The Island of the Colorblind

Island Hopping

Islands have always fascinated me; perhaps they fascinate everyone. The first summer holiday I remember – I was just three years old – was a visit to the Isle of Wight. There are only fragments in memory – the cliffs of many-colored sands, the wonder of the sea, which I was seeing for the first time: its calmness, its gentle swell, its warmth, entranced me; its roughness, when the wind rose, terrified me. My father told me that he had won a race swimming round the Isle of Wight before I was born, and this made me think of him as a giant, a hero. Stories of islands, and seas, and ships and mariners entered my consciousness very early – my mother would tell me about Captain Cook, about Magellan and Tasman and Dampier and Bougainville, and all the islands and peoples they had discovered, and she would point them out to me on a globe. Islands were special places, remote and mysterious, intensely attractive, yet frightening too. I remember being terrified by a children’s encyclopedia with a picture of the great blind statues of Easter Island looking out to sea, as I read that the islanders had lost the power to sail away from the island and were totally cut off from the rest of humanity, doomed to die in utter isolation.[1]

I read about castaways, desert islands, prison islands, leper islands. I adored The Lost World, Conan Doyle’s splendid yarn about an isolated South American plateau full of dinosaurs and Jurassic life-forms – in effect, an island marooned in time (I knew the book virtually by heart, and dreamed of growing up to be another Professor Challenger).

I was very impressionable and readily made other people’s imaginings my own. H.G. Wells was particularly potent – all desert islands, for me, became his Aepyornis Island or, in a nightmare mode, the Island of Dr. Moreau. Later, when I came to read Herman Melville and Robert Louis Stevenson, the real and the imaginary fused in my mind. Did the Marquesas actually exist? Were Omoo and Typee actual adventures? I felt this uncertainty most especially about the Galapagos, for long before I read Darwin, I knew of them as the ‘evilly enchanted’ isles of Melville’s Encantadas.

Later still, factual and scientific accounts began to dominate my reading – Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle, Wallace’s Malay Archipelago, and my favorite, Humboldt’s Personal Narrative (I loved especially his description of the six-thousand-year-old dragon tree on Teneriffe) – and now the sense of the romantic, the mythical, the mysterious, became subordinated to the passion of scientific curiosity.[2]

For islands were, so to speak, experiments of nature, places blessed or cursed by geographic singularity to harbor unique forms of life – the aye-ayes and pottos, the lorises and lemurs of Madagascar; the great tortoises of the Galapagos; the giant flightless birds of New Zealand – all singular species or genera which had taken a separate evolutionary path in their isolated habitats.[3] And I was strangely pleased by a phrase in one of Darwin’s diaries, written after he had seen a kangaroo in Australia and found this so extraordinary and alien that he wondered if it did not represent a second creation.[4]

As a child I had visual migraines, where I would have not only the classical scintillations and alterations of the visual field, but alterations in the sense of color too, which might weaken or entirely disappear for a few minutes. This experience frightened me, but tantalized me too, and made me wonder what it would be like to live in a completely colorless world, not just for a few minutes, but permanently. It was not until many years later that I got an answer, at least a partial answer, in the form of a patient, Jonathan I., a painter who had suddenly become totally colorblind following a car accident (and perhaps a stroke). He had lost color vision not through any damage to his eyes, it seemed, but through damage to the parts of the brain which ‘construct’ the sensation of color. Indeed, he seemed to have lost the ability not only to see color, but to imagine or remember it, even to dream of it. Nevertheless, like an amnesic, he in some way remained conscious of having lost color, after a lifetime of chromatic vision, and complained of his world feeling impoverished, grotesque, abnormal – his art, his food, even his wife looked ‘leaden’ to him. Still, he could not assuage my curiosity on the allied, yet totally different, matter of what it might be like never to have seen color, never to have had the least sense of its primal quality, its place in the world.

Ordinary colorblindness, arising from a defect in the retinal cells, is almost always partial, and some forms are very common: red-green colorblindness occurs to some degree in one in twenty men (it is much rarer in women). But total congenital colorblindness, or achromatopsia, is surpassingly rare, affecting perhaps only one person in thirty or forty thousand. What, I wondered, would the visual world be like for those born totally colorblind? Would they, perhaps, lacking any sense of something missing, have a world no less dense and vibrant than our own? Might they even have developed heightened perceptions of visual tone and texture and movement and depth, and live in a world in some ways more intense than our own, a world of heightened reality – one that we can only glimpse echoes of in the work of the great black-and-white photographers? Might they indeed see us as peculiar, distracted by trivial or irrelevant aspects of the visual world, and insufficiently sensitive to its real visual essence? I could only guess, as I had never met anyone born completely colorblind.

Many of H.G. Wells’ short stories, it seems to me, fantastical as they are, can be seen as metaphors for certain neurological and psychological realities. One of my favorites is ‘The Country of the Blind,’ in which a lost traveller, stumbling into an isolated valley in South America, is struck by the strange ‘parti-coloured’ houses that he sees. The men who built these, he thinks, must have been as blind as bats – and soon he discovers that this is the case, and indeed that he has come across an entire blind society. He finds that their blindness is due to a disease contracted three hundred years before, and that over the course of time, the very concept of seeing has vanished:

Wells’ traveller is at first contemptuous of the blind, seeing them as pitiful, disabled – but soon the tables are reversed, and he finds that they see him as demented, subject to hallucinations produced by the irritable, mobile organs in his face (which the blind, with their atrophied eyes, can conceive only as a source of delusion). When he falls in love with a girl in the valley and wants to stay there and marry her, the elders, after much thought, agree to this, provided he consent to the removal of those irritable organs, his eyes.

Forty years after I first read this story, I read another book, by Nora Ellen Groce, about deafness on the island of Martha’s Vineyard. A sea captain and his brother from Kent, it seems, had settled there in the 1690s; both had normal hearing, but both brought with them a recessive gene for deafness. In time, with the isolation of the Vineyard, and the intermarriage of its close community, this gene was carried by the majority of their descendants; by the mid-nineteenth century, in some of the up-island villages, a quarter or more of the inhabitants were born totally deaf.

Hearing people were not so much discriminated against here as assimilated – in this visual culture, everyone in the community, deaf and hearing alike, had come to use sign language. They would chat in Sign (it was much better than spoken language in many ways: for communicating across a distance, for instance, from one fishing boat to another, or for gossiping in church), debate in Sign, teach in Sign, think and dream in Sign. Martha’s Vineyard was an island where everyone spoke sign language, a veritable country of the deaf. Alexander Graham Bell, visiting in the 1870s, wondered indeed whether it might not come to harbor an entire ‘deaf variety of the human race,’ which might then spread throughout the world.

And knowing that congenital achromatopsia, like this form of deafness, is also hereditary, I could not help wondering whether there might also be, somewhere on the planet, an island, a village, a valley of the colorblind.

When I visited Guam early in 1993, some impulse made me put this question to my friend John Steele, who has practiced neurology all over Micronesia. Unexpectedly, I received an immediate, positive answer: there was just such an isolate, John said, on the island of Pingelap – it was relatively close, ‘barely twelve hundred miles from here,’ he added. Just a few days earlier, he had seen an achromatopic boy on Guam, who had journeyed there with his parents from Pingelap. ‘Fascinating,’ he said. ‘Classical congenital achromatopsia, with nystagmus, and avoidance of bright light – and the incidence on Pingelap is extraordinarily high, almost ten percent of the population.’ I was intrigued by what John told me, and resolved that – sometime – I would come back to the South Seas and visit Pingelap.

When I returned to New York, the thought receded to the back of my mind. Then, some months later, I got a long letter from Frances Futterman, a woman in Berkeley who was herself born completely colorblind. She had read my original essay on the colorblind painter and was at pains to contrast her situation with his, and to emphasize that she herself, never having known color, had no sense of loss, no sense of being chromatically defective. But congenital achromatopsia, she pointed out, involved far more than colorblindness as such. What was far more disabling was the painful hypersensitivity to light and poor visual acuity which also affect congenital achromatopes. She had grown up in a relatively shadeless part of Texas, with a constant squint, and preferred to go outside only at night. She was intrigued by the notion of an island of the colorblind, but had not heard of one in the Pacific. Was this a fantasy, a myth, a daydream generated by lonely achromatopes? But she had read, she told me, about another island mentioned in a book on achromatopsia – the little island of Fuur, in a Jutland fjord – where there were a large number of congenital achromatopes. She wondered if I knew of this book, called Night Vision – one of its editors, she added, was an achromatope too, a Norwegian scientist named Knut Nordby; perhaps he could tell me more.

Astounded at this – in a short time, I had learned of not one but two islands of the colorblind – I tried to find out more. Knut Nordby was a physiologist and psychophysicist, I read, a vision researcher at the University of Oslo and, partly by virtue of his own condition, an expert on colorblindness. This was surely a unique, and important, combination of personal and formal knowledge; I had also sensed a warm, open quality in his brief autobiographical memoir, which forms a chapter of Night Vision, and this emboldened me to write to him in Norway. ‘I would like to meet you,’ I wrote. ‘I would also like to visit the island of Fuur. And, ideally, to visit the island with you.’

Having fired off this letter impulsively, to a complete stranger, I was surprised and relieved by his reaction, which arrived within a few days: ‘I should be delighted to accompany you there for a couple of days,’ he wrote. Since the original studies on Fuur had been done in the 1940s and ‘50s, he added, he would get some more up-to-date information. A month later, he contacted me again:

I too was disappointed, but wondered whether we should go nonetheless. I imagined finding strange residues, ghosts, of the achromatopes who had once lived there – parti-colored houses, black-and-white vegetation, documents, drawings, memories and stories of the colorblind by those who once knew them. But there was still Pingelap to think of; I had been assured there were still ‘plenty’ of achromatopes there. I wrote to Knut again, asking how he might feel about coming with me on a ten-thousand-mile journey, a sort of scientific adventure to Pingelap, and he replied yes, he would love to come, and could take off a few weeks in August.

Colorblindness had existed on both Fuur and Pingelap for a century or more, and though both islands had been the subject of extensive genetic studies, there had been no human (so to speak, Wellsian) explorations of them, of what it might be like to be an achromatope in an achromatopic community – to be not only totally colorblind oneself, but to have, perhaps, colorblind parents and grandparents, neighbors and teachers, to be part of a culture where the entire concept of color might be missing, but where, instead, other forms of perception, of attention, might be amplified in compensation. I had a vision, only half fantastic, of an entire achromatopic culture with its own singular tastes, arts, cooking, and clothing – a culture where the sensorium, the imagination, took quite different forms from our own, and where ‘color’ was so totally devoid of referents or meaning that there were no color names, no color metaphors, no language to express it; but (perhaps) a heightened language for the subtlest variations of texture and tone, all that the rest of us dismiss as ‘grey.’

Excitedly, I began making plans for the voyage to Pingelap. I phoned up my old friend Eric Korn – Eric is a writer, zoologist, and antiquarian bookseller – and asked him if he knew anything about Pingelap or the Caroline Islands. A couple of weeks later, I received a parcel in the post; in it was a slim leather-bound volume entitled A Residence of Eleven Tears in New Holland and the Caroline Islands, being the Adventures of James F. O’Connell. The book was published, I saw, in Boston in 1836; it was a little dilapidated (and stained, I wanted to think, by heavy Pacific seas). Sailing from McQuarrietown in Tasmania, O’Connell had visited many of the Pacific islands, but his ship, the John Bull, had come to grief in the Carolines, in a group of islands which he calls Bonabee. His description of life there filled me with delight – we would be visiting some of the most remote and least-known islands in the world, probably not much changed from O’Connell’s time.

I asked my friend and colleague Robert Wasserman if he would join us as well. As an ophthalmologist, Bob sees many partially colorblind people in his practice. Like myself, he had never met anyone born totally colorblind; but we had worked together on several cases involving vision, including that of the colorblind painter, Mr. I. As young doctors, we had done fellowships in neuropathology together, back in the 1960s, and I remembered him telling me then of his four-year-old son, Eric, as they drove up to Maine one summer, exclaiming, ‘Look at the beautiful orange grass!’ No, Bob told him, it’s not orange – ’orange’ is the color of an orange. Yes, cried Eric, it’s orange like an orange! This was Bob’s first intimation of his son’s colorblindness. Later, when he was six, Eric had painted a picture he called The Battle of Grey Rock, but had used pink pigment for the rock.

Bob, as I had hoped, was fascinated by the prospect of meeting Knut and voyaging to Pingelap. An ardent windsurfer and sailor, he has a passion for oceans and islands and is reconditely knowledgeable about the evolution of outrigger canoes and proas in the Pacific; he longed to see these in action, to sail one himself. Along with Knut, we would form a team, an expedition at once neurological, scientific, and romantic, to the Caroline archipelago and the island of the colorblind.

We converged in Hawaii: Bob looked completely at home in his purple shorts and bright tropical shirt, but Knut looked distinctly less so in the dazzling sun of Waikiki – he was wearing two pairs of dark glasses over his normal glasses: a pair of Polaroid clip-ons, and over these a large pair of wraparound sunglasses – a darkened visor such as a cataract patient might wear. Even so, he tended to blink and squint almost continuously, and behind the dark glasses we could see that his eyes showed a continual jerking movement, a nystagmus. He was much more comfortable when we repaired to a quiet (and, to my eyes, rather dimly lit) little café on a side street, where he could take off his visor, and his clip-ons, and cease squinting and blinking. I found the café much too dark at first, and groped and blundered, knocking down a chair as we went in – but Knut, already dark adapted from wearing his double dark glasses, and more adept at night vision to begin with, was perfectly at ease in the dim lighting, and led us to a table.

Knut’s eyes, like those of other congenital achromatopes, have no cones (at least no functional cones): these are the cells which, in the rest of us, fill the fovea – the tiny sensitive area in the center of the retina – and are specialized for the perception of fine detail, as well as color. He is forced to rely on the more meager visual input of the rods, which, in achromatopes as in the rest of us, are distributed around the periphery of the retina, and though these cannot discriminate color, they are much more sensitive to light. It is the rods which we all use for low-light, or scotopic, vision (as, for instance, walking at night). It is the rods which provide Knut with the vision he has. But without the mediating influence of cones, his rods quickly blanch out in bright light, becoming almost nonfunctional; thus Knut is dazzled by daylight, and literally blinded in bright sunlight – his visual fields contract immediately, shrinking to almost nothing – unless he shields his eyes from the intense light.

His visual acuity, without a cone-filled fovea, is only about a tenth of normal – when we were given menus, he had to take out a four-power magnifying glass and, for the special items chalked on a blackboard on the opposite wall, an eight-power monocular (it looked like a miniature telescope); without these, he would barely be able to read small or distant print. His magnifying glass and monocular are always on his person, and like the dark glasses and visors, they are essential visual aids. And, with no functioning fovea, he has difficulty fixating, holding his gaze on target, especially in bright light – hence his eyes make groping, nystagmic jerks.

Knut must protect his rods from overload and, at the same time, if detailed vision is needed, find ways of enlarging the images they present, whether by optical devices or peering closely. He must also, consciously or unconsciously, discover ways of deriving information from other aspects of the visual world, other visual cues which, in the absence of color, may take on a heightened importance. Thus – and this was apparent to us right away – his intense sensitivity and attention to form and texture, to outlines and boundaries, to perspective, depth, and movements, even subtle ones.

Knut enjoys the visual world quite as much as the rest of us; he was delighted by a picturesque market in a side street of Honolulu, by the palms and tropical vegetation all around us, by the shapes of clouds – he has a clear and prompt eye for the range of human beauty too. (He has a beautiful wife in Norway, a fellow psychologist, he told us – but it was only after they married, when a friend said, ‘I guess you go for redheads,’ that he learned for the first time of her flamboyant red hair.)

Knut is a keen black-and-white photographer – indeed his own vision, he said, by way of trying to share’it, has some resemblance to that of an orthochromatic black-and-white film, although with a far greater range of tones. ‘Greys, you would call them, though the word ‘grey’ has no meaning for me, any more than the term ‘blue’ or ‘red.’’ But, he added, ‘I do not experience my world as ‘colorless’ or in any sense incomplete.’ Knut, who has never seen color, does not miss it in the least; from the start, he has experienced only the positivity of vision, and has built up a world of beauty and order and meaning on the basis of what he has.[5]

As we walked back to our hotel for a brief night’s sleep before our flight the next day, darkness began to fall, and the moon, almost full, rose high into the sky until it was silhouetted, seemingly caught, in the branches of a palm tree. Knut stood under the tree and studied the moon intently with his monocular, making out its seas and shadows. Then, putting the monocular down and gazing up at the sky all around him, he said, ‘I see thousands of stars! I see the whole galaxy!’

‘That’s impossible,’ Bob said. ‘Surely the angle subtended by a star is too small, given that your visual acuity is a tenth of normal.’

Knut responded by identifying constellations all over the sky – some looked quite different from the configurations he knew in his own Norwegian sky. He wondered if his nystagmus might not have a paradoxical benefit, the jerking movements ‘smearing’ an otherwise invisible point image to make it larger – or whether this was made possible by some other factor. He agreed that it was difficult to explain how he could see stars with such low visual acuity – but nonetheless, he did.

‘Laudable nystagmus, eh?’ said Bob.

By sunrise, we were back at the airport, settling in for the long flight on the ‘Island Hopper,’ which calls twice a week at a handful of Pacific islands. Bob, jet-lagged, wedged himself in his seat for more sleep. Knut, dark-glassed already, took out his magnifying glass and began to pore over our bible for this trip – the admirable Micronesia Handbook, with its brilliant, sharp descriptions of the islands that awaited us. I was restless, and decided to keep a journal of the flight:

After almost a thousand miles, we at last saw land – a tiny, exquisite atoll on the horizon. Johnston Island! I had seen it as a dot on the map and thought, ‘What an idyllic place, thousands of miles from anywhere.’ As we descended it looked less exquisite: a huge runway bisected the island, and to either side of this were storage bins, chimneys, and towers: eyeless buildings, all enveloped in an orange-red haze…my idyll, my little paradise, looked like a realm of hell.

Landing was rough, and frightening. There was a loud grinding noise and a squeal of rubber as the whole plane veered suddenly to one side. As we skewed to a halt on the tarmac, the crew informed us that the brakes had locked and we had torn much of the rubber off the tires on the left – we would have to wait here for repairs. A bit shaken from the landing, and cramped from hours in the air, we longed to get off the plane and stroll around a bit. A stair was pushed up to the plane, with ‘Welcome to Johnston Atoll’ written on it. One or two passengers started to descend, but when we tried to follow, we were told that Johnston atoll was ‘restricted’ and that non-military passengers were not allowed to disembark. Frustrated, I returned to my seat and borrowed the Micronesia Handbook from Knut, to read about Johnston.

It was named, I read, by a Captain Johnston of the HMS Cornwallis, who landed here in 1807 – the first human being, perhaps, ever to set foot on this tiny and isolated spot. I wondered if it had somehow escaped being seen altogether before this, or whether perhaps it had been visited, but never inhabited.

Johnston, considered valuable for its rich deposits of guano, was claimed by both the United States and the Kingdom of Hawaii in 1856. Migratory fowl stop here by the hundreds of thousands, and in 1926 the island was designated a federal bird reserve. After the Second World War it was acquired by the U.S. Air Force, and ‘since then,’ I read, ‘the U.S. military has converted this formerly idyllic atoll into one of the most toxic places in the Pacific.’ It was used during the 1950s and ‘60s for nuclear testing, and is still maintained as a standby test site; one end of the atoll remains radioactive. It was briefly considered as a test site for biological weapons, but this was precluded by the huge population of migratory birds, which, it was realized, might easily carry lethal infections back to the mainland. In 1971 Johnston became a depot for thousands of tons of mustard and nerve gases, which are periodically incinerated, releasing dioxin and furan into the air (perhaps this was the reason for the cinnamon haze I had seen from above). All personnel on the island are required to have their gas masks ready. Sitting in the now-stuffy plane as I read this – our ventilation had been shut off while we were on the ground – I felt a prickling in my throat, a tightness in my chest, and wondered if I was breathing some of Johnston’s lethal air. The ‘Welcome’ sign now seemed blackly ironic; it should at least have had a skull and crossbones added. The crew members themselves, it seemed to me, grew more uneasy and restless by the minute; they could hardly wait, I thought, to shut the door and take off again.

But the ground crew was still trying to repair our damaged wheels; they were dressed in shiny, aluminized suits, presumably to minimize skin contact with the toxic air. We had heard in Hawaii that a hurricane was on its way towards Johnston: this was of no special importance to us when we were on schedule, but now, we started to think, if we were further delayed, the hurricane might indeed catch up with us on Johnston, and maroon us there with a vengeance – blowing up a storm of poison gases and radioactivity too. There were no planes scheduled to arrive until the end of the week; one flight, we heard, had been detained in this way the previous December, so that the passengers and crew had to spend an unexpected, toxic Christmas on the atoll.

The ground crew worked for two hours, without being able to do anything; finally, with many anxious looks at the sky, our pilot decided to take off again, on the remaining good tires. The whole plane shuddered and juddered as we accelerated, and seemed to heave and flap itself into the air like some giant or-nithopter – but finally (using almost the entire mile-long runway) we got off the ground, and rose through the brown, polluted air of Johnston into the clear empyrean above.

Now another lap of more than 1,500 miles to our next stop, Majuro atoll, in the Marshall Islands. We flew endlessly, all of us losing track of space and time, and dozing fitfully in the void. I was woken briefly, terrifyingly, by an air pocket which dropped us suddenly, without warning; then I dozed once more, flying on and on, till I was woken again by altering air pressure. Looking out the window, I could see far below us the narrow, flat atoll of Majuro, rising scarcely ten feet above the waves; scores of islands surrounded the lagoon. Some of the islands looked vacant and inviting, with coconut palms fringing the ocean – the classic desert-island look; the airport was on one of the smaller islands.

Knowing we had two badly damaged tires, we were all a little fearful about landing. It was indeed rough – we were flung around quite a bit – and it was decided we should stay on Majuro until some repairs could be made; this would take at least a couple of hours. After our long immurement in the plane (we had travelled nearly three thousand miles now from Hawaii), all of us burst off it, and scattered, explosively.

Knut, Bob, and I stopped first at the little shop in the airport – they had souvenir necklaces and mats, strung together from tiny shells, but also, to my delight, a postcard of Darwin.[6]

While Bob explored the beach, Knut and I walked out to the end of the runway, which was bounded by a low wall overlooking the lagoon. The sea was an intense light blue, turquoise, azure, over the reef, and darker, almost indigo, a few hundred yards out. Not thinking, I enthused about the wonderful blues of the sea – then stopped, embarrassed. Knut, though he has no direct experience of color, is very erudite on the subject. He is intrigued by the range of words and images other people use about color and was arrested by my use of the word ‘azure.’ (‘Is it similar to cerulean?’) He wondered whether ‘indigo’ was, for me, a separate, seventh color of the spectrum, neither blue nor violet, but itself, in between. ‘Many people,’ he added, ‘do not see indigo as a separate spectral color, and others see light blue as distinct from blue.’ With no direct knowledge of color, Knut has accumulated an immense mental catalog, an archive, of vicarious color knowledge about the world. He said that he found the light of the reef extraordinary – ’A brilliant, metallic hue,’ he said of it, ‘intensely luminous, like a tungsten bronze.’ And he spotted half a dozen different sorts of crabs, some of them scuttling sideways so fast that I missed them. I wondered, as Knut himself has wondered, whether his perception of motion might be heightened, perhaps to compensate for his lack of color vision.

