Author: UNKNOWN. AUTHOR
Publisher: Forgotten Books
Published: 2015-07-13
Total Pages: 186
ISBN-13: 9781331349761
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Excerpt from The Story of the Good Ship Bounty and Her Mutineers: And Mutinies in Highland Regiments This is one of the saddest and most eventful stories of mercantile enterprise. It resulted from an attempt to find cheap food for slaves in the days when good King George III. was a leading controller of the destinies of Great Britain. How much it will tell to the advantage of that golden, olden time, is an inference which must be left to the discernment of the readers of it. We cannot now greatly admire a good many of the doings of those times. In the year of grace 1787, seventeen years after Captain Cook returned from his first voyage, the London merchants and planters "interested in the West Indian possessions," as Sir John Barrow writes, or, as people in our day would say, the slaveholders in the capital of England, represented to George III. that the bread-fruit tree of Otaheite was an article which would constitute cheap enough and good enough food for their human property in the West Indies. His Majesty, after hearing what they had to say, thought so too, and graciously ordered means to be taken for the procuring of this benefit, supposed to be essential for the good of the inhabitants of those islands. A vessel was purchased and put into ship-shape for this benevolent object at Deptford, a royal dockyard about a mile west of Greenwich, which had been established by Henry VIII. in the fourth year of his reign. Sir Joseph Banks, renowned for his ignorance of Greek and his great learning in botany - "Here is Banks," said some of his fellow-students at Oxford, "but he knows nothing of Greek" - made all the arrangements for the procuring and transhipment of the economical plants. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
