Sailing into Sandy: Media and the Moral Wreckage of the HMS Bounty

Abstract

Crises have a way of bringing media values into sharp focus.Simon Dumenco (2012) on Hurricane Sandy's impact on news media.Things do not exist without being full of people.Bruno Latour (2000)In October 2012, one of most bizarre and highly publicized shipwrecks occurred involving perhaps most recognizable ship in popular culture: HMS Bounty. wooden eighteenthcentury replica tall ship that appeared in Mutiny on Bounty and in a series of subsequent films such as Dead Man's Chest starring Johnny Depp sank in Hurricane Sandy after its captain, Robin Walbridge, had insisted he could elude front and successfully complete trip from New London, Connecticut to St. Petersburg, Florida. From media's reliance on online documents, such as ship's Facebook page, to celebrity status of ship itself, Bounty disaster provides an ideal case study of materiality of news. Through analysis of forty-six news reports on event, this research examines press' treatment of captain's privileging material preservation of ship over lives of crew. press' handling of captain's culpability and economic pressure hinged directly on interpretations and discourse strategies regarding materiality of ship, ranging from an exalted relic worth preserving to a rotting vessel with a deteriorating frame, and captain's log-in this case an ephemeral Facebook page-as journalistic objects.This research explores status of journalistic object in determining news media's initial inattention to and subsequent focus on captain's negligence as a primary cause of wreck. How does material status of ship, especially a cherished replica with a storied past like Bounty's, become a determining factor of bias in press coverage? What elegiac notes did press sound in loss of this material emblem of a distant age especially in light of controversial circumstances of its sinking? To gain insight on media's surprising silence regarding Walbridge's decision to sail through this massive hurricane, this study views news discourse as dynamically engaged within, and as part of socially realized protocols that define sites of communication and sources of meaning offering] nothing less-if not a great deal more-than material cultures of knowledge and information (Gitelman 153).Theorizing Bounty as Cultural ArtifactTheoretical formulations of materialism in modernity (Brown, Dening, Bornstein, Benjamin) offer an ideal lens through which to view journalistic object of Bounty. Particularly useful is Walter Benjamin's famous assertion in The Work of Art in Age of Mechanical Reproduction that original material context of a work fades with each commercial reproduction for a mass audience. mechanism of fame drives the cult of movie star, a process in which the money of film industry preserves not unique aura of person, but 'spell of personality,' phony spell of commodity (Benjamin 231).The Bounty's biography followed precisely this trajectory, as vessel's original historical identity vanished upon its transformation into a commodified celebrity replica. Originally, a transport ship sailing from England in 1787 for Tahiti to obtain breadfruit trees for delivery to West Indies to provide a cheap form of sustenance for colonists, Bounty underwent a munity led by disgruntled crewman Fletcher Christian. conflict arose when crew, desiring more time with Tahitian women whom they had taken as wives, resisted Captain William Bligh's command to leave port. After removing Bligh from his post in dead of night and setting him off on ship's boat, mutineers then took six Tahitian men and eleven women aboard and sailed for Pitcairn, where they promptly burned Bounty to prevent ship's detection. London news media framed event as a cautionary tale reinforcing readers' fear of revolution in nation's colonies abroad and thus demonized Christian. …