he passes his bottle around. So, when he accidentally dies on Tahiti, it is a blow to Byam. Another man remarks that it is people like Bacchus who form the invisible glue that holds together a ship’s crew and that, without him, the crew will feel a great loss. The authors have had a great deal to say about the doctor over quite a few pages and then, suddenly, he is gone. The reader is made to feel the same loss that the Bounty‘s crew does. That is a pretty piece of writing.

Christian decides to jump ship. He lashes together some planks but is stopped from paddling back to Tahiti by chance events — seamen on deck rather than below, for instance. His desertion disintegrates and becomes, in the course of a couple of hours, a mutinous conspiracy that includes a number of other men. Bligh always believed that men had plotted against him for a long time before mutinying, but Nordhoff and Hall follow all the testimony that says that the mutiny was spontaneous — that dissatisfaction with Captain Bligh combined with a desire for a better life in tropical paradise caused men to grab a musket and revolt.

In the confusion, as Bligh is tied up and trading curses with the mutineers, Byam runs below to grab some clothing since he means to get into the launch with Bligh, but by the time he gets back on deck, there is no room for him in the overloaded open boat. There are others that Christian will not allow to leave: the armorer, who is a smith, and the carpenter’s assistants, though the carpenter, Purcell, is thought troublesome and allowed to leave the Bounty. Bligh yells out to the men gathered at the rail that he won’t forget them when he gets back to England and Byam thinks Bligh’s grace will extend to him. On the other hand, no one thinks it likely that Bligh and the crew of the launch will live for very long.

Ned Young, who was not one of the original mutineers, throws in his lot with them. Chance has decided, he says, and he has no wish to see England again.

“We may as well make the best of it… It’s far from a bad best, if you look at the matter sensibly. I’ve always wanted a life of ease. Ever since reading Captain Wallis’s and Captain Cook’s accounts of their discoveries in the Pacific, I’ve dreamed of nothing but tropical islands. When the chance came to ship with the Bounty I was the happiest man in England. I’m willing to confess now that, had it been possible, I would have deserted the ship at Tahiti.”

Christian is chosen captain of the mutinous crew and he names Young as his second-in-command. Christian gives a little speech:

“It should be needless to tell British seamen that no ship, whether manned by mutineers or not, can be handled without discipline. …I mean to be obeyed. There shall be no injustice here. I shall punish no man without good cause, but I will have no man question my authority.”

The mutineers know that, in a year or perhaps two, when no word of the Bounty is received in England, a warship will be sent out to look for her. If any of the mutineers (who are also pirates now) are caught, they will be hanged. So Christian means to find a place where they can live in the vast uncharted South Pacific. There will be no return to England for them, ever.

Christian takes on a solitary life: “All the gaiety had gone out of him; there was never the hint of a smile on his face — only an expression of sombre melancholy.” At first Byam feels bitter about Christian but soon comes to pity him. Nine of the mutineers sail off to find an uncharted island where they can start over. Byam and some others, non-mutineers and some who don’t wish to stay with Christian’s crew, are dropped off at Tahiti.

Roger Byam and Tehani. Illustration by N. C. Wyeth for The Bounty Trilogy

Months pass. Byam falls in love with Tehani, a chief’s daughter, who is delivered of a baby girl in 1790. Several of the non-mutineers begin building a schooner that they mean to sail to Batavia, a Dutch colony, where they hope to get passage on a ship back to Europe. There is some trouble when a mutineer murders a native — an Indian or a Maori, as the English called these Polynesians– and he and a companion are killed in return. Then a British warship, the Pandora, arrives. Byam paddles out to her and is immediately clapped in irons. Soon, he shares a prison space with others of the Bounty‘s crew. The Pandora leaves Tahiti.

From this point on, Mutiny on the Bounty is concerned with the injustices suffered by Byam and his fellow prisoners. They are mistreated in captivity and some die, no one will listen to Byam when he proclaims his innocence, a young man named Ellison, who Byam thinks a foolish and harmless boy, may hang, but all these are secondary to Byam’s main grievance: the letter his mother received from Captain Bligh. When Bligh finally reached England after the voyage described in the next volume in the trilogy, Byam’s mother wrote to him enquiring about her son. Bligh replied that Byam was a contemptible villain and second only to Christian in culpability for the mutiny. Mrs. Byam dies before Roger gets home and he blames Bligh for her death.

Bligh overheard Christian and Byam talking together the evening before the mutiny and believes that they were plotting. Only one person can save Byam: Tinkler, the coconut thief, who survived the voyage of the Bounty‘s launch, but when word arrives that Tinkler’s ship has been wrecked in the West Indies, all hope seems lost. Byam, along with young Ellison and two others, is condemned to hang. Serious testimony against him is given by a fellow midshipman on the Bounty, a man Byam disliked. Several men who tried to get into the launch are freed and one man is convicted and pardoned. During this period, as the court attempts to parse the guilt or innocence of each man, so we are invited to assess the evidence for and against. Nordhoff and Hall have loaded the testimony to favor Byam, but his real life counterpart, Peter Heywood, played a more amibiguous role in the proceedings and shifted his story once or twice. The authors are determined to present us with an innocent man facing the gallows.

Well, you know Byam will escape hanging or else he wouldn’t be narrating this book. Poor Ellison will hang. And there is the nub of the problem: how can good men and women accept life under injustice? Byam is, as he tells us at the book’s beginning, conservative, but Nordhoff and Hall are Americans, descendants of revolution, and you can sense a certain dissonance in their account of Byam’s pliant accomodation to a system that elevates cruelty and calls it discipline.

