The Island of the Colorblind

The fruit grows on the boughs like apples; it is as big as a penny loaf, when wheat is at five shillings the bushel; it is of a round shape, and hath a thick, tough rind. When the fruit is ripe, it is yellow and soft, and the taste is sweet and pleasant. The natives of Guam use it for bread. They gather it when full grown, while it is green and hard; then they bake it in an oven, which scorcheth the rind and maketh it black; but…the inside is soft, tender and white, like the crumb of a penny loaf. There is neither seed nor stone in the inside, but all of a pure substance, like bread. It must be eaten new, for if it be kept above twenty-four hours, it grows harsh and choky, but it is very pleasant before it is too stale. This fruit lasts in season eight months in the year, during which the natives eat no other sort of bread-kind.

18

Many holothurians have very sharp, microscopic spicules in their body walls; these spicules take all sorts of shapes – one sees buttons, granules, ellipsoids, bars, racquets, wheel forms with spokes, and anchors. If the spicules (especially the anchor-shaped ones, which are as perfect and sharp as any boat anchor) are not dissolved or destroyed (many hours, or even days, of boiling may be needed), they may lodge in the gut lining of the unfortunate eater, causing serious but invisible bleeding. This has been used to murderous effect for many centuries in China, where trepang is regarded as a great delicacy. 

19

Irene Maumenee Hussels and her colleagues at Johns Hopkins have taken samples of blood from the entire population of Pingelap and from many Pingelapese in Pohnpei and Mokil. Using DNA analysis, they hope it will be possible to locate the genetic abnormality which causes the maskun. If this is achieved, it will then be possible to identify carriers of the disease – but this, Maumenee Hussels points out, will raise complex ethical and cultural questions. It may be, for example, that such identification would militate against chances of marriage or employment for the thirty percent of the population that carries the gene.

20

In 1970 Maumenee Hussels and Morton came to Pingelap with a team of geneticists from the University of Hawaii. They came on the MS Microglory, bringing sophisticated equipment, including an elec-troretinogram for measuring the retina’s response to flashes of light. The retinas of those with the maskun, they found, showed normal responses from the rods, but no response whatever from the cones – but it was not until 1994 that Donald Miller and David Williams at the University of Rochester described the first direct observation of retinal cones in living subjects. Since then, they have used techniques from astronomy, adaptive optics, to allow routine imaging of the moving eye. This equipment has not yet been used to examine any congenital achromatopes, but it would be interesting to do so, to see whether the absence or defect of cones can be visualized directly.

21

‘Cannibalism,’ wrote Stevenson, ‘is traced from end to end of the Pacific, from the Marquesas to New Guinea, from New Zealand to Hawaii.…All Melanesia appears tainted…[but] in Micronesia, in the Marshalls, with which my acquaintance is no more than that of a tourist…I could find no trace at all.’

But Stevenson never visited the Carolines, and O’Connell does claim to have witnessed cannibalism on one of Pingelap’s sister atolls, Pakin (which he calls Wellington Island):