ABSTRACT
The story of the mutiny on the Bounty is well known. Captain Bligh’s loss of his vessel and the mutineers’ subsequent misadventures are literally the stuff of Hollywood. Many people also know that the mutiny was prompted in part by the demands imposed on the crew by the Bounty’s unusual cargo: 1,015 breadfruit plants, which took up much of the ship’s space and water supply. The saplings were promptly jettisoned after Bligh’s removal. This setback did not deter the British government from funding a second expedition, which in 1792 succeeded in bringing breadfruit to Britain’s colonies in the West Indies. This extraordinary exercise in relocating a tropical tree from the South Pacific to the Caribbean was but one of many endeavours undertaken by eighteenth-century botanists and statesmen to move edible plants from one part of the world to another for the ostensible purpose of providing “wholesome and pleasant food” for “workers and black people” in Europe’s colonial spaces. This chapter explores these colonial efforts at nutritional botany, and analyses the place of diet in the Enlightenment dream of the pursuit of happiness.