Three mutineers hanged. Illustration by N. C. Wyeth for The Bounty Trilogy

After his release, Byam wants to return to his Tahitian family but others talk him out of it, saying that he needs to uphold his family’s name and so on. So Byam returns to the Royal Navy just in time for the Napoleonic Wars. After twenty years of service he finally makes it back to the South Seas only to discover that the place has been terribly damaged by intercourse with Europe. The population has diminished, disease has struck the natives, the tribes have warred, and the old social structures are in disarray. Tahiti is “a graveyard of memories” to Byam. Nordhoff and Hall lived in Tahiti and had native wives. There is a melancholy about the last pages of Mutiny on the Bounty that arises from their own feelings (I think). At any rate, Byam discovers that Tehani died only a few months after the Pandora carried him away. He sees his daughter, a grown woman now with a child of her own, but Byam does not make himself known to her. To him the island has become “full of ghosts, — shadows of men alive and dead, — my own among them.”

Bligh being cast adrift in the lauch by the mutineers. A man is throwing down cutlasses to the boat, which will be their only armament. Engraving by Robert Dodd, 1790. [via Wikipedia]

Mutiny on the Bounty is twice as long as either of the two books that follow. Men Against the Sea can be quickly summarized: this is the story of Bligh’s triumph. He successfully navigates 3600 miles of ocean to bring those who followed him — all except one man killed by hostile natives — to safety at the Dutch settlement in Timor. In this book, Bligh is a hero, a man who accomplishes a great and perilous task. And he does this through his iron will and application of discipline:

We reached the Dutch East Indies, not by a miracle, but owing to the leadership of an officer of indomitable will, skilled in seamanship, stern to preserve discipline, cool and cheerful in the face of danger. His name will be revered by those who accompanied him for as long as they live.

The narrator of Men Against the Sea is Thomas Ledward, who succeeded Old Bacchus as acting surgeon on the Bounty. Ledward is a very different kind of man than Byam. First, Ledward did exist and did sail with Bligh on the Bounty and on the launch. But there is no great story around Ledward as there was about Byam’s model, Peter Heyward, who may or may not have been part of the mutiny. And, Ledward is a grown man, one who has a certain quality of assessing people without judging them — possibly he is Nordhoff and Hall’s version of a good general practitioner, the doctor who sees the flaws and wounds in a patient, but who does not diminish that person with his knowledge.

Ledward’s assessment of Samuel, Bligh’s clerk who Byam accused of Jewishness, is that “He was a man wholly lacking in imagination, and his belief in Captain Bligh was like that of a dog in its master.” Now, willing lieutenants to tyrants are a subject of interest to anyone who has examined the last century’s political history, but there is more to Samuel than simple devotion. After the famished exhausted crew find a place that they name Restoration Island where they can rest and feed on shellfish, some of the crew complain. Then:

“You know your Bible, Mr. Ledward,” remarked Samuel…”Do you recall the passage concerning Jeshurun who waxed fat and kicked?” [Deut. 32:15]
“Aye, and it falls pat on Restoration Island!”
Samuel smiled. “Where would they be, where would they all be, without Captain Bligh? Yet they must murmur the moment their bellies are full! I’ve no patience with such men.”
“Nor I.” Glancing at the clerk’s formerly plump body, now reduced to little more than skin and bones, and clad in rags, I could not suppress a smile. “Though we kick,” I said, “none of us could be accused of waxing fat!”

Before reaching this bit of land, the crew had been reduced to eating raw seagulls, when they can catch them, first cutting their throats so that the blood could be given to the weakest. The birds are cut up into eighteen pieces, one for each man. When Bligh is offered a portion of breast, he refuses and says that he will take the same chances as any other man. So the crew plays the seaman’s game of Who-Shall-Have-This. One man holds a portion behind his back and the others call out a name at random. The order of names is to be changed at every capture of a bird. So a name is called, that man gets a piece of raw seagull. Another name… And so on. Bligh winds up with a bird’s foot, but he gnaws it to the bone.

Ledward speaks of the men’s charity toward one another, their attention to each other’s weaknesses, and there is a cooperative spirit amongst the crew that Fletcher Christian wanted among the mutineers who land on Pitcairn’s Island. There is one exception, Lamb, who has stolen food on the launch and who ruins a bird-catching expedition by catching and devouring as many as he can, thereby alarming the huge flock that fly away. “I must do him the credit to say that he had done a good job of them; scarcely anything remained but feathers, bones, and entrails.” Cole had earlier given Lamb his own portion because he thought the man needed it more than himself, now he shakes his head looking down at the blood-smeared wretch. Cole, Ledward, Samuel, and Tinkler agree not to tell Bligh about Lamb’s gorging, because it would do no good. They do, however, tell the captain that Lamb frightened the birds away — this to protect themselves.

Along the voyage only one man challenges Bligh and that is Purcell, the carpenter, who had been rejected by the mutineers because of his troublesome nature. Several times Purcell challenges Bligh who finally takes up a cutlass and throws another to the carpenter and invites him to duel it out. This bit of political action is very ancient and there are records of Viking raiders in 9th Century France who battle it out for leadership. In this instance Purcell backs down and Bligh has no more trouble with him.

