Background

Charles Nordhoff was born on February 1, 1887, in London. He was the son of American parents, a correspondent for the New York Times, Walter Nordhoff, and Sarah Cope Whitall. Charles, with his parents, returned to the United States in 1889. He spent his childhood on ranchlands in both California and Mexico.

Education

Charles Nordhoff studied at the Thacher School in Ojai, California. He entered Stanford University at seventeen but transferred after one year to Harvard, where he received a Bachelor of Arts in 1909.

Career

After working on a sugar plantation in Mexico for two years as a manager and then for five years in California as secretary and treasurer for a Tile and Fine Brick Company that manufactured tile and bricks, Charles Nordhoff decided to join the French Ambulance Corps in 1916. He later joined the French Foreign Legion and the Lafayette Flying Corps. When the United States entered World War I, Charles transferred to the United States Air Service, in which he served in the capacity of lieutenant.

Charles Nordhoff's first published work was an article in an ornithological journal, written in 1902, but It was his mother who launched his writing career. She was responsible for sending Nordhoff s descriptive accounts of his ambulance driving and piloting experiences to the Atlantic Monthly. These letters home appealed to the public as true-life war tales and coincidentally appeared with wartime essays written by Hall. The letters were gathered in whole and published as The Fledgling. Also, Charles was a contributor to periodicals, including Atlantic Monthly and Harper's.

By 1918 both Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall were introduced and asked to collaborate on an official history of the Lafayette Flying Corps, of which they had both been members. This collaboration had published in 1920, and by its end, the men decided they were through with civilization. They solicited Harper's magazine for a cash advance in exchange for a proposed series of articles on the South Seas, and they sailed to Papeete, Tahiti. So. these articles became the essay collection Faery Lands of the South Seas. The writing team eventually discovered that they had quite a lot in common and thrilled at the ease of their mutual efforts and the complementary strengths of their writing habits. In the 1920s, Nordhoff was approached by his publisher to write a sequel to an adventure novel he had written for children, and he invited Hall to share the assignment. The result was the book, Falcons of France: A Tale of Youth and the Air, a commercial success, and compelled the authors to consider their next project.

Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall had been consistently intrigued by one of the island's favorite stories about a mutiny that happened aboard a British ship in 1789. Strangely, they made only two attempts to recount the fascinating tale, a factual account by Sir John Barrow, and a fictionalized children's book. Nordhoff and Norman Hall amassed as much research as possible, pouring through mutineers' diaries, accounts recorded by the ship's infamous Captain Bligh, interviews with the only surviving mutineer, and transcripts of the eventual trial. The ambitious men spent the next three years sorting through their research, ordering the stories, recreating events to the best of their abilities, and editing each others' work. In Mutiny on the Bounty, the authors tell the tale through Captain Roger Byam, who was a lowly midshipman under Captain Bligh. In the story Men against the Sea, of Captain Bligh and the eighteen men who sailed with him in an open boat, traveling 3,600 miles from the Friendly Islands in the South Pacific to the Dutch colony of Timor in the East Indies. Amazingly, Men against the Sea was written in only two months, during which time the authors stopped work on what would be their next novel, Pitcairn's Island. The final installment of the trilogy, Pitcairn's Island, received favorable reviews even though the authors had to utilize conflicting accounts and incomplete information.

Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall ultimately collaborated on six more novels, most of which faired well, arguably in large part because of their solid reputation. Nordhoff's productivity tapered off as a result of marital problems and his abusive relationship with alcohol. He eventually abandoned his island paradise, as well as four children from his first marriage and three children from a relationship with his Tahitian mistress, and moved back to California with two of his daughters, and he remarried. Nordhoff was ill for most of the decade before he died of a heart attack in 1947. He will always be remembered for his contribution to the most famous and celebrated sea adventure stories of all time.

Achievements

• Charles Nordhoff was widely known as a writer. Though he did author several books, articles, and essays on his own, he was most well known and acclaimed for his collaboration with James Norman Hall on their legendary trilogy: Mutiny on the Bounty, Men against the Sea, and Pitcairn's Island. The American reading public wholeheartedly embraced the abounding themes of courage, greed, and man against nature. Hollywood immortalized Mutiny on the Bounty in a film version in 1935, 1962, and as The Bounty in 1984, making the incredible account of a nearly forgotten true story accessible to millions more people than had already read the books. Also, during World War II, Charles had the honor of having a Liberty ship, SS Charles Nordhoff, built in Portland in 1943, named after him.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Lafayette Flying Corps

    (Volume one of a two-volume history of the famous American...)

    1920
  • In Yankee Windjammers

    (The memoirs of the famous Mutiny on the Bounty co-author'...)

    1940
  • Pitcairn's Island

    (The novel unfolds a tale of desperation, profligacy, and ...)

    1934
  • The Pearl Lagoon

    (Charlie Selden, a young Californian, leaves his father's ...)

    1924
  • Botany Bay

    (The story of the convict ships sent to present-day Austra...)

    1941
  • The Dark River

    (A cultural and geographical picture of Tahiti as it was d...)

    1938
  • The High Barbaree

    (Story of the dream of a young pilot whose plane is wrecke...)

    1945
  • The Fledgling 1919
  • Faery Lands of the South Seas 1921
  • Pícaro 1924
  • The Derelict 1928
  • Falcons of France 1929
  • Mutiny On The Bounty 1932
  • Men Against the Sea 1933
  • No More Gas 1940
  • Men Without Country 1942

Connections

Charles Nordhoff married Vahime Tua Tearae Smidt in 1920, but they divorced in 1936. Then, he married Laura Whiley in 1941. Charles Nordhoff had seven children: four from the first marriage and three with Tahitian mistress.

Father:

Walter Nordhoff

Mother:

Sarah Cope Whitall

colleague:

James Norman Hall

James Norman Hall was an American writer best known for the novel Mutiny on the Bounty with co-author Charles Nordhoff.

Wife:

Vahime Tua Tearae Smidt

Vahime Tua Tearae Smidt was Charles Nordhoff's first wife. They divorced in 1936.

Wife:

Laura Grainger Whiley

Daughter:

Sarah Nordhoff

Daughter:

Rita Marguerite Nordhoff

Daughter:

Jane Nordhoff

Son:

Charles Nordhoff

Son:

Charles Tale Nordhoff

Daughter:

Marie Vahinetua Nordhoff

Son:

James Nordhoff