Don’t blame Brando, blame the historians

Turning it over with my bare toes, it had the look and feel of finely ground coffee, typical of the island’s volcanic black beaches. I could not help but smile to myself: even the white coral sand was a myth.

As a youngster, I fell in love with a 1930s book series called The Bounty Trilogy, by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall.  They introduced me to the greatest true story ever told.  The narrative is swift and vibrant, the characterisation sublime.  The book inspired the 1935 Oscar-winning film starring Charles Laughton and Clark Gable, and the 1962 remake, with Trevor Howard and Marlon Brando. But Nordhoff & Hall, by their own admission, were not bound by historical truth. Like countless plays and books before them, they made most of it up.  The books are fiction and so are the films of Laughton and Brando. A love so dashed became an obsession for the truth.