One more person needs mention: Tinkler, who stole the coconut that precipitated the mutiny, who is necessary to Byam’s defense, the young midshipman who is respected by Purcell as a gentleman, though the carpenter disrespects Captain Bligh. On one of the islands where the crew lands and tries to find sustenance, a forage team loses Tinkler. Bligh is furious with the team leader and berates him. The team sets out to find Tinkler when he suddenly reappears, leading some natives carrying food and water:

This good fortune came at a time when it was needed, and I was glad that Bligh, who had been cursing the lad during his absence, forgot his anger and commended him warmly. Tinkler was pleased as only a boy can be who has succeeded in a matter in which his elders have failed.

That is a warm and human assessment of a young man. But the troublesome note, about Bligh forgetting his anger, suggests something about the man’s difficult personality. And Tinkler, it must be said, is one lucky fellow throughout all three books.

Difficult or not, Bligh completes his mission. He sails his open boat to Timor, 3600 miles from where he was dropped into the sea. He returns to England and is hailed as a hero. The Pandora sets out to find the mutineers. Ledward has a few words to say about the fate of his fellow voyagers — some are worn out and do not live long after reaching Timor. The launch is sold at a Dutch auction. It disturbs Bligh that the boat the crew has come to love is knocked down for peanuts. Ledward is still unable to travel; he shakes Bligh’s hand — “…the finest seaman under whom I have ever had the privilege to sail. From the bottom of my heart I wish him God Speed.”

Now we have seen the injustice of English society, the unspoiled paradise of Tahiti, the necessity of discipline and the cruelty of its use — now it is time to see what Fletcher Christian can offer as a substitute. Pitcairn’s Island is very different in structure from the other two books. It is related in the third person, except for a long bit at the end, but Nordhoff and Hall faced a problem here. When, in 1808, the American sealer Topaz discovered that there were people on Pitcairn’s Island, there was only one of the mutineers still alive. This man called himself Alexander Smith on the Bounty, but his real name was John Adams. He had been raised in a foundling home before he went to sea. He had been virtually illiterate until fellow mutineer Ned Young taught him to read and write. Young had kept a journal and Adams added to it — some parts have been reconstructed from quotes given by those who read the book, but the original has long since disappeared. Still, Adams told the story of the mutiny and the Pitcairn settlement to anyone who asked. The trouble is, he never told the same story twice. Some of the other Pitcairners, like Jenny, possibly wife to Isaac Martin (Jenny is Brown’s wife in the novel), also told their stories, but there are many discrepancies and lapses of memory among them. Nordhoff and Hall, experienced novelists, have put together a story that is internally coherent but may not be completely factual. But, for the moment, let’s stick with their version, Pitcairn’s Island.

The nine mutineers still commanding the Bounty picked up six Polynesian men and twelve women at Tahiti and other places. They stocked the ship with animals, plant and seeds, anything they could find that might aid them in creating a new community. Some of the men and women have formed bonds before taking ship, but several women have essentially been abducted from their home island. These twenty-seven will form a new society.

Bounty Bay. Only boats can cross the reef and pull into shore.[via Wikipedia]

Christian knows that there is a place called Pitcairn’s Island at a certain location but when he cannot find it, calculates that the discoverer was off in longitude. He then criss-crosses the latitude he has until he finds the island, some hundred and fifty or so miles off its supposed location. Pitcairn has fertile land, is uninhabited, and no safe landing for ships to use. It is perfect. The mutineers send a boat in past the reef to reconnoiter, then strip everything from the Bounty that they can use. Then the Bounty‘s husk is set afire so that no one may ever find it.

There are three groups on Pitcairn’s Island: the Bounty mutineers, the Polynesian men– some of them chiefs and some quasi-slaves, and there are the women. Although a few female characters have been introduced previously, Nordhoff and Hall take care in delineating the different personalities of the women taken to Pitcairn. Maimiti, wife to Christian, is generally deferred to, since her husband is obviously the most important chief. Taurua is married to Young and Balhadi to Alexander Smith (Adams). Moetua, Nanai, and Hutia are married to the three Polynesian chiefs. The chief’s servants are without wives, something that both men and women sense may cause a problem.

The women gather to bathe in the afternoon, There they talk amongst themselves. The whites have strange ways. Among the Polynesians it is the custom for men and women to eat separately and their meals are prepared by someone of the same sex. But the whites insist that their native wives, who they have given odd English names, cook for them and share their meals. Some — like Maimiti and Balhadi – say they are content with their white husbands but others are unhappy. They were abducted and now some are abused.

“What of the men who have no wives?” asked Moetua [wife to the chief Minarii]…
“How miserable they are!” said Hutia [wife to Tararu, Minarii's nephew], laughing. “Who is to comfort them?”
“Not I,” remarked Balhadi, “I am content with my man, and will do nothing to cause him pain or anger.”
“Why should he be angry for so small a thing?” asked Nanai [wife to Tetahiti, close friend of Brown and Christian].
“You know nothing of white men,” said Prudence [abducted by Mills]. “They consider it a shameful thing for the wife of one man to give herself to another. Nevertheless, I will be one of those to be kind to the wifeless men.”
“And I!” exclaimed Susannah. “I fear Martin as much as I hate him, but I shall find courage to deceive him. To make a fool of him will comfort me.”

The Rope. [copyright Mike Warren via onlinepitcairn.com]

But the first one to be unfaithful is Hutia who has an affair with John Williams. Williams’ own wife, Fasto, “a short, dark, sturdy woman”, is determined to be a good wife. When she learns of the affair, she kills herself by throwing herself off a cliff called The Rope. Williams falls into depression. He stays away from Hutia for a time but finally goes to the other white men and tells them that he wants to take Hutia into his house. Everyone knows that this will mean conflict and bloodshed and they refuse to go along with Williams. After a time, Williams takes the Bounty‘s cutter and tries to leave the island. Christian and some others catch up with him:

“Leave be, Mr. Christian… I’ll not go on as I have…
Christian seated himself beside him. “Think, Williams,” he said kindly. “This boat is common property. And how would we fare without a blacksmith? Tahiti lies three hundred leagues from here. You would be going to certain death. … Come, take yourself in hand!”
Williams sat gazing at his bare feet for a long time before he spoke, “Aye, sir, I’ll go back… I’ve done my best. If trouble comes o’ this, let no man hold me to account.”

