1. Christian & Ors v. The Queen (The Pitcairn Islands), Appeal Judgment, UKPC 47, ILDC 553 (UK 2006), October 30, 2006, Privy Council of the United Kingdom, https://www.bailii.org/uk/cases/UKPC/2006/47.html.

2. We build on the approach of Lauren Benton and Lisa Ford, who characterize such processes as “systemic, but not systematic” in their operation and effects. See Lauren Benton and Lisa Ford, Rage for Order: The British Empire and the Origins of International Law, 1800–1850 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016), 2.

3. On the development of somewhat disjointed approaches to Pacific history, see David Armitage and Alison Bashford, “Introduction: The Pacific and Its Histories,” in Pacific Histories: Ocean, Land, People, ed. David Armitage and Alison Bashford (New York: Palgrave, 2014), 1–28; Paul Kramer, “A Complex of Seas: Passages Between Pacific Histories,” Amerasia Journal 42, no. 3 (2016): 32–41.

4. Sarah Heathcote, “Legal Models and Methods of Western Colonisation of the South Pacific,” Journal of the History of International Law 24, no. 1 (2022): 62–101, here pp. 64–65.

5. Peter Cane, Lisa Ford, and Mark McMillan, “Editors’ Introduction,” in The Cambridge Legal History of Australia, ed. Peter Cane, Lisa Ford, and Mark McMillan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 1–16, here p. 7.

6. Saliha Belmessous, ed., Native Claims: Indigenous Law Against Empire, 1500–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). For examples focusing on Pacific Native sovereignty and rights, see Lisa Ford, Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and Australia, 1788–1836 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011); Bain Attwood, Empire and the Making of Native Title: Sovereignty, Property and Indigenous People (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020); Mark Hickford, Lords of the Land: Indigenous Property Rights and the Jurisprudence of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Kristy Gover, “Legal Pluralism and Indigenous Legal Traditions,” in The Oxford Handbook of Global Legal Pluralism, ed. Paul Schiff Berman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 847–75.

7. On legal encounters as a framework, see Cane, Ford, and McMillan, “Editors’ Introduction”; on legal pluralism, see in particular Lauren Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Shaunnagh Dorsett, “Plural Legal Orders: Concept and Practice,” in Cane, Ford, and McMillan, The Cambridge Legal History of Australia, 19–39.

8. On jurisdictional politics, see Benton and Ford, Rage for Order, chapters 5 and 6; on protection arrangements enfolding small islands into imperial spheres of influence, see Lauren Benton and Adam Clulow, “Protection Shopping Among Empires: Suspended Sovereignty in the Cocos-Keeling Islands,” Past & Present 257, no. 1 (2022): 209–47; on the regime of naval intervention, see Lauren Benton, They Called It Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024), chapter 5.

9. For an expanded discussion of this critique of common assumptions about legal pluralism, see Lauren Benton and Adam Clulow, “Interpolity Law and Jurisdictional Politics,” Law and History Review 3 (2023): 1–13. For a critique of legal pluralism from a perspective that highlights the capacity of Indigenous law to repurpose and remake European law, see Alecia Pru Simmonds, “Cross-Cultural Friendship and Legal Pluralities in the Early Pacific Salt-Pork Trade,” Journal of World History 28, no. 2 (2017): 219–48.

10. On the early and mid-nineteenth century as a period when imperial law was overshadowed in international law, see Benton and Ford, Rage for Order, chapters 1 and 7; Martti Koskenniemi, To the Uttermost Parts of the Earth: Legal Imagination and International Power, 1300–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), chapter 9.

11. The key work is Stuart Banner, Possessing the Pacific: Land, Settlers, and Indigenous People from Australia to Alaska (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007). Compare Attwood, Empire and the Making of Native Title.

12. Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time [1979], trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 49.

13. On future-conditional states, see Natasha Wheatley, The Life and Death of States: Central Europe and the Transformation of Modern Sovereignty (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023).

14. For a detailed analysis of the mariners’ motivations and grievances, see Greg Dening, Mr. Bligh’s Bad Language: Passion, Power and Theater on H. M. Armed Vessel Bounty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

15. It was a bad bet for some, a good one for others. Of the fourteen mutineers detained in Tahiti, four died when HMS Pandora went aground on its return voyage. The rest were court-martialed, although a majority escaped capital punishment.

16. Andrew Lewis, “Pitcairn’s Tortured Past: A Legal History,” in Justice, Legality, and the Rule of Law: Lessons from the Pitcairn Prosecutions, ed. Dawn Oliver (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 39–62, here p. 48.

