WHEN INDY-BASED travel journalist Brandon Presser arrived on Pitcairn Island in 2018, the subtropical humidity warped his notebook within minutes of arriving. Nevertheless, he came away with an experience worthy of his first literary work to add to a crowded bookshelf of bylines, including some 40 Lonely Planet guidebooks and countless magazine articles.
The Far Land: 200 Years of Murder, Mania and Mutiny in the South Pacific is about the infamous Pitcairn Island, where the Mutiny on the Bounty saga wound up some 200 years ago. It came out earlier this month—with a big, juicy endorsement from Tom Hanks on the back cover.
A Harvard grad who has hosted a travel show on Bravo, Presser is a sought-after travel writer with an agent at Creative Artists Agency and more than 130 passport stamps. He specializes in emerging travel destinations and adventure, the kind of trips that involve paddling a dugout canoe across a fjord to meet his host in Papua New Guinea, or spending a month in the “Stan” countries of Asia. He received an exclusive invitation to Pitcairn four years ago, inspiring The Far Land. A contact of Presser’s put an advanced copy of the book in Hanks’s hands.
Presser didn’t find out until that person passed along a message from America’s Dad himself: He loved the book and wanted to help promote it. Hanks isn’t on social media, so he offered a jacket blurb, saying the story “swells with the cause and effect of actions of passion … You can’t make this stuff up!”
In his personal message to Presser, Hanks compared the book to a delicious cake in the refrigerator that beckons throughout the night.
(By now you’re dying to know why Presser lives in Indianapolis. Not about the many parts unknown he has visited, but this place. Sure, OK. He landed here for love. Back to the story.)
The Far Land is part Presser’s travelogue and part nonfiction that adds to the legend of the Bounty. Refresher: In the late 1700s, Lieutenant William Bligh was kicked off the HMS Bounty in Tahiti by a handful of mutineers, who then hid on Pitcairn Island for 20 years before being found. A lot of crazy stuff had gone down on Pitcairn in that time, inspiring many books and films, most famously the 1962 movie starring Marlon Brando.
That’s as much as most people know. But for the world’s thirstiest travelers, those who venture past the edges of civilization, Pitcairn Island has lived on as a Holy Grail. It’s nearly impossible to reach—there’s no airport, and getting there requires a three-day journey on a 1960s cargo ship from the nearest port of call. The island is the size of Central Park, and the population is 48, all descendants of the original mutineers. It is undeveloped and wild, the spiders are huge, and the jungle is eating what little infrastructure there is.
As wonderful as it sounds, Pitcairn needs some help attracting tourists. Home stays are popular among travelers now, and lucrative, and that’s what Pitcairn can offer—an authentic cultural experience in one of the world’s most unusual places, plus some excellent scuba diving. Presser got the only media invitation to come check it out.
He stayed with the two frenemy clans that inhabit the island, the seventh generation of the original mutineers, and discovered “a wicked world rich in present-day and historical characters.” Despite the tiny population, the island is engulfed in mystery and scandal. In Hanks’s words, “the relentless consequences of the Bounty mutineers” persist today. Presser’s agent talked him into writing a book. The New York Times would call it “a bizarre mashup of an 18th-century adventure novel and the darkest episode of Law & Order.” (Presser also wrote an article for Travel & Leisure titled “That Time I Had Dinner With an Entire Country.”)
The Far Land adds chapters long missing from the famous saga of…
Read More: Locally Written By Brandon Presser, Tom Hanks–Approved – Indianapolis Monthly