Williams and Hutia resume their clandestine affair.

Meanwhile, babies begin arriving and the young women settle in. There are other difficulties between the white and native factions that do not involve lust. Some of the whites consider the Polynesians their slaves. They cannot force their will on the chiefs, but begin mistreating the other three native men. Christian, Young, and Smith try to put a stop to this but problems are brewing.

Hutia moves in with Williams and Tauru is unable to get her back. His uncle, Minarii, a man of great strength, beats Williams and fetches Hutia back. Christian holds a council. Hutia must choose who she will live with. Hutia chooses Williams and the matter is closed. But the humiliated Tauru means to kill Williams. When Hutia learns of this, she goes to where Tauru is working and poisons his lunch. Tauru and his servant both die.

The colony is teetering on the edge of destruction and Christian knows it. There are several wistful statements from him and the others about how they should cherish this paradise where they live but finally some of the mutineers come to him with a demand that the land on the island be parcelled out into private plots, but only for the whites, the natives must labor as slaves. Christian tries to dissuade them but they call for a vote and win, five to four. Earlier, Young had tried to convince Christian that allowing every man a vote was a bad idea, that Christian should remain captain and rule. Christian refused, saying that he had brought the men here against their will and now they deserved a voice in how things are run. There was never any question, apparently, of giving the Polynesians a vote. Later, Christian decides that he must intervene and stop the injustice of the whites, but by then it is too late.

Death of Mills from the Classics Illustrated version of Pitcairn’s Island, artist: Rudolph Palais.

Word of the vote reaches the natives and they decide to attack the white men and kill them all. They argue as to whether the “good” men, Christian, Young, and Brown should die, but the logic is: kill one, then all must follow. The natives quietly remove the weapons from the places where they are stored, then begin their mission. Williams, Martin, Mills, and Brown are killed. Christian and Smith  are seriously wounded. Ned Young is hidden by the women including those married to the chiefs. The women determine to protect him and the two wounded men and agree amongst themselves that they will try to block any attempt at vengeance when the killing subsides.

The Polynesian men split up to search for Quintal, Young, and McCoy. Tetahiti finds Moetua, Minarii’s wife. She tells him that she has not seen Quintal or McCoy and, if she knew where Young was, would not tell him. Tetahiti shrugs, he feels the same way about Young, yet he thinks Minarii is right, all the whites must die. Moetua turns away, “Blood! Blood!… Men are wild beasts. To-day I hate them all!”

Meanwhile, Minarii finds Quintal near the cliff that the islanders call The Rope. Minarii hates Quintal so much that he wants to kill him his bare hands. He throws aside his musket and slaps his left bicep with his hand, loud as a pistol shot, the Polynesian challenge to fight. The two men rush together. Minarii is incredibly strong but Quintal is the most powerful of the mutineers. The two grapple with one another and Quintal manages to break Minarii’s arm. Then he throws him down the Rope.

Three of the mutineers’ widows gather and decide to kill the three last native men. Jenny, Brown’s wife, has discovered where they are sleeping:

“We have an axe and two cutlasses. Are your hearts strong? Will your arms not falter?”
“Not mine,” said Hutia grimly.
“I claim Nihau,” remarked Prudence in her soft voice.
“Aye,” said Jenny, “and Tetahiti is mine!”

The women then go off quietly and kill the three sleeping men. Later, they get Quintal to claim that he committed the killings so that they will escape the vengeance of the bereft women.

Maimiti, Christian’s wife, had given birth to their third child while all this was going on. No one tells her of the deaths. Finally, though, she is brought to the dying Christian. Smith picks up the narration now and the remainder of the book is in his voice:

God meant this little island to be a little Garden of Eden, and we’d made a hell of it. Mr. Christian had done all a man could. Now he lay dying for his pains. Knowing him as I did, I reckoned he’d be glad to go. We’d had our chance and we’d failed. Why? …it was no fault of the Indians. All the men asked was to be treated like men; they’d have been our best friends had we met ‘em halfway. As for the girls, ye’d travel far to find a better lot. Real helpmates, they was, ready to take their share in all that was going. And none o’ your sour scolding kind. We was to blame and no one else.

Smith attends the dying Christian who now has heard what has taken place:

When he spoke again it took me by surprise and I’m not certain of the words to this day. He said, “There’s a chance, now,” or “There’s still a chance” — one or the other.
He seemed to expect no reply, so I made none, but lay there trying to make out just what he meant. If he’d said, “There’s a chance, now,” the words was the bitterest ever spoke, for he must have meant that with him dead and out of the way there might be hope for us. I can scarce believe he spoke so, but it may have been.

Christian’s last words: “Never let the children know!” This was September, 1793, six years after the mutiny and four years after the landing on Pitcairn.

Now there is peace, but a new problem arises. McCoy, who has worked in a Scottish distillery, has figured out how to distill alcohol from a native plant. The four remaining men descend into a perpetual state of drunkeness. Some of the women, especially those who have much they want to forget, like Hutia and Prudence, also learn to drink but most stay away. McCoy’s hut becomes the scene of a perpetual drunken orgy. Finally, the women can no longer stand it and abandon the men. They actually try to leave the island, taking the children with them, but their boat capsizes and the four men rescue them. For a while they are shaken enough to resolve to give up drinking, but that doesn’t last. Although the men’s wives still bring them food, they leave them otherwise alone. The women have taken all the arms and they build a stockade. Maimiti (called Mrs. Christian by Smith) is their leader.

Young has come to a stage of deep self-hatred and when Smith tells him of the stockade, Young says that he means to leave the women alone and McCoy agrees. But Quintal intends to take Moetua, the widow of the strong chief Quintal killed. She is almost as strong as her husband was, and she despises Quintal who considers the widows of the dead Polynesians his own property. He advances on the stockade. Instead of retreating into the fort, the women spread out in a line. Moetua gets on her knees and Prudence rests a musket on her shoulder. Maimiti sets up behind a rock. Quintal advances “like the thick-skulled simpleton he was” and the women open fire. Quintal is wounded and runs away.

It takes a few months for Quintal to heal. Young, from the moment Smith told him of the women’s fort, ceases drinking completely and the other three men seldom see him. Quintal is determined to take one of the women back. He and McCoy decide to steal one from the fort. Smith refuses to help them. Quintal and McCoy seize Nanai, Tetahiti’s widow, and Jenny, Brown’s widow. They take them back to McCoy’s hut and, when they cannot force the women to drink, batter them into submission. Later, when the men have passed out, the women escape.

Smith comes around the next day. Young arrives. He is having a bout of what Smith/Adams says is asthma but what sounds more like tuberculosis. Young brings a message from the women: the men must clear out. They can take the cutter and supplies, but they have three days to leave. Young says that he will go with them. Young is clearly in no shape for any kind of exertion but he is the only man left who can use a sextant. Without him, the others don’t have a chance. “…he was thinkin’ of the women and children more than us. He wanted them to have a chance to live quiet decent lives.”

Quintal and McCoy refuse. Young goes away. Smith: “…low-spirited I was, thinkin’ of the lonesome unnatural life we had, when there was no need for it. …I missed the children and craved to see ‘em. What fools we was to think more of our grog than we did of them!” After three days, the women attack. They set fire to the hut and shoot at the men as they try to escape. Smith gets away and runs to Young’s house only to find it deserted. The women have come and carried Young off so that they can care for him. McCoy also escapes and manages to get to Young’s house, though he is terribly wounded. There is no sign of Quintal.

McCoy heals and, one day his wife, Mary, meets him in the woods. Quintal was wounded, she says, and Smith and McCoy have been watched since the women suspected that they were nursing Quintal. Neither Mary, nor Balhadi, Smith’s wife, nor even the battered Sarah Quintal had participated in the assault on McCoy’s hut. “Bad as we’d used ‘em.” says McCoy, “they had no wish to see us dead.” The women will leave the men alone, so long as they stay away.

Smith and McCoy talk of giving up alcohol, but they cannot manage it. Over the next months, McCoy comes to guilt himself for all that has happened. He drinks and blames himself for instigating the quarrel with the native men. One night, he throws himself off a cliff. After that, Smith smashes the kegs and bottles of homemade booze and throws the still into the sea. Then he struggles with exorcising alcohol. He moves into Young’s house and works hard during the day to repair all the houses abandoned when the women built their stockade. At night he is lonely and fights for sleep. One day Balhadi comes to see him. At first he tries to rescue his pride, “Where’s your musket, Balhadi?” but she embraces him, weeping on his shoulder. He tells her that he has destroyed the still and she tells him that Young is alive but very sickly among the women. Soon, the colony reunites, occupying the houses that Smith has repaired. Quintal, now quite mad and sunken into a beast-like state, takes one of the women. Smith tracks him down and kills him. Young teaches Smith to read and write, the Bible being the only text available. Young dies and Smith turns the islanders to Christianity.

The colony is discovered by the Topaz in 1808. The captain decides not to arrest the mutinous pirate Smith and sails away, leaving the old man to determine how, in spite of Christian’s directive, to tell the children of their history.

Two descendants of Fletcher Christian pose beside the Bounty anchor, raised in 1957.

There is no easy path through this lengthy metaphoric narrative about human governance. Discipline — rules — may be necessary, but it is noble to oppose tyranny. The natural state of man may be Utopia or it may be a Hobbesian nightmare. When democracy results in bad decisions by the majority, should a higher authority intercede? If so, where does this stop? And so on. One area of interest is the women’s part in this story. I think there is a fair amount of material here for a feminist analysis, but I lack the parts for that. One item of interest is that, in 1838, when Pitcairn created its first constitution, all native Pitcairners are able to vote. Thus, Pitcairn’s Island becomes the third nation in history, after Sweden and Corsica, and the first with a British-based constitution, to allow women’s suffrage.

Over the last fifty years or so, there have been a number of books and articles that attempt to shift the blame for the mutiny from Bligh to Christian. John Barrow’s 1831 account,The Eventful History of the Mutiny and Piratical Seizure of H.M.S. Bounty: Its Cause and Consequences was a main source for Nordhoff and Hall and, to me, rings true in its assessment of the situation: Bligh was an asshole who did not understand the nature of command, at least on a peaceful situation such as the voyage to Tahiti, but Christian was an oversensitive jerk who needed to wait it out and charge Bligh once he got back to England. In other words, blame shared but the lion’s part goes to Christian whose personal grievances drew a good many others to catastrophe.

There is a cave on Pitcairn that Fletcher Christian discovered but kept secret. There he hid weapons and ammunition. Nordhoff and Hall say that was because he was determined never to be taken and was prepared for a fight to the death should a ship appear. One of the contradictory statements of John Adams/Smith says that Christian had become dictatorial and disliked –  “by many acts of cruelty and inhumanity, brought on himself the hatred and detestation of his companions, he was shot by a black man whilst digging in his field” (from the report by Captains Staines and Pipon) . He implies that Christian fortified the cave to stand off the other colonists.

And here it must be said that the voyage on the Bounty’s launch wasn’t all that cooperative. Most historians now see a division between the pro- and anti-Bligh factions. This might explain some of Bligh’s comments later. And it may or may not raise him in your estimation as a commander. After all, it is one thing to sail a ship with regulations in force and another to steer an open boat full of starving, disgruntled men, half of whom hate you, 3600 miles through uncharted ocean. So, it is not easy to shape the messy affairs of humanity into a coherent narrative or political tract.

After Pitcairn’s discovery, the place became a stopover for whaling ships who provisioned there, then a regular stop for ships on the passage to New Zealand. The islanders supplied food to the whalers and knick-knacks to the tourists. John Adams reigned as patriarch until his death in 1829. His grave is still maintained, though the original stone has been removed. There was a major effort, at one point, to remove the Pitcairners to Norfolk Island, though some returned. A crazed but charismatic outsider brought the island under his control for a while before the people discovered that he was a fraud. Seventh Day Adventists converted the Pitcairners and most still follow that faith. There was a flurry of interest in Pitcairn genetics in the 1960s when it was claimed that one of the mutineers’ recessive gene for blindness was rampant. That seems of  little importance now, with Pitcairners not seen in terrible genetic danger, although Pitcairn is an archetypal exemplar of “founder effect”, that occurs in populations with little genetic diversity. In the late 20th and early 21st Centuries, reports of incest and abuse were investigated by outside authorities and several men — patriarchs — were convicted. The current population, once more than two hundred and thirty is now less than fifty. The island remains what the UN calls a Non Self-Governing Territory (under British authority but administered through New Zealand).

Hall and Nordhoff [via jamesnormanhallhome.pf]

Nordhoff and Hall both served in World War I in the Lafayette Escadrille, a French Foreign Legion unit of mostly American flyers. They did not meet during the war — Hall was shot down over German lines and spent the last part of the war in a German prison camp. Both were writers, both had published in The Atlantic Monthly. In 1919, they were approached to do a history of the Lafayette Escadrille, which they found themselves well able to do. They collaborated on a number of books after that, notably 1929′s Falcons of France about World War I aviation. Harper’s sent them to the South Pacific in 1920 to do a series of articles. Hall spent the rest of his life in Tahiti, Nordhoff lived there for twenty years, then divorced his wife and moved to California. He was suffering from depression and alcoholism which had begun to show up during the writing of the Bounty trilogy. He died, possibly a suicide, in 1947. Hall died in Tahiti in 1951 where he is well remembered. None of the pair’s other books ever approached the success of Mutiny on the Bounty but that book, and the two that followed, are very much worth reading.

Notes:

 The Bounty Trilogy is the primary work. Used editions with N.C. Wyeth illustrations are readilly available.
Caroline Alexander’s The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty is currently the best book on the mutiny.
For more on James Norman Hall.
For the story of Europe meeting the South Seas, Alan Moorehead’s The Fatal Impact is good and available in many different editions.

There is a lot of historic data on the mutiny on the internet:

Captain Bligh’s account via Project Gutenberg.
John Barrow’s 1831 history, mentioned above. 
The Pitcairn Islands Study Center has a great deal of info including a rundown of each of the mutineers that includes Captain Bligh’s descriptions of the wanted men.
Fateful Voyage makes available a number of documents pertaining to the case.
More on Pitcairn and the history of its inhabitants.
And this from janesoceania.com

Good Books: Rebellion in the Backlands by Euclides da Cunha (Part Two)

[ Recap of Part One:  In 1876 the new republic of Brazil is faced with a problem in the remote northeast. A mystic preacher  named Antonio the Counselor has gathered a huge following and built a town at Canudos. Other towns claim that bandits from Canudos are robbing them. One town claims that it is threatened with invasion. The state government of Bahia sends a few hundred men who are dispersed after a small skirmish. A second, larger, expedition fares no better. Now the government gets serious and sends thirteen hundred soldiers with artillery and machine guns under the command of Moreira Cesar, a harsh and feared officer. The expedition ends in disaster; two hundred men are  killed, including Moreira Cesar.]

News of the Moreira Cesar expedition’s disaster spread across Brazil via newly strung telegraph lines. First reports indicated a great massacre and it was weeks before the true number of casualties were known. In the meantime, fear spread through Brazil’s cities. At some point, Antonio the Counselor was labelled a royalist; soon it was claimed that he meant to overthrow the republic and restore the emperor. Brazil’s states were discrete units — the wealthy cacao barons of the south were little interested in poorer states like Bahia — but they were united in anti-royalist sentiment. They had reason to be concerned about the possibilty of the government being overthrown; there had been three major revolts in the eight years since Dom Pedro II’s departure. Now the states joined in an effort to end this threat to the republic.

Da Cunha treats this phase of the Canudos War with some amusement, mocking the extravagant reports of the press, though his newspaper reports filed at the time show the same anti-monarchist hysteria as those he quotes. Much later, when da Cunha actually reads some of Antonio’s words, he calls them “innocuous”.

Antonio Conselheiro, sculpture by Mario Cravo

An army was assembled with units from every state. There was a call for enlistments and the president swore to put the entire legislature in uniform, should more troops be required. No effort was to be spared in ending the terror of the revolutionary monarchist, Antonio the Counselor, and his band of savage warriors. The troops gathered in Baía where some showed their republican loyalties by trying to smash the carved royal coat of arms over the custom house doorway. Da Cunha: “Patriotic passion, the truth is, was verging on insanity.”

It is decided that General Arthur Oscar will command the new expedition. He divides his force of more than three thousand and puts part under the command of General Claudio Savaget. Oscar’s plan is to send Savaget around the east and then west to Canudos along the road created by the now dry riverbed of the Vasa Barris. Meanwhile, he will take his force directly north from Monte Santo, but enter Canudos via Mount Favella. This is not exactly a pincer movement since the routes of the two columns converge slightly east of Canudos.[NB: see the map in Part One]

So, in April, General Oscar set out for Monte Santo. His group was almost two thousand men and included artillery, not just the Krupp field guns already seen in the War (four of which were lost on the Moreira Cesar expedition) but also a huge Whitworth 32, a 170mm siege gun that weighed tons. He also had a detachment of engineers that proceeded ahead of the force and actually cleared a road through the bush and up the side of Mount Favella that will accept the traffic, including the Whitworth, that is to follow. (I found myself wondering why the sertanejos didn’t wipe out this lightly armed forward party. Perhaps they only attacked when units came within a certain radius of Canudos. Or perhaps they realized that the road was a marker of the advance and that they could set up positions and wait.)

Whitworth 32 at the Linares Military Museum

General Oscar spends some time drilling his troops and draining the surrounding country of supplies. It is June before his column moves north. General Savaget also spent his downtime training his troops, almost three thousand, and has created a unit of lancers, mounted and lightly armed, to be used as scouts. In June, Savaget also moves toward Canudos.

General Oscar’s group has problems. His soldiers have eaten most of the food in the area so that they are given only half rations for the march. The heavy Whitworth cannot keep up with the troops — at one point, it is twenty-nine miles behind. The rear guard unit is assigned the task of guarding the artillery while it makes its slow progress. Meanwhile, the unit’s supplies, rations and ammunition, follow the rear guard and the cannon. So Oscar commands three separated units moving north into the sertão. General Savaget splits his supply unit into three parts and assigns each to a section of his force. The lancers work very well as scouts and Savaget’s column is not surprised by an enemy attack.

General Oscar’s group runs into a few probes, outbreaks of sniper fire, and small skirmishes that da Cunha suggests were meant to keep the column advancing along a certain line. The sertanejo in command is none other than Pajehú, the unwittingly heroic cafuso. By the time Oscar’s column reaches Mount Favella on June 27, it is under sniper fire which grows ever fiercer, but the troops keep going. Around midday they pass the remains of Moreira Cesar’s expedition:

…bleached shreds of uniforms swaying from the tips of withered branches, and old saddles, and bits of military cloaks and capes scattered over the ground, along with fragments of bones. At the left side of the road, on the bough of a tree — turned into a clothes rack from which hung a weather-beaten uniform — was the decapitated corpse of Colonel Tamarindo, the arms dangling, the skeleton hands clad in black gloves, while at the feet lay the colonel’s cranium and boots. Upon leaving the side of the road and plunging into the weeds, the soldiers come upon the remains of other unfortunate ones: skeletons clad in tattered, filthy uniforms, lying supine here and there in tragic formation or parlously attached to flexible shrubs which, bending with the breeze, conferred upon them the weird movements of specters. All of which had been deliberately staged…

But the column cannot stop because the rifle fire has become serious. They reach the top of Favella, which is crushed by the earth’s martyrdom and somewhat indented so that the troops are marching into a bowl surrounded by a rim of high ground. The sniper fire is now a crescendo, but a couple of the Krupp guns are dragged across the mountaintop and up the slope that overlooks Canudos. Night has fallen. The heavy Whitworth and other artillery are still some distance behind them and the supply train is five miles to the rear. The cannon fire twenty-one shots at Canudos, just for the show of it. General Oscar first sees the town, less than a mile away, through the glare of artillery fire. Suddenly:

…the entire range of slopes from top to bottom burst into running flame and a terrible, deadly rifle fire broke upon them from the hundreds of trenches, as if the ground beneath their feet were exploding with shells.

The slopes of Mount Favella are riddled with rifle pits and the government troops are sitting ducks. They run about in confusion, tripping over wounded comrades, and try to figure out what to do. A blind charge up the hillsides in the dark seems not a good plan and the troops wind up hugging the ground, waiting things out. After an hour or so, the shooting stops. In the dark, the Whitworth and other artillery are brought up the mountainside. What General Oscar has yet to learn is that, at the same time his soldiers were being shot up, the sertanejos attacked the supply train in the rear. Not only is Oscar surrounded by hidden rifle men, there are no supplies, no ammunition, no rations, for his troops.

Meanwhile, the Savaget column, coming around from the northeast along the Vasa Barris river expects and finds contact with the sertanejo forces on June 25 at a place called Cocorobó. This is a rough gap where two gorges formed by the river when it is in flood come together, then open out onto a plain. The sertanejos are waiting in the jumbled rocks overlooking the road and the plain and open up on the troops as they come out of the gap.

…the sertanejos were staging the same rude, sinister,, monotonous drama of which they were the invisible protagonists. No matter how long or arduous their apprenticeship in the art of war, their system never varied, for the reason that, by its very excellence, it admitted of no corrections or additions. From those dismantled parapets, they could fire in safety on our men, who formed a perfect target there on the barren level plain down below….they did not waste their ammunition; they depended not upon quantity but on the accuracy of their aim.

The two forces fire away at one another but it is Savaget’s column that is taking damage. After two hours, a Krupp gun is brought up and trained on the rocks where the sertanejos are dug in. A bombardment of the mountain side results in a lot of rocks being blown up in spectacular fashion but having no other practical result. The gunfire from the sertanejos increases and Savaget is taking serious losses. “This was something very like a defeat,” says da Cunha:

After three hours of fighting, the attackers had not gained one foot of ground. At a distance of five hundred yards from their adversaries, with thousands of eyes fixed upon those barren slopes, they had not caught a glimpse of a single man. There was no telling how many of them there were.

The soldiers could not continue to sit still and be decimated; they had to take action, retreat or attack. Savaget chose to attack. A wild bayonet charge straight up the slopes followed. The sertanejos were surprised and fell back. The soldiers overran some of their trenches. These are empty but the spent rifle casings in them were still warm. The troops continued to charge up the mountain, the sertanejos continued to pick them off. But the government troops persist and eventually force the sertanejos from their trenches and rifle pits. The soldiers catch their first glimpse of the enemy as the sertanejos abandon their positions.

Government soldiers outside Canudos

Government casualties at this point are 178 including General Savaget, who is wounded but continues to command the force. The next day the column fights its way down the road. By nightfall, they have travelled another mile. The following day, the 27th, Savaget’s column is supposed to link up with Oscar’s at Canudos. They push forward under fire. Now they are in the outskirts of Canudos and houses begin to form part of the battleground. The terrain is composed of small hillocks and sertanejo sharpshooters command these little guntowers. Savaget’s troops charge up one hill after another, sometimes finding and killing the enemy, sometimes finding the objective deserted. Then they push on to the next hill. It is exhausting fighting in enormous heat but, by the end of the day, Savaget’s force has reached its goal. Below them they can see the town of Canudos with the new church’s twin steeples glowing white in the sun. As night falls they hear the cannonfire from Oscar’s column which has reached the top of Mount Favella.

The morning of the 28th, Savaget’s group turns its guns on Canudos and watches Mount Favella, expecting to see General Oscar’s troops pouring down the mountainside on the town. Instead, a scout from Oscar’s forces arrives telling Savaget that they are trapped on the mountain and desperately need ammunition and food. Savaget decides that instead of sending a detachment with supplies, he will attack Mount Favella with his entire force. Fairly quickly, he drives away the sertanejos and then sends a group back to rescue Oscar’s supply train. Some of the mules and supplies are recovered and, by the end of the 28th, the entire expedition is ensconced on Mount Favella, overlooking Canudos. Out of a beginning force of almost 5000, there are more than 900 casualties. That night, the sertanejos once again begin firing on the camp.

On the 29th, Oscar’s artillery fires on Canudos. Once again, the result is a massive return fire from the sertanejos. Units scour the hills, trying to root out the riflemen. The sertanejos withdraw, await their chance, and attack or reclaim their rifle pits.

There was here a certain inversion of roles. On the one hand were men equipped for war by all the resources of modern industry, materially strong and brutal, as from the mouths of their cannon they hurled tons of steel at the rebels; and on the other hand, were these rude warriors who opposed to all this the masterly and unfathomable stratagems of the backwoodsman.

That pretty well sums up many guerrilla campaigns throughout history.

The government troops on Mount Favella had to stick it out; a retreat would be a disaster worse than that of the Moreira Cesar expedition. But they were very short on supplies. The rations rescued from the supply train plus what Savaget had left combined for three days’ supply for the entire group. Oscar pinned his hopes on a relief supply train coming to them, but there was none. The oxen that had pulled the great Whitworth up the mountain were slaughtered. The soldiers began spending more time hunting than fighting. A soldier would make his way among the rocks and brush, following the sound of goat bells, only to discover a waiting sertanejo jingling a bell, drawing him in for the kill. The cavalry, on weary, underfed horses — there is no grass atop Mount Favella, only thorns and rocks — the cavalry began rounding up what few cattle they could locate. Through all this came the incessant sniper fire and, suddenly, an all-out attack that would explode in fury for an hour or two, then melt back into cover. Soon the government troops ran low on water. With no relief in sight, by early July, soldiers began to desert.

The situation was desperate when, on the 11th of July, a scout rode into camp to announce that a brigade of reinforcements, more than a thousand men, and a large supply train was two days away. This good news was dampened when the leader of the relief expedition told General Oscar that the base at Monte Santo was more or less nonexistent, no one had bothered to organize it properly, and that this was all the relief that there was. They must attack Canudos or starve where they sit. The generals hashed out a plan. On July 18th, the troops assaulted the town. The plans disintegrated as the troops tried to move into Canudos. Units were broken up by the maze of alleyways between the houses where they tried to take cover. The sertanejos were quite aware that the mud walls would not stop a bullet and fired through them at the huddled troops. At day’s end Oscar’s expedition had suffered a further thousand casualties and was clinging to its hold on the edge of Canudos. Once again, the army was faced with a no retreat/no advance situation.

During the assault, Lieutenant Wanderly, charging forward, was shot and his leaping horse wound up wedged in a rock crevice. Wanderly’s body was recovered but the horse’s corpse remained frozen in a charge, its mane blowing in the breeze, muzzle pointed at Canudos, as it mummified under the sun.