The Pretender of Pitcairn Island: Joshua Hill - The Man Who Would Be King Among the Bounty Mutineers

I wasn't gonna do this but I feel like it's actually appropriate to say a little bit about how this to be and about why it made sense to me to tell the story of a small South Pacific island here on an island in the North Atlantic the the story of Pitcairn it seems to me as I hope to play out in the talk tonight is the story of an island who that can only be told in a global context many of the Islanders from here whalers and sailors went to Pitt Kernan the time that I'm working on and in the time that I was writing about so I encountered them from in this island through their writings and it's that that helped me put this story together so it does seem fitting and it's its own sort of circular way to come back to bring Pitcairn to here in Norfolk all right it's rather in Nantucket I actually will say that my I first encountered Pitts current as a small boy in Tennessee my grandfather was a poorly educated farmer he collected books and collected that was his way of claiming some sense of Education and when I was young he gave me his copy of the mutiny on the bounty trilogy by Nora Dauphin Hall that was in his collection of book club addiction Edition and I read that and that's when I first fell in love with this story so it's a story that started for me actually in Tennessee took me to the Pacific and then brought me here to Nantucket to tell the story of this island and I know I'll come back to Nantucket a little bit later on I thought I would quote Herman Melville when I started but I decided that it didn't make sense you all probably know what Melville said about man Tucket far better than I did so I decided that I would start this talk with a quote from James Michener in his tales of the South Pacific I wish I could tell you about the South Pacific he begins that book the way it actually was the endless ocean the infinite specks of coral we called islands coconut palms nodding gracefully towards the ocean reefs which waves broke into spray and inner lagoons lovely beyond description I wish I could tell you about the sweating jungle the full moon rising behind the volcanoes and the waiting the waiting the timeless repent of waiting those are the first lines of his tales of the South Pacific from 1947 on October 28 1832 an enigmatic man then aged 59 landed at Pitcairn Island it was a Sunday Joshua W Hill had sailed from Tahiti more than 1300 nautical miles to the northeast of the tiny Pacific island best known as the home to the descendants of the mutineers from the HMS Bounty and its ill-fated breadfruit mission under Captain William Bligh in 1789 hardly a major tourist destination Pitcairn was and remains an inhospitable rock formed from an upwelling of magma deep beneath the waters of the Pacific Ocean less than two square miles an area Pitcairn has no natural landing for visiting boats its sloping Hills drop off into the ocean as dangerous cliffs against which the angry waters of the Pacific beat a ferocious music the only small beach on the island is located at a bay so shallow that it hardly merits the name Bay it's known as bounty Bay for it was there that the infamous vessel made its last Anchorage in 1790 the Bay is sealed in by a coral reef so high and so sharp that only export longboat men are able to surf in from the open ocean on the crests of incoming ways the climb from the beach to the islands only settlement Adams town is so steep and inhospitable that the as to be called the hill of difficulty Joshua Hills voyage from Tahiti to Pitt Kern is cloaked in uncertainty petitions written years later by the Pitcairn Island errs indicate that he'll arrived on a small Tahitian vessel the pomorie captained by Thomas Emeril the official Island register though records that no such ship landed at the island in 1832 it does however record that on October 28 the Morea under the command of Captain Thomas Emeril did land at the island the Maria if the record is accurate was one of only five ships to reach Pitt Curran in the year its Euler to me as we shall see it's peculiar peculiar to the description of a lot of the story but not uncommon that there should be no sense of certainty about an event as rare or as notable as the arrival of a ship off the shores of Pitcairn Island there is no record of Hills actual landing in Bali Bey either we do know though what he made of Adam's town and that wasn't good having touched at pit Curran in 1833 only a few months after Hills arrival Captain Charles Fremantle of the HMS challenger recorded that he'll found the island in the greatest state of irregularity most of the Islanders were drunk including one Englishman by the name of George hon nobs who was the island's pastor by all accounts Hill was horrified by the state of things on the small island but what happened next remains something of a mystery as did James Michener I can only wish I could tell you the whole tale if we believe Hill and his partisans he convinced the Islanders that they were in need of reform volunteering his servants his services rather as an agent of change Captain Fremantle was initially concerned that Hill was a little more than a quote adventurer but he was quickly impressed by a mountain of papers and a lengthy curriculum vitae that Hill presented as his bona fides these documents suggested that Hill had lived a peripatetic sixty or so years before he ventured to Pitt Kern in the 1830s his travels had brought him into contact and communication with the rich and the famous he knew the abolitionist William Wilberforce he had he boasted quote visited the four quadrants of the globe in quote and he had done so in style he lived and died in palaces and with no less than the likes of Madame Bonaparte and Lady Hamilton mistress to the great Lord may Lord Nelson he was friends with George the fourth and William before he had been guests at meetings of the Royal Society in London and was an associate of its president Sir Joseph Banks whose idea it had been to send Captain Bligh on his ill-fated breadfruit mission to begin with he had published in some of the leading newspapers of the day and visited some of the great tourist destinations in South Asia and North America he had and pulled some of the finest wines at the tables of loyal hosts across Europe and he was perhaps hypocritically a member of several temperance societies he had attended Napoleon's coronation these were at least some of the claims he made the islands residents tell a different story George hon noms the islands erstwhile drunken preacher later noted that the newly arrived Englishmen announced that he had been sent from London to quote adjust the internal