Errol Flynn – PLACE ODDITY

“Shoot the bugger!” screamed someone as Captain William Bligh was bundled overboard at musket-point and into a longboat. Dawn was breaking off the tiny Pacific island of Tofua when HMAV Bounty’s first mate Fletcher Christian ordered his captain and 18 loyalists into the six-metre boat. Shooting them might have been a kinder fate. Instead, they were set adrift in mid-ocean, some 6000 km from the nearest European outpost at Kupang, Timor.

April 28, 2019 marked the 230^th anniversary of the infamous Mutiny on the Bounty. Overlooked amid the ensuing blue water opera of passion, heroics and revenge is that the Bounty might be seen, whimsically perhaps, as the pioneer of South Pacific cruising. If so, was the tempestuous, brilliant William Bligh — who is officially credited with discovering 13 Pacific islands — the South Pacific’s first European tourist, even if its most reluctant one? As visitors to the Pacific today, we sail in the wake of Bligh and the Bounty.

Bruny Island, Tasmania. In August 1788, His Majesty’s Armed Vessel Bounty, on a mission from England to Tahiti, made its first Pacific stop in Tasmania. As well as ‘discovering’ Hobart’s Mt Wellington, William Bligh planted at Adventure Bay seven apple trees — the very first the for future ‘Apple Isle’. On the shores of the bay, today’s Bligh Museum of Pacific Exploration commemorates the Bounty visit as well as those of other great navigators such as Cook, Flinders and D’Entrecasteaux.

Bounty Islands. On a roundabout route to its place in history, Bounty passed a desolate cluster of 13 granite islands in the Subantarctic. Now New Zealand territory, this uninhabited group is home to the world’s largest breeding colony of New Zealand fur seals and vast populations of seabirds. Bligh named the islands in honour of his ship, no doubt having in mind more glorious landmarks to append his own name to than these guano-bombed outcrops. The islands are now World Heritage-protected. Landing is prohibited and they are seen these days only by occasional expedition cruises. Bounty then headed north to warmer Pacific latitudes, but life at sea on any 18^th century ship was always harsh and often more so under Bligh’s rigid discipline.

Tahiti, French Polynesia. The Society Islands, aka The Isles of Love, are renowned today for their lagoon resorts, vivid reefs and postcard lushness. To Bligh and the British Admiralty they simply meant breadfruit. Bounty’s mission was to collect a thousand saplings for transportation to the West Indies, hopefully to be used there as cheap food for sugar plantation slaves.

You can stand today on the black volcanic sands of Point Venus, 10 km from Papeete, and look across Matavai Bay to where Bounty rode at anchor for over five months during 1788 and 1789. While gathering the breadfruit plants, its crew were seduced by ‘paradise’ in the form of ample food and generous, amorous Polynesian consorts.

When Bounty up-anchored on 4 April, 1789 and sailed from ‘Otaheite’, its lowly sailors knew their days of near-aristocratic indulgence were reverting to the norm of being little more that seagoing slaves. (As the writer Dr Johnson noted after visiting a British man-of-war of that era, ‘Serving in a ship is like being in a prison — with a chance of drowning.’)Many of the crew, Fletcher Christian among them, were lovesick for their Tahitian sweethearts, while the caustic manner of Bligh, their master, commander and tormentor was salt to their wounds.

Cook Islands. All Polynesia had been populated by 1000 AD but Bligh is credited with ‘discovering’ Aitutaki — ‘Wytootackee’ — in the Cook Islands. He recorded, ‘I saw no Smoke or any Sign of Inhabitants, it is scarcely to be imagined however, that So charming a little Spot is without them.’ Bligh wasn’t the only ‘first white man to see’ part of the Cook Islands. Following the mutiny, Fletcher Christian aboard the fleeing Bounty sighted Rarotonga, which today is the most populous of the Cook Islands and its capital. But Fletch, being a no-good, shipjacker, would never be credited by the Admiralty with anything but heinous mutiny and thus candidature for hanging from the highest yard-arm. His sighting goes pointedly un-commemorated.

Tofua Island, Tonga. The Tongan Islands are known today as the Friendly Isles, a magnet for yachts, game fishing and whale watching, but as the Bounty wended its way through the archipelago in late April 1789, there were few friendly notions brewing on its foredeck. The rot set in terminally at Nomuka Island when Christian led an armed party ashore to find water but retreated under threat from hostile locals. Bligh publicly damned him as a ‘cowardly rascal’ afraid of ‘a set of Naked Savages’.

“Vintage engraving showing mutineers seizing Captain Bligh on board the Bounty. The Mutiny on the Bounty was a mutiny aboard the British Royal Navy ship HMS Bounty on 28 April 1789. The mutiny was led by Fletcher Christian against commanding officer Lieutenant William Bligh. According to most accounts, the sailors were attracted to the idyllic life on the Pacific island of Tahiti and were further motivated by harsh treatment from their captain.”

