1996 - The Island of the Colorblind (25 page)

The pig is the main element of animal food among the islands… Many islanders live with their pigs as we do with our dogs; both crowd around the hearth with equal freedom; and the island pig is a fellow of activity, enterprise, and sense. He husks his own cocoa-nuts, and (I am told) rolls them into the sun to burst…It was told us in childhood that pigs cannot swim; I have known one to leap overboard, swim five hundred yards to shore, and return to the house of his original owner.

12
It was striking how green everything was in Pingelap, not only the foliage of trees, but their fruits as well – breadfruit and pandanus are both green, as were many varieties of bananas on the island. The brightly colored red and yellow fruits – papaya, mango, guava – are not native to these islands, but were only introduced by the Europeans in the 1820
s
.

J.D. Mollon, a preeminent researcher on the mechanisms of color vision, notes that Old World monkeys ‘are particularly attracted to orange or yellow fruit (as opposed to birds, which go predominantly for red or purple fruit).’ Most mammals (indeed, most vertebrates) have evolved a system of dichromatic vision, based on the correlation of short- and medium-wavelength information, which helps them to recognize their environments, their foods, their friends and enemies, and to live in a world of color, albeit of a very limited and muted type. Only certain primates have evolved full trichromatic vision, and this is what enables them to detect yellow and orange fruits against a dappled green background; Mollon suggests that the coloration of these fruits may indeed have coevolved with such a trichromatic system in monkeys. Trichromatic vision enables them too to recognize the most delicate facial shades of emotional and biological states, and to use these (as monkeys do, no less than humans) to signal aggression or sexual display.

Achromatopes, or rod-monochromats (as they are also called), lack even the primordial dichromatic system, considered to have developed far back in the Paleozoic. If ‘human dichromats,’ in Mollon’s words, ‘have especial difficulty in detecting colored fruit against dappled foliage that varies randomly in luminosity,’ one would expect that monochromats would be even more profoundly disabled, scarcely able to survive in a world geared, at the least, for dichromats. But it is here that adaptation and compensation can play a crucial part. This quite different mode of perception is well brought out by Frances Futter-man, who writes:

When a new object would come into my life, I would have a very thorough sensory experience of it. I would savor the feel of it, the smell of it, and the appearance of it (all the visible aspects except color, of course). I would even stroke it or tap it or do whatever created an auditory experience. All objects have unique qualities which can be savored. All can be looked at in different lights and in different kinds of shadows. Dull finishes, shiny finishes, textures, prints, transparent qualities – I scrutinized them all, up close, in my accustomed way (which occurred because of my visual impairment but which, I think, provided me with more multi-sensory impressions of things). How might this have been different if I were seeing in color? Might the colors of things have dominated my experience, preventing me from knowing so intimately the other qualities of things?

13
Darwin’s colleague and, later, editor, John Judd, relates how Lyell, the strongest proponent of the submerged volcano theory, ‘was so overcome with delight’ when the young Darwin told him of his own subsidence theory, ‘that he danced about and threw himself into the wildest contortions.’ But he went on to warn Darwin: ‘Do not flatter yourself that you will be believed till you are growing bald like me, with hard work and vexation at the incredulity of the world.’

14
The coconut palm, which Stevenson called ‘that giraffe of vegetables…so graceful, so ungainly, to the European eye so foreign,’ was the most precious possession of the Polynesians and Micronesians, who brought it with them to every new island they colonized. Melville describes this in
Otnoo
:

The blessings it confers are incalculable. Year after year, the islander reposes beneath its shade, both eating and drinking of its fruit. He thatches his hut with its boughs and weaves them into baskets to carry his food. He cools himself with a fan platted from the young leaflets and shields his head from the sun by a bonnet of the leaves. Sometimes he clothes himself with the cloth-like substance which wraps round the base of the stalks. The larger nuts, thinned and polished, furnish him with a beautiful goblet; the smaller ones, with bowls for his pipes. The dry husks kindle his fires. Their fibers are twisted into fishing lines and cords for his canoes. He heals his wounds with a balsam compounded from the juice of the nut and with the oil extracted from its meat embalms the bodies of the dead.

