The historical story of the Mutiny on the Bounty has been filmed not three but four times, starting with an Australian film of little consequence except for the appearance of a young Errol Flynn, then moving on to the versions with Clark Gable (still the best), Marlon Brando, and Mel Gibson. In all of those, Fletcher Christian is treated as a tragic hero.
(Yes, I know that only the Gable and Brando versions are based on the novels by Nordhoff and Hall. They are all still based on the historical event.)
The implication at the end of the Gable version at least, and to a lesser extent the Gibson version, is that the mutineers had found their refuge from civilization and got to live happily ever after.
What amazes me about THE BOUNTY story is that nobody has made a full-length movie about the mutineers turning against one another on Pitcairn Island. We know exactly what happened there, and it is a fine parable of male entitlement and white privilege, which seems to me to be *made* for the movies.
What happened is that Christian and the mutineers took the BOUNTY back to Tahiti to pick up the women they’d dallied with, as well as some men to help round out their crew.
As dramatized, the women loved these whites so much they were happy to go, and maybe they were; but one factor is that the Tahitian King ordered them and the other dragooned sailors to go, because he wanted plausible deniability. He was not an idiot and wanted no war with the British Empire. So the native men and the women who went with them were taking a hit, for their homeland, and they might have been unhappy indeed. (Some BOUNTY sailors decided to stay on Tahiti and wait for British justice, and it largely did not go well for them.)
The mutineers knew that there was no place they could go, anywhere in the known world, where they wouldn’t be imprisoned as criminals, so they ventured to an island they knew about that nobody ever went to, Pitcairn. It was ideal in part because it had no harbor and was therefore not a useful port. Uninhabited at the time, it was a fine, sleepy little paradise, self-sustaining, if you want to lounge around all day doing almost no work.
The mutineers stripped the BOUNTY of supplies and burned it to keep it from being spotted, then settled down to what they imagined would be a life of ease.
So for a while the mutineers lived with their native women (some of whom, we are now sophisticated enough to understand, may not have appreciated the finality of the deal they were making), raising families, and then one day, one of the mutineers found himself a widower.
Tough luck.
Except that, however justified you imagine the mutiny to have been, it is a crime that once committed, is easier to commit a second time.
The bereaved man went to Christian, their leader, and demanded that he order one of the Tahitian men to hand over his woman, or at least share her. He had more rights to a woman than this brown savage!
The Tahitians resented this. Some of the mutineers thought Christian should throw his weight around, make them buckle under.
Honestly, these people were living in peace — with or without tensions — until this one white guy decided that the brown people were interchangeable.
I do not recall whether Christian took the part of his fellow white men or of the Tahitians, but either way, the situation escalated, and he was reduced to hiding in a cave on the island while anybody who had not been killed was out for his head.
When Pitcairn *was* finally revisited by another British ship, they found only one lone surviving mutineer, and a handful of children — the ancestors of everybody living on Pitcairn today. No further adults had survived.
A parable for how white male entitlement will wipe out civilization.
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