The Island of the Colorblind

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.

64