A month-by-month account of the story of the famous ship Bounty, plus background on the mutiny and the people involved.

Who has not heard of the mutiny on the Bounty? For two hundred years this event has fired the imagination of millions of people, countless books have been written on it, and five motion pictures—so far—dramitized it on the screen. This book is unique in the literature on the mutiny and is the first companion volume to the story. The first part, the Bounty Chronicle, gives a panoramic, yet detailed, month-by-month account of the events, starting before the Bounty’s departure and ending with Fletcher Christian’s death on Pitcairn Island. It even chronicles Captain Bligh’s second breadfruit expedition of which so many people are unaware. The second part of the book, the Bounty Encyclopedia, is full of all the exciting and fascinating details surrounding this great story.

The South Seas charts the idea of the South Seas in popular cultural productions of the English-speaking world, from the beginnings of the Western enterprise in the Pacific until the eve of the Pacific War. Building on the notion that the influences on the creation of a text, and the ways in which its audience receives the text, are essential for understanding the historical significance of particular productions, Sean Brawley and Chris Dixon explore the ways in which authors’ and producers’ ideas about the South Seas were “haunted” by others who had written on the subject, and how they in turn influenced future generations of knowledge producers. The South Seas is unique in its examination of an array of cultural texts. Along with the foundational literary texts that established and perpetuated the South Seas tradition in written form, the authorsexplore diverse cultural forms such as art, music, theater, film, fairs, platform speakers, surfing culture, and tourism.

In the grand tradition of Patrick O'Brian, this new installment in Julian Stockwin's epic Napoleonic-era naval adventure series re-creates one of history's most notorious naval insurrections. With all the wind-whipped passion and salty authenticity that only a veteran naval lieutenant commander could bring to the fiction table, bestselling author Julian Stockwin continues the acclaimed saga of seaman Thomas Paine Kydd as he takes on the most perilous venture of his career. The year is 1797. Kydd has been at sea four long, hard years, ever since he was pressed into service. Despite that inauspicious start to his naval career, he has learned to love his life aboard ship. It's in his blood. It's in his soul. Having now risen to the rate of master's mate, Kydd volunteers to join the crew of the frigate Bacchante in a mission to rescue a British diplomat mired in the hostilities of Napoleon's siege of Venice. The city is surrounded. It will soon fall to Napoleon, and the diplomat will be trapped unless Kydd and the men from Bacchante can help him escape. Stockwin's rousing narrative follows Kydd and his mysterious seafaring mate Nicholas Renzi across the Mediterranean to a rendezvous with danger, and then back toward an even greater challenge -- a harrowing fleet mutiny. As the king's loyal servant, Kydd must decide whether to join his shipmates in their uprising. The cause is just -- sailors' pay has not been raised for a century and a half! But to mutiny is to commit the ultimate treason against king and country. Will Kydd honor his pledge to his sovereign lord, or will he stand by his friends? Kydd faces the most difficult decision of his life in this richly nuanced novel from a master storyteller whose naval expertise and love for the sea shine through on every page.

From internationally bestselling author Julian Stockwell comes a dramatic story closely based on real events following one man’s journey as he becomes a true sailor and defender of Britain. Europe is ablaze with war. The British prime minister is under pressure to intimidate the French and dispatches a Navy squadron to appear off the French coast. To man the ships, ordinary citizens must be press-ganged. Thomas Paine Kydd, a young wig-maker from Guildford, is seized and taken across the country to be part of the crew of the ninety-eight-gun line-of-battle ship Duke William. The ship sails immediately and Kydd has to learn the harsh realities of shipboard life fast. Despite all he goes through, amid dangers of tempest and battle, he comes to admire the skills and courage of his fellow seamen, taking up the challenge himself to become a true sailor and defender of Britain at war. Kydd launches a masterly writing talent and is the first installment of a thrilling new series. Based on dramatic real events, it is classic storytelling at its best, rich with action, exceptional characters, and a page-turning narrative.

"Following the commercial and critical success of his first book, Typee, Herman Melville continued his series of South Seas adventure-romances with Omoo. Melville's second book chronicles the narrator's involvement in a mutiny aboard a South Seas whaling vessel, his incarceration in a Tahitian jail, and then his wanderings as an omoo, or rover, on the island of Eimeo (Moorea). Based on Melville's personal experience as a sailor on a South Pacific whaleship, Omoo is a first-person account of life as a sailor during the nineteenth century, filled with colorful characters and detailed descriptions of the far-flung locales of Polynesia."--BOOK JACKET.

