Pamela Stephenson and A Salty Tale

Showing on the ABC TV at the moment is a programme about Pamela Stephenson looking for the wreck of her great great grandfathers. I will attach and article from The Age newspaper re the reasons for this search.

The point I want to make having watch two shows [more to come] is that you get the impression that these people are so up themselves it puts them all in a bad light. It is a bit like the Hierarchical system of the English royalty playing it's self out and the main players are so unaware of their awful behavior.

They are either Royalty [Pam] with lines like, 'I want them to get off my boat'. 'It's my money'. [Referring to the lost treasure.]

Or they are the Courtiers, in this case minor public school affected voices pampering to the Queens desires.

Then comes the downstairs crew. Upstairs downstairs trip. The downstairs are the security, cooks, film crew.

And one more category the hangers on. I think at one point there is mention of 17 people on this 'Yacht'.

In many ways it is a rich persons junket, there are probably hundred of them taking place every year. It's just this could of been a good story of lost treasure and mutinous crew. Instead it is insight of sorts into the rich and not so famous and how they live, and such they don't come out smelling of roses.

To sum up there is a scene where two of the hangers on, are celebrating the sun going over the yard arm, by downing a couple of beers. With a bit of banter and a few shots of them swigging away the final shot is of the pair of them throwing their empty beer bottles over the side. Moments after which, we are told by Pamela just how beautiful and pristine the sea is.

And when she really needs to get somewhere [fast] she abandons the multi-million dollar yacht and flies off to pursue her search. The sense of adventure lost immediately.

So there you have it the comings and goings of the rich.

Woof.

The Age Article

STUNNED by a chance meeting and a revelation about her great-great-grandfather's grisly demise, Pamela Stephenson sailed into pirate-plagued waters to discover her past.

The New Zealand-born wife of Scottish comedian Billy Connolly walked into a bar in Malta and heard a woman say: "It wasn't a mutiny, you know."

In her book Billy, Stephenson had briefly mentioned that her great-great-grandfather, British sailor Samuel "Salty Sam" Stephenson, had been the victim of a mutiny on his ship near Java in 1821.

But someone thought otherwise.

"It is probably the weirdest coincidence of my life," she said, describing in Melbourne yesterday the curious meeting. The woman said she was descended from a crew member of his ship Rosalie, and said it had been seized by pirates, who killed Stephenson.

"I was absolutely shocked that there should have been two completely different stories … handed down through families over many generations," she said. "The full import of it didn't hit me right then. It was only in the subsequent weeks that I thought, what is going on here?"

She readied a crew and sailed her 30-metres yacht Takapuna from Cairns to the Indonesia Archipelago. What happened from there is the basis of a book and four-part television series Murder or Mutiny, which investigates the story through old shipping records, personal testimony and physical evidence. Stephenson, a former actor and comic turned psychologist and author, feels satisfied with the results of her exploration, but continues to seek information about Salty Sam.

"One of the things that I'm hoping is that somebody might have more information," she said. "I think there are lots of pieces I still don't know."