The Island of the Colorblind

Most of the statues of Easter Island do not, in fact, face the sea; they face away from the sea, toward what used to be the exalted houses of the island. Nor are the statues eyeless – on the contrary, they originally had startling, brilliant eyes made of white coral, with irises of red volcanic tuff or obsidian; this was only discovered in 1978. But my children’s encyclopedia adhered to the myth of the blind, eyeless giants staring hopelessly out to sea – a myth which seems to have had its origin, through many tellings and retellings, in some of the early explorers’ accounts, and in the paintings of William Hodges, who travelled to Easter Island with Captain Cook in the 1770s.

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Humboldt first described the enormous dragon tree, very briefly, in a postscript to a letter written in June 1799 from Teneriffe:

In the district of Orotava there is a dragon-tree measuring forty-five feet in circumference…Four centuries ago the girth was as great as it is now.

In his Personal Narrative, written some years later, he devoted three paragraphs to the tree, and speculated about its origin:

It has never been found in a wild state on the continent of Africa. The East Indies is its real country. How has this tree been transplanted to Teneriffe, where it is by no means common?

Later still, in his ‘Physiognomy of Plants’ (collected, with other essays, in Views of Nature ) he devoted nine entire pages to ‘The Colossal Dragon-Tree of Orotava,’ his original observations now expanded to a whole essay of rich and spreading associations and speculations:

This colossal dragon-tree, Dracaena draco, stands in the garden of M. Franqui, in the little town of Orotava…one of the most charming spots in the world. In June 1799, when we ascended the peak of Teneriffe, we found that this enormous tree measured 48 feet in circumference…When we remember that the dragon-tree is everywhere of very slow growth, we may conclude that the one at Orotava is of extreme antiquity.

He suggests an age of about six thousand years for the tree, which would make it ‘coeval with the builders of the Pyramids…and place its birth…in an epoch when the Southern Cross was still visible in Northern Germany.’ But despite its vast age, the tree still bore, he remarks, ‘the blossom and fruit of perpetual youth.’

Humboldt’s Personal Narrative was a great favorite of Darwin’s. ‘I will never be easy,’ he wrote to his sister Caroline, ‘till I see the peak of Teneriffe and the great Dragon tree.’ He looked forward eagerly to visiting Teneriffe, and was bitterly disappointed when he was not permitted to land there, because of a quarantine. He did, however, take the Personal Narrative with him on the Beagle (along with Lyell’s Principles of Geology ), and when he was able to retrace some of Humboldt’s travels in South America, his enthusiasm knew no bounds. ‘I formerly admired Humboldt,’ he wrote. ‘Now I almost adore him.’

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Remarkable specializations and evolutions may occur not only on islands, but in every sort of special and cut-off environment. Thus a unique stingless jellyfish was recently discovered in an enclosed saltwater lake in the interior of Eil Malk, one of the islands of Palau, as Nancy Barbour describes: