![Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
cup.columbia.edu
Copyright © 2021 Columbia University Press
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Taylor, Mark C., 1945– author.
Title: Intervolution : smart bodies smart things / Mark C. Taylor.
Description: New York : Columbia University Press, [2020] |
Series: No limits | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020017703 (print) | LCCN 2020017704 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780231198202 (hardback) | ISBN 9780231198219
(trade paperback) | ISBN 9780231552530 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Medical innovations. | Prosthesis. | Human body
and technology. | Biomedical engineering. | Technology—Social
aspects.
Classification: LCC RA418.5.M4 T37 2020 (print) | LCC RA418.5.M4
(ebook) | DDC 610.28/4—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020017703
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020017704
Columbia University Press books are printed
on permanent and durable acid-free paper.
Printed in the United States of America
Cover design: Lisa Hamm](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25952732-250521043250-6ee957ba/85/Intervolution-Smart-Bodies-Smart-Things-Mark-C-Taylor-8-320.jpg)
![7
OUR BODIES OUR SELVES
subjecting all natural and worldly processes to human ends
turns individuals into prostheses of the machines they cre-
ate. As Kierkegaard was the first to realize, this process
starts with industrialism’s mass production and mass
media, and, as Heidegger argues, it is extended by cyber-
netics and later by digital media. Modern technology results
in a condition Heidegger labels “everydayness” (Allta a
umlaut glichkeit). “Everydayness,” he explains,
manifestly stands for that way of existing in which Das-
ein [i.e., human being] maintains itself “every day.” And
yet this “every day” does not signify the sum of those
“days” which have been allotted to Dasein in its “lifetime.”
Though this “every day” is not to be understood calendri-
cally, there is still an overtone of some temporal character
in the signification of the “everyday.” . . . “Everydayness”
means the “how” in accordance with which Dasein “lives
unto the day.” . . . To this “how” there belongs further the
comfortableness of the accustomed, even if it forces one
to do something burdensome and “repugnant.” That
which will come tomorrow (and this is what everyday con-
cern keeps awaiting) is “eternally yesterday’s.” In every-
dayness everything is one and the same, but whatever
the day may bring is taken as diversification.3
When “the comfortableness of the accustomed” becomes a
person’s primary preoccupation, the self is scattered and
absorbed in others. Interiority disappears as the public
invades the private. No longer thoughtful and responsible
subjects, people engage in “idle talk” and mindless chatter
in which they do not think for themselves but become](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25952732-250521043250-6ee957ba/85/Intervolution-Smart-Bodies-Smart-Things-Mark-C-Taylor-29-320.jpg)
![21
OUR BODIES OUR SELVES
During the last two decades of the twentieth century and
the first two decades of the twenty-first century, the six
innovations I have noted converged to create new forms of
production, marketing, and consumption that are more
pervasive and invasive. With the ability to gather, store,
process, and distribute information about the activities,
habits, and patterns of the behavior of individuals in real
time, massification gives way to personalization. Mass pro-
duction and mass advertising are superseded by the mass
customization of products and the precision targeting of
consumers. The aim of this targeting can be social and polit-
ical as well as economic. Whatever its purpose, new distrib-
uted computational and networking technologies involve, as
Heidegger correctly predicted, the quantification, calcula-
tion, and modification of human behavior. Charlie Chaplin’s
managers programming workers on assembly lines have
been displaced by closed-loop systems of sensors, embedded
in both things and people and run by algorithms on calcu-
lating machines trained by machine learning. Information
collected by mobile phones and other devices is transmit-
ted to servers where it is processed and personalized by
relating it to the previous patterns of an individual’s deci-
sions and activities. These data are then retransmitted to the
same devices that had sent the original information. Person,
device, data center, and computer form a closed loop that is
self-generating and self-regulating.
In her timely book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The
Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power,
Shoshana Zuboff, professor emerita at Harvard Business
School, writes, “Just as [Henry] Ford tapped into a new mass
consumption, Apple was among the first to experience
explosive commercial success by tapping into a new society](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25952732-250521043250-6ee957ba/85/Intervolution-Smart-Bodies-Smart-Things-Mark-C-Taylor-43-320.jpg)
Intervolution Smart Bodies Smart Things Mark C Taylor
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- 6. NO LIMITS Edited by Costica Bradatan The most important questions in life haunt us with a sense of boundlessness: there is no one right way to think about them or an exclusive place to look for answers. Philosophers and prophets, poets and scholars, scientists and artists—all are right in their quest for clarity and meaning. We care about these issues not simply in themselves but for ourselves—for us. To make sense of them is to understand who we are better. No Limits brings together creative thinkers who delight in the pleasure of intel- lectual hunting, wherever the hunt may take them and whatever critical boundaries they have to trample as they go. And in so doing they prove that such searching is not just rewarding but also transformative. There are no limits to knowledge and self- knowledge—just as there are none to self-fashioning. Aimlessness, Tom Lutz Touch: Recovering Our Most Vital Sense, Richard Kearney
- 7. Intervolution SMART BODIES SMART THINGS Mark C. Taylor Columbia University Press New York
- 8. Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2021 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Taylor, Mark C., 1945– author. Title: Intervolution : smart bodies smart things / Mark C. Taylor. Description: New York : Columbia University Press, [2020] | Series: No limits | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020017703 (print) | LCCN 2020017704 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231198202 (hardback) | ISBN 9780231198219 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780231552530 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Medical innovations. | Prosthesis. | Human body and technology. | Biomedical engineering. | Technology—Social aspects. Classification: LCC RA418.5.M4 T37 2020 (print) | LCC RA418.5.M4 (ebook) | DDC 610.28/4—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020017703 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020017704 Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America Cover design: Lisa Hamm
- 9. For Robin Goland and her colleagues at the Naomi Berrie Diabetes Center #
- 11. We have to think of the body plugged into a new technological terrain. —STELARC
- 13. Preface xi Acknowledgments xv 1 Our Bodies Our Selves 1 2 Intranet of the Body 35 3 Internet of Things 69 4 Internet of Bodies 109 5 Intervolutionary Future 143 Notes 177 Index 187 Contents
- 15. Agricultural Revolution. Industrial Revolution. Infor- mation Revolution. Internet Revolution. When revo- lution becomes the normal condition, emergent develop- ments no longer seem revolutionary. Nevertheless, as disruptive technologies appear at an accelerating rate and global networks continue to expand and become more inva- sive, the world seems to be rushing toward some kind of inflection point. This turn of events provokes both utopian and dystopian visions of the future. For some of Silicon Val- ley’s true believers, new digital and networking technolo- gies are converging with innovations in neuroscience, nan- otechnology, and genetic engineering to usher in what has been dubbed “the Singularity,” which promises to launch human beings into a new stage of evolution where all ills will be cured and even death will be overcome. Entrepre- neurs and investors with more worldly concerns are con- vinced that the same technologies create the prospect of expanding markets that will generate vast wealth. Many Preface
- 16. xii PREFACE thoughtful critics, however, interpret these developments differently. The optimism of the early days of personal com- puters and the Internet has given way to anxiety about a panoptical world in which privacy vanishes as personal images and data are bought and used for pernicious eco- nomic and political purposes. Technologies that had been promoted as vastly increasing freedom of choice for indi- viduals now threaten the very foundations of democratic societies. As the reach of an invisible network state grows, more and more citizens and politicians are calling for the regulation and even the dismantling of the high-tech companies in which so much hope has recently been invested. Right or left. Red or Blue. Technophilic or tech- nophobic. Utopian or dystopian. As always, both extremes are misleading. While there is no doubt that digital technologies are changing our minds and bodies in many unpredictable ways, the Promethean dreams of technological gurus like Ray Kurzweil, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and their epigones are, unbeknownst to them, the latest version of Nietzsche’s will to power and Heidegger’s will to mastery. While a few may thrive, many more struggle and even suffer. When the will to control is out of control, natural processes and dis- empowered human beings become standing reserves exploited by those who hold the digital advantage. The dreams of some people are the nightmares of others. Tech- nologies that were supposed to unite different people around the world and increase communication and coop- eration have turned out to be so divisive they are creating disagreements and conflicts between and among groups that no longer even try to understand each other. Social
- 17. xiii PREFACE media, paradoxically, are antisocial. Furthermore, the combination of high-speed computers, networked mobile devices, proliferating cameras and sensors, and Big Data has created a condition of asymmetrical transparency that has led to a surveillance state designed to support surveil- lance economies. Whereas, in industrial capitalism, those who owned the means of production had the power, in sur- veillance capitalism, communism, and socialism, those who own the networks and control the data have the power. As the abuses of digital technologies spread, there are louder and louder calls for regulation and reform. A grow- ing number of informed and informative books and articles sound the alarm about current and projected developments. While in no way minimizing the importance of these works, I undertake a different task in this book. Without a doubt, there is an urgent need for thoughtful assessment and oversight of the technologies that are shap- ing our future. Effective policies must be developed by people who understand not only the dangers but also the potential for these technologies to improve life and allevi- ate human suffering. Nowhere are these possibilities greater today than in the area of medical research and development. In the following pages, I will consider some of the ways in which the same image-processing and voice recognition technologies, as well as tracking devices that are being used for political, economic, and even criminal surveillance, and apps that are being used for real and fake targeted polit- ical ads and customized marketing are also being used to monitor patients and deliver precision medical care. Net- worked medical devices monitored by vigilant algorithms are allowing patients to live longer without the debilitating
- 18. xiv PREFACE complications that so many terrible diseases often bring. Technology is never neutral—it can always be used for good and for ill. It would be a serious mistake to allow the abuse of advanced information and networking technologies to disrupt medical research and prevent the deployment of digital devices that are already saving lives. Finally, a word about the title of this book—Intervolution. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, intervolve was first used by John Milton in 1667: “Mazes intricate, Eccen- tric, intervolv’d, yet regular, Then most, when most irregu- lar they seem.” In 1850, Nathaniel Hawthorne used inter- volution in The Scarlet Letter: “Making one little pause, with all its wreathed intervolutions in open sight.” Intervolve derives from inter + volvere, to roll, wind, and means to wind or coil together. In contrast to evolve, which means to unfold or roll0ut (e, ex + volvere), and coevolve, which means to evolve jointly or in parallel (co, joint, together + volvere), intervolve means to intertwine. Intervolution involves a developmental process in which seemingly distinct enti- ties are braided together in such a way that each becomes itself in and through the other and neither can be itself apart from the other. Though the word is old, it accurately captures something new about the interplay of smart bodies and smart things in the proliferating webs and networks that constitute our world. Friedrich Nietzsche’s words in Thus Spoke Zarathustra have never been truer: “All things are entwined, enmeshed, enamored.”
- 19. Researching and writing this book has taken me into new territories and would not have been possible with- out the generous assistance and support of many people. I would like to express my deep appreciation to Margaret Weyers, Chip Lovett, Bill Lenhart, and Betty Zimmerberg, Williams College; Kevin McCurry, Ittai Dayan, and Mark Michalski, Partners HealthCare; Herbert Allen, Rob Lowe, and John Koski, Allen & Co.; Clark Otley, Mayo Clinic; Gor- don and Susan Weir, Joslin Clinic; Rosalind Picard and Ethan Zuckerman, MIT Media Lab; Jack Miles, University of California, Irvine; George Rupp and Wayne Proudfoot, Columbia University; Esa Saarinen, Helsinki; Robin Goland, Remi Creusot, Utpal Pajvani, Rudolph Leibel, Dieter Egli, Cara Lampron, Courtney Melrose, and Megan Sykes, Naomi Berrie Diabetes Center, Wendy Lochner and Costica Bradatan, Susan Pensak, Lisa Hamm, and Lowell Frye of Columbia University Press; and, as always, Dinny Stearns Taylor. Acknowledgments
- 21. Intervolution
- 23. If you can understand the “artificial” pancreas I wear on my belt, you can understand the world now emerging in our midst. It all begins with disease. Not any disease, but chronic disease, terminal disease. Disease reveals the self you never knew you were and shatters the familiar everyday world by stealing time you once thought was yours. Unexpected words single you out and leave you alone, isolated even from those with whom you are closest. “You are sick, and there is no cure for the disease you suffer. With commit- ment and discipline it can be managed, and fatal complica- tions can be deferred. At least for a while.” In an instant time—lifetime—changes. You withdraw into yourself and look back to the past for an explanation that never satisfies. Why did this happen? Why did it happen now? Could I have done anything to avoid it? More exercise, less meat and sugar? Should I feel shame, guilt, self-pity? What should I say to others? Should I reveal or conceal “my” disease? Will 1 Our Bodies Our Selves
- 24. 2 OUR BODIES OUR SELVES others see me differently? What will they say about me behind my back? Was disease always there, even before I was here, silently lurking in the body of my father or mother, in the bodies of their parents and grandparents? Will I pass on this disease to my children and grandchildren, or will it skip them only to reappear in generations neither I nor they will ever know? Is biology destiny? Was my future always already programmed in a code I did not write? As the past overwhelms the future, the present is trans- formed. I gradually realize that I am not and never have been who I thought I was. More precisely, I have always been and always will be both myself and the other of myself. The problem is not, as religious believers and philosophers have long insisted, mind vs. body, but, rather, body vs. body. The duplicity of consciousness and self-consciousness reflects a divided body. This fault cannot be mended, this gap cannot be closed, this tear cannot be wiped away. There is no cure—my condition cannot be changed; it is perma- nent and must be accepted, and the attempt to deny it only makes it worse. The diagnosis of the other must become my own. My doctor’s words “You are” must be repeated as “I am.” “I am sick, and there is no cure for the disease I suf- fer. With commitment and discipline, I can manage my condition and defer fatal complications. At least for a while.” Acceptance is not resignation; to the contrary, acceptance makes it possible to utter Samuel Beckett’s words again and again, “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”1 Chronic disease is relentless—it never takes a holiday. Year after year, month after month, week after week, day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute, illness must be man- aged. What makes the disease so pernicious is that its
- 25. 3 OUR BODIES OUR SELVES symptoms are not always visible, and, thus, others cannot understand what you are dealing with unless you decide to reveal your secret to them. How can you tell them that the thread of your life has unraveled and you have discovered that you are not who you thought you were? How can you explain to them that you can no longer do what you once did? While they are eating, drinking, playing, dancing, you are always silently counting, calculating, adjusting. The unavoidable repetition compulsion, which management requires, makes it difficult to connect the dots of one’s life to form a coherent narrative that extends from the past through the present to the future or, conversely, from the future through the present to the past. Life and death become as much quantitative as qualitative. For Pythagoras, numbers were the substance of things seen and unseen—pure forms that can be mathematically defined transcend space and time yet nonetheless consti- tute the program on which the world runs. For those who know the code, nothing remains mysterious. If analysis is careful and calculation is precise, numbers explain every- thing. Though this ancient faith still has many followers, I have always been skeptical. Do numbers tell the whole story? What if things are not so precise? Is life actually quan- tifiable? Is it numbers all the way down and all the way in? Can everything be measured? Everyone calculated? Can every code be broken? Every program debugged? Questions proliferate endlessly until disease—chronic disease— befalls you, and then everything changes. Numbers that yesterday were meaningless today are a matter of life and death. Numbers, countless numbers: 120/80 (blood pres- sure), 80–120 (glucose), below 7 (glycohemoglobin), below
- 26. 4 OUR BODIES OUR SELVES 200 milligrams per deciliter (HDL cholesterol), below 100 (LDL cholesterol), 8,000–12,000 (white blood cell count), 12 million (red blood cell count), below 3.5 grams per deciliter (albumin), 135–144 milliequivalent per liter (sodium), .06–1.2 milligrams for every deciliter of blood (creatinine). Normalcy you discover is a very narrow bandwidth. Too much or too little, too high or too low, and the system shuts down. At the tipping point, the rising and falling line on the graph chart- ing vital statistics flatlines. Whether waking or sleeping, adjustments constantly must be made. Far from a dumb machine or mindless meat, the body is incomprehensibly smart. It is an astonishing information-processing network of networks that continuously makes innumerable calcula- tions even the most accomplished scientists do not fully understand. When a circuit breaks or a part malfunctions, the patches applied, implants inserted, and prostheses attached struggle to mimic processes that are only imper- fectly understood. No matter how hard you try, life always remains out of balance. Struggling with chronic disease becomes frustrating and wears you down; many days it all becomes too much, and you just want to give up. O O O On April 4, 1967, Martin Heidegger delivered a lecture with the daunting title “The Provenance of Art and the Destina- tion of Thought” in Athens. It quickly becomes apparent that he is more concerned with technology than with art, though he sees the two as inseparable. Writing during the Cold War with the overshadowing threat of atomic annihi- lation and at the dawn of the Information Revolution, which
- 27. 5 OUR BODIES OUR SELVES brought the promise and danger of the new era in biotech- nology ushered in by James Watson and Francis Crick’s cracking of the genetic code in 1953, Heidegger argues that modern science and technology bring to full expression the will to power inherent in the Western philosophical tradi- tion ever since its beginning in ancient Greece. In retro- spect, his analysis proves to be astonishingly prescient. What is most surprising about Heidegger’s argument is his early recognition of the far-reaching implications of cyber- netics and information-processing machines. “The funda- mental characteristic of the cybernetic blueprint of the world,” he argues, “is the feedback control system, within which the inductive feedback cycle takes place. The widest feedback control circle comprises the interactions between human being and the world.” The distinguishing feature of the techno-social system emerging in the 1950s and 1960s was the tendency to quantify human behavior in a way that made it calculable and thus subject to human manipula- tion and control. It is worth quoting Heidegger’s argument at length because he effectively frames the issues and poses many of the questions I will consider in the following pages. The cybernetic blueprint of the world presupposes that steering or regulating is the most fundamental character- istic of all calculable world-events. The regulation of one event by another is mediated by the transmission of a mes- sage, that is, by information. To the extent that the regu- lated event transmits messages to the one that regulated it and so informs it, the regulation has the character of a positive feedback-loop of information.
- 28. 6 OUR BODIES OUR SELVES This bidirectional movement of the regulation of events in their interdependence is thus accomplished in a circular movement. That is why the fundamental charac- teristic of the world, in this cybernetic blueprint, is this feedback control system. The capacity for self-regulation, the automation of a system of motion, depends on such a system. The world as represented in cybernetic terms abolishes the difference between automatic machines and living beings. It is neutralized in this indiscriminate pro- cessing of information. The cybernetic blueprint of the world . . . makes possible a completely homogeneous— and in this sense universal—calculability, that is, the absolute controllability of both the animate and the inani- mate world. Humanity also has its place assigned to it within this uniformity of the cybernetic world. . . . Within the purview of cybernetic representation, the place of humankind lies in the widest circuit of the feedback con- trol system. According to the modern representation of man, he is in fact the subject who refers himself to the world as the domain of objects in that he works on them. The ensuing transformation of the world is fed back onto the human being. The subject-object relation, in its cyber- netic understanding, consists of the interaction of infor- mation, the inductive feedback within the widest circuit of the feedback control system, which can be described by the designation of “man and world.”2 In this cybernetic feedback loop, human beings create tech- nologies, which, in turn, recreate human beings. Through this two-way process, a subtle but crucial rever- sal occurs—the very effort to attain mastery and control by
- 29. 7 OUR BODIES OUR SELVES subjecting all natural and worldly processes to human ends turns individuals into prostheses of the machines they cre- ate. As Kierkegaard was the first to realize, this process starts with industrialism’s mass production and mass media, and, as Heidegger argues, it is extended by cyber- netics and later by digital media. Modern technology results in a condition Heidegger labels “everydayness” (Allta a umlaut glichkeit). “Everydayness,” he explains, manifestly stands for that way of existing in which Das- ein [i.e., human being] maintains itself “every day.” And yet this “every day” does not signify the sum of those “days” which have been allotted to Dasein in its “lifetime.” Though this “every day” is not to be understood calendri- cally, there is still an overtone of some temporal character in the signification of the “everyday.” . . . “Everydayness” means the “how” in accordance with which Dasein “lives unto the day.” . . . To this “how” there belongs further the comfortableness of the accustomed, even if it forces one to do something burdensome and “repugnant.” That which will come tomorrow (and this is what everyday con- cern keeps awaiting) is “eternally yesterday’s.” In every- dayness everything is one and the same, but whatever the day may bring is taken as diversification.3 When “the comfortableness of the accustomed” becomes a person’s primary preoccupation, the self is scattered and absorbed in others. Interiority disappears as the public invades the private. No longer thoughtful and responsible subjects, people engage in “idle talk” and mindless chatter in which they do not think for themselves but become
- 30. 8 OUR BODIES OUR SELVES vehicles for the noise of mass media. Unique individuality disappears in an anonymous “They” as masses unknow- ingly avoid anxiety and flee the awareness of death by finding reassurance in everyday routine. What appear to be responsible decisions are really actions programmed by others. Rather than autonomous actors, shoppers on Amazon’s website are automatons run by hidden machi- nations to which they remain blind. The overriding purpose of Heidegger’s entire philosophy is to awaken people from their self-forgetfulness and alert them to their singularity. To explain how self-awareness is cultivated, he offers the unlikely example of a dedicated craftsman whose familiarity with his tools makes them an extension of his body. Like the gifted athlete who is in the zone, the skilled craftsman works unselfconsciously. The absence of deliberation and calculation lends his move- ments ease, spontaneity, and grace. Past and future disap- pear in the present moment, which becomes all absorbing— until the tool breaks or is missing. When the spell is broken, the craftsman becomes aware of the tool as a sepa- rate object and of himself as an independent agent. Disease—especially serious disease—is the functional equivalent of the tool breaking. In everyday life, the body performs so smoothly that most of the time we remain unaware of it until disease disrupts its rhythms. Chronic and terminal diseases shatter the everyday world and dis- rupt routines that now appear to have been strategies designed to avoid the prospect of disease and the inevita- bility of demise. The present is no longer all-consuming because awareness is always divided between a past that has become questionable and a future that remains uncertain.
- 31. 9 OUR BODIES OUR SELVES For Heidegger, the recognition of individuality is most acute in the awareness of death. The death of others makes one aware of one’s own impending death and disrupts everything that once had seemed secure. No one can die in my place, and in confronting my mortality I realize that I must accept responsibility for the individual person I have become. In this way, the acknowledgment of death trans- forms one’s relation to time. No longer lost in the present, the self remains suspended between a recollected past that is always receding and an anticipated future that is forever approaching. The self one discovers when shaken by disease is not precisely the one Heidegger described five decades ago. When you are ill—chronically ill—self-forgetfulness is a luxury you cannot afford. Heidegger was right when he argued that the awareness of death singles you out from others and leaves you standing alone. If you choose life over death, constant vigilance, focused attention, and deliberate self-discipline are required. But Heidegger was wrong when he argued that quantification and calculation are marks of inauthenticity; to the contrary, they are conditions of life itself. The insulin junkie is always counting and calculating—blood glucose, carbs, exercise, doses. Too much or too little insulin results in confusion, disorienta- tion, hallucinations, sometimes coma, and even death. Hei- degger was also right about the importance of cybernetics, but was also wrong to insist that expansion of information and communications technologies necessarily leads to the loss of so-called authentic selfhood. Today even a hut on a hillside in the Black Forest is wired to the entire world. This connectivity need not distract the mind and disturb the
