Anne Salmond creates international buzz with Bligh biography

A new biography about Pacific explorer and Bounty commander William Bligh by Distinguished Professor Dame Anne Salmond of The University of Auckland is receiving critical acclaim.

Bligh: William Bligh in the South Seas (New Zealand Penguin Group (NZ), University of California Press) brings new revelations of Bligh’s voyages from 1777. William Bligh is perhaps the most misunderstood character of the early Pacific explorers and colonisers.

Award-winning anthropologist Anne Salmond, from the Faculty of Arts, charts Bligh’s three Pacific voyages – with Captain James Cook in the Resolution, on board the Bounty, and as commander of the Providence – and beyond.

Salmond breaks new ground by portraying the Pacific islanders as key players for the first time and shows this episode as important to the history of the wider world, not simply of the West.

Leading world scholar on the Pacific, Patrick V. Kirch, says, “Salmond has added another masterpiece to her already brilliant repertoire.” Likewise, a leading Captain Cook scholar, Nicholas Thomas, author of Cook: The Extraordinary Voyages, states, “Her book situates Bligh in the Pacific more effectively than any previous attempt. Bligh reveals not a British history with an exotic setting but a genuinely cross-cultural history that remains thought-provoking to this day.”

Salmond retells the infamous mutiny aboard the Bounty, when Bligh lost control of his ship and was left marooned in a small boat near the Tahitian islands and forced to navigate 3,000 miles across the Pacific to get to safety. All the drama and danger of sea-fearing is brought to life on the page. There are many new revelations about Bligh’s relationship with Captain Cook.

“Although he is famed as a practical seaman and hydrographer, Bligh was also a pioneering ethnographer, who made major contributions to our knowledge of life in
Polynesia during the early contact period,” Salmond says.

Anne Salmond is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Māori Studies at The University of Auckland. One of New Zealand’s most prominent anthropologists and historians, Professor Salmond is the author of many significant books, including The Trial of the Cannibal Dog: Captain Cook in the South Seas and Aphrodite’s Island: The European Discovery of Tahiti.

Salmond is donating royalties for the New Zealand printing of Bligh to the Longbush Ecological Trust, for the The Waikereru Ecosanctuary in Gisborne.