The Island of the Colorblind

It is not enough, of course, for seeds to arrive; they must find conditions hospitable for colonization. ‘How small would be the chance of a seed falling on favourable soil and coming to maturity!’ Darwin exclaimed. The Northern Marianas – Pagan, Agrihan, Alamagan, Anata-han, Asuncion, Maug and Uracas – are doubtless visited by cycad seeds, but are too unstable, too actively volcanic, to allow them to survive and establish a viable colony.

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 The history and naming of the oceanic cycads is a story at once picturesque and confused. Surely Pigafetta, sailing with Magellan, must have observed the cycads of Guam and Rota, but if he did, his descriptions are too vague for us to be certain. It needed a botanical or taxonomic eye to demarcate cycads in the first place, from the circumambient palms around them. It was not until the next century that such botanical skills appeared, and then they appeared, with a sort of synchronicity, in two men, Rheede and Rumphius, whose lives and interests ran parallel in many ways. Both were officers of the Dutch East Indies Company. It was Rumphius who first described a cycad, on the Malabar coast in 1658. It was Rheede, his younger contemporary, who was to become governor of Malabar and publish a Hortus Indicus Mal-abaricus in the 1680s (after Rumphius’ own manuscript for a Hortus Malabaricus was destroyed in a fire). Rumphius’ and Rheede’s cycads were taken to be the same, and both were called Cycas circinalis by Linnaeus. When the French botanist Louis du Petit-Thouars identified a cycad on the east coast of Africa in 1804, it was natural that he should call this C. circinalis too, though it would be recognized as a distinct species and renamed C. thouarsii a quarter of a century later.

In the past few years there has been an effort to reexamine the taxonomy of the Pacific cycads, a task made peculiarly complicated, as Ken Hill notes, by ‘the successive recolonization of areas by genetically distinct forms…facilitated by aquatic dispersal of the buoyant seeds.’

Most botanists now are disposed to confine the name C. circinalis to the tall Indian cycad (that originally figured in Rheede’s Hortus ), which grows inland and lacks buoyant seeds. This at least is Hill’s formulation; he sees the Western Pacific cycads as belonging to the C. rumphii complex, and the Marianas cycad, which he has named C. micronesica, as a unique species within this complex. David de Laubenfels, a cycad taxonomist at Syracuse, agrees that C. circinalis occurs only in India and Sri Lanka, but feels that Guam cycad belongs to an earlier-named species, C. celebica. Since, however, the Guam cycad has been called C. circinalis for two centuries, the likelihood is that it will continue to be called this, and that only botanists will insist on using its ‘correct’ name.

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Aboriginal forests, cycad forests, seem to excite feelings of awe and reverence, religious or mystical feelings, in every culture. Bruce Chatwin writes of Cycad Valley, in Australia, as ‘a place of immense importance’ on some aboriginal songlines and a sacred place to which some aboriginals make their final pilgrimage before death. Such a scene, of final meetings and dyings beneath the cycads (‘like magnified treeferns’), forms the ending of The Songlines.

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The term ‘deep time’ was originated by John McPhee, and in Basin and Range he writes of how those most constantly concerned with deep time – geologists – may assimilate a sense of this into their inmost intellectual and emotional being. He quotes one geologist as saying, ‘You begin tuning your mind to a time scale that is the planet’s time scale. For me, it is almost unconscious now and is a kind of companionship with the earth.’

But even for those of us who are not professional geologists or paleontologists, seeing ferns, ginkgos, cycads, forms of life whose basic patterns have been conserved for eons, must also alter one’s inmost feelings, one’s unconscious, and produce a transformed and transcendent perspective.