58
I was sorry to see that Darwin, who seems to love and admire every form of life, speaks (in The Voyage of the Beagle ) of ‘the slimy disgusting Holothuriae…which the Chinese gourmands are so fond of.’ Indeed, they are not loved. Safford refers to seeing them ‘creep about like huge brown slugs.’ Jack London, in The Cruise of the Snark, speaks of them as ‘monstrous sea-slugs’ which ‘ooze’ and ‘writhe’ beneath his feet – the only negative note for him as he skims (‘in a chromatic ecstasy’) above the Pacific reef.
59
In his history of Pacific exploration, J.C. Beaglehole speaks of three phases – the Spanish explorations of the sixteenth century, ‘animated by a mingled zeal for religion and gold’; the Dutch voyages of the seventeenth, undertaken for commercial reasons; and the final English and French ones, devoted expressly to the acquisition of knowledge – but he sees a spirit of curiosity and wonder, no less than conquest, as animating all the explorations. Certainly this was true of Antonio Pigafetta, a gentleman-volunteer who joined Magellan, ‘desirous of seeing the wonderful things of the ocean,’ and wrote the best history of the voyage. And it was true of the Dutch voyages, which took naturalists to never before explored parts of the world – thus Rumphius and Rheede, going to the Dutch East Indies in the seventeenth century, made major contributions to biological knowledge (and, specifically, provided the first descriptions and illustrations of cycads and other plants hitherto unknown in Europe). And it was especially true of Dampier and Cook, who were, in a sense, precursors of the great nineteenth-century naturalist-explorers.
But Magellan’s reputation has not fared as well. His discovery of Guam, especially, took place under very adverse circumstances. His men were starving and sick with scurvy, reduced to eating rats and the hides which kept the rigging from chafing; they had been at sea for ninety-eight days before they finally sighted land on March 6, 1521. When they anchored in Umatac Bay and went ashore, the inhabitants stole their skiff and various odds and ends. Magellan, normally temperate, overreacted in a monstrous way, taking a large party of men ashore, burning forty or fifty houses, and killing seven Chamorros. He christened Guam (and Rota) the Ladrones, the Isles of Thieves, and treated their inhabitants with cruelty and contempt. Magellan’s own death came soon afterward, at the hands of a crowd of infuriated natives he had provoked in the Philippines. And yet Magellan should not be judged entirely by his actions in the final months of his life. For his conduct up to this point had been both moderate and masterly, in his handling of sick, angry, impatient, and sometimes mutinous crews; in his brilliant discovery of the Strait of Magellan – and in his usually respectful feeling for the indigenous peoples he encountered. And yet, as with all the early Spanish and Portuguese explorers, a sort of zealous violence was built in – Beaglehole calls this ‘a sort of Christian arrogance,’ and feels it overcame Magellan at the end.
This arrogance seems to have been wholly absent from the admirable Pigafetta, who (though himself wounded at the time of Magellan’s death) described the entire voyage – its natural wonders, the peoples they visited, the desperation of the crew, and Magellan’s own character, with its heroism, its candor, its mystical depths, its fatal flaws – with the sympathy of a naturalist, a psychologist, and a historian.
60
A frightful picture of leprosy on Guam is to be found in Arago’s description of the Freycinet voyage:
A few hundred yards from Anigua are several houses, in which are kept lepers of both sexes, whose disease is so virulent that it commonly deprives them of the tongue or some of their limbs, and is said to become a contagious distemper. I have delineated two of these unfortunate creatures, exhibiting to the eye the most hideous aspect of human misery. One shudders with horror on approaching these houses of desolation and despair. I am persuaded, that by enlarging these paltry buildings, collecting in them all the persons in the island severely attacked by the leprosy, and prohibiting all communication with them from without, they might expel from the country this frightful disease; which, if it do not quickly cause the death of the patient, at least shortens his days, and perhaps leads him to curse them. (It is here called the disease of St. Lazarus.) What a scene, to behold an infant, a few days old, calmly reposing in the arms of a woman devoured by the leprosy, who imprudently lavishes on it her caresses! Yet this occurs in almost every house; government opposes no obstacle to it; and the infant, while sucking in its mother’s milk, inhales with it death and disease.
61
The rarity of Safford’s understanding and sympathy is brought out by comparison with the almost contemporary account of Antoine- Alfred Marche. The Chamorros, Marche reported,
…do not engage in any serious work…The indigenes today are intelligent but very lazy, proud, and dishonest, incapable of gratitude, and, like their ancestors, without any moral sense…All that is frivolous…attracts them…without limit or decency…One finds a few individuals who have learned how to benefit from our civilization, but they are the few.
62
The little village of Umatac is strangely peaceful, a backwater now – though there is a memorial to Magellan just outside town, remembering that momentous day in the spring of 1521 when he landed at Guam. For Julia Steele, a journalist and historian (and John’s daughter), the village is symbolic of that moment of first contact:
The more I thought about Umatac, the more I liked thinking about Umatac, this little town of such significance, a minor understudy thrust into a major role on history’s stage: the first spot where island and Western cultures had clashed, in the first of thousands of conflicts that would be played out time and again throughout the Pacific and bring with them a cataclysm of change in island societies. Just as the Indies had been for Magellan, from that point on Umatac became for me a concept, a vehicle for thinking about the world and its structure.
63
Though Lake Fena is the largest above-ground reservoir on Guam, most of the fresh water is provided by an exceptionally large water lens which floats above the saltwater aquifer underlying the northern end of the island. Fena is a manmade lake whose waters add to this supply. It is rumored that the lake was built as a ‘quenching facility’ to stop a chain reaction should an accident occur in the surrounding nuclear storage area.
64
In hindsight, John feels, it is far from clear whether these few non-Chamorro immigrants had true lytico-bodig or classic ALS or parkinsonism. But some of their offspring, half Chamorro, have gone on to develop lytico-bodig. And though Kurland could not pursue the genetic hypothesis with the technology of the 1950s, he and his colleague W.C. Wiederholt are now looking at the children of the Californian Chamorros, to see if lytico-bodig appears in any of them.
65
Kuru, a fatal neurological disease which had been endemic in the area for a century or more, could be transmitted, Gajdusek found, by the ritual practice of eating the brains of the dead. The disease agent was a newly discovered form of virus, a so-called slow virus which could remain latent in the tissues for years before giving rise to actual symptoms. The elucidation of kuru might not have been accomplished, one feels, had Gajdusek not combined a very sharp and sophisticated medical curiosity with a deep and sympathetic knowledge of the cultural beliefs and traditions of the indigenous tribes in the region. Such a combination of medical, biological, and ethological passions has underlain almost all of his work and has driven him to investigate geographical isolates throughout the world – not only the kuru and lytico-bodig in New Guinea, but the endemic goitrous cretinism, the cysticercosis with epidemic epilepsy, and the pseudohermaphroditism there; the muscular dystrophy in New Britain; the congenital orthopedic deformities in the New Hebrides; the Viliuisk encephalitis in Siberia; the hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome in Korea; the genetic diseases of Australian aborigines; and dozens of others (during his 1972 expedition on the research vessel Alpha Helix, he paid a brief visit to Pingelap). Besides his hundreds of technical articles, Gajdusek has kept immensely detailed journals for the last forty years, which combine the hard science of his investigations with vivid evocations of places and people, and form a unique record of the life-work of one of the most extraordinary physician-naturalists of our time.