1996 - The Island of the Colorblind

by Oliver Sacks

  32Kahn notes that ‘the major credit for smallpox is usually ceded to Spain, for leprosy to Germany, for dysentery to England, for venereal disease to the U.S., and for tuberculosis to Japan.’ Leprosy was, indeed, widespread throughout the Pacific: there was, until fairly recently, a leper colony on Pingelap; and for many years, a large leper colony on Guam; and, of course, there was the infamous leper colony of the Hawaiian Islands, on Molokai, which Jack London wrote about in ‘The Sheriff of Kona’ and ‘Koolau the Leper.’

  33Melville includes a footnote on this term in Omoo:

  Beach-comber: This is a term much in vogue among sailors in the Pacific. It is applied to certain roving characters, who, without attaching themselves permanently to any vessel, ship now and then for a short cruise in a whaler; but upon the condition only of being dishonorably discharged the very next time the anchor takes hold of the bottom; no matter where. They are, mostly, a reckless, rollicking set, wedded to the Pacific, and never dreaming of ever doubling Cape Horn again on a homeward-bound passage. Hence, their reputation is a bad one.

  34 Our Western diseases have had a disastrous effect on the native populations of the Pacific – scarcely less disastrous than those of military conquest, commercial exploitation, and religion. Jack London, visiting the valley of Typee sixty-five years after Melville, found the splendid physical perfection of which Melville spoke almost entirely destroyed:

  And now…the valley of Typee is the abode of some dozen wretched creatures, afflicted by leprosy, elephantiasis, and tuberculosis.

  Wondering what had befallen the Typee, London speaks of both immunity and evolution:

  Not alone were the Typeans physically magnificent; they were pure. Their air did not contain the bacilli and germs and microbes of disease that fill our own air. And when the white men imported in their ships these various micro-organisms of disease, the Typeans crumpled up and went down before them.…

  Natural selection, however, gives the explanation. We of the white race are the survivors and the descendants of the thousands of generations of survivors in the war with the microorganisms. Whenever one of us was born with a constitution peculiarly receptive to these minute enemies, such a one promptly died. Only those of us survived who could withstand them. We who are alive are the immune, the fit – the ones best constituted to live in a world of hostile micro-organisms. The poor Marque-sans had undergone no such selection. They were not immune. And they, who had made a custom of eating their enemies, were now eaten by enemies so microscopic as to be invisible, and against whom no war of dart and javelin was possible.

  35Both Joakim and Valentine displayed in a high degree what the naturalist E.O. Wilson calls ‘biophilia.’ He defines this as an ‘inborn affinity human beings have for other forms of life’ – an affinity which can extend itself to an ecological feeling, a feeling for habitat. Howard Gardner, well known for his theory of multiple intelligences (mathematico-logical, visuo-spatial, kinaesthetic, social, etc.) is now inclined to recognize such a ‘biological’ intelligence as a distinctive one. Though such an intelligence may be enormously developed in a Darwin or a Wallace, it is present to varying degrees in us all. Others besides naturalists may be richly endowed with it and may express it in their vocations or avocations: gardeners, foresters, farmers, and hor-ticulturalists; fishermen, horsemen, cattlemen, animal trainers, birdwatchers. Many artists express this in their work – D. H. Lawrence, to my mind, is miraculous here and seems to know directly, by a sort of connaturality what it is like to be a snake or mountain lion; to be able to enter the souls of other animals. Biophilia may run in families (one thinks of the Hookers, the Tradescants, the Forsters, the Bartrams, etc., where both father and son were passionate botanists); and it may be unusually common in people with Tourette’s syndrome or autism. One has to wonder whether it may not have – as linguistic competence and musical intelligence have – a clear neurological basis, which may be more richly developed by experience and education, but is none the less innate.

  36 Stevenson remarked on the ‘attractive power’ of the Pacific islands in In the South Seas:

  Few men who come to the islands leave them; they grow grey where they alighted; the palm shades and the trade-winds fan them till they die, perhaps cherishing to the last the fancy of a visit home…No part of the world exerts the same attractive power.

