It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to any of you by now that I’m obsessed with faces. They fascinate me, due to their infinite variety, and all the shades of meaning, emotion, personality, and personal history that they register. So, when I stumble upon someone from history who captures my attention, and they don’t have any form of verifiable likeness that I can scrutinize, it irks me beyond reason.
This is the story of how I once attempted to plug such a gap…
On the eve of going to university in the early 1990s, I became entranced by the true story of the mutiny on the Bounty. In 1789, this event brought to an abrupt end a British mission to transport breadfruit plants from the South Pacific to the West Indies. At the heart of the story’s epic sweep is the compelling conflict between two friends; Lieutenant William Bligh, and his second-in-command, Fletcher Christian.
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