- 32. 10 OUR BODIES OUR SELVES body; rather, networking mind and body can open new channels for messages that sustain life. Our Bodies Our Selves. Contrary to expectation, just as the acceptance of death creates new possibilities for living, so disease can be surprisingly liberating—by shaking an individual out of his or her lethargy of everydayness, disease expands awareness by revealing life’s limits. O O O If I had lived one hundred years ago, I would have been dead for more than three decades. As we will see in detail in the next chapter, diabetes is the result of the pancreas producing too little or none of the insulin necessary to metabolize blood glucose or sugar. While ancient Egyptians and Greeks recognized what eventually was named diabe- tes, it was centuries before scientists began to understand the disease, and even today there are more questions than answers. Effective treatment had to await the discovery of insulin in 1921. Insulin is a hormone produced by cells in the pancreas that regulates the metabolism of carbohy- drates, fats, and glucose from the blood in the liver.4 In 1869, the German physiologist Paul Langerhans discovered the portion of the pancreas responsible for creating the cells that produce insulin. The first person to suggest that pan- creatic cells might be involved in controlling blood sugar was the English physiologist Sir Edward Albert Sharpey- Schafer, who is widely regarded as the founder of endocri- nology. The real breakthrough came several decades later when Frederick G. Banting, who was a general practitioner working in Canada, became obsessed with finding a cure
- 33. 11 OUR BODIES OUR SELVES for diabetes. Prior to his efforts, diabetes was inevitably fatal. The only treatment for the diseased involved a near- starvation diet that required precisely measuring every gram of carbohydrates consumed. Even for those who faith- fully followed this strict regimen, the best that could be hoped for was a brief delay of death. Patients were con- demned to a slow death as their energy ebbed and their bodies wasted away. Arataeus’s description of diabetics in the first century C.E. grimly described their condition as “a melting down of the flesh and limbs into urine.”5 Faculty members at the University of Toronto dismissed Banting as a country bumpkin whose ideas could not compete with the advanced research they were doing. But Banting per- sisted and eventually persuaded John Macleod to give him laboratory space and a modest stipend with which he bought dogs that he used to conduct his experiments. Eventually, he and his colleague Charles Best were able to remove insulin-producing cells from the pancreas and purify the extract. After trials on dogs, Banting successfully adminis- tered insulin to humans, and, for the first time, people with diabetes were no longer necessarily condemned to an early death. In 1923, Banting and Macleod, but not Best, received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discov- ery of insulin. Since Banting’s discovery, research has followed two tracks: first, the investigation of the origin, operation, and possible cure for diabetes; second, the search for treatments to mitigate the effects of the disease. I will consider the first line of inquiry in the next chapter; in the following pages I will concentrate on current treatment technologies. A cen- tury after its discovery, insulin remains the only drug that
- 34. 12 OUR BODIES OUR SELVES can alleviate the symptoms of type 1 diabetes. Today insulin is produced by using recombinant DNA technology in which a human gene is inserted into the genetic material of a com- mon bacterium. In the last hundred years, the therapy for diabetes has remained basically the same, though the method of delivering insulin has changed dramatically. The most significant developments have occurred in the past five to six years. While medical research continues to make steady progress, the most important changes in treatment have been the result of the transfer of new technologies cre- ated for very different purposes to medical applications. We are in the midst of major changes in medical research and clinical practice that are part of a much larger techno- logical revolution. When I started treatment for diabetes more than thirty years ago, I had to check my blood six to eight times a day, estimate my carbohydrate consump- tion, calculate the amount of insulin needed to stabilize my blood glucose, and administer the insulin with an injection. There was no way to ascertain glucose levels between blood tests and there was no way to deliver insulin other than intermittent injections with syringes. In the ten years before I started using an insulin pump, I injected insulin into my body approximately 16,000 times, and in the nearly thirty years before I started using a continuous glu- cose monitor (CGM), I drew blood to test approximately 65,000 times. In the absence of a cure, the dream of patients, research- ers, and physicians for many years has been an invention that could monitor, regulate, and automate the delivery of insulin: such a device would be, in effect, an artificial pan- creas. In 1963, Arnold Kadish created the first insulin pump, which was as big as a heavy backpack.
- 35. 13 OUR BODIES OUR SELVES While the size, weight, and cumbersomeness of the machine made it impractical, the experiment provided proof of concept and encouraged further investment and research. The first commercial pump, known as the Big Blue Brick, was introduced in 1978, but its use was restricted FIGURE 1.1 First insulin pump.
- 36. 14 OUR BODIES OUR SELVES because of the difficulty ensuring safe insulin dosage. Throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, major advances were made in the size, flexibility, and accuracy of pumps. By the time I began using an insulin pump in the late 1990s, it was the size of a phone pager and could be worn on a belt or attached to one’s clothing. It was still necessary to test your blood, estimate carbohydrates, and input the grams of carbohydrates consumed. When programmed with the patient’s individual insulin sensitivity, the pump would calculate the quantity of insulin needed. The next major advance leading to a viable artificial pancreas was the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the first con- tinuous glucose monitor in 1999. Sensors inserted into the body every seventy-two hours take subcutaneous glucose readings every ten seconds, thereby eliminating the need for finger-prick blood tests. By 2017, this system had been improved so much that sensors could remain in the body for ten days and a transmitter could send data up to twenty feet for display on a handheld receiver or a mobile phone. At the same time that new sensor technology was being developed, pumps were being redesigned to be integrated with continuous glucose monitors. By closing the loop between pump and monitor, the dream of an artificial pan- creas has become a reality. What began as an oversize back- pack, almost too heavy to carry, became a wearable device considerably smaller than a deck of cards. The inconspicuous device I wear on my belt is “my” quasi-automatic digital pancreas. It is a small black device that looks like a mobile phone, so no one ever notices it. If you look carefully, however, you can see a translucent plastic tube tucked under my shirt that is connected to another
- 37. 15 OUR BODIES OUR SELVES tube inserted in my body. A touch screen displays numbers that indicate the amount of insulin in my body and the length of time it will remain active. There is also a graph plotting dots that register readings from a continuous glu- cose monitor every five minutes for three, six, twelve, and twenty-four hours. These data are transmitted wirelessly to the pump from the sensor, which I also insert into my body. The horizontal axis of the graph measures blocks of time ranging from three to twenty-four hours, and the vertical axis has numbers from fifty to four hundred, which indi- cate my glucose level. The dotted line records the increase and decrease in my glucose level. A horizontal red line indi- cates the lower limit for my glucose, and a horizontal yel- low line indicates the upper limit. Using finely tuned algorithms to process the information from the sensor and FIGURE 1.2 My insulin pump.
- 38. 16 OUR BODIES OUR SELVES the pump as well as data accumulated for the past several weeks, the pump calculates whether I need more or less insulin. The only input for this calculation I have to make is the grams of carbohydrates I consume. There are currently two forms of the artificial pancreas. In the semi-autonomous artificial pancreas, the pump cal- culates the insulin required and allows the patient to approve and trigger the release of the insulin. The autono- mous artificial pancreas is called the closed-loop system because data from the continuous glucose monitor are transmitted directly to the pump, which independently cal- culates the required dosage and automatically delivers it. Both versions of the pump indicate whether glucose levels are increasing, decreasing, or holding steady and can antic- ipate problems before they occur. The rate of decrease is calculated in relation to the active insulin in the body, and, when necessary, insulin delivery is suspended. Current sys- tems are especially effective in anticipating low blood glu- cose levels and interrupting the flow of insulin to prevent complications. In the closed-loop system, the rate of glucose increase is calculated in relation to the amount of insulin in the body and, when necessary, additional insulin is automatically delivered. All these calculations must be pre- cise—too much insulin results in hypoglycemia, which can lead to confusion, hallucinations, loss of conscious- ness, coma, and death. Too little insulin results in hypergly- cemia, which can also result in damage to blood vessels, kidneys, nerves, and organs. Long-term hyperglycemia leads to blindness, neuropathy, kidney failure, heart attack, stroke, and death.
- 39. 17 OUR BODIES OUR SELVES While the autonomous artificial pancreas is a closed- loop system, it is, like the semi-autonomous artificial pan- creas, open to machines and networks extending far beyond the individual’s body. Both systems are regulated by the algorithmic processing of data collected and not only in the person’s pump but also from millions of other patients and stored in computers scattered around the world that are connected in global networks. At regular intervals, I upload my pump’s data into the cloud, where my doctor and the manufacturers of the pump and the CGM, as well as any- one else to whom I give my password, can access it. In the near future this data will be transmitted both from and to the pump in real time. Like all cloud-based systems, the data from my digital pancreas can be hacked by anonymous agents lurking anywhere in the world. The danger of hack- ers transferring funds from my bank account pales in com- parison to the danger of hackers programming a fatal dose of insulin or cutting off my insulin supply. Far from a sci-fi fantasy, this is a current danger. In a recent Wall Street Jour- nal article entitled “FDA Says Medtronic Insulin Pumps Pose Cybersecurity Risk,” Thomas Burton reports, “The Food and Drug Administration warned that certain insulin pumps made by Medtronic PLC have cybersecurity vulner- abilities and could be manipulated by hackers, causing dan- ger to diabetes patients.”6 Though there is much debate about the convenience, reliability, and danger of self-driving cars, trucks, and planes, there is little discussion of the more important creation and proliferation of autonomous digi- tal medical devices that are attached to or implanted in bod- ies and connected in worldwide webs. If you think going
- 40. 18 OUR BODIES OUR SELVES for a ride in a self-driving car requires a leap of faith, try having your life depend on an autonomous pancreas whose algorithms interact with both data in the cloud and infor- mation processed by your body’s countless interconnected communication networks. With the move first from mainframe to personal com- puters and then to handheld mobile devices, there has been a progressive miniaturization, decentralization, and distri- bution of data-processing machines. The new new thing is the Internet of Things (IoT), which connects scattered devices and enables them to talk to each other. This network links everything from instruments in home security sys- tems and surveillance systems to the Global Position Sys- tem and servers in high-speed financial networks. In some cases, these connected devices require intentional human interaction, and in other cases the networks operate with- out human agents. The purpose of the IoT is to collect and analyze data that can be used to control things and through them regulate human behavior. The same technologies underlying the IoT are also being used to create a newly emerging Internet of Bodies (IoB). Wearable computers like my continuous glucose monitor and insulin pump as well as implantable devices like pacemakers and brain chips are connected through the cloud to remote data-processing centers, where bodily func- tions and activities are monitored, regulated, and modu- lated. Bodies distributed in space and time are increas- ingly interconnected in a worldwide web. The IoT and IoB are inextricably interrelated—each requires the other. When joined together and linked to the Intranet of the Body, they constitute an intervolutionary network in which
- 41. 19 OUR BODIES OUR SELVES the form of life following what has been known as human- ity is emerging. This global network constitutes the tech- nological unconscious that is the performative infrastruc- ture for bodily and cognitive development in the twenty-first century. These extraordinary changes are the result of six closely related developments. 1. Ultra-high-speed networked computers 2. Massive quantities of data gathered from the Internet and other sources 3. Expansion of wireless networks 4. Explosive growth of mobile devices 5. Rapid proliferation of low-cost miniaturized sensors 6. Radical changes in artificial intelligence I will consider each of these developments in the follow- ing chapters. In this context, it is important to understand how the interplay of the IoT and the IoB simultaneously extends and modifies technologies and practices that have been operational for more than a century. It has become commonplace to contrast the so-called Industrial Revolution with the so-called Information Revo- lution. This is a mistake because the Industrial Revolution was already an Information Revolution, and the Informa- tion Revolution is also an Industrial Revolution. Con- sider, for example, Charlie Chaplin’s film Modern Times (1936). The film begins with music playing and a full- screen shot of a clock with the second hand moving toward 6:00. After the credits roll, words appear superim- posed on the clock. “Modern Times.” A story of industry,
- 42. 20 OUR BODIES OUR SELVES individual enterprise—humanity crusading in pursuit of happiness.” The film captures the travails of workers in post-Depression industrial America. The action begins with a herd of pigs rushing to their slaughter, followed by a herd of men emerging from the subway rushing to a fac- tory, where they assume their assigned positions on the fac- tory floor. While workers desperately scramble to keep up with the assembly line, managers reading newspapers in comfortable offices surrounded by secretaries and calculat- ing machines order their subordinates on the shop floor to keep speeding up production. An elaborate surveillance network of cameras and screens monitors workers even during bathroom breaks. With his bodily movements as automated and mechanized as the production line, Little Tramp rushes to keep up but eventually gets caught in turn- ing gears and is literally devoured. Chaplin’s factory represents the implementation of Fred- erick Winslow Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management (1911), which provided rules and procedures that functioned as algorithms programming workers thereby making them into machines that operate at maximum efficiency. For the industrial system to prosper, mass production required mass consumption, which was promoted through emerg- ing mass media. Modern advertising initially used print media—newspapers, magazines, brochures, pamphlets, and catalogues distributed through the expanding United States Postal Service. With the appearance of radio and tele- vision, new advertising agencies devised novel tactics and strategies designed to keep the wheels of production turning. Throughout most of the twentieth century, mass advertising distributed through mass media promoted the mass con- sumption that mass production required.
