Byron’s The Island: Sources and Influences

Abstract

This thesis examines Byron’s The Island (1823) in relation to its source material – William Bligh’s A Narrative of the Mutiny, on Board his Majesty’s Ship Bounty (1790) and William Mariner’s Account of the Natives of the Tonga Islands, in the South Pacific Ocean – and to the contexts and debates surrounding Tahiti and the Bounty mutiny. Byron had a penchant for fact and historical accuracy, as evidenced by his often-quoted remark, in an 1817 letter to John Murray, that “there should always be some foundation of fact for the most airy fabric, and pure invention is but the talent of a liar” (Letters Vol V: 203). I argue here that, consistent with this interest in historical veracity, The Island is engaged with the historical events and texts upon which the poem is based to a greater extent than has been acknowledged. There has been a turn in recent criticism (Fulford [2004], Kitson [2007], Fang [2010]) to a more historicised understanding of The Island, and I draw on these critics’ work throughout. Chapter one looks at the South Pacific background to the poem, giving an overview of the debates that arose around the publication of Hawkesworth’s Account of the Voyages Undertaken by the Order of His Present Majesty for Making Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere (1773), focusing particularly on the literary treatment of these discussions in a series of periodical poems published in the 1770s that became known as the “Oberea Cycle”. Byron’s ambivalence about Toobonai is best understood in the context of a public discourse which, often simultaneously, found in Tahiti both a terrestrial paradise and a place already corrupted and turned to vice. The second chapter looks at Byron’s use of the song taken from Mariner’s text, discussing it in the larger context of Romantic ideas of orality and their relation to primitivist discourse. Drawing on McLane’s (2008) discussion of “mediality” in the relationship between oral and literate traditions, I examine the ways in which Byron’s use of Mariner’s text brings into light questions of authenticity and cross-cultural understanding. The final chapter looks at Byron’s relationship to Bligh and the Bounty mutiny. Mutinies were politically charged in Britain because of their associations of violent revolution, and Byron is careful to avoid explicitly condoning the mutineers’ actions. The chapter ends by asking what significance the idea of mutiny has, both thematically and structurally, in the poem as a whole. By complicating and overturning the assumptions and orthodoxies upon which Britain’s imperialist policies rested, The Island enacts a kind of mutiny of its own.