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PITCAIRN ISLAND, South Pacific. It is one of those places you either have heard of & know about--its history & significance; or haven't heard & don't give a damn about. As a child I was not attracted by Pitcairn, Bligh, HMAV Bounty, or Fletcher Christian. I only became interested in the island because my parents were going to Pitcairn (by sailing ship) for its 1990 biCentennial celebrations, as well as an extended voyage of the central South Pacific, taking in Rarotonga (discovered by Christian & Bounty after the mutiny), Tahiti, Moorea, & other islands significant to the story. As a preparation to this voyage (which they decided to go on in mid-1988), they took a ten-day trip on the sail-training vessel Eye of the Wind in March 1989, a year before the Pitcairn trip was to begin. At this point I had not decided to go, but some months after their short trip round Southern Tasmania from Hobart to Port Davey, the ship came into Beauty Point on the Tamar River, near Launceston, where we lived, & they took me down to meet & visit the ship & the crewmembers they knew.

It was a cloudy, cold Saturday 8th of April, 1989. Along with several dozen other spectators we stood on the wharf at Beauty Point, watching the pair of tiny spikes that were the Eye's mastheads slowly grow in the distance, before the ship (Hermaphrodite Brigantine, actually) herself hove into view.

For some of us, there are moments which later stick in the mind as being especially significant; loaded with import. Taken in isolation, they are fulcrums, pivotal points in life. For me, one of these was the first clear looks I got at the Eye, as she lost headway coming upstream, & turned under power, to tie up at the wharf. I have always been interested in the sea & ships (tho' never Bounty, oddly enough), as a result of my Paternal seafaring family; seamen, captains & so on. I was brought up with Cutty Sark, Mayflower, Santa Maria, Ark Royal, Victory, Hood, Drake, Nelson & Cook & others, like Australian children are brought up with the First Fleet, Bradman, Lawson & Banjo Patterson. My childhood toys were ships, not cars or cricket bats & footies. As a result I have always had an affinity for ships, their lines, shapes, & especially their movement. Despite the fact that I live on a river on an island with a strong maritime tradition, I had never really seen ships in their own environment, moving with the waves.

I could almost feel the personality of the Eye, as she turned like a huge, silent, strong animal, with the mass & smooth power of a whale or a dinosaur. People were clustered on her deck, but people on a ship always seem slightly divorced from what the ship does & how she moves, as if they are somehow being carried by some giant, gentle sentient organism.

In that moment, as she turned, as if to face us, I sensed what it was I had been simulating with decades of waterline plastic ship models, strewn across the carpets of my home. That was what my ships had done, almost deceptive in their ability to woo you into thinking they were alive & independent. She moved, she swung & turned & rose & fell slightly on the tiny swell, just like I had always imagined ships did, as I pushed those frequently-stepped-on plastic waterline 1:700 models up & down on the carpet. This was what it was all about! This was the essence of what ships are: those silent, mysterious women that capture the minds of men & (more recently other) women. They are not machines. They are not soulless like cars when compared to horses. They are not stiff, noisy, smelly arrogant beasts like aircraft, whose only majesty is in their size & noise & speed.

Ships are different, in a spiritual way, like steam trains have magic, but not diesels. Ask an ardent trainspotter. It's a religion. A mystical cult. In that moment I was transfixed. Taken. Converted. Convinced it would be more than a hell of an experience to go to Pitcairn (or anywhere) if only I could stand on her deck as she moved, be taken & carried & held in the dark of a rough night in that silent, compassionate embrace.

Standing the same afternoon on her decks it wasn't the same, for two reasons. One is because ships are like mountains: you can only experience them whole, from a distance; when you are on it it's not a mountain, just sloping land you are standing on.

The other reason is that things & feelings pass on, they don't stay. Like lovemaking & winning a race & the first step on the Moon, the moment arrives, is here, & goes; becomes past. You may relive it in memory, or on film or sound, but that is a recording, not the primary experience. You also remember the feeling that this is a pivotal point, but you remember it as a pivotal point, not the hazy, dizzy, almost hallucinogenic feeling of the moment, the climax, the triumph, the first step, without any perception or analysis.

Ships are different for other reasons. They are worlds in isolation; miniatures of the wider experience of all of us. They restrict us in ways normal life does not. When we are on ships, & especially at sea, we are limited much more dramatically than on land, save when we are trapped in a lift or in a prison. Few prisons are as small as ships. Even prisons have more floors, corridors & outside space than all but the largest of ships. They may have fences & locked doors, but still exercise yards where the rest of the world is only a few feet away; visiting hours, where the rest of the world is fleetingly visible; even TV! Ships do not. They have no space outside the walls, no bare earth, no gardens, no place that is not synthetic & unnatural-- wood, steel, aluminium, & there for a reason. The world is both something you are cut off from, & yet also it is on every side. The world of a ship is both continually changing & unchanging at once. The sea is always rising & falling, clouds, sun, moon & stars move across the sky; yet the same: sea, waves, wind, sky, light & dark. Now & then there is a whale, or a seabird, or another ship. Storms, calms. There is a unique & for humans essentially unnatural duality at sea. The world of the sea is everywhere around & yet cut off from everything else. The ship moves across the surface while remaining almost entirely separate from actions & occurrences elsewhere. More importantly, the people aboard are limited by the ship. They cannot get off, or get away from each other. Like a prison they are limited to the cellmates they have chosen to be with.

All good & bad feelings are contained within the ship--love, hate, fear, envy, joy, gratitude, greed. Whatever happens, happens only to those aboard, no-one else is immediately affected, tho' inevitably the ship must come to land. When it does the world is again present conventionally, & takes part directly in the life of the ship & those aboard, instead of operating only in the minds of the crew. The rest of the world is after all the reason for the ship, very few people ever take ship simply to be rid of the care & problems of the wider world, & those that do find that some of the problems follow, & others replace those shed entirely. You cannot escape the world on a ship, you merely take pieces of it with you, & restrict yourself to who & what was brought. You can never get away from the other people aboard, save by three ways, & two of them are terrible & dreadful choices, not taken lightly or without severe consequences. You may leave the ship when next it docks at land; you may suicide by leaving it in person or by boat, or you may force others to leave, changing the people or problem aboard by removing them & not yourself.

These three choices were available to the crew of Bounty, & all were used at varying times. There were no other choices, & that is why the desperate men aboard used all three to try & save themselves, when they no longer had any choice. Restriction breeds desperation, the narrower the world the less safe it becomes. When your world is 90'x24'x12', & 43 other men, it is narrow indeed, & your choices correspondingly few. Few choices can lead to desperate attempts & tragic consequences.

Imagine, if you will, Michael Douglas (sans accent) in ROMANCING THE STONE as Captain James Cook: tall, imposing, beetle-browed, cantankerous, foul-mouthed, charismatic & strong. Loved & respected by all. Only on his last voyage was there ambiguity & confusion, unwarranted violence, & thus disaster.

Then, Danny Devito, in the same movie, as Lieutenant William Bligh; modelled on Cook & a great Navigator & sailor in his own right, but without Cook's Right Stuff...Devito has the skills, but not the height, the authority, the imposing frightening look when roused. He is merely a caricature, a short, effeminate, pale copy of Cook. Hence his discipline problem. When he shouts & swears, no-one takes him seriously the way they do with Cook. He appears ridiculous rather than frightening, a dangerous thing in a closed environment. Bligh ruled with power but without authority. One without the other can be a perilous existence.

Add to this his inability to bridge the gap between foul-weather competence & fair-weather incompetence. He could not feel safe & calm when he was not being taxed to the full. Thus the need to denigrate those around himself. In order to feel strong he needed weak men around him, men he felt could not do without him. When everyone worked well in good weather there was nothing for Bligh to do, & so he reduced others & built himself.

Without commissioned officers to maintain the position of lonely commander, Bligh's friendship with Fletcher bridged that gap & confused the crew & confused the normal order of a ship. His poor relationship with the cowardly, incompetent Fryer & over-sensitive Purcell meant the normal command & communication structure was upset, & moreso by Fletcher's position as Executive Officer with official rank. Most of all his inability to let things be...chipping away at the self-esteem of others in good weather & overbearingly protective & considerate of them in storm & bad weather...Bligh was a package of disaster-mismanagement, made worse by Fletcher's oversensitivity & eventual inability to cope beyond a certain level of stress. Neither one is entirely guilty, both should not have been there. Bligh should have had a ground command where his subordinates could escape him & him them, where the pressures of confinement were off. Fletcher should have been with another commander, without his too-close & too-passionate relationship with Bligh. Irrespective of whether it was homosexual, the relationship was too deep for safety aboard a ship. Good friends can become great enemies, love & hate are very similar emotions, & without an authoritarian, absolute command structure free of confusion & ambiguity there will be disaster when relationships sour & personal feelings interfere with everyday shipboard life. You cannot escape form your shipmates without land or drastic action, as we will see.

There are dangerous ambiguities. Bligh's inconsistency: friendly, if careful one minute, then fire-spitting & foul the next, an hour later cool & calm & acting as if all transgressions are forgotten. Bligh's personal method of letting off his own tensions on his crew (on a ship where there can be no escape from anyone else) is a ticking bomb waiting to go off, waiting till he pushes Fletcher too far, & the catalyst of Ned Young (the Rudolf Hess of Bounty) whispering "If I were you I'd take the ship..." makes Fletcher decide that it should be Bligh & not himself that should leave Bounty to save the situation... Where is Ned during the mutiny?! He vanishes...

Later, on Pitcairn, it is the grief & guilt-stricken Fletcher who abdicates the star-role & the mysterious Ned Young who takes charge, from literally behind the scenery...pushing the others into corners they can't get out off, till most of the white & all the Tahitian men are dead & only he & John Adams remain, progenitors, having formed, almost, a tiny plantation in miniature, with slaves & masters, power relationships without escape mechanism, of other plantations, or other people, to save the situation. On Pitcairn, as well as not being able to leave because you have no boats (& the nearest island is 350 miles away), you are lumbered with a tiny area, a speck of coral uplift in the middle of nowhere only two miles long & a mile wide, less than the metropolitan area of most major cities. It is surrounded by 200 foot cliffs, & has hardly any flat land at all. There is only one beach & only one place that approximates a harbour-& they are not even at the same place! Most of Pitcairn in 1790--& today--was covered with tropical vegetation, & was steep. Pitcairn is basically the top of a hill, some of it above the Pacific. Only about 1/25 of it was cultivatable. This meant those who arrived & those descended from them had only a limited amount to work from. Add to that the fact that there were not enough women, so that the Tahitians & Tubuians (the latter left over from an earlier attempt to colonise an already inhabited island) had to share three between them while the nine white remaining mutineers had one each, & there is another example of resources being stretched beyond capacity. Just why these restrictions are important will become obvious later.

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