Interesting

While I was at the cabin I read two books:

The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty

by Caroline Alexander

and

A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World

by Tony Horwitz

Both are books that I've read several times.

I knew some of the history of the Mutiny, but the big question still is:

Why did Fletcher Christian do it?

What was his motivation?

I've seen the 1962 Marlon Brando movie version

as well as

the 1984 Anthony Hopkins and Mel Gibson version entitled The Bounty.

(In light of recent events, it is a little difficult to admit

Mel Gibson is my favorite actor

and the movie The Year of Living Dangerously

is one of my all-time favorite movies,

but his personal life may be what makes him a great actor)

In The Bounty, his love for his Tahitian wife

seems to be the outward motivation

but there is something deeper going on.

The straight-laced dutiful English society

vs the laid-back devil may care Island-time society of Tahiti

are at odds.

There are two amazing endings to the story:

Bligh made it the 47 days and over 3600 hundred miles

from the middle of the Pacific to the Dutch East Indies in a 23-foot boat with his crew

and

there was a little surviving community on Pitcairn Island where

Christian and the other mutineers made their final destination

(albeit mostly women and children and only 1 man)

I guess that is the whole point:

it was almost too incredible to be true.

When I got home, I started reading The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown

mainly because I had recently viewed

La Jaconda (otherwise known as the Mona Lisa)

at the Louvre.

And Madonna on The Rocks.