affairs of the island in quote indeed no one seems to have questioned the claim that Hill had again quote British ships of war off the coast under his direction and at his command we know though that there were no boats there were no such orders as we shall see Hill tried to convince the British government in London the London Missionary Society which I will probably call the LMS tonight to take up the issue of Pitcairn Island but neither had done so he seems therefore to have arrived on the island of his own accord he was but one man and yet from 1832 until he was removed from the island late in 1837 Joshua Hill ruled at Pitt current as the islands high priest its president and its schoolteacher he managed in short to dislodge pit kern from any authorised form of british colonial control without ever firing a single shot but who was joshua w hill pictured there the only known picture of him where exactly had he come from why did he decide that pitt current ought to be the target of his quote philanthropic tour among the islands of the Pacific few historians have looked at the history of Pitcairn Island have ventured to ask any of these admittedly basic questions about this enigmatic man most it is true had been far more interested in Pitts current as the ultimate home of the mutineers from the bounty than they had as part of the broader history of Britain's global 19th century Empire but the general tendency to be done with the remarkable story of mr. Hills fraudulent rule at Pitt current in a few quick lines or a short paragraph or two is I think surprising nearly all historians who have written about Hills sojourn at patron have assumed that Hills claims were lies and they have concluded result that it is nearly impossible to know much about this specific Mont bomber I want to start from a different premise I want to try to tell a different tale let us imagine that there is more to this story than one imposter threescore gullible Pacific Islanders and a half decade of British colonial neglect let us assume that Joshua Hill was connected to bigger colonial concerns that he did have global connections and that his arrival at Pitt Kern was part of a larger if admittedly idiosyncratic sense of how to reform and re4 to Phi British imperialism around the globe let us assume in short that Joshua Hill had a reason to go to Pitcairn Island after all in 1832 as today one doesn't end up at Pitcairn Island by accident let us assume therefore that Joshua Hills arrival off bounty Bay in either the pomorie or the Maria the boats don't matter on October 28 1832 was intentional that I want to suggest tonight is a tale worth the telling few in the early nineteenth century could have been unaware of Pitcairn Island the romantic story of the swashbuckling mutineers still captivates audiences to this day as is indicated by the number of repeated times it's been filmed I do actually think it's about time for another bounty film he said suggestively but the power of the story to seduce was even more palpable to contemporaries from the first hint that a mutiny had occurred on board the bounty everyone wanted to know the same thing where was the ship who where were the mutineers where was the cabal's leader the infamous Fletcher Christian so well known was the story of the Bounty's Lost crew that wind the Nantucket born whale a sealer Mayhew Folger came upon an uncharted island in 1808 he knew from the very verse syllables because they were in English off the lips of the natives that he had found the final resting place of Bligh's rebellious crew the museum has a bowl that the Islanders gave to him here in its collection in his journal fake Folger simply says I had found them in the 1808 there was no need in naval history to say who them was were sailing the South Pacific in reference to finding people very few ships landed at Pitcairn between Folgers 1808 arrival and mr. hills landing in 1832 compared with ports like Honolulu on Oahu in the Hawaiian or Sandwich Islands and Maccabi Bay in Tahiti bounty Bay was isolated and quiet it did not take more than a few ships a year though to distribute an elaborate narrative about Pitcairn Island the story that emerged from the island was one of a veritable paradise Glen Christian the historian himself a distant relative of Fletcher summarized the Pitcairn myth nicely when he wrote that Pickering was home to quote a unique people founded by a lawbreaker a mutineer a pirate a black birder and possibly a fool in 1790 when the mutineers landed at Pitcairn it was Britain's second Pacific colony after only Australia and like that larger piece of colonial landscape most of the inhabitants at pick Kern indeed all of the British men there were criminals but the romance of the story seemed to wash away the taint of the founding crime what Rousseau had dreamed Glen Christian concluded Fletcher Christian did when captain Folger landed in 1808 only one member of blacks crew was still alive a man the Islanders identified as Alexander Smith Smith freely admitted his part in the mutiny and outlined a history of the island and of its people it was not a pretty story after the mutiny Christian had sailed the bounty back to Tahiti for supplies aware that the crew were now all wanted men Christian had to seek an uncharted island where he and the 23 Bali men could live out their lives in hiding after several false starts Kristin returned to the Headey one last time there 16 of Christians men announced their plans to remain at Tahiti taking their chances there rather than continuing to sail the South Seas aimlessly that left Christian a crew of only nine men counting himself Christian set sail from Tahiti for the last time in September of 1789 with 16 men and 11th ahijon women on board the bounty with him in almost every account these Tahitian sailed as semi hostages true some of the women had developed attachment to the bounty men but nearly every narrative of the bounty final departure from Tahiti includes a nighttime sailing a secretive order to up the anchor and the attempt by at least one Tahitian woman to jump ship and swim home Christian and his men settled at Pitt Kern in 1790 burning the bounty in the bay that now bears its name so that its masts wouldn't disclose the mutineers final location in 1793 tensions erupted between the Tahitian men of Pitcairn and the nine English mutineers in part the conflicts of 1793 with a byproduct the christians decision to divide the island only among the white inhabitants leaving the kidnap Tahitian men to serve as veritable serfs to the English fugitives but the conflict was also the result of the gender imbalance on the island some of the mutineers had seen to it that their favorite