Variant Bio Partners with QUT to Conduct Third Phase of Norfolk Island Health Study

View from Norfolk Island and its infamous Norfolk Pines. Image credit: Robert Smith.

Part I: History of Norfolk Island

Here we recount the captivating history of how a tiny island in the Pacific came to be home to descendants of British mutineers and the Tahitian women they kidnapped.

Check back soon for Part II, where we discuss the work that Prof. Lyn Griffiths and her team have done over the past 20 years on Norfolk Island, and our plans for future work there.

Variant Bio, along with QUT (Queensland University of Technology), Australia, is thrilled to announce the launch of the third phase of the Norfolk Island Health Study.

Prof. Lyn Griffiths, Principal Investigator of the Norfolk Island Health Study

The Norfolk Island Health Study is a long-running research initiative led by Professor Lyn Griffiths, the Director of the Centre for Genomics and Personalised Health and the Genomics Research Centre at QUT. Since 2000, Prof. Griffiths has worked with residents of Norfolk Island to study their health and the genetic and environmental factors associated with various disorders and traits in this population. There are about 1,700 people¹ who currently live on Norfolk, and the majority of them can trace their ancestry back to a group of eight British seamen and 18 Tahitian women. For this reason, the people of Norfolk have a lot of unique health characteristics, with higher levels of certain conditions, and lower levels of others.

Some of those unique health characteristics can be attributed to the fascinating history of how humans came to permanently occupy Norfolk Island. Norfolk Island is shorthand for the official “Territory of Norfolk Island” which comprises three islands: Norfolk, Philip, and Nepean Islands. It is located in the Pacific Ocean between New Zealand and New Caledonia and is currently an external territory of Australia.² The oldest archaeological evidence of human occupation of these islands is from the 13th or 14th centuries, when it was probably settled by Polynesian and Melanesian peoples.³ However, at some point visits to the island became scarce, and it was unoccupied when the British arrived in 1788.

Location of Norfolk Island (circled) in relation to Australia on the globe. Image credit: TUBS, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

In the late 18th century, the British were looking for places in Polynesia to create penal colonies, where they could send their prisoners. They established one on Norfolk Island in 1788, at the same time they created one on Australia. The Norfolk Island colony was a prison on and off for almost 70 years, until 1855 when the remaining prisoners were removed to Tasmania.⁴ Norfolk Island was not permanently occupied until a year later, on June 8, 1856, with the arrival of a ship of 194 people who would become the ancestors of a large portion of current island residents.

The Mutiny on the Bounty and the Peopling of Norfolk Island

To understand how the ancestors of current islanders arrived on Norfolk, we need to rewind 69 years to 1787 Britain. At this time in history, the United Kingdom had been an active participant in the transatlantic slave trade for 200 years and was enslaving people from West Africa and selling them in the British colonies of the Caribbean and North America.⁵ In 1878, the Royal Navy purchased a ship, the HMS Bounty, to transport breadfruit plants (a type of jackfruit) from Tahiti to the West Indies to serve as cheap food for enslaved people. The HMS Bounty, captained by William Bligh, reached Tahiti the next year, in 1788. The crew spent five months ashore, filling the ship’s hold with 1,015 potted breadfruit trees, before leaving for the next leg of their trip to drop them off in the West Indies.⁶

Breadfruit tree with fruit. Photo credit: Joel Abroad c/o Flicker

However, they didn’t get very far, because about 1,300 miles west of Tahiti a mutiny broke out onboard. On April 28, 1789 the mutineers, led by the ship’s acting Lieutenant, Fletcher Christian, took control of the ship from Captain Bligh. They ordered the Captain and those loyal to him to board one of the ship’s small boats and set them out to sea. The remaining 25 mutineers then dumped the breadfruit trees into the ocean and set sail for the small island of Tubuai.⁷

Painting by Robert Dodd, from October 1790, titled “The Mutineers turning Lieut Bligh and part of the Officers and Crew adrift from His Majesty’s Ship the Bounty.” Image credit: National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London

Christian considered Tubuai a good place to hide out and evade capture by the British Royal Navy because it is surrounded by coral reefs, and easily defended. Upon arrival to the island, the mutineers were met by a flotilla of native islanders in canoes. The mutineers shot at them, murdering a dozen people.⁸ The bay where this occurred is now known as “Baie Sanglante” or Bloody Bay. For the next two months, the mutineers attempted to establish themselves on Tubuai, returning to Tahiti to restock provisions and bring back Tahitians to populate and work their settlement. However, the mutineers’ intrusion on their island continued to not be tolerated by the people already living there. This culminated in a battle that left 66 Tubuaians dead. After the battle, Christian, realizing that his people were becoming discontent, called a meeting of the mutineers to vote on what their next step would be. Eight men remained loyal to him, but 16 wished to return to Tahiti.⁹

On September 22, 1789, the Bounty once again arrived in Tahiti and dropped off the men who had voted to return. That night, the men who remained loyal to Christian threw a party aboard the ship, inviting several Tahitians with whom they had become friendly during their five months onshore collecting breadfruit. However, once the party was underway, Christian cut the anchor and sailed away with the guests–now captives–aboard. One Tahitian woman dove overboard once it became apparent that Christian was not going for a tour around the island, as he claimed. Six of the captives were elderly women, whom Christian unceremoniously dumped on the nearby island of Mo’orea. Christian, the remaining eight mutineers, and 18 captured Tahitians then sailed around Polynesia for four months in search of Pitcairn Island, which Christian had heard of from the British navigator Captain Cook.¹⁰

A sketch drawn in August 1849 by Admiral Sir Edward Gennys Fanshawe when visiting Pitcairn Island. Artist’s caption: “Pitcairn’s Island, Augt 12th 1849. 1200 ft — The Village is on the green patch about 500ft above the sea.” Image credit: National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London

Christian eventually found Pitcairn Island on January 15, 1790. The island was uninhabited, allowing the mutineers to settle on it and ultimately evade capture by the British Navy, which was actively searching for them.¹¹ For several decades the mutineers, the captive Tahitians, and their children lived on Pitcairn, though not necessarily peacefully; several of the mutineers ended up killing each other, and the Tahitian men–who were treated as slaves by the mutineers–rose up and killed some of the mutineers (including, by one account, Fletcher Christian while he was tilling his yam field). In retaliation, the mutineers killed some of the Tahitian men. After several waves of massacres, the Tahitian women attempted to leave the island and return to Tahiti by constructing a boat. However, the small vessel was no match for the Pacific, and the women returned to their unhappy existence on Pitcairn.¹²

A sketch drawn in August 1849 by Admiral Sir Edward Gennys Fanshawe when visiting Pitcairn Island. Depicted are Teraura “Susan” Young, the only surviving Tahitian woman on Pitcairn Island, and most likely her grandson, Simon, on the right. Image credit: National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London

Despite the continual bloodshed, the Pitcairn Islanders’ numbers eventually outgrew the small island. Now considered members of the United Kingdom, they wrote to Queen Victoria to beseech her for a place to resettle. Norfolk Island, having only just recently been abandoned as a penal colony and therefore uninhabited, provided a convenient solution. On June 8, 1856, 66 years after landing on Pitcairn, 194 descendants of the Tahitians and Bounty mutineers were relocated to Norfolk Island by the British government.¹³

Norfolk Island Today

Upon settling on Norfolk Island, the islanders established farming and whaling industries. Today, the population numbers roughly 1,700 people.¹⁴ Many islanders are direct descendants of the Tahitian female captives and European male Bounty mutineers, and thus are of mixed European-Polynesian ancestry. The other residents are mainly descendants of Australian and New Zealand citizens of European ancestry who migrated to the island in the 19th and 20th centuries.¹⁵ Because of this unique history, the island has two official languages: English and Norf’k-Pitcairn, a creole mix of Tahitian, 18th century English, and a healthy sprinkling of sailing terms, which was made the co-official language of the island in 2004.¹⁶

A tourism sign on Norfolk Island, with English and Norf’k-Pitcairn captions. Image Credit: Robert Smith.