17. Quoted in Tillman W. Nechtman, The Pretender of Pitcairn Island: Joshua W. Hill – The Man Who Would Be King Among the Bounty Mutineers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 251.

18. Kew, The National Archives, (hereafter “TNA”), ADM 1/53, Captain Russell Eliott (HMS Fly) to Rear Admiral Charles B. H. Ross, January 25, 1839, enclosing Regulations for the appointment of a Magistrate at Pitcairns Island. Eliott recorded that he found ninety-nine residents living on Pitcairn. Multiple spellings of Eliott’s name appear in the records.

19. TNA, CO 201/370, minute of James Stephen, permanent undersecretary of state for the colonies, to George William Lyttelton, parliamentary undersecretary for war and the colonies, January 14, 1846.

20. It seems likely that the inquiry of Lennox-Boyd, a conservative, was related to that year’s debate about whether subjects of new members of the Commonwealth should enjoy the same rights to immigration to Great Britain as the subjects of old members of the Commonwealth. The conservatives were advocating a more expansive view of immigration rights. See David Welsh, “The Principle of the Thing: The Conservative Government and the Control of Commonwealth Immigration, 1957–59,” Contemporary British History 12, no. 2 (1998): 51–79.

21. TNA, CO 1036/17, Pitcairn Group, constitutional status, 1955, fol. 7.

22. British Settlements Act, 1887 (50 and 51 Vic. c. 54), https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Vict/50-51/54.

23. The prompt for this expansion was a case arising from the murder of a woman and child on Pitcairn in 1897. Concluding that there was no other way to prosecute the accused man, Henry Christian, the colonial secretary, pushed the island under the authority of the Western Pacific High Commission, created in 1877 and located on Fiji. The High Commissioner’s Court assumed jurisdiction of the murder and appointed a judicial commissioner to travel to Pitcairn to try the case, along with two officers of HMS Royalist. Christian was convicted and transported to Fiji to be hanged. See Michael O. Eshleman, “A South Seas State of Nature: The Legal History of Pitcairn Island, 1790–1900,” UCLA Pacific Basin Law Journal 29, no. 1 (2011): 1–35, especially pp. 23–28.

24. Christian & Ors v. The Queen (The Pitcairn Islands), Appeal Judgment, UKPC 47, ILDC 553 (UK 2006), October 30, 2006, Privy Council of the United Kingdom. The case originated with charges in 2004 against seven men. It was initially heard on Pitcairn by the Pitcairn Supreme Court, which was filled as per the 2002 Pitcairn Trials Act by judges from New Zealand. Six of the accused were found guilty. The case then passed to the newly created Pitcairn Court of Appeal and from there to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. For an excellent study of these legal proceedings, see Oliver, Justice, Legality, and the Rule of Law; Michael O. Eshleman, “A Preliminary Legal Bibliography of the Pitcairn Islands, South Pacific Ocean,” Law Library Journal 106, no. 2 (2014): 221–36. On the history of jurisdiction in Pitcairn, see Eshleman, “A South Seas State of Nature.”

25. Case for Appellants, submitted to Privy Council, Case for Len Calvin Davis Brown, Dennis Ray Christian, and Randall Kay Christian, May 31, 2006, https://evols.library.manoa.hawaii.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/8cd4184b-5d7d-4cdb-8691-436191ddd8f8/content. This was one of multiple appeals. A huge repository of materials connected to these cases are stored electronically in eVols at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.

26. Christian & Ors v. The Queen (The Pitcairn Islands), Appeal Judgment, UKPC 47, ILDC 553 (UK 2006), October 30, 2006, Privy Council of the United Kingdom. In an important study, Dawn Oliver notes: “To the extent that judgments are supposed to communicate the justifications for a decision to the parties and to the public, the formalistic approach falls short and leaves the court vulnerable to criticisms of, in this case, undue deference to the executive.” Oliver, “The Pitcairn Prosecutions, Paper Legal Systems, and the Rule of Law,” in Oliver, Justice, Legality, and the Rule of Law, 23–38, here p. 26. Two of the judges, Lord Woolf and Lord Hope, dismissed the appeal but did acknowledge some of these issues.

27. As one example, Lummis describes events on Pitcairn as a “gripping drama.” Trevor Lummis, Pitcairn Island: Life and Death in Eden (London: Routledge, 1997), 4.

