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Bounty

by Landeg White

DANGAROO Press 1993

Signed copies of this book can be purchased directly from the author.

Price: €7.99


The case is Christian’s mutiny. But your court
won’t stomach that Christian. It smells of
mercy. This tale’s awash like the Bounty’s
bilge with meanings no one wants. We were all there, you
all saw, Adams, black Matthew, gunner Mills,
by Christ, Adam’s mutiny! Jack Adams, John Doe,
every-man-Jack’s mutiny! But your Lords
need a hanging, not this tale rippling
Irishly like a stone in a green lagoon.

I remember the white untidy beach, my head
a washed-up coconut jumping with sandflies.
If my fiddle were jailed and not fathom
five in the Barrier reef singing to catfish
I’d strike up a jig the court martial
would dance to! Michael Byrne, Irish fiddler,
two thirds blind, on trial for my life.

I kissed that maid and went away.
Says she, “young man, why don’t ye stay?”

Reviews

“…. I praised Landeg White’s last book to the skies; Bounty is even better. Actually, it can’t be compared this brilliant account of the mutiny and its aftermath through the voice of Michael Byrne, Captain Bligh’s blind Irish fiddler, is a kind of balladic counterpoint to Derek Walcott’s epic Omerus … White’s so light on his feet that one wonders how Bligh and Fletcher et al come across so vividly, but they do. So does the incomprehension, the belief that we were (and are) being bountiful.”

The Observer

“White has an innately dramatic sense of how to make a story happen through what is not said, through lies, contradictions and silences … If, like me, you think you know what happened on the Bounty, read this book to discover that you don’t, and to relish this exposure of how an accepted history is made from a teeming, chaotic muddle of motives and passions.”

Poetry Review

“… a kind of Browningesque monologue by one of the mutineers, Michael Byrne … his blank verse is broken up by extremely effective brief switches to ballad and shanty and this alternates through much of the poem with episodes of Tahitian cosmology. Landeg White has retold this inexhaustible tale for our own times as an episode in Europe’s long appalling bounty to the rest of the world.”

Wasafiri