From the first European contact with Tahiti in 1767, the myth of the South Sea maiden has endured through many incarnations. Although the maiden frequently provided an idealized antidote to Western women's self-assertion, the South Pacific also afforded a space where boundaries between the sexes could be relaxed and transgressed. From James Cook and Captain Bligh to James Michener and Margaret Mead, the Island girl has occupied a special place in the erotic imagination of the West. In a sweeping study that embraces history, literature, visual arts, anthropology and film, this study gives fresh insight into the myths and reality of a Western icon. While women from far off lands have always been presented as exotic and alluring, the South Sea maiden has come to symbolize feminine sexuality, as an integral part of the adventure, sensuality, and romance of the South Pacific. Everyone from early explorers to 19th century writers and artists to latter day anthropologists, film makers, and tourism promoters have extolled their virtues and their bodies. Sturma looks behind the popular clich^D'es to reveal how the myth-making process reflected not only Western desires, but the cut and thrust of changing sexual politics. The result is an intriguing look at both South Sea image-makers and the women whom they found so seductive.

'He writes history like nobody else. He thinks like nobody else ... He sees the world as a whole, with its limitless fund of stories' Bryan Appleyard, Sunday Times Where have the people in any particular place actually come from? What are the historical complexities in any particular place? This evocative historical journey around the world shows us. 'Human history is a tale not just of constant change but equally of perpetual locomotion', writes Norman Davies. Throughout the ages, men and women have endlessly sought the greener side of the hill. Their migrations, collisions, conquests and interactions have given rise to the spectacular profusion of cultures, races, languages and polities that now proliferates on every continent. This incessant restlessness inspired Davies's own. After decades of writing about European history, and like Tennyson's ageing Ulysses longing for one last adventure, he embarked upon an extended journey that took him right round the world to a score of hitherto unfamiliar countries. His aims were to test his powers of observation and to revel in the exotic, but equally to encounter history in a new way. Beneath Another Sky is partly a historian's travelogue, partly a highly engaging exploration of events and personalities that have fashioned today's world - and entirely sui generis. Davies's circumnavigation takes him to Baku, the Emirates, India, Malaysia, Mauritius, Tasmania, Tahiti, Texas, Madeira and many places in between. At every stop, he not only describes the current scene but also excavates the layers of accumulated experience that underpin the present. He tramps round ancient temples and weird museums, summarises the complexity of Indian castes, Austronesian languages and Pacific explorations, delves into the fate of indigenous peoples and of a missing Malaysian airliner, reflects on cultural conflict in Cornwall, uncovers the Nazi origins of Frankfurt airport and lectures on imperialism in a desert oasis. 'Everything has its history', he writes, 'including the history of finding one's way or of getting lost.' The personality of the author comes across strongly - wry, romantic, occasionally grumpy, but with an endless curiosity and appetite for knowledge. As always, Norman Davies watches the historical horizon as well as what is close at hand, and brilliantly complicates our view of the past.

The mutiny on HMS Bounty, in the South Pacific on 28 April 1789, is one of history's truly great stories - a tale of human drama, intrigue and adventure of the highest order - and in the hands of Peter FitzSimons it comes to life as never before. Commissioned by the Royal Navy to collect breadfruit plants from Tahiti and take them to the West Indies, the Bounty's crew found themselves in a tropical paradise. Five months later, they did not want to leave. Under the leadership of Fletcher Christian most of the crew mutinied soon after sailing from Tahiti, setting Captain William Bligh and 18 loyal crewmen adrift in a small open boat. In one of history's great feats of seamanship, Bligh navigated this tiny vessel for 3618 nautical miles to Timor. Fletcher Christian and the mutineers sailed back to Tahiti, where most remained and were later tried for mutiny. But Christian, along with eight fellow mutineers and some Tahitian men and women, sailed off into the unknown, eventually discovering the isolated Pitcairn Island - at the time not even marked on British maps - and settling there. This astonishing story is historical adventure at its very best, encompassing the mutiny, Bligh's monumental achievement in navigating to safety, and Fletcher Christian and the mutineers' own epic journey from the sensual paradise of Tahiti to the outpost of Pitcairn Island. The mutineers' descendants live on Pitcairn to this day, amid swirling stories and rumours of past sexual transgressions and present-day repercussions. Mutiny on the Bounty is a sprawling, dramatic tale of intrigue, bravery and sheer boldness, told with the accuracy of historical detail and total command of story that are Peter FitzSimons' trademarks.