Diana Preston recounts here the stories of several epic sea voyages of the late 18th-century, in particular those of Cook, Bligh, Phillip and convict Mary Bryant. There is no shortage of books about the British exploration of the Pacific and the First Fleet but for some reason a book that combines these themes in one convenient volume has not hitherto crossed my desk. That’s somewhat surprising, because Cook, Bligh and Phillip were all contemporaries produced and moulded by the British Navy of the mid to late 18th century. Indeed, Bligh served under Cook, and all three were conspicuous examples of the social mobility which that meritocratic albeit conservative institution could generate. Mary Bryant, of course, the escaping convict who sailed from Sydney to Timor, is the outlier in this cohort.

As the title suggests, Preston’s main focus is the very familiar tale of the Bounty mutiny, but she sets the mission of acquiring breadfruit seedlings in its larger imperial context (feeding Caribbean slaves whose food supply had been threatened by the American Revolution) while explicating the careers of her protagonists in the context of the British Navy of the late 18th century. As a bonus, we also get to see a fair bit of Joseph Banks, Boswell and Dr Johnson, all of whom knew each other and were to varying degrees concerned with, interested in or affected by the project of geographical and scientific discovery being undertaken in the South Pacific.

Preston’s take on the Bounty mutiny is fairly conventional, though she tends to fall on the side of those who stress Bligh’s defects as a leader over the lure of exotic females as the principal motivation of the mutineers.

Diana Preston does us the service of presenting aspects of a greater enterprise: Britain’s exploration of the Pacific and the colonisation of Australia. She does a good job in covering a lot of ground, and ocean, in a concise but not simplistic style.

Reviewed by Grant Hansen