PITCAIRN ISLAND – DNA experts are to investigate a collection of 18th-century pigtails believed to be from the Bounty mutineers who settled in Pitcairn Island in the late 1700s.

Scientists hope to be able to extract DNA from the hair and match it to living descendants of the crewmen.

While the news has caused a bit of a stir among those living on the remote Pacific island, Pitcairners are even more excited about work underway to solve a much bigger mystery.

The Pitcairn Island Study Centre in the United States was gifted the pigtails two years ago.

Now it wants to try to find out just who these tufts of hair belonged to by tracing female descendants of the mutineers’ mothers to see if their DNA matches that from the hair.

A descendant of the mutineers who lives on Pitcairn, Melva Evans, hopes people will respond to the call.

“There are lots and lots of written accounts of the mutiny but there’s nothing that’s really personal about any of the mutineers that we can put our hands on.

“We’ve got items that once belonged to some of them. To get a positive identification like DNA samples from the matrilineal line, I think that would be absolutely thrilling.”

The director of the Pitcairn Island Study Centre and a long time scholar of the Bounty saga, Herbert Ford, says the pigtails have been in storage for the past two years among the hundreds of Bounty artefacts at the centre.

“But then recently we brought these pigtails out and of course as I looked at them I said, ‘are they really what they’re supposed to be or not’, and so I determined that we needed to try to get scientific evidence about what they really were as versus the written history we have.”

Meralda Warren, who also still lives on Pitcairn, traces her line back to the leader of the mutiny, Fletcher Christian.

“I have heard, I’ve seen it written down as well, that the women, they kept the hair of their men – so it would be chopped off after they were killed.”

Professor Ford says the adopted daughter of one of the mutineers convinced seven of the men to chop off their pigtails. Somehow they found their way in an old tobacco tin to a Sothebys auction 200 years later.

“In that day and time the cutting of pigtails of hair, giving them to or keeping them by different people was kind of a term of endearment and it was not unusual at all,” he said.

More of a mystery though is the site where the mutineers were buried. Only one, John Adams, has a marked grave.

Last month an archaeologist arrived on Pitcairn and Warren is hoping he’ll be able to trace the remains of the other men.

“Right now nobody knows exactly where those bones are buried but we all have been told as hand-me-downs that they are buried in the graveyard which is underneath the town hall.”

Finding the bones of Fletcher Christian and his fellow Bounty mutineers could be a much more tangible link than the pigtails to Pitcairn’s intriguing past, Professor Ford said.

- RNZI/PNC