The Island of the Colorblind

We swam through shoals of wrasse and parrot fish and damsels, and saw turkey fish, with rusty feather fans, hovering beneath us. I reached out my hand to touch one as it hovered, but Alma shook her head violently (later she told me the ‘feathers’ were quite poisonous to touch). We saw flatworms waving like tiny scarves in the water and plump polychaetes with iridescent bristles. Large starfish, startlingly blue, crawled slowly on the bottom, and spiny sea urchins made me glad my feet were protected by fins.

Another few yards and we were suddenly in a deep channel, the bottom forty feet below us, but the water so clear and transparent that we could see every detail as if it were at arm’s length. Alma made some gesture I could not understand as we swam in this channel; and then we turned back, to the shallower waters of the reef. I saw hundreds of sea cucumbers, some nearly a yard long, making their cylindrical way slowly across the ocean floor, and found these enchanting – but Alma, to my surprise, made a grimace, shook her head.

‘They’re bad news,’ she said, after we had come in and showered and were eating fresh tuna and a salad with John on the porch. ‘Bottom feeders! They go with pollution – you saw how pale the reef was today.’ Indeed, the corals were varied and beautiful, but not quite as brilliant as I had hoped, not as brilliant as they had been when I snorkelled off Pohnpei. ‘Each year it gets paler,’ Alma continued, ‘and the sea cucumbers multiply. Unless they do something, it’ll be the end of the reef.’[58]

‘Why did you gesture when we were in the channel?’ I asked.

‘That means it’s a shark channel – that is their highway. They have their own schedules and times, times I would never dream of going near it. But it was a safe time today.’

We decided to rest and read for a while, in companionable silence on the verandah. Wandering inside to Alma’s comfortable living room, I spotted a large book on her shelf entitled The Useful Plants of the Island of Guam, by W.E. Safford. I pulled it out – gingerly, as it was starting to fall apart. I had thought, from the title, that it was going to be a narrow, rather technical book on rice and yams, though I hoped it would have some interesting drawings of cycads as well. But its title was deceptively modest, for it seemed to contain, in its four hundred densely packed pages, a detailed account not only of the plants, the animals, the geology of Guam, but a deeply sympathetic account of Chamorro life and culture, from their foods, their crafts, their boats, their houses, to their language, their myths and rituals, their philosophical and religious beliefs.

Safford quoted detailed accounts of the island and its people from various explorers – Pigafetta, Magellan’s historian, writing in 1521; Legazpi in 1565; Garcia in 1683; and half a dozen others.[59] These all concurred in portraying the Chamorros as exceptionally vigorous, healthy, and long-lived. In the first year of the Spanish mission, Garcia recorded, there were more than 120 centenarians baptized – a longevity he ascribed to the ruggedness of their constitutions, the naturalness of their food, and the absence of vice or worries. All of the Chamorros, noted Legazpi, were excellent swimmers and could catch fish in their bare hands; indeed, he remarked, they sometimes seemed to him ‘more like fish than human beings.’ The Chamorros were skilled as well in navigation and agriculture, maintained an active trade with other islands, and had a vital society and culture. Romantic exaggeration is not absent in these early accounts, which sometimes seem to portray Guam as an earthly paradise; but there is no doubt that the island was able to support a very large community – the estimates all fall between 60,000 and 100,000 – in conditions of cultural and ecological stability.

Though there were occasional visitors in the century and a half that followed Magellan’s landing, there was to be no massive change until the arrival of Spanish missionaries in 1668, in a concerted effort to Christianize the population. Resistance to this – to forced baptism, in the first place – led to savage retaliation, in which whole villages would be punished for the act of a single man, and from this to a horrifying war of extermination.

On top of this, there now came a series of epidemics introduced by the colonists – above all smallpox, measles, and tuberculosis, with leprosy as a special, slowly smoldering gift.[60] And in addition to actual extermination and disease, there were the moral effects of a forced colonization and Christianization – the attempted soul murder, in effect, of an entire culture.