Frances is also hugely knowledgeable about specialized sunglasses for visually impaired people, and had advised us on which type to bring to Pingelap. ‘She has collated a huge amount of practical information on all kinds of aids for achromatopic people,’ Knut remarked, ‘and although she repeatedly refers to herself as a nonscientific person, I regard her as a genuine investigator in the real meaning of the term.’
30
This is very much what happened with Virgil, a man virtually blind from birth whom Bob and I had worked with (his case history, ‘To See and Not See,’ is given in An Anthropologist on Mars ). When it was suggested that Virgil’s sight might be restored by surgery, he could not help being intrigued and excited by the prospect of seeing. But after the operation, which was seen, medically, as ‘successful,’ the reality, for Virgil, was bewildering. He had built up his world entirely from nonvisual information, and the sudden introduction of visual stimuli threw him into a state of shock and confusion. He was overwhelmed by new sensations, visual sensations, but he could make no sense of them, he could not give them any order or meaning. The ‘gift’ of sight disturbed him profoundly, disturbed a mode of being, habits and strategies he had had for fifty years; and, increasingly, he would shut his eyes, or sit in the darkness, to shut out this frightening perceptual assault, and regain the equilibrium which had been taken from him with the surgery.
On the other hand, I recently received a fascinating letter from a deaf man who received a cochlear implant in middle age. Though he experienced many difficulties and confusions, analogous to those of Virgil (and though the use of cochlear implants can often be fraught with problems), he can now enjoy melodies and harmonies, which before he could neither perceive nor imagine.
31
Traditionally, very few of the islanders who enter medical schools have got their degrees, and Greg Dever has worked to develop a curriculum relevant to the resources and needs of the Pacific – he was very proud of his first class, of which two-thirds of the entering students had been graduated, including the first women physicians from Pohnpei.
32
Kahn notes that ‘the major credit for smallpox is usually ceded to Spain, for leprosy to Germany, for dysentery to England, for venereal disease to the U.S., and for tuberculosis to Japan.’ Leprosy was, indeed, widespread throughout the Pacific: there was, until fairly recently, a leper colony on Pingelap; and for many years, a large leper colony on Guam; and, of course, there was the infamous leper colony of the Hawaiian Islands, on Molokai, which Jack London wrote about in ‘The Sheriff of Kona’ and ‘Koolau the Leper.’
33
Melville includes a footnote on this term in Omoo:
Beach-comber: This is a term much in vogue among sailors in the Pacific. It is applied to certain roving characters, who, without attaching themselves permanently to any vessel, ship now and then for a short cruise in a whaler; but upon the condition only of being dishonorably discharged the very next time the anchor takes hold of the bottom; no matter where. They are, mostly, a reckless, rollicking set, wedded to the Pacific, and never dreaming of ever doubling Cape Horn again on a homeward-bound passage. Hence, their reputation is a bad one.
34
Our Western diseases have had a disastrous effect on the native populations of the Pacific – scarcely less disastrous than those of military conquest, commercial exploitation, and religion. Jack London, visiting the valley of Typee sixty-five years after Melville, found the splendid physical perfection of which Melville spoke almost entirely destroyed:
And now…the valley of Typee is the abode of some dozen wretched creatures, afflicted by leprosy, elephantiasis, and tuberculosis.
Wondering what had befallen the Typee, London speaks of both immunity and evolution:
Not alone were the Typeans physically magnificent; they were pure. Their air did not contain the bacilli and germs and microbes of disease that fill our own air. And when the white men imported in their ships these various micro-organisms of disease, the Typeans crumpled up and went down before them.…
Natural selection, however, gives the explanation. We of the white race are the survivors and the descendants of the thousands of generations of survivors in the war with the microorganisms. Whenever one of us was born with a constitution peculiarly receptive to these minute enemies, such a one promptly died. Only those of us survived who could withstand them. We who are alive are the immune, the fit – the ones best constituted to live in a world of hostile micro-organisms. The poor Marque-sans had undergone no such selection. They were not immune. And they, who had made a custom of eating their enemies, were now eaten by enemies so microscopic as to be invisible, and against whom no war of dart and javelin was possible.
35
Both Joakim and Valentine displayed in a high degree what the naturalist E.O. Wilson calls ‘biophilia.’ He defines this as an ‘inborn affinity human beings have for other forms of life’ – an affinity which can extend itself to an ecological feeling, a feeling for habitat. Howard Gardner, well known for his theory of multiple intelligences (mathematico-logical, visuo-spatial, kinaesthetic, social, etc.) is now inclined to recognize such a ‘biological’ intelligence as a distinctive one. Though such an intelligence may be enormously developed in a Darwin or a Wallace, it is present to varying degrees in us all. Others besides naturalists may be richly endowed with it and may express it in their vocations or avocations: gardeners, foresters, farmers, and hor-ticulturalists; fishermen, horsemen, cattlemen, animal trainers, birdwatchers. Many artists express this in their work – D. H. Lawrence, to my mind, is miraculous here and seems to know directly, by a sort of connaturality what it is like to be a snake or mountain lion; to be able to enter the souls of other animals. Biophilia may run in families (one thinks of the Hookers, the Tradescants, the Forsters, the Bartrams, etc., where both father and son were passionate botanists); and it may be unusually common in people with Tourette’s syndrome or autism. One has to wonder whether it may not have – as linguistic competence and musical intelligence have – a clear neurological basis, which may be more richly developed by experience and education, but is none the less innate.
36