The Island of the Colorblind

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.

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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.

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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.

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