92.)

Bligh's name appears frequently in Cook's Journal, and is also mentioned
in King's excellent narrative of the conclusion of the voyage after
Cook's murder. He was master of the Resolution, and was on several
occasions entrusted with tasks of some consequence: as for instance on
first reaching Hawaii, when Cook sent him ashore to look for fresh water,
and again at Kealakeakura Bay (January 16, 1779) when he reported that he
had found good anchorage and fresh water "in a situation admirable to
come at." It was a fatal discovery, for on the white sands of that bay, a
month later (February 14), the great British seaman fell, speared by the
savages.

On each of Cook's voyages a call had been made at Tahiti in the Society
group. Bligh no doubt heard much about the charms of the place before he
first saw it himself. He was destined to have his own name associated
with it in a highly romantic and adventurous manner. The idyllic beauty
of the life of the Tahitians, their amiable and seductive
characteristics, the warm suavity of the climate, the profusion of food
and drink to be enjoyed on the island with the smallest conceivable
amount of exertion, made the place stand out in all the narratives of
Cook's expeditions like a green-and-golden gem set in a turquoise sea, a
lotos-land "in which it seemed always afternoon," a paradise where love
and plenty reigned and care and toil were not. George Forster, the German
naturalist who accompanied Cook on his second voyage, wrote of the men as
"models of masculine beauty," whose perfect proportions would have
satisfied the eye of Phidias or Praxiteles; of the women as beings whose
"unaffected smiles and a wish to please ensure them mutual esteem and
love;" and of the life they led as being diversified between bathing in
cool streams, reposing under tufted trees, feeding on luscious fruits,
telling tales, and playing the flute. In fact, Forster declared, they
"resembled the happy, indolent people whom Ulysses found in Phaeacia, and
could apply the poet's lines to themselves with peculiar propriety:

'To dress, to dance, to sing our sole delight,
The feast or bath by day, and love by night.'"

In Tahiti grew an abundance of breadfruit. It was in connection with this
nutritious food, one of nature's richest gifts to the Pacific, that Bligh
undertook a mission which involved him in a mutiny, launched him upon one
of the most dangerous and difficult voyages in the annals of British