Tahitian women were brought either willingly or by force on board the bounty but as the gender imbalance stood in favor of the islands male population some of the mutineers demanded sexual access to the women who had established themselves with the Tahitian men in the conflicts that followed five of the nine years including collector Christian and all six of the Tahitian men were murdered William McCoy either slipped from a cliff or committed suicide in a drunken fit in 1798 the cliff is still known as where William fall in 1799 Matthew Quentin all decided to murder that's two remaining white compatriots Edward Young and Alexander Smith both of whom had stepped in to fill the power vacuum left by Christians death six years earlier tipped off to Quentin's plan by Tahitian women young and Smith butchered Quentin 'el with a hatchet leading to the tahitian pit Kerr nice phrase dead as a hatchet young who had always been a sickly man died of asthma related complications in Christmas Eve 1800 it had only been ten years since Pitt kern was settled and already the island had witnessed the death of 14 of its 26 original inhabitants and only one of those due to natural causes it took six years after the rediscovery of Pitt Kern for British fish vessels to land on the island in 1814 Captain Sir Thomas Staines of the HMS Britain accompanied by Captain Pitman of the HMS Tagus reported that they had met a man by the name of John Adams at Pitt Kern John Adams not Alexander Smith John Adams the fabrication here was rather clear Adams had changed his name upon seeing a British ship approaching most likely in fear that he Alexander Smith a name that does appear on the bounty registers was about to be arrested some have suggested that Smith's real name may actually have been John Adams though like so many of the details of this story there's nothing in any archival record that I've ever seen that verifies which name was the real one the narrative history of Pitt current that Adams gave to stains in Pippin didn't match the one Smith had told the Folger in 1808 and it goes beyond the names by 1814 Christian's stains recorded had been the quote leader and sole cause of the mutiny Adams for his part is a venerable old man whose exemplary conduct in fatherly care of the whole of the little colony could not but command admiration the pious manner in which all those born on the island had been reared and the correct sense of religion which has been instilled into their young minds by this old man has given him the preeminence over the whole of them to whom they look up as the father of the whole family remember that's about a man that they know was a mutineer who has lied to them they know about his very name John Adams or Alexander Smith I don't know what to call him anymore live long enough he did not die until 1829 to welcome captain william frederick beachy to pit kern during his celebrated pacific voyage in the HMS blossom in 1825 the narrative BG heard from the now nearly 60-year old mutineer was different yet again perhaps the mutineers memory had slipped with time or perhaps he continued to use his place in history as the sole surviving mutineer nobody ever asked the Tahitian women their stories to improve on the story in ways that were advantageous for himself living long enough to tell the tale means no one is there to catch you telling tales what remained constant from stains 1814 report on was the notion that Pitts current and its community had become a tranquil place that it extirpated the violence and the crimes that its own markets early years that it had become a Pacific paradise a particular note over and over and over again was the religiosity of the islands John or lebar who sailed as a midshipman on board the HMS syringa Patong under Captain William wall de Grey from 1829 to 1837 in 1830 it was delightful he wrote to meet everywhere with the clear brow and smiling countenance of health and content their happiness is centred on the bosom of their families and the capabilities of living are comfortably within their reach hallowed by religion their lives must be won continued stream of uninterrupted pleasures there is here to be sure a celebration of the Pacific as something of an exotic and luxurious paradise patty O'Brien the historian has argued elsewhere that it's almost entirely possible to tell the history of the Pacific at least as the West has viewed it only errata sized bodies of pacific women but there's also more here than just the hints of noble savagery pit corners though complicate all of these myths in rather interesting ways first few if any of those who commented on pit kern in the early part of the 19th century cared one jot or tittle about the Tahitian women this was the story of John Adams or Alexander Smith and the redemptive work that he seems to have done in the years after 1800 and of the half English half Tahitian offspring that the mutineers had left to John Adams as their patriarch these were not noble savages because they never described as savages in any traditional sense but neither were they ever fully British indeed insofar as these people were British they were heirs to criminal acts mutiny being the first murder kidnapping etc having been added later in a way that was particularly Pitcairn ease then it was the confluence of the nobility of Tahitian savagery and the exotic ism of the South Seas and the reforming influences of Western Christianity that Adams or Smith had brought to them that lifted the descendants of the mutiny from their fathers criminal pass transforming an island that might otherwise have been seen as the last refuge of scoundrels which is what I have said before I wanted to name the book into a semi utopia space the home of a singular people who enter history here as the pit corners 19th century evangelicals captivated by this story worried that the pit Kerner's idyllic purity would be lost as they became more and more familiar with the outside world but by the late 1820s it was increasingly hard for picker and to ignore that world whalers sailors colonialist from around the globe were coming to their Island increasingly more and more ships were arriving than ever before though the numbers were never huge but not only were more ships arriving than ever before the numbers were still small the environmental concerns were beginning to plague the island and its population by the 1830s with the islands population nearing 90 people there was growing concern in Pitt current and in London that the island had reached its carrying capacity the lack of an adequate freshwater supply Pitt Kern has no naturally occurring rivers or lakes was particularly pressing it was in this climate then that Joshua Hill seems first to have heard about Pitcairn Island in the newspapers in May 1829 hill then a resident in Liverpool wrote a letter to the London Missionary Society noting that he was concerned that there was no one at picker to replace John Adams who by Hill's reckoning had to be nearly 75 years old it was he wrote to be feared that if we neglect them much longer it may become too late to use them to the advantage I have so long anticipated as a school in furtherance of native missionaries across the Pacific Ocean end quote Hill went on to outline his plan for securing a continuity of authority at Pitt Kern it seemed obvious to him at least that a certain number of London Missionary Society missionaries then employed at Tahiti had to remove themselves to Pitt current to form a school for his part Hill agreed to sign on as the head of that operation he was he noted a seasoned nautical officer capable of getting himself to the small island furthermore he would do so at his own expense something the British government always appreciated in its colonial agents from there he agreed quote to remain myself established as head school and thus become their teacher and improve their condition and welfare so far as maybe in my humble and power and abilities say from three to five years it is not clear whether or not the London Missionary Society leadership even approached the government about the idea but Pitts Kern was on the government's mind in response to the concerns about the islands lack of natural resources London organised an even more ambitious injure than Joshua Hills the total removal of the entire Pitt current population back to Tahiti the operation required not only that the government convinced the Pitt care nurse to leave their island home but also to convince the government of Queen pumorii the forth of Tahiti to have them it was no small project but early in 1831 Captain Alexander a Sandilands arrived on board the HMS sloop comet alongside a small Australian bark the lucien from sydney with orders to remove the islanders to tahiti sandal is negotiated with and cajoled the pit crew nursed for weeks before they agree to depart on March 6th the removal to Tahiti as that voyage is now remembered in Pitts Kearney's legend was disastrous though the patron errs were descended from Britons the bounty mutineers and Tahitian women the mutineers had kidnapped and though the Pickers had been visited from time to time by the outside world since 1808 they had lived in ecological isolation from long enough from 1790 to 1831 that they were vulnerable to diseases when transplanted into the more cosmopolitan world at poppy D 13th pick Turner's including the 41 year old Thursday October Christian Fletcher Christians eldest son died within three months of their arrival at Tahiti 17 of the Islanders died in all by June it was clear to the Pitts current leadership that the Islanders needed to go home and the first of the emigrants turned immigrants arrived at Pickering by the end of that month mr. Hill meanwhile seems to have sailed from Britain in June 1830 as we had seen Hill had a perm had prior to his departure had a proverbial bee in his bonnet over Pitcairn Island in his letters to the London Missionary Society and indeed in almost every letter he seems to have written to anybody who would listen Hill repeatedly articulated his personal narrative the story is remarkably consistent for a man we know who we'll go about lying later in our in the in the text and despite the dismissiveness of previous historical accounts my research has turned up evidence that what he told the Islanders is remarkably true let me give you a quick outline of what we know Hill was born on April 15 1773 in colonial North America his father remained loyal to the British crown in the tumultuous events surrounding the American Revolution losing significant amounts of land and wealth as a result given the descriptions that Hill has left to us with his father and accounts from the London accounts from the london-based Commission charged with remunerating loyalists for their losses during the revolution it seems possible and I think likely that Hills father was also named Joshua Hill a delegate to the colonial legislature in Delaware the elder hill upon leaving the rebellious colonies went northward to Canada where he seems to have settled for some time there before taking his family back to London our Joshua Hill joined the East India Company in 1794 sailing for China on board the ERC's East Indiaman bridgewater by 1802 though he had made his way back to Europe to Paris in particular where he was introduced at the institut de france by dr. Charles Blagdon longtime secretary to the Royal Society in London at the urging of Sir Joseph Banks the Society's president he did know Joseph Banks given that Blagdon visited josephine bonaparte at mama saw only two days after first meeting Hill in Paris it seems possible if not altogether certain that Hill may well have befriended Napoleon's wife as he claims to have done he may well for that matter have actually attended Napoleon's coronation in 1804 the record indicates he was in Paris at the time at some point most likely in the years between his departure from Delaware in 1775 and is returned to London or in the years after his return from Paris circa 1806 seven he'll toward the new American Republic visiting not only Niagara Falls in New York where he claims to have become well acquainted with the Seneca Indian leader red jacket but also to a well frequented natural stone bridge in West Virginia that Thomas Jefferson said was one of the wonders of the new continent and a celebrated reciprocating spring often cited in textbooks on hydraulics in the Pierre in eastern Tennessee the same state that started me on my voyage to Pitcairn Island there's a lot of circling around here as the early years of the 19th century brought war to Spain's colonies in South America Hill like many other British mercenaries sought employment among the various Liberation Army's in modern-day Argentina and Uruguay by the 1820s he had settled in Liverpool joined several evangelical associations as he told the Islanders he had done and turned his attention to the Pacific concerned as were other missionary minded Britons of the day that South Pacific Islanders famed for their sexual licentiousness were in grave need of British moral reform in preparing for that philanthropic tour of the Pacific hill contacted the London Missionary Society about its activities in Tahiti as I suggested before and he seems also to studied up on the activities of the American Board of Commissioners for foreign missions the ABC FM a group of evangelical missionaries from the