1996 - The Island of the Colorblind

by Oliver Sacks

  When Jane Hurd, an anthropologist, spent a year on Pingelap in 1968 and ‘69, the old nahnmwarki was still able to give her, in the form of an extended epic poem, an entire oral history of the island – but with his death a good deal of this knowledge and memory died.22 The present nahnmwarki can give the flavor of old Pingelapese belief and myth, but no longer has the detailed knowledge his grandfather had. Nonetheless, he himself, as a teacher at the school, does his best to give the children a sense of their heritage and of the pre-Christian culture which once flourished on the island. He spoke nostalgically, it seemed to us, of the old days on Pingelap, when everyone knew who they were, where they came from, and how the island came into being. At one time, the myth went, the three islets of Pingelap formed a single piece of land, with its own god, Isopaw. When an alien god came from a distant island and split Pingelap into two, Isopaw chased him away – and the third islet was created from a handful of sand dropped in the chase.

  We were struck by the multiple systems of belief, some seemingly contradictory, which coexist among the Pingelapese. A mythical history of the island is maintained alongside its secular history; thus the maskun is seen simultaneously in mystical terms (as a curse visited upon the sinful or disobedient) and in purely biological terms (as a morally neutral, genetic condition transmitted from generation to generation). Traditionally, it was traced back to the Nahnmwarki Okonomwaun, who ruled from 1822 to 1870, and his wife, Dokas. Of their six children, two were achromatopic. The myth explaining this was recorded by Irene Maumenee Hussels and Newton Morton, geneticists from the University of Hawaii who visited Pingelap (and worked with Hurd) in the late 1960s:

  The god Isoahpahu became enamored of Dokas and instructed Okonomwaun to appropriate her. From time to time, Isoahpahu appeared in the guise of Okonomwaun and had intercourse with Dokas, fathering the affected children, while the normal children came from Okonomwaun. Isoahpahu loved other Pingelapese women and had affected children by them. The ‘proof’ of this is that persons with achromatopsia shun the light but have relatively good night vision, like their ghostly ancestor.

  There were other indigenous myths about the maskun: that it might arise if a pregnant woman walked upon the beach in the middle of the day – the blazing sun, it was felt, might partly blind the unborn child in the womb. Yet another legend had it that it came from a descendant of the Nahnmwarki Mwahuele, who had survived typhoon Lengkieki. This descendant, Inek, was trained as a Christian minister by a missionary, Mr. Doane, and was assigned to Chuuk, as Hussels and Morton write, but refused to move because of his large family on Pingelap. Mr. Doane, ‘angered by this lack of evangelical zeal,’ cursed Inek and his children with the maskun.

  There were also persistent notions, as always with disease, that the maskun had come from the outside world. The nahnmwarki spoke, in this vein, of how a number of Pingelapese had been forced to labor in the German phosphate mines on the distant island of Nauru, and then, on their return, had fathered children with maskun. The myth of contamination, ascribed (like so many other ills) to the coming of the white man, took on a new form with our visit. This was the first time the Pingelapese had ever seen another achromatope, an achromatope from outside, and this ‘confirmed’ their brooding suspicions. Two days after our arrival, a revised myth had already taken root in the Pingelapese lore: it must have been achromatopic white whalers from the far north, they now realized, who had landed on Pingelap early in the last century – raping and rampaging among the island women, fathering dozens of achromatopic children, and bringing their white man’s curse to the island. The Pingelapese with maskun, by this reckoning, were partly Norwegian – descendants of people like Knut. Knut was awed by the rapidity with which this not entirely jocular, fantastic myth emerged, and by finding himself, or his people, ‘revealed’ as the ultimate origin of the maskun.

  On our last evening in Pingelap, a huge crimson sunset shot with purples and yellows and a touch of green hung over the ocean and filled half the sky. Even Knut exclaimed, ‘Unbelievable!’ and said he had never seen such a sunset before. As we came down to the shore, we saw dozens of people almost submerged in the water – only their heads were visible above the reef. This happened every evening, James had told us – it was the only way to cool off. Looking around, we saw others lying, sitting, standing and chatting in small clusters – it looked as if most of the island’s population was here. The cooling hour, the social hour, the hour of immersion, had begun.