The noble trunk itself is far from being valueless. Sawed into posts, it upholds the islander’s dwelling. Converted into charcoal, it cooks his food…He impels his canoe through the water with a paddle of the same wood and goes to battle with clubs and spears of the same hard material…

Thus, the man who but drops one of these nuts into the ground may be said to confer a greater and more certain benefit upon himself and posterity than many a life’s toil in less genial climes.

15
The sort of divergence which has made Pingelapese a distinct dialect of Pohnpeian has occurred many times throughout the scattered islands of Micronesia. It is not always clear at what point the line between dialect and language has been crossed, as E.J. Kahn brings out, in
A Reporter in Micronesia
:

In the Marshalls, Marshallese is spoken, and in the Marianas, Chamorro. From there on, things start to get complicated. Among the languages…is a rare one used by the eighty-three inhabitants of Sonsorol and the sixty-six of Tobi, two minute island groups in the Palau district but far off the beaten Palauan track. It has been argued that the Sonsorolese and Tobians don’t really have a language at all but merely speak a dialect of Palauan, which is that district’s major tongue. Yapese is another major one, and a complex one, with thirteen vowel sounds and thirty-two consonants. The Ulithi and Woleai atolls in the Yap district have their own languages, provided one accepts Woleaian as such and not as a dialect of Ulithian. The speech of the three hundred and twenty-one residents of still another Yap district atoll, Sa-tawal, may also be a separate language, though some assert that it is simply a dialect of Trukese, the main language of Truk.

Not counting Satawalese, there are at least ten distinctive dialects of Trukese, among them Puluwatese, Pulapese, Pu-lusukese, and Mortlockese. (A number of scholars insist that the tongue of the Mortlock Islands, named for an eighteenth-century explorer, is a bona fide separate language.) In the Ponape district, in addition to Ponapean, there is Kusaiean; and because the Pona-pean sector of Micronesia contains the two Polynesian atolls, Nukuoro and Kapingamarangi, there is a language that is used in those places – with considerable dialectical variations between the version in the one and that in the other. And, finally, there are linguists who maintain that the languages spoken in still two more Ponapean island groups, Mokil and Pingelap, are not, as other linguists maintain, mere variations of standard Ponapean, but authentic individualistic tongues called Mokilese and Pingelapese.

‘Some Micronesians,’ he goes on, ‘have become remarkably versatile linguists.’

One cannot but be reminded of how animals and plants diverge from the original stock, first into varieties, and then into species – a speciation intensely heightened by the unique conditions on islands, and so most dramatic in the contiguous islands of an archipelago. Cultural and linguistic evolution, of course, normally proceeds much faster than Darwinian, for we directly pass whatever we acquire to the next generation; we pass our ‘mnemes,’ as Richard Semon would say, and not our genes.

16
There are two kerosene generators on Pingelap: one for lighting the administration building and dispensary and three or four other buildings, and one for running the island’s videotape recorders. But the first has been out of action for years, and nobody has made much effort to repair or replace it – candles or kerosene lamps are more reliable. The other dynamo, however, is carefully tended, because the viewing of action films from the States exerts a compulsive force.

17
William Dampier was the first European to describe breadfruit, which he saw in Guam in 1688:

The fruit grows on the boughs like apples; it is as big as a penny loaf, when wheat is at five shillings the bushel; it is of a round shape, and hath a thick, tough rind. When the fruit is ripe, it is yellow and soft, and the taste is sweet and pleasant. The natives of Guam use it for bread. They gather it when full grown, while it is green and hard; then they bake it in an oven, which scorcheth the rind and maketh it black; but…the inside is soft, tender and white, like the crumb of a penny loaf. There is
neither seed nor stone
in the inside, but all of a pure substance, like bread. It must be eaten new, for if it be kept above twenty-four hours, it grows harsh and choky, but it is very pleasant before it is too stale. This fruit lasts in season
eight months
in the year, during which the natives eat no other sort of bread-kind.

18
Many holothurians have very sharp, microscopic spicules in their body walls; these spicules take all sorts of shapes – one sees buttons, granules, ellipsoids, bars, racquets, wheel forms with spokes, and anchors. If the spicules (especially the anchor-shaped ones, which are as perfect and sharp as any boat anchor) are not dissolved or destroyed (many hours, or even days, of boiling may be needed), they may lodge in the gut lining of the unfortunate eater, causing serious but invisible bleeding. This has been used to murderous effect for many centuries in China, where trepang is regarded as a great delicacy.

19
Irene Maumenee Hussels and her colleagues at Johns Hopkins have taken samples of blood from the entire population of Pingelap and from many Pingelapese in Pohnpei and Mokil. Using DNA analysis, they hope it will be possible to locate the genetic abnormality which causes the maskun. If this is achieved, it will then be possible to identify carriers of the disease – but this, Maumenee Hussels points out, will raise complex ethical and cultural questions. It may be, for example, that such identification would militate against chances of marriage or employment for the thirty percent of the population that carries the gene.

20
In 1970 Maumenee Hussels and Morton came to Pingelap with a team of geneticists from the University of Hawaii. They came on the MS
Microglory
, bringing sophisticated equipment, including an elec-troretinogram for measuring the retina’s response to flashes of light. The retinas of those with the maskun, they found, showed normal responses from the rods, but no response whatever from the cones – but it was not until 1994 that Donald Miller and David Williams at the University of Rochester described the first direct observation of retinal cones in living subjects. Since then, they have used techniques from astronomy, adaptive optics, to allow routine imaging of the moving eye. This equipment has not yet been used to examine any congenital achromatopes, but it would be interesting to do so, to see whether the absence or defect of cones can be visualized directly.

21
‘Cannibalism,’ wrote Stevenson, ‘is traced from end to end of the Pacific, from the Marquesas to New Guinea, from New Zealand to Hawaii.…All Melanesia appears tainted…[but] in Micronesia, in the Marshalls, with which my acquaintance is no more than that of a tourist…I could find no trace at all.’

But Stevenson never visited the Carolines, and O’Connell does claim to have witnessed cannibalism on one of Pingelap’s sister atolls, Pakin (which he calls Wellington Island):

I did not believe, till my visit, that the natives of Wellington Island were cannibals; then I had ocular demonstration. It seemed with them an ungovernable passion, the victims being not only captives, but presents to the chiefs from parents, who appeared to esteem the acceptance of their children, for a purpose so horrid, an honor. Wellington Island…is, in fact, three islands, bounded by a reef. One of them is inhabited, and the other two are uninhabited spots, claimed by different chiefs, as if to afford a pretext for war, and the gratification of their horrible passion for human flesh.

22
The legendary history of Pingelap is told in the
Liamweiwet
, an epic or saga which had been transmitted to each generation for centuries as a recitation or chant. In the 1960
s
, only the nahnmwarki knew all 161 verses; and if Jane Hurd had not transcribed these, this epic history would now be lost.

But an anthropologist, however sympathetic, tends to treat an indigenous chant or rite as an object, and may not be able to fully enter its inwardness, its spirit, the perspective of those who actually sing it. An anthropologist sees cultures, one wants to say, as a physician sees patients. The penetration, the sharing, of different consciousnesses and cultures needs skills beyond those of the historian or the scientist; it needs artistic and poetic powers of a special kind. Auden, for instance, identified with Iceland (his first name, Wystan, was Icelandic; and an early book was his
Letters from Iceland
)  – but it is his linguistic and poetic powers which make his version of the Elder Edda, the great saga of Iceland, such an uncanny recreation of the original.

And it is this which gives unique value to the work of Bill Peck, a physician and poet who has spent the last thirty-five years living and working in Micronesia. As a young doctor with the U.S. Public Health Service, he was shocked by his first experience in Micronesia as an official observer of the atomic tests, and appalled by the treatment of the islanders. Later, as commissioner of health for the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands (as Micronesia was called), he attracted energetic and romantic physicians (including John Steele and later Greg Dever) to help him develop new health services (now the Micronesian Health Service) and train native nurses to be physician’s aides.