Wordsworth scholar Jane Gresham, having grown up hearing stories that mutineer Fletcher Christian returned from exile on Pitcairn Island to live out his life in England, is inspired when a two-hundred-year-old corpse bearing South Pacific tattoos washes out of a hillside in the Lake District, to hunt for a rumored manuscript Wordsworth wrote about Christian's adventures, not realizing there are others who want the lost poem for personal gain and are willing to kill to get it.