  As it got darker, Knut and the achromatopic islanders moved more easily. It is common knowledge among the Pingelapese that those with the maskun manage better at scotopic times – dusk and dawn, and moonlit nights – and for this reason, they are often employed as night fishers. And in this the achro-matopes are preeminent; they seem able to see the fish in their dim course underwater, the glint of moonlight on their outstretched fins as they leap – as well as, or perhaps better than, anyone else.

  Our last night was an ideal one for the night fishers. I had hoped we might go in one of the enormous hollow-log canoes with outriggers which we had seen earlier, but we were led instead toward a boat with a small outboard motor. The air was very warm and still, so it was sweet to feel a slight breeze as we moved out. As we glided into deeper waters, the shoreline of Pingelap vanished from sight, and we moved on a vast lightless swell with only the stars and the great arc of the Milky Way overhead.

  Our helmsman knew all the major stars and constellations, seemed completely at home with the heavens – Knut, indeed, was the only one equally knowledgeable, and the two of them exchanged their knowledge in whispers: Knut with all modern astronomy at his fingertips, the helmsman with an ancient practical knowledge such as had enabled the Micronesians and Polynesians, a thousand years ago, to sail across the immensities of the Pacific by celestial navigation alone, in voyages comparable to interplanetary travel, until, at last, they discovered islands, homes, as rare and far apart as planets in the cosmos.

  About eight o’clock the moon rose, almost full, and so brilliant that it seemed to eclipse the stars. We heard the splash of flying fish as they arced out of the water, dozens at a time, and the plopping sound as they plummeted back to the surface.

  The waters of the Pacific are full of a tiny protozoan, Noc-tiluca, a bioluminescent creature able to generate light, like a firefly. It was Knut who first noticed their phosphorescence in the water – a phosphorescence most evident when the water was disturbed. Sometimes when the flying fish leapt out of the water, they would leave a luminous disturbance, a glowing wake, as they did so – and another splash of light as they landed.23

  Night fishing used to be done with a flaming torch; now it is done with the help of a flashlight, the light serving to dazzle as well as spot the fish. As the beautiful creatures were illuminated in a blinding flashlight beam, I was reminded how, as a child, I would see German planes transfixed by roving searchlights as they flew in the darkened skies over London. One by one we pursued the fish; we followed their careerings relentlessly, this way and that, until we could draw close enough for the fisher to shoot out the great hoop of his net, and catch them as they returned to the water. They accumulated in the bottom of the boat, silvery, squirming, until they were hit on the head (though one, actually, in its frenzy, managed to leap out of the boat, and we so admired this that we did not try to catch it again).

  After an hour we had enough, and it was time to go after deeper-water fish. There were two teenage boys with us, one achromatopic, and they now donned scuba gear and masks and, clutching spears and flashlights, went over the side of the boat. We could see them, two hundred yards or more from the boat, like luminous fish, the phosphorescent waters outlining their bodies as they moved. After ten minutes they returned, loaded with the fish they had speared, and climbed back into the boat, their wet scuba gear gleaming blackly in the moonlight.

  The long, slow trip back was very peaceful – we lay back in the boat; the fishers murmured softly among themselves. We had enough, mo
re than enough, fish for all. Fires would be lit on the long sandy beach, and we would have a grand, final feast on Pingelap before flying back to Pohnpei the next morning. We reached the shore and waded back onto the beach, pulling the boat up behind us. The sand itself, broader with the tide’s retreat, was still wet with the phosphorescent sea, and now, as we walked upon it, our footsteps left a luminous spoor.

  Pohnpei

  In the 1830s, when Darwin was sailing on the Beagle, exploring the Galapagos and Tahiti, and the youthful Melville was dreaming of South Seas travels to come, James O’Con-nell, a sailor from Ireland, was marooned on the high volcanic island of Pohnpei. The circumstances of his arrival are unclear – he claimed, in his memoirs, to have been shipwrecked on the John Bull near Pleasant Island, eight hundred miles away; and then, improbably, to have sailed from Pleasant Island in an open boat to Pohnpei in a mere four days. Once he arrived, O’Connell wrote, he and his companions were seized by ‘cannibals,’ and narrowly escaped being eaten for dinner (so they thought) by diverting the natives with a rousing Irish jig. His adventures continued: he was submitted to a tattooing ritual by a young Pohnpeian girl who turned out to be the daughter of a chief; he then married the daughter, and became a chief himself.24

  Whatever his exaggerations (sailors tend to tall tales, and some scholars regard him as a mythomaniac), O’Connell had another side, as a curious and careful observer. He was the first European to call Pohnpei, or Ponape, by its native name (in his orthography, ‘Bonabee’); the first to give accurate descriptions of many Pohnpeian customs and rites; the first to provide a glossary of the Pohnpeian language; and the first to see the ruins of Nan Madol, the remnant of a monumental culture going back more than a thousand years, to the mythological keilahn aio, ‘the other side of yesterday.’

  His exploration of Nan Madol formed the climax and the consummation of his Pohnpeian adventure; he described the ‘stupendous ruins’ in meticulous detail – their uncanny desertion, their investment with taboo. Their size, their muteness, frightened him, and at one point, overwhelmed by their alien-ness, he suddenly ‘longed for home.’ He did not refer to, and probably did not know of, the other megalithic cultures which dot Micronesia – the giant basalt ruins in Kosrae, the immense taga stones in Tinian, the ancient terraces in Palau, the five-ton stones of Babeldaop bearing Easter Island-like faces. But he realized what neither Cook nor Bougainville nor any of the great explorers had – that these primitive oceanic islands, with their apparently simple, palm-tree cultures, were once the seat of monumental civilizations.

  We set out for Nan Madol on our first full day in Pohnpei. Located off the far side of Pohnpei, it was easiest to approach by boat. Not sure exactly what we would encounter, we took gear of every kind – storm gear, scuba gear, sun gear. Moving slowly – we had an open boat with a powerful outboard – we left the harbor at Kolonia and passed the mangrove swamps which fringe the main island; I could pick out their aerial roots with my binoculars, and Robin, our boatman, told us about the mangrove crabs which scuttle among them and are considered a delicacy on the island. As we moved into open water, we picked up speed, our boat throwing a huge foaming wake behind it, a great scythe of water which glittered in the sun. A sense of exhilaration seized us as we sped along, almost on the surface, like a giant water ski. Bob, who has a catamaran and a windsurfer, was excited by seeing canoes with brilliantly colored sails here and there, tacking sharply in the wind, but absolutely stable with their outriggers. ‘You could cross an ocean,’ he said, ‘with a proa like that.’

  Rather suddenly, about half an hour out, the weather changed. We saw a grey funnel of cloud barrelling rapidly toward us – another few seconds, and we were in the thick of it, being tossed to and fro. (Bob, with great self-possession, managed to get a superb photo of the cloud before it hit us.) Our visibility down to a few yards, we could no longer get our bearings. Then, just as abruptly, we were out of the cloud and wind, but in the midst of torrential and absolutely vertical rain – at this point, absurdly, we unfurled the bright red umbrellas our hotel had provided, no longer heroes in the eye of the storm, but parasoled picnickers in a Seurat painting. Though the rain still poured down, the sun came out once again, and a spectacular rainbow appeared between sky and sea. Knut saw this as a luminous arc in the sky, and started to tell us of other rainbows he had seen: double rainbows, inverted rainbows, and, once, a complete rainbow circle. Listening to him now, as so often before, we had the sense that his vision, his visual world, if impoverished in some ways, was in others quite as rich as our own.

  There is nothing on the planet quite like Nan Madol, this ancient deserted megalithic construct of nearly a hundred artificial islands, connected by innumerable canals. As we approached – going very slowly now, because the water was shallow, and the waterways narrow – we started to see the details of the walls, huge hexagonal columns of black basalt, so finely interlocking and adjusted to each other as to have largely survived the storms and seas, the depredations of many centuries. We glided silently between the islets, and finally landed on the fortress island of Nan Douwas, which still has its immense basalt walls, twenty-five feet in height, its great central burial vault, and its nooks and places for meditation and prayer.

  Stiff from the boat, eager to explore, we scrambled out and stood beneath the giant wall, marvelling how the great prismatic blocks – some, surely, weighing many tons – had been quarried and brought from Sokehs on the other side of Pohnpei (the only place on the island where such columnar basalt is naturally extruded) and levered so precisely into place. The sense of might, of solemnity, was very strong – we felt puny, overwhelmed, standing next to the silent wall. But we had a sense too of the folly, the megalomania, which goes with the monumental – the ‘wilde enormities of ancient magnanimity’ – and all its attendant cruelties and sufferings; our boatman, Robin, had told us about the vicious overlords, the Saudeleurs, who had conquered Pohnpei and reigned in Nan Madol for many centuries, exacting an ever more murderous tribute of food and labor. When one looked at the walls with this knowledge, they took on a different aspect, and seemed to sweat with the blood and pain of generations. And yet, like the Pyramids or the Colosseum, they were noble as well.

  Nan Madol is still virtually unknown to the outside, almost as unknown as when O’Connell stumbled upon it 160 years ago. It was surveyed by German archaeologists at the beginning of the twentieth century, but it is only in the past few years that a detailed knowledge of the site and its history has been achieved, with radiocarbon dating human habitation to 200 b.c. The Pohnpeians, of course, have always known about Nan Madol, a knowledge embedded in myth and oral history, but because the place itself is still invested with a sense of sacredness and taboo, they hesitate to approach it – their tradition is full of tales of those who met untimely deaths after offending the spirits of the place.

  It was an uncanny feeling, as Robin gave us vivid details of life as it once was in the city around us – I began to feel the place breathing, coming to life. Here are the old canoe docks, Robin said, gesturing at Pahnwi; there is the boulder where pregnant women went to rub their stomachs to ensure an easy birth; there (he pointed to the island of Idehd) is where an annual ceremony of atonement was held, culminating in the offering of a turtle to Nan Samwohl, the great saltwater eel who served as a medium between the people and their god. There, on Peikapw, the magical pool where the ruling Saudeleurs could see all that was taking place on Pohnpei. There, the great hero Isohkelekel, who had finally vanquished the Saudeleurs, shocked at seeing his aged face reflected in the waters, threw himself into the pool and drowned, a Narcissus in reverse.

  It is the emptiness, the desertedness, finally, of Nan Madol which makes it so uncanny. No one now knows when it was deserted, or why. Did the bureaucracy collapse under its own weight? Did the coming of Isohkelekel put an end to the old order? Were the last inhabitants wiped out by disease, or plague, or climatic change, or starvation? Did the sea rise, inexorably, and engul
f the low islands? (Many of them, now, are under water.) Was there a feeling of some ancient curse, a panicked and superstitious flight from this place of the old gods? When O’Connell visited 160 years ago, it had already been deserted for a century or more. The sense of this mystery, the rise and fall of cultures, the unpredictable twists of fate, made us contemplative, silent, as we returned to the mainland.25

  The return journey, indeed, was difficult, and frightening, as night fell. It started to rain again, and this time the rain was driven violently, slantingly, by a strong wind. In a few minutes we were utterly soaked, and began to shiver in the chill. A dense, drizzling mist settled over the water as we inched in, with extreme circumspection, fearing every moment to be grounded on the reef. After an hour in this thick, soupy, blinding fog, our other senses had adapted, sharpened – but it was Knut who picked out the new sound: an intricate, syncopated drumming, which gradually grew louder as, still blinded, we approached the shore. Knut’s auditory acuteness is quite remarkable – this was not unusual in achromatopes, he told us, perhaps a compensation for the visual impairment. He picked up the drumming when we were still half a mile or more from shore, even before Robin, who, expecting it, was listening intently.

  This beautiful, mysterious, complex drumming came, we were to discover, from a trio of men pounding sakau on a large stone by the dock. We watched them briefly when we landed. I was eagerly curious about sakau, especially as Robin had expatiated on its virtues as we returned from Nan Madol. He drank it every night, he said, and with this the tension of the day drained out, a peaceful calm came upon him, and he slept deeply and dreamlessly (he could not sleep otherwise). Later that evening Robin came along to the hotel with his Pohnpeian wife, bearing a bottle of slimy greyish liquid; it looked, to my eyes, like old motor oil. I sniffed it gingerly – it smelled of licorice or anise – and tasted a little, uncouthly, in a tooth glass from the bathroom. But sakau is supposed to be drunk with due protocol, from coconut shells, and I looked forward to drinking it in the proper way, at a traditional sakau ceremony.