The Island Of The Colour Blind

PINGELAP ISLAND BURSTS WITH RICH COLOURS, but some of its inhabitants can’t appreciate the picturesque sights in the same way the rest of us do – they see the world in black and white, with no colour vision to speak of

- Marta Cervino

This story started at the end of the 18th century. Up to that moment, Pingelap was only a dot on the map of the world, a tiny atoll in the Pacific Ocean, totalling an area of 1.8km2 in Micronesia, a wilderness of disconcerting beauty. But in 1775, typhoon Lengkieki and the famine that followed decimated the island’s population, which dropped from 1 000 to approximately only 20, including the king.

That monarch was the bearer of a rare genetic condition: total colour blindness due to the mutation of chromosomes two and eight. For achromatics such as him, reality is in black and white; no scintillating blue of the ocean or iridescent green of vegetation. The next baby without colour vision was born in 1820 and, since then, the number has increased exponentially through hereditary transmission. Today, while this condition affects approximately one person out of 30 000 in the world, at Pingelap, four to 10% of the inhabitants suffer from it, making the island the focus of much interest and research. The colour-blind people of Pingelap and Pohnpei (a nearby island on which a dense community of achromatic Pingelapese live) are the subject of neurologist and neuroanthropologist Oliver Sacks’ travel book The Island of the Colorblind, published in 1996.