I wandered out to join Bob on the beach, with its fine-grained white sand and coconut palms. There were breadfruit trees here and there and, hugging the ground, low tussocks of zoysia, a beach grass, and a thick-leaved succulent which was new to me. Driftwood edged the strand, admixed with bits of cardboard carton and plastic, the detritus of Darrit-Uliga-Delap, the three-islanded capital of the Marshalls, where twenty thousand people live in close-packed squalor. Even six miles from the capital, the water was scummy, the coral bleached, and there were huge numbers of sea cucumbers, detritus feeders, in the turbid water. Nonetheless, with no shade and the humid heat overwhelming, and hoping there would be clearer water if we swam out a bit, we stripped down to our underwear and walked carefully over the sharp coral until it was deep enough to swim. The water was voluptuously warm, and the tensions of the long hours in our damaged plane gradually eased away as we swam. But just as we were beginning to enjoy that delicious timeless state, the real delight of tropical lagoons, there came a sudden shout from the airstrip – ’The plane is ready to leave! Hurry!’ – and we had to clamber out hastily, clutching wet clothes around us, and run back to the plane. One wheel, with its tire, had been replaced, but the other was bent and difficult to remove, and was still being worked on. So having rushed back to the plane, we sat for another hour on the tarmac – but the other wheel finally defeated all efforts at repair, and we took off again, bumping, noisily clattering over the runway, for the next lap, a short one, to Kwajalein.

Many passengers had left at Majuro, and others had got on, and I now found myself sitting next to a friendly woman, a nurse at the military hospital in Kwajalein, her husband part of a radar tracking unit there. She painted a less than idyllic picture of the island – or, rather, the mass of islands (ninety-one in all) that form Kwajalein atoll, surrounding the largest lagoon in the world. The lagoon itself, she told me, is a test target for missiles from U.S. Air Force bases on Hawaii and the mainland. It is also where countermissiles are tested, fired from Kwajalein at the missiles as they descend. There were nights, she said, when the whole sky was ablaze with light and noise as missiles and antimissiles streaked and collided across it, and reentry vehicles crashed into the lagoon. ‘Terrifying,’ she said, ‘like the night sky in Baghdad.’

Kwajalein is part of the Pacific Barrier radar system, and there is a fearful, rigid, defensive atmosphere in the place, she said, despite the ending of the Cold War. Access is limited. There is no free discussion of any sort in the (military-controlled) media. Beneath the tough exterior there is demoralization and depression, and one of the highest suicide rates in the world. The authorities are not unaware of this, she added, and bend over backward to make Kwajalein more palatable with swimming pools, golf course, tennis courts, and whatnot – but none of it helps, the place remains unbearable. Of course, civilians can leave when they want, and military postings tend to be brief. The real sufferers, the helpless ones, are the Marshallese themselves, stuck on Ebeye, just three miles from Kwajalein: nearly fifteen thousand laborers on an island a mile long and two hundred yards wide, a tenth of a square mile. They come here for the jobs, she said – there are not many to be had in the Pacific – but end up stuck in conditions of unbelievable crowding, disease, and squalor. ‘If you want to see hell,’ my seatmate concluded, ‘make a visit to Ebeye.’[7]

I had seen photographs of Ebeye – the island itself scarcely visible, with virtually every inch of it covered by tar-paper shacks – and hoped we might get a closer look as we descended; but the airline, I learned, was at some pains to keep the sight of it from passengers. Like Ebeye, the other infamous Marshallese atolls – Bikini, Eniwetak, Rongelap – many of them still uninhabitable from radioactivity, are also kept from ordinary eyes; as we got closer to them, I could not help thinking of the horror stories from the 1950s: the strange white ash that had rained down on a Japanese tuna fishing vessel, the Lucky Dragon, bringing acute radiation sickness to the entire crew; the ‘pink snow’ that had fallen on Rongelap after one blast – the children had never seen anything like it, and they played with it delightedly.[8] Whole populations had been evacuated from some of the nuclear test islands; and some of the atolls were still so polluted, forty years later, that they were said to glow eerily, like a luminous watch dial, at night.

Another passenger who had got on at Majuro – I got to chatting with him when we were both stretching our legs at the back of the plane – was a large, genial man, an importer of canned meats with a far-flung business in Oceania. He expatiated on ‘the terrific appetite’ the Marshallese and Micronesians have for Spam and other canned meats, and the huge amount he was able to bring into the area. This enterprise was not unprofitable, but it was, above all, to his mind, philanthropic, a bringing of sound Western nutrition to benighted natives who, left alone, would eat taro and breadfruit and bananas and fish as they had for millennia – a thoroughly un-Western diet from which, now, they were happily being weaned. Spam, in particular, as my companion observed, had come to be a central part of the new Micronesian diet. He seemed unaware of the enormous health problems which had come along with the shift to a Western diet after the war; in some Micronesian countries, I had heard, obesity, diabetes, and hypertension – previously quite rare – now affected huge percentages of the population.[9]

Later, when I went for another stretch, I got to talking to another passenger, a stern-looking woman in her late fifties. She was a missionary who had got on the plane at Majuro with a gospel choir composed of a dozen Marshallese in flowered shirts. She spoke of the importance of bringing the word of God to the islanders; to this end she travels the length and breadth of Micronesia, preaching the gospel. She was rigid in her self-righteousness and posture, her hard, aggressive beliefs – and yet there was an energy, a tenacity, a single-mindedness, a dedication which was almost heroic. The double valence of religion, its complex and often contradictory powers and effects, especially in the collision of one culture, one spirit, with another, seemed embodied in this formidable woman and her choir.

The nurse, the Spam baron, the self-righteous missionary, had so occupied me that I had scarcely noticed the passage of time, the monotonous sweep of the ocean beneath us, until suddenly I felt the plane descending toward the huge, boomerang-shaped lagoon of Kwajalein. I strained to see the shantied hell of Ebeye, but we were approaching Kwajalein from the other side, its ‘good’ side. We made the now-familiar sickening landing, crashing and bouncing along the huge military runway; I wondered what would be done with us while the bent wheel was finally mended. Kwajalein is a military encampment, a test base, with some of the tightest security on the planet. Civilian personnel, as on Johnston, are not allowed off the plane – but they could hardly keep all sixty of us on it for the three or five hours which might be needed to replace the bent wheel and do whatever other repairs might be necessary.

We were asked to line up in single file and to walk slowly, without hurrying or stopping, into a special holding shed. Military police directed us here: ‘PUT YOUR THINGS DOWN,’ we were told, ‘STAND AGAINST THE WALL.’ A slavering dog, which had lain panting on a table (it seemed to be at least a hundred degrees in the shed) was now led down by a guard, first to our luggage, which it sniffed carefully, and then to us, each of whom it sniffed in turn. Being herded in this way was deeply chilling – we had a sense of how helpless and terrified one could be in the hands of a military or totalitarian bureaucracy.

After this ‘processing,’ which took twenty minutes, we were herded into a narrow, prisonlike pen with stone floors, wooden benches, military police, and, of course, dogs. There was one small window, high up on a wall, and by stretching and craning I could get a glimpse through it – of the manicured turf, the golf course, the country club amenities, for the military stationed here. After an hour we were led out into a small compound at the back, which at least had a view of the sea, and of the gun emplacements and memorials of the Second World War. There was a signpost here, with dozens of signs pointing in all directions, giving the distances to major cities all over the world. Right at the top was a sign saying ‘Lillehammer, 9716 miles’ – I saw Knut scrutinizing this with his monocular, perhaps thinking how far he was from home. And yet the sign gave a sort of comfort, by acknowledging that there was a world, another world, out there.

The plane was repaired in less than three hours, and though the crew was very tired – with the long delays in Johnston and Majuro, it was now thirteen hours since we had left Honolulu – they opted to fly on rather than spend the night here. We got on our way, and a great sense of lightness, relief, seized us as we left Kwajalein behind. Indeed there was a festive air on the plane on this last lap, everyone suddenly becoming friendly and voluble, sharing food and stories. We were united now by a heightened consciousness of being alive, being free, after our brief but frightening confinement.

Having seen the faces of all my fellow passengers on the ground, in Kwajalein, I had become aware of the varied Mi-cronesian world represented among them: there were Pohn-peians, returning to their island; there were huge, laughing Chuukese – giants, like Polynesians – speaking a liquid tongue which, even to my ears, was quite different from Pohnpeian; there were Palauans, rather reserved, dignified, with yet another language new to my ears; there was a Marshallese diplomat, on his way to Saipan, and a family of Chamorros (in whose speech I seemed to hear echoes of Spanish), returning to their village in Guam. Back in the air, I now felt myself in a sort of linguistic aquarium, as my ears picked up different languages about me.

Hearing this mix of languages started to give me a sense of Micronesia as an immense archipelago, a nebula of islands, thousands in all, scattered across the Pacific, each as remote, as space surrounded, as stars in the sky. It was to these islands, to the vast contiguous galaxy of Polynesia, that the greatest mariners in history had been driven – by curiosity, desire, fear, starvation, religion, war, whatever – with only their uncanny knowledge of the ocean and the stars for guidance. They had migrated here more than three thousand years ago, while the Greeks were exploring the Mediterranean and Homer was telling the wanderings of Odysseus. The vastness of this other odyssey, its heroism, its wonder, perhaps its desperation, seized my imagination as we flew on endlessly over the Pacific. How many of these wanderers just perished in the vastness, I wondered, never even sighting the lands they hoped for; how many canoes were dashed to pieces by savage surf on reefs and rocky shores; how many arrived at islands which, appearing hospitable at first, proved too small to support a living culture and community, so that their habitation ended in starvation, madness, violence, death?

Again the Pacific, now at night, a vast lightless swell, occasionally illuminated, narrowly, by the moon. The island of Pohnpei too was in darkness, though we got a faint sense, perhaps a silhouette, of its mountains against the night sky. As we landed, and decamped from the plane, we were enveloped in a huge humid warmth and the heavy scent of frangipani. This, I think, was the first sensation for us all, the smell of a tropical night, the scents of the day eluted by the cooling air – and then, above us, incredibly clear, the great canopy of the Milky Way.

But when we awoke the next morning, we saw what had been intimated in the darkness of our arrival: that Pohnpei was not another flat coral atoll, but an island mountain, with peaks rising precipitously into the sky, their summits hidden in the clouds. The steep slopes were wreathed in thick green jungle, with streams and waterfalls tracing down their sides. Below this we could see rolling hills, some cultivated, all about us, and, looking toward the coastline, a fringe of mangroves, with barrier reefs beyond. Though I had been fascinated by the atolls – Johnston, Majuro, even Kwajalein – this high volcanic island, cloaked in jungle and clouds, was utterly different, a naturalist’s paradise.

I was strongly tempted to miss our plane and strand myself in this magical place for a month or two, or perhaps a year, the rest of my life – it was with reluctance, and a real physical effort, that I joined the others for our flight onward to Pingelap. As we took off, we saw the entire island spread out beneath us. Melville’s description of Tahiti in Omoo, I thought, could as well have been Pohnpei:

Pingelap

Pingelap is one of eight tiny atolls scattered in the ocean around Pohnpei. Once lofty volcanic islands like Pohnpei, they are geologically much older and have eroded and subsided over millions of years, leaving only rings of coral surrounding lagoons, so that the combined area of all the atolls – Ant, Pakin, Nukuoro, Oroluk, Kapingamarangi, Mwoakil, Sap-wuahfik, and Pingelap – is now no more than three square miles. Though Pingelap is one of the farthest from Pohnpei, 180 miles (of often rough seas) distant, it was settled before the other atolls, a thousand years ago, and still has the largest population, about seven hundred. There is not much commerce or communication between the islands, and only a single boat plying the route between them: the MS Microglory, which ferries cargo and occasional passengers, making its circuit (if wind and sea permit) five or six times a year.

Since the Microglory was not due to leave for another month, we chartered a tiny prop plane run by the Pacific Missionary Aviation service; it was flown by a retired commercial airliner pilot from Texas who now lived in Pohnpei. We barely managed to squeeze ourselves in, along with luggage, ophthalmoscope and various testing materials, snorkelling gear, photographic and recording equipment, and special extra supplies for the achromatopes: two hundred pairs of sunglass visors, of varying darkness and hue, plus a smaller number of infant sunglasses and shades.

The plane, specially designed for the short island runways, was slow, but had a reassuring, steady drone, and we flew low enough to see shoals of tuna in the water. It was an hour before we sighted the atoll of Mwoakil, and another hour before we saw the three islets of Pingelap atoll, forming a broken crescent around the lagoon.

We flew twice around the atoll to get a closer view – a view which at first disclosed nothing but unbroken forest. It was only when we skimmed the trees, two hundred feet from the ground, that we could make out paths intersecting the forest here and there, and low houses almost hidden in the foliage.

Very suddenly, the wind rose – it had been tranquil a few minutes before – and the coconut palms and pandanus trees began lashing to and fro. As we made for the tiny concrete airstrip at one end, built by the occupying Japanese a half century before, a violent tailwind seized us near the ground, and almost blew us off the side of the runway. Our pilot struggled to control the skidding plane, for now, having just missed the edge of the landing strip, we were in danger of shooting off the end. By main force, and luck, he just managed to bring the plane around – another six inches and we would have been in the lagoon. ‘You folks OK?’ he asked us, and then, to himself, ‘Worst landing I ever had!’

Knut and Bob were ashen, the pilot too – they had visions of being submerged in the plane, struggling, suffocating, unable to get out; I myself felt a curious indifference, even a sense that it would be fun, romantic, to die on the reef – and then a sudden, huge wave of nausea. But even in our extremity, as the brakes screamed to halt us, I seemed to hear laughter, sounds of mirth, all around us. As we got out, still pale with shock, dozens of lithe brown children ran out of the forest, waving flowers, banana leaves, laughing, surrounding us. I could see no adults at first, and thought for a moment that Pingelap was an island of children. And in that first long moment, with the children coming out of the forest, some with their arms around each other, and the tropical luxuriance of vegetation in all directions – the beauty of the primitive, the human and the natural, took hold of me. I felt a wave of love – for the children, for the forest, for the island, for the whole scene; I had a sense of paradise, of an almost magical reality. I thought, I have arrived. I am here at last. I want to spend the rest of my life here – and some of these beautiful children could be mine.

‘Beautiful!’ whispered Knut, enraptured, by my side, and then, ‘Look at that child – and that one, and that…’ I followed his glance, and now suddenly saw what I had first missed: here and there, among the rest, clusters of children who squinted, screwed up their eyes against the bright sun, and one, an older boy, with a black cloth over his head. Knut had seen them, identified them, his achromatopic brethren, the moment he stepped out of the plane – as they, clearly, spotted him the moment he stepped out, squinting, dark-glassed, by the side of the plane.

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.[10]

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.[11]

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.[12]

‘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:

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.[13] The reef-constructing corals, for Darwin, were

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.[14]

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.[15] 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 1820s, 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.[16] 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):

Everywhere we saw breadfruit trees – sometimes whole groves of them, with their large, deeply lobed leaves; they were heavy with the giant fruits which Dampier, three hundred years ago, had likened to loaves of bread.[17] I had never seen trees so generous of themselves – they were very easy to grow, James had said, and each tree might yield a hundred massive fruits a year, more than enough to sustain a man. A single tree would bear fruit for fifty years or more, and then its fine wood could be used for lumber, especially for building the hulls of canoes.

Down by the reef, dozens of children were already swimming, some of them toddlers, barely able to walk, but plunging fearlessly into the water, among the sharp corals, shouting with excitement. I saw two or three achromatopic kids diving and romping and yelling with the rest – they did not seem isolated or set apart, at least at this stage of their lives, and since it was still very early, and the sky was overcast, they were not blinded as they would be later in the day. Some of the larger children had tied the rubber soles of old sandals to their hands, and had developed a remarkably swift dog paddle using these. Others dived to the bottom, which was thick with huge, tumid sea cucumbers, and used these to squeeze jets of water at each other…I am fond of holothurians, and I hoped they would survive.

I waded into the water, and started diving for sea cucumbers myself. At one time, I had read, there had been a brisk trade exporting sea cucumbers to Malaya, China, and Japan, where they are highly esteemed as trepang or beche-de-mer or namako. I myself love a good sea cucumber on occasion – they have a tough gelatinousness, an animal cellulose in their tissues, which I find most appealing. Carrying one back to the beach, I asked James whether the Pingelapese ate them much. ‘We eat them,’ he said, ‘but they are tough and need a lot of cooking – though this one,’ he pointed to the Stichopus I had dredged up, ‘you can eat raw.’ I sank my teeth into it, wondering if he was joking; I found it impossible to get through the leathery integument – it was like trying to eat an old, weathered shoe.[18]

After breakfast, we visited a local family, the Edwards. Entis Edward is achromatopic, as are all three of his children, from a babe in arms, who was squinting in the bright sunlight, to a girl of eleven. His wife, Emma, has normal vision, though she evidently is a carrier of the gene. Entis is well educated, with little command of English but a natural eloquence; he is a minister in the Congregationalist Church and a fisherman, a man well respected in the community. But this, his wife told us, was far from the rule. Most of those born with the maskun never learn to read, because they cannot see the teacher’s writing on the board; they have less chance of marrying – partly because it is recognized that their children are likelier to be affected, partly because they cannot work outdoors in the bright sunlight, as most of the islanders do.[19] Entis was an exception here, on every count, and very conscious of it: ‘I have been lucky,’ he said. ‘It is not easy for the others.’

Apart from the social problems it causes, Entis does not feel his colorblindness a disability, though he is often disabled by his intolerance of bright light and his inability to see fine detail. Knut nodded as he heard this; he had been deeply attentive to everything Entis said, and identified with him in many ways. He took out his monocular to show Entis – the monocular which is almost like a third eye for him, and always hangs round his neck. Entis’ face lit up with delight as, adjusting the focus, he could see, for the first time, boats bobbing on the water, trees on the horizon, the faces of people on the other side of the road, and, focusing right down, the details of the skin whorls on his own fingertips. Impulsively, Knut removed the monocular from around his neck, and presented it to Entis. Entis, clearly moved, said nothing, but his wife went into the house and came out bearing a beautiful necklace she had made, a triple chain of matched cowrie shells, the most precious thing the family had, and this she solemnly presented to Knut, while Entis looked on.

Knut himself was now disabled, without his monocular – ’It is like giving half my eye to him, because it is necessary to my vision’ – but deeply happy. ‘It will make all the difference to him,’ he said. ‘I’ll get another one later.’

The following day we saw James, squinting against the sunlight, watching a group of teenagers playing basketball. As our interpreter and guide, he had seemed cheerful, sociable, knowledgeable, very much part of the community – but now, for the first time, he seemed quiet, wistful, and rather solitary and sad. We got to talking, and more of his story emerged. Life and school had been difficult for him, as for the other achromatopes on Pingelap – unshielded sunlight was literally blinding for him, and he could hardly go out into it without a dark cloth over his eyes. He could not join the rough-and-tumble, the open-air games the other children enjoyed. His acuity was very poor, and he could not see any of the schoolbooks unless he held them three inches from his eyes. Nonetheless he was exceptionally intelligent and resourceful, and he learned to read early, and loved reading, despite this handicap. Like Delihda, he had gone to Pohnpei for further schooling (Pingelap itself has a small elementary school, but no secondary education). Clever, ambitious, aspiring to a larger life, James went on to get a scholarship to the University of Guam, spent five years there, and got a degree in sociology. He had returned to Pingelap full of brave ideas: to help the islanders market their wares more efficiently, to obtain better medical services and child care, to bring electricity and running water into every house, to improve standards of education, to bring a new political consciousness and pride to the island, and to make sure that every islander – the achromatopes especially – would get as a birthright the literacy and education he had had to struggle so hard to achieve.

None of this had panned out – he encountered an enormous inertia and resistance to change, a lack of ambition, a laissez-faire, and gradually he himself had ceased to strive. He could find no job on Pingelap appropriate to his education or talents, because Pingelap, with its subsistence economy, has no jobs, apart from those of the health worker, the magistrate, and a couple of teachers. And now, with his university accent, his new manners and outlook, James no longer completely belonged to the small world he had left, and found himself set apart, an outsider.

We had seen a beautifully patterned that outside the Edwards’ house, and now noticed similar ones everywhere, in front of the traditional thatched houses, and equally the newer ones, made of concrete blocks with corrugated aluminum roofs. The weaving of these mats was a craft unchanged from ‘the time before time,’ James told us; the traditional fibers, made from palm fronds, were still used (although the traditional vegetable dyes had been replaced by an inky blue obtained from surplus carbon paper, for which the islanders otherwise had little need). The island’s finest weaver was a colorblind woman, who had learned the craft from her mother, who was also colorblind. James took us to meet her; she was doing her intricate work inside a hut so dark we could hardly see anything after the bright sunlight. (Knut, on the other hand, took off his double sunglasses and said it was, visually, the most comfortable place he had yet encountered on the island.) As we adapted to the darkness, we began to see her special art of brightnesses, delicate patterns of differing luminances, patterns that all but disappeared as soon as we took one of her mats into the sunlight outside.

Recently, Knut told her, his sister, Britt, to prove it could be done, had knitted a jacket in sixteen different colors. She had devised her own system for keeping track of the skeins of wool, by labelling them with numbers. The jacket had marvellous intricate patterns and images drawn from Norwegian folktales, he said, but since they were done in dim browns and purples, colors without much chromatic contrast, they were almost invisible to normal eyes. Britt, however, responding to luminances only, could see them quite clearly, perhaps even more clearly than color-normals. ‘It is my special, secret art,’ she says. ‘You have to be totally colorblind to see it.’

Later in the day, we went to the island’s dispensary to meet more people with the maskun – almost forty people were there, more than half the achromatopes on the island. We set up in the main room – Bob with his ophthalmoscope, his lenses and acuity tests, and I with a mass of colored yarns and drawings and pens, as well as the standard color-testing kits. Knut had brought along a set of Sloan achromatopsia cards. I had never seen these before, and Knut explained the test to me: ‘Each of these cards has a range of grey squares which vary only in tone, progressing from a very light grey to a very dark grey, almost black, really. Each square has a hole cut out in the center, and if I place a sheet of colored paper behind these – like this – one of the squares will be a match for the color; they will have an equal density.’ He pointed to an orange dot, surrounded by a medium grey background. ‘For me the internal dot and the surround here are exactly the same.’

Such a match would be completely meaningless for a color-normal, for whom no color can ever ‘match’ a grey, and extremely difficult for most – but quite easy and natural for an achromatope, who sees all colors, and all greys, only as differing luminances. Ideally, the test should be administered with a standard source of illumination, but since there was no electricity to run lights on the island, Knut had to use himself as a standard, comparing each achromatope’s responses to his own. In nearly every case, these were the same, or very close.

Medical testing is usually rather private, but here it was very public, and with dozens of youngsters peering in through the windows, or wandering among us as we tested, took on a communal and humorous and almost festive quality.

Bob wanted to check refraction in each person, and to examine their retinas closely – by no means easy, when the eyes are continually jerking with nystagmus. It was not possible, of course, to see the microscopic rods and cones (or lack thereof) directly, but he could find nothing else amiss on inspection with his ophthalmoscope. It had been suggested by some earlier researchers that the maskun was linked with severe myopia; but Bob found that although many of the achromatopes were nearsighted, many were not (Knut himself is rather farsighted) – and he also found that a similar proportion of the island’s color-normals were nearsighted as well. If there were a genetic form of myopia here, Bob felt, it was transmitted independently of the achromatopsia.[20] It was possible as well, he added, that reports of nearsightedness had been exaggerated by earlier researchers who had observed so many of the islanders squinting and bringing small objects closer to view – behaviors which might appear to indicate myopia but actually reflected the intolerance of bright light and poor acuity of the achromatopes.

I asked the achromatopes if they could judge the colors of various yarns, or at least match them one with another. The matching was clearly done on the basis of brightness and not color – thus yellow and pale blue might be grouped with white, or saturated reds and greens with black. I had also brought the Ishihara pseudoisochromatic test plates for ordinary partial colorblindness, which have numbers and figures formed by colored dots, distinguishable only by color (and not luminosity) from the dots surrounding them. Some of the Ishihara plates, paradoxically, cannot be seen by color-normals, but only by achromatopes – these have dots which are identical in hue, but vary slightly in luminance. The older children with the maskun were particularly excited by these – it turned the tables on me, the tester – and they jostled to take their turns pointing out the special numbers that I could not see.

Knut’s presence while we were examining those with maskun, his sharing of his own experiences, was crucial, for it helped remove our questions from the sphere of the inquisitive, the impersonal, and bring us all together as fellow creatures, making it easier for us, finally, to clarify and reassure. For although the lack of color vision in itself did not seem to be a subject of concern, there were many misapprehensions about the maskun – in particular, fears that the disease might be progressive, might lead to complete blindness, might go along with retardation, madness, epilepsy, or heart trouble. Some believed that it could be caused by carelessness during pregnancy, or transmitted through a sort of contagion. Though there was some sense of the fact that the maskun tended to run in certain families, there was little or no knowledge about recessive genes and heredity. Bob and I did our best to stress that the maskun was nonprogressive, affected only certain aspects of vision, and that with a few simple optical aids – dark sunglasses or visors to reduce bright light, and magnifying glasses and monoculars to allow reading and sharp distance vision – someone with the maskun could go through school, live, travel, work, in much the same way as anyone else. But more than words could, Knut himself brought this home, partly by using his own sunglasses and magnifier, partly by the manifest achievement and freedom of his own life.

Outside the dispensary, we began to give out the wraparound sunglasses we had brought, along with hats and visors, with varying results. One mother, with an achromatopic infant squalling and blinking in her arms, took a pair of tiny sunglasses and put them on the baby’s nose, which seemed to calm him, and led to an immediate change in his behavior. No longer blinking and squinting, he opened his eyes wide and began to gaze around with a lively curiosity. One old woman, the oldest achromatope on the island, indignantly refused to try any sunglasses on. She had lived eighty years as she was, she said, and was not about to start wearing sunglasses now. But many of the other achromatopic adults and teenagers evidently liked the sunglasses, wrinkling their noses at the unaccustomed weight of them, but manifestly less disabled by the bright light.

It is said that Wittgenstein was either the easiest or the most difficult of house-guests to accommodate, because though he would eat, with gusto, whatever was served to him on his arrival, he would then want exactly the same for every subsequent meal for the rest of his stay. This is seen as extraordinary, even pathological, by many people – but since I myself am similarly disposed, I see it as perfectly normal. Indeed, having a sort of passion for monotony, I greatly enjoyed the unvarying meals on Pingelap, whereas Knut and Bob longed for variety. Our first meal, the model which was to be repeated three times daily, consisted of taro, bananas, pandanus, breadfruit, yams, and tuna followed by papaya and young coconuts full of milk. Since I am a fish and banana person anyhow, these meals were wholly to my taste.

But we were all revolted by the Spam which appeared with each meal – invariably fried; why, I wondered, should the Pin-gelapese eat this filthy stuff when their own basic diet was both healthy and delicious? Especially when they could hardly afford it, because Pingelap has only the small amount of money it can raise from the export of copra, mats, and pandanus fruits to Pohnpei. I had talked with the unctuous Spam baron on the plane; and now, on Pingelap, I could see the addiction in full force. How was it that not only the Pingelapese, but all the peoples of the Pacific, seemingly, could fall so helplessly, so voraciously, on this stuff, despite its intolerable cost to their budgets and their health? I was not the first to puzzle about this; later, when I came to read Paul Theroux’s book The Happy Isles of Oceania, I found his hypothesis about this universal Spam mania:

So far as I knew, though, there was no tradition of cannibalism on Pingelap.[21]

Whether or not Spam is, as Theroux suggests, a sublimate of cannibalism, it was a relief to visit the taro patch, the ultimate source of food, which covers ten swampy acres in the center of the island. The Pingelapese speak of taro with reverence and affection, and sooner or later everyone takes a turn at working in the communally owned patch. The ground is carefully cleaned of debris, and turned over by hand, and the soil is then planted with shoots about eighteen inches long. The plants grow with extraordinary speed, soon reaching ten feet or more in height, with broad triangular leaves arching overhead. The upkeep of the patch devolves traditionally on the women, working barefoot in the ankle-high mud, and different parts of the patch are tended and harvested by them each day. The deep shade cast by the huge leaves makes it a favorite meeting place, particularly for those with the maskun.

A dozen or more varieties of taro are grown in the patch, and their large, starchy roots range in taste from bitter to sweet. The roots can be eaten fresh, or dried and stored for later use. Taro is the ultimate crop for Pingelap, and there is still a vivid communal memory of how, during typhoon Lengkieki two centuries ago, the taro patch was inundated with salt water and totally destroyed – and that it was this which brought the remaining islanders to starvation.

Coming back from the taro patch, we were approached by an old man in the woods, who came up to us diffidently, but determinedly, and asked if he could get Bob’s advice, as he was going blind. He had clouded eyes, and Bob, examining him later at the dispensary with his ophthalmoscope, confirmed that he had cataracts, but could find nothing else amiss. Surgery could probably help him, he told the old man, and this could be done in the hospital on Pohnpei, with every chance of restoring good vision. The old man gave us a big smile and hugged Bob. When Bob asked Delihda, who coordinates with the visiting nurse from Pohnpei, to put the man’s name down for cataract surgery, she commented that it was a good thing he had approached us. If he had not, she said, he would have been allowed to go completely blind. Medical services in Pingelap are spread very thin, already overstretched by more pressing conditions. Cataracts (like achromatopsia) are a very low priority concern here; and cataract surgery, with the added costs of transport to Pohnpei, is generally considered too expensive to do. So the old man would get treatment, but he would be the exception to the rule.

I counted five churches on Pingelap, all Congregationalist. I had not seen so great a density of churches since being in the little Mennonite community of La Crete in Alberta; here, as there, churchgoing is universal. And when there is not church-going, there is hymn singing and Sunday school.

The spiritual invasion of the island began in earnest in the mid-nineteenth century, and by 1880, the entire population had been converted. But even now, more than five generations later, though Christianity is incorporated into the culture, and fervently embraced in a sense, there is still a reverence and nostalgia for the old ways, rooted in the soil and vegetation, the history and geography, of the island. Wandering through the dense forest at one point, we heard voices singing – voices so high and unexpected and unearthly and pure that I again had a sense of Pingelap as a place of enchantment, another world, an island of spirits. Making our way through the thick undergrowth, we reached a little clearing, where a dozen children stood with their teacher, singing hymns in the morning sun. Or were they singing to the morning sun? The words were Christian, but the setting, the feeling, were mythical and pagan. We kept hearing snatches of song as we walked about the island, usually without seeing the singer or singers – choirs, voices, incorporeal, on the air. They seemed innocent at first, almost angelic, but then to take on an ambiguous, mocking note. If I had thought first of Ariel, I thought now of Caliban; and whenever voices, hallucination-like, filled the air, Pingelap, for me, took on the quality of Prospero’s isle:

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:

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, more 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 engulf 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.

Pohnpei was one of the first of the Carolines to be colonized by humans – Nan Madol is much older than anything to be found on any of the outlying atolls – and with its high terrain, its size, and rich natural resources, it is still the ultimate refuge when disaster strikes the smaller islands. The atolls, smaller, more fragile, are intensely vulnerable to typhoons, droughts, and famines – Oroluk, according to legend, was once a thriving atoll, until most of it washed away in a typhoon; it now consists of a fifth of a square mile.[26] Moreover, all of these islands, with their limited size and resources, are liable sooner or later to reach a Malthusian crisis of overpopulation, which must lead to disaster, unless there can be emigration. Throughout the Pacific, as O’Connell observed, islanders are periodically forced to emigrate, setting out in their canoes, as their ancestors did centuries before, not knowing what they will find, or where they will go, and hoping against hope that they may find a new and benign island to resettle.[27]

But Pohnpei’s satellite atolls are able to turn to the mother island in such times, and thus there are separate enclaves in the town of Kolonia, Pohnpei’s capital, of refugees from other islands – Sapwuahfik, Mwoakil, Oroluk, and even the Mortlock Islands, in the neighboring state of Chuuk. There are two sizeable Pingelapese enclaves on Pohnpei, one in Sokehs province, the other in Kolonia, first established when Pingelap was devastated by the 1905 typhoon, and enlarged by subsequent emigrations. In the 1950s there came yet another emigration from Pingelap, this time in consequence of extreme overcrowding, and a new enclave was established by six hundred Pingelapese in the remote Pohnpeian mountain valley of Mand. Since then the village has burgeoned to a population of more than two thousand Pingelapese – three times the population of Pingelap itself.

Mand is isolated geographically, but even more ethnically and culturally – so that forty years after the original settlers migrated here from Pingelap, their descendants have avoided, largely, any contact or marriage with those outside the village, and have maintained, in effect, an island on an island, as homogenous genetically and culturally as Pingelap itself – and the maskun is, if anything, even more prevalent here than on Pingelap.

The road to Mand is very rough – we had to travel in a jeep, often slowing down to little more than a walking rate – and the journey took more than two hours. Outside Kolonia, we saw occasional houses and thatched sakau pubs, but as we climbed, all signs of habitation disappeared. A separate trail – traversable only by foot or by four-wheel drive – led off from the main road, climbing steeply up to the village itself. As we got higher, the temperature and humidity diminished, a delightful change after the heat of the lowlands.

Though isolated, Mand is a good deal more sophisticated than Pingelap, with electricity, telephones, and access to university-trained teachers. We stopped first at the community center, a spacious, airy building with a large central hall used for village meetings, parties, dances. Here we could spread out our equipment and meet some of the achromatopes of the community, and distribute sunglasses and visors. Here, as on Pingelap, there was a certain amount of formal testing, and we explored the details of daily life in this very different environment, and how much this might be helped with proper visual aids. But, as in Pingelap, it was Knut, quietly open about himself, who could do the deepest, most sympathetic probing and counselling. He spent a good deal of time with the mother of two achromatopic children, five years and eighteen months old, who was deeply anxious that they might go completely blind – fearful too that their eye condition might have been her fault, that it was something she had done during pregnancy. Knut did his best to explain to her the mechanisms of heredity, to reassure her that her daughters would not go blind, that there was nothing wrong with her as a wife or a mother, that the maskun was not necessarily a barrier to receiving an education and holding a job, and that with the proper optical aids and eye protection, the proper understanding, her daughters could do as well as any other child. But it was only when he made clear that he himself had the maskun – she suddenly stared at him in a new way at this point – that his words seemed to take on a solid reality for her.[28]

We moved on to the school, where a busy day was in progress. There were twenty or thirty children in each class, and, in each, two or three were colorblind. There were a number of excellent, well-trained teachers here, and the level of education, sophistication, was clearly far better than on Pingelap; some of the classes were in English, others in Pohnpeian or Pingelapese. In one class of teenagers, we sat in on a lesson in astronomy – this included pictures of earthrise from the moon and close-ups of the planets from the Hubble space telescope. But admixed with the latest astronomy and geology, the secular history of the world, a mythical or sacred history was given equal force. If the students were taught about shuttle flights, plate tectonics and submarine volcanoes, they were also immersed in the traditional myths of their culture – the ancient story, for example, of how the island of Pohnpei had been built under the direction of a mystical octopus, Lidakika. (I was fascinated by this, for it was the only cephalopod creation myth I had ever heard.)

