The Pretender Of Pitcairn Island

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.

James Norman Hall (1887–1951) was an American author best known for the novel Mutiny on the Bounty with co-author Charles Bernard Nordhoff (1887–1947) an English-born American novelist and traveler.Mutiny on the Bounty is the title of the 1932 novel by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall, based on the mutiny against Lieutenant William Bligh, commanding officer of the Bounty in 1789. It has been made into several films and a musical. It was the first of what became "The Bounty Trilogy", which continues with Men Against the Sea, and concludes with Pitcairn's Island.

The infamous Bounty mutiny of 1790 culminated in nine mutineers taking up residence on the small Pitcairn Island in the South Pacific. Rivalry over Polynesian women soon led to homicidal strife and, by 1808, when American sealing vessel Topaz stopped at the island, John Adams was the only mutineer alive. He, however, headed what was soon discovered to be a utopianlike Christian society. Beginning with a background look at the circumstances surrounding the mutiny, this volume contains a detailed history of the Pitcairn Islanders from the original settlement through the opening years of the 21st century. The island's isolation is contrasted with the international attention garnered from its captivating history, making the society a one-of-a-kind historical conundrum. Helpful maps and photographs enhance the reader's experience.

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