In July 1823, Sadler's Wells presented what contemporaries called 'one of the most successful Aqua Dramas ever produced' a pirated adaptation of The Island, Lord Byron's version of the mutiny on the Bounty saga. As the programme indicates, the extravaganza featured music, dance, costumes, and 'Melodramatic Business', with sets including the Bounty's deck, a 'General View of Otaheite', the 'Interior of the Islands', the 'Habitation of Neuha', and a 'Breadfruit Plantation'. During the performance, 'REAL WATER' cascaded over the retreating mutineers before portraying the 'Overthrow of Christian and his Comrades' and the 'Victory of the British Flag over Mutineers and deserters'. The audience saw the 'CHRYSTALLIZED BASALTIC CAVERN' into which the lovers escape. Then, in the finale, the performance treated spectators to 'ALLEGORICAL FIREWORKS with Captain Bligh's Ship in the Offing BRILLIANTLY ILLUMINATED'.1 This admittedly extravagant performance does resolve at least one of the critical issues that has confronted readers of The Island since its publication in 1823. By privileging spectacle over subversion, the performance works to contain the poem's provocative ideology and, by using jingoistic theatrical devices, domesticates the narrative by leading the audience away from the political and into the pastoral. While the aqua drama applauds Bligh and demonizes the mutineers, The Island itself, the last narrative poem Byron completed, treats both captain and mutineers even-handedly. By the end of The Island, three different points of view introduce readers to three heroes and lead us to view events from the perspectives of Bligh, Christian, and Torquil. Critics of the poem characterize this as textual and narrative incongruity, but the poem's three heroes and narrative perspectives can be reconciled. I see The Island as a performative text that engages the reader in mutiny, a performance accomplished by the text's divergent points of view. Byron's manipulation of narrative perspective and the poem's tripartite structure do not appease but rather subvert the ideology of a conventional public. The poem also reinforces two pervasive Byronic themes: the recognition of truth as relative and of narrators as untrustworthy, themes which Byron explored in Don Juan's late cantos, whose composition overlaps that of The Island. For while Byron's Bounty saga concludes by absolving the least guilty mutineer, we know from the narrative manipulations of Don Juan that the story has merely stopped and not ended. The narrator could have ended somewhere else instead, giving the poem an entirely different and even contradictory moral. As we will see, Byron's treatment of mutiny resembles his manipulation of narrative voice in Don Juan; both rely on Romantic Irony to make and then undercut every statement. Byron himself recognized what critics see as the poem's moral ambiguity. He showed The Island to Leigh Hunt and received a cool response. Discussing the poem with Hunt in a letter of 25 January 1823, Byron confessed that he did not want to 'run counter to the reigning stupidity altogether-otherwise they will say that I am eulogizing Mutiny'.2 His anxiety about 'eulogizing Mutiny' stems in part from the implications in his use of the word 'eulogy', meaning praise, especially of the dead.3 Byron certainly recognized that praising mutiny and undermining hierarchical order would not endear him to his general readership. The implication that mutiny has died seems ironic, however, because in The Island, mutiny remains very much alive. First, obviously, the poem revolves around the Bounty's mutiny. Then the text's narrative manipulations encourage the reader's mutiny. Finally, in changing publishers and issuing The Island (and Don Juan's late cantos) through John Hunt, Byron himself mutinied against publishing patriarch John Murray. Thus, The Island can be seen as a meditation on Regency England's literary marketplace and on the ways in which usurpation (mutiny, if you will) functions within it. …