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Epilogue: The Self-Constituted King of Pitcairn

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 August 2018

Tillman W. Nechtman
Affiliation:
Skidmore College, New York
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Summary

The final pages of this book seek to summarize what we have been able to learn about the mysterious Joshua W. Hill and his illegal administrative over Pitcairn Island. Hill is a shadowy figure. There is much that a close study of his life has been able to reveal, but this last chapter demonstrates too that there is much we cannot know. That tension between knowing and not knowing is central to the discipline of history more generally. Many of the historical actors who have appeared in this book also appeared in fictional accounts of the nineteenth-century Pacific – in the works of authors like Herman Melville and Robert Louis Stevenson. Joshua Hill’s biography, then, offers a moment to consider the fine line between fact and fiction in Pacific History, and, even more tantalizingly, it gives us an excuse to conclude with some reflections on the value of blurring that fine line almost to the point of invisibility.
Type
Chapter
Information
The Pretender of Pitcairn Island
Joshua W. Hill – The Man Who Would Be King Among the Bounty Mutineers
, pp. 296 - 311
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2018

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