1996 - The Island of the Colorblind (24 page)

Such is the feeling inspired, for me, by the horseshoe crabs each June.

The sense of deep time brings a deep peace with it, a detachment from the timescale, the urgencies, of daily life. Seeing these volcanic islands and coral atolls, and wandering, above all, through this cycad forest on Rota, has given me an intimate feeling of the antiquity of the earth, and the slow, continuous processes by which different forms of life evolve and come into being. Standing here in the jungle, I feel part of a larger, calmer identity; I feel a profound sense of being at home, a sort of companionship with the earth.
94

It is evening now, and as Tommy and Beata go off to gather some medicinal plants, I sit on the beach, looking out to sea. Cycads come down almost to the water’s edge, and the strand is littered with their gigantic seeds, along with the tough egg cases of sharks and rays, which are shaped like bizarre fortune cookies. A light wind has sprung up, rustling the leaves of the cycads, blowing up little ripples on the water. Ghost crabs and fiddler crabs, hidden in the heat of the day, have emerged and are darting to and fro. The chief sound is the lapping of waves on the shore, lapping as they have done for billions of years, ever since land rose out of the water – an ancient, soothing, hypnotic sound.

I look at the cycad seeds curiously, thinking of Beata’s words, how they float and can perhaps survive long immersion in sea-water. Most, no doubt, have dropped from the trees above me, but some, perhaps, are nomads, brought here across the sea from Guam, or more distant islands – perhaps even Yap or Palau, or beyond.

A large wave comes in, lifts a couple of the seeds, and they float, bobbing, by the shore. Five minutes later, one of the seeds has been cast up again on the shore, but the other is still bobbing atop the waves, a few feet from land. I wonder where it will go, whether it will survive, will be cast back here on Rota, or taken hundreds, perhaps thousands, of miles to another island in the Pacific. Ten minutes more and I can no longer see it – it is launched, like a little ship, on its journey on the high seas.

1
Most of the statues of Easter Island do not, in fact, face the sea; they face away from the sea, toward what used to be the exalted houses of the island. Nor are the statues eyeless – on the contrary, they originally had startling, brilliant eyes made of white coral, with irises of red volcanic tuff or obsidian; this was only discovered in 1978. But my children’s encyclopedia adhered to the myth of the blind, eyeless giants staring hopelessly out to sea – a myth which seems to have had its origin, through many tellings and retellings, in some of the early explorers’ accounts, and in the paintings of William Hodges, who travelled to Easter Island with Captain Cook in the 1770
s
.

2
Humboldt first described the enormous dragon tree, very briefly, in a postscript to a letter written in June 1799 from Teneriffe:

In the district of Orotava there is a dragon-tree measuring forty-five feet in circumference…Four centuries ago the girth was as great as it is now.

In his
Personal Narrative
, written some years later, he devoted three paragraphs to the tree, and speculated about its origin:

It has never been found in a wild state on the continent of Africa. The East Indies is its real country. How has this tree been transplanted to Teneriffe, where it is by no means common?

Later still, in his ‘Physiognomy of Plants’ (collected, with other essays, in
Views of Nature
) he devoted nine entire pages to ‘The Colossal Dragon-Tree of Orotava,’ his original observations now expanded to a whole essay of rich and spreading associations and speculations:

This colossal dragon-tree,
Dracaena draco
, stands in the garden of M. Franqui, in the little town of Orotava…one of the most charming spots in the world. In June 1799, when we ascended the peak of Teneriffe, we found that this enormous tree measured 48 feet in circumference…When we remember that the dragon-tree is everywhere of very slow growth, we may conclude that the one at Orotava is of extreme antiquity.

He suggests an age of about six thousand years for the tree, which would make it ‘coeval with the builders of the Pyramids…and place its birth…in an epoch when the Southern Cross was still visible in Northern Germany.’ But despite its vast age, the tree still bore, he remarks, ‘the blossom and fruit of perpetual youth.’

Humboldt’s
Personal Narrative
was a great favorite of Darwin’s. ‘I will never be easy,’ he wrote to his sister Caroline, ‘till I see the peak of Teneriffe and the great Dragon tree.’ He looked forward eagerly to visiting Teneriffe, and was bitterly disappointed when he was not permitted to land there, because of a quarantine. He did, however, take the
Personal Narrative
with him on the
Beagle
(along with Lyell’s
Principles of Geology
), and when he was able to retrace some of Humboldt’s travels in South America, his enthusiasm knew no bounds. ‘I formerly admired Humboldt,’ he wrote. ‘Now I almost adore him.’

3
Remarkable specializations and evolutions may occur not only on islands, but in every sort of special and cut-off environment. Thus a unique stingless jellyfish was recently discovered in an enclosed saltwater lake in the interior of Eil Malk, one of the islands of Palau, as Nancy Barbour describes:

The jellyfish in the lake are members of the genus
Mastigias
, a jellyfish commonly found in the Palau Lagoon whose powerful stinging tentacles are used for protection and for capturing planktonic prey. It is believed that the ancestors of these
Mastigias
jellyfish became trapped in the lake millions of years ago when volcanic forces uplifted Palau’s submerged reefs, transforming deep pockets in the reefs into landlocked saltwater lakes. Because there was little food and few predators in the lake, their long, clublike tentacles gradually evolved into stubby appendages unable to sting, and the jellyfish came to rely on the symbiotic algae living within their tissues for nutrients. The algae capture energy from the sun and transform it into food for the jellyfish. In turn, the jellyfish swim near the surface during the day to ensure that the algae receive enough sunlight for photosynthesis to occur…Every morning the school of jellyfish, estimated at more than 1.6 million, migrates across the lake to the opposite shore, each jellyfish rotating counter-clockwise so that the algae on all sides of its bell receive equal sunlight. In the afternoon the jellyfish turn and swim back across the lake. At night they descend to the lake’s middle layer, where they absorb the nitrogen that fertilizes their algae.

4
‘I had been lying on a sunny bank,’ Darwin wrote of his travels in Australia, ‘reflecting on the strange character of the animals of this country as compared to the rest of the World.’ He was thinking here of marsupials as opposed to placental animals; they were so different, he felt, that

…an unbeliever in everything beyond his own reason might exclaim, ‘Surely two distinct Creators must have been at work.’

Then his attention was caught by a giant ant-lion in its conical pitfall, flicking up jets of sand, making little avalanches, so that small ants slid into its pit, exactly like ant-lions he had seen in Europe:

Would any two workmen ever hit on so beautiful, so simple, and yet so artificial a contrivance? It cannot be thought so. The one hand has surely worked throughout the universe.

5
Frances Futterman also describes her vision in very positive terms:

Words like ‘achromatopsia’ dwell only on what we lack. They give no sense of what we have, the sort of worlds we appreciate or make for ourselves. I find twilight a magical time – there are no harsh contrasts, my visual field expands, my acuity is suddenly improved. Many of my best experiences have come at twilight, or in moonlight – I have toured Yosemite under the full moon, and one achromatope I know worked as a nighttime guide there; some of my happiest memories are of lying on my back among the giant redwood trees, looking up at the stars.

As a kid I used to chase lightning bugs on warm summer nights; and I loved going to the amusement park, with all the flashing neon lights and the darkened fun house – I was never afraid of that. I love grand old movie theaters, with their ornate interiors, and outdoor theaters. During the holiday season, I like to look at all the twinkling lights decorating store windows and trees.

6
The caption on this postcard of Darwin suggested that he had ‘discovered’ his theory of coral atolls here in Majuro; though in fact he conceived it before he had ever seen an atoll. He never actually visited Majuro, nor any of the Marshalls or the Carolines (though he did go to Tahiti). He does, however, make brief reference in
Coral Reefs
to Pohnpei (as Pouynipete, or Senyavine) and even mentions Pingelap (by its then-usual name, Macaskill).

7
Ebeye can be seen, perhaps, as a sort of end-point, an end-point characterized not only by desperate overcrowding and disease but by loss of cultural identity and coherence, and its replacement by an alien and frenzied consumerism, a cash economy. The ambiguous processes of colonization showed their potential right from the start – thus Cook, visiting Tahiti in 1769, only two years after its ‘discovery,’ could not help wondering, in his journals, whether the arrival of the white man might spell doom for all the Pacific cultures:

We debauch their morals, and introduce among them wants and diseases which they never had before, and which serve only to destroy the happy tranquillity they and their forefathers had enjoyed. I often think it would have been better for them if we had never appeared among them.

8
A pioneer in the use of streptomycin, Bill Peck came to Micronesia in 1958 as an official observer of the atomic tests in the Marshalls. He was one of the first to record the great incidence of thyroid cancer, leukemia, miscarriage, etc., in the wake of the tests, but was not allowed to publish his observations at the time. In
A Tidy Universe of Islands
, he gives a vivid description of the fallout on Rongelap after the detonation of the atomic bomb Bravo in Bikini:

The fallout started four to six hours after the detonation and appeared first as an indefinite haze, rapidly changing to a white, sifting powder: like snow, some of them said who had seen movies at Kwajalein. Jimaco and Tina romped through the village with a troop of younger children, exulting in the miracle and shouting, ‘Look, we are like a Christmas picture, we play in snow,’ and they pointed with glee at the sticky powder that smeared their skin, whitened their hair, and rimed the ground with hoarfrost.

As evening came on the visible fallout diminished until finally all that remained was a little unnatural lustre in the moonlight. And the itching. Almost everyone was scratching…In the morning they were still itching, and several of them had weeping eyes. The flakes had become grimy and adherent from sweat and attempts to wash them off in cold water failed. Everyone felt a little sick, and three of them vomited.

9
Obesity, sometimes accompanied by diabetes, affects an overwhelming majority of Pacific peoples. It was suggested by James Neel in the early 1960
s
that this might be due to a so-called ‘thrifty’ gene, which might have evolved to allow the storage of fat through periods of famine. Such a gene would be highly adaptive, he posited, in peoples living in a subsistence economy, where there might be erratic periods of feast and famine, but could prove lethally maladaptive if there was a shift to a steady high-fat diet, as has happened throughout Oceania since the Second World War. In Nauru, after less than a generation of Westernization, two-thirds of the islanders are obese, and a third have diabetes; similar figures have been observed on many other islands. That it is a particular conjunction of genetic disposition and lifestyle which is so dangerous is shown by the contrasting fates of the Pima Indians. Those living in Arizona, on a steady high-fat diet, have the highest rates of obesity and diabetes in the world, while the genetically similar Pima Indians of Mexico, living on subsistence farming and ranching, remain lean and healthy.

10
A similar feeling of kinship may occur for a deaf traveller, who has crossed the sea or the world, if he lights upon other deaf people on his arrival. In 1814, the deaf French educator Laurent Clerc came to visit a deaf school in London, and this was described by a contemporary:

As soon as Clerc beheld this sight [of the children at dinner] his face became animated: he was as agitated as a traveller of sensibility would be on meeting all of a sudden in distant regions, a colony of his countrymen…Clerc approached them. He made signs and they answered him by signs. This unexpected communication caused a most delicious sensation in them and for us was a scene of expression and sensibility that gave us the most heartfelt satisfaction.

And it was similar when I went with Lowell Handler, a friend with Tourette’s syndrome, to a remote Mennonite community in northern Alberta where a genetic form of Tourette’s had become remarkably common. At first a bit tense, and on his best behavior, Lowell was able to suppress his tics; but after a few minutes he let out a loud Tourettic shriek. Everyone turned to look at him, as always happens. But then everybody smiled – they understood – and some even answered Lowell with their own tics and noises. Surrounded by other Touretters, his Tourettic brethren, Lowell felt, in many ways, that he had ‘come home’ at last – he dubbed the village ‘Tourettesville,’ and mused about marrying a beautiful Mennonite woman with Tourette’s, and living there happily ever after.

11
R.L. Stevenson writes about pigs in his memoir of Polynesia,
In the South Seas
: