CBR16 Bingo – Bananas: A lot of people eat a lot of bananas across several centuries and a number of South Pacific islands. Also, this story is utterly bananas.
Several centuries after the mutineers from the HMS Bounty settled Pitcairn Island, author Brandon Presser goes to visit this isolated place, where he tries to understand how the bloody and conflicted past has shaped the present day lives of the descendants.
Considering how much I enjoy true crime and strange stories, it’s probably odd that I never really dug into the famous story of the mutiny on the Bounty until now. There’s plenty of movies and books covering the topic, after all, and I have even attempted to tackle a few of them. But I always had the sense that the story was only half told. The tellings often focus primarily on the mutineers, but the Tahitians surely were as integral to understanding the story as them, and yet they are often overlooked.
Presser makes an effort to remedy this, and this alone would make for a satisfying read. Presser alternates between the past and present, writing the puzzled out events that led to the settlement on Pitcairn as narrative nonfiction, as well as his own recounting of his time living on Pitcairn, where he got to know the residents and the fascinating way in which they are both trapped and sustained by the Bounty story. Though some elements of the narrative nonfiction sections were probably a stretch, Presser explained his sources and reasons for conjecture in sufficient detail that it didn’t bother me.
However, I was rather disappointed how briefly Presser addresses the rampant child sexual abuse that was happening on Pitcairn in at least the last few decades of the 1900s, especially considering he lives with and meets some of the men who were convicted in the case. That this chapter is at the very end of the book, after he and the reader have cohabited with these people for most of the book, made me feel almost like the author was trying to gloss over it. Perhaps it would have been beyond the scope of the story, but to barely acknowledge it made me feel that we were missing an essential part of the reckoning.