"Dusky damsels": Pitcairn Island's neglected matriarchs of the Bounty saga.

Abstract

In the 1920s and 1930s, the American physical anthropologist Harry L. Shapiro studied the inheritance of anthropometric and qualitative traits among descendants of the Bounty mutineers and their Polynesian wives on Norfolk and Pitcairrn Islands. He assumed that the islanders were derived from 'two fairly divergent groups - English and Tahitian', the women being 'the darker ancestral group' in skin colour and 'fairly homozygous for brown eyes'. However, his findings did not tally with his 'Mendelian expectations'. Skins and eyes were generally lighter and the islanders looked too European. The article argues that many Tahitians of the Bounty 's time were descended from European seamen of the lost caravel San Lesmes , who had settled in the Society Islands in 1526. Selective breeding since then had produced a predominantly white Caucasoid population.