- 43. 21 OUR BODIES OUR SELVES During the last two decades of the twentieth century and the first two decades of the twenty-first century, the six innovations I have noted converged to create new forms of production, marketing, and consumption that are more pervasive and invasive. With the ability to gather, store, process, and distribute information about the activities, habits, and patterns of the behavior of individuals in real time, massification gives way to personalization. Mass pro- duction and mass advertising are superseded by the mass customization of products and the precision targeting of consumers. The aim of this targeting can be social and polit- ical as well as economic. Whatever its purpose, new distrib- uted computational and networking technologies involve, as Heidegger correctly predicted, the quantification, calcula- tion, and modification of human behavior. Charlie Chaplin’s managers programming workers on assembly lines have been displaced by closed-loop systems of sensors, embedded in both things and people and run by algorithms on calcu- lating machines trained by machine learning. Information collected by mobile phones and other devices is transmit- ted to servers where it is processed and personalized by relating it to the previous patterns of an individual’s deci- sions and activities. These data are then retransmitted to the same devices that had sent the original information. Person, device, data center, and computer form a closed loop that is self-generating and self-regulating. In her timely book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, Shoshana Zuboff, professor emerita at Harvard Business School, writes, “Just as [Henry] Ford tapped into a new mass consumption, Apple was among the first to experience explosive commercial success by tapping into a new society
- 44. 22 OUR BODIES OUR SELVES of individuals and their demand for individualized con- sumption. The inversion implied a larger story of commer- cial reformation in which the digital era finally offered the tools to shift the focus of consumption from the mass to the individual, liberating and reconfiguring capitalism’s operations and assets. It promised something utterly new, urgently necessary, and operationally impossible outside the networked spaces of the digital. . . . In offering consum- ers respite from an institutional world that was indifferent to their individual needs, it opened the door to the possibil- ity of a new rational capitalism able to reunite supply and demand by connecting us to what we really want in exactly the ways we choose.”7 For many advocates from Silicon Val- ley to Wall Street, these technologies represent the latest stage in the increasing efficiency of production and con- sumption that maximizes profits for those who own shares in the means of production and reproduction. There is, however, a significant price to be paid in terms of privacy and individual autonomy. The intersection of the IoT and the IoB creates what Zuboff aptly labels “Body Ren- dition.” “The rendition of your body begins quite simply with your phone. Even when your city is not ‘smart’ or owned and operated by Google, market players with an interest in your behavior know how to find your body. . . . Your body is reimagined as a behaving object to be tracked and calculated for indexing and search.” Citing a Carnegie Mellon University study of the number of times phone apps accessed location data for a three-week period, Zuboff reports, participants “were flabbergasted by the sheer vol- ume of the onslaught as they each variously learned that their locations were accessed 4,182 times, 5,398 times, 356
- 45. 23 OUR BODIES OUR SELVES times, and so on, over a 14-day period—all for the sake of advertisers, insurers, retailers, marketing firms, mortgage companies and anyone else who pays to play in these behav- ior markets.”8 The leader in data processing for targeted advertising, not surprisingly, is Google. As we will see in more detail in chapter 4, everything that is digitized is searchable. Android phones, Gmail, Google Street View, Google Glass, social media, and countless platforms and apps provide data for tar- geted marketing and behavior modification programs. According to Zuboff, in 2016, 89 percent of the income for Google’s parent company, Alphabet, came from targeted advertising. Many of the data for these programs are har- vested from the 3.5 billion searchers per day and the 1.2 trillion searches per year. With the exponential expansion of social media, the sources of data are increasing faster than the capacity to process them. Pop-up ads that seemed revolutionary only a few years ago now appear to be a primi- tive form of much more sophisticated deployments of new technologies. The precision of real-time targeting some- times is carried to extremes. For example, companies can now adjust automobile insurance rates in real time based upon a person’s performance while he or she is driving. If the driver exceeds the speed limit, runs a red light, or fails to stop at a stop sign, the insurance rate goes up, and if he or she complies with the rules of the road, the insurance rate stays the same or even goes down. While continuous rate adjustment might encourage safe driving, the real pur- pose is undeniably financial—fewer accidents means fewer claims insurance companies must pay, which results in greater profits. In a world that favors innovation and
- 46. 24 OUR BODIES OUR SELVES disruption over stability and continuity, there is no end to the effort to monetize data. What some people regard as an emerging capitalist utopia others see as a looming capitalist or totalitarian dys- topia. As computational technologies and AI have become more powerful and miniature cameras and sensors more pervasive, skepticism and criticism of high-speed finan- cial networks, social networks, and Big Data have been increasing. Concern focuses on two primary areas: eco- nomic and political. Critics argue that surveillance capi- talism effectively combines consumer and finance capital- ism by creating high-speed exchange networks where trillions of transactions provide endless data to be mined for economic advantage. To make matters worse, the rise of the Information Revolution has been conterminous with the spread of neoliberal economic principles, which favor unregulated market activity. The cozy relation among Washington, Silicon Valley and Wall Street has created a positive feedback loop accelerating financial returns. This, in turn, has led to the excessive accumulation of capital, which is exacerbating the already large wealth gap. For other critics, the issue is not only the inequitable distribu- tion of wealth and the influence it brings, but also the inequitable distribution of political power. As Marx rightly argued, in industrial capitalism, those who own the means of production hold the power. In today’s world, those who own the means of gathering information and processing data hold the power. Asymmetrical transparency is creat- ing a panoptical surveillance state in which ubiquitous cameras, sensors, tracking devices, and facial recognition technology are being used to monitor activity and control
