The Island of the Colorblind

The following day we set off for the rain forest with a botanist friend of Greg’s, Bill Raynor, and he brought along two Pohnpeian colleagues: Joakim, a medicine man, deeply knowledgeable about the native plants and their traditional uses, and Valentine, an expert on location, who seemed to know every inch of the island, where every plant was to be found, its favorite conditions, its relationship to all the other inhabitants of the ecosystem. Both men seemed to be born naturalists; in the West, they might have become doctors or botanists.[35] But here their powers had been molded by a different tradition – more concrete, less theoretical than ours, so that their knowledge was intimately bound up with the bodily and mental and spiritual balance of their people, with magic and myth, the sense that man and his environment were not separable, were one.

Bill himself came to Pohnpei as a volunteer Jesuit missionary, prepared to teach the natives about agricultural management and plant conservation. He had arrived with a sort of arrogance, he told me, flushed with the hubris of Western science, and then had been astonished, humbled, by finding in the local medicine men a vastly detailed and systematic knowledge of the plants on the island – they recognized dozens of different ecosystems, from the mangrove swamps and seagrass beds to the dwarf forests at the summit. Every plant on the island, Bill said, was considered significant and sacred; the vast majority were seen as therapeutic. Much of this he had discounted as mere superstition when he came to Pohnpei, but now he was more inclined to think in anthropological terms, and to see what he had first called ‘superstition’ as a highly developed ‘concrete science’ (in Levi-Strauss’ term), an immense system of knowledge and principles wholly different from his own.

Having come to teach, he found himself instead listening and learning, and after a while started to form fraternal or collegial relationships with the medicine men, so that their complementary knowledge and skills and attitudes could be joined. Such a working together is essential, he feels, the more so as Pohnpei is still formally owned by the nahnmwarkis, and without their willing cooperation, nothing can be done. In particular, he believes, a comprehensive investigation of all the plants in Pohnpei is needed to see whether any have unique pharmacological properties – and it is urgent to do so now, before the plants themselves, and knowledge about them, become extinct.

It has been similar, in a way, in the matter of religion. Arriving as a missionary with a firm conviction of the primacy of Christianity, Bill was struck (as many of his fellow missionaries have been) by the moral clarity of those he came to convert. He fell in love with and married a Pohnpeian woman, and has a whole clan now of Pohnpeian in-laws, as well as a fluent command of the language. He has lived here for sixteen years, and plans to remain for the rest of his life.[36]

Islands were thought, in the eighteenth century, to be broken-off pieces of continent, or perhaps the peaks of submerged continents (and thus, in a sense, not islands at all but continuous with the main). The realization that for oceanic islands, at least, no such continuity existed – that they had risen as volcanoes from the depths of the ocean floor, and had never been part of the main, that they were insulae, insulated, in the most literal sense – was largely due to Darwin and Wallace and their observations of island fauna and flora. Volcanic islands, they made clear, had to start from scratch; every living creature on them had to make its way or be transported to them.[37] Thus, as Darwin noted, they often lacked entire classes of animals, such as mammals and amphibians; this was certainly true of Pohnpei, where there were no native mammals, other than a few species of bats.[38] The flora of oceanic islands was also quite restricted, compared to that of continents – though, because of the relatively ready dispersal of seeds and spores, not nearly to such a degree. Thus a considerable range of plants had made it to Pohnpei, and settled and survived, in the five million years that it had existed, and though the rain forest was not as rich as the Amazon’s, it was, nonetheless, quite remarkable – and no less sublime. But it was a rain forest of a peculiar sort, because many of the plants here occurred nowhere else in the world.