The Island of the Colorblind

When I visited Guam early in 1993, some impulse made me put this question to my friend John Steele, who has practiced neurology all over Micronesia. Unexpectedly, I received an immediate, positive answer: there was just such an isolate, John said, on the island of Pingelap – it was relatively close, ‘barely twelve hundred miles from here,’ he added. Just a few days earlier, he had seen an achromatopic boy on Guam, who had journeyed there with his parents from Pingelap. ‘Fascinating,’ he said. ‘Classical congenital achromatopsia, with nystagmus, and avoidance of bright light – and the incidence on Pingelap is extraordinarily high, almost ten percent of the population.’ I was intrigued by what John told me, and resolved that – sometime – I would come back to the South Seas and visit Pingelap.

When I returned to New York, the thought receded to the back of my mind. Then, some months later, I got a long letter from Frances Futterman, a woman in Berkeley who was herself born completely colorblind. She had read my original essay on the colorblind painter and was at pains to contrast her situation with his, and to emphasize that she herself, never having known color, had no sense of loss, no sense of being chromatically defective. But congenital achromatopsia, she pointed out, involved far more than colorblindness as such. What was far more disabling was the painful hypersensitivity to light and poor visual acuity which also affect congenital achromatopes. She had grown up in a relatively shadeless part of Texas, with a constant squint, and preferred to go outside only at night. She was intrigued by the notion of an island of the colorblind, but had not heard of one in the Pacific. Was this a fantasy, a myth, a daydream generated by lonely achromatopes? But she had read, she told me, about another island mentioned in a book on achromatopsia – the little island of Fuur, in a Jutland fjord – where there were a large number of congenital achromatopes. She wondered if I knew of this book, called Night Vision  – one of its editors, she added, was an achromatope too, a Norwegian scientist named Knut Nordby; perhaps he could tell me more.

Astounded at this – in a short time, I had learned of not one but two islands of the colorblind – I tried to find out more. Knut Nordby was a physiologist and psychophysicist, I read, a vision researcher at the University of Oslo and, partly by virtue of his own condition, an expert on colorblindness. This was surely a unique, and important, combination of personal and formal knowledge; I had also sensed a warm, open quality in his brief autobiographical memoir, which forms a chapter of Night Vision, and this emboldened me to write to him in Norway. ‘I would like to meet you,’ I wrote. ‘I would also like to visit the island of Fuur. And, ideally, to visit the island with you.’

Having fired off this letter impulsively, to a complete stranger, I was surprised and relieved by his reaction, which arrived within a few days: ‘I should be delighted to accompany you there for a couple of days,’ he wrote. Since the original studies on Fuur had been done in the 1940s and ‘50s, he added, he would get some more up-to-date information. A month later, he contacted me again:

I have just spoken to the key specialist on achromatopsia in Denmark, and he told me that there are no known achro-mats left on the island of Fuur. All of the cases in the original studies are either dead…or have long since migrated. I am sorry – I hate to bring you such disappointing news, as I would much have fancied travelling with you to Fuur in search of the last surviving achromat there.

I too was disappointed, but wondered whether we should go nonetheless. I imagined finding strange residues, ghosts, of the achromatopes who had once lived there – parti-colored houses, black-and-white vegetation, documents, drawings, memories and stories of the colorblind by those who once knew them. But there was still Pingelap to think of; I had been assured there were still ‘plenty’ of achromatopes there. I wrote to Knut again, asking how he might feel about coming with me on a ten-thousand-mile journey, a sort of scientific adventure to Pingelap, and he replied yes, he would love to come, and could take off a few weeks in August.