- 47. 25 OUR BODIES OUR SELVES people. These developments seem to contradict the original logic of personal computers. As I have noted, the shift from mainframes first to personal computers and then to mobile devices was supposed to create nonhierarchical distributed networks that would facilitate the equitable distribution of wealth and power. However, just as tech- nologies designed to connect us now divide us, so the tech- nologies that were supposed to distribute wealth and power have led to their increasing concentration in the hands of fewer and fewer people. In 2001, only three years after Google was founded, Larry Page was asked, “What is Google?” “If we did have a cate- gory,” he responded, “it would be personal information. . . . Communications. . . . Sensors are really cheap. . . . Storage is cheap. Cameras are cheap. People will generate enor- mous amounts of data. . . . Everything you’ve ever heard or seen or experienced will become searchable. Your whole life will be searchable.”9 When everything and everyone is search- able, privacy is dead, and, many fear, democracy is doomed. As the unforeseen and unintended consequences of digital technologies become evident, many critics and activists are calling for the strict regulation or even complete disman- tling of large technology companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook. Nowhere is the concern about privacy greater than in the area of medical information. Doctors and hospitals have been extremely slow to digitize their records. Everyone is familiar with the frustration of having to fill out the same forms and answer the same questions again and again while doctors, physician’s assistants, and nurses slowly write down the information on paper. Further complicating
- 48. 26 OUR BODIES OUR SELVES matters, neither different doctors nor different hospitals readily share information. This inefficiency results in enor- mous losses of valuable time and money. In the past few years, this situation has slowly started to change. Many doc- tors and hospitals, especially in urban areas, are making the transition from paper to electronic medical records (EMRs), but significant problems still remain. All too often doctors and hospitals use different programs and platforms, and, thus, communication and information transfer are still slow or even impossible. While many of the difficulties are attributable to administrative ineptitude, the reluctance to digitize medical information and standardize data also reflects a justifiable concern with privacy. Many respon- sible healthcare professionals are worried about the recent entry of large companies like Google, Amazon, and Walmart into the medical business.10 These ventures assume that business models used in other areas can also disrupt health- care. Even more valuable than the profits from medical pro- grams is the anticipated value of the accumulated medical data for marketing an expanded range of products. The Internet of Bodies might turn out to be as valuable as the Internet of Things. Medical information in the hands of companies, employ- ers, colleagues, and even friends and families can have devastating personal, social, and economic consequences. In addition to this, as people become more aware of the ownership, management, sale, and possible misuse of med- ical information, many are attempting to take control of their data. Companies like PatientSphere, #My31, and Hu -manity.co have created platforms that enable people to limit access to their data and to profit from the use or sale of it.
- 49. 27 OUR BODIES OUR SELVES In February 2019 California governor Gavin Newsom pro- posed that people should be paid a “data dividend” for the use of their personal information. Senators Mark Werner and Josh Hawley are sponsoring a bill that requires com- panies to put a price on people’s data. Other critics have gone so far as to call for regulating or even dismantling the Big Tech companies responsible for collecting, processing, and selling data. While these concerns are understandable and, to a cer- tain extent, justifiable, it would be a huge mistake to take precipitous actions that would unduly limit research and technological development by inhibiting the free exchange of medical information. High-speed networked computers, mobile devices, miniature sensors, Big Data, and artificial intelligence are converging to create breakthroughs that offer hope for the treatment and perhaps even the cure of diseases that have plagued human beings for centuries. This work requires the collection, storage, and processing of massive amounts of standardized data. Allowing people to charge for the use of their medical information and exces- sive regulation would distort the pool of data available to researchers. At the precise moment that research in many areas is approaching the tipping point, overly aggressive policies and regulations threaten to arrest progress. Tech- nology has different costs and benefits in different contexts. The same technologies that enable Amazon to display annoying pop-up ads on your computer screen, or insur- ance companies to monitor your driving and automati- cally adjust insurance rates, also make it possible for my insulin pump to continuously monitor my glucose and automatically adjust my insulin dosage in real time. The
- 50. 28 OUR BODIES OUR SELVES investigation of the biochemistry of diabetes and emerging strategies for treatment reveal the importance of these tech- nologies for the rapidly expanding Internet of Bodies. Diabetes is a ticking time bomb in the healthcare sys- tems in many countries today. The growing significance of this disease is not only personal but is also social, political, and economic. In the foreword to the 2017 IDF Diabetes Atlas, Shaukat Sadikot, president of the International Dia- betes Federation, declares a “current diabetes pandemic.” Diabetes, he explains, “is not only a health crisis; it is a global societal catastrophe. Due to its chronic nature, dia- betes causes devastating personal suffering and drives fam- ilies into poverty. Governments worldwide are struggling to meet the cost of diabetes care and the financial burden will continue to expand due to the growing number of peo- ple developing diabetes.”11 Currently, 425 million people worldwide, or 8.8 percent of adults between the ages of 20 and 79, have diabetes. This number is predicted to increase to 629 million by 2045. In the past two and a half decades, the incidence of diabetes has almost tripled. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that, by 2050, one in three people in the United States will have type 2 diabetes. Today 4 million people die annually from diabetes and its com- plications. Alarming as these figures are, they actually underestimate the scope of the problem because 30–80 per- cent of people with diabetes are undiagnosed. There are two main types of diabetes: type 1, which is an autoimmune disease and is insulin dependent; type 2, which is not an autoimmune disease and is not insulin dependent. As we will see in the next chapter, both kinds of diabetes involve the malfunctioning of the immune
- 51. 29 OUR BODIES OUR SELVES system. In type 1 diabetes, the cells that produce the insulin necessary to metabolize glucose, lactose, fructose, and car- bohydrates are destroyed, and survival depends on injecting insulin into the body. In type 2 diabetes, insulin-producing cells are impaired but not destroyed and can produce some but not enough insulin. This condition can be managed by diet, exercise, and oral medication that enhances insulin production. The occurrence of diabetes is unevenly distