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SERPENT IN PARADISE by Dea Birkett
Picador, L16.99, pp. 299
When Dea Birkett saw the film The Bounty one wet afternoon in Elephant and Castle she immediately decided to set out for Pitcairn, the remote Pacific island Fletcher Christian and his fellow mutineers had made their home. Birkett's reaction seems rather strange in the circumstances, since what the movie made most people want to do was go straight to bed and have a long sleep, but it serves its purpose as the first obligatory scene in any travel book: the Moment of Inspiration.
The second archetypal scene is, of course, Writer Researching in the British Library. Dea flicks through the pages of a scholarly journal called Studia Bountyana and fills us in on background information. William Bligh, having distinguished himself as Captain Cook's navigator, was made Captain of the Bounty and ordered to proceed to the South Pacific via Cape Horn, where he is to pick up some breadfruit seedlings to transport to the West Indies. But his crew had a tough time on board, found they rather liked...