1996 - The Island of the Colorblind (5 page)

Though Knut had read the scientific literature, and though he had occasionally met other achromatopic people, this had in no way prepared him for the impact of actually finding himself surrounded by his own kind, strangers half a world away with whom he had an instant kinship. It was an odd sort of encounter which the rest of us were witnessing – pale, Nordic Knut in his Western clothes, camera around his neck, and the small brown achromatopic children of Pingelap – but intensely moving.
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Eager hands grabbed our luggage, while our equipment was loaded onto an improvised trolley – an unstable contraption of rough-hewn planks on trembling bicycle wheels. There are no powered vehicles on Pingelap, no paved roads, only trodden-earth or gravelled paths through the woods, all connecting, directly or indirectly, with the main drag, a broader tract with houses to either side, some tin-roofed, and some thatched with leaves. It was on this main path that we were now being taken, escorted by dozens of excited children and young adults (we had seen no one, as yet, over twenty-five or thirty).

Our arrival – with sleeping bags, bottled water, medical and film equipment – was an event almost without precedent (the island children were fascinated not so much by our cameras as by the sound boom with its woolly muff, and within a day were making their own booms out of banana stalks and coconut wool). There was a lovely festive quality to this spontaneous procession, which had no order, no program, no leader, no precedence, just a raggle-taggle of wondering, gaping people (they at us, we at them and everything around us), making our way, with many stops and diversions and detours, through the forest-village of Pingelap. Little black-and-white piglets darted across our path – unshy, but unaffectionate, unpetlike too, leading their own seemingly autonomous existence, as if the island were equally theirs. We were struck by the fact that the pigs were black and white and wondered, half seriously, if they had been specially bred for, or by, an achromatopic population.

None of us voiced this thought aloud, but our interpreter, James James, himself achromatopic – a gifted young man, who (unlike most of the islanders) had spent a considerable time off-island and been educated at the University of Guam – read our glances and said, ‘Our ancestors brought these pigs when they came to Pingelap a thousand years ago, as they brought the breadfruit and yams, and the myths and rituals of our people.’

Although the pigs scampered wherever there was food (they were evidently fond of bananas and rotted mangoes and coconuts), they were all, James told us, individually owned – and, indeed, could be counted as an index of the owner’s material status and prosperity. Pigs were originally a royal food, and no one but the king, the nahnmwarki, might eat them; even now they were slaughtered rarely, mostly on special ceremonial occasions.
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Knut was fascinated not only by the pigs but by the richness of the vegetation, which he saw quite clearly, perhaps more clearly than the rest of us. For us, as color-normals, it was at first just a confusion of greens, whereas to Knut it was a polyphony of brightnesses, tonalities, shapes, and textures, easily identified and distinguished from each other. He mentioned this to James, who said it was the same for him, for all the achro-matopes on the island – none of them had any difficulty distinguishing the plants on the island. He thought they were helped in this, perhaps, by the basically monochrome nature of the landscape: there were a few red flowers and fruits on the island, and these, it was true, they might miss in certain lighting situations – but virtually all else was green.
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‘But what about bananas, let’s say – can you distinguish the yellow from the green ones?’ Bob asked.

‘Not always,’ James replied. ‘Tale green’ may look the same to me as ‘yellow.’’

‘How can you tell when a banana is ripe, then?’

James’ answer was to go to a banana tree, and to come back with a carefully selected, bright green banana for Bob.

Bob peeled it; it peeled easily, to his surprise. He took a small bite of it, gingerly; then devoured the rest.

‘You see,’ said James, ‘we don’t just go by color. We look, we feel, we smell, we
know
 – we take everything into consideration, and you just take color!’

I had seen the general shape of Pingelap from the air – three islets forming a broken ring around a central lagoon perhaps a mile and a half in diameter; now, walking on a narrow strip of land, with the crashing surf to one side and the tranquil lagoon only a few hundred yards to the other, I was reminded of the absolute awe which seized the early explorers who had first come upon these alien land forms, so utterly unlike anything in their experience. ‘It is a marvel,’ wrote Pyrard de Laval in 1605, ‘to see each of these atolls, surrounded by a great bank of stone involving no human artifice at all.’

Cook, sailing the Pacific, was intrigued by these low atolls, and could already, in 1777, speak of the puzzlement and controversy surrounding them:

Some will have it they are the remains of large islands, that in remote times were joined and formed one continued track of land which the Sea in process of time has washed away and left only the higher grounds… Others and I think…that they are formed from Shoals or Coral banks and of consequence increasing; and there are some who think they have been thrown up by Earth quakes.

But by the beginning of the nineteenth century it had become clear that while coral atolls might emerge in the deepest parts of the ocean, the living coral itself could not grow more than a hundred feet or so below the surface and had to have a firm foundation at this depth. Thus it was not imaginable, as Cook conceived, that sediments or corals could build up from the ocean floor.

Sir Charles Lyell, the supreme geologist of his age, postulated that atolls were the coral-encrusted rims of rising submarine volcanoes, but this seemed to require an almost impossible serendipity of innumerable volcanoes thrusting up to within fifty or eighty feet of the surface to provide a platform for the coral, without ever actually breaking the surface.

Darwin, on the Chilean coast, had experienced at first hand the hugh cataclysms of earthquakes and volcanoes; these, for him, were ‘parts of one of the greatest phenomena to which this world is subject’ – notably, the instability, the continuous movements, the geological oscillations of the earth’s crust. Images of vast risings and sinkings seized his imagination: the Andes rising thousands of feet into the air, the Pacific floor sinking thousands of feet beneath the surface. And in the context of this general vision, a specific vision came to him – that such risings and fallings could explain the origin of oceanic islands, and their subsidence to allow the formation of coral atolls. Reversing, in a way, the Lyellian notion, he postulated that coral grew not on the summits of rising volcanoes, but on their submerging slopes; then, as the volcanic rock eventually eroded and subsided into the sea, only the coral fringes remained, forming a barrier reef. As the volcano continued to subside, new layers of coral polyps could continue to build upward, now in the characteristic atoll shape, toward the light and warmth they depended on. The development of such an atoll would require, he reckoned, at least a million years.

Darwin cited short-term evidence of this subsidence – palm trees and buildings, for instance, formerly on dry land, which were now under water; but he realized that conclusive proof for so slow a geologic process would be far from easy to obtain. Indeed, his theory (though accepted by many) was not confirmed until a century later, when an immense borehole was drilled through the coral of Eniwetak atoll, finally hitting volcanic rock 4,500 feet below the surface.
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The reef-constructing corals, for Darwin, were

…wonderful memorials of the subterranean oscillations of level…each atoll a monument over an island now lost. We may thus, like unto a geologist who had lived his ten thousand years and kept a record of the passing changes, gain some insight into the great system by which the surface of this globe has been broken up, and land and water interchanged.

Looking at Pingelap, thinking of the lofty volcano it once was, sinking infinitesimally slowly for tens of millions of years, I felt an almost tangible sense of the vastness of time, and that our expedition to the South Seas was not only a journey in space, but a journey in time as well.

The sudden wind which had almost blown us off the landing strip was dying down now, although the tops of the palms were still whipping to and fro, and we could still hear the thunder of the surf, pounding the reef in huge rolling breakers. The typhoons which are notorious in this part of the Pacific can be especially devastating to a coral atoll like Pingelap (which is nowhere more than ten feet above sea level) – for the entire island can be inundated, submerged by the huge wind-lashed seas. Typhoon Lengkieki, which swept over Pingelap around 1775, killed ninety percent of the island’s population outright, and most of the survivors went on to die a lingering death from starvation – for all the vegetation, even the coconut palms and breadfruit and banana trees, was destroyed, leaving nothing to sustain the islanders but fish.
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At the time of the typhoon, Pingelap had a population of nearly a thousand, and had been settled for eight hundred years. It is not known where the original settlers came from, but they brought with them an elaborate hierarchical system ruled by hereditary kings or nahnmwarkis, an oral culture and mythology, and a language which had already differentiated so much by this time that it was hardly intelligible to the ‘mainlanders’ on Pohnpei.
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This thriving culture was reduced, within a few weeks of the typhoon, to twenty or so survivors, including the nahnmwarki and other members of the royal household.

The Pingelapese are extremely fertile, and within a few decades the population was reapproaching a hundred. But with this heroic breeding – and, of necessity, inbreeding – new problems arose, genetic traits previously rare began to spread, so that in the fourth generation after the typhoon a ‘new’ disease showed itself. The first children with the Pingelap eye disease were born in the 1820
s
, and within a few generations their numbers had increased to more than five percent of the population, roughly what it remains today.

The mutation for achromatopsia may have arisen among the Carolinians centuries before; but this was a recessive gene, and as long as there was a large enough population the chances of two carriers marrying, and of the condition becoming manifest in their children, were very small. All this altered with the typhoon, and genealogical studies indicate that it was the surviving nahnmwarki himself who was the ultimate progenitor of every subsequent carrier.

Infants with the eye disease appeared normal at birth, but when two or three months old would start to squint or blink, to screw up their eyes or turn their heads away in the face of bright light; and when they were toddlers it became apparent that they could not see fine detail or small objects at a distance. By the time they reached four or five, it was clear they could not distinguish colors. The term maskun (‘not-see’) was coined to describe this strange condition, which occurred with equal frequency in both male and female children, children otherwise normal, bright, and active in all ways.

Today, over two hundred years after the typhoon, a third of the population are carriers of the gene for maskun, and out of some seven hundred islanders, fifty-seven are achromats. Elsewhere in the world, the incidence of achromatopsia is less than one in 30,000 – here on Pingelap it is one in 12.

Our ragged procession, tipping and swaying through the forest, with children romping and pigs under our feet, finally arrived at the island’s administration building, one of the three or four two-storey cinderblock buildings on the island. Here we met and were ceremoniously greeted by the nahnmwarki, the magistrate, and other officials. A Pingelapese woman, Delihda Isaac, acted as interpreter, introducing us all, and then herself – she ran the medical dispensary across the way, where she treated all sorts of injuries and illnesses. A few days earlier, she said, she had delivered a breech baby – a difficult job with no medical equipment to speak of – but both mother and child were doing fine. There is no doctor on Pingelap, but Delihda had been educated off-island and was often assisted by trainees from Pohn-pei. Any medical problems which she cannot handle have to wait for the visiting nurse from Pohnpei, who makes her rounds to all the outlying islands once a month. But Delihda, Bob observed, though kind and gentle, was clearly a ‘real force to be reckoned with.’

She took us on a brief tour of the administration building – many of the rooms were deserted and empty, and the old kerosene generator designed to light it looked as if it had been out of action for years.
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As dusk fell, Delihda led the way to the magistrate’s house, where we would be quartered. There were no street lights, no lights anywhere, and the darkness seemed to gather and fall very rapidly. Inside the house, made of concrete blocks, it was dark and small and stiflingly hot, a sweatbox, even after nightfall. But it had a charming outdoor terrace, over which arched a gigantic breadfruit tree and a banana tree. There were two bedrooms – Knut took the magistrate’s room below, Bob and I the children’s room above. We gazed at each other fearfully – both insomniacs, both heat intolerant, both restless night readers – and wondered how we would survive the long nights, unable even to distract ourselves by reading.

I tossed and turned all night, kept awake in part by the heat and humidity; in part by a strange visual excitement such as I am sometimes prone to, especially at the start of a migraine – endlessly moving vistas of breadfruit trees and bananas on the darkened ceiling; and, not least, by a sense of intoxication and delight that now, finally, I had arrived on the island of the colorblind.

None of us slept well that night. We gathered, tousled, on the terrace at dawn, and decided to reconnoitre a bit. I took my notebook and made brief notes as we walked (though the ink tended to smudge in the wet air):