He is an American adventurer and filibuster who instigates a coup d'état on the Pitcairn Islands and has himself crowned "Emperor Butterworth I".
Twain based his story on one sentence in a naval report by Royal Navy officer Algernon de Horsey: "One stranger, an American, has settled on the island – a doubtful acquisition", which was probably referring to Peter Butler, a survivor of the 1875 Khandeish shipwreck.
[1] The story was probably also inspired by the life of American adventurer Joshua Hill, who briefly ruled the Pitcairn Islands as a dictator in the 1830s.
[2] In the story, Stavely rises to political power by exploiting the internal divisions and suspicions surrounding a lawsuit between Thursday October Christian II and Elizabeth Mills waged over a trespassing chicken.
Stavely's cynical manipulation of the easily corruptible islanders has been interpreted as an indictment of U.S. colonialism and the cultural imperialism of American missionaries.