Watching two little achromatopic girls doing their arithmetic lessons with their noses virtually touching the pages of the book, Knut was reminded powerfully of his own school days, before he had any optical aids. He pulled out his pocket magnifying loupe to show them – but it is not easy, unpracticed, to use a high-power magnifying glass to read with.

We stayed longest in a class of five- and six-year-olds, who were just learning to read. There were three achromatopic children in this class – they had not been placed, as they should have been, in the front row; and it was immediately apparent that they could not see the letters on the blackboard where the teacher was printing, which the other children could see easily. ‘What’s this word?’ the teacher would ask – everyone’s hands would shoot up, including the achromatopes’, and when another child gave the answer, they echoed it in unison. If they were asked first, though, they could not answer – they were just imitating the other children, pretending to know. But the achromatopic children seemed to have developed very acute auditory and factual memories, precisely as Knut had developed in his own childhood:

The achromatopic children were oddly knowledgeable too about the colors of people’s clothing, and various objects around them – and often seemed to know what colors ‘went’ with what. Here again Knut was reminded of his own childhood strategies:

Thus we could already observe in these achromatopic children in Mand how a sort of theoretical knowledge and know-how, a compensatory hypertrophy of curiosity and memory, were rapidly developing in reaction to their perceptual problems. They were learning to compensate cognitively for what they could not directly perceive or comprehend.[29]

‘I know that colors carry importance for other people,’ Knut said later. ‘So I will use color names when necessary to communicate with them. But the colors as such carry no meaning for me. As a kid, I used to think that it would be nice to see colors, because then I would be able to have a driver’s license and to do things that people with normal color vision can do. And if there were some way of acquiring color vision, I suppose it might open a new world, as if one were tone deaf and suddenly became able to hear melodies. It would probably be a very interesting thing, but it would also be very confusing. Color is something you have to grow up with, to mature with – your brain, the whole system, the way you react to the world. Bringing in color as a sort of add-on later in life would be overwhelming, a lot of information I might not be able to cope with. It would give new qualities to everything that might throw me off completely. Or maybe color would be disappointing, not what I expected – who knows?’[30]

We met Jacob Robert, an achromatope who works at the school, in charge of ordering books and supplies. He was born in Pingelap, but emigrated to Mand in 1958 to finish high school. In 1969, he told us, he had been flown, with Entis Edward and a few others, to the National Institutes of Health in Washington for special genetic studies associated with achromatopsia – this was his first glimpse of life outside Micronesia. He was particularly intrigued, when he was there, to hear about the island of Fuur, in Denmark. He had not known there were any other islands of the colorblind in the world, and when he returned to Pohnpei, his fellow achromatopes were fascinated too. ‘It made us feel less alone,’ he said. ‘It made us feel we had brothers somewhere in the big world.’ It also started a new myth, that there was ‘a place in Finland, which gave us the achromatopsia.’ When we had heard this myth in Pingelap, we had assumed it was a new one, generated by Knut’s presence; now, as we listened to Jacob, and how he had brought back news of a place in the far north with the maskun, it became evident that the myth had arisen twenty-five years earlier and, perhaps now half forgotten, had been reanimated, given a new form and force, with Knut’s arrival.

He was intrigued to hear the story of Knut’s own childhood in Norway, so similar in many ways to his – and yet different, too. Jacob had grown up surrounded by others with the maskun and by a culture which recognized this; most achromatopes around the world grow up in complete isolation, never knowing (or even knowing of) another of their kind. Yet Knut and his brother and sister, by a rare genetic chance, had each other – they lived on an island, a colorblind island, of three.

The three of them, as adults, all achromatopic, all highly gifted, have reacted and adapted to their achromatopsia in very different ways. Knut was the firstborn, and his achromatopsia was diagnosed before he started school – but it was felt that he would never be able to see well enough to learn to read, and recommended that he (and his siblings, later) be sent to the local school for the blind. Knut rebelled at being regarded as disabled, and refused to learn Braille by touch, instead using his sight to read the raised dots, which cast tiny shadows on the page. He was severely punished for this and forced to wear a blindfold in classes. Soon after, Knut ran away from the school, but, determined to read normal print, taught himself to read at home. Finally, having convinced the school administrators that he would never make a willing student, Knut was allowed to return to regular school.

Knut’s sister, Britt, dealt with her loneliness and isolation as a child by identifying with, becoming a member of, the blind community. She flourished at the school for the blind as much as Knut hated it, becoming fluent in Braille; and she has spent her professional life as an intermediary between the blind and sighted worlds, supervising the transcription and production of books into Braille at the Norwegian Library for the Blind. Like Knut, Britt is intensely musical and auditory and loves to close her eyes and surrender herself to the nonvisual domain of music; but equally, she relaxes by doing needlework, using a jeweller’s loupe attached to her glasses, to keep her hands free.

It was now three in the afternoon – time to set back for Kolo-nia – and despite our altitude, burningly hot. While Knut sat under a shade tree to cool off, Bob and I decided to dive into the beautifully clear stream which ran nearby. Finding a flat rock under the surface, shaded by ferns, I clung onto this and let the cool waters stream over me. Downstream, a quarter of a mile or so, some of the women were washing dark, heavy clothes – the formal Sunday wear of Mand.

Refreshed by our swim, Bob and I decided to walk down the trail from the village; the others would meet us at the road below in the jeep. In the afternoon light, we were dazzled by the brilliance of oranges hanging in the trees – they seemed almost alight in the dark green foliage, like Marvell’s oranges in his poem ‘Bermudas’:

I felt a sudden sadness that Knut, that the achromatopes around us, could not share this startling Marvellian vision.

We had gone a couple of hundred yards when we were overtaken by a twelve-year-old boy running at top speed, fearlessly, looking like a young knight with his new sun visor. He had been squinting, looking down, avoiding the light when we saw him earlier, but now he was running in broad daylight, confidently making his way down the steep trail. He pointed to the dark visor and gave a big smile. ‘I can see, I can see!’ and then he added, ‘Come back soon!’

Dusk descended as we drove back slowly to Kolonia, and we began to see occasional bats, then great numbers of them, rising from the trees, taking off on their nighttime forays, emitting shrill cries (and doubtless sonar too). Bats are often the only mammals that manage to make it to distant islands (they were the only mammals on Pohnpei and Guam, until rats and others were introduced from sailing ships), and one feels they ought to be more respected, more loved, than they are. They are considered fancy eating on Guam, and exported by the thousand to the Marianas. But they are an essential part of the island’s ecology, eating many types of fruit and distributing the seeds, and one hopes their delicious taste does not lead to their extinction.

Greg Dever, director of the Pacific Basin Medical Officers Training Program in Kolonia, has a brusque surface, but underneath this is deeply romantic and dedicated to his work. He had gone to Palau as a young man in the Peace Corps, and had been shocked at what he saw – a fearful incidence of treatable diseases, combined with a drastic shortage of doctors – and this decided him on a career in medicine, so that he could return to Micronesia as a doctor. He trained as a pediatrician at the University of Hawaii and moved to the Carolines fifteen years ago. Here on Pohnpei he has established a small hospital, a clinic and outreach service stretching to the outlying atolls, and a medical program aimed at training indigenous students from all the archipelagoes, in the hope that when they graduate as doctors they will stay and practice and teach in the islands (although some, now that their degrees are accepted in the States, have gone on to more lucrative careers on the mainland).[31]

He had asked us, as visiting scientists, to give a presentation on the maskun. We felt odd, as visitors, talking to these doctors, mostly native, about problems they themselves presumably had lived with and knew intimately. Yet we thought that our very naivete, coming at the subject from another angle, might have some value for the audience – and we hoped we might learn more from them as well. But it became increasingly clear – as Bob spoke about the genetics and the retinal basis of the maskun; I about adapting neurologically to such a condition; and Knut about the challenges of actually living with it – that many of those in the audience had never actually encountered the maskun. We found this extraordinary. Even though there are half a dozen papers in the scientific literature on the maskun, here in the capital of achromatopsia there was almost no local medical awareness of the problem.

One reason for this, perhaps, had to do with the simple act of recognizing and naming the phenomenon. Everyone with the maskun has behaviors and strategies which are obvious once one is attuned to them: the squinting, the blinking, the avoidance of bright light. It was these which allowed an instant mutual recognition between Knut and the affected children the moment he landed on Pingelap. But before one has assigned a meaning to these behaviors, categorized them, one may just overlook them.

And there is also a medical attitude, enforced by necessity, which militates against proper recognition of the maskun. Greg and many others have worked incessantly to train good doctors in under-doctored Micronesia. But their hands are constantly full with critical conditions demanding immediate attention. Amebiasis and other parasitic infections are rife (there were four patients with amebic liver abscesses in the hospital while we were there). There are constant outbreaks of measles and other infectious diseases, partly because there are not enough resources to vaccinate the children. Tuberculosis is endemic in the islands, as leprosy once was.[32] Widespread chronic vitamin-A deficiency, probably linked to the shift to a Western diet, can cause severe ear and eye problems (including night blindness), lower resistance to infection, and lead to potentially fatal malabsorption syndromes. Though almost every form of venereal disease is seen, AIDS has not yet appeared in this remote place, but Greg worries about the inevitable: ‘All hell will break loose when we get AIDS,’ he said. ‘We just don’t have the manpower or the resources to deal with it.’

This is the stuff of medicine, the acute medicine which must be the first priority in the islands. There is little time or energy left over for something like the maskun, a congenital, nonprogressive condition which one can live with. There is no time for an existential medicine which enquires into what it might mean to be blind or colorblind or deaf, how those affected might react and adapt, how they might be helped – technologically, psychologically, culturally – to lead fuller lives. ‘You are lucky,’ said Greg. ‘You have the time. We’re too harried here, we don’t have the time.’

But the unawareness of achromatopsia is not limited to medical professionals. The Pingelapese of Pohnpei tend to stay among their own, and the achromatopes among them – who often stay inside, out of the bright light and out of sight, for much of the day – form an inconspicuous and almost invisible enclave within the Pingelapese enclave itself, a minority within a minority. Many people on Pohnpei do not know of their existence.

Kolonia is the only major town on Pohnpei, situated on the north coast next to a wide harbor. It has a charming, indolent, run-down feel. There are no traffic lights in Kolonia, no neon signs, no cinemas – only a shop or two, and, everywhere, sakau bars. As we walked along the middle of the main street, almost deserted at noontime, looking in at the sleepy souvenir shops and scuba shops on either side, we were struck by its nonchalant, dilapidated air. The main street has no name, none of the streets now have names; Kolonians no longer remember, or are anxious to forget, the street names imposed by successive occupations and have gone back to talking of them, as in precolonial days, as ‘the street by the waterfront’ or ‘the road to Sokehs.’ The town seemed to have no center, and what with this, and the nameless streets, we kept getting lost. There were a few cars on the road, but they moved extraordinarily slowly, at a walking pace or slower, stopping every few yards for dogs which were lying in the road. It was difficult to believe that this lethargic place was in fact the capital not only of Pohnpei, but of the Federated States of Micronesia.

And yet, here and there, rising incongruously above tin-roofed shanties, were the bulky cinderblock buildings of the government and the hospital, and a satellite dish so vast that it brought to mind the huge radio telescopes in Arecibo. I was amazed to see this – were the Pohnpeians searching for life in outer space? The explanation, more mundane, was still in its way rather astonishing. The satellite dish is part of a modern telecommunications system: the mountainous terrain and bad roads had prevented the installation of a telephone system until a few years ago; now the satellite system allows instant, crystal-clear conversations between the most isolated parts of the island, and gives Pohnpei access to the Internet as well, a page on the World Wide Web. In this sense, Kolonia has skipped the twentieth century and moved direct, without the usual intermediate stages, to the twenty-first.

