The Island of the Colorblind

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.

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I 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.

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In 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 hitherto 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.

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