by Oliver Sacks
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 an
other 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 R
ome.
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.
