1996 - The Island of the Colorblind

by Oliver Sacks

  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.

  6The 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).

  7Ebeye 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 1960s 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 f
arming 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:

  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 1820s.

  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?

  13Darwin’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.’

  14The 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 eighteen
th-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.