The Island of the Colorblind

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

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

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

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

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

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

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