Significance of the History of Norfolk Island on Health

You might be asking yourself, what does the story of a mutiny aboard an 18th century ship have to do with genetics? Well, the Norfolk Island population is a classic example of what is known as a “founder effect” population. A founder effect is when a small number of people establish–or found–another population. The overall genetic diversity of the new population is lower than the genetic diversity of their larger source populations (in this case, those of Tahiti and Britain). The small colony of Tahitians and British men on Pitcairn and later Norfolk Island had many generations of children, and rarely did outsiders join their population. (Only three newcomers from visiting whaling vessels permanently settled on Pitcairn.) Once the islanders moved to Norfolk, they enacted laws that severely limited outsiders (even Australian citizens) from immigrating to the island.¹⁷ This was the case until 2016, when the previously semi-autonomous governance of Norfolk was transferred to Australia and the Australian migration system replaced the previous restricted immigration policy. Prior to this, however, the result was over 200 years of relative genetic isolation on the island.

On Norfolk Island now, roughly 80% of the current population can directly trace their ancestry to the original eight mutineers and 18 Tahitian captive women (the captive Tahitian men are not thought to have had any children following their capture).¹⁸ As a result of this small and isolated gene pool, the population of Norfolk has unique health characteristics, with higher levels of certain conditions, while at the same time, lower levels of others. For example, previous studies by Prof. Griffiths and her colleagues found that residents of the islands have lower levels of blindness and visual impairment, but higher rates of glaucoma.¹⁹ They also are more likely to suffer from migraines,²⁰ cardiovascular disease, and kidney disease,²¹ but are less likely to have type 2 diabetes.²² Because of the genetically isolated nature of the population, Norfolk is a good place to look for the genetic causes of some of these complex disorders.

About The Norfolk Island Health Study

For the past 20 years, Prof. Lyn Griffiths and her team of collaborators at the Genomics Research Centre have worked with Norfolk Islanders to screen the community for common diseases with the aim of identifying risk factors and providing preventative health care information. Phase I of the Norfolk Island Health Study took place in 2000, with a Phase II follow-up in 2010. The third phase–this one in partnership with Variant Bio–will kick off this year, 21 years after the initial study.

Building on the work already undertaken by Prof. Griffiths, Phase III of the project provides the opportunity to expand the study into new clinical areas, as well as to revisit the island to follow up with previous study participants and collect additional samples from island residents. More specifically, our research collaboration focuses on determining the burden of kidney disease, its causes, and how we might prevent kidney disease in the Norfolk Island community. We also aim to characterize other common chronic diseases and identify genes and genetic pathways that affect disease development.

Up Next: Part II: Community Engagement on Norfolk Island

As we’ve described in previous blog posts (see here for an example from Tahiti and here for an example from Madagascar), Variant Bio is committed to engaging on a local level with communities prior to starting any studies. This process involves gathering input about the study and buy-in from participating communities and helps to ensure that local communities are engaged in an individualized, ethical, and culturally attuned manner.

Because travel to Norfolk Island has been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S.-based Variant Bio team was not able to visit to the island to engage with the community directly. However, in May of this year, Prof. Griffiths and her team spent a week on the island, describing the proposed third phase of the project and Variant Bio’s involvement, as well as soliciting feedback from Norfolk Islanders.

Check back soon for a guest post about that trip by Dr. Robert Smith, the acting Project Manager of the Norfolk Island Health Study.

Further Reading

If the story of the mutiny on the Bounty sounds familiar, that can be credited to the fact that it has lived large in popular imagination for over two hundred years. The first creative retelling of the story was a ballet staged in 1816 after American and English ships returned with stories of stumbling upon the Pitcairn Islanders, whom they described as having “all the features of an honest English face.”²³ Thus started a long tradition of romanticizing the characters and circumstances of the Bounty mutiny. Numerous poems (one authored by Lord Byron), films, documentaries, musicals, and books have been written about the events that took place, both real and imagined (Fletcher Christian has been portrayed by no less than Errol Flyn, Clark Gable, Marlon Brando, and Mel Gibson).

However, if you would like to delve into an excellent account based on historical documents of the events leading up to, during, and after the mutiny, I wholeheartedly recommend Caroline Alexander’s The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty.

1. Australian Bureau of Statistics. “Norfolk Island (State Suburb)”. 2016 Census QuickStats. https://quickstats.censusdata.abs.gov.au/census_services/getproduct/census/2016/quickstat/SSC90004
2. An Australian external territory is an offshore dependent territories which has local governing status, overseen by the federal government.
3. Anderson, Atholl; White, Peter (2001). “Prehistoric Settlement on Norfolk Island and its Oceanic Context”. Records of the Australian Museum. 27 (Supplement 27): 135–141.
4. Hoare, Merval (1969). Norfolk Island: An Outline of Its History, 1774–1968. St. Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press.
5. Klein, Herbert S., and Jacob Klein (1999). The Atlantic Slave Trade. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Cambridge University Press.
6. Alexander, C. (2004). The Bounty: The true story of the mutiny on the Bounty. Penguin.
7. Ibid.
8. Morrison, J. The Journal of James Morrison, Boatswain’s Mate of the Bounty, Describing the Mutiny and Subsequent Misfortunes of the Mutineers, Together with an Account of the Island of Tahiti. Edited by Owen Rutter. London: Golden Cockerel Press, 1935.
9. Alexander, C. (2004). The Bounty: The true story of the mutiny on the Bounty. Penguin.
10. Ibid.
11. The British Royal Navy was successful in capturing the mutineers who decided to return to Tahiti. In 1791 the Navy captured 14 of the 16 mutineers and then spent the next few months sailing the Pacific to locate the remaining ones. They eventually shipwrecked and only a few people survived to return to England to be tried and, ultimately, most were hanged.
12. Alexander, C. (2004). The Bounty: The true story of the mutiny on the Bounty. Penguin.
13. Ibid.
14. Australian Bureau of Statistics. “Norfolk Island (State Suburb)”. 2016 Census QuickStats. https://quickstats.censusdata.abs.gov.au/census_services/getproduct/census/2016/quickstat/SSC90004
15. McEvoy, B. P., Zhao, Z. Z., Macgregor, S., Bellis, C., Lea, R. A., Cox, H., … & Visscher, P. M. (2010). European and Polynesian admixture in the Norfolk Island population. Heredity, 105(2), 229–234.
16. https://www.legislation.gov.au/Details/C2015Q00190
17. https://www.legislation.gov.au/Details/F2016L01117/Explanatory%20Statement/Text
18. Bellis, C., Cox, H. C., Ovcaric, M., Begley, K. N., Lea, R. A., Quinlan, S., … & Griffiths, L. R. (2008). Linkage disequilibrium analysis in the genetically isolated Norfolk Island population. Heredity, 100(4), 366–373.
19. Sherwin JC, Kearns LS, Hewitt AW, Ma Y, Kelly J, Griffiths LR, Mackey DA. Prevalence of chronic ocular diseases in a genetic isolate: the Norfolk Island Eye Study (NIES). Ophthalmic Epidemiol 2011; 18:61–71.
20. Cox, Hannah C., et al. “Heritability and genome-wide linkage analysis of migraine in the genetic isolate of Norfolk Island.” Gene 494.1 (2012): 119–123.
21. Benton, M. C., Lea, R. A., Macartney-Coxson, D., Hanna, M., Eccles, D. A., Carless, M. A., … & Griffiths, L. R. (2015). A Phenomic scan of the Norfolk Island genetic isolate identifies a major pleiotropic effect locus associated with metabolic and renal disorder markers. PLoS genetics, 11(10), e1005593.
22. Benton, M. C., Lea, R. A., Macartney-Coxson, D., Bellis, C., Carless, M. A., Curran, J. E., … & Griffiths, L. R. (2015). Serum bilirubin concentration is modified by UGT1A1 Haplotypes and influences risk of Type-2 diabetes in the Norfolk Island genetic isolate. BMC genetics, 16(1), 1–15.
23. Alexander, C. (2004). The Bounty: The true story of the mutiny on the Bounty. Penguin. pg. 273.