Picture this: 28 April 1789, beneath the brooding volcanic crown of Tofua Island in the Ha’apai Group, William Bligh is roused from his bunk at bayonet-point and thrown into the longboat, along with his 18 loyalists. Scant food and water, plus a sextant and compass, but no charts, are flung after them.

In this frail craft it was as far to the moon as to a safe shore. No blue lagoons or happy hour sundowners for these doomed men. But, as the mutineers set Bounty’s sail for Tahiti and its promises of languid paradise, the iron-willed Bligh set his own mind to the near-impossible, to navigate the tiny boat to Timor and revenge.

Fiji. Thus began the survivors’ 41-day, open-boat voyage, regarded as one of the most outstanding feats of seamanship in maritime history. As the first Europeans to sail through Fiji, Bligh marked their route so well that his chart of the ‘Bligh Islands’ (as he modestly named them and as Fiji was first known) is still useable today. The strait between the main islands of Viti Levu and Vanua Levu remains named after him.

Fiji’s beautiful Yasawa Islands today are famed for resorts like Turtle Island and the 1980 Brooks Shields’ movie The Blue Lagoon. Inevitably, there is a Bounty Island Resort. For the castaways, however, if there were to be any picnic in the Yasawas, they feared that they would be the main delicacy. Bligh recorded his men as having to frantically out-row a pursuing canoe of supposedly salivating cannibals.

Restoration Island, Cape York Peninsula. Constantly rowing, and aided by only two small sails, they inched their way towards ‘New Holland’ and through the Great Barrier Reef. Many of the men could barely walk when on 28 May they beached on a sandy islet that Bligh called Restoration Island, where they found water, oysters and berries aplenty. They ate ravenously. The island (“Resto” to today’s locals) sits a few hundred meters offshore from the Lockhart River mainland and 800 kilometers north of Cairns.

In 1932 the young Errol Flynn, sailing to New Guinea in his schooner Sirocco, visited the island and was fascinated by its Bounty connection. He soon went on to play Fletcher Christian in his first film, the 1933 version of Mutiny on the Bounty. Some 70 years later, Russell Crowe, star of another maritime epic, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, lingered at Resto in 2003 while on a seafaring honeymoon with wife Danielle.

Kupang, Timor. Reaching the northernmost point of the Australian continent, aka New Holland, the wretched survivors found a passage, now known as Bligh Entrance, through the Torres Strait and rowed on, ever westwards. More dead than alive following their six-week voyage of ‘extreme hardship, brilliant navigation and mutual hatred’, they sailed into Kupang harbour, Dutch Timor, on 14 June 1789. Bligh, always a stickler for protocol, insisted on doing so under a makeshift Union Jack.

Today’s travellers might head to Indonesia’s West Timor for surfing on Roti Island or next door to independent Timor-Leste for birding, diving and mountain biking but, for Bligh, Timor was just the beginning of his furious return to England in order to restore his reputation and to call down the Admiralty’s implacable wrath on Fletcher Christian and company.

Pitcairn Island. Meanwhile, back on the Bounty, the mutineers hightailed it to Tahiti and the longed-for good life but, understanding too well the grisly penalty for mutiny, most of them knew better than to linger where the Admiralty would surely track them. Collecting their female consorts and six Tahitian men, Christian and eight mutineers sailed the Bounty off the map.

After desperately searching the ocean for a haven they came across uninhabited, uncharted Pitcairn Island in January 1790. They burned the Bounty to avoid discovery and thus became the first permanent European settlers in the Pacific Islands. Within months, however, they were at each other’s throats. Within a decade all but one of the mutineers were dead.

The fate of the vanished Bounty remained a mystery for almost 20 years until an American whaling ship stumbled upon the island in 1808 and was greeted by a gaggle of polite, robust, English-speaking, mixed-race youngsters and a white-bearded, Bible-quoting elder, the last surviving mutineer, John Adams. Visitors today can reach this truly remote corner of the Pacific, with MV Bravo Supporter calling there several times a year. Some Bounty remains, mostly ballast stones, remain visible in the clear waters of Pitcairn’s Bounty Bay.

Norfolk Island. The mutineers’ English-Tahitian descendants thrived and multiplied on tiny Pitcairn to the point of overcrowding. When Queen Victoria granted them lush Norfolk Island in 1856 the entire Pitcairn community of 194 people was relocated there. Today, there are resorts, good dining, reef diving and convict ruins on Norfolk. And, of course, Bounty lore and proud ‘Mutiny’ descendants galore.

Footnote: The author sailed in April 1989 on the 200^th anniversary re-enactment of the mutiny aboard the replica vessel built for the 1984 movie, The Bounty.

© John Borthwick 2019

Cuba has always been on my radar but it wasn’t until I was offered a trip to Cancun, Mexico, that I was able to realise my ambition. I had little knowledge about Cuba outside its popular mythology but knew instantly where I wanted to stay.

