The Island of the Colorblind

Colorblindness had existed on both Fuur and Pingelap for a century or more, and though both islands had been the subject of extensive genetic studies, there had been no human (so to speak, Wellsian) explorations of them, of what it might be like to be an achromatope in an achromatopic community – to be not only totally colorblind oneself, but to have, perhaps, colorblind parents and grandparents, neighbors and teachers, to be part of a culture where the entire concept of color might be missing, but where, instead, other forms of perception, of attention, might be amplified in compensation. I had a vision, only half fantastic, of an entire achromatopic culture with its own singular tastes, arts, cooking, and clothing – a culture where the sensorium, the imagination, took quite different forms from our own, and where ‘color’ was so totally devoid of referents or meaning that there were no color names, no color metaphors, no language to express it; but (perhaps) a heightened language for the subtlest variations of texture and tone, all that the rest of us dismiss as ‘grey.’

Excitedly, I began making plans for the voyage to Pingelap. I phoned up my old friend Eric Korn – Eric is a writer, zoologist, and antiquarian bookseller – and asked him if he knew anything about Pingelap or the Caroline Islands. A couple of weeks later, I received a parcel in the post; in it was a slim leather-bound volume entitled A Residence of Eleven Tears in New Holland and the Caroline Islands, being the Adventures of James F. O’Connell. The book was published, I saw, in Boston in 1836; it was a little dilapidated (and stained, I wanted to think, by heavy Pacific seas). Sailing from McQuarrietown in Tasmania, O’Connell had visited many of the Pacific islands, but his ship, the John Bull, had come to grief in the Carolines, in a group of islands which he calls Bonabee. His description of life there filled me with delight – we would be visiting some of the most remote and least-known islands in the world, probably not much changed from O’Connell’s time.

I asked my friend and colleague Robert Wasserman if he would join us as well. As an ophthalmologist, Bob sees many partially colorblind people in his practice. Like myself, he had never met anyone born totally colorblind; but we had worked together on several cases involving vision, including that of the colorblind painter, Mr. I. As young doctors, we had done fellowships in neuropathology together, back in the 1960s, and I remembered him telling me then of his four-year-old son, Eric, as they drove up to Maine one summer, exclaiming, ‘Look at the beautiful orange grass!’ No, Bob told him, it’s not orange – ’orange’ is the color of an orange. Yes, cried Eric, it’s orange like an orange! This was Bob’s first intimation of his son’s colorblindness. Later, when he was six, Eric had painted a picture he called The Battle of Grey Rock, but had used pink pigment for the rock.

Bob, as I had hoped, was fascinated by the prospect of meeting Knut and voyaging to Pingelap. An ardent windsurfer and sailor, he has a passion for oceans and islands and is reconditely knowledgeable about the evolution of outrigger canoes and proas in the Pacific; he longed to see these in action, to sail one himself. Along with Knut, we would form a team, an expedition at once neurological, scientific, and romantic, to the Caroline archipelago and the island of the colorblind.

We converged in Hawaii: Bob looked completely at home in his purple shorts and bright tropical shirt, but Knut looked distinctly less so in the dazzling sun of Waikiki – he was wearing two pairs of dark glasses over his normal glasses: a pair of Polaroid clip-ons, and over these a large pair of wraparound sunglasses – a darkened visor such as a cataract patient might wear. Even so, he tended to blink and squint almost continuously, and behind the dark glasses we could see that his eyes showed a continual jerking movement, a nystagmus. He was much more comfortable when we repaired to a quiet (and, to my eyes, rather dimly lit) little café on a side street, where he could take off his visor, and his clip-ons, and cease squinting and blinking. I found the café much too dark at first, and groped and blundered, knocking down a chair as we went in – but Knut, already dark adapted from wearing his double dark glasses, and more adept at night vision to begin with, was perfectly at ease in the dim lighting, and led us to a table.