As we explored further, we also got the feeling of Kolonia as an archeological site or palimpsest composed of many strata, many cultures superimposed one upon another. There were signs of American influence everywhere (perhaps one saw this most in the Ambrose supermarket, where tins of cuttlefish in their own ink sat next to entire aisles devoted to Spam and other tinned meats); but beneath this, more faintly, those of the Japanese, the German, and the Spanish occupations, all superimposed upon the original harbor and village, which the Pohn-peians, in O’Connell’s day, had called Mesenieng, ‘the eye of the wind,’ a magical and sacred place.

We tried to imagine what the town had been like in the 1850s, a couple of decades after O’Connell landed here. Then too it had been a roistering town, for Pohnpei had become a favorite stopping place for British vessels plying the trade routes to China and Australia and, a little later, for American whalers. The attractions of Pohnpei, allied to the brutalities and hardships of shipboard life (which had caused Melville to jump ship in the 1840s), incited frequent desertions, and the island rapidly acquired a colorful assortment of ‘beachcombers,’ to use the contemporary term.[33] The beachcombers brought with them tobacco, alcohol, and firearms; and fights, inflamed by liquor, would end, as often as not, in gunfire. Thus the atmosphere, by the 1850s, was that of a frontier town, not unlike Copperopolis or Amarillo, full of high living and adventure (for the beachcombers, not the Pohnpeians), but also of violence, prostitution, exploitation, crime. With these outsiders descending on an immunologically naive population, disaster, in the form of infectious disease, could not be long in coming. Half the population was wiped out by smallpox in 1854 following the arrival of the American whaler Delta, which landed six infected men on the island; and this was soon followed by epidemics of influenza and measles.[34] Barely a seventh of the population was left by the 1880s, and they might not have survived had it not been for the Scottish, English, and American missionaries who had started to come thirty years earlier, determined to bring morality to Pohnpei, turf out the beachcombers, stop sex and crime, and bring medical and spiritual aid to the beleaguered people of the island.

If the missionaries succeeded in saving Pohnpei physically (it was not totally destroyed, like Melville’s valley of the Typee), it may have been at another, spiritual cost. The traders and beachcombers had seen Pohnpei as a rich prize to plunder and exploit; the missionaries saw it as a prize too: an island of simple heathen souls waiting to be converted and claimed for Christ and country. By 1880 there were fourteen churches on Pohnpei, dispensing an alien mythology, morality, and set of beliefs to hundreds of converts, including several of the local chiefs; missionaries had been sent to Pingelap and Mwoakil as well. And yet, as with the Marranos in Spain, the old religion was not so easily denied; and beneath the veneer of an almost universal conversion, many of the old rites, the old beliefs, remained.

While beachcombers and missionaries were fighting it out, Germany had been quietly building an empire in the Carolines, based especially on the marketing of coconut meat, copra; and in 1885 she laid claim to Pohnpei and all the Carolines – a claim which was immediately contested by Spain. When papal arbitration awarded the Carolines to Spain, Germany withdrew, and a brief period of Spanish hegemony began. The Spanish presence was passionately resented, and there were periodic rebellions, quickly suppressed. The colonists fortified their district of Mesenieng (now renamed La Colonia), surrounding themselves with a high stone wall, which by 1890 encircled much of the town. A good part of the old wall survives today (though much of it was destroyed by later colonists and by Allied bombing in 1944); this, along with the bell tower of the old Catholic church, gave us some sense of La Colonia as it must have been a century ago.

Spanish rule in the Carolines was ended by the Spanish-American War, and the whole of Micronesia was sold to Germany for four million dollars (apart from Guam, which remained in American hands). Determined to mold Pohnpei into a profitable colony, the Germans instituted large agricultural schemes, uprooting acres of native flora to plant coconut trees and employing forced labor to build roads and public works. German administrators moved into the town, which they now renamed Kolonia.

A blow-up finally occurred in 1910, when the resentful people of Sokehs province gunned down the tyrannical new German district administrator and his assistant, along with two of their overseers. Reprisals were swift in coming: the entire population of Sokehs had its land confiscated, many were killed or exiled to other islands, the young men being sent to labor in the phosphate mines of Nauru, from which they returned, if at all, broken and destitute, a decade later. We were intensely conscious, wherever we walked, of Sokehs Rock – it looms massively to the northwest and forces itself upon the eye at every point in Kolonia – a reminder of the brutal German occupation and the hopeless uprising of the rebels, whose mass grave, we were told, lay just outside town.

We found oddly few reminders of the Japanese occupation, though of all the occupations, this most transformed Kolonia. It was difficult to visualize, as we wandered through the rundown, slow-paced town, the bustling place it had been in the 1930s, in the heyday of the Japanese occupation. Its population then had been swelled by ten thousand Japanese immigrants, and it was a thriving business and cultural center, full of commerce and recreation (including, I read, some twenty restaurants, fifteen dispensers of Japanese medicines, and nine brothels). The Pohnpeians themselves enjoyed little of these riches, and indeed were strictly segregated, with contact between Pohn-peian men and Japanese women totally prohibited.

The mark of occupation, of desecration, of conversion and exploitation, has been imprinted not only on the place, but on the identities of those who live here. There is another Colonia a few hundred miles away, on the island of Yap – there are Colonias and Kolonias all over Micronesia – and one elderly citizen there, when questioned by E.J. Kahn some years ago, said: ‘You know, we’ve learned in our day to be Spanish, and we’ve learned to be German, and we’ve learned to be Japanese, and now we’re learning to be American – what should we be preparing to learn to be next?’

The following day we set off for the rain forest with a botanist friend of Greg’s, Bill Raynor, and he brought along two Pohnpeian colleagues: Joakim, a medicine man, deeply knowledgeable about the native plants and their traditional uses, and Valentine, an expert on location, who seemed to know every inch of the island, where every plant was to be found, its favorite conditions, its relationship to all the other inhabitants of the ecosystem. Both men seemed to be born naturalists; in the West, they might have become doctors or botanists.[35] But here their powers had been molded by a different tradition – more concrete, less theoretical than ours, so that their knowledge was intimately bound up with the bodily and mental and spiritual balance of their people, with magic and myth, the sense that man and his environment were not separable, were one.

Bill himself came to Pohnpei as a volunteer Jesuit missionary, prepared to teach the natives about agricultural management and plant conservation. He had arrived with a sort of arrogance, he told me, flushed with the hubris of Western science, and then had been astonished, humbled, by finding in the local medicine men a vastly detailed and systematic knowledge of the plants on the island – they recognized dozens of different ecosystems, from the mangrove swamps and seagrass beds to the dwarf forests at the summit. Every plant on the island, Bill said, was considered significant and sacred; the vast majority were seen as therapeutic. Much of this he had discounted as mere superstition when he came to Pohnpei, but now he was more inclined to think in anthropological terms, and to see what he had first called ‘superstition’ as a highly developed ‘concrete science’ (in Levi-Strauss’ term), an immense system of knowledge and principles wholly different from his own.

Having come to teach, he found himself instead listening and learning, and after a while started to form fraternal or collegial relationships with the medicine men, so that their complementary knowledge and skills and attitudes could be joined. Such a working together is essential, he feels, the more so as Pohnpei is still formally owned by the nahnmwarkis, and without their willing cooperation, nothing can be done. In particular, he believes, a comprehensive investigation of all the plants in Pohnpei is needed to see whether any have unique pharmacological properties – and it is urgent to do so now, before the plants themselves, and knowledge about them, become extinct.

It has been similar, in a way, in the matter of religion. Arriving as a missionary with a firm conviction of the primacy of Christianity, Bill was struck (as many of his fellow missionaries have been) by the moral clarity of those he came to convert. He fell in love with and married a Pohnpeian woman, and has a whole clan now of Pohnpeian in-laws, as well as a fluent command of the language. He has lived here for sixteen years, and plans to remain for the rest of his life.[36]

Islands were thought, in the eighteenth century, to be broken-off pieces of continent, or perhaps the peaks of submerged continents (and thus, in a sense, not islands at all but continuous with the main). The realization that for oceanic islands, at least, no such continuity existed – that they had risen as volcanoes from the depths of the ocean floor, and had never been part of the main, that they were insulae, insulated, in the most literal sense – was largely due to Darwin and Wallace and their observations of island fauna and flora. Volcanic islands, they made clear, had to start from scratch; every living creature on them had to make its way or be transported to them.[37] Thus, as Darwin noted, they often lacked entire classes of animals, such as mammals and amphibians; this was certainly true of Pohnpei, where there were no native mammals, other than a few species of bats.[38] The flora of oceanic islands was also quite restricted, compared to that of continents – though, because of the relatively ready dispersal of seeds and spores, not nearly to such a degree. Thus a considerable range of plants had made it to Pohnpei, and settled and survived, in the five million years that it had existed, and though the rain forest was not as rich as the Amazon’s, it was, nonetheless, quite remarkable – and no less sublime. But it was a rain forest of a peculiar sort, because many of the plants here occurred nowhere else in the world.

Bill brought this out, as we made our way through the dense vegetation: ‘Pohnpeians recognize and name about seven hundred different native plants, and, interestingly, these are the same seven hundred that a Western botanist would pick out as separate species.’ Of these, he said, about a hundred species were endemic – they had evolved on Pohnpei, and were unique to the island.[39] This was often stressed in the species names: thus there were Garcinia ponapensis, Clinostigma ponapensis, Freycinetia ponapensis, and Astronidium ponapense, as well as Ga-leolaponapensis, a native orchid.

Pohnpei’s sister island, Kosrae, is a very beautiful and geologically similar high volcanic island, little more than three hundred miles away. You might expect Kosrae to have much the same flora as Pohnpei, said Bill, and many species are of course common to both. But Kosrae has its own endemic plants, unique to it, like Pohnpei. Though both islands are young in geological terms – Pohnpei is perhaps five million years old and Kosrae, much steeper, only two million – their flora have already diverged quite widely. The same roles, the same eco-niches, are filled with different species. Darwin had been ‘struck with wonder,’ in the Galapagos, at the occurrence of unique yet analogous forms of life on contiguous islands; indeed this seemed to him, when he looked back on his voyage, the most central of all his observations, a clue to ‘that great fact – that mystery of mysteries – the first appearance of new beings on this earth.’

Bill pointed out a tree fern, Cyathea nigricans, with its massive trunk, twice my height, and a crown of long fronds overhead, some of them still unfurling in hairy croziers or fiddleheads. Another tree fern, Cyathea ponapeana, was now rather rare and grew only in the cloud forest, he added, but despite its name, it was not completely endemic, for it had also been found on Kosrae [Cyathea nigricans, similarly, had been found on both Pohnpei and Palau). The tree fern’s wood is prized for its strength, Joakim said, and used to build houses. Another giant fern, Angiopteris evecta, spread low to the ground, with twelve-foot fronds arching, tentlike, from its short stubby base; and there were bird’s-nest ferns four feet or more in diameter, clinging high up to the tops of trees – a sight which reminded me of the magical forests of Australia. ‘People take these bird’s-nest ferns from the forest,’ Valentine interjected, ‘and reattach them so they can grow, epiphytically, on pepper plants, sakau – the two of them together, tehlik and sakau, are a most prized gift.’

At the other extreme, Bill pointed out delicate club mosses sprouting on the base of a bird’s-nest fern – an epiphyte growing upon an epiphyte. These too, Joakim said, were traditional medicine (in my medical student days we used their spores, ly-copodium powder, on rubber gloves – though it was subsequently found to be an irritant and carcinogen). But the strangest, perhaps – Bill had to search hard to find one – was a most delicate, iridescent, bluish-green filmy fern, Trichomanes. ‘It is said to be fluorescent,’ he added. ‘It grows chiefly near the summit of the island, on the trunks of the moss-covered trees in the dwarf forest. The same name, didimwerek, is used for luminous fish.’[40]

Here is a native palm, Clinostigmaponapensis, Bill said – not so common here, but plentiful in the upland palm forests, where it is the dominant plant. Valentine told us the ancient story of how this palm, the kotop, had protected Pohnpei from invading warriors from Kosrae – seeing the hundreds of palms with their light-colored flowering stalks on the mountainside, the invaders had mistaken these for men’s skirts made from hibiscus bark. Thinking the island must be heavily defended, they withdrew. So the kotop saved Pohnpei, as the geese saved Rome.

Bill pointed out a dozen different trees used in making canoes. ‘This is the traditional one; the Pohnpeians call it dohng…but if lightness and size are desired, they use this one, sadak.’

The sadak tree he pointed out was more than a hundred feet high. There were many wonderful smells in the forest, from cinnamon trees with their aromatic bark, to native koahnpwil trees with their powerful, resinous sap – these were unique to the island and useful, Joakim said, for stopping menstrual bleeding or dysentery and also to kindle fires.

The drizzling rain in which we had started had steadily mounted in intensity, and our path was rapidly becoming a stream of mud, so, reluctantly, we had to return. Bill commented on the many streams which traced down through the forest to the gully. ‘They used to be absolutely clear and transparent,’ he said. ‘Now look at them – turbid and brown.’ This was due, he said, to people clearing forest on the steep hills – illicitly, as this is a state preserve – to grow their own sakau. Once the trees and vines are cleared, the soil on the hills begins to crumble, and washes down into the streams. ‘I am all for sakau,’ said Bill. ‘I revere it…you could call it one of the moral vines which hold us together – but it is madness to uproot the forest to grow it.’

There is no sakau in Pingelap; like alcohol, it is forbidden by the Congregationalist Church. But in Pohnpei, the drinking of sakau, once reserved only for those of royal blood, has now become virtually universal (indeed I wondered whether it was partly responsible for the lethargic pace of life here); the Catholic Church, more accommodating than the Congregationalist, accepts it as a legitimate form of sacrament.[41] We had seen sakau bars in town and thatched, open-air bars all over the countryside – circular, or semicircular, with a great metate, or grinding stone (which the Pohnpeians call a peitehl) in the center, and we remained eager to try some ourselves.

We had been invited by a local physician and colleague of Greg’s, May Okahiro, to experience a traditional sakau ceremony that evening. It was a cloudless evening, and we got to her house at sunset, and settled into chairs on her deck, overlooking the Pacific. Three Pohnpeian men, wiry and muscular, arrived, carrying pepper roots and a sheaf of slimy inner bark from a hibiscus plant – a large peitehl awaited them in the courtyard. They chopped the roots into little pieces, and then started pounding those with heavy stones, in an intricate, syncopated rhythm like the one we heard across the water on our return from Nan Madol, a sound at once attention holding and hypnotic, because, like a river, it was both monotonous and ever changing. Then one man got up, went to get fresh water, and poured this in, a little at a time, to wet the pulpy mass in the metate, while his companions continued their complex, iridescent rhythm.

The roots were all macerated now, their lactones emulsified; the pulp was placed on the sinewy, glistening hibiscus bark, which was twisted around it to form a long, closely wound roll. The roll was wrung tighter and tighter, and the sakau exuded, viscous, reluctant, at its margins. This liquid was collected carefully in a coconut shell, and I was offered the first cup. Its appearance was nauseating – grey, slimy, turbid – but thinking of its spiritual effects, I emptied the cup. It went down easily, like an oyster, numbing my lips slightly as it did so.

More sakau was squeezed out of the hibiscus sheath, and a second cup of fluid obtained – it was offered to Knut, who took it in the proper way, hands crossed, palms up, and then quaffed it down. The cup, emptied and refilled half a dozen times, went to each person, according to a strict order of precedence. By the time it came back to me, the sakau was thinner. I was not wholly sorry, for a sense of such ease, such relaxation, had come on me that I felt I could not stand, I had to sink into a chair. Similar symptoms seemed to have seized my companions – but such effects were expected, and there were chairs for us all.

The evening star was high above the horizon, brilliant against the near-violet backdrop of the night. Knut, next to me, was looking upward as well, and pointed out the polestar, Vega, Arc-turus, overhead. ‘These are the stars the Polynesians used,’ said Bob, ‘when they sailed in their proas across the firmament of space.’ A sense of their voyages, five thousand years of voyaging, rose up like a vision as he talked. I felt a sense of their history, all history, converging on us now, as we sat facing the ocean under the night sky. Pohnpei itself felt like a ship – May’s house looked like a giant lantern, and the rocky prominence we were on like the prow of the ship. ‘What good chaps they are!’ I thought, eyeing the others. ‘God’s in his heaven and all’s well with the world!’

Startled at this unctuous, mellifluous flow of thought – so far from my usual anxious, querulous frame of mind – I realized my face was set in a mild, vapid smile; and looking at my companions, I could see the same smile had them too. Only then did I realize that we were all stoned; but sweetly, mildly, so that one felt, so to speak, more nearly oneself.

I gazed at the sky once again, and suddenly a strange reversal or illusion occurred, so that instead of seeing the stars in the sky, I saw the sky, the night sky, hanging on the stars, and felt I was actually seeing Joyce’s vision of ‘the heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.’[42] And then, a second later, it was ‘normal’ again. Something odd was going on in my visual cortex, I decided, a perceptual shift, a reversal of foreground and background – or was this a shift at a higher level, a conceptual or metaphoric one? Now the sky seemed full of shooting stars – this, I assumed, was an effervescence in my cortex, and then Bob said, ‘Look – shooting stars!’ Reality, metaphor, illusion, hallucination, seemed to be dissolving, merging into one another.

I tried to get up, but found I could not. There had been a gradually deepening numbness in my body, starting as a tingling and numbness in my mouth and lips, and now I no longer knew where my limbs were, or how I could get them to move. After a momentary alarm, I yielded to the feeling – a feeling which, uncomprehended, was frightening uncontrol, but which, now accepted, was delicious, floating, levitation. ‘Excellent!’ I thought, the neurologist in me aroused. ‘I have read of this, and now I’m experiencing it. Lack of light touch, lack of proprioception – this must be what de-afferentation feels like.’ My companions, I saw, were all lying motionless in their chairs, levitating too, or perhaps asleep.

All of us, indeed, slept deeply and dreamlessly that night, and the next morning awoke crystal clear, refreshed. Clear, at least, cognitively and emotionally – though my eyes were still playing tricks, lingering effects, I presumed, of the sakau. I got up early and recorded these in my notebook:

These effects continue at breakfast, which I share with Knut.[43] A plate of bread, but the bread is pale grey. Stiff, shining, as if smeared with paint, or the thick, shiny, grey sludge of the sakau. Then, deliriously, liqueur chocolates – pentagonal, hexagonal, like the columns at Nan Madol. Ghost petals ray out from a flower on our table, like a halo around it; when it is moved, I observe, it leaves a slight train, a visual smear, reddish, in its wake. Watching a palm waving, I see a succession of stills, like a film run too slow, its continuity no longer maintained. And now, isolated images, scenes, project themselves on the table before me: our first moment on Pingelap, with dozens of laughing children running out of the forest; the great floodlit hoop of the fisherman’s net, with a flying fish struggling, iridescent, inside it; the boy from Mand, running down the hill, visored, like a young knight, shouting, ‘I can see, I can see.’ And then, silhouetted against the heaventree of stars, three men round a peitehl, pounding sakau.

That evening we all packed up, sad to be leaving these islands. Bob would be returning directly to New York, and Knut heading back, by stages, to Norway. Bob and I had seen Knut at first as a charming, scholarly, slightly reserved colleague – an expert on, and exemplar of, a rare visual condition. Now, after our few weeks together, we saw all sorts of other dimensions: his omnivorous curiosity and sometimes unexpected passions (he was an expert on trams and narrow-gauge railways and was full of recondite knowledge on these), his sense of humor and adventure, his cheerful adaptability. Having seen the difficulties which attend achromatopsia, especially in this climate – above all the sensitivity to light and inability to see fine detail – we had a renewed appreciation of Knut’s determination, his boldness in making his way around new places, his openness to every situation despite his poor sight (perhaps indeed his resourcefulness and unerring sense of direction had been heightened in compensation for this). Reluctant to say goodbye, the three of us stayed up half the night, finishing off a bottle of gin which Greg had given us. Knut took out the cowrie necklace which Emma Edward had given him on Pingelap and, turning it over and over in his hands, started to reminisce about the trip. ‘To see an entire community of achromats has changed my entire perspective,’ he said. ‘I am still reeling from all of these experiences. This has been the most exciting and interesting journey I will ever make in my life.’

When I asked him what stayed in his mind above all, he said, ‘The night fishing in Pingelap…that was fantastic.’ And then, in a sort of dreamlike litany, ‘The cloudscapes on the horizon, the clear sky, the decreasing light and deepening darkness, the nearly luminous surf at the coral reefs, the spectacular stars and Milky Way, and the shining flying fishes soaring over the water in the light from the torches.’ With an effort he pulled himself back from the night fishing, though not before adding, ‘I would have no trouble at all tracking and netting the fish – maybe I’m a born night fisher myself!’

But was Pingelap an island of the colorblind after all, an island of the Wellsian sort I had fantasied or hoped for? Such a place, in the full sense, would have to consist of achromatopes only, and to have been cut off from the rest of the world for generations. This was manifestly not the case with the island of Pingelap or the Pingelapese ghetto of Mand, where the achro-matopes were diffused amid a larger population of color-normals.[44]

Yet there was an obvious kinship – not just familial, but perceptual, cognitive – among the achromatopes we met on Pingelap and Pohnpei. There was an immediate understanding and sharing between them, a commonality of language and perception, which instantly extended to Knut as well. And everyone on Pingelap, colorblind or color-normal, knows about the maskun, knows that it is not only colorblindness that those affected must live with, but a painful intolerance of bright light and inability to see fine detail. When a Pingelapese baby starts to squint and turn away from the light, there is at least a cultural knowledge of his perceptual world, his special needs and strengths, even a mythology to explain it. In this sense, then, Pingelap is an island of the colorblind. No one born here with the maskun finds himself wholly isolated or misunderstood, which is the almost universal lot of people with congenital achromatopsia elsewhere in the world.

Knut and I each stopped in Berkeley, separately, on our way back from Pohnpei, to visit our achromatopic correspondent, Frances Futterman, and tell her what we had found on the island of the colorblind. She and Knut were especially excited to meet one another finally; Knut told me later that it was ‘an unforgettable and very stimulating experience – we had so much to talk about and so much to share with each other that we talked incessantly like excited children for several hours.’

Like many achromatopes in our society, Frances grew up with a severe degree of disability, for although her condition was diagnosed relatively early, good visual aids were not available to her, and she was forced to remain indoors as much as possible, avoiding any situation with bright light. She had to contend with a great deal of misunderstanding, and isolation, from her peers. And perhaps most important, she had no contact with others of her kind, with anyone who could share and understand her experience of the world.

Did such isolation have to exist? Could there not be a sort of community of achromatopes who (even though geographically separated) were bound together by commonalities of experience, of knowledge, of sensibility, of perspective? Was it possible that even if there was no actual island of the colorblind, there might be a conceptual or metaphoric one? This was the vision which haunted Frances Futterman and inspired her, in 1993, to start an Achromatopsia Network, publishing monthly newsletters so that achromatopes all over the country – and potentially all over the world – could find each other, communicate, share their thoughts and experiences.

Her network and newsletter – and now a Web site on the Internet – have indeed been very successful, have done much to annul geographical distance and apartness. There are hundreds of members spread around the world – in New Zealand, Wales, Saudi Arabia, Canada, and now in Pohnpei too – and Frances is in contact with them all, by phone, fax, mail, Internet. Perhaps this new network, this island in cyberspace, is the true Island of the Colorblind.