1996 - The Island of the Colorblind

by Oliver Sacks

  Similar considerations apply to ‘arrowroot,’ which, properly speaking, is obtained from the rootstock of the arrowroot, Maranta, but is also extracted from other plants, including the cycad Zamia. The Seminole Indians in Florida had long made use of the Zamia (or koonti) which grew wild there, and in the 1880s a substantial industry was set up, producing twenty tons or more of ‘Florida arrowroot’ annually, for use in infant foods, biscuits, chocolates, and spaghetti. The industry closed down in the 1920s, after overharvesting the cycad almost to extinction.

  53The consumption of this sake prepared from C. revoluta, David Jones remarks,

  …is almost as deadly as a game of Russian roulette, since it is slightly poisonous and occasionally a potent batch kills all who partake.

  It would go well, one feels, with a meal of puffer fish, or fugu.

  54 Georg Rumpf (known to posterity as Rumphius), already a passionate naturalist and botanist in his twenties, enlisted with the Dutch East India Company and set sail for Batavia and the Moluccas in 1652. In the following decade he travelled widely in Southeast Asia, spending much time on the Malabar coast of India, where in 1658 he documented a new plant – this was the first cycad ever described, and the one which Linnaeus, a century later, was to call Cycas circinalis, and to take as the cardinal ‘type’ of all cycads. A few years later, Rumphius was appointed assistant to the Dutch governor of Ambon, in the Moluccas, where he embarked on his magnum opus, the Herbarium Amboinensis, describing 1,200 species of plants peculiar to Southeast Asia.

  Though stricken by blindness in 1670, he continued his work, helped now by sighted assistants. H.C.D. de Wit, in a 1952 address on Rumphius at the Hortus Botanicus in Amsterdam (on the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Rumphius’ death) described in detail his labors on the Herbarium, which were to take forty years and were punctuated by a relentless series of travails, including the death of his wife and daughter:

  It was the 17th of February, 1674. In the gathering dusk Mrs. Rumpf and her youngest daughter went for a visit to a Chinese friend to look at the Chinese New Year celebrations, a colourful procession through the streets, to be held later in the evening. They saw Rumphius [who was by now completely blind] passing by to take some air. Some minutes later a disastrous earthquake destroyed the larger part of the town.

  Both women were killed by collapsing walls.

  Rumphius returned to work on his manuscript, but in 1687 a calamitous fire burned the town of Amboina to the ground, destroying his library and all his manuscripts. Still undaunted, and aided by his remarkable abilities and determination, he began rewriting the Herbarium, and the original copy of the first six books finally started on its way to Amsterdam in 1692, only to be lost when the ship carrying it was sunk. (Fortunately, the governor-general of Batavia, Cam-phuys, had taken the precaution of having Rumphius’ manuscript copied before shipping it on to Holland.) Rumphius continued working on the last six volumes, but suffered another setback when sixty-one colored plates were stolen from his office in Batavia in 1695. Rumphius himself died in 1702, some months after completing the Herbarium – but his great work was not published until the middle of the century. The final work, despite all these mishaps, contains nearly 1,700 pages of text and 700 plates, including half a dozen magnificent plates of cycads.

  55 Sidney Parkinson, the artist who voyaged on the Endeavour with Cook, described the plants they encountered:

  Of vegetables we found…Cicas circinalis, the kernels of which, roasted, tasted like parched peas; but it made some of our people sick, who ate it: of this fruit, they make a kind of sago in the East Indies.

  Cycas circinalis does not occur in Australia, and the cycad which Cook’s crew encountered there, David Jones suggests, was probably the native C. media.

  56 Lathyrism is a form of paralysis long endemic in parts of India, where it is associated with eating the chickling or grass pea, Lathyrus sativus; a little lathyrus does no harm, but sometimes it is the only food available – and then the hideous choice is to be paralyzed or starve.

  It was similar, in some ways, with the ‘jake paralysis’ which paralyzed tens of thousands of Americans during Prohibition. Driven to seek some source of alcohol, these unfortunates turned to a readily available extract of Jamaica ginger (or ‘jake’), not knowing it contained large quantities of a poison (later found to be a toxic organophospho-rus compound) which could lead to paralysis. (My own research, as a student, was an attempt to elucidate its mechanism of action, using chickens as experimental animals.)

  The Minamata Bay paralysis first became apparent in the mid-1950s, in Japanese fishing villages surrounding the bay. Those affected would first become unsteady, tremulous, and suffer various sensory disturbances, going on (in the worst cases) to become deaf, blind, and demented. There was a high incidence of birth defects, and domestic animals and seabirds seemed affected too. The local fish fell under suspicion, and it was found that when they were fed to cats, they indeed produced the same progressive and fatal neurological disease. Fishing was banned in Minamata Bay in 1957, and with this the disease disappeared. The precise cause was still a mystery, and it was only the following year that it was observed by Douglas McAlpine that the clinical features of the disease were virtually identical to those of methyl mercury poisoning (of which there had been isolated cases in England in the late 1930s). It took several more years to trace the toxin back to its source (Kurland, among others, played a part here): a factory on the bay was discharging mercuric chloride (which is moderately toxic) into the water, and this was converted by microorganisms in the lake to methyl mercury (which is intensely toxic). This in turn was consumed by other microorganisms, starting a long ascent through the food chain, before ending up in fish, and people.

  57 That lytico or bodig can remain almost stationary for years in this way is utterly unlike the relentless progression of classic Parkinson’s disease or ALS, but such an apparent halting of the disease process was sometimes seen in post-encephalitic parkinsonism or amyotrophy. Thus one patient I have seen, Selma B., immediately following the encephalitic epidemic in 1917, developed a mild parkinsonism on one side of her body, which has remained essentially unchanged for more than seventy-five years. Another man, Ralph G., developed a gross, polio-like wasting of one arm as part of a post-encephalitic syndrome – but this has neither advanced nor spread in fifty years. (This is one reason why Gajdusek regards post-encephalitic syndromes not as active disease processes but as hypersensitivity reactions.) And yet such arrests are the exception, and lytico-bodig, in the vast majority of cases, is relentlessly progressive.

  58I was sorry to see that Darwin, who seems to love and admire every form of life, speaks (in The Voyage of the Beagle ) of ‘the slimy disgusting Holothuriae…which the Chinese gourmands are so fond of.’ Indeed, they are not loved. Safford refers to seeing them ‘creep about like huge brown slugs.’ Jack London, in The Cruise of the Snark, speaks of them as ‘monstrous sea-slugs’ which ‘ooze’ and ‘writhe’ beneath his feet – the only negative note for him as he skims (‘in a chromatic ecstasy’) above the Pacific reef.

  59In his history of Pacific exploration, J.C. Beaglehole speaks of three phases – the Spanish explorations of the sixteenth century, ‘animated by a mingled zeal for religion and gold’; the Dutch voyages of the seventeenth, undertaken for commercial reasons; and the final English and French ones, devoted expressly to the acquisition of knowledge – but he sees a spirit of curiosity and wonder, no less than conquest, as animating all the explorations. Certainly this was true of Antonio Pigafetta, a gentleman-volunteer who joined Magellan, ‘desirous of seeing the wonderful things of the ocean,’ and wrote the best history of the voyage. And it was true of the Dutch voyages, which took naturalists to never before explored parts of the world – thus Rumphius and Rheede, going to the Dutch East Indies in the seventeenth century, made major contributions to biological knowledge (and, specifically, provided the first descriptions and illustrations of cycads and other plants hi
therto unknown in Europe). And it was especially true of Dampier and Cook, who were, in a sense, precursors of the great nineteenth-century naturalist-explorers.

  But Magellan’s reputation has not fared as well. His discovery of Guam, especially, took place under very adverse circumstances. His men were starving and sick with scurvy, reduced to eating rats and the hides which kept the rigging from chafing; they had been at sea for ninety-eight days before they finally sighted land on March 6, 1521. When they anchored in Umatac Bay and went ashore, the inhabitants stole their skiff and various odds and ends. Magellan, normally temperate, overreacted in a monstrous way, taking a large party of men ashore, burning forty or fifty houses, and killing seven Chamorros. He christened Guam (and Rota) the Ladrones, the Isles of Thieves, and treated their inhabitants with cruelty and contempt. Magellan’s own death came soon afterward, at the hands of a crowd of infuriated natives he had provoked in the Philippines. And yet Magellan should not be judged entirely by his actions in the final months of his life. For his conduct up to this point had been both moderate and masterly, in his handling of sick, angry, impatient, and sometimes mutinous crews; in his brilliant discovery of the Strait of Magellan – and in his usually respectful feeling for the indigenous peoples he encountered. And yet, as with all the early Spanish and Portuguese explorers, a sort of zealous violence was built in – Beaglehole calls this ‘a sort of Christian arrogance,’ and feels it overcame Magellan at the end.

  This arrogance seems to have been wholly absent from the admirable Pigafetta, who (though himself wounded at the time of Magellan’s death) described the entire voyage – its natural wonders, the peoples they visited, the desperation of the crew, and Magellan’s own character, with its heroism, its candor, its mystical depths, its fatal flaws – with the sympathy of a naturalist, a psychologist, and a historian.

  60 A frightful picture of leprosy on Guam is to be found in Arago’s description of the Freycinet voyage:

  A few hundred yards from Anigua are several houses, in which are kept lepers of both sexes, whose disease is so virulent that it commonly deprives them of the tongue or some of their limbs, and is said to become a contagious distemper. I have delineated two of these unfortunate creatures, exhibiting to the eye the most hideous aspect of human misery. One shudders with horror on approaching these houses of desolation and despair. I am persuaded, that by enlarging these paltry buildings, collecting in them all the persons in the island severely attacked by the leprosy, and prohibiting all communication with them from without, they might expel from the country this frightful disease; which, if it do not quickly cause the death of the patient, at least shortens his days, and perhaps leads him to curse them. (It is here called the disease of St. Lazarus.) What a scene, to behold an infant, a few days old, calmly reposing in the arms of a woman devoured by the leprosy, who imprudently lavishes on it her caresses! Yet this occurs in almost every house; government opposes no obstacle to it; and the infant, while sucking in its mother’s milk, inhales with it death and disease.

  61 The rarity of Safford’s understanding and sympathy is brought out by comparison with the almost contemporary account of Antoine- Alfred Marche. The Chamorros, Marche reported,

  …do not engage in any serious work…The indigenes today are intelligent but very lazy, proud, and dishonest, incapable of gratitude, and, like their ancestors, without any moral sense…All that is frivolous…attracts them…without limit or decency…One finds a few individuals who have learned how to benefit from our civilization, but they are the few.

  62 The little village of Umatac is strangely peaceful, a backwater now – though there is a memorial to Magellan just outside town, remembering that momentous day in the spring of 1521 when he landed at Guam. For Julia Steele, a journalist and historian (and John’s daughter), the village is symbolic of that moment of first contact:

  The more I thought about Umatac, the more I liked thinking about Umatac, this little town of such significance, a minor understudy thrust into a major role on history’s stage: the first spot where island and Western cultures had clashed, in the first of thousands of conflicts that would be played out time and again throughout the Pacific and bring with them a cataclysm of change in island societies. Just as the Indies had been for Magellan, from that point on Umatac became for me a concept, a vehicle for thinking about the world and its structure.

  63 Though Lake Fena is the largest above-ground reservoir on Guam, most of the fresh water is provided by an exceptionally large water lens which floats above the saltwater aquifer underlying the northern end of the island. Fena is a manmade lake whose waters add to this supply. It is rumored that the lake was built as a ‘quenching facility’ to stop a chain reaction should an accident occur in the surrounding nuclear storage area.

  64In hindsight, John feels, it is far from clear whether these few non-Chamorro immigrants had true lytico-bodig or classic ALS or parkinsonism. But some of their offspring, half Chamorro, have gone on to develop lytico-bodig. And though Kurland could not pursue the genetic hypothesis with the technology of the 1950s, he and his colleague W.C. Wiederholt are now looking at the children of the Californian Chamorros, to see if lytico-bodig appears in any of them.

