Robby's South Pacific Readings - position 9°30 S 130°4 4 W
Canopus 3 on the Blue Water Rally
Jean Michel Coulon
Fri 21 Mar 2008 02:15
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We have been sailing with two headsails since the
16th and have enjoyed almost ideal conditions for a fast passage, but the winds
are now slowly subsiding, and within a day or so we may be motoring again.
At the moment, however, we still have around 15 knots of wind pushing us along
at 7.5 to 8 knots, not bad at all.
Last night's watch proved to be my easiest
yet--the gentler winds meant less extreme boat motion and less need to worry
about gusts damaging the balooner, and despite failing to get any sleep that
afternoon I was sufficiently alert to read (at the chart table) for a good part
of the watch rather than sit in the cockpit counting the times my head
jerked as I began falling asleep. This morning I finished The
Bounty, by Caroline Alexander, which, along with my previoius book;
Melville's Typee, is replete with adventures in areas we will be
visiting. Unlike Typee, however, Bounty is a remarkable
(if occasionally too detailed) work of scholarship that interprets with flair,
to take one example, the impact of the French Revolution and the
Cambridge-based abolitionist movement on popular perceptions of Captain Bligh
when the brother of chief mutineer Fletcher Christian organized a campaign to
salvage Fletcher's reputation by damaging Bligh's.
Alexander argues that it was Bligh's "ill luck to
have his own great adventure coincide exactly with the dawn of this new era,
which saw devotion to a code of duty and established authority as less
honorable than the celebration of individual passions and liberty." She
posits Christian as the forerunner of the "Romantic hero to be glamorized by
Byron," though she later points out that Byron came down strongly on Bligh's
side. "Perhaps Byron's uncharacteristic disapproval of so romantic a
figure arose from pique; a wounded sense that Fletcher Christian--his long hair
loose, his shirt collar open--had out-Byroned Byron." As for Fletcher's
brother, he died, according to a cousin, "in the full vigour of his
incapacity." What a marvelous way to savage someone!
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