The Island of the Colorblind

Darwin’s colleague and, later, editor, John Judd, relates how Lyell, the strongest proponent of the submerged volcano theory, ‘was so overcome with delight’ when the young Darwin told him of his own subsidence theory, ‘that he danced about and threw himself into the wildest contortions.’ But he went on to warn Darwin: ‘Do not flatter yourself that you will be believed till you are growing bald like me, with hard work and vexation at the incredulity of the world.’

14

The coconut palm, which Stevenson called ‘that giraffe of vegetables…so graceful, so ungainly, to the European eye so foreign,’ was the most precious possession of the Polynesians and Micronesians, who brought it with them to every new island they colonized. Melville describes this in Otnoo:

The blessings it confers are incalculable. Year after year, the islander reposes beneath its shade, both eating and drinking of its fruit. He thatches his hut with its boughs and weaves them into baskets to carry his food. He cools himself with a fan platted from the young leaflets and shields his head from the sun by a bonnet of the leaves. Sometimes he clothes himself with the cloth-like substance which wraps round the base of the stalks. The larger nuts, thinned and polished, furnish him with a beautiful goblet; the smaller ones, with bowls for his pipes. The dry husks kindle his fires. Their fibers are twisted into fishing lines and cords for his canoes. He heals his wounds with a balsam compounded from the juice of the nut and with the oil extracted from its meat embalms the bodies of the dead.

The noble trunk itself is far from being valueless. Sawed into posts, it upholds the islander’s dwelling. Converted into charcoal, it cooks his food…He impels his canoe through the water with a paddle of the same wood and goes to battle with clubs and spears of the same hard material…

Thus, the man who but drops one of these nuts into the ground may be said to confer a greater and more certain benefit upon himself and posterity than many a life’s toil in less genial climes.

15

The sort of divergence which has made Pingelapese a distinct dialect of Pohnpeian has occurred many times throughout the scattered islands of Micronesia. It is not always clear at what point the line between dialect and language has been crossed, as E.J. Kahn brings out, in A Reporter in Micronesia: