It's fair to Captain Bligh, so often caricatured as a bully and a tyrant. For all his stock journalese – "he fumed", "Indeed", etc – he doesn't write a bad page in Men Without Country. His profile of Murray Wilson, mythologised as the Beast of Blenheim but in reality just a piece of shit wherever he went, was a tour-de-force, at once horrified and keenly observed. "My trade is journalism, and I have applied a journalistic method to the story."Īs a former Stuff journalist – he's now fished up in San Francisco – Christian was one of the more talented writers in New Zealand media. "My relation to Fletcher has no doubt coloured the contents of these pages, but I hope it hasn’t disqualified me from writing a balanced account," he writes. His father was born in Auckland, his grandfather was born on Norfolk Island, his fourth great-grandfather left Pitcairn Island for Norfolk Island in 1856, his fifth great-grandfather was one of three children fathered by Fletcher Christian after he arrived on Pitcairn in 1789. Harrison Christian briskly details his family tree in the Introduction to his book Men Without Country. The problem is that it never gets new, either. Once again with the story of the mutiny on the Bounty, this time from a direct descendant of Fletcher Christian, that complex revolutionary who toppled a form of royal household at sea and established one of the strangest and most fragile bicultural civilisations in the history of the South Pacific.
Steve Braunias reviews a new account of the mutiny on the Bounty
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