THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, September 25, 1995 TAG: 9509230047
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Larry Bonko
LENGTH: Long : 104 lines
EARLIER THIS year, the folks at New Dominion Pictures in Virginia Beach who produce the ``Archaeology'' series for The Learning Channel sent crews to Australia's Great Barrier Reef.
The mission: Write the last chapter in the sad story of His Majesty's man o'war Bounty.
This is the Bounty of ``Mutiny on the Bounty,'' the ship once commanded by Capt. William Bligh, later commandeered by Lt. Fletcher Christian and his mutineers.
The story of the Bounty's mutiny was made into a four-star film in 1935 starring Charles Laughton and Clark Gable, and a picture of less merit in 1962 with Marlon Brando and Trevor Howard.
Now here comes New Dominion Pictures in Virginia Beach to continue the story and tie up the loose ends on ``Archaeology,'' which begins its fourth season on TLC tonight at 8. The half-hour series also runs at 11 p.m. Mondays and on Sundays at 8:30 and 11:30 p.m.
The British crown in 1791 wanted the Bounty's mutineers brought back to England, tried and punished for taking over the ship and setting Bligh and 18 crewman adrift in an open boat.
The heavily armed Pandora and its vengeful crew were sent to the South Seas to fetch the mutineers. ``Archaeology'' picks up the story of how the Pandora's officers and men rounded up 14 of the mutineers and set sail for home only to see their ship smashed on the Great Barrier Reef's mountain of coral.
Tonight on ``Archaeology,'' New Dominion producer Tom Naughton and his gang show how divers aboard the research vessel Pacific Conquest search the wreck of the Pandora, bringing up artifacts that any museum director would die for.
``It is an expedition not for the faint of heart,'' says series host and narrator John Rhys-Davies. ``The wreck lies 110 feet down where the specter of de-compression sickness is the divers' constant companion.''
He goes on to say, ``The currents which brought the Pandora to grief 200 years ago are no calmer today.''
Rhys-Davies, a barrel-chested actor of great presence, doesn't get to go to the four corners of the globe with Naughton's camera crews. He's appearing in the Fox science-fiction drama ``Sliders,'' which premiered last season and is scheduled to return, perhaps in January.
When it is time for Rhys-Davies to do the opening and closing of ``Archaeology'' in that wonderful rolling baritone of his, the actor visits Virginia Beach. The city by the sea and its neighbors in Hampton Roads have stood in nicely for exotic locations around the world.
For his turn on ``In Pursuit of the Bounty,'' Rhys-Davies stood before the cameras at Seashore State Park in Virginia Beach.
``It's not the Great Barrier Reef, but it works,'' said Naughton. As the fourth season of ``Archaeology'' rolls on, Rhys-Davies will be introducing stories about the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, a malaria epidemic that swept through ancient Rome, female priestesses and warriors known as Amazons, and this one on Nov. 13: ``Return to Ground Zero.''
How about Suffolk as ancient Rome, Tom?
The ``Ground Zero'' episode tells of archaeologists working in the Nevada desert on a former nuclear test site, gathering debris to make a permanent record of that chapter in the Cold War. How eerie it is to see on film a crater 320 feet deep and 1,280 feet wide made when an atomic weapon was tested above ground.
There were 900 tests run on the Nevada test site, Rhys-Davies reminds viewers.
``Nine hundred times the desert rumbled with the blasts, 900 times the desert sky was lit by the ghastly white light of the most dreadful weapons yet devised by humankind.''
You'll get goose bumps listening to Rhys-Davies doing that narration. He is the best at this. For this episode, Seashore State Park again formed the background for Rhys-Davies' narration.
In ``Archaeology,'' a local company is producing a series of documentaries that are as entertaining and informative as anything on television. There are awards elbowing one another for space on shelves in Naughton's Oceanfront office.
Take a bow, guys.
As ``Archaeology'' launches into its fourth season, director Joseph Wiecha is off to India on another assignment. Naughton, who is the series producer along with Nicolas Valcour, said New Dominion will do 13 episodes for TLC this season.
If the episodes about Pompeii, Rome, ancient Chile, the fall of the Mayan culture and raiders on the high seas during the Civil War are as smashing as ``In Pursuit of the Bounty'' and ``Return to Ground Zero,'' it is going to be a heck of a year on ``Archaeology.''
I'm grateful to the New Dominion crews for giving us an epilogue on the Bounty story, which has fascinated me for years. The Pandora's crew rounded up 14 mutineers and put them in chains. Four of them died along with 31 Pandora crewmen when the ship went under on Aug. 28, 1791.
Christian and all but two of the mutineers on Pitcairn Island were murdered by the island's natives. The descendants of the English sailors still live on Pitcarin.
The original mission of the Bounty and the ships that followed it - to bring back breadfruit trees to feed slaves on Tahiti - was completed by another man o' war.
``The breadfruit was successfully cultivated,'' says Rhys-Davies in his mini-history lesson. ``But the slaves working in the cane fields refused to eat it.''
Thank you, New Dominion Pictures. I've been wondering about that for years.
``Archaeology.'' It's a little industry in Virginia Beach. Be proud of it. by CNB