Day 72: 20231204 Monday, December 4, 2023 At Sea
Thanks to our alarm clocks, we were able to get up in time for the morning trivia at 9:30am. Price and Ciara slept in a bit rather than trying to get in an early morning workout before trivia. We teamed up with an Australian software engineer from India who was by himself to make a team of 5 and we won the morning Trivia session, earning ourselves some Royal Princess coasters.
We had breakfast at the International cafe after trivia and then started packing our small suitcases for an overnight overland excursion which begins early tomorrow morning in Milford Sound. While we are traveling overland, the ship will work its way around the south end of the South Island and we will rejoin the ship in Dunedin.
Our next activity was attending the enrichment lecture on the Mutiny on the Bounty. Captain Bligh was sent to Tahiti to gather up breadfruit tree saplings to be transported to the Caribbean so they could be used to grow breadfruit for the slaves to eat. They got to Tahiti without troubles, but they stayed in Tahiti for quite some time because it took a while to grow the breadfruit saplings to the point where they could be transported. The crew mixed with the Tahitians and took up local wives, even though many may have had wives back in Britain. Living in the tropical paradise of Tahiti proved to be much more desirable for some of the crew than another several months at sea. This appeared to be the driving force behind the mutiny. They put Captain Bligh and the officers onto the ship’s launch with weeks worth of supplies and they turned the ship around to return to Tahiti. The mutineers hadn’t thought things through all that well because it was only a matter of time before Captain Bligh would return to Britain and report the whole affair to the Admiralty, who would not take kindly to the idea of allowing mutineers to go unpunished.
Some of the mutineers eventually figured out that if they stuck around Tahiti, the long arm of the British navy would eventually come looking for them on Tahiti. So a faction took the Bounty and sailed with their Tahitian wives to the island of Pitcairn where they could hide. They burned and sank the bounty there to cover their tracks.
Sure enough, the British came back to Tahiti with another ship and rounded up all the mutineers, put them in an cage on the open deck and only gave them enough food and water to keep them miserable but alive so they could be hanged on return to Britain. But that ship wrecked off the NE coast of Australia on the Great Barrier Reef. The survivors eventually made it to land and then on to Britain where out of the 10 surviving mutineers, 7 were either acquitted or pardoned and 3 were hanged. There were men who were loyal to Captain Bligh who could not accompany him when he was cast off the Bounty because the launch did not have the capacity to hold that many men.
As for the band who fled to Pitcairn Island, they set up a village there and learned how to make an alcoholic beverage by fermenting the local fruit. This beverage had a tendency to make the men crazy, so they murdered each other until there was only one man left, a John Adams. He ended up leading the women and children for years. Eventually American whalers ran into them and reported the affair to the British Admiralty. For whatever reason, the Admiralty had lost interest in exacting penance from the sole survivor there.
Parts of the wreck of the Bounty were discovered and recovered in the 1980’s, and Pitcairn Island is still populated by the descendants of those mutineers.
We did a casual lunch in the buffet and pool deck venues which produce tasty burgers and pizza, but it was cold, windy and sprinkling rain on the outside decks. Most of the outside decks were closed because of rain and wind conditions most of the day. The only open deck area was the pool deck which is relatively sheltered.
The ship has a Maori couple whom they refer to as cultural ambassadors who do lectures, shows and activities. This afternoon they lead passenger volunteers in the Piazza in a Waiata-a-ringa class, which is basically the Maori version of hula. There were some very young kids participating which were very cute.
We did the afternoon trivia with an Australian couple who were seated nearby but ended up losing by 2 points. That was a little aggravating because we had considered the right answers for several questions we ultimately missed, choosing alternatives that were incorrect.
This was the first formal night of this cruise so we got dressed up and had dinner in the dining room. Service was pretty good and we got done in time to see the early Princess Theater production show “Encore” which features a guest soprano and popular opera and some James Bond songs. The vocalists in the cast are better than the vocalists that were on the Grand and Coral Princess. They probably staff the Royal class ships with their best entertainment talent since they have the most passengers.
We did try some of the premium desserts which are included in the Princess Plus package which we have. They have fancy layer cakes and fancy ice cream sundaes. They are huge servings so there really is no way anyone is going to be able to eat two of these a day, which is the limit.
Janet and Ben finished their evening with a “Before They Were Famous” trivia. It’s funny how people change as they grow up, but when you see childhood pictures next to adult pictures, you can always see a resemblance, even though it can be very hard to figure out some of the child versions of some celebrities.
The ship boards its pilot and a Naturalist to narrate the scenic cruising into the Milford Sound at 6am. We have to report to the Princess Theater with our overnight bags and touring gear at 7:15am, so it’ll be an early morning for us.
