The Far Land: 200 Years of Murder, Mania, and Mutiny in the South Pacific

Travel writer Presser debuts with a fascinating account of what happened after the HMS Bounty mutineers and their Tahitian companions settled on the remote South Pacific island of Pitcairn in 1790. Interwoven with this dramatic history is Presser’s chronicle of his 2018 visit to Pitcairn to meet the island’s 48 inhabitants, most of them descendants of the mutineers. Drawn to Pitcairn in part because its “punishing verticality” made it so inaccessible, the fugitives kept their whereabouts hidden for 18 years. Presser focuses on their efforts to establish a settlement and the frightening ways their colony devolved through infighting, drunken rages, and a revolt by the Polynesians, who were treated like slaves. By the fourth year on Pitcairn, most of the Bounty mutineers were dead, Presser notes. Arriving in 2018 via the island’s only link to the outside world—a cargo ship that visits four times a year—Presser finds two warring clans bound together by the island’s “widespread legacy of sexual misconduct.” Though he occasionally veers into melodrama, Presser expertly intertwines the historical and contemporary elements of the story and brings Pitcairn’s unusual culture to vibrant life. Readers will have a tough time putting this one down. (Mar.)