Pacific Voyage

A New Account Of A Famous Pacific Voyage

The story of the mutiny on the Bounty has long had a fascination for Commander

Geoffrey Rawson, who, well be

fore World War I, began a sea faring life in sail.

ROUND about 1936, Commander Rawson published a book called Bligh of the Bounty, and later came Mary Bryant, the story of the convict woman who, with several com panions, escaped in an open boat from Sydney and reached Timor, only to be arrested by Captain Edward Edwards of HMS Pandora who had been sent out to arrest the Bounty mutineers.

Now, Commander Rawson has told the story of the Pandora's voyage in a book called Pandora’s Last Voyage, which incorporates some of the material in his previous two books.

Pandora’s Last Voyage is obviously a labour of love, and is a very read able account of one of the most notable and disastrous voyages in Pacific history.

It does what no other work on the subject has yet done—it says a few things in favour of Captain Edwards, who is invariably criticised for in humanity towards the Bounty mutineers he managed to capture, and for his failure to explore the

Pacific more thoroughly while he was looking for them.

However, a glance at Commander Rawson’s bibliography shows that he is not aware of any research that has been done on the subject of his book since 1936. As a result, his book is not as valuable as it might be.

Commander Rawson does not know, for example, that an account of the voyage of a schooner, which was built in Tahiti by James Morri son, the Bounty's boatswain’s mate, and which Captain Edwards con fiscated for use as a tender to the Pandora, was acquired by Sydney’s Mitchell Library a couple of years ago.

This has been the only first-hand account of the schooner’s voyage to come to light—and it filled in many gaps and corrected much of the data that had previously been available on it.

An article on the “lost manuscript” account of the schooner’s voyage ap peared in PIM in August, 1961 (p. 29). Another article, throwing new light on another aspect of the Pandora's voyage, which would have been of interest to Commander Rawson, appeared in PIM in Septem ber, 1962 (p. 77).

This goes to show (a) that anyone contemplating writing a book on the Pandora would do well to read PIM first, and (b) that such an author should not assume that, because an event happened nearly two centuries ago, no one is likely to find out any

thing new about it now.-

RL.

‘Pandoras Last Voyage,

Longmans. 37/3.)

The "Bounty" modern version. This is the one used in the film, starring Marlon Brando—and Peter Pinney.