The Pretender of Pitcairn Island: Joshua W. Hill – The Man Who Would Be King Among the Bounty Mutineers
Cambridge University Press, 9/13/2018
EAN 9781108424684, ISBN10: 1108424686
Hardcover, 362 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 2.4 cm
Language: English
Originally published in English
Pitcairn, a tiny Pacific island that was refuge to the mutineers of HMAV Bounty and home to their descendants, later became the stage on which one imposter played out his influential vision for British control over the nineteenth-century Pacific Ocean. Joshua W. Hill arrived on Pitcairn in 1832 and began his fraudulent half-decade rule that has, until now, been swept aside as an idiosyncratic moment in the larger saga of Fletcher Christian's mutiny against Captain Bligh, and the mutineers' unlikely settlement of Pitcairn. Here, Hill is shown instead as someone alert to the full scope and power of the British Empire, to the geopolitics of international imperial competition, to the ins and outs of naval command, the vicissitudes of court politics, and, as such, to Pitcairn's symbolic power for the British Empire more broadly.
Prologue
telling tales of the South Pacific
1. The masquerade
2. The chosen people
3. Kingdoms of God
4. The age of reform
5. The island
6. Seduction
7. Colonization
Epilogue
the self-constituted king of Pitcairn.