3 PACIFIC PARABLE
For The Far Land: 200 years of Murder, Mania and Mutiny in the South Pacific, Ottawa-born journalist Brandon Presser spent part of 2018 on Pitcairn Island, living among the descendants of rebel Fletcher Christian and his lot, made infamous via Mutiny on the Bounty – the Marlon Brando film based on a book. The island, where the mutineers landed after putting out Captain Bligh and crew in 1789, is almost as remote now as it was back then – a freighter journey is the only way on or off this home to fewer than 50 people. Presser examines the legacy of the mutineers and the curse of Pitcairn, which, over seven generations, touched The Bounty Trilogy’s co-author James Norman Hall, who survived a shipwreck en route to the island in 1933. Brando, too, suffered: he twice divorced women who were in versions of Mutiny: Movita Castaneda (the 1935 original), and Tarita Teriipaia (the 1962 Brando remake). Their daughter Tarita Cheyenne died by suicide in 1995. A few years prior, Christian, his son from a previous marriage, was jailed for the murder of Cheyenne’s boyfriend.