Mutiny on the Rising Sun: A Tragic Tale of Slavery, Smuggling, and Chocolate
By: Jared Ross Hardesty / Narrated By: Joe Barrett
Length: 6 hrs and 7 mins
Yikes, I’ve a feeling Hardesty tried his darn-tootin’ best, but this is a noooo… Weep with me!
You’re gonna have to sue me or something cuz I do sooo love a subtitle! Here: A Tragic Tale of Slavery, Smuggling, and Chocolate. Where, in all of that, is anything that is NOT engaging, nay, scintillating even?!
Uhm, and then ya listen to it and, gosh… Only 6 hours and dude, I was so falling asleep.
Wellll, first I was getting all aggravated because author Jared Ross Hardesty, like, tells us that, really, it’s pretty much impossible to chronicle what happened during the Mutiny as it happened 300 years ago -BUT- much can be posited given context of the times. Papers, documents, letters, journal entries, newspaper blurbs, interrogations. SURELY, said I to m’self, this is going to be fascinating. My much-loved History told through inference! Hey, I’ve got a good imagination, and I’m just as capable as the next person to connect the dots.
Lay it all out for me, Hardesty! I’m ready.
And so it begins. And first I must get to something that is causing me no end of heartache. Joe Barrett, the dearest of narrators to me, is quite simply, TOTALLY NOT the man to narrate ANY kind of, say, Mutiny where blood has been spilled. Nooo, his tones are far too avuncular, so here in the beginning where all is hitting the fan? Barrett cries out, the voices of the doomed men: MURDER! MURDER! -and- AHH, I AM DEAD!
And it all sounds so jaunty, so whimsical, that I was oh sooo desperately trying to picture the hacking and stabbing, the blood, the gore that Hardesty wrote, but all I could see was a scene with puppies, and kittens, and rainbows… maybe even a unicorn or two…
So there’s that.
Then we get to the meat of Hardesty’s story: Tales of the men who played parts in the Mutiny, whether as victims or victimizers. Ooooh, apPARently there’s absolutely no way to tell their stories except for going into the gazillion (And six!) people who worked with them, or rubbed shoulders with them, or barely knew them. By the time I got to the connection of dots via the church in New England that aaaaaaallll these people attended?
Oh snoooze.
Seriously, it started so well with Hardesty positing that, given the era these men lived in, they all could conceivably be considered good men despite being smugglers and in the slave trade. Nay, that they could also own the enslaved people and come out looking like roses. Lives lived in shades of gray, questions of how people comport themselves, deSPIte things being societally acceptable, was interesting. Especially with Captain Jackson and his chocolate shop. Sure he smuggled, sure he doled out torture to the enslaved people he carried back and forth, sure he neeeeded those enslaved people himself to make chocolate. But hey! it’s chocolate!
Nope, then we get to how cacao is grown and processed. And don’t even get me started on trying to reconstruct the lives of those humans being smuggled, traded, used. Hardesty loudly reminds us that it’s truly impossible to judge from modern social norms, from our knee-jerk senses of revulsion. But seriously, it made me sick.
Okay, so being bored, getting sick, and let’s go all the way to the end where interrogations are carried out. Follow that up with gruesome executions and >yaaaaawn< because Hardesty can’t help himself. He reads, word for word, the questions asked; he reads, word for word, the exACt same accounts but from different people, sooo… Jeez! Part of the executions was driving hooks into the mutineers’ sides and drawing them up so that they dangled for hours. Get on to one surviving that ordeal only to go onto a gory beheading… It should’ve been horrifying. But as Hardesty has SEVeral people saying blah blah sides impaled on hooks blah blah sides impaled on hooks blah blah sides impaled on hooks blah. BLAH.
It’s tragic that this bored me to tears. It’s tragic that Joe Barrett was used for this. It’s tragic that this was 6-hours of my time.
-Fortunately-
Mutiny on the Rising Sun was a Limited Deal at Chirpbooks, and the only thing worse than a waste of time and money is a waste of a credit.
>PHEW<
Still, that’s six hours where I could’ve been sleeping, drool running down my cheeks.
Oh, wait, I WAS sleeping, drool running down my cheeks. Okay, so? No harm, no foul…
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