Table of Contents

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.

Promotional Information

A study of one imposter and his influential vision for British control over the nineteenth-century Pacific Ocean.

About the Author

Tillman W. Nechtman is Professor and Chair of the Department of History at Skidmore College, New York. He writes extensively on the British Empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and his previous works include Nabobs: Identity and Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 2010).

Reviews

'Nechtman's The Pretender of Pitcairn Island intrigues, instructs, and entertains. It is at once an energetic dialogue with many generations of Pacific scholars, a detailed meditation on British colonialism and Oceanian histories, and a feat of literary storytelling with 'Man Who Would Be King' resonances, populated by colorful, tragic, and terrifying characters.' Matt Matsuda, Rutgers University, New Jersey, and author of Pacific Worlds: A History of Seas, Peoples, and Cultures

'This is an absorbing account of a missing chapter in the notorious story of the mutiny of the Bounty and its long aftermath. But it is also an engagingly written, wider reflection upon maritime history and myth-making that everyone interested in Oceania's pasts ought to read.' Nicholas Thomas, University of Cambridge and author of Islanders: Experiences of Empire in the Pacific

'From the sea came this 'pavonine tin god' named Joshua W. Hill. He came with authority, he said, to reform the descendants of mutineers of HMAV Bounty on Pitcairn's Island. But he had no authority, and instead of reform he left the island in a shambles, under arrest on a British warship.' Herbert Ford, Pitcairn Islands Study Center

'Through impressive investigation, [Nechtman] shows us that Hill's CV was not as wholly fictitious as previous authors, myself included, have always assumed. Nechtman has found Hill's textual footprints not just on Pitcairn, but across the 19th-century world, from London to Tahiti.' Adrian Young, The Journal of Pacific History

'Nechtman's book will be of great interest to historians of Pitcairn Island and the Pacific region at large.' Richard Lansdown, Journal of New Zealand and Pacific Studies