  37Two-thirds of Krakatau Island, originally six miles long and clothed in tropical rain forest, disappeared in the huge eruption of 1883, but a remnant of the southern volcano was left standing, along with two close neighbors, Sertung and Panjang. All of these were covered by a thirty-foot blanket of hot ash, so that ‘not a plant, not a blade of grass, not a fly, survived,’ in Ian Thornton’s account. Three years later, ferns were the first plants to recolonize the island. These were followed by casuarinas, birds which had migrated from Australia, and a monitor lizard.

  38Biologically, as well as geologically, continental islands (such as, for instance, New Zealand, Madagascar, or New Guinea) are entirely different from oceanic ones. For continental islands are broken-off pieces of the main and (at least initially) may have all the species of the parent continent. Once broken off, of course, they become as isolated as any other island, and their isolation (and altered conditions) may promote the most extravagant speciation, as with the unique primates of Madagascar or the flightless birds of New Zealand.

  There are also diseases endemic to islands, diseases which have emerged or persisted because of their isolation, and are thus analogous to an island’s endemic flora and fauna. This too was recognized more than a century ago, by the great German epidemiologist Hirsch. The study of such diseases, he thought, would constitute a ‘geographical and historical pathology’ and such a science, he wrote, ‘in an ideally complete form, would furnish a medical history of mankind.’

  39More than forty varieties of banana are grown on Pohnpei, and some of these seem to be unique to the island. The banana has a remarkable tendency to somatic mutation, to ‘sports’ – some of these are disadvantageous, but others may lead to plants which are more disease resistant, or fruit which is more delectable in one way or another; and this has stimulated cultivation of some five hundred varieties worldwide.

  The major banana sports are regarded as species (and given binomial, Linnaean names), the minor sports as varieties only (which bear only local names). But the difference, as Darwin remarks, is only one of degree: ‘Species and variations,’ he writes in the Origin, ‘blend into each other by an insensible series; and a series impresses the mind with the idea of an actual passage.’ In time, many varieties will diverge sufficiently to become distinct species.

  The importation of bananas onto islands, as it happens, has also shown us something of the rate of evolution in sympatric species. Thus, as H.W. Menard notes, ‘Five new species of banana moths have evolved in Hawaii since the Polynesians introduced the banana to Hawaii only about one thousand years ago.’ For islands are forcing grounds for evolutionary change, whether of plants or animals, insects or microbes; under the special conditions of island life, the slow processes of mutation and specialization may be amplified and accelerated to a spectacular degree.

  J.B.S. Haldane once proposed a way of quantifying the rate of change of any variable – a bird’s beak, an ammonite’s whorl – as it evolved, suggesting that a change of one percent per million years be called a ‘darwin.’ Evolution generally proceeded, he thought, in ‘millidarwins,’ and he imagined (as Darwin himself did) that with this infinitesimal rate evolution could never actually be seen. But we are now finding (as Jonathan Weiner recounts in The Beak of the Finch ) that evolution can occur at a very much faster rate when selection pressures are high. This has been studied by Peter and Rosemary Grant, with the very finch populations Darwin himself observed, on the small Galapagos island of Daphne Major. Following a catastrophic drought, the finch population showed clear evolutionary changes (in beak and body size) in a matter of months, an ‘evolutionary rate,’ Weiner calcu
lates, of 25,000 darwins.

  One does not need to deal only with rare and catastrophic circumstances to see evolution in action. A beautiful example has recently been observed by Martin Cody and Jacob Overton with the seeds of some daisies, which are blown by the wind to small islets off the Pacific coast of Canada. A fluffball or pappus holds the seed aloft, and its size determines, other things being equal, how far the seed is liable to be carried. Once the plants have settled on an island, their pappi become shorter, so they are less liable to be dispersed. These changes, like those of finches, have been observed within the span of a year or two.

  But the most astounding example of very rapid, massive evolution relates to the more than three hundred species of cichlid fish unique to Lake Victoria. DNA studies (by Axel Meyer) have indicated that these species diverged very recently in evolutionary terms, and there is now strong geologic evidence that the lake itself is only 12,000 years old. While Darwin’s Galapagos finches evolved perhaps twenty different species over four million years, the cichlids of Lake Victoria have shown a rate of speciation more than five thousand times greater.

  40Jack London, in Uaitape, found Bora-Borans dancing ‘with strange phosphorescent flowers in their hair that pulsed and dimmed and glowed in the moonlight.’

  41Paul Theroux has called sakau (known on many islands as kava) ‘the most benign drug in the world.’ Its benignness was also stressed by Cook when he encountered it on his first visit to Tahiti (a related variety of pepper in New Zealand is now named captaincookia in his honor). Though it was described by naturalists on Cook’s first voyage, credit for its ‘discovery’ is usually given to the Forsters, the botanical father and son who accompanied Cook on his second voyage, and the plant has since been known by the name they gave it, Piper methysticum Forst.

  An eloquent description of its effects was given by Lewin in his Phantastica; I had read this years before, as a student, and had been curious to try it myself. All is benign, stresses Lewin, if one does not overdo it:

  When the mixture is not too strong, the subject attains a state of happy unconcern, well-being and contentment, free of physical or psychological excitement.…The drinker never becomes angry, unpleasant, quarrelsome or noisy, as happens with alcohol… The drinker remains master of his conscience and his reason. When consumption is excessive, however, the limbs become tired, the muscles seem no longer to respond to the orders and control of the mind, walking becomes slow and unsteady and the drinker looks partly inebriated. He feels the need to lie down. The eyes see the objects present, but cannot or do not want to identify them accurately. The ears also perceive sounds without being able or wanting to realize what they hear. Little by little, objects become vaguer and vaguer…[until] the drinker is overcome by somnolence and finally drifts off to sleep.

  We had all been struck, when we arrived in Pohnpei, by the extraordinary slowness of drivers and pedestrians in Kolonia, but put this down to unhurriedness, a sense of leisure, ‘island time.’ But some of this slowness was clearly physiological, a sakau-induced psychomotor retardation. Sakau use and abuse is widespread here, although the effects of this are generally not dangerous. Dr. G.A. Holland mentions having seen only one sakau-related accident in his many years of practice in Micronesia; this was an elderly man who stumbled while returning home from a sakau party, fell, and broke his neck.

  It was remarked even in the last century that sakau was incompatible with alcohol, but in recent years, its use has been much less restrained by tradition, and some younger Pohnpeians have taken to drinking it with beer, which can produce drastic changes in blood pressure and even sudden death. Chronic sakau drinkers, moreover, may develop a hard, scaly skin; we saw many older Pohnpeians with ichthyosis, or ‘fish’ skin.

  42John Updike, in In the Beauty of the Lilies, re-reverses the foreground⁄background reversal of Joyce’s image, and writes of a ‘humid blue-black sky and its clusters of unreachable stars.’

  43I had not heard of these effects normally occurring after sakau. But I had had a low-level visual migraine for the last three days; I had been seeing squiggles and patterns since landing in Pingelap, and the sakau seemed to have exacerbated this. Knut told me that he sometimes had attacks of migraine too, and I wondered whether a direct stimulation of the color areas in the brain, as may occur in a visual migraine, could evoke color even in someone with no normal experience of it. Someone had once asked him if he saw migraine phosphenes in color – but he had replied, ‘I would not know how to answer.’

  44There was, I had been told, a cluster of houses near the Edwards’ on Pingelap, all of which belonged to achromatopic families – but it was unclear whether these families had clustered together because they were related (as virtually everyone on Pingelap is) or because they all shared the maskun.

  45 A vast epidemic of viral sleepy-sickness, encephalitis lethargica, starting in Europe in the winter of 1916-17, swept through the world in the following years, coming to an end in the mid-1920s. Many patients seemed to recover from the acute illness entirely, only to fall victim, years or decades later, to strange (and sometimes progressive) post-encephalitic syndromes. There were thousands of such patients before the 1940s, and every neurologist at the time had a vivid idea of these syndromes. But by the 1960s, there were only a few hundred of these patients left – most very disabled and forgotten in chronic hospitals; and neurologists training at this time were scarcely aware of them. In 1967, when L-DOPA became available for treating parkinsonism, there were only, to my knowledge, two ‘colonies’ or communities of post-encephalitic patients left in the world (at Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx and the Highlands Hospital in London).

  46Zimmerman’s brief report, in fact, was written up for the U.S. Navy, but not available generally; its existence was virtually unknown for almost a decade. It was not until the late 1950s that his paper was recognized as the first to report on the Guam disease.

  47Hirano’s visit to Guam is still vivid for him thirty-five years later – the long and complex journey there, his delight in the island, the patients he saw, the autopsies he performed, the microscopic sections he prepared. He presented his findings at the 1961 annual meeting of the American Association of Neuropathologists – the same meeting at which, three years later, Steele, Olszewski, and Richardson presented their findings on progressive supranuclear palsy, another equally strange ‘new’ disease. Hirano was struck at the time by the fact that ‘the histological and cytological features were essentially similar in the two,’ and concluded, in his remarks as a discussant of their paper, that:

  The striking similarity of tissue response in these two disorders, occurring at two different geographical locations, certainly deserves attention, not only in the clinical and pathological sense, but also from the standpoint of their familial and epidemiological features.

  48 It was Freycinet’s impression that though the cycads had always been common on Guam, they had not been eaten ‘until the Spanish taught the natives how to separate its substance from the poisonous juice it contained.’ But this is a matter which has to be questioned, for in many other cultures the use of cycads and the knowledge of how to prepare and detoxify them go back to prehistoric times, as David Jones remarks in Cycads of the World:

  Studies suggest that Australian aborigines had developed the technology for the preparation of edible foods from cycads at least 13,000 years ago…Perhaps toxic cycads were one of the first dangerous plants to be tamed by humans…Nevertheless, in view of the presence of virulent toxins, the use of cycad parts by humans as food is quite extraordinary.…Although the techniques of preparation are relatively simple…there is room for error. It is tempting to speculate on the hit or miss learning procedure which must have preceded the successful development of such a methodology.

  49Cycads, properly speaking, do not have fruits, for fruits come from flowers, and cycads have no flowers. But it is natural to speak of ‘fruits,’ for the seeds are enclosed in a brightly colored, luscious outer tunic (o
r sarcotesta), which resembles a greengage or plum.

  50Raymond Fosberg spent his entire professional life studying tropical plants and islands. ‘From a childhood fascination with islands,’ he remarked in a 1985 commencement address at the University of Guam:

  [which] I gained from maps, in grade-school geography books, and a wonderful book, read at an early age, titled Australia and the Islands of the Sea, I gravitated toward islands at my first opportunity. This was a Sierra Club visit to Santa Cruz Island, off the California coast. The vision of [its] beauty…has never left me.

  During the Second World War, he worked in the tropical jungles of Colombia in search of cinchona bark to provide quinine for combat troops in malarial areas and helped to export nine thousand tons of the bark. After the war, he devoted himself to the islands of Micronesia, cataloguing minutely their plant life and studying the effects of human development and the introduction of alien species upon the vulnerable habitats of islands with their native flora and fauna.

  51Botanists now recognize more than two hundred cycad species and eleven genera – the newest genus, Chigua, was discovered in Colombia in 1990 by Dennis Stevenson of the New York Botanical Garden.

  52Cycas revoluta is sometimes called the sago palm (or king sago), and C. circinalis the false sago palm (or queen sago). The word ‘sago’ is itself a generic one, referring to an edible starchy material obtained from any plant source. Sago proper, so to speak (such as English children in my generation were brought up on), is obtained from the trunks of various palms (especially Metroxylon ), but it also occurs in the stems of cycads, even though they are botanically quite different. The male trunks of C. revoluta contain about fifty percent starch, the female ones about half this. There is also a good deal of starch in their seeds – and the seeds, of course, are replenishable, whereas harvesting of the trunk kills the entire plant.