The caption on this postcard of Darwin suggested that he had ‘discovered’ his theory of coral atolls here in Majuro; though in fact he conceived it before he had ever seen an atoll. He never actually visited Majuro, nor any of the Marshalls or the Carolines (though he did go to Tahiti). He does, however, make brief reference in Coral Reefs to Pohnpei (as Pouynipete, or Senyavine) and even mentions Pingelap (by its then-usual name, Macaskill).
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Ebeye can be seen, perhaps, as a sort of end-point, an end-point characterized not only by desperate overcrowding and disease but by loss of cultural identity and coherence, and its replacement by an alien and frenzied consumerism, a cash economy. The ambiguous processes of colonization showed their potential right from the start – thus Cook, visiting Tahiti in 1769, only two years after its ‘discovery,’ could not help wondering, in his journals, whether the arrival of the white man might spell doom for all the Pacific cultures:
We debauch their morals, and introduce among them wants and diseases which they never had before, and which serve only to destroy the happy tranquillity they and their forefathers had enjoyed. I often think it would have been better for them if we had never appeared among them.
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A pioneer in the use of streptomycin, Bill Peck came to Micronesia in 1958 as an official observer of the atomic tests in the Marshalls. He was one of the first to record the great incidence of thyroid cancer, leukemia, miscarriage, etc., in the wake of the tests, but was not allowed to publish his observations at the time. In A Tidy Universe of Islands, he gives a vivid description of the fallout on Rongelap after the detonation of the atomic bomb Bravo in Bikini:
The fallout started four to six hours after the detonation and appeared first as an indefinite haze, rapidly changing to a white, sifting powder: like snow, some of them said who had seen movies at Kwajalein. Jimaco and Tina romped through the village with a troop of younger children, exulting in the miracle and shouting, ‘Look, we are like a Christmas picture, we play in snow,’ and they pointed with glee at the sticky powder that smeared their skin, whitened their hair, and rimed the ground with hoarfrost.
As evening came on the visible fallout diminished until finally all that remained was a little unnatural lustre in the moonlight. And the itching. Almost everyone was scratching…In the morning they were still itching, and several of them had weeping eyes. The flakes had become grimy and adherent from sweat and attempts to wash them off in cold water failed. Everyone felt a little sick, and three of them vomited.
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Obesity, sometimes accompanied by diabetes, affects an overwhelming majority of Pacific peoples. It was suggested by James Neel in the early 1960s that this might be due to a so-called ‘thrifty’ gene, which might have evolved to allow the storage of fat through periods of famine. Such a gene would be highly adaptive, he posited, in peoples living in a subsistence economy, where there might be erratic periods of feast and famine, but could prove lethally maladaptive if there was a shift to a steady high-fat diet, as has happened throughout Oceania since the Second World War. In Nauru, after less than a generation of Westernization, two-thirds of the islanders are obese, and a third have diabetes; similar figures have been observed on many other islands. That it is a particular conjunction of genetic disposition and lifestyle which is so dangerous is shown by the contrasting fates of the Pima Indians. Those living in Arizona, on a steady high-fat diet, have the highest rates of obesity and diabetes in the world, while the genetically similar Pima Indians of Mexico, living on subsistence farming and ranching, remain lean and healthy.
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A similar feeling of kinship may occur for a deaf traveller, who has crossed the sea or the world, if he lights upon other deaf people on his arrival. In 1814, the deaf French educator Laurent Clerc came to visit a deaf school in London, and this was described by a contemporary:
As soon as Clerc beheld this sight [of the children at dinner] his face became animated: he was as agitated as a traveller of sensibility would be on meeting all of a sudden in distant regions, a colony of his countrymen…Clerc approached them. He made signs and they answered him by signs. This unexpected communication caused a most delicious sensation in them and for us was a scene of expression and sensibility that gave us the most heartfelt satisfaction.
And it was similar when I went with Lowell Handler, a friend with Tourette’s syndrome, to a remote Mennonite community in northern Alberta where a genetic form of Tourette’s had become remarkably common. At first a bit tense, and on his best behavior, Lowell was able to suppress his tics; but after a few minutes he let out a loud Tourettic shriek. Everyone turned to look at him, as always happens. But then everybody smiled – they understood – and some even answered Lowell with their own tics and noises. Surrounded by other Touretters, his Tourettic brethren, Lowell felt, in many ways, that he had ‘come home’ at last – he dubbed the village ‘Tourettesville,’ and mused about marrying a beautiful Mennonite woman with Tourette’s, and living there happily ever after.
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R.L. Stevenson writes about pigs in his memoir of Polynesia, In the South Seas:
The pig is the main element of animal food among the islands… Many islanders live with their pigs as we do with our dogs; both crowd around the hearth with equal freedom; and the island pig is a fellow of activity, enterprise, and sense. He husks his own cocoa-nuts, and (I am told) rolls them into the sun to burst…It was told us in childhood that pigs cannot swim; I have known one to leap overboard, swim five hundred yards to shore, and return to the house of his original owner.
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It was striking how green everything was in Pingelap, not only the foliage of trees, but their fruits as well – breadfruit and pandanus are both green, as were many varieties of bananas on the island. The brightly colored red and yellow fruits – papaya, mango, guava – are not native to these islands, but were only introduced by the Europeans in the 1820s.
J.D. Mollon, a preeminent researcher on the mechanisms of color vision, notes that Old World monkeys ‘are particularly attracted to orange or yellow fruit (as opposed to birds, which go predominantly for red or purple fruit).’ Most mammals (indeed, most vertebrates) have evolved a system of dichromatic vision, based on the correlation of short- and medium-wavelength information, which helps them to recognize their environments, their foods, their friends and enemies, and to live in a world of color, albeit of a very limited and muted type. Only certain primates have evolved full trichromatic vision, and this is what enables them to detect yellow and orange fruits against a dappled green background; Mollon suggests that the coloration of these fruits may indeed have coevolved with such a trichromatic system in monkeys. Trichromatic vision enables them too to recognize the most delicate facial shades of emotional and biological states, and to use these (as monkeys do, no less than humans) to signal aggression or sexual display.
Achromatopes, or rod-monochromats (as they are also called), lack even the primordial dichromatic system, considered to have developed far back in the Paleozoic. If ‘human dichromats,’ in Mollon’s words, ‘have especial difficulty in detecting colored fruit against dappled foliage that varies randomly in luminosity,’ one would expect that monochromats would be even more profoundly disabled, scarcely able to survive in a world geared, at the least, for dichromats. But it is here that adaptation and compensation can play a crucial part. This quite different mode of perception is well brought out by Frances Futter-man, who writes: