Hybridity, Race, and Science: The Voyage of the Zaca, 1934–1935
Author(s): Warwick Anderson
Reviewed work(s):
Source: Isis, Vol. 103, No. 2 (June 2012), pp. 229-253
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Hybridity, Race, and Science
The Voyage of the Zaca, 1934 –1935
By Warwick Anderson*
ABSTRACT
In 1929 and 1934 –1935, the physical anthropologist Harry L. Shapiro voyaged in the
South Seas on the Mahina-I-Te-Pua and the Zaca, measuring mixed-race islanders,
including the descendants of the Bounty mutineers on Pitcairn Island. His research in
Polynesian hybridity reflects the growing cultural and scientific investment of the United
States in the Pacific during this period. Shapiro’s oceanic adventures and intimate encounters prompted him to discount typological speculation and emphasize instead the
liberal Boasian program in physical anthropology, giving him the confidence to refigure
his evaluations of racial difference. The seaborne investigatory enterprise came to influence U.S. racial thought, adding impetus to the condemnation of racism in science. On his
return from the South Seas, Shapiro tried to get his fellow physical anthropologists to issue
a manifesto opposing the harnessing of their science to racial discrimination and prejudice.
“
T
HE MARQUESAS!” Herman Melville exclaimed in the 1840s. “What strange visions
of outlandish things does the very name spirit up.” In Typee the novelist polished to
a romantic gloss recollections of his stay as a young sailor among the cannibals of
Taipivae valley on Nuku Hiva. This “peep” at Polynesian life, as Melville called it,
revealed pagan worshippers and noble savages at the point of first contact, before
missionaries, commerce, and civilization wrought destruction. Yet even then the “natives”
were perhaps not as pure and untouched as the young American adventurer imagined.
“The endless variety of complexions to be seen in the Typee valley” mystified him. He
wondered about the “European cast” of the features of the Marquesans. He gave the
* Department of History, University of Sydney, SOPHI, Quadrangle A14, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia;
[email protected].
Bronwen Douglas and Chris Ballard persuaded me to present an earlier paper on the Zaca at their conference
on race and oceanic encounters, held at the Australian National University. I am grateful to them and to Fae
Dremock, Margaret Jolly, Hans Pols, and Charles Rosenberg, who commented on drafts of the essay. Cecily
Hunter provided research assistance. Barbara Mathé (American Museum of Natural History), Danielle Castronovo (California Academy of Science), and Don Luce (Bell Natural History Museum, University of Minnesota) helped to secure the illustrations. I received support for this project from the U.S. National Science
Foundation (SES-0720951), the Australian Research Council (DP-0881067), and a fellowship (2005–2006) from
the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Isis, 2012, 103:229 –253
©2012 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved.
0021-1753/2012/10302-0001$10.00
229
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HYBRIDITY, RACE, AND SCIENCE
maiden Fayaway alluring blue eyes. These observations all suggest that the Marquesas
were not as isolated from European contact as Melville claimed. Indeed, he admitted,
“once in the course of a half century, to be sure, some adventurous rover would break in
upon their peaceful repose, and astonished at the unusual scene, would be almost tempted
to claim the merit of a new discovery.”1
As an adolescent at Boston Latin School, toward the end of World War I, Harry L.
Shapiro read Typee with fascination, developing an intense interest in the Pacific. Later,
from his teachers at Harvard, Shapiro learned the methods of physical anthropology,
becoming expert at anthropometry, the comparative study of human body measurements.
In a genetics class with William E. Castle, he heard debates about the racial status of the
Pitcairn and Norfolk Islanders, descendants of the English Bounty mutineers and Polynesian women.2 Some scientists claimed that the mixed race showed hybrid vigor, while
others believed them degenerate—yet none of these “experts” had managed to visit the
islands. Encouraged by Earnest A. Hooton, the leading anthropology professor at Harvard,
Shapiro decided to investigate the descendants of the Bounty mutineers for his Ph.D.
dissertation.3 A pioneering Jewish student in the Ph.D. program, he graduated in 1926 and
spent the next fifteen years roaming the Pacific, studying human hybridity in Pitcairn, the
Marquesas, Hawaii, and islands in between. Gruff and lanky, constantly smoking his pipe
or fiddling with it, Shapiro saw himself as a manly intellectual, equally comfortable in the
museum, wearing a tweed jacket and a bow tie, or donning a pareu and hanging out on
some atoll. Yet a brusque manner never completely disguised his social awkwardness,
pensive moods, and sensitivity. At the American Museum of Natural History in New York
he became the curator of physical anthropology, emerging in the 1930s as a leading figure in
the discipline and a staunch opponent of racism in science.4 The Bernice P. Bishop Museum
in Honolulu provided Hari—as he was known locally—with a regional base and wildly
entertaining traveling companions, including the anthropologists Kenneth P. Emory (or “Keneti”) and Peter Buck (Te Rangi Hiroa) and the linguist J. Frank Stimson (or “Ua”).
In this essay I want to focus on Shapiro’s visits to the Marquesas in 1929 and 1934 and
to Pitcairn in 1934 –1935, the 1930s trip aboard the Zaca, the famous luxury yacht of the
Californian plutocrat Charles Templeton Crocker (and later Errol Flynn’s boat). Surprisingly—in view of the topic of his Ph.D. dissertation—this was Shapiro’s first encounter
with the Pitcairners. Bad weather had caused him to abandon an effort to land there in
1923, so he had to make do with the Norfolk Island descendants of the Bounty mutineers.
1
Herman Melville, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846; New York: Penguin, 1996), pp. 5, 182, 184, 85, 5.
The Bounty mutiny, led by Fletcher Christian against Captain William Bligh, took place in 1789. Nine of the
English mutineers, along with twelve women and six men from Tahiti, landed on Pitcairn in 1790. Their
descendants and the remaining mutineer were not discovered until 1813. The Pitcairners rapidly became
temperate, devout, and loyal to the British Crown. In 1856 they all left Pitcairn for Norfolk Island, but a few
homesick families returned in 1859 and more came back in 1864. They converted to Seventh-day Adventism in
1886. See Greg Dening, Mr. Bligh’s Bad Language: Passion, Power, and Theatre on the “Bounty” (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992).
3 Harry L. Shapiro, “A Stroll Down Memory Lane” [ca. 1987], Box 26, H. L. Shapiro Papers, MSS S537,
Archives and Special Collections, American Museum of Natural History, New York (hereafter cited as Shapiro
Papers). On other occasions, Shapiro recalled Hooton lecturing on the descendants of the Bounty mutineers. A
brief biography of Shapiro appears in Anne Roe, The Making of a Scientist (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1952).
Hooton used to call Shapiro, who was his first graduate student, his “ewe lamb”; later, Shapiro called his former
advisor “Hootie” or, more rarely, “Babe Ruth.”
4 On the American Museum during this period see Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and
Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York: Routledge, 1989); and Ronald Rainger, An Agenda for
Antiquity: Henry Fairfield Osborn and Vertebrate Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History,
1890 –1935 (Tuscaloosa: Univ. Alabama Press, 1991).
2
WARWICK ANDERSON
231
Therefore his arrival on Pitcairn at Christmas 1934 was fraught with tremendous significance for him and would prove the culmination of his investigation of Pacific hybridity.
It led to Shapiro’s most popular and influential book, The Heritage of the “Bounty,”
published in 1936. It also gave him new perspective on his own identity, pushing him
toward studies of his Jewish ancestry.5 Moreover, encounters on Pitcairn confirmed his
drift away from formal racial classification in anthropology, causing him to try in 1935 to
organize the first American public condemnation of scientific racism—issued in Hooton’s
name, since Shapiro feared that it would be discounted as Jewish special pleading if he or
his friend and mentor Franz Boas, the anthropology professor at Columbia University,
affixed their signatures.
The history of racial science is largely subsumed within the history of ideas, but here
I am attempting to reconstruct some of the practice of inquiry into human diversity
between the wars. I want to show how these varied and sometimes confusing interactions
with erstwhile research subjects and supposed natives in the Pacific could influence the
sensibilities and thoughts of itinerant physical anthropologists. In describing human
biology as a seaborne investigatory enterprise, I hope to relocate to the colonial Pacific the
story of the disintegration of racial classification or typology in the 1930s and 1940s. That
is, I focus here, as much as the records allow, on race science as part of the complex
process of cross-cultural interaction and exchange in southern seas. The engagement of
seafaring scientists and islanders inevitably was difficult, trying, and bewildering for
everyone involved; often it was inflected with condescension and paternalism; occasionally it would lead all parties into moral peril; but sometimes it created intimacy and
understanding, even a new sense of identity and what it means to be human. It is this
modulation of the perception of human difference—this oceanic vision—that I seek to
recapture here.
In this essay, then, I bring the history of race science into contact with postcolonial
studies, prompting a sort of background conversation that sometimes interrupts the
narrative. The postcolonial reframing of the history of science involves more than relocating
the main action to the South Seas and other colonial sites, recognizing them as significant sites
of cognition and critical reflection—though this is a good start. It means that we need to trace
the influence of colonial engagements—the complex encounters in these contact zones— on
scientific thought and practice more generally, thereby activating the “colonial” as a useful
category of historical analysis even among savants who have tended to deny or forget their
imperial or global relations. Such critical analysis entails a postcolonial insinuation of the
agency of colonized peoples into the conventional history of science. To imagine a
distinctive North Atlantic science simply diffusing out and capturing the attention of the
world is to repeat colonial amour propre in one of its more self-deceiving forms. Of
course, we must not ignore coercion and appropriation, dominance and submission, where
they occur. But neither should we disregard more ambiguous and complicated interactions
in the contact zones; scoff at sympathy and affection, however evanescent; or deny efforts
at reciprocity, however unequal and confused. Postcolonial studies do not just relocate
historical narratives: they open up conventional analytic frameworks to dispersive logic
5 On the failed attempt to reach Pitcairn in 1923 see H. L. Shapiro, “Polynesian Nostalgia,” n.d., Box 37,
Shapiro Papers. See also Shapiro, Descendants of the Mutineers of the “Bounty” (Honolulu: Bishop Museum,
1929); and Shapiro, The Heritage of the “Bounty” (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1936). The book that resulted
from his studies of his Jewish ancestry was Shapiro, The Jewish People: A Biological History (Paris: UNESCO,
1960).
232
HYBRIDITY, RACE, AND SCIENCE
and disseminated agency.6 Historians might then become beachcombers, even in the North
Atlantic, observing the science that washes up in the colonial wake.
AN AMERICAN LAKE
In the twentieth century it became possible to imagine the Pacific as an American lake.7
Since Alfred Thayer Mahan had urged the nation in the 1890s to project its naval power
across the ocean, the United States acquired an island empire, encompassing Hawaii, the
Philippines, Guam, and other outposts. The Californian historian Hubert Howe Bancroft
declared in his best seller The New Pacific that the ocean would constitute a broad basin
for American expansion.8 In addition to direct territorial governance, the United States
could exert influence informally across the patchwork of competing imperial claims,
including those of France and Britain, infiltrating these other scattered sovereignties.
American political and military commitment to the Pacific set the scene for wide-ranging
cultural and scientific engagement with the region in the first half of the twentieth
century.9 The Pacific tales of Mark Twain, Jack London, and Zane Grey proved immensely popular; Melville, long neglected, was rediscovered as an American master; the
art world experienced a Gauguin craze; and the South Seas featured in countless romances
and travel narratives.10 In 1919 the beachcomber and hobo Frederick O’Brien published
White Shadows in the South Seas, an acclaimed account of his travels through the
Marquesas, which stirred up American interest in Polynesia.11 For O’Brien, Polynesians
seemed living representatives of the childhood of the Caucasian race, whereas he disparaged the European residents as wretched, displaced whites. In 1928 W. S. “Woody” van
Dyke and Robert Flaherty filmed White Shadows for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM)—
Shapiro watched the movie with a critical eye just before he too set out for the Marquesas.
Unlike the book, the film explored the sexual flouting of racial boundaries, a theme that
soon predominated in American visions of the South Seas.12 The issue had been deftly
6 For an extended analysis of postcolonial studies of science see Warwick Anderson and Vincanne Adams,
“Pramoedya’s Chickens: Postcolonial Studies of Technoscience,” in The Handbook of Science and Technology
Studies, 3rd ed., ed. Edward J. Hackett, Olga Amsterdamska, Michael Lynch, and Judy Wajcman (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 2007), pp. 181–204; and Anderson, “From Subjugated Knowledge to Conjugated Subjects:
Science and Globalisation, or Postcolonial Studies of Science?” Postcolonial Studies, 2009, 12:389 – 400.
7 An echo of O. H. K. Spate, The Pacific since Magellan, Vol. 1: The Spanish Lake (London: Croom Helm,
1979).
8 Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future (London: Sampson Low,
Marston, 1897); Mahan, Lessons of the War with Spain, and Other Articles (Boston: Little, Brown, 1899); and
Hubert Howe Bancroft, The New Pacific (New York: Bancroft, 1900).
9 Jeffrey Geiger, Facing the Pacific: Polynesia and the U.S. Imperial Imagination (Honolulu: Univ. Hawaii
Press, 2007). See also John R. Eperjesi, The Imperialist Imaginary: Visions of Asia and the Pacific in American
Culture (Hanover, N.H.: Dartmouth College Press, 2005); and Paul Lyons, American Pacificism: Oceania in the
U.S. Imagination (New York: Routledge, 2006).
10 See, e.g., Mark Twain, Following the Equator: A Journey around the World (1897; New York: Dover,
1989); Jack London, South Sea Tales (London: Macmillan, 1911); London, The Cruise of the “Snark” (New
York: Macmillan, 1932); and Zane Grey, Tales of Tahitian Waters (New York: Harper, 1928). Although not
American, Robert Louis Stevenson, In the South Seas (1896; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998), should not be
discounted.
11 Frederick O’Brien, White Shadows in the South Seas (New York: Laurie, 1919). O’Brien had edited a
newspaper in Manila before his Pacific travels. He called White Shadows a “record of one happy year spent
among the simple, friendly cannibals of Atuona valley, on the island of Hiva Oa in the Marquesas” (p. v). When
he left, he wrote: “The beauty and depressingness of these islands is overwhelming” (p. 448).
12 More generally, see Gina Marchetti, Romance and the “Yellow Peril”: Race, Sex, and Discursive Strategies
in Hollywood Fiction (Berkeley: Univ. California Press, 1994). Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa: A
WARWICK ANDERSON
233
evaded in Hollywood’s Polynesian films of the 1920s, such as A Virgin Paradise (1921),
starring Pearl White; Aloma of the South Seas (1926), with the “shimmy queen” Gilda
Gray; and Hula (1927), the Hawaiian romance featuring Clara Bow, the original “It girl.”
In contrast, White Shadows in the South Seas and its follow-up The Pagan (1929) daringly
focused on the ambiguity of interracial romance, though usually it was clear that since
Polynesians presumably were proto-Caucasians the racial difference actually was minimal. In The Pagan, the “Latin lover” Ramon Novarro played the half-caste hero who
mediated between cultures as he sang the catchy “Pagan Love Song.” Yet two years later,
F. W. Murnau made sure as he filmed Tabu on Bora Bora to avoid any reference to the
mixed ancestry of his leads Anna Chevalier and Matahi. Sadly, the strict enforcement of
the Hays Code after 1934 would gradually shift Hollywood’s attention away from the
South Seas to the far less sexy Wild West—with a few notable exceptions, of course,
principally the Bounty movies and South Pacific.13
Racial fieldworkers like Shapiro participated intimately in the American cultural discovery of Polynesia. Frequently perched at the Papeete bar Le Cercle Bougainville, the
anthropologist drank heavily with the filmmakers van Dyke and Flaherty. One night at the
Blue Lagoon café Shapiro persuaded some local writers, the Americans Charles Nordhoff
and James Norman Hall, both married to Polynesian women, to look into the Bounty story.
In 1932 they published The Mutiny on the “Bounty,” igniting a global obsession with that
tragic ship, its crew, and their mixed-race descendants.14 Within a year, Charles Chauvel
cast Errol Flynn in In the Wake of the “Bounty”—which may explain why the actor later
claimed one of the mutineers as a relative.15 Although mostly filmed in a Sydney studio,
this early Australian talkie contained footage of the mutineers’ descendants on Pitcairn,
taken by Chauvel on a brief visit to the island. In 1935, soon after Shapiro returned to New
York from Pitcairn, MGM released a more accomplished film, Mutiny on the “Bounty,”
starring Charles Laughton as Captain Bligh and a clean-shaven Clark Gable as Fletcher
Christian. A popular sensation, the movie won the Academy Award for best picture that
year.16
There were also good scientific reasons for Shapiro to be interested in race mixing in
the Pacific. Between the wars, anthropologists and biologists in the United States became
fascinated with “miscegenation.” Boas had led the way: as early as the 1890s, the young
anthropologist visited scattered Native American reservations and boarding schools to
examine what he called the “half-blood Indian.” His evaluation of this new form of
humanity was ambivalent at the time, but as his interest in race mixing grew over the
following forty years his assessment of the outcome became more positive. “The imporPsychological Study of Primitive Youth for Civilization (New York: Morrow, 1928) intensified the interest in the
Pacific, though it concerns a region far to the west of the scene of these scientific investigations.
13 Filmed on Kauai, the 1958 film South Pacific was based on the 1949 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical,
which was in turn derived from James Michener, Tales from the South Pacific (New York: Macmillan, 1947),
set in the Solomon Islands.
14 Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall, The Mutiny on the “Bounty” (Boston: Little, Brown, 1932).
Within a few years the book had sold over twenty-five million copies. The authors followed up with Pitcairn’s
Island (London: Chapman & Hall, 1935). Hall describes his Pitcairn research in The Tale of a Shipwreck
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934). See also Paul L. Briand, In Search of Paradise: The Nordhoff-Hall Story
(New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1966). Shapiro would also have been familiar with Jack London’s account
of a Pitcairner pilot, “The Seed of McCoy,” in South Sea Tales (cit. n. 10), pp. 149 –186.
15 He suggests this in Errol Flynn, My Wicked, Wicked Ways (New York: Putnam’s, 1959), p. 27. Chauvel’s
film was released in 1933; he had visited Pitcairn in 1932. See Charles Chauvel, In the Wake of “The Bounty”:
To Tahiti and Pitcairn Island (Sydney: Endeavour, 1933).
16 Marlon Brando starred in the 1962 MGM version of the story and later married a Tahitian member of the
cast, settling in the islands.
234
HYBRIDITY, RACE, AND SCIENCE
tance of research on this subject cannot be too strongly urged,” Boas wrote in 1911, “since
the desirability or undesirability of race mixture should be known.”17 The Minnesota
anthropologist Albert E. Jenks, on his return from the Philippines, followed Boas in
studying the offspring of Native Americans and European Americans. He extolled their
potential for assimilation into modern society. In the 1920s, Boas encouraged his Columbia graduate student Melville Herskovits to investigate the physical qualities and social
accomplishments of the mixed-race black Americans creating the Harlem Renaissance.
Assisted reluctantly by Zora Neale Hurston, Herskovits could discern no trace of degeneracy in the “New World Negro,” to use his term, and speculated that the emerging type
might even be developing a unique civilization.18 Over in Chicago, the sociologist Robert
E. Park and his student Edwin B. Reuter were also evaluating the potential of mixed-race
peoples, these new “marginal men,” during this period. They too were impressed with the
new type. Park even imagined charting a “miscegenation map” of the world.19
In 1935, the African-American intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois lamented that fear of race
mixing was still “the crux of the so-called Negro problem in the United States.” A little
more than ten years earlier, Virginia had passed the “one-drop” rule in order to sharpen
the boundaries of white identity. In 1925, Leonard “Kip” Rhinelander scandalized New
York when he took Alice Jones to court for tricking him into marrying her by passing as
white. Interracial marriage was illegal in at least forty states (though not in the American
insular territories).20 Du Bois was dismayed but not surprised when educated Americans
continued to cite approvingly racial purists and eugenicists like Madison Grant, Lothrop
Stoddard, and Charles B. Davenport, rather than their more liberal colleagues. Davenport,
17 Franz Boas, “The Half-Blood Indian” [1894], in Race, Language, and Culture (New York: Free Press,
1940), pp. 138 –148; and Boas, The Mind of Primitive Man (New York: Macmillan, 1911), p. 275. Boas felt
strongly the environmentalist influence of his mentor Rudolf Virchow. See A. L. Kroeber et al., eds., Franz Boas,
1858 –1942 (Menasha, Wis.: American Anthropological Association, 1942); and Melville Herskovits, Franz
Boas: The Science of Man in the Making (New York: Scribner’s, 1953).
18 Albert E. Jenks, “Indian-White Amalgamation: An Anthropometric Study,” University of Minnesota Studies
in the Social Sciences, 1916, 6:1–24; Jenks, “Assimilation in the Philippines, as Interpreted in Terms of
Assimilation in America,” American Journal of Sociology, 1914, 19:773–791; Melville J. Herskovits, “Variability and Race Mixture,” American Naturalist, 1927, 61:68 – 81; Herskovits, “Social Selection and the
Formation of Human Types,” Human Biology, 1929, 1:250 –262; and Herskovits, The Anthropometry of the
American Negro (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1930). See also Jerry Gershenhorn, Melville J. Herskovits
and the Racial Politics of Knowledge (Lincoln: Univ. Nebraska Press, 2004). Zora Neale Hurston’s biographer
claims she took a pair of calipers and stood on a Harlem street corner with an air of “relaxed insouciance”: Robert
E. Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (Urbana: Univ. Illinois Press, 1977), p. 63. Edwin R.
Embree relied on Herskovits’s data for Brown America: The Story of a New Race (New York: Viking, 1931).
19 Robert E. Park, “Race Relations and Certain Frontiers,” in Race and Culture Contacts, ed. Edward B. Reuter
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1934), pp. 57– 85, on p. 78. See also Park, “Our Racial Frontier in the Pacific” [1926],
in Race and Culture: The Collected Papers of Robert E. Park (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1950), Vol. 1, pp.
138 –151; and Park, “Human Migration and the Marginal Man” [1928], ibid., pp. 345–356. For Reuter’s work
see Reuter, The Mulatto in the United States (Boston: Badger, 1918); and Reuter, Race Mixture: Studies in
Intermarriage and Miscegenation (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1931). Although mixed-race peoples were not the
only “marginal men,” for Park during this period they epitomized the condition.
20 W. E. B. Du Bois, “Miscegenation” [1935], in Against Racism: Unpublished Essays, Papers, Addresses,
1887–1961, by W. E. B. Du Bois, ed. Herbert Aptheker (Amherst: Univ. Massachusetts Press, 1980), pp. 90 –102,
on p. 99. Regarding the illegality of interracial marriage see Peggy Pascoe, “Miscegenation Law, Court Cases,
and Ideologies of ‘Race’ in Twentieth-Century America,” Journal of American History, 1966, 83:44 – 69. More
generally, see Joel Williamson, New People: Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the United States (New York: Free
Press, 1980); Paul R. Spickard, Mixed Blood: Intermarriage and Ethnic Identity in Twentieth-Century America
(Madison: Univ. Wisconsin Press, 1989); Werner Sollors, ed., Interracialism: Black-White Intermarriage and
Ethnic Identity in American History, Literature, and Law (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000); and David A.
Hollinger, “Amalgamation and Hypodescent: The Question of Ethnoracial Mixture in the History of the United
States,” American Historical Review, 2003, 108:1363–1390.
WARWICK ANDERSON
235
with Morris Steggerda, had conducted a notorious study of race mixing in Jamaica in
1929, and he concluded that the Caribbean hybrids were physically degenerate and
mentally deficient.21 Such assertions incensed Du Bois, Boas, and Shapiro. Yet Davenport
seemed to attract all the public attention.
For Hooton at Harvard, then the major center for training physical anthropologists, the
study of miscegenation was “perhaps the most important field of research in anthropology
today.” Since 1916 his colleague Alfred Tozzer, a close friend of Boas, had measured
mixed-race Hawaiians on his annual visits to his wife’s family on Oahu. The geneticist
Leslie C. Dunn analyzed the data he brought back, extolling the “great experiment in race
mixture.”22 At Harvard, Hooton taught a graduate course on the biology of miscegenation
and from the 1920s sent most of his advanced students—the “Peabody boys”— out to
study the results of racial amalgamation. Although studies in North America would have
been more pertinent to pressing domestic racial concerns, fieldworkers soon discovered
that African Americans, in particular, were resistant research subjects.23 Scientific light
could best be shed on U.S. racial problems from a distance. Shapiro was the first to go
abroad, but others soon ventured to different parts of the Pacific, Yucatan, and the
Maghreb—anywhere race mixing was recent, research subjects compliant, and authorities
permissive. The last of these Harvard rovers would be Joseph B. Birdsell, who with
Norman Tindale conducted the 1938 –1939 Harvard-Adelaide Anthropological Expedition, examining the “half-castes” of Australia. Birdsell admired Shapiro and modeled his
Australian work on the earlier Pacific excursions.24
Shapiro knew he was not adrift on some scientific backwater. The explanation of race
mixing in the Pacific had become a major interest of anthropologists and biologists,
whether based in Oceania or elite U.S. institutions. His own career followed the contours
of rising commitment to Pacific research in both the Department of Anthropology at
21 See, in particular, Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race; or, The Racial Basis of European History
(New York: Scribner’s, 1918); Lothrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color against White World Supremacy
(New York: Scribner’s, 1921); and Charles B. Davenport and Morris Steggerda, Race Crossing in Jamaica
(Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution, 1929). See also Davenport, “Effects of Race Intermingling,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 1917, 130:364 –368. For contemporary critiques see Karl Pearson,
“Race Crossing in Jamaica,” Nature, 1930, 126:427– 428; and William E. Castle, “Race Mixture and Physical
Disharmonies,” Science, 1930, 71:603– 606. On Davenport see Charles E. Rosenberg, “Charles Benedict
Davenport and the Irony of American Eugenics,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 1983, 15:18 –23. For partial
overviews of the science of race mixing during this period see William B. Provine, “Geneticists and the Biology
of Race Crossing,” Science, 1973, 182:790 –796; and Paul Farber, “Race Mixing and Science in the United
States,” Endeavour, 2003, 27:166 –170.
22 Earnest A. Hooton, “Progress in the Study of Race Mixtures with Special Reference to Work Carried on at
Harvard University,” Proc. Amer. Phil. Soc., 1926, 65:312–325, on p. 312; and L. C. Dunn, An Anthropometric
Study of Hawaiians of Pure and Mixed Blood (Cambridge, Mass.: Peabody Museum, 1928), p. 2. See also
Hooton, “Race Mixture in the United States,” Pacific Review, 1912, 2:116 –127; Hooton, Up from the Ape
(London: Allen & Unwin, 1931); and Dunn, “Some Results of Race Mixture in Hawaii,” in Scientific Papers of
the Second International Congress of Eugenics, ed. Charles B. Davenport (Baltimore: Williams & Williams,
1923), pp. 109 –124.
23 Apart from the research of Herskovits, assisted by Hurston, the other major study of mixed-race African
Americans was conducted by Caroline Bond Day, Hooton’s only African-American M.A. student. Most of her
research subjects were family friends in Atlanta, including W. E. B. Du Bois. See Caroline Bond Day, A Study
of Some Negro-White Families in the United States (Cambridge, Mass.: Peabody Museum, 1932); on Du Bois’s
own engagement with anthropometry see Maria Farland, “W. E. B. Du Bois, Anthropometric Science, and the
Limits of Racial Uplift,” American Quarterly, 2006, 58:1017–1045. In the 1920s and 1930s Hooton sent Homer
Kidder to Tunisia, George D. Williams to Yucatan, Walter B. Cline to Egypt, Carleton S. Coon to Morocco, and
Joseph B. Birdsell to Australia—all to study race mixing.
24 Warwick Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health, and Racial Destiny in Australia
(Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 2006), Ch. 8.
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Harvard and the American Museum of Natural History. He was expected from the start to
expand the racial investigations of his predecessor at the American Museum, Louis R.
Sullivan, who had worked closely with the anthropologists associated with the Bishop
Museum in Hawaii.25 Shapiro negotiated with colleagues and competitors—the other
physical anthropologists at Harvard, Columbia, and the Bishop Museum, the sociologists
at Chicago and the University of Hawaii—apportioning the Pacific field among themselves. More than the others, Shapiro was especially adept at attaching his scientific
research to broader cultural enthusiasms, in particular the fate of the Bounty mutineers,
thus giving race mixing a white human face. He combined the Polynesian craze and
incipient South Seas tourism with liberal doses of science. The Pacific allowed him to
elaborate on progressive Boasian physical anthropology—an agenda distinct from the
parallel development of the “culture concept” occurring at Columbia.26 The vast sea of
islands therefore gave rise to what might be called a modernist human biology, focusing
on racial hybridity and environmental adaptation.
“FLOWER OF THE FOAM”
“The rumble of the elevated,” Kenneth Emory wrote to Shapiro in 1928, “is to be replaced
by the roar of the surf.” Emory was planning a big trip the following year, outbound from
Papeete and visiting the Tuamotus and Marquesas, putting together a survey of humanity
in French Polynesia. “Come if you have to bust a gut, and brush up your French.” The
cultural anthropologist wanted someone with expertise in anthropometry to relieve him of
a task he found trying and unrewarding. “It is a tough job to jolly the natives along during
the tedious measuring,” the gentle, curious Emory wrote to Herbert Gregory, director of
the Bishop Museum, “especially if they feel it is a ridiculous stunt. The actual measuring
takes a discouraging amount of time, but the preliminary work is even more exacting and
drawn out, then at the end, the natives must be paid with photographs.”27 If the Bishop
Museum permitted Shapiro to come along, these activities would become his responsibility.
But when Shapiro arrived in Papeete he found Emory and Nordhoff still building the
boat. Eager to get to work, he decided instead to take passage on one of the rancid copra
tubs calling at the other Society Islands and the Tuamotu Archipelago. On first landing in
Tahiti, Shapiro regarded the inhabitants as “fascinating but dreadfully tantalizing.” From
the start he wanted “to know each half-caste’s ancestry—to understand the complicated
history that could produce so many varieties.”28 But his original hopes of describing pure
25 Louis R. Sullivan, “The Racial Diversity of the Polynesian Peoples,” Journal of the Polynesian Society,
1923, 32:79 – 84. Sullivan died young, from tuberculosis.
26 George W. Stocking, Jr., “Franz Boas and the Culture Concept in Historical Perspective,” in Race, Culture,
and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1968), pp. 195–233. On
the contemporary Columbia “culture-and-personality school” see Joanne Meyerowitz, “‘How Common Culture
Shapes Separate Lives’: Sexuality, Race, and Mid-Twentieth-Century Social Constructionist Thought,” J. Amer.
Hist., 2010, 96:1057–1084.
27 Kenneth Emory to Harry L. Shapiro, 20 Nov. 1928; and Emory to Herbert Gregory, 20 Nov. 1928: Box 3,
Correspondence 1923–30, Shapiro Papers. Shapiro had met Emory in 1925, when the latter was spending a
semester at Harvard. Emory grew up in Hawaii, where he became expert in hula, taught himself basic
archaeology and anthropology (supplemented by later graduate studies at Harvard and Yale), and then married
a French-Tahitian woman. See Bob Krauss, Keneti: South Seas Adventures of Kenneth Emory (Honolulu: Univ.
Hawaii Press, 1988).
28 H. L. Shapiro, “Field Notes of H. L. Shapiro, 1929,” 11 Apr. 1929, p. 1, Shapiro Collection, Division of
Anthropology Archives, American Museum of Natural History, New York (hereafter cited as Shapiro Collec-
WARWICK ANDERSON
237
Polynesian types as well as those with mixed ancestry were soon dashed. Evidently few
Polynesians boasted a pure line of descent. Accordingly, he would concentrate on
measuring and assessing sociologically the tantalizing half-castes.
In the western Tuamotus, low-lying atolls on the fringe of lagoons, Shapiro assiduously
measured the inhabitants, keeping a daily “tally,” observing initially their distinctive
frontozygomatic index, orthognathous profile, striking maxilla, and so on. Most of them
looked very “Caucasoid” and therefore related to Europeans—whether through phylogeny
or more proximate descent. But local genealogical reckoning was disturbingly imprecise,
especially in identifying paternity, so it was difficult to interpret the accumulating measurements accurately. Shapiro described his field technique:
We unpack our equipment in a convenient native house and soon have an enormous crowd
watching us. . . . The old men are pushed forth as victims but the young lusty ones are usually
fishing or in the fields working. By slow stages we manage to catch enough to fill the morning
and sometimes the afternoon. But usually after a native lunch we trudge off calipers in hand
and seek those resting at home. . . . It requires almost a flirtation to get the women to be
measured. In most cases a photograph is irresistible bait.29
Shapiro regretted that he failed to obtain blood samples for grouping: even seeking them
proved an impediment to further work. On each island he laboriously documented subjects
on index cards, wrote field notes, took photographs, and made films, producing a portable
human archive. (See Figure 1.)
The longer Shapiro traveled among these people, and ate, fished, sat around, drank, and
danced with them, the closer he became. Usually he doctored them in a basic fashion,
mostly dispensing Lysol. Before long, the twenty-seven-year-old became sensitive to their
“soft, languorous expression,” their “liquid eyes.”30 Emory and the older, pushy Stimson—Keneti and Ua— encouraged him to sleep with the local girls, as they did, thereby
“normalizing” their presence, so it seemed. Once sexual relations were established, the
research process might go more smoothly, or so Shapiro speculated.31 But mostly the
“boys” simply relied on Keneti’s guitar and Ua’s fluent Tahitian to break the ice.
With his “collector’s cupidity,” as he called it—typical of the museum man—Shapiro
also avidly sought Polynesian skulls and bones, especially the remains of the earlier
long-headed type that the contemporary round-headed islanders had supplanted. He was
aware of local sensitivities. To Clark Wissler at the American Museum he wrote: “At
Tahiti the crania are in maraes which are still considered sacred and inviolable. Looting
tion). See also “Report of Kenneth P. Emory for the Year 1929,” Box 4, Group 9, Emory Papers, Bishop
Museum Archives, Honolulu (hereafter cited as Emory Papers). On the history of French Polynesia see Robert
Aldrich, The French Presence in the South Pacific, 1842–1940 (Basingstoke: Macmillan 1990); and Colin
Newbury, Tahiti Nui: Change and Survival in French Polynesia, 1767–1945 (Honolulu: Univ. Hawaii Press,
1980).
29 Shapiro to Clark Wissler, 3 June 1929, Shapiro Collection.
30 “Field Notes of H. L. Shapiro, 1929,” 15 Apr. 1929, p. 3; 27 May 1929, p. 10: Shapiro Collection. Shapiro
measured at Takaroa and Takapoto.
31 Harry L. Shapiro interview by Bob Krauss, n.d., Box 8, Emory Papers. Shapiro argued that the locals would
have thought it odd if a man did not consort with a woman. Stimson was allegedly more sexually active with
vahines than Emory: see Folder 13, Box 8, Group 12, Emory Papers. The son of a New York painter, Stimson
studied architecture in Paris before moving to Tahiti and marrying a Chinese-Tahitian woman, whom he later
left for a girl from Vahitahi. Van Wyck Brooks, the New York literary critic, was his brother-in-law; and Henry
L. Stimson, governor-general of the Philippines and U.S. secretary of state (later secretary of war), and Alfred
Lee Loomis, a philanthropist, were first cousins. Ernest Beaglehole called Frank Stimson—a stout, irascible
man—the “stormy petrel” of Polynesian anthropology: Frank Beaglehole, “Review of Raivavae: An Expedition
to the Most Fascinating Island in Polynesia, by Donald Marshall,” American Anthropologist, 1962, 64:186 –187.
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Figure 1. Emory, Shapiro, and Stimson (left to right) on Hao atoll, Tuamotus, 1929. Courtesy of
the Bernice P. Bishop Museum, Honolulu, Hawaii.
them would be a grave mistake.”32 Nonetheless, Shapiro and Keneti sometimes climbed
high in the steep Tahitian valleys to raid burial caves, struggling back, sweaty and
fatigued, carrying packs laden with skulls. On one occasion, Shapiro noted:
I had a knapsack with six skulls on my bare shoulders . . . and in one hand the axe and shirt
full of bones. Literally, we moved by inches. At times we sat in helplessness. Thrown forward
by the weight of the knapsack, I had the continuous impression of being ready to go headlong
any moment. . . . When we finally reached bottom I could hardly see through my glasses
running sweat, covered with dirt and perspiration.33
That night they treated themselves to a steak dinner, and the intrepid anthropologist sent
the bones to the American Museum of Natural History. As he continued to travel through
32 “Field Notes of H. L. Shapiro, 1929,” 19 May 1929, p. 3, Shapiro Collection; and Shapiro to Wissler, 12
Apr. 1929, Shapiro Collection. On Wissler see Stanley A. Freed and Ruth S. Freed, “Clark Wissler and the
Development of Anthropology in the United States,” Amer. Anthropol., 1983, 85:800 – 825.
33 “Field Notes of H. L. Shapiro, 1929,” 19 May 1929, p. 4, Shapiro Collection. As Emory wrote to Gregory
at the Bishop Museum: “The cliff climbing, stream wading, march through the gloomy groves of mape trees,
appealed enormously to Harry’s sense of adventure.” Emory to Gregory, 26 May 1929, Box 8, Group 12, Emory
Papers.
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239
the islands, Shapiro repeatedly attempted to “rescue” skulls from burial sites, but often he
left disappointed. At Fakahina, though, he heard of a skull recently reburied in the
cemetery. “I reacted to that as simply and decisively as the hind leg of a frog to an electric
spark,” he wrote. “Because of the superstition of the natives I did not remove the skull at
the time, but Emory and I had a minor adventure that night when we quietly abstracted it
and hid it in my laundry.” Still, Shapiro could claim that, although “voracious enough, I
hesitate to disturb the natives flagrantly.”34
Impatient, Shapiro set off alone for the Marquesas in June 1929, aboard a tramp
steamer. The rugged archipelago was enthralling: a scene of romance conjured up by
Melville, the stunning precipices rising abruptly from the ocean. “Is it possible,” Shapiro
asked, “to transfix the subtle impression of Nuku Hiva?” But he had arrived in the middle
of a dance festival, and few Marquesans showed any inclination to stop to be measured.
“It was sad, my first day, seeing the change at Taiohae,” he recorded, “the wooden houses,
the half-caste slattern women, the depleted population.” Fayaway was nowhere to be seen.
“Without doubt,” he went on, “mixture has been as rampant here as in the Societies.”
Overcoming the local distractions, Shapiro managed eventually to measure forty-eight
inhabitants of Nuku Hiva, most of them half-caste, some dubiously pure. The people of
Hiva Oa proved less cooperative, with one protesting that he was not a pig to be measured.
But when the scientist promised each potential subject an illegal glass of wine, most
complied. On the whole, the anthropologist found the somber valleys of the Marquesas
dispiriting, leaving him nostalgic for the lost world of Typee. “It is a sad population now,”
he wrote, “mixed with white, dirty and unkempt. Not a trace of the old life. No evidence
of joyous youth.”35
On his return to Papeete, Shapiro discovered that Keneti had finally launched his cutter,
Mahina-I-Te-Pua, the “Flower of the Foam.” In September 1929 they set off, again with
Ua, for the Tuamotus, the “Dangerous Isles.” Traveling east, Shapiro located remarkably
Caucasian elements on Fangatau, a very “primitive” group on Reao, and the “divergent”
inhabitants of Napuka. The reddish-brown hair and gray eyes of many of these people
impressed him. He observed how “white blood” appeared to have spread even to the
fringes of Polynesia. But the expedition proved troubling. Frequently, islanders assumed
that Shapiro was an agent of the French government seeking information on available
manpower for the next war. Some of them believed his equipment would make them sick.
Still more disturbing, Shapiro and his fellow argonauts soon realized that their boat was
far too small and unstable for the expedition; repeatedly, it broke down, bits came off, and
capsize seemed imminent in the imposing swells. The bunks soon resembled lagoons.
34 On the “minor adventure” see Shapiro to Wissler, 17 Oct. 1929, Shapiro Collection. See also “Journal of
Kenneth P. Emory, 1929,” 15 Oct. 1929, pp. 14 –15, Box 8, Group 12, Emory Papers. For Shapiro’s claim
regarding his restraint see Shapiro to Wissler, 31 Aug. 1929, Shapiro Collection.
35 “Field Notes of H. L. Shapiro, 1929,” 14 June 1929, pp. 12, 13; 23 June 1929, p. 14; 7 July 1929, p. 17:
Shapiro Collection. Shapiro also briefly visited Fatu Hiva and Ua Pou on this trip. E. J. Craighill Handy and
Willowdean Handy, anthropologists from the Bishop Museum, had previously visited the Marquesas and
measured many of the inhabitants, though probably not as fastidiously as Shapiro. See E. J. C. Handy, The Native
Culture in the Marquesas (Bernice P. Bishop Museum Bulletin 9) (Honolulu, 1923). The anthropologist Ralph
Linton, shedding some of his archaeological interests, also wrote on the Marquesas during this period: Ralph
Linton, “Marquesan Culture,” Amer. Anthropol., 1925, 27:474 – 478. So too did Karl von den Steinen, who
produced Die Marquesane und ihre Kunst (Kronberg, 1928). The most evocative history of the islands is Greg
Dening, Islands and Beaches: Discourse on a Silent Land: Marquesas, 1774 –1880 (Honolulu: Univ. Hawaii
Press, 1980), which touches on the twentieth century. On the “discovery” of the Marquesas in the 1920s see
Guillaume Le Bronnec, “Le tourisme aux ı̂les Marquises,” Bulletin de la Société des Études Océaniennes, 1922,
6:54 – 63, 1923, 7:52–57.
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Figure 2. Hauling the Mahina ashore, Bishop Museum Tuamotus Expedition, Vahitahi Island, 1930.
Courtesy of the Bernice P. Bishop Museum, Honolulu, Hawaii.
Often they struggled to find enough fuel, and then the schooner carrying the canned food
to replenish their provisions sank. Ua and Keneti began to bicker. Hari took to singing sea
chanteys in a very loud voice. When the Mahina’s engine developed some trouble, Keneti
dropped Hari and Ua on Hao atoll and sputtered back to Papeete for repairs.36 Somehow
he forgot to tell anyone they were out there. Abandoned for six weeks, florid and foaming,
Ua never forgave Keneti—though Hari soon did.37 (See Figure 2.)
Despite such inconveniences and diversions, Shapiro accumulated an anthropometric
series of about eight hundred subjects by the end of his South Seas voyages. But
genealogical uncertainties and inconsistencies, along with persisting gaps in his sampling
of French Polynesia, meant that Shapiro was unsure just what to do with all this
information. For the moment, he piled up the boxes of Pacific material in his offices at the
American Museum of Natural History and talked to the New York newspapers about his
adventures. He told them that Polynesians derived from Caucasian stock and that race
mixing was restocking the islands with new sorts of people, even more Caucasian. “We
hope to throw some light on the laws of inheritance,” he stated in the Herald Tribune, “and
36 H. L. Shapiro, “Field Report, 1929”; and Shapiro to Wissler, 13 Sept. 1929: Shapiro Collection. The best
sources are “Journal of Kenneth P. Emory, 1929,” Box 8, Group 12, Emory Papers; and “Field Notes of H. L.
Shapiro, 1929,” Shapiro Collection.
37 In the 1930s they also argued bitterly over Tuamotu theology, with Stimson claiming that the people were
monotheists and Emory asserting their polytheism. A year later Stimson wrote to Shapiro, hoping to “talk over
and re-live (a little at least) the days of adventure and romance that I think you and I both enjoyed in spite of
the sordidness and the dirt and the Catholics!” J. Frank Stimson to Shapiro, 27 May 1931, Stimson Folder, Box
2, Correspondence 1931–32, Shapiro Papers. Shapiro remarked in a later letter that Polynesia “is becoming
synonymous, in these times of depression, with refuge and ease”: 2 Sept. 1932, Shapiro Papers.
WARWICK ANDERSON
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the effects of racial miscegenation which may be useful in the United States.” But they
would have to await further analysis of the data before any scientific guidance could be
offered. For the next few years, Shapiro would be preoccupied instead with further studies
of race mixing in Hawaii.38
His experiences in the South Seas tended to disorient and disturb the scientist, putting
him into unpredictable and even confusing relations with erstwhile research subjects. The
impressionable New Yorker felt his identity shifting from one encounter to the next: he
adjusted from scientist to doctor, friend to grave robber, and trader to entertainer. At one
moment he would flirt with the women; on another occasion, measure them. Sometimes
he disliked these people; then again, they might intrigue and even enthrall him. Ambivalent encounters in this contact zone were changing him as a person, making him think
again about the nature of human difference and his potential for sympathy and engagement.
ON THE ZACA
In January 1933 Henry Fairfield Osborn, the formidable president of the American
Museum of Natural History, wrote to an old friend in San Francisco, Charles Templeton
Crocker, to ask if he was prepared to sponsor a scientific expedition to the South Seas.
Osborn and Crocker shared with others in their circle, including Madison Grant and
Charles Davenport, a patrician enthusiasm for science and eugenics. Descended from a
pioneering Californian family, which became immensely rich through railroads and
banking, Crocker was a self-consciously cultivated cosmopolitan with time and money to
spare. Cole Porter had encouraged him to dabble in light opera and musicals: one of his
Chinese extravaganzas, Fay-Yen-Fah, played in 1925 at the Monte Carlo Opera House,
supported by Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russe; another stirred his comrades under the
redwoods of the Bohemian Grove one summer.39 A prodigious collector of rare books, he
also refounded the California Historical Society, as a sort of family history project.40 But
Crocker soon tired of mere terrestrial distinction. In 1930 he built the Zaca, a 118-foot
double-topsail schooner, among the most beautiful boats that ever put to sea.41 Crocker
decided to sail the world, accompanied by scientists, collecting natural history specimens
38 “Polynesia Study Shows Evidence of White Race,” New York Herald Tribune, 21 Feb. 1930. See also H. L.
Shapiro, “Statement on the Fieldwork of H. L. Shapiro,” 14 Feb. 1930, Folder 1930, Box 3, Shapiro Papers.
Regarding the anthropometric series of some eight hundred subjects see Shapiro, “Field Report, 1929,” Shapiro
Collection. For Shapiro’s work on race mixing in Hawaii see Warwick Anderson, “Racial Hybridity, Physical
Anthropology, and Human Biology in the Colonial Laboratories of the United States,” Current Anthropology,
2012, 53:S95–S107.
39 Henry Fairfield Osborn to Charles Templeton Crocker, 3 Jan. 1933, Box 3, Shapiro Papers. On the
Californian Hubert Stowitts’s homoerotic and Orientalist designs for Fay-Yen-Fah see Robert Aldrich, Colonialism and Homosexuality (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 166. See also William G. Domhoff, The Bohemian
Grove and Other Retreats: A Study in Ruling Class Cohesiveness (New York: Harper & Row, 1974).
40 Henry R. Wagner, Recollections of Templeton Crocker, Founder of the California Historical Society
(Oakland, Calif.: Westgate, 1950). Crocker married a sugar heiress from Hawaii, which may have strengthened
his interest in the Pacific—though it was said that he neglected her. His uncle William H. Crocker was president
of the board of trustees of the California Academy of Sciences.
41 The Zaca—supposedly a Native American word for “peace”— hosted multiple scientific expeditions during
the 1930s. See Templeton Crocker, The Cruise of the “Zaca” (New York: Harper, 1933); and William Beebe,
“Zaca” Venture (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1938). The U.S. Navy requisitioned the yacht in 1942. Errol Flynn
acquired her in 1945— once even attempting a scientific expedition, which turned into a fiasco—and let Orson
Welles use her in The Lady from Shanghai (1948). Owned by an Italian industrialist, the Zaca is now berthed
in Monte Carlo. It is worth noting that the Bounty was only 91 feet in length.
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for museums in the United States—it would at least give him an excuse for shooting and
fishing. Hence Osborn’s request.
The chief purpose of the proposed expedition— or “world jaunt,” as Crocker called
it—was the collection of evocative materials for the Pacific Hall under construction at the
American Museum. It was still particularly deficient in birds, so one of the museum’s
ornithologists, James P. Chapin, and its bird illustrator, F. Lee Jaques, would accompany
Crocker, who had generously volunteered to take charge of fish acquisition himself.
Shapiro seized the opportunity to return to Polynesia in order to complete his studies of
race mixing there, focusing this time on native sex life. Crocker cheerfully agreed to call
at the Marquesas, Tuamotus, Mangareva, Pitcairn, and Rapa Nui (Easter Island), returning
to San Francisco along the South American coast. At last, Shapiro might go ashore at the
fabled Pitcairn Island. Before they departed, Gregory wrote urgently from the Bishop
Museum to Shapiro: “I hope you will share the plunder you get.”42
On a clear evening in September 1934, the Zaca left its berth at the San Francisco Yacht
Club and sailed out through the Golden Gate, heading for Nuku Hiva in the Marquesas.
(See Figure 3.) For the next three weeks they rolled heavily south, Chapin and Jaques
scanning for birds, Shapiro playing solitaire, reading, scratching on his cello, or looking
for whales. The perpetually tanned Crocker mostly sunbathed on deck, though sometimes
he worried about engine trouble and fuel levels, or complained about the stench of
formaldehyde from the tanks on deck, or took shots at passing tropicbirds and petrels.
Nearer the equator, they wore only bathing trunks or pareus. “We could do little but loaf,
eat excellently, and bask in the sun till we were brown all over,” Chapin wrote to his
superior at the American Museum. In the evenings they listened to classical music on the
gramophone as the crew served dinner. Crocker observed “Shapiro reading, writing, or
closing his eyes contentedly when music of the proper quality is being played.”43
On 6 October the “bold virile cliffs” of Nuku Hiva emerged from the ocean, as grand
as Shapiro remembered. Crocker agreed that the island was astounding, but its inhabitants
failed to impress. “The apathy of the few natives was quite noticeable after we dropped
anchor,” he wrote in his journal. “Scarcely anyone was seen. Several women were seated
lazily on the verandah of one of the houses.”44 Once ashore, Shapiro recognized some old
friends and found the ailing Père Siméon Delmas, the unusually learned priest at Taiohae,
whom he greatly respected.45 All the same, he initially felt keen disappointment. “The
42 C. Templeton Crocker, “Journal, Eastern Polynesia, 1934 –35,” n.d., Box 3, Crocker Papers, California
Academy of Sciences, San Francisco (hereafter cited as Crocker, “Journal, Eastern Polynesia”); and Gregory
to Shapiro, 12 Feb. 1934, Folder 1934, Box 3, Shapiro Papers. Chapin grew up on Staten Island and worked at
the American Museum from the age of sixteen for almost sixty years, finding time to complete his studies in
ornithology at Columbia. He knew more about African birds than anyone, having participated in the museum’s
five-year Congo expedition, from which came his four-volume treatise on the regional birds. See Herbert
Friedmann, “In Memoriam: James Paul Chapin,” Auk, 1966, 83:240 –252. Jaques, from the north woods of
Minnesota, became a popular natural history artist, painting more than fifty dioramas and illustrating forty or so
books. See Florence Page Jaques, Francis Lee Jaques: Artist of the Wilderness World (New York: Doubleday,
1973). Chapin, Jaques, and Crocker were some ten to twenty years older than Shapiro, who was in his early
thirties.
43 James P. Chapin to Frank M. Chapman, 12 Oct. 1934, Folder 1934, Shapiro Papers (Chapin also noted that
he had seen few birds, but plenty of rats); and Crocker, “Journal, Eastern Polynesia,” 30 Sept. 1934.
44 H. L. Shapiro, “The Templeton Crocker Expedition to the Pacific, September 15, 1934 to January 31, 1935,”
6 Oct. 1934, p. 15, Shapiro Collection (hereafter cited as Shapiro, “Expedition to the Pacific”); and Crocker,
“Journal, Eastern Polynesia,” 6 Oct. 1934. Fatu Hiva, he wrote later (21 Oct. 1934), was another island of
“mysterious silence and fantastic majesty.”
45 As much natural historian as missionary, Delmas had dwelled in the Marquesas since 1886, providing
hospitality for travelers such as Robert Louis Stevenson. He spent his later years trying to preserve the local
WARWICK ANDERSON
243
Figure 3. The Zaca off Nuku Hiva, Marquesas Islands, 1934. C. Templeton Crocker Papers,
California Academy of Sciences Archives, San Francisco, California.
people seemed for the most part degenerate,” he noted that first day. “These people are the
frayed end of a discarded garment and they know it. . . . Sad Marquesas!” Later, at
Taipivae, he observed a “bastard remnant, with a miserable existence. Not only have
Fayaway and Kory-Kory disappeared but all their throng with them.” Yet it pleased him
to see that the number of children had increased since his last visit. “Maybe this bastard
population will be able to repopulate the Marquesas,” he wrote. “Certainly it is hopeless
to expect again a Polynesian Marquesas—that has gone.”46 Over the following days,
Shapiro chatted with Marquesan women about their sex lives, finding this interaction
much easier than when he had tried to measure them a few years earlier. One night the
locals put on some dances for him, culled, it seemed, from Tahiti, Hawaii, and Fortysecond Street: the anthropologist participated energetically, to his hosts’ satisfaction.
Throughout the Marquesas it was much the same for Shapiro this trip: spectacular scenery,
language. When Shapiro visited him, he was suffering greatly from elephantiasis. See Siméon Delmas, La
religion, ou le paganisme des Marquisiens: d’Après les notes des anciens missionaries (Paris: Gabriel
Beauchesne, 1927); and Delmas, Essai d’histoire de la mission des Îles Marquises (Océanie): Depuis les
origines jusqu’en 1881 (Paris: Annales des Sacres-Coeurs, 1929).
46 Shapiro, “Expedition to the Pacific,” 6 Oct. 1934, p. 19; 8 Oct. 1934, p. 23; 7 Oct. 1934, p. 21. Earlier, Jack
London observed, “There are more races than there are persons, but it is a wreckage of races at best. . . . The
valley of Typee was the abode of death, and the dozen survivors of the tribe were gasping feebly the last painful
breaths of the race”: London, Cruise of the “Snark” (cit. n. 10), pp. 163, 167. The Norwegian adventurer Thor
Heyerdahl later lived a year at Fatu Hiva, searching for isolated primitives, but he was disappointed and the
inhabitants resented him. See Thor Heyerdahl, “Turning Back Time in the South Seas,” National Geographic
Magazine, 1940, 79:109 –136; and Heyerdahl, Fatu-Hiva (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1974).
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Figure 4. Map of the voyage of the Zaca, 1934 –1935. C. Templeton Crocker Papers, California
Academy of Sciences Archives, San Francisco, California.
occupied by miserable but informative half-castes, with moments of pleasure and connection. (See Figure 4.)
A week or so later, at Tatakoto in the Tuamotu Archipelago, Shapiro resumed his
measuring. He set up a “combination clinic and anthropometric lab,” with the ship’s
doctor, George P. Lyman, examining the sick and taking blood samples and Crocker
recording the measurements. Shapiro thought the people there rather slender, with bony
faces, narrow foreheads, and long, narrow skulls—almost Caucasian, he noted.47 Having
efficiently added a few more Tuamotuans to his series, the anthropologist and his
colleagues retreated to the Zaca at the end of the day and sailed on to the next atoll. At
each stop Shapiro sought to expand the series.
At Hao, where Emory had abandoned him and Stimson five years earlier, a crowd at the
47
Shapiro, “Expedition to the Pacific,” 25 Oct. 1934, pp. 44 – 45.
WARWICK ANDERSON
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pier met Shapiro, shouting “Hari, Hari.” In his journal he wrote: “My progress was a
continual succession of kisses with women and handclasps with men. No one seemed a
day older since I left and everyone was so glad to see me that it warmed my heart.
Everyone treats me as though I were really a member of [the] family.” But a few old
friends had died, and his former house was empty. “This has been a very emotional day,”
he concluded, “and I wish I had never come.” However mixed his feelings, the return to
Hao constituted a breakthrough of sorts for Shapiro, the moment when he came to engage
more sympathetically with his research subjects, to recognize his relatedness to them,
though he resisted their full embrace. Indeed, the following day he came back to measure
them again and take blood samples. But over the next week Hari moved in with a local
family and settled into village life, chatting with his neighbors and listening to them strum
guitars in the evenings. He played “Believe Me, if All Those Endearing Young Charms”
on his cello but was uncertain if they appreciated it. Their gifts of shells, hats, baskets,
meat, and fish touched him. “I have been so completely accepted and trusted that I could
get anything I wanted,” Hari wrote. “Coming back as an old friend, as a kind of son to
Fariua, everyone has been completely at ease with me and very cordial. For the first time
I felt as though I were in the inside of their lives.” When he departed, they serenaded him
with a song composed in honor of the Zaca. In his journal, Shapiro wrote that day: “White
people so often look like inferior curs among natives.”48
For another month, the Zaca continued its voyage through French Polynesia. Shapiro
meticulously measured “natives” on Tahiti, Moorea, Rimatara, Rurutu, Raivavae, Rapa,
and many other islands and atolls. His tally kept rising. The comments in his journal are
revealing. In Tahiti, he “picked them out of their houses, stopped them on the road; and
when the bus stopped we grabbed them off the bus.” At Rurutu, he got a native judge “to
help round up suspects.” The Raivavaens proved especially reluctant to be measured and
bled—Shapiro heard that someone had been there before, taking measurements and
calling them savages, but he dismissed this as “absurd” since he was the only one they
could mean. The people seemed “irrationally and childishly” uncooperative. At Rapa, he
found the women “very sulky looking and shrewish.” They refused to have any blood
taken “out of fear and out of stupid contrariness.” But elsewhere he encountered few
objections, so long as he donated a photograph at the end of the proceedings. He especially
cherished any supposedly pure Polynesians, yet such types appeared exceptionally rare, so
he made do, as usual, with mixed-race subjects. Although he kept hoping for “a nice haul
of skulls” to supplement the data collected from his living specimens, few became
available, much to his chagrin.49
The voyage of the Zaca possessed an ambiguous status in the “racial laboratory” of the
Pacific. Although historians of science observe that “European scientists transformed a
physical area into a conceptual laboratory,” the Zaca carried its own maritime social world
along with the scientists and their instruments.50 Shapiro and his colleagues found
48 Ibid., 27 Oct. 1934, p. 49; 5 Nov. 1934, p. 55 (Fariua had “adopted” him in 1929); 5 Nov. 1934, p. 61. Even
Jack London had noted that in the South Seas “one is almost driven to the conclusion that the white race
flourishes on impurity and corruption”: London, Cruise of the “Snark” (cit. n. 10), p. 169.
49 Ibid., 24 Nov. 1934, p. 74; 28 Nov. 1934, p. 90; 2 Dec. 1934, pp. 97, 98; 9 Dec. 1934, pp. 109, 110; 22 Dec.
1934, p. 130.
50 Roy MacLeod and Philip F. Rehbock, “Introduction,” in Darwin’s Laboratory: Evolutionary Theory and
Natural History in the Pacific, ed. MacLeod and Rehbock (Honolulu: Univ. Hawaii Press, 1994), pp. 1–18, on
p. 4; and Rod Edmond and Vanessa Smith, eds., Islands in History and Representation (New York: Routledge,
2003).
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themselves adapting to particular maritime hierarchies and demands, their specimens
treated as cargo, their schedules subject to weather forecasts, their behavior at sea shaped
by the customs of the crew and their own memories of adventure narratives. For Shapiro,
the Zaca inevitably followed in the wake of the Bounty and the Snark. It became a site of
manly endeavor and virile display, not just a floating laboratory bench. It was a vehicle for
challenging nature as much as a means of analyzing racial experiments.51
The view from the Zaca’s decks was quite different from one located more securely on
land, especially from the verandah of a researcher’s long-term residence. Self-contained
and protected, the ship could give investigators a feeling of distance and autonomy. At the
same time, sailing in unknown waters and meeting new people day after day might create
a sense of mobility and mutability, as well as apprehension, often provoking concern
about volatility and hospitality. The scientists arrived already enmeshed in regional
maritime habits and customs, different from those acquired on board and often mysterious
to them. Encountering a seaborne anthropologist would subtly alter the accessibility of
local inhabitants, shape the character of their offerings to the stranger, and inflect the
information they gave. The distinctive trace of these transitory meetings became fixed in
the science.52
Personal relations on board ship were almost as difficult to calibrate as those ashore. On
the Zaca, Shapiro and Crocker found each other increasingly insufferable. Chapin tried
convivially to coax them into conversation, but their animosity proved durable. Brisk and
dictatorial, Crocker provoked resentment in Shapiro and the others. “I have never been
regarded so suspiciously or treated so unjustly and rudely,” the anthropologist claimed.
“Crocker hates us all . . . with a bitter venom which he takes no pains to conceal. . . . We
can scarcely make an innocent comment but what he takes a vindictive opposition. At
times I have really believed that he were going insane.” “It is curious,” Shapiro observed,
“that so introspective a man with ultra-sensitive feelings should be so callous about
inflicting torture on others.” The parallels with Bligh and Christian on the Bounty did not
escape his notice. He also deplored Crocker’s rudeness to the islanders, which became
more evident as they traveled. Crocker’s apparent disdain for clever Jews and dirty natives
grated on Shapiro. Crocker himself was lonely and unhappy; his first thought on getting
back to San Francisco would be how glad he was “to be among . . . friends again.”53 (See
Figure 5.)
Late in December 1934, the Zaca left Mangareva’s remnants of tropical medievalism
behind, heading for Pitcairn, some two days’ sail across the “long, measured, dirge-like
swell” of the Pacific.54 Scanning the horizon on the second day, Shapiro eventually
discerned a faint gray shape, which graduated slowly into a chunky, rugged island, a sort
51 Helen M. Rozwadowski, Fathoming the Ocean: The Discovery and Exploration of the Deep Sea (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 2005); and Gary Kroll, America’s Ocean Wilderness: A Cultural History of
Twentieth-Century Exploration (Lawrence: Univ. Press Kansas, 2008).
52 See Richard Sorrenson, “The Ship as a Scientific Instrument in the Eighteenth Century,” Osiris, 2nd Ser.,
1996, 11:221–236; Bronwen Douglas, “Seaborne Ethnography and the Natural History of Man,” Journal of
Pacific History, 2003, 38:3–27; and Simon Schaffer, “‘On Seeing Me Write’: Inscription Devices in the South
Seas,” Representations, 2007, 97:90 –122.
53 Shapiro, “Expedition to the Pacific,” 27 Oct. 1934, p. 48, 25 Jan. 1935, pp. 201, 202; and Crocker, “Journal,
Eastern Polynesia,” 30 Mar. 1935. In contrast to his other expeditions, Crocker did not write a book about this
one.
54 Melville, Typee (cit. n. 1), p. 10. The megalomaniac priest Laval had enslaved the Mangarevans a century
earlier, making them construct a grandiose church, palace, and village, based on a French medieval model—all
but the church and convent were in ruins by the time the Zaca arrived.
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247
Figure 5. Lunch on the Zaca: Shapiro, Chapin, Jaques, and Crocker (seated left to right).
C. Templeton Crocker Papers, California Academy of Sciences Archives, San Francisco, California.
of elevated plateau—vividly green—surrounded by cliffs and crashing waves. Soon,
though, it was dusk. “There is a grand yellow-orange moon just rising and the sky is soft
with stars,” Shapiro noted, “a lovely night to dream about Pitcairn before the disillusion
tomorrow.” The following morning, big wooden whaleboats put out from Bounty Bay to
meet the Zaca. As burly brown men crowded the yacht, Shapiro observed their wide,
heavy faces and beaky noses; they wore ragged, secondhand clothes and spoke English
haltingly, with what he thought was a “colonial” accent. After speaking with Parkins
Christian, the magistrate—“a fine tall rather distinguished looking man whose somewhat
flattened nose and dark skin gave him a half-caste appearance”—it was decided that the
anthropologist could stay ashore.55 Before long, Shapiro was holding tight as the whaleboat caught a wave toward the cliffs, hurtling onto a narrow shingle.
Shapiro spent the Christmas period keenly observing the 178 Pitcairners, measuring
them when the opportunity arose. It was indubitably an inbred, hybrid population—no
scientific training was needed to recognize that. As he measured their bodies, Shapiro
observed the descendants of the Bounty mutineers closely:
It was interesting to watch their faces. . . . Parkins, with his dark skin, tall, hard lean figure, very
distinguished, masterful and slow speakin’, but with a humorous twinkle which lights up his
face, reminiscent of Tahiti. Arthur Young, shorter, with a high beaked nose and a small chin,
high bony head, looks like an old time professor. Some of the others like old New England tars.
Yet others look like anemic cockneys and a few like half-castes. With a few exceptions, the
men are lean and wiry, knobby, big feet, thin wiry legs, and great hairy chests.
55
Shapiro, “Expedition to the Pacific,” 22 Dec. 1934, p. 131; 23 Dec. 1934, pp. 132, 133.
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The women, however, did not impress Shapiro. They “all seem to have become withered
and thin with age, unlike Polynesian women,” he wrote. “On the whole the men are
stouter, better looking, and many seem like old salts in their appearance and expression.”56
There were some exceptions. Shapiro met the two brothers whom the anatomist Arthur
Keith had measured almost twenty years earlier on their visit to London. Although Keith
believed that “in both there could be no thought of physical degeneration; in chest and
muscle they were splendidly developed”— he did wonder if small skulls accounted for
their limited “powers of apprehension.” Shapiro agreed that they seemed a little slow
mentally, but then he realized how different they were from the other islanders.57
Living among natural abundance, Pitcairners seemed content to dwell in untidy, dirty
shacks. Discarded furniture, broken equipment, and pandanus littered the ground around
their houses. Chickens wandered through the mess. “The general aspect is not one of
scrupulous cleanliness,” Shapiro wryly noted. The food usually was heavy and unappetizing. There was little entertainment, aside from boring Seventh-day Adventist services
in the small chapel and regular community meetings. “It would be difficult to estimate the
number of morons,” Shapiro wrote, “but a number are not very bright.” The schoolteacher
did “not find the scholars very apt or eager.” All the same, the community appeared
conspicuously proper and polite—in stark contrast to its origins. But Pitcairners did not
strike Shapiro as natural aristocrats. “There is perhaps too much of the touch of shanty
whites about these islanders which make them too close to our seamy side to be truly
romantic,” the middle-class New Yorker observed with regret. “And yet the kindness is
very touching.”58
The agreeable Jimmy Chapin developed the best rapport with the islanders, especially
those like Lucy Christian who helped him find birds. “Thank you for the merry time you
had last night,” she wrote to him on New Year’s Day 1935. “It made me merry too— did
you hear me laughing? And I also shouted a happy new year to you and the yacht Zaca.
I am sure we will never forget the pleasant time spent with you.”59 Chapin and Lucy
Christian continued to correspond for the following twenty years. “It is not that we have
forgotten you in the least that we didn’t write before this,” she told him later in 1935, soon
after the expedition departed, “but we feel we are so far beneath you.” During the next few
decades she frequently recalled the good old days and the exceptionally fine weather when
the Zaca was anchored in Bounty Bay. She often reminded Chapin of their days birding
together: “I will never forget the beauties seen in the flowers, leaves and grasses that was
magnified.” “Your two friends Harry Shapiro and Lee Jaques are pretty well remembered,” she wrote nearly fifteen years after their visit.60
56
Ibid., 25 Dec. 1934, p. 145; 23 Dec. 1934, p. 137.
Arthur Keith, “The Physical Characteristics of Two Pitcairn Islanders,” Man, 1917, 17:121–131, on pp. 130,
124; and Shapiro, “Expedition to the Pacific,” 29 Dec. 1934, p. 156. Keith, the curator of the museum at the
Royal College of Surgeons, was a leading race theorist and a major influence on Hooton. For an account of the
visit of the Pitcairners see Keith, Autobiography (London: Watts, 1950), pp. 402– 404.
58 Shapiro, “Expedition to the Pacific,” 23 Dec. 1934, p. 135, 25 Dec. 1934, p. 146; H. L. Shapiro, “Pitcairn
Notebook,” Dec. 1934, Box 146, Shapiro Papers; and Shapiro, “Expedition to the Pacific,” 27 Dec. 1934, p. 150.
Later, Shapiro remembered that he had “cursed the personal equation which always confronted me in my studies
of the human animal. For a moment I longed for the god-like power of the entomologist or zoologist”: Shapiro,
Heritage of the “Bounty” (cit. n. 5), p. 24.
59 Lucy Christian to Chapin, 1 Jan. 1935, Box 35, Shapiro Papers. Chapin later reflected: “I knew [Pitcairn’s]
birds were few, and scarcely suspected the far deeper appeal of its human inhabitants”: James P. Chapin,
“Through Southern Polynesia,” Natural History, 1936, 37:287–308, on p. 292. By the time they left, “these fine
people had won our deepest respect and sympathy” (p. 293).
60 Christian to Chapin, 30 Mar. 1935 (emphasis in original), 31 Mar. 1937, 15 Jan. 1948, Box 35, Shapiro
57
WARWICK ANDERSON
249
Figure 6. Pitcairners on board the Zaca, December 1934. C. Templeton Crocker Papers,
California Academy of Sciences Archives, San Francisco, California.
In contrast, the haughty Crocker felt little affinity with the islanders, whom he regarded
as ugly and importunate. He was indignant when they treated him like a mere “tourist.”
When he tried playing Beethoven on the gramophone, it made no impression and they
requested religious music instead. “They commenced singing, interminable religious
songs as they always do on the slightest provocation.” Their bodies also repelled him.
“There are two noticeable characteristics of these Pitcairn islanders,” Crocker wrote,
“their hideous feet and an almost total lack of front teeth.” He disliked the way they
“swarmed” all over the ship.61 And yet, even Crocker eventually came to admire their
lower-class modesty and hospitality. (See Figure 6 and frontispiece.)
At times, Shapiro wondered about the value of the islanders for genetic studies. “I am
afraid that too much admixture from stray sources and sub rosa promiscuity on the island
has botched the record.” He distrusted their formal genealogical reckoning. Fortunately,
ancient Mary Ann McCoy, blind and stooped, felt obliged to tell him family secrets,
revealing affairs and illegitimacies, to ensure scientific accuracy. She lamented the illicit
promiscuity of the islanders. But Shapiro still harbored doubts about his data. “In a group
five or six generations removed from the original cross with genealogical histories
over-complex for so small a series and with characters largely multiple factor in origin,”
Papers. When I visited Pitcairn in 2009 they were almost forgotten. Irma Christian (interviewed 20 Feb. 2009),
who was seven years old in 1934, vaguely recalled Shapiro’s name, and her face lit up when Chapin was
mentioned. Tom Christian (interviewed 19 Feb. 2009), Parkins’s nephew, was the only member of the
community, now shrunk to forty-seven people, who had read Shapiro’s work. He did not appreciate the claim
that they were “inbred.”
61 Crocker, “Journal, Eastern Polynesia,” 23 Dec. 1934, 1 Jan. 1935, 25 Dec. 1934, 1 Jan. 1935.
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he wrote to Emory, “it is a waste of time to attempt classic genetic methods.”62 Instead,
he would simply describe and evaluate the mixed group.
After completing a “full sweep of everyone at Pitcairn,” Shapiro rejoined the Zaca. As
he left, the Pitcairners sang the “Star Spangled Banner,” various doleful hymns, and their
goodbye song. The yacht weighed anchor and sailed on to Rapa Nui (Easter Island), where
Shapiro took more measurements, rummaged for skulls, and made a cast of one of the
statues for the museum.63 By the time they reached South America, he had decided to jump
ship and make his own way back to New York. “The calm of the islands from this
distance,” he wrote a few months later to Emory, “has become altogether a mirage that
never really existed.”64
CONCLUSION: OCEANIC VISIONS
“The biological experiment that blind circumstances have created on Pitcairn,” Shapiro
wrote later in 1935, “offers a rare opportunity for the investigation of the laws of
heredity.” In The Heritage of the “Bounty” he described vividly the encounter of English
mutineers and Tahitian maidens, expatiating on how isolation had preserved the results of
their union. Pitcairn constituted the perfect laboratory for the study of race mixing, since
the parental groups were distinctive, genealogical records were available (and could be
corrected if necessary), and the hybrids suffered no social stigma. In this popular book,
Shapiro combined his measurements of his subjects’ bodies in order to represent the
“hypothetical Pitcairn Islander.” He noted evidence of “hybrid vigor,” finding that the
islanders exceeded both parental stocks in average height. Their heads were long, like
those of Tahitians, though less wide; skin and hair color was darker than normal among
the English; and noses and lips seemed intermediate. Bad teeth doubtless were an English
attribute. These hybrids also demonstrated normal intelligence. “On the whole the features
of the islanders are definitely English,” Shapiro concluded, “but familiarity reveals a
number of individuals who favor the Tahitian side.” Still, the anthropologist was surprised
that the hybrid population proved so homogeneous— causing him to speculate on whether
inbreeding could have spread smoothly a diverse inheritance. “The Pitcairn Islanders
reveal in their sum total a mosaic of characters, some borrowing their colors from Tahiti,
others from England, with an occasional patch where the colors have run to produce a
blend.” Most important, miscegenation and inbreeding had not caused “degeneration.”65
Even though the Pitcairners claimed descent from distinct racial groups, Shapiro
told a reporter from the New York Times, they were “strong, husky, above average in
stature and intelligent.” He found them charming and hospitable, a people living under
a form of communism, with no use for money. “While judgments on physical good
looks differ with varying tastes,” he continued, “I should say the average Pitcairn
Islander is pleasing to the eyes.” The following day, a report in the Times extolled the
62 Shapiro, “Expedition to the Pacific,” 27 Dec. 1934, p. 149; and Shapiro to Emory, 12 Mar. 1935, Folder
1935, Shapiro Papers.
63 Shapiro to Emory, 6 Mar. 1935, Folder 1935, Shapiro Papers. The cast was Shapiro’s idea, but Crocker did
most of the work. It now stands in the Mead Hall of Pacific Peoples in the American Museum of Natural History.
64 Shapiro to Emory, 17 Mar. 1935, Folder 1935, Shapiro Papers. Roy Chapman Andrews wrote to Crocker
to tell him “this was one of the most successful expeditions that the Museum has ever had”: 26 Apr. 1935, Box
9, Crocker Collection, California Academy of Sciences Archives, San Francisco.
65 Shapiro, Heritage of the “Bounty” (cit. n. 5), pp. 217, 221, 222, 232, 225, 254. The lack of variability among
mixed-race individuals echoed Herskovits’s findings, though this was not mentioned.
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251
island as a “kind of laboratory in which nature may be watched as she performs the
miracle of welding alien types into an anthropological unit and thus illuminates the
dark subject of our own racial status.” One reviewer of The Heritage of the “Bounty”
argued analogically that “Pitcairn Island, its people and its development, but represent
the world brought down to simplest elementals.” For another, though, Shapiro’s
narrative was just a “first-rate travel book of the very finest sort.” E. S. Craighill
Handy, the anthropologist of the Marquesas, observed that “the Pitcairners have had
the good fortune to be registered in the annals of science and history by a scientist
whose sympathetic nature responded to theirs so genuinely.”66
Back in New York, Shapiro was shocked at the racial policies of Nazi Germany,
especially the yoking of anthropological science to technologies of extermination. The
racial harmony of the Pacific now offered a strange and distant counterpoint to
European prejudice. In October 1935 Shapiro approached Hooton, enjoining his
former advisor to issue a public statement condemning race science and disassociating
physical anthropologists from Nazi excesses. Although still committed to racial
classification, Hooton was pleased to help. Boas told Shapiro he was “delighted” that
an unimpeachable authority like Hooton was prepared to write a manifesto opposing
scientific racism. Moreover, he agreed with Shapiro that, as Jews, they should not
append their names to it.67 Hooton wrote to Boas to assure him that he was “entirely
friendly” to him and “in complete sympathy” with his motives— but at the same time
he was anxious to have Boas “refrain from entering the arena in regard to the Jewish
question.”68 To his colleagues’ surprise, the amiably misanthropic Hooton would take
on that responsibility.
Although he continued to assert the scientific validity of race, describing it as a vague
“biological aggregate,” Hooton argued forcefully against racial prejudice. In particular, he
denied any association of psychological or cultural attributes with physical form. Moreover, he pointed out that no pure races exist. “The present races of man have intermingled
and inbred for thousands of years,” he wrote, “so that their genealogical lines have become
inextricably confused.” In addition, he explicitly exonerated racial admixture, much to
Shapiro’s satisfaction. “Hybrids exhibit a wide range of combinations of features and
blends inherited from both parental races, but no degeneracy.” Hooton omitted from the
final statement some of the incendiary text of his first draft: “The educated public,” he had
thundered, “is advised to disregard and reject all racial propaganda purveyed by scheming
politicians, by social agitators whether proletarian or pretended aristocratic, and by
pseudo-scientists and journalists who exploit race prejudice and class hatred for pecuniary
motives.” Shapiro optimistically supported the effort to moderate the language. “It is a
66 H. L. Shapiro, quoted in “Two Hundred Found Living on Pitcairn Island,” New York Times, 27 Feb. 1935,
p. 21; “A Racial Laboratory,” ibid., 28 Feb. 1935, p. 18; Percy Hutchison, “The Heritage of the Famous
Mutineers of the Bounty,” New York Times Book Review, 26 Apr. 1936, p. 10; Robert Van Gelder, “Review of
The Heritage of the ‘Bounty,’” New York Times, 21 Apr. 1936, p. 21; and E. S. Craighill Handy, “Review of The
Heritage of the ‘Bounty,’” Amer. Anthropol., 1937, 39:356 –358, on p. 358.
67 Franz Boas, quoted in Shapiro to Earnest Hooton, 22 Oct. 1935, Folder 1935, Shapiro Papers. Boas also later
wrote to Hooton (31 Mar. 1936), telling him that “being of Jewish descent I thought it best to keep in the
background entirely”: Franz Boas to Hooton, Box 3, E. A. Hooton Papers, 995-1, Peabody Museum Archives,
Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts (hereafter cited as Hooton Papers). It is unclear whether the
initiative came from Shapiro or Boas, but certainly it was Shapiro who approached Hooton.
68 Hooton to Boas, 28 Mar. 1936, 3 Apr. 1936, Franz Boas Papers, B B61, Series I, American Philosophical
Society, Philadelphia (hereafter cited as Boas Papers). Hooton and Shapiro also asked for their names to be
removed from the advisory board of the American Eugenics Society at about this time.
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clear, forceful and absolutely balanced statement,” he told Hooton. “I am personally
deeply grateful . . . I hated asking you.”69 But most other physical anthropologists were
reluctant to endorse even a qualified declaration. “They are unwilling to sign,” Hooton
wrote to Boas, “because they do not wish to enter the arena of controversy and are
unwilling to accept the responsibility of attaching their names to anything that may be
interpreted as propaganda.”70 Yet some had shown overt hostility to antiracist objectives.
Regretfully, then, Hooton decided to publish the statement in Science under his sole
authorship.71
Political events in Europe were prompting many physical anthropologists in the
United States to challenge the racist assumptions woven into their science, but some,
like Boas and Shapiro, had found faults in the fabric of racial thought long before they
were impelled to action.72 In the Pacific, Shapiro had already come to appreciate racial
hybridity and plasticity, observing complex processes of racial formation and development, discounting simple human typologies. He learned to accept and value human
biological difference, which seemed to him separable from the equally appealing
cultural variation he observed. In intellectual terms, one might argue that Shapiro was
fulfilling the Boasian agenda in physical anthropology, pursuing a nominalist and
statistical approach to race formation, studying human variation, hybridity, and
malleability in the South Seas.73 But this disavowal of the typological conception of
race was predicated on matters at once more personal and more fundamental. In his
Pacific fieldwork, Shapiro often found himself sympathetically engaged with his
research subjects, relating to some of them, intimate with others. His contact with
Marquesans made him sad and nostalgic; in the Tuamotus he rediscovered a sort of
family; and on Pitcairn the islanders touched him with their generosity and hospitality.
Such moments of contact, recognition, and sympathy may have been evanescent, but
their accumulated impact was disconcerting and critical. Perhaps Shapiro’s Jewish
heritage, and his sense of himself as a socially liminal figure at Harvard and the
American Museum, made him unusually receptive to these other marginal people and
promoted rapport with so-called misfits and hybrids, even as it turned him against
69 Earnest Hooton, “Ten Statements about Race,” Hrdlicka Folder, Box 13, Hooton Papers; Hooton, “Twelve
Statements about Race,” Hrdlicka Folder, Box 13, Hooton Papers; and Shapiro to Hooton, 23 Oct. 1935, Folder
1935, Shapiro Papers (here Shapiro addresses Hooton as “Earnest ‘Babe Ruth’ Hooton”).
70 Hooton to Boas, 28 Mar. 1936, Box 3, Hooton Papers. Tozzer and the Smithsonian anthropologist Alěs
Hrdlika were prepared to sign the statement without amendment; see Alfred Tozzer to Boas, 2 Nov. 1936, Boas
Papers. As Hooton later mentioned to Boas: “Anthropologists, at any rate, I have found to be very touchy.”
Hooton to Boas, 30 Oct. 1937, Boas Papers.
71 Earnest A. Hooton, “Plain Statements about Race,” Science, 1936, 83:511–513. Hooton altered the wording
of his earlier drafts, adding some praise of nonracialist eugenics. But he also referred to use of “the specious
excuse of racial difference” in social policy (p. 512). Moreover, he noted that “each racial type runs the gamut
from idiots and criminals to geniuses and statesmen” (p. 513). American scientists as a group did not publicly
condemn racism until 1938, when the American Anthropological Association passed a resolution to that effect,
following the “Scientists’ Manifesto” of the same year. Shapiro became an outspoken opponent of racism in
science, though not of all uses of race concepts, during World War II and later. See H. L. Shapiro, “Anthropology’s Contribution to Inter-racial Understanding,” ibid., 1944, 99:373–376.
72 For others in the same situation see Nancy Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800 –1960
(New York: Archon, 1982), p. 140; Elazar Barkan, The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race
in Britain and the United States between the World Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992), p. 344;
and Gavin Schaffer, “‘Like a Baby with a Box of Matches’: British Scientists and the Concept of ‘Race’ in the
Interwar Period,” British Journal for the History of Science, 2005, 38:307–324, esp. p. 324.
73 This challenges the claim of George W. Stocking, Jr., that the impact of Boas’s thinking on physical
anthropology was “limited.” See his seminal “The Critique of Racial Formalism,” in Race, Culture, and
Evolution (cit. n. 26), pp. 161–194, on p. 189.
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proud Anglo-Saxons like Templeton Crocker.74 Thus in 1935, when he returned to
New York and grimly faced the atrocities in Europe, he could still conjure up the
mirage of the Pacific, still hear the roar of the surf and imagine a vision of oceanic
racelessness. He kept rubbing his eyes, wondering if it could be true.
74 Similarly, Ira Bashkow has argued that David Schneider’s most important anthropological insights “were in
fact products of his ‘compromised’ rapport relationships” on Yap. See Ira Bashkow, “The Dynamics of Rapport
in a Colonial Situation: David Schneider’s Fieldwork on the Island of Yap,” in Colonial Situations: Essays on
the Contextualization of Ethnographic Knowledge, ed. George W. Stocking, Jr. (Madison: Univ. Wisconsin
Press, 1991), pp. 170 –242, on p. 234.