  65 Kuru, a fatal neurological disease which had been endemic in the area for a century or more, could be transmitted, Gajdusek found, by the ritual practice of eating the brains of the dead. The disease agent was a newly discovered form of virus, a so-called slow virus which could remain latent in the tissues for years before giving rise to actual symptoms. The elucidation of kuru might not have been accomplished, one feels, had Gajdusek not combined a very sharp and sophisticated medical curiosity with a deep and sympathetic knowledge of the cultural beliefs and traditions of the indigenous tribes in the region. Such a combination of medical, biological, and ethological passions has underlain almost all of his work and has driven him to investigate geographical isolates throughout the world – not only the kuru and lytico-bodig in New Guinea, but the endemic goitrous cretinism, the cysticercosis with epidemic epilepsy, and the pseudohermaphroditism there; the muscular dystrophy in New Britain; the congenital orthopedic deformities in the New Hebrides; the Viliuisk encephalitis in Siberia; the hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome in Korea; the genetic diseases of Australian aborigines; and dozens of others (during his 1972 expedition on the research vessel Alpha Helix, he paid a brief visit to Pingelap). Besides his hundreds of technical articles, Gajdusek has kept immensely detailed journals for the last forty years, which combine the hard science of his investigations with vivid evocations of places and people, and form a unique record of the life-work of one of the most extraordinary physician-naturalists of our time.

  66 A very full discussion of the ecological disaster in Guam has recently been provided by David Quammen in his book The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction. He describes how the native bird populations, which had been numerous and varied in 1960, were brought to the verge of extinction little more than twenty years later. No one at the time had any idea what was causing this:

  Where had the birds gone? What was killing them? Had they been devastated by an exotic disease, as in Hawaii? Had they been poisoned by cumulative doses of DDT? Had they been eaten by feral cats and tree-climbing pigs and Japanese soldiers who refused to surrender?

  It was only in 1986 that Guam’s ‘ecological murder mystery’ was solved and the bird-eating tree snake, Boiga irregularis, was proved to be the culprit. There had been a spreading explosion of these snakes, starting in the southern savannahs in the 1950s, reaching the northern forests by 1980, correlating precisely with the wave of bird extinctions. It was estimated in the mid-eighties that there were now thirteen thousand snakes to the square mile, three million on the whole island. Having consumed all the birds by this time, the snakes turned to other prey – skinks, geckos, other lizards, and even small mammals – and these too have shown catastrophic declines. Going with this there has been a vast increase in the numbers of
orb-weaving spiders (I saw their intricate webs everywhere), probably due to the decline of the lizards. Thus the inauguration of what ecologists call a trophic cascade, the accelerating imbalance of a previously balanced ecosystem.

  67 Lynn Raulerson had told me of something even rarer, an immense tassel fern, Lycopodium phlegmaria, which used to be common in the forest, but had now almost vanished, because most specimens had been poached for cultivation as house plants. Both this and the great ribbon fern are also to be found in Australia, and Chamberlain, while cycad hunting there, was fascinated by these and wrote of them in his 1919 book The Living Cycads:

  The immense Lycopodium phlegmaria, the ‘tassel fern,’ with tassel-like cluster of cones, and Ophioglossum pendulum, the ‘ribbon fern,’ were the most interesting features of the epiphytic vegetation of the treetops. If a tree with such specimens was a foot or less in diameter the bushmen were likely to cut it down; if larger they would climb; but when they found that fine, uninjured specimens were worth three pence or even six pence, a climb of eighty feet was not at all objectionable.

  68 It is sometimes said (the term goes back to Charcot) that patients with Parkinson’s disease have a ‘reptilian’ stare. This is not just a picturesque (or pejorative) metaphor; normal access to the motor functions, which gives mammals their delicate motor flexibility, is impaired in parkinsonism; this leads to alternations of extreme immobility with sudden, almost explosive motion, which are reminiscent of some reptiles.