RUTHFULLY YOURS

Yet the tale of the Bounty, set against the backdrop of the South Pacific, in time became romanticized, at the expense of the “tyrannical” captain, William Bligh, and to the advantage of young Fletcher Christian, a target of his ire, who as a petty officer led the uprising. It is well known that many of the crew, including Christian, had by then succumbed to the amorous appeal of half-clad Tahitians. Less emphasized in most accounts was Bligh’s epic feat of seamanship upon being cast adrift after the mutiny: navigating a cramped launch with 18 loyal sailors before finding a safe harbor in the Dutch East Indies. In 48 days, they had traveled more than 3,600 nautical miles.

The author of 10 earlier books on such disparate topics as Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Boxer Rebellion, the historian Diana Preston revisits the mutiny in “Paradise in Chains: The Bounty Mutiny and the Founding of Australia.” Grounded in a familiar assortment of printed manuscripts and secondary sources, the book is comprehensive in scope, cogently written and amply detailed. In addition to the Bounty’s factious crew, we encounter an intriguing cast of indigenous personalities, including the Tahitian queen Purea, who years before the Bounty’s mutineers came to her island had seduced the famous naturalist Sir Joseph Banks.

Yet for the most part “Paradise in Chains” offers neither new insights nor fresh information. Ms. Preston acknowledges Bligh’s navigational skill and bravery, but she blames his short temper and narcissism for triggering the mutiny, giving insufficient weight to Caroline Alexander’s painstaking evidence, presented in “The Bounty” (2003), of a concerted campaign in England to tar Bligh’s reputation by the prominent families of Fletcher Christian and Peter Heywood, a fellow mutineer. Not to be minimized, in addition to Christian’s inflated sense of entitlement, was the reluctance of some crewmen to return home once they had seen Tahiti.

Side by side with Ms. Preston’s account of the Bounty is a second narrative involving the founding of Australia, an event of far greater consequence. As a result of the American Revolution, Great Britain had lost a dumping ground for convicts. In prior decades, upward of 50,000 felons had been “transported beyond the seas” to America, usually for seven years of servitude in Virginia and Maryland—prompting Benjamin Franklin to urge, in turn, the exportation of rattlesnakes to England.

After the Revolution, London officials, facing mounting crime at home and having made fruitless efforts to establish enclaves in West Africa and South America, chose Sydney Cove in New South Wales—on Australia’s eastern seaboard—for the site of a penal colony. With the arrival of 11 ships, the settlement got under way in January 1788.

Again, Ms. Preston’s eye for detail is rewarded. Among the few admirable figures in the venture was a senior marine officer, Watkin Tench. Owing to his experience as a prisoner of war aboard a French ship, he empathized with the anguish of prisoners who had been “severed, perhaps forever, from their native land.” Even so, and despite the colony’s harsh conditions, some prisoners quickly adapted. According to the British governor, many London neighborhoods “were not so well guarded and watched as the small, but rising town of Sydney,” thanks to a night watch staffed by convicts.