Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/250756
Writer Lucas Aykroyd snorkels at the InterContinental Resort, Moorea. (top right) A replica HMS Bounty sets sail; performers twirl fire at Moorea's Tiki Village. It's April 28, 1789, and mutiny is brewing on the HMS Bounty in the South Pacific. Commanded by tyrannical captain William Bligh, the ship is transporting breadfruit plants obtained in Tahiti as cheap food for West Indies slaves. But first mate Fletcher Christian and 18 other sailors are sick of Bligh's insults and floggings. Memories of the warm Tahitian weather, tropical food and beautiful women they've left behind are too much to resist. Christian leads an armed revolt, forcing Bligh and his loyalists off the 28-metre, 215-ton armed merchant ship into a small open boat. The mutineers sail back to Tahiti and whoop it up. Some later decamp to remote Pitcairn Island to escape justice but wind up fighting one another. Meanwhile, Bligh and his men survive a gruelling 47-day voyage to Timor, some 6,700 kilometres away in the Dutch East Indies. It remains the most famous mutiny in naval history. I grew up reading the 1930s-penned Mutiny on the Bounty trilogy by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall. I wrote and recorded a radio play based on the books in high school. I thrilled to the 20th century's multiple movie versions. Hollywood's quintessential bad boys have played Fletcher Christian, including Errol Flynn (1933), Clark Gable (1935), Marlon Brando (1962) and Mel Gibson (1984). This year, 2014, marks the 250th anniversary of Christian's birth, which has inspired me to travel to Tahiti and compare my experiences to those of the mutineers. As Brando stated in his 1994 autobiography: "The happiest moments of my life have been in Tahiti." How could I resist? T he eight-hour Air Tahiti Nui flight from Los Angeles to Tahiti is certainly more comfortable than the Bounty's 10-month slog from England. Instead of seasickness and salt pork, I get striking flight attendants with aquamarine eyeshadow that matches the decor, minimal turbulence and tasty meals graced by white tiare flowers. Even before landing, I can see why the word "jealous" invariably popped up when I told someone I was going to the largest of French Polynesia's Windward Islands. Papeete, the capital city, greets me with a pink sunset and humid 29 C weather. The laid-back port city, mingling classic French colonial architecture with cheerful, ramshackle modern buildings, is home to 26,000 of the 274,000 inhabitants of French Polynesia, which covers more than 4,000 square kilometres. (Nineteenth-century French Catholic missionaries were clearly more influential than 18th-century British sailors: Tahiti's been a French colony since 1880.) My room at the Manava Suite Resort features seashell-adorned walls and a king-size bed beneath a ceiling fan. After breakfasting on a chocolate croissant with coffee, I stroll down Avenue du Générale de Gaulle to admire the Bounty wall mosaic by Italian artist P. Volpatti. Measuring eight metres by four metres, it portrays sailors and natives exchanging greetings and gifts in vivid hues. The tension between Bligh – stiff and Napoleonic – and Christian – brooding and powerful – is palpable. Farther down the street sits the 1875-consecrated Notre Dame de L'Immaculée Conception, a butter-yellow Catholic cathedral made partly of coral. Inside the front door is a wooden statue of the Madonna and Child, with Jesus gripping a breadfruit – historically implausible but culturally sensitive, and something that might have resonated with the Bounty's breadfruit-gathering crew. Tahiti grows more than 200 varieties of this starchy plant. During their idyllic five-month stay, the sailors feasted on roast hogs, plantains and 24 W e s t w o r l d | S p r i n g 2 0 14 p22-27_Tahiti.indd 24 14-01-23 10:57 AM