The Hotel Nacional de Cuba was popularized in the movie Godfather II as the venue for what came to be called, in real life, the Havana Conference. Held in December 1946, it brought together America’s top crime bosses including “Lucky” Luciano, then in exile in Italy, and Meyer Lanksy, who was to head the push by American organised crime into Cuba’s numerous casinos under the patronage of Cuban President, Fulgencio Batista.

The Nacional thus had just the sort of pop cultural juice I thirst for when travelling. The hotel opened in 1930, designed by the New York architectural firm of McKim, Mead & White (also responsible for the New York Public Library). Co-founder of the firm, Stamford White, had his own literary pedigree; his 1906 murder forms the centerpiece of E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime.

Havana was everything I was expecting and far, far more. While the people may be poor, they are overwhelmingly hospitable with a ready sense of humour. It seems as if every second Cuban is a musician; linger for more than a few minutes in a bar or café and a group will wander in unannounced and strike up a tune that would have the Buena Vista Social Club tapping their toes in appreciation.

The Nacional, however, was a mixed bag. The public areas, in dark local mahogany and imported Spanish tiles, are an intoxicating melange of Moorish and Art Deco, the design equivalent of Othello dancing a tango with Nora Charles. The guestrooms tend to the smallish and could most kindly be described as Period Shabby Chic but many have histories that almost make up for their lack of comfort.

The breakfast buffet was a constant feast of surprises, some of which were actually edible. One morning, there appeared on a serving tray what had most likely originally been a huge slab of frozen pre-sliced bacon that had had all the meat carefully removed and then been boiled in one piece. In another country it would have been a prop for a particularly obscure piece of performance art or an unwanted item from the Damien Hirst factory store. Guests gathered around it, curious and rather unsure of what to do with it. For once, I went with the Europeans and chose the stale bread rolls and hard-boiled eggs.

Hotel staff generally, with the exception of the friendly and efficient housekeepers, seem under the impression they’re working in a museum. Any request, no matter how trivial, is terminated with a sigh of detached reservation and a polite refusal. I was determined to get a tour of the hotel and eventually found a concierge who defrosted slightly under a relentless barrage of flattery and a folded €20 note.

It opened up a seemingly endless exploration of the second floor, where all the celebrities of the last 80 years stayed. The so-called Mafia Room is a double suite, numbers 211-13. It doesn’t appear like a hangout for a mob of wiseguys and their henchmen, where the 1947 hit on “Bugsy” Siegel was sanctioned or the corporatisation of the American drug trade was finely honed. It looks more like the place your grandparents would stay for their golden wedding anniversary.

Celebrity guests of a more benign nature included Frank Sinatra (Room 214), Nat King Cole (218), Ava Gardner (225), Fred Astaire (228) and Tarzan actor Johnny Weissmuller (232).

Errol Flynn stayed in Room 235, two doors down from mine. If our rooms were identically sized, I figured he needed to be extremely dexterous to exercise his growing reputation. Flynn was also said to have been a drinking companion of Ernest Hemingway although it must be noted that, if you had a pulse and were in Cuba anytime between the 1920s and 1960s, there’s a pretty fair chance you’d end up drinking with Hemingway.

The Celebrity Hall of Fame in the Bay-View Bar shows that celebrities have been a little light on in the recent past, the best-known being Kevin Costner, Oliver Stone and The Backstreet Boys

The rear gardens amble down to a cliff-face overlooking the harbor. Pancho, the Nacional’s pet peacock, lives in a small shed in front of La Barraca, an outdoor restaurant promising, although not exactly delivering, Cuban cuisine. A living and breathing contradiction in terms (locals will readily admit that the best Cuban food is in Miami), I overheard a group of Australian tourists refer to it as La Berocca.

The centre of the hotel’s social scene is the colonnaded verandah just off the lobby. At any time of the day or night, hotel guests gather to consume fat cigars and over-priced, shamefully bad mojitos and watch the security guards chase away anybody who looks like a local.

The long driveway from the street to the front entrance is lined with the immaculate late-model Mercedes that function as official hotel taxis and decrepit but vigorously-maintained 1950s American cars. Enormous mid-century land yachts, masterfully-wrought slabs of Detroit steel, what little remains of their original paintwork faded and blemished but fastidiously polished, chrome pitted and cloudy, body panels rusted out by sea spray and held together with wire and prayers, these leftovers of the days when Cuba was America’s playground can be hired for tours of the city. The owner-drivers, once you break through their habitually gruff exteriors, are like classic car custodians the world over – proud and more than happy to share their enthusiasm. Cut off from such niceties as spare parts by more than 50 years of economic sanctions, a look under the hood of these automotive dinosaurs reveal wondrously inventive repair methods that would make MacGyver green with envy.

The Hotel Nacional de Cuba, as the Cubans might say (if they spoke Spanish as badly as me), offers up buenos tiempos but it’s all a matter of interpretation.

Tag: Errol Flynn

CAPTAIN BLIGH’S PACIFIC PARADISES by John Borthwick

Hotel Nacional de Cuba – Mojitos and Mobsters by David Latta