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):
I did not believe, till my visit, that the natives of Wellington Island were cannibals; then I had ocular demonstration. It seemed with them an ungovernable passion, the victims being not only captives, but presents to the chiefs from parents, who appeared to esteem the acceptance of their children, for a purpose so horrid, an honor. Wellington Island…is, in fact, three islands, bounded by a reef. One of them is inhabited, and the other two are uninhabited spots, claimed by different chiefs, as if to afford a pretext for war, and the gratification of their horrible passion for human flesh.
22
The legendary history of Pingelap is told in the Liamweiwet, an epic or saga which had been transmitted to each generation for centuries as a recitation or chant. In the 1960s, only the nahnmwarki knew all 161 verses; and if Jane Hurd had not transcribed these, this epic history would now be lost.
But an anthropologist, however sympathetic, tends to treat an indigenous chant or rite as an object, and may not be able to fully enter its inwardness, its spirit, the perspective of those who actually sing it. An anthropologist sees cultures, one wants to say, as a physician sees patients. The penetration, the sharing, of different consciousnesses and cultures needs skills beyond those of the historian or the scientist; it needs artistic and poetic powers of a special kind. Auden, for instance, identified with Iceland (his first name, Wystan, was Icelandic; and an early book was his Letters from Iceland ) – but it is his linguistic and poetic powers which make his version of the Elder Edda, the great saga of Iceland, such an uncanny recreation of the original.
And it is this which gives unique value to the work of Bill Peck, a physician and poet who has spent the last thirty-five years living and working in Micronesia. As a young doctor with the U.S. Public Health Service, he was shocked by his first experience in Micronesia as an official observer of the atomic tests, and appalled by the treatment of the islanders. Later, as commissioner of health for the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands (as Micronesia was called), he attracted energetic and romantic physicians (including John Steele and later Greg Dever) to help him develop new health services (now the Micronesian Health Service) and train native nurses to be physician’s aides.
Living in Chuuk in the early 1970s, he became increasingly conscious of the ancient traditions and myths of the Chuukese, and had a ‘conversion experience’ when he met Chief Kintoki Joseph of Udot. He spent several weeks with the chief, listening, recording. This, he says, was
…like discovering the Dead Sea Scrolls or the Book of Mormon…Chief Kintoki would sit quietly, almost in a trance, nodding rhythmically as he recalled a prayer or chant. Then, gesturing, he would recite it dramatically in Ittang, his voice rising and falling as the glory or awe or fright of his vision impelled him… Chief Kintoki said to me, ‘Each time I recite these poems I believe, for the moment, that I am the ancient prophet who first revealed them.’
This encounter opened a new dedication for Bill – to record and preserve, to recreate for posterity, the songs and myths of Chuuk and of all the Micronesian cultures (though only a fraction of his work has been published, in his Chuukese Testament and I Speak the Beginning, as well as a handful of articles and poems). His is a voice, a scientific and poetic transparency, as remarkable as any in Micronesia. In Rota, where he has retired to live and write (and where I met him), he is an honorary citizen, the only non-Chamorro ever accorded this honor. ‘Here I am,’ he said as I finally left him, ‘an old doctor, an old poet, in my eighty-third year, translating, preserving the old legends for the future – trying to give back to these people some of the gifts they have given me.’
23
There may be as many as thirty thousand of these tiny biolumi-nescent creatures in a cubic foot of seawater, and many observers have attested to the extraordinary brilliance of seas filled with Noctiluca. Charles Frederick Holder, in his 1887 Living Lights: A Popular Account of Phosphorescent Animals and Vegetables, relates how M. de Tessan described the phosphorescent waves as ‘appearing like the vivid flashes of lightning,’ giving enough illumination to read by:
It lighted up the chamber that I and my companions occupied [de Tessan wrote J…though it was situated more than fifty yards distant from the breakers. I even attempted to write by the light, but the flashes were of too short duration.
Holder continues his account of these ‘living asteroids’:
When a vessel is ploughing through masses of these animals, the effect is extremely brilliant. An American captain states that when his ship traversed a zone of these animals in the Indian Ocean, nearly thirty miles in extent, the light emitted by these myriads of fire-bodies…eclipsed the brightest stars; the milky way was but dimly seen; and as far as the eye could reach the water presented the appearance of a vast, gleaming sea of molten metal, of purest white. The sails, masts, and rigging cast weird shadows all about; flames sprang from the bow as the ship surged along, and great waves of living light spread out ahead – a fascinating and appalling sight…