We live and suffer in the Bounty’s launch, love her faithful obedience, rejoice with her when she reaches friendly beach at last.
This was a shrewd stroke, for who more likely than the doctor to be a student of men? So, without ever an intrusion of ‘literature,’ we get pure experience. The story is told in the person of Ledyard, flic ship’s surgeon. The wind and weather of the narrative, they tell us, are those of Bligh’s own log. By some miracle of study or temperament Nordhoff and Hall have written two classics of the eighteenth century, and have set them permanently on the shelf of sea adventure. There was no reader of Mutiny on the Bounty who did not hanker to follow the adventures of Bligh and his men when they were cast adrift by the mutineers. I will not pretend to speak coldly of this grand book yet I must not be too detailed lest I spoil some of its thrill. That appetite and that meal, and much more besides, are waiting for you in Men Against the Sea. And you will sharpen this appetite with memories of the turtle too big to hold, the fish they did not catch, canoes and arrows pursuing in the moonlight, and the face of Bligh at the tiller all night in the gale. They did not land again until they got inside the Great Barrier Beef. I should have said eighteen men: one was killed by the Indians on Tofoa. Nineteen men in an open boat only twenty-three feet long, six foot nine inches beam so overburdened that even in calm water the sea licked your hand on the gunwale. But to have Bligh’s appetite you must have been twenty-six days at sea in an open boat have sailed some 2500 miles of uncharted ocean (and a thousand yet to go), without firearms and past islands where you dared not land among hostile savages have lived on two ounces of bread and a gill of water per day - with the blood and scraps of a sea bird it you could strike it down with a stick.
0 kommentar(er)
