Rating: 
Summary: What Great History!
Review: This book is interesting. It gives a great and detailed history of the ship Bounty. With her tyrant captain (William Bligh) and the admirable Fletcher Christian the ship sails from England to the south sea island of Tahiti. The whole crew recieves either physical or verbal abuse by Captain Bligh. Finally Christian becomes sick of it and gets most of the crew to rise in mutiny... You will have to read the book to find out the rest of this exciting story. Told in the words of the innocent midshipman, Roger Byam, who is wrongly found guilty of mutiny and condemned to death, this is a classic few can forget. Read this exciting book and I guaranty that you will love it's adventure and suspense. You won't be disappointed!
Rating:
Summary: Mutiny on the Bounty
Review: This is a wonderful book about the taking of the ship Bounty
by its crew. It is well written much in the character of a
romance novel. The work teaches the futility of managing
small groups via coercion and excess force. Captain Bligh
is nowhere near the equal of Fletcher Christian in managing
the crew and handling daily ministerial decisions.
In almost every instance, Captain Bligh resolves conflict
with excessive punishment and flippant directives.
With every moment, the crew resents his presence even more.
The readers can appreciate the easy contrast between Captain
Bligh and Fletcher Christian. Further into the novel,
a military court procedure leaves the judges perplexed
and ultimately disappointed in the disproportionate
punishments administered by Captain Bligh. Near the end of
the novel, his judgment is questioned and the audience
develops more sympathy for the person of Fletcher Christian
and his crew. The novel portrays a beautiful wilderness and
island paradise replete with exotic wildlife and fresh
fruit of every color and taste. Students will debate this
novel for years to come. It is appropriate for the high
school reading audience.
Rating: 
Summary: A farcical defense of pirates.
Review: We will probably never know exactly what occurred aboard HMS Bounty to cause a piratical Fletcher Christian to cast off Lt. Bligh and 18 other men in a 23 foot lauch to face near certain death either at the hand of savage islanders or the brutal open sea. But let me hazard a guess that events most certainly did not unfold as presented by Messrs. Nordhoff & Hall.The authors' attempts to cast Christian as Melville's Handsome Sailor and Bligh as Forester's crazed Captain Sawyer are at best laughable and at worst slanderous to the name of an officer whose only faults appear to be a salty tongue and a tendency to coddle his men. It is axiomatic that pirates and mutineers are not noble men, and it is difficult to present a captain who promotes sailors to avoid putting his officers on watch and watch, who allows his friends on board (including Fletcher) free and full access to his grog, and who took great pains to return those who remained loyal to civilization (losing only a single man to island savages) as an unrepentant tyrant. It appears that Bligh is an imperfect leader, perhaps evidenced most strongly by the fact that the Bounty was not the only mutiny the man suffered, nevertheless, historical documents related to the events described in N&H's work suggest that their presentation of these events is one-sided in the extreme. Bligh's problem, it appears, is that he would give an inch, his men would take a mile, and then eventually Bligh would berate his men to return the ship to order. I recommend to the reader The Bounty Muntiny, which consists of a number of documents written or released by Bligh and Fletcher's brother Edward in the years following the mutiny. Although these documents raise more questions than they answer, they suggest "blame" for the historical events cannot so easily be laid at Bligh's door. That book also reveals the interesting choices N&H made in editing the courtmartial proceedings they present. Notably failing to mention that Heywood (the mutineer on which Byam's character is likely based) was seen with a cutlass close at hand during the mutiny and fabricating testimony to shore-up the fairy-tales invented by the mutineers. If I were to hazard a guess, I would suggest that the dissipation resulting from a crew spending months at leisure in the tropics among libidinous women and food and drink far superior to a ship's stores was a much larger motivation for the mutiny than Bligh's foul language. But, then again, maybe one's view of the mutiny depends much less upon the actual facts of the matter than upon whether one values ordered liberty or Godless, Freemasonic, French Revolutionary-esque hedonism.
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