The Wikipedia article on the American adventurer Joshua W. Hill consists of one six-sentence paragraph. It tells us that, for about five years, Hill served as head magistrate of the small community residing at Pitcairn, a tiny Pacific Island of barely two square miles, located roughly halfway between Panama and Auckland. It also tells us that Hill's reign in Pitcairn grew authoritarian and that he was ultimately removed from office.

The entry does not mention—presumably because this bit of knowledge is assumed—that the most famous mutiny in British naval history (though by no means the most consequential) ended on Pitcairn. In late April of 1789, a band of mutineers led by master's mate Fletcher Christian seized HMS Bounty as it made its way from Tahiti to the West Indies bearing a cargo of juvenile breadfruit trees. The cargo, the voyage's government sponsors hoped, would provide a reliable, high-calorie food source for Britain's West Indian sugar plantations. Eighteen loyalists joined the ship's benighted commander, William Bligh, for a horrific forty-seven-day open-boat voyage to the Dutch port of Batavia. Christian and the twenty-three crew members who remained aboard the Bounty then made their way to Tahiti, intending to sail on to some more remote hiding place. Sixteen mutineers chose to remain at Tahiti, however, leaving just nine crew members—too few to sail a ship of the Bounty’s size. With the help of seventeen Tahitians (six men and eleven women), Christian and the remaining crew eventually sailed out of Matavei Bay, ultimately making their way to the uninhabited Pitcairn, some 1,300 nautical miles to the east-southeast. The subsequent fate of the Bounty, its remaining crew members, and the Tahitians who accompanied them, has to be assembled from the barest fragments. Most of what is known comes from interviews conducted by American and British ship captains who happened to encounter the island. Only one mutineer, John Adams (formerly Alexander Smith), is known to have survived the Pitcairn colony's early years long enough to have had his memories recorded.

By the time Euro-American seafarers found the island, Pitcairn's thirty-five or so inhabitants, save Adams, consisted of mixed-race descendants of mutineers and several of their aged Tahitian widows (a term which must be used advisedly, since the mutineers seem to have conflated kidnapping, enslavement, and marriage). In the minds of countless nineteenth-century poets, short-story writers, and essayists, the Pitcairners’ splendid isolation had glorious results: shielded from industrial modernity, the islanders had come closer to moral perfection than any community, anywhere.

Tillman W. Nechtman's The Pretender of Pitcairn Island: Joshua W. Hill—The Man Who Would be King among the Bounty Mutineers, an often illuminating microhistory centering on Hill, looks to overturn much of the myth shrouding Pitcairn's early history. Drawing on a vast and disparate body of sources, Nechtman reconstructs Hill's short reign at Pitcairn. As Hill's brief Wikipedia page suggests, it is a daunting task.

Hill's biographical record consists primarily of two documents: a petition for government compensation published in London in 1841 and a letter Hill wrote from Pitcairn in 1834. Nechtman suggests that the authenticity of even these sources cannot be known for certain. The letter seems to exist only as excerpted in a nineteenth-century book published well over a decade after Hill had been driven from the island. The Admiralty petition might be more reliable, but Nechtman offers little reason to think so. He observes that insofar as Hill was known at all, it was as teller of tales. John Buffet, an Englishman residing on the island when Hill arrived, recalled that (in Nechtman's words) “the islanders knew at once that this tall Englishman … was telling them stories” (30). Elsewhere, Nechtman characterizes Hill as the “confidence man of Pitcairn Island” (46), “history's most fortunate fanfaron” (45), “an absolute flannelmouth” (43) and “a pavonine tin god” (6). The modifiers here, it should be said, reflect Nechtman's distracting affection for arcane and archaic terminology, such as “smellfungus” (71), “bibulous” (73), “tosspots” (75), “shilly-shallied” (87), “shirty” (133), “alopecic scalp” (137), “puffery and tradiddle” (140), “gadabouts” (149), “pediculous” (149), “colonial fugleman” (149), and “pecksniffian”(151).

With so little jelly to nail to the historian's wall, Nechtman is left with context. We may not learn much new about Joshua Hill, but Nechtman has a great deal to say about the Pitcairn colony and the larger Polynesian archipelago. He tells us about Anglo-American evangelicals and French Catholics who traveled to the island; he offers details about the island's complex politics; he explores its ecological history and its demographic struggles.

Although Nechtman is a historian of the British Empire, he has surprisingly little to say about Pitcairn's place within it. Hill, it seems clear, believed Pitcairn to be a British colony, and there is ample evidence that the isolated Pitcairners occasionally attracted the attention of colonial officials. But by all accounts, the remote island could be considered a colony in name only—it had no standing administration, no military presence, no customs agents, no merchants. It lacked even an accessible beach, let alone anything that could be mistaken for a deep-water port. British missionaries and beachcombers visited the island, as they did most inhabited Polynesian islands, but Nechtman offers little about any informal imperial regime they might have imposed. The point belies one of Nechtman's central claims: namely, that Hill undid “British power at Pitcairn” (140) and that his actions “called into question the power of British imperialism writ large” (148). In fact, Nechtman's depiction of British Pitcairn is less suggestive of far-reaching imperial might and its overthrow than of some sort of Gilbert and Sullivan version of empire, in which strapping Britons raise Union Jacks aboard sporty dinghies as they set sail on duck ponds.