Poets and The Islands

LONG before Tennyson imagin atively pictured the South Sea Islands in “Locksley Hall” (“Poet’s Imagery,” in February PIM), Byron had a go at it in a poem concerning the Bounty mutiny.

There is no copy of the noble lord’s work available at the moment; but the poem contains (I think) the famous line about “happy isles without a law,” and also something about bread growing as a fruit.

The poem was written primarily in praise of Bligh, who was the idol of England when he returned after the open-boat voyage from Tonga to Timor. In those days Fiji was known as Bligh’s Islands, and it was not until long afterwards that Bligh’s stock slumped and a senti mentalised version of Fletcher Christian emerged, as something of a champion of human rights against a tyrannical mons'er, (As a Bounty student for 21 years, the writer maintains that the truth lies about

half-way between).

“Isles without a law,” whether happy or otherwise, was nonsense even in Byron’s day, but both he and Tennyson produced a truer version than R. M. Ballantyne, whose boys’ classic, “The Coral Island,” was full of excruciating absurdities. Like the two poets, Ballantyne never visited the South

Pacific, and when some of his Islands disasters came home to roost, he vowed that never again would he write of places he did not know.—S.