American northeast whose activities were in Hills day centered in the Sandwich Islands primarily at the Port of Honolulu as he sent out for the Pacific in June 1830 he'll make sure that everyone he encountered on his voyage was deeply alerted to his cosmopolitan credentials but why why did it matter that a British adventurer in Honolulu or maxify Bay should have welcomed been well-connected in London Boston or Paris what did it matter that he had moved among the world's glitterati that he had rubbed elbows with the rich in noses with the famous the answer at a basic level surely hinges on hubris Hill was nothing if not self-confident and his biography it was admittedly impressive by almost any standard but there is more here precisely because Hills biography cannot be encapsulated inside any sort of what we might call national narrative Joshua Hill's biography demonstrates that he was an international player what I've come to call a citizen of the world in many ways like whalers from Nantucket who had as much familiarity with the South Pacific as they did the northeast of the United States in this sense Hill's biography was well placed to function within the Pacific world of the 1830s their international missionary ventures often work side by side indeed it's not far-fetched our an American missionary at Oahu had more in common with a British missionary at Tahiti than he and they were mostly men did with an American Whaler calling it Honolulu episodes of violence between missionaries and whalers in the Pacific were in fact frequent I'm sure there's somewhat famous here on this island perhaps the most infamous from the British standpoint was the feud between captain Buckley of the London whale ship Daniel that landed at Lahaina in Hawaii in October 1825 taking umbrage at new ordinances that prohibited Hawaiian women from going on board visiting whale ships captain Buckley and his cruise harass Reverend William Richards for the better part of a week insisting that it was missionary interference that had cost the sailors their traditional right of access to Hawaiian women on the fourth day of the standoff bunk Buckley his crew stormed Richards property raging outside the missionaries house with knives and pistols and threatening to murder the meddlesome American later whale ships made similar charges against Richards one American crew went so far as to pull down his house interestingly LMS missionaries from Britain and Tahiti took a great deal of interest in the events in Hawaii in no small measure because they too were subject to similar harassment letters back and forth from Tahiti to London Missionary Society headquarters in Britain chronicled the events surrounding the Daniel affair national affinities aside British missionaries at Tahiti could agree with American evangelicals in Hawaii that mate whalers as a lot were this is a quote wrong Island for this quote a most pernicious influence and a group of boisterous pleasure-seeking rabble who's the boss tree will convert the islands of Oceania into a transoceanic grog shop and brothel and quote on the whole Hawaiian Chiefs sided with the missionaries in these struggles Tahitian princes did the same in both the sandwich in the society island groups indigenous leaders predicated both their increasingly consolidated political power and the core of their legal codes around evangelical Christianity but Christianity being brought to them by groups like the LMS and the ABC FM in response to the Daniel affair Kawika Ely better known as kamehameha the third issued a penal code in December of 1827 at Hawaii that's circumscribe the movements of men from visiting ships at Hawaii what we see then is a tangled world in which indigenous Pacific island alii or elites and the euro-americans who were with them whether his merchants or missionaries forged complex and triangulated alliances in the early 19th century alliances that cut across traditional national and even imperial boundaries the Pacific I want to argue was an international space before it was a national space as our logical system of thinking would have us believe when we placed Joshua Hill into this world then we see that there he had more ideologically in common with the missionary movements than sweeping the Pacific and helping stabilize and secure newly emerging indigenous nations in the region than he did with British imperial power there this internationalist sensibility may ultimately help to explain why he'll seize control at Pitt Kern without any real authorization from the colonial power brokers in London at no time in he'll specific tour was what I am calling his international sensibility more apparent than during his brief stay in Hawaii with Hiram Bingham and his community from the American Board of Commission's commissioners for foreign missions in 1831 in a letter Hiram Bingham wrote to Jeremiah Everett's at Boston from Honolulu in June 28 On June 28 1831 the missionary leader noted that a captain JW hill had joined in an evangelical prayer meeting here Bingham wrote you would have seen Christian brethren at the table of our common Lord from England Scotland the United States of America and from the society islands and from the churches at Kauai Honolulu Lahaina and Hilo all bowing at the same altar there were just shy of 300 euro Americans living in the Hawaiian Islands at that time and Hills arrival there happened to coincide with the arrival of a community of French Catholic priests headed by Father John John Alexis Pasha low despite binghams description of universal Christian Concord bash shallows arrival and his announcement that Pope Leo the twelve had established a prefecture apostolic over the Sandwich Islands had caused some small amount of tension among the Hawaiian Christians Hill seems to mediated the situation in a rather telling manner while we might expect that a British adventurer in the Pacific with evangelical aspirations for his work there would oppose the expansion of French Catholicism in the region on both political and doctrinal grouts Hill took no such position indeed he seems to have argued that both with both Bingham and Kamehameha the third that neither had the right to expel the Roman delegation from Hawaii at the same time he our bachelor to take his delegation to some other island group after all as he argued the Pacific is filled with Islands his argument here was that there was plenty of Christianizing work to be done in the South Seas and that there was concomitant Lee no need for competing Christian factions to step on one another's toes for national or doctrinal reasons when the word could be divided out the ocean could be shared and God's work could be more completely fulfilled godlet godlessness was it would seem the real enemy here not the Catholics not the French Hills then was a solution that was distinctly internationalist a position that was for him I want to suggest the natural outgrowth of an international life that he stressed each time he arrived at a new island and met with new people to note that he'll operated as an internationalist in the Pacific when it was an international space is hardly to suggest that he wasn't wholly British in the way he approached his work in the South season at Pitt current in particular we must keep in mind that the world he'll was leaving behind this was the error of reform in Britain and it seems hardly coincidental that our South Pacific reformer should land at Pitt Kern with a reformist agenda for the small colonial island in the same year that Parliament in London passed the great Reform Act of 1832 that sought to remake the face of parliamentary democracy in metropolitan Britain it is difficult to fully appreciate the nature of the reform he'll sought to achieve at Pitt Kern in no small way that's because he never actually articulated a large-scale political regime or a proposal in one form we know from letters he wrote to the London Missionary Society into the British government before leaving Liverpool that he was concerned that nobody was looking out for the moral character of the Pitt Kerner's that the government had transported the Islanders to Tahiti in 1831 only confirmed phears Hills condemnation of the activities of the government's policies towards the Pitcairn Islands does not however constitute a proactive plan for political action to get it Hills agenda we can only look at what he actually did when he was in charge of the island from 1832 to 1835 and to do that we have to rely largely on declarations that have come down to us from men who stood against him three names in particular deserve our attention here George hon nobs we've met before the drunken preacher John Evans and John Buffett Nog's Evan Buffett were when Hill arrived at Pitt Corinth the only three residents of the island without a hereditary connection to the bounty story they were to use a word I learned here yesterday wash of sores they were to use Joshua Hills label for them Englishmen who had settled on the island and all with in recent memory Buffon's and Buffett and Evans had landed in 1823 noms in 1828 ironically on the same day four years earlier that Hill had arrived all three had been involved in some way with British naval and merchant ventures in the South Pacific all three had reason to stop over Midway at Pitt current and all three chose to stay on the island Evans married into John Adams his family within a year at the time of the removal all three Englishmen traveled with the pit crew nurse to Tahiti and Buffett and his family were the first to return in 1831 in his early years on the island Buffett had served as the island's primary educator but he had been replaced in that capacity by nobs when he landed in 1828 that he'll already certain that exposure to the broader world would pollute the Pitt Kearney's people found nobs Evans and Buffett engaged in the distilling of the tea route plant that had drunken ever intoxicated everyone that Sunday morning when he arrived that they were sitting idly around Pitt current when he arrived did little to change his opinion that London's policies and the influence of these as he called them lousy foreigners was going to diminish Pitcairn Island the majority of the Islanders seem to have warmed to he'll quickly a petition from the public functionaries and others at Pitt Curran dated a October 1833 praised him for having saved the island and for quote snatching its people providentially as it were from the break of infidelity itself and as well as other crying and by setting since now too painful for us to contemplate which otherwise must have been our entire and total ruin the same memorandum further argued that as long as the three foreigners they had picked up hills turned by that point remained on the island the Islanders would never be able to go a right or to resist the corrupting and destructive practices that those foreigners had brought with them it's worth pausing to reflect on the persistent use of the word foreigner to describe these Englishmen Hill - was an Englishman he too was a foreigner the Pickers were all partially English but nobs Evans and Buffett were almost universally labeled as English or foreign in all of these debates as if they had no relation to the islands idyllic mythology and it's Christian story of redemption how did Hill get away with not being a foreigner in that same paradigm my sense is that he'll having framed himself as the pit Koerner Savior on the other hand was English but never foreign to the island he was part of a narrative of reform that was distinctly part of the pit carnies story to that end he'll justified some of his more draconian policies first and foremost he'll insisted that he had do right to the house that knobs had occupied as the islands teacher a property supplied to both Hill and knobs at the expense of the Islanders other inhabitants secondly Hill suggests that it was hardly right that foreigners should own land at Pitt Kern and he threatened to seize any property owned by Evans knobs Buffett or their children according to later testimonials from the three hill seems to have attempted to break the men apart from their families to secure the purity of the pit Kearney's bloodline nobs records that it records that he feared going out alone on the island lest he be met by Hill or one of his supporters and beaten buffett was beaten and his family and friends were ordered not to visit with him during his recuperation Evans his wife was encouraged to leave him and come live at Hills formerly nob cz's house under Hills protection it would be too far stretch I think to connect Hills attempts at land reallocation at Pitt Kern to the parliamentary reapportionment undertaken by the great Reform Act of 1832 and in fact the legislation passed only after he'll sailed from Britain so he didn't know about it at the time although he would have known about some of the earlier talk for the legislation there is no reason to stop here and reflect on what Hill was doing when the bounty landed at Pitt Kern Fletcher Christian had divided the island into nine plots one for each of the white mutineers those plots had over time been subdivided among the Pitts counters the racial divide between English and Tahitian settlers had as a result effectively been erased as the Pitt Kerner's interbred and as a national identity Pitt Kerner's or Pekinese emerged as a distinctly Anglo Polynesian mixed people nowhere then was the influence of foreigners more directly evident than in the revolutionary new alignment of land ownership that was being put into place when Evans nobs and Buffett arrived and married into the islands population it is noteworthy that Hill who occupied a home courtesy of the Islanders for his services of teacher didn't intend to own land himself on the island his presence was never to be permanent it didn't introduce anything new to the lineage of these people whose unique Anglo Tahitian origins had overcome so many perceived disadvantages to achieve an almost prelapsarian perfection in fact over and over Hill tells us I'm Mary I'm going home I have a family back in London he was different in that regard than these other men in the great age of British political reform Joshua Hill introduced a reformist movement to Pitt current that was distinctly rooted in an imperial and evangelical and a Pacific context in May 1833 he unilaterally declared that it would therefore thereafter be illegal for the children of any of the three lousy foreigners a phrase that appears in the legislation you don't often see that in legislation could inherit land on the island in August of the same year he ordered that every weapon on the island be secured under lock and key at his house according to George nobs Hill sat with a loaded musket under a seat at church on every subsequent Sunday to intimidate his hearers indeed once Hill secured control over all the islands weapons he initiated a policy that it concluded to mandatory holy services every Sunday and both according to what Hill defined as a pure Wesleyan variety than the Church of England services that knobs had feet favoured Hill reformed the school he pulled down the stills in the islands forest at hinterlands he patched up the landing docks in bounty Bay here II paved the way to up the hill of difficulty to Adams town as well eventually Hill's efforts to purge and purify pit current worked nobs Buffett and Evans all left the island during Hills years their noms and Evans to the Gambier Islands and Buffett to Tahiti initially they all left on their own only later to return and take their families with them but as you can easily imagine Hill's victory over the foreigners at Pitt Kern could never have been permanent the fraudulent origins of his power at the island were always destined for disclosure when Captain Lord Edward Russell and the HMS act and arrived in Pitt current early in 1837 Hill pushed his luck one boast too far Lord Russell a distant relative of the Duke of Bedford quickly saw through Hills claims that he was a close associate of the Duke and he reported his suspicions we returned to London London for its part had begun to wonder about the goings-on at Adams town and all of the kerfuffles that were popping up at other islands as Pitt Turner started showing up there in exile they wanted to know who was this captain Joshua W Hill and they ordered captain HW Bruce of the HMS Imogene to visit Pitt current during his specific crossing late in 1837 captain Bruce landed at Pitt current in December of that year and he was has left us with a rather thin description of what he found mr. Hill he wrote in one to spot dispatch had quote made himself slightly obnoxious to the natives having assumed power and control over them slightly obnoxious then that's all on the other hand Bruce also noted that Hill's conduct and rule at Pickering had been quote marked by the strictest moral integrity far harsher was Bruce's assessment of evidence nobs and Buffett the three of whom had returned to Pitt Kern after hearing word that Hills of Hills run-in with Lord Russell quote but for the fact these three strangers and foreigners had misconducted themselves the little community of natives would have formed a social circle not to be met with elsewhere on the face of the globe like Hill Bruce admonished the three quote delinquent foreigners picking up on a claim and a label that he'll had used alas truce concluded wherever English lingo there profligacy and depravity are to be found in their train vice or crime were unknown among the children of these mutineers that's in and of itself a fascinating vice and crime were unknown to mutineers until the settlement of the three English Outlanders I have mentioned on the island he to those three or Outlanders Hill is not bruce then seems to have resettled on the notion that pit Curran was a Pacific paradise there are here he later recorded in a letter the most kindly generous affectionate and guiltless people I can meet with to hold intercourse with them as a source of inescapable gratification the pit corners are so pure so unsuspicious so amiable and above all they are also very pious Bruce often recalled later in his life that he should quote like to have passed some days on shore with the natives of this most interesting Christian community but my time was too limited for that after all as we know Bruce had a job to do to remove captain Joshua W Hill but what of that job perhaps the most remarkable thing about Bruce's reflections on his visit to Pitt Kern were the notes he had about Joshua Hill notes that were limited to the simple observation that he had quote brought Hill away at his own request the novelist James Norman Hall who with Charles Nordhoff would co-author the now famous bounty trilogy of novels that began my voyage with this island in this history once observed that Joshua Hill was the Mussolini of Pitcairn Island I love that description but Bruce and his crew seem to have experienced a different man entirely John C Dalrymple Hey later to be knighted and elevated to the rank of Admiral in the Royal Navy sailed with Bruce on board the imogene as a midshipman later in his career double hey reflected back on his voyage to pit crew noting that quote we deported from the island a gentleman a member of an English University who having spent all his money had obtained a passage in an American Whaler and landed about two years before in quote here again we see a lot of confusion about Hills arrival at Pitts current this time that he came aboard an American whale ship no American will ship at Pitt Kernan 1832 so that's wrong and about the time because he says 1835 not 32 as well as about it as well as evidence of his willingness to tell tales about himself this time the unsubstantiated and unsubstantiated a bull claimed that he belonged to an Oxbridge elite hey confess though that hill had quote persuaded the Islanders to maintain him and appoint him as their schoolmaster but he was not well calculated for that post but he'll officer he also noted that Hill was charismatic and simply put fun quote on the passage to Valparaiso he regaled us with anecdotes of high life his stories often began with when I was sipping my clover a with His Royal Highness and things of that sort in quote Hill was it would seem the life of the party it's worth remembering scoundrels often are by both bruce and haze account the imogene landed Joshua Hill at Valparaiso in Chile then one of the most significant ports on the eastern coast of the Pacific in the centre for all British naval operations in South America they did not see or hear from hill any further indeed history loses all sight of hill again until 1841 when he seems to petition the British government for payment for services he rendered to them as the governor of their colony at Pitcairn Island at the time Hill was resident in London in his petition he claims to have developed diabetes as the result of the hardships he endured for the good of the Pitt Kearney's people and similarly he declares that his wife whom he seems to have left behind in Liverpool while he sailed the South Seas had abandoned him for a disreputable life on the European continent this was a man who had suffered for a cause and who he suggested deserve to be paid for the work needless to say Joshua Hill never got paid according to census data he continued to live in London until January 1848 when he died aged 75 and was buried in st. Pancras churchyard just behind what we now know as st. Pancras train station in London Charles Haddon Spurgeon one of Britain's most celebrated Baptist preachers of the 19th century once wrote that a lie will go around the world while the truth is pulling its boots on Spurgeon observation is often attributed to Mark Twain who rather appropriately wrote a short story model hils years at Pitt Kernan titled the great revolution at Pitt Corinth in 1879 it's a short story that no one knows about it's fitting that hill and Spurgeon and or I'm sorry the Twain of Spurgeon would bind themselves up here it seems to me and it makes this quote an even more fitting epithet for Joshua Hill's brief dictatorship at Pitt corn island and I think it does so on multiple levels on one hand we have here the story of a man and his great big whopper of a lie that London wanted him to go to govern Pitt Kern that singular lie has heretofore been the only thing historians had wanted to tell us about Joshua Hill the lie has literally gone round the world more than once but Hill's lie need not blind us to the broader truths that are buried within his philanthropic tour of the Pacific and it's tyrannical rule at Pitt Kern in particular indeed as I suggested the lie itself is telling because the lie leads us to a life the life leads us on a voyage around the globe from Tennessee and back it is part of the tale it speaks to Hill's hubris and to the hubris of the empires that were beginning to reach out into the Pacific in the early 19th century at the same time Hills great lie has obscured the truth of the story for far too long because Hill lied about the legitimacy of his authority at Pitt current historians have assumed he lied about everything else while the lie has been going around the world the truth that would seem didn't even have a pair of boots to pull on by taking the rest of Hills biography seriously and trying to find out what parts of it were true and what weren't and trying to figure out where this man was and wasn't I hope I've accomplished several historical ends first and most basically I hope to have developed a better sense of this idiosyncratic man this ghostly figure whose face we will probably only ever know from this faded pencil sketch who decided that one small island of mixed-race colonists was in so much danger of losing its godly character that he got on a boat that he sailed around the world only to lie to his chosen people and hold them in fear of his wrath for the better part of a decade second and I think this is more significant I think that by taking mr. Hills biography a bit more seriously I've exposed a set of connections that better enables us to understand the complex nature of the Pacific Ocean in the nineteenth century historians of the Atlantic world have in recent decades developed a much more sophisticated sense of how international history worked in that Basin particularly in the years after 1492 commerce colonialization and perhaps more importantly still the horrors of the Atlantic slave trade quite literally roped Europe the Americas and Africa together in ways that we're still coming to terms with the Pacific contrapuntal II has attracted very few willing to grapple with the meaning of a comparable history of the Pacific world I'm not sure that I've taken that task up myself I have as I started by quoting James Dunn as James Michener son wish I could tell you a story of the South Pacific but that wish it seems to me will probably always remain somewhat elusive in telling you a tale of the South Pacific I've had to wander from colonial North America to London from London to Liverpool from Liverpool to South Asia to Nantucket from France to Niagara Falls my tale of the South Pacific is taken detours through the tribal lands of the Seneca Indians and it did all of this before it even remotely thought to enter the warmer tropical waters of the South Seas but perhaps that is a point where it's stopping on a history of the Pacific is a history that cannot be bounded and that refuses to be reined in by mere geography Pacific history is perhaps a history that dissolves rather than unites empires nations and stable boundaries of those sorts all fade out in the Pacific as ideological and internationalist intersections rise to the foreground more troubling at least more troubling for me as a historian knowledge and truth seem to blur away as well.did he'll arrive on the pomorie or the Maria or maybe on that American Whaler in 1832 or 1835 we just don't know did he know Josephine Bonaparte did he dine with her at Malmaison we likely won't ever know frustrating to write a biography and have a bunch of stuff you just don't know so was he telling the truth or was he making it up I cannot say I wish I could tell you a tale about the South Pacific the way it actually was but the South Pacific eludes the telling we can sail that endless ocean that covers more than one-third of the surface of the globe but a history of the South Pacific must I would suggest in conclusion always be more about the voyage than it is about the destination thank you [Applause] you

Channel: nantuckethistory

Views: 6,500

Keywords: Joshua W. Hill, Pitcairn Island, HMS Bounty, mutineers, Tillman Nechtman, Nantucket Whaling Museum, Nantucket Historical Association

Id: w9ToQhV-ZDQ

Length: 54min 24sec (3264 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 17 2019