Genetics on Pitcairn

In December 1787, H. M. S. Bounty, a British armed transport commanded by a brutal martinet named William Bligh, set sail from Spithead, England, for Tahiti, from which it was to take breadfruit plants to the West Indies. After leaving Tahiti two-thirds of the crew, led by the first officer, mutinied and abandoned Bligh and 18 of his supporters in a small boat equipped with oars and sail. Bligh and his companions won through to Kupang after 43 nightmarish days. Meantime the mutineers returned to Tahiti, whence nine of them set out again with a Tahitian princess for the first officer, eleven other native women and six native men. On Pitcairn Island, a tiny, wooded, steep, craggy scrap of land in the South Pacific, they beached and burned the Bounty, hoped they were safe from reprisal. They were not safe from one another. Unbridled drinking and mating, suicides, a war between natives and whites, between women and men, left alive one man, a handful of women, 25 children. After that the little colony turned over a new leaf and feared God. They were found by a New Bedford whaler in 1808, were not molested. By 1855 the colony numbered 175 souls. Fearing a water shortage, they persuaded the British Government to move them to a larger island. A few were unhappy there and returned to Pitcairn. There they and their descendants have lived in peace ever since.*

Last December the tawny, friendly islanders received the longest visit (ten days) from a scientist that any of them could remember. The visitor was Harry Lionel Shapiro, 32-year-old anthropologist of Manhattan's American Museum of Natural History. Dr. Shapiro went to Pitcairn not as a nostalgic historian and romancer of the sea but as a student of what he called a ''laboratory experiment"--the development by cross-breeding of a new type of human from precisely traceable origins. In the ''Pitcairn Island Register" he found a record of births and deaths and he was able to obtain vital statistics concerning newcomers who joined the colony late in its history. There is a preponderance of European inheritance over the Tahitian and more occidental features are discernible than those of the South Sea native, but in appearance the islanders range through all gradations between European and Tahitian. No pure types of either remain and the statistical chance of such a "throwback'' is extremely remote. Dr. Shapiro prepared hereditary charts from which he plans to show the operation of the laws of genetics on Pitcairn--the same laws by which geneticists predict and produce nearly 700 mutations in the fruit fly.

"Inbreeding in this instance," said he, back in Manhattan last week, "although extremely close, has not led to degeneracy as it is usually supposed to do. Inbreeding in a stock which has latent defects will naturally intensify those traits. I can't say that race mixture in this case has been harmful. . . . The people are superior physically and are also a hardworking, intelligent lot. In psychology and behavior they are predominantly British."

Pitcairn Islanders are Seventh Day Adventists and only a few backsliders eat meat. Every family head owns his own plot of ground, contributes a tithe of his produce to the community and seven days' labor a year to public works. Equal suffrage was instituted long before any European nation had it. School attendance is compulsory. Each family has a brand with which it marks all its possessions, animate and inanimate. The local government consists of a council of seven headed by a magistrate. There is no such thing as money, and only occasional mail from the outside world.

Although the islanders read English, Dr. Shapiro found the spoken tongue a mixture of degenerate English, Tahitian, and Pitcairn-coined words. He heard children say, "see ahse scauws zsegoin out da big ship" ("see the boats going out to the big ship"); and, "pfwat youall comee do diffy daffy?" ("why are you coming to do this and that?"). A few words, such as "tai-tai" (tasteless), are retained from the Tahitian although long since obsolete on Tahiti itself.

*That Pitcairn Island (a British possession) has come to be one of the most famed dots on the world map is largely due to two writers, Charles Bernard Nordhoff and James Norman Hall, who live in Tahiti with their native wives and dusky children. In Mutiny on the Bounty, Men Against the Sea and Pitcairn's Island, U. S. Authors Nordhoff and Hall effectively told the whole story of the Bounty and its tangled sequel (TIME, Aug. 20 et ante).

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