Until now, histories of the Mutiny on the Bounty have largely stopped at the settlement of Pitcairn Island in 1790. Far too few historians have been interested in the unique colony that was settled by the Bounty mutineers and that persists as a piece of the British Empire down to the present. Of even less interest has been the dictatorship of Joshua W. Hill at Pitcairn, a moment that began when Hill landed at the island in 1832. Hill had no permission to govern at Pitcairn. He bamboozled the islanders in an elaborate confidence scheme. Most historians have assumed that we will not and cannot know anything about Hill other than that he lied to the islanders in 1832. This book begins from a different premise, insisting that the quest to know something about this seeming charlatan might just tell us something more about the history of British imperialism and about the Pacific Ocean in the nineteenth century.