The Island of the Colorblind

Melville’s story, while it charmed readers, was generally seen as romantic fiction, although Melville himself always insisted on its veracity – a century later anthropologists were able to confirm his story, which had been indelibly recorded in the oral history of the remaining Typee. It was easier for O’Connell to obtain credence for his story, for he arrived back in the United States tattooed from top to toe; indeed, he went on to tell his story all over the country, billed as ‘the Tattooed Irishman.’

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The way in which human populations have met ‘mysterious ends on over a dozen Polynesian islands’ has been investigated by M.I. Weisler, particularly in relation to Pitcairn and Henderson, which are among the world’s most remote and isolated islands. Both of these were colonized from the parent island, Mangareva, around 1000 A.D.

Henderson, a coral atoll with little soil and no permanent fresh water, could not support more than fifty people, but Pitcairn, a volcanic island, was able to support several hundred. At first, when these two populations remained in touch with each other and with the parent colony on Mangareva, and the populations did not exceed their resources, they were able to maintain a social and ecological balance. But expanding populations, hypothesizes Weisler, deforested Mangareva and Pitcairn and drove the seabirds and tortoises on Henderson to near-extinction. Mangareva’s population survived, but ‘descended into an orgy of war and cannibalism,’ in Jared Diamond’s words, and fell out of contact with Henderson and Pitcairn around 1450. Without the physical and cultural contact of Mangareva, these populations were now doomed, shrank into themselves, and finally vanished around 1600. Diamond speculates on what may have occurred in these last, pathetic years:

No potential marriage partners could have remained who did not violate incest taboos…climatic variations in an already marginal environment may have driven the islanders to starvation… The people of Henderson may have [turned to]] murder and cannibalism (like those on Mangareva, and Easter Island)… The islanders may have become insane from social deprivation.

If they managed to avoid all these gruesome fates, Diamond stresses, the islanders ‘would have run up against the problem that fifty people are too few to constitute a viable population.’ Even a society of several hundred ‘is insufficient to propel human culture indefinitely,’ if it is isolated; even if it survives physically, it will become stagnant and un-creative, regressed and culturally ‘inbred.’

When I collected stamps as a boy, I was especially pleased by the stamps of Pitcairn, and the idea that this remote island was populated by only seventy people, all descendants of the Bounty mutineers. But of course, the Pitcairners now have access to the larger world, with modern communications and frequent ship and air traffic.

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Darwin marvelled at the survival of these fragile atolls:

These low hollow islands bear no proportion to the vast ocean out of which they abruptly rise; and it seems wonderful, that such weak invaders are not overwhelmed, by the all-powerful and never-tiring waves of that great sea, miscalled the Pacific.

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Cook learned of many instances of accidental migrations, often due to the strong westward trade winds. Landing at Atiu, he found three survivors who had been cast ashore from Tahiti, seven hundred miles away. They had set out in a party of twenty, expecting to make a brief journey from Tahiti to Raiatea, a few miles away, but had been blown off course. Similar unintentional voyages, he thought, might explain ‘how the South Seas, may have been peopled; especially those [Islands] that lie remote from any inhabited continent, or from each other.’

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I thought of Montaigne’s words in relation to Knut that day: