4 - Performance anxieties

Summary

1. You received gifts from me; they were accepted.

2. But you don't understand how to think about the dead.

3. – Czeslaw Milosz

On Saturday 6 December 1788 William Bligh, anchored in Matavai Bay on the Bounty, ‘experienced a scene . . . of Wind and Weather which I never supposed could have been met with in this place’. A ‘very high breaking Sea’ increased after sunset; all hands were on deck all night, with ‘the Sea foaming all around us so as to threaten instant destruction’. ‘In this situation,’ wrote Bligh in his journal, ‘my Friends on shore became very anxious for my safety.’ Tina, his wife ’Itia and Moana, one of the ari'i of Matavai, assisted in paddling a canoe, and ‘came through it all to see me’, bearing provisions: ‘each of these Kind people came and embraced me with a flood of tears, said they had prayed to the Eatua for my safety, but that they feared the Ship would be lost’. While Bligh managed to reassure Tina and his wife, Moana was inconsolable: ‘He remained still not to be comforted, or [sic] could I get this good old Man to resume a natural chearfullness which from the first moment I saw him he never lost before’ (Bligh 1937: I, 414).