of Education and Social Sciences, and the HTC Honors College at Coastal Carolina University. I. He is a geographer who studies sustainable food systems in the world’s coastal and island settings. Fielding is the author of The Wake of the Whale: Hunter Societies in the Caribbean and North Atlantic (2018).
He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Breadfruit: Three Global Journeys of a Bountiful Tree, with the following results:
From page 99:Visit Russell Fielding's website.“Sir, your abuse is so bad that I cannot do my duty with any pleasure.”On page 99 of Breadfruit: Three Global Journeys of a Bountiful Tree, the narration is midway through the story of the mutiny on the Bounty. This British naval mission of the late 18th-century was intended to procure breadfruit saplings in Tahiti and to transport them to the Caribbean where they would be planted, propagated, and distributed among the islands of the region to provide food for laborers enslaved on British sugar plantations. After the mutiny, Captain Bligh was set adrift in a longboat and the Bounty was burned, marking both the figurative and literal finality of the mission’s failure.
As if to enact literally the farcical warning that “floggings will continue until morale improves,” Bligh punished Christian for this remark.
… Before sunrise on April 28, 1789, the crew mutinied.
For many readers, the story of the mutiny on the Bounty is the single preexisting touchpoint connecting their literary experience to the subject of breadfruit. The early 20th-century botanist David Fairchild once wrote that, “it is curious to me that every educated person should have heard of the ‘Mutiny of the Bounty’ and, merely as incidental to the sea story, should know about breadfruit… Could we infer from this that most people are excitedly interested in what other men do that is dangerous, but only mildly so in the plants they grow?”
In writing a book about breadfruit, I knew that the story of the mutiny would need to play a role, but I didn’t want it to steal the focus. I believed, contrary to Fairchild’s supposition, that a plant story could indeed hold a reader’s “excited interest.” I decided to describe the mutiny, and to allude to it in the book’s subtitle, but to get it done with and move on, calling back only occasionally and to draw out counterintuitive connections. Focusing as it does on the “three journeys” of the breadfruit tree—from its point-of-origin in Southeast Asia across the Pacific, from Tahiti to the Caribbean eventually successfully, and around the world as both a novel culinary ingredient and a tool for sustainable development—Breadfruit includes the Bounty story only as that of an aborted journey, a failed, presumptuous attempt.
As such, the Page 99 Test produces an interesting result with Breadfruit. On the one hand, it drops the reader directly into the single most famous, or infamous, breadfruit-related story in the canon of English literature. On the other, the story receives a far more succinct telling than the voluminous tomes and full-length motion pictures that other authors have derived from these events. In Breadfruit, the Bounty story is given its due respect, but the book quickly moves on to the more interesting, successful, and world-changing journeys of this bountiful tree.
--Marshal Zeringue
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