28. Dening, Mr. Bligh’s Bad Language. In addition to shipboard conflicts over the proper performance of authority, events after the mutiny showed that some mariners did not regard it as a permanent repudiation of British power. The sailors who stayed behind on Tahiti decided to risk arrest and trial, hoping that explanations of their participation would save them from hanging. Some were proved right. Of the ten brought to trial in London, seven were acquitted or pardoned, and three were hanged. Adams was not arrested when the islanders were discovered twenty years later, despite the Admiralty’s earlier determination to find and punish the mutineers, and was pardoned in 1825. These interpretive possibilities cut against treatments of mutinies as being mainly about “maritime radicalism.” See Niklas Frykman et al., “Mutiny and Maritime Radicalism in the Age of Revolution: An Introduction,” International Review of Social History 58, no. S21 (2013): 1–14.

29. Nechtman, The Pretender of Pitcairn Island, 7 and 137. Hill was not unusual in this regard; petty tyranny and zeal for reform existed in frequent combination across the nineteenth-century British Empire. On this point, see Benton and Ford, Rage for Order, chapter 2.

30. One set of restrictions was replaced with another when the government decided at the end of the Napoleonic Wars that the Navigation Laws applied to New South Wales. The purpose was to restrict foreign trade into British ports. The question was immediately raised whether inter-island trade was considered foreign if conducted by British merchants. The company’s monopoly collapsed in 1813. In 1835, the government clarified that South Pacific islands were not British, but they were not foreign in relation to the Navigation Laws. John Manning Ward, British Policy in the South Pacific, 1786–1893: A Study in British Policy Towards the South Pacific Islands Prior to the Establishment of Governments by the Great Powers (Sydney: Australasian Publishing Company, 1948), 29. The question provided yet another register of ambiguity about the limits and reach of the empire. See also Benton and Ford, Rage for Order, chapter 6.

31. The precise designation was islands between 10 degrees 37 minutes south and 43 degrees 39 minutes south, according to Phillip’s commission. Ward, British Policy in the South Pacific, 35.

32. Phillip appointed some justices of the peace on several “adjacent” islands, and in an attempt to introduce a measure of control over British ex-convicts causing disorder in the region, required ships leaving Port Jackson for other islands to purchase “good behavior bonds.” Ward points out that both measures were “probably illegal.” Ward, British Policy in the South Pacific, 35.

33. An Act for the More Speedy Trial of Offences Committed in Distant Parts upon the Sea, 46 Geo. 3. c. 54, May 23, 1806. https://www.dloc.com/CA01200167/00001/images/0.

34. An Act for the More Effectual Punishment of Murders and Manslaughters Committed in Places Not Within His Majesty’s Dominions, 57 Geo. 3. c. 53, June 27, 1817.

35. “Vice-Admiralty Court of NSW, 1787–1911,” Museums of History, New South Wales, https://mhnsw.au/guides/vice-admiralty-court-nsw-1787-1911/#Vice-Admiralty-Court-1787-1812.

36. Hickford, Lords of the Land, 73 and 93–94; Benton, They Called It Peace, 159–60.

37. Benton, They Called It Peace, chapter 5. Captains’ actions were part of a wider imperial strategy of extending power through delegated legal authority in globally militarizing empires.

38. Benton and Ford, Rage for Order, chapter 6.

39. Benton and Clulow, “Protection Shopping Among Empires.”

40. On Brooke, see Benton and Ford, Rage for Order, 140–45.

41. Sydney, State Library of New South Wales, Sir Joseph Banks Papers, series 71.05, “Capt Pipon’s Narrative of the State Mutineers of H. M. Ship Bounty Settled on Pitcairns Island in the South Sea,” September 1814.

42. The appellants in the case before the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in 2006 argued, in part, that the failure to arrest Adams “operated strongly against any claims of the British Government that it had lawfully acquired Pitcairn Island by settlement.” Case for Appellants, submitted to Privy Council, Case for Len Calvin Davis Brown, Dennis Ray Christian, and Randall Kay Christian, May 31, 2006, https://evols.library.manoa.hawaii.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/8cd4184b-5d7d-4cdb-8691-436191ddd8f8/content.

43. Alan Strode Campbell Ross and Albert W. Moverley, The Pitcairnese Language (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 62; Donald H. McLoughlin, “The Development of the System of Government and Laws of Pitcairn Island from 1791 to 1971,” in The Laws of Pitcairn, Henderson, Ducie and Oeno Islands (Wembley: Government of the Islands of Pitcairn, Henderson, Ducie and Oeno, rev. ed., 1971); Adrian Michael Young, “Mutiny’s Bounty: Pitcairn Islanders and the Making of a Natural Laboratory on the Edge of Britain’s Pacific Empire” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2016), 70.

44. Amasa Delano, A Narrative of Voyages and Travels, in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres: Comprising Three Voyages Round the World […] (Boston: E. G. House, 1818), 139. Young describes the status they claimed as that of “transplanted Britons”: Young, “Mutiny’s Bounty,” 57.

45. Frederick W. Beechey, Narrative of a Voyage to the Pacific and Beering’s Strait (London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1831), 121.

46. John Barrow, “Recent Accounts of the Pitcairn Islanders,” Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London 3 (1833): 156–68, here p. 161.

47. Young, “Mutiny’s Bounty,” 67. Claiming Britishness was also a survival strategy. Lummis notes that if the islanders had “been perceived as natives such a small group may well have been destroyed by being taken for enforced labour or slavery.” Lummis, Pitcairn Island, 130–31. In a recent study, Linda Colley suggests that visitors regarded the island’s inhabitants as “non-white, mixed-culture people.” See Colley, The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions and the Making of the Modern World (New York: Liveright, 2021), 253. In fact, observers found durable if questionable signs of Britishness.

48. John Barrow, The Eventful History of the Mutiny and Piratical Seizure of H.M.S. Bounty: Its Cause and Consequences (London: J. Murray, 1831), 339.

49. Philip Pipon, “The Descendants of the Bounty’s Crew: As First Discovered by the Briton and Tagus Frigates – From the Unpublished Mss. of the Late Capt. Pipon, R.N.,” United Service Journal and Naval and Military Magazine 1 (1834): 191–99, here p. 192.

50. Sydney, State Library of New South Wales, Sir Joseph Banks Papers, series 71, copy of a letter from Captain Sir Thomas Staines (HMS Briton) to Vice Admiral Dixon, off Valparaíso, October 18, 1814.

51. Barrow, “Recent Accounts of the Pitcairn Islanders,” 165.

52. The costs to the Admiralty of the relocation came in at about 400 pounds—a significant sum. H. E. Maude, “Tahitian Interlude: The Migration of the Pitcairn Islanders to the Motherland in 1831,” Journal of the Polynesian Society 68, no. 2 (1959): 115–40, here p. 135.

53. Lummis, Pitcairn Island, 136.

54. Barrow, “Recent Accounts of the Pitcairn Islanders,” 159.

55. Ibid., 160.

56. Lummis, Pitcairn Island, 136.

57. Young and Adams, who survived the island’s turbulent early years, had steered the community to calm after a period of brutal violence. Even as Adams ruled as the island’s patriarch for close to three decades, the Christians retained residual authority based on the prestige attached to the family because of Fletcher Christian’s rank and his role in the mutiny.

58. Barrow, “Recent Accounts of the Pitcairn Islanders,” 160. Quintal had ample reason to yearn for power. When he fathered an illegitimate child with one of Adams’ daughters, Dinah, the island’s patriarch had initially sentenced her to be shot; only resistance to the ruling forced a pardon. Quintal married Dinah and the controversy faded, but he had learned a sharp lesson in the potential consequences of being excluded from leadership.

59. Hill had reached Tahiti in early 1832. He was fifty-nine when he arrived in Pitcairn.

60. Joshua Hill, The Humble Memorial of Joshua Hill […] (London, 1841), 10.

61. Lummis, Pitcairn Island, 97. For a typical account that describes Hill as a “sociopath,” see Robert W. Kirk, Pitcairn Island, theBountyMutineers and Their Descendants: A History (2008; Jefferson: McFarland and Company, 2014), 83–85.

62. Nechtman, The Pretender of Pitcairn Island, 7.

63. “Voyage of Her Majesty’s Ship Acteon, Captain the Right Honourable Lord Edward Russell,” Nautical Magazine and Naval Chronicle 7 (1838): 514–22, here p. 520.

64. “Copy of a Letter, Dated Pitcairn’s Island, 3rd October 1833, from the Public Functionaries and Others, to Captain Joshua Hill, Teacher, &c,” in Walter Brodie, Pitcairn’s Island, and the Islanders, in 1850 (London: Whittaker & Co., 1851), 193–94, here p. 194. In this case, the term comes from a letter supposedly written by Hill’s allies on Pitcairn.

65. “The Humble Petition of the Principal Native Inhabitants of Pitcairn’s Island, Dated 19th June, 1834 to His Excellency Lord James Townshend […],” in Brodie, Pitcairn’s Island, 204–10, here p. 204.

66. According to Nechtman, “His move helped to certify the ‘foreignness’ of the three Englishmen at Pitcairn and, simultaneously, to elevate the significance of the islanders’ indigeneity.” Nechtman, The Pretender of Pitcairn Island, 154.

67. “The Humble Petition of John Evans, Two Years Resident on Pitcairn’s Island,” in Brodie, Pitcairn’s Island, 190–93, here p. 192.

68. Barrow, “Recent Accounts of the Pitcairn Islanders,” p. 168; Hill, The Humble Memorial, 3.

69. Hill, The Humble Memorial, 3–4.

70. Our interpretation challenges Nechtman’s argument that Hill’s actions on Pitcairn amounted to a mutiny that “illegally wrested Pitcairn Island out of London’s control.” Nechtman, The Pretender of Pitcairn Island, 165.

71. “The Humble Petition of George Hann Nobbs, Late Teacher at Pitcairn’s Island,” in Brodie, Pitcairn’s Island, 179–85, here p. 184. Brodie gives the author’s name as George Hann Nobbs but he appears as George Hunn Nobbs in the vast majority of sources.

72. “The Humble Petition of John Evans, Two Years Resident on Pitcairn’s Island,” in Brodie, Pitcairn’s Island, 190–93, here pp. 191–92. Nobbs’ petition was largely identical: “As soon as a ship appeared off the island, a canoe was despatched on board, forbidding the officers and crew coming to our houses, and we were threatened with stripes if we offered to go on board.” “The Humble Petition of George Hann Nobbs, Late Teacher at Pitcairn’s Island,” in Brodie, Pitcairn’s Island, 179–85, here p. 183.

73. John Buffett, “A Narrative of 20 Years’ Residence on Pitcairn’s Island,” part 5, The Friend of Temperence and Seamen 4, no. 7 (1846): 50–51, here p. 50 (emphasis in the original).

74. Hill, The Humble Memorial, 6.

75. Ibid., 7. Although the author of this description is not listed, it was likely Hill. According to Buffett, Hill convinced Quintal and the other two elders of the “estimation in which they would be held by officers of men-of-war.” Buffett, “A Narrative of 20 Years’ Residence,” part 5, p. 50.

76. TNA, ADM 1/48, Captain Edward Russell (HMS Actaeon) to Commodore Francis Mason, January 1837.

77. TNA, ADM 1/1819, Captain Charles Fremantle (HMS Challenger) to the Admiralty, May 30, 1833. Fremantle explained that “I found even now that it was a most difficult matter to obtain the truth on any point.” In acting as a legal agent, Fremantle was following a well-established British practice across the region—and the world. See Benton, They Called It Peace, chapter 5.

78. According to Hill, Fremantle “directed a public meeting to be called for the purpose of investigating the general affairs of the inhabitants.” Hill, The Humble Memorial, 5. On navy captains’ investigations on other islands in the South Pacific, see Benton, They Called It Peace, chapter 5.

79. Barrow, “Recent Accounts of the Pitcairn Islanders,” 166.

80. Joshua Hill to Lord James Townshend, June 20, 1834, in Brodie, Pitcairn’s Island, 198–202, here p. 201.

81. Hill, The Humble Memorial, 4.

82. Daniel Owen Spence, A History of the Royal Navy: Empire and Imperialism (London: I. B. Tauris, 2015), 67.

83. John Bach, “The Royal Navy in the Pacific Islands,” The Journal of Pacific History 3, no. 1 (1968): 3–20, here p. 6.

84. Hill, The Humble Memorial, 3 and 6.

85. These petitions can be found in Brodie, Pitcairn’s Island, 179–85, 190–93, and 198–202.

86. “The Humble Petition of George Hann Nobbs, Late Teacher at Pitcairn Island,” in Brodie, Pitcairn’s Island, 179–85, here p. 182.

87. Copy of a letter from John Buffett to Lord James Townshend, in Brodie, Pitcairn’s Island, 185–88, here p. 187.

88. Joshua Hill to Lord James Townshend, June 20, 1834, in Brodie, Pitcairn’s Island, 198–202, here p. 198.

89. “The Humble Petition of the Principal Native Inhabitants of Pitcairn’s Island, Dated 19th June, 1834, to His Excellency Lord James Townshend […],” in Brodie, Pitcairn’s Island, 204–10, here p. 209.

90. Ibid., 207.

91. The correspondence appears in Brodie, Pitcairn’s Island, 174–76, here p. 176. See also Nechtman, The Pretender of Pitcairn Island, 170.

92. TNA, ADM 1/48, Captain Edward Russell (HMS Actaeon) to Commodore Francis Mason, January 1837.

93. TNA, ADM 1/48, Captain Edward Russell (HMS Actaeon) to Commodore Francis Mason, January 1837.

94. The term is from Ward, British Policy in the South Pacific, 275–76.

95. “Laws and Regulations of Pitcairn’s Island,” in Brodie, Pitcairn’s Island, 85–91.

96. Young, “Mutiny’s Bounty,” 19. F. M. Bladen writes that “Captain Eliott of H.M.S. Fly took formal possession of the Island on behalf of the British Government. The exact date was 29th November, 1838.” Bladen, “Settlement of the Pitcairn Islanders on Norfolk Island,” The Australian Historical Society: Journal and Proceedings 2, no. 1 (1906): 1–12, here p. 2. Lummis suggests that Eliott’s actions made “Pitcairn Island British.” Lummis, Pitcairn Island, 154. Kenneth Roberts-Wray notes that on November 29, 1838, “Captain Eliott took possession on behalf of the Crown.” Roberts-Wray, Commonwealth and Colonial Law (London: Stevens & Sons, 1966), 906. Similarly, Robert W. Kirk suggests that Pitcairn became a “component of the British empire” in 1838. Kirk, Pitcairn Island, 89. Some historians have been far more critical of notions that Eliott’s actions were in any way decisive. See Louis Assier-Andrieu, “Pitcairn, le vaisseau des mutinés. Note sur une dépossession culturelle,” in L’empire de la propriété. L’impact environnemental de la norme en milieu contraint, vol. 3, Exemples de droit colonial et analogies contemporaines, ed. Éric de Mari and Dominique Taurisson-Mouret (Paris: Éditions Victoire, 2016), 53–62.

97. The context was a response to the United Nations’ inquiries about prospects for independence for even very small colonial territories. TNA, FCO 32/1252, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, internal memorandum, “United Nations Interest in Pitcairn,” August 5, 1975.

98. Colley emphasizes the Navy’s role as protector of an independent people. She describes Eliott as a “rescuing agent” who secured a favorable outcome for a “predominantly non-white, mixed-culture people” who were threatened by visiting vessels. In this way, Colley sees Eliott’s intervention as one designed to repel “white invaders.” Colley, The Gun, the Ship and the Pen, 260. Kirk argues that Pitcairn was “a separate nation” in this period. Kirk, Pitcairn Island, 88.

99. Case for Appellants, submitted to Privy Council, Case for Len Calvin Davis Brown, Dennis Ray Christian, and Randall Kay Christian, May 31, https://evols.library.manoa.hawaii.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/8cd4184b-5d7d-4cdb-8691-436191ddd8f8/content.

100. Lauren Benton and Benjamin Straumann, “Acquiring Empire by Law: From Roman Doctrine to Early Modern European Practice,” Law and History Review 28, no. 1 (2010): 1–38. European legal writers more often argued that non-Europeans were masters of their own lands, a position that allowed them to assert (sometimes also while amassing evidence of occupation) that Indigenous inhabitants had ceded or sold sovereign rights to them.

101. This aspect of possession made it especially appealing in contexts where there were two rivals—as, for example, in the competition between Spanish and Portuguese settlers in the New World or between Spanish and Portuguese expeditions to the Molucca Islands. The Treaty of Tordesillas (June 7, 1494), often misinterpreted as having divided the world into two sovereign realms, awarded to the Portuguese and Spanish Crowns the right to “discover and possess” territories in their respective spheres. The Crowns had to direct subjects to perform and document discovery and possession, and both powers set about gathering and reporting the relevant evidence. Other European empires followed suit as they sought to challenge Iberian claims and construct their own spheres of influence. See Lauren Benton, “Possessing Empire: Iberian Claims and Interpolity Law,” in Belmessous, Native Claims, 19–40. Tamar Herzog analyzes jockeying over territorial possession by Portuguese and Spaniards in the Atlantic world, but her analysis misses the Roman approach to possession discussed by Benton and Straumann in “Acquiring Empire by Law.” See Tamar Herzog, Frontiers of Possession: Spain and Portugal in Europe and the Americas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015).

102. Banner, Possessing the Pacific. Other historians have noticed the importance of practices of possession in European empires without grasping their indeterminacies. Patricia Seed cataloged European ceremonies of possession: erecting stone markers, scattering earth, hoisting flags, recording geographic details, founding towns, and conducting public trials. But she suggested that different empires were culturally predisposed to rely on different ceremonies. The approach overlooked the importance of presenting proofs of possession that would be legible to rivals. Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

103. See, for example, Canberra, National Library of Australia, NLA MS 2, “Secret Instructions for Lieutenant James Cook Appointed to Command His Majesty’s Bark the Endeavour,” July 30, 1768.

104. Lauren Benton and Adam Clulow, “Empires and Protection: Making Interpolity Law in the Early Modern World,” Journal of Global History 12, no. 1 (2017): 74–92. At times European powers refused requests to formalize protection arrangements by recognizing states as protectorates, as the British government did in Tahiti and Uruguay in the mid-nineteenth century. See Benton and Ford, Rage for Order, chapter 6.

105. Lauren Benton, Adam Clulow, and Bain Attwood, Protection and Empire: A Global History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Benton and Clulow, “Protection Shopping Among Empires”; Amanda Nettlebeck, Indigenous Rights and Colonial Subjecthood: Protection and Reform in the Nineteenth-Century British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

106. TNA, ADM 1/53, Captain Russell Eliott (HMS Fly) to Rear Admiral Charles B. H. Ross, January 25, 1839, enclosing Regulations for the appointment of a Magistrate at Pitcairns Island.

107. Greenwich, National Maritime Museum (hereafter “NMM”), JON/5, Captain Jenkin Jones (HMS Curaçao) to Rear Admiral Charles B. H. Ross, September 6, 1841.

108. NMM, Caird Library and Archives, REC/61, Pitcairn Island Register, 1790–1854.

109. NMM, JON/5, Captain Jenkin Jones (HMS Curaçao) to Rear Admiral Charles B. H. Ross, September 6, 1841. The nature of the anchorage at Pitcairn makes such an attack unlikely. Visiting vessels were reliant on the islanders to transport crew members to and from the shore since Pitcairn had no harbor and the treacherous waters could only be navigated by small crafts.

110. Colley, The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen, 260. Lummis gives a similar account, writing that “the crew of one whaling ship came ashore for a fortnight and threatened to violate any woman they could lay their hands upon. The islanders were forced to stay together, armed, to protect the women and for two weeks they were obliged to let their crops go untended.” Lummis, Pitcairn Island, 152.

111. McLoughlin, The Laws of Pitcairn, 20.

112. As has been well documented, the residents of Pitcairn worked hard to offer up an idealized version of their community that had little basis in reality. The tactic was part of a long tradition of what became known as “hypocriting the stranger” or presenting an image of a “virtuous and innocent family” in order to ensure maximal support from the British government. Eshleman, “A South Seas State of Nature,” 20. See also TNA, ADM 101/95/4, William Gunn, medical journal of HMS Curaçao, 1841.

113. Eliott wrote that he had delayed “only one day at Pitcairns.” He arrived on November 29, 1838, but the regulations he drew up were signed aboard his vessel on November 30, 1838, which meant that his visit crossed into a second calendar day.

114. Captain Russell Eliott (HMS Fly) to Rear Admiral Charles B. H. Ross, January 25, 1839, enclosing Regulations for the appointment of a Magistrate at Pitcairns Island, TNA, ADM 1/53. Eliott’s accompanying legal code consisted of ten clauses. Given his very short stay on the island, he almost certainly drew from existing laws. They included regulations for animals such as cats, dogs, and hogs as well as rules targeting the school, wood, landmarks, and trading with ships.

115. TNA, ADM 1/53, Captain Russell Eliott (HMS Fly) to Rear Admiral Charles B. H. Ross, January 25, 1839, enclosing Regulations for the appointment of a Magistrate at Pitcairns Island.

116. Eliott never asserted that he had claimed possession, and his superiors were equally clear that the island had not become a British colony. See the discussion of Stephen’s comments below. One striking and previously uncited exception is a copy of an 1839 letter preserved on Norfolk Island, which later became home to many resettled Pitcairn Islanders. Apparently penned by Rear Admiral Ross and addressed to Edward Quintal, the letter asserted that Captain Eliott’s actions were responsible for “placing the Island [of Pitcairn] under the protection of the British Flag as forming a part of the possessions of Great Britain.” See Canberra, National Archives of Australia, CP599/1, Copies of Pitcairn and Norfolk Island Despatches 1837 to 1897, Rear Admiral Charles B. H. Ross to Edward Quintal, magistrate of Pitcairn’s Island, June 30, 1839. But no such message was communicated to the Admiralty or the Colonial Office, and Ross’ letter—assuming the copy is accurate—was likely intended to assure the islanders of British interest in their security. Meanwhile, other officials and islanders continued to regard the question of Pitcairn’s status as unresolved.

117. Nechtman argues that “Eliott’s administrative framework at Pitcairn looks very much like Hill’s.” Nechtman, The Pretender of Pitcairn Island, 268. The magistrate wielded significant political power befitting his role as “Chief Ruler of Pitcairn’s Island.” Although he was aided by two councilors, they were clearly subordinate. Indeed, the magistrate could appoint one of these two councilors himself. The second was to be “be named by the Votes of the Assembly,” but in any case the magistrate’s “decision [was] final.” TNA, ADM 1/53, Captain Russell Eliott (HMS Fly) to Rear Admiral Charles B. H. Ross, January 25, 1839, enclosing Regulations for the appointment of a Magistrate at Pitcairns Island.

118. TNA, ADM 1/53, Captain Russell Eliott (HMS Fly) to Rear Admiral Charles B. H. Ross, January 25, 1839, enclosing Regulations for the appointment of a Magistrate at Pitcairns Island.

119. The islanders did record ships, births, and deaths in the Pitcairn Island Register, but there was resistance within the Pitcairn community to keeping even this document. TNA, ADM 1/5618, address by Rear Admiral Fairfax Moresby to Pitcairn Islanders, May 17, 1853. Notably, the record was kept by Buffett and then Nobbs—not by the magistrate.

120. “The Late Lieut. James Lowry’s Visit to Pitcairn’s Island, 1839, in H.M.S. Sparrow-hawk,” in Brodie, Pitcairn’s Island, 164–69, here p. 166.

121. TNA, ADM 101/95/4, William Gunn, medical journals of HMS Curaçao, July 1, 1841–September 20, 1842.

122. “Extract of a Letter from One of the Officers of HMS Curaçao,” United Service Magazine and Naval and Military Journal 40, no. 3 (1842): 607–11, here p. 610.

123. Colonial Office minutes regarding Captain Eliott’s report, October 1839, reproduced in Pitcairn Privy Council Record of Proceedings, https://evols.library.manoa.hawaii.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/f9adce4c-aed4-4e90-b159-8a7d6537d236/content. See also Lewis, “Pitcairn’s Tortured Past,” 53.

124. TNA, CO 201/370, minute of James Stephen, permanent undersecretary of state for the colonies, to George William Lyttelton, parliamentary undersecretary for war and the colonies, January 14, 1846.

125. Edward Quintal was elected in the presence of Eliott in 1838, and then again for a full term in 1839. His brother Arther Quintal assumed the role in 1840. Edward died at a young age in 1841.

126. TNA, CO 201/370, Lieutenant Commander Henry S. Hunt (HM Ketch Basilisk) to Rear Admiral Richard D. Thomas, August 1, 1844. Nobbs’ fortunes changed when he won the support of a powerful outside champion, Rear Admiral Fairfax Moresby, who visited the island and arranged for Nobbs to travel to England and obtain ordination as a minister in the Church of England. Nobbs returned a far stronger figure.

127. NMM, JON/5, Captain Jenkin Jones (HMS Curaçao) to Rear Admiral Charles B. H. Ross, September 6, 1841.

128. One visitor recorded that “the Chief Magistrate with a party then came off from the shore to welcome us, and remained on board all night and were truly grateful at the many tokens of remembrance.” “Pitcairn Island,” Nautical Magazine and Naval Chronicle (1854): 256–59, here p. 256.

129. “The Humble Petition of George Hann Nobbs, Late Teacher at Pitcairn’s Island,” in Brodie, Pitcairn’s Island, 179–85, here p. 181.

130. TNA, CO 201/370, Lieutenant Commander Henry S. Hunt (HM Ketch Basilisk) to Rear Admiral Richard D. Thomas, August 1, 1844.

131. TNA, CO 201/370, minute of William Gladstone, January 15, 1846.

132. Even after 1898, when Pitcairn was formally listed as a British settlement, there was little direct oversight by British legal authorities. This situation changed only in the early twenty-first century, when the British government intervened to assert criminal jurisdiction after the fallout of decades of sexual abuse sparked public outrage.

133. Lisa Ford, Settler Sovereignty; Attwood, Empire and the Making of Native Title.

134. Kate Stevens, Gender, Violence and Criminal Justice in the Colonial Pacific, 1880–1920 (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023), chapter 1; Sally Engle Merry, Colonizing Hawai‘i: The Cultural Power of Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

135. Tracey Banivanua Mar, Decolonisation and the Pacific: Indigenous Globalisation and the Ends of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

136. The apt phrase is from Hickford, Lords of the Land, 3.