Читать книгу Mutiny on the Bounty. Historical Novel онлайн

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I was a rawboned lad of seventeen, lazy in body and mind, with overfast growth, but the words were like a galvanic shock to me. “With Captain Cook!” I exclaimed. “Ask him by all means!”

My mother smiled. “I thought you would be pleased,” she said.

The carriage was dispatched in good time with a note for Mr. Bligh, bidding him to dine with us that evening if he could. I remember how I set out, with the son of one of our tenants, to sail my boat at high tide on Bridgwater Bay, and how little I enjoyed the sail. My thoughts were all of our visitor, and the hours till dinner-time seemed to stretch ahead interminably.

I was fonder, perhaps, of reading than most lads of my age, and the book I loved best of all was one given me by my father on my tenth birthday—Dr. Hawkesworth’s account of the voyages to the South Sea. I knew the three, heavy, leather-bound volumes almost by heart, and I had read with equal interest the French narrative of Monsieur de Bougainville’s voyage. These early accounts of discoveries in the South Sea, and of the manners and customs of the inhabitants of Otaheite and Owhyhee (as those islands were then called), excited an interest almost inconceivable to-day. The writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau, which were to have such lamentable and far-reaching results, preached a doctrine which had made converts even among people of consequence. It became fashionable to believe that only among men in a state of nature, freed from all restraints, could true virtue and happiness be found. And when Wallis, Byron, Bougainville, and Cook returned from their voyage of discovery with alluring accounts of the New Cytheræa, whose happy inhabitants, relieved from the curse of Adam, spent their days in song and dance, the doctrines of Rousseau received new impetus. Even my father, so engrossed in his astronomical studies that he had lost touch with the world, listened eagerly to the tales of his friend Sir Joseph Banks, and often discussed with my mother, whose interest was equal to his, the virtues of what he termed “a natural life.”