History: Reviews of New Books | 2019
World War II at Sea: A Global History
Abstract
brigandage, cruelty and all kinds of disorders reign” (7), she again quotes from Salmond (91), who in turn quoted from John Dunmore (Dunmore, trans. and ed., The Pacific Journal of Louis-Antoine de Bougainville [Cambridge University Press, 2002], p. xl). In presenting Hawkesworth’s characterization of the Tahitians’ sexual mores (25), she quotes from Richard Holmes’s The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (Pantheon 2008), rather than from Hawkesworth (1773). Given that she has had the riches of the British Library and splendid university libraries so readily at hand, this practice is puzzling. There are also lapses because Preston too readily accepts details from original sources at face value, especially the accuracy of Bligh’s A Voyage to the South Seas (1792). It was not Bligh’s idea to urge Polynesian migration to New Holland. That was James Burney’s insertion, supported by Banks. The account given by the Tahitian woman Te’ehuteatuaonoa (“Jenny”) is, by no means, “one of the few independent accounts of Fletcher Christian’s voyage to Pitcairn Island and his life and death there” (xii). In fact, there are three versions of two separate interviews with Jenny, all of which have been edited and shaped by European assumptions. (It is impossible that an illiterate Polynesian woman who, at best, spoke only halting English, should have said that John Adams prayed extempore, for example.) Although Preston acknowledges the contradictions and uncertainties of the various accounts of what happened on Pitcairn Island, she nonetheless builds her case on some details that are, at best, doubtful. There are also significant gaps in Preston’s knowledge of the relevant historical literature. Unaware of my detailed analysis of the hulks system of 1776–87 (“Overcrowded Hulls, Foetid Sinks?”, Botany Bay Mirages: Illusions of Australia’s convict beginnings [Melbourne University Press 1994], pp. 9–41), she repeats the standard lurid picture of conditions on them, ignoring the very real improvements that Duncan Campbell progressively introduced, as well as his innovative rehabilitation and early release scheme. In addition, “by the end of the American War (1782/3)” (44) there were not five hulks in use. There were two on the Thames, with a third added in 1785; one was commissioned at Plymouth in 1784, and another at Portsmouth in 1785. In common with others, Preston ignores the fact that progress by Admiralty commission or appointment by Navy Board warrant represented separate career paths in the Royal Navy. She, thus, repeats the old saw that Bligh’s appointment of Christian to acting lieutenant must have humiliated John Fryer, the fallacy of which Rolf Du Rietz exposed in 1979. (Incidentally, she lists none of Du Rietz’s incisive essays on Bounty matters in her bibliography.) Preston is unreliable, as well, about the disease that ravaged the Aboriginal population about Sydney in mid-1789 (282). It is by no means clear that it was smallpox; one recent medically informed view suggests that it was, rather, chicken pox. If it was smallpox, however, it is also uncertain from whence it came. Smallpox would have been much more likely to have been introduced to northern Australia by contact with infected Macassan fishermen, then spread southwards through Aboriginal populations, than by contact with the Europeans at Sydney. In a larger perspective, there are questions of balance and relevance in this work. Preston’s coverage of Phillip’s slow but steady progress with the colony is meager in comparison to her lengthy and extraneous story of William and Mary Bryant and their companions’ escape from Sydney to Timor in an open boat. This is a noteworthy story, but it has just about nothing to do with the colony’s fortunes. Neither is it easy to find the relevance of James Boswell’s sexual proclivities to the story of the colony, on the one hand, nor of the butcheries of the Paris mob to the court-martial of the surviving Bounty mutineers, on the other. Finally, what on earth does the title signify? True, Bligh termed Tahiti “the Paradise of the World,” and, like other European visitors, the Bounty’s initially found this to be so. The Tahitians were not in chains, however, and the Europeans who elected to stay there when Christian sailed off were only enchained once Captain Edwards arrested them, by which time their lives on Tahiti had turned precarious. The convicts who were sent to New South Wales in the First, Second, and Third Fleets did arrive in chains. What they came to was, in its early years, very far from a paradise, what with famine, illness, theft, and conflict with the Aborigines. Even then, the convicts were only closely confined again if they reoffended. Preston’s account of the Bounty’s voyage and its aftermaths is, unfortunately, no better than older flawed ones. There are many more detailed and reliable accounts of the convict colony’s progress.