"What's the status of this project?"
Time to finally answer that question.
Allow me to wax personal for a while. When Simon and I first started working on this project together (as complete strangers connected by the same obsession), our vision of what we were going to do was different than it is today. For my part- and for some time, my part was to lead the expedition- I wanted a documentary about the mutiny, sorted through and organised to differentiate fact from assumption from outright fiction. In any quick research of the subject, you will still see events that only occurred on screen cited as fact, and the imagined reputations of fictionalised characters given as reasons for their historical counterparts' behaviour. People have heard the story over and over again and they believe in Laughton and Howard's irredeemable Bligh, in Gable's heroic Christian.
And also in the beautiful, almost enchanted, but solely decorative Tahitian girls.
Even as I was already dragging the camera through England and lugging it across continents all the way to Tahiti, I had a dreadful feeling of limitation. I knew and know a lot about the mutiny- after all, it's been my passion for well over ten years. Give me a name from the crew roster and it's likely I'll tell you a story about the man and how life and legend treated him. Ask me about the mutiny if you know nothing, and you'd best be prepared for hours of listening to the most fascinating story in the world.
(this has come in handy on long car rides)
But the further I walked, the more phone calls I made and interviews I set up, the more fearful and lost I felt. Something just wasn't right. I tried to dismiss the feeling as inexperience and social anxiety, and even as I sat in my friend's LA apartment, downing tranquilisers as I waited for the airport shuttle, I repeated to myself: you will be fine, because this is your territory. This is what you know.
That was my mantra through Security Check, at the gate, and on the flight to Papeete. It was what people had told me whenever I told them I was nervous. You know this. You got this.
Fortunately, the very moment I landed and breathed in South Pacific air mixed with the scent of tiare, I realised there was no bigger lie.
I say fortunately, because that realisation opened up a path that I had previously been convinced was too difficult to follow.
You see, I had imagined that I could gather all the relevant information in Tahiti in a few weeks, patch up the gaps in my knowledge and return home with my mutiny story finally complete and comprehensible. I knew it from the sailor's side, I'd even spent six months on board a tall ship to better understand- so all I needed was to see the islands themselves!
I had to actually step out of the plane and walk in Tahiti to realise how ridiculous a notion that was. And that not only was there a bigger, better story to be told, but that there were people around who could tell it.
(And that I, myself, was not one of those people, and that that was actually really good news.)
The absolute turning point was October 26th in Matavai Bay, where we met a crowd of Bounty descendants and interviewed Fifi Bellais. In a quarter of an hour, she told us more about the Bounty women that I had ever read in any of the dozens of Bounty books I own.
So here we are, two years later, with an outlook that has changed. I am glad, and excited to listen and record. Simon, though reluctant to come into the spotlight at first, the humble fellow, has now taken a step forward- he is our link to the Bounty after all. As I write this, he is traveling to Norfolk with his family. Two tiny 9th generation Bounties will thus begin to discover their extended family and their heritage.
“Well, that is all very fine”, I hear you cry, “but what IS the status of this project?”
We are still working on this documentary. Never stopped.
We simply had a long year of trying to get our heads around where we were going with it. Where it was worth taking.
And we realised we were not ready before. But we know what we need to do to BE ready.
(also, a brand new 9th gen. Bounty arrived in Simon's family last autumn, which naturally slowed things down a bit)
We are no longer focusing on retelling the story from the well-known (if distorted) point of view of the Bounty crew.
That story has been told and retold, and while it will have its place in our film, it is not the main subject.
We are instead looking at the story of how a unique community was founded through the meeting of two distant cultures.
We are looking at the Polynesian women and men who took part in the story, but who are so rarely mentioned by history.
We are looking at Mauatua, at Teehuteatuaonoa, at Teraura, at Toofaiti, to name only a few.
We are reading the imperfect record of their accounts.
We are searching for an echo of their life in the life of modern Tahiti.
We are listening to their voices through the voices of their descendants.
We are trying to see their world through the objects and crafts they have left behind.
We are trying, before we do anything else, to fill in the gaps that the average Western account leaves blank. Tahitian culture. Tahitian politics. The women and men who chose to go. The women who were kidnapped. The massacre on Tubuai. The confrontations on Pitcairn. The knowledge of Hitiaurevareva. The choices made, the ties kept, the customs broken.
A great number of people have already helped light the path for us, and we have a list a mile long of those we would still like to speak with- on Tahiti and Pitcairn and Norfolk, but also all over the world.
We know we need to go back to Tahiti and stay there for quite a bit of time, listening. We've only heard a fraction of what there is to hear. I am trying to learn Te Reo Mā'ohi, because I can't possibly progress without it. Simon is doing some pretty obsessive research into his family tree.
We've managed to charm and recruit Pauline Reynolds as our project's godmother ;) Pauline is herself a descendant of Mauatua, an 'Ahu Sista and a tremendous source of knowledge, all the more wonderful for never having stopped her research.
We are learning.
(Speaking of learning: the photograph above is a snapshot from just a few days ago. Simon Quintal’s daughter Margrete is learning how to make tapa from Pauline Reynolds, a Bounty descendant of Mauatua, whose handmade tapa cloth has been preserved in the Kew Gardens Economic Botany Collection. I chose that image to illustrate this post because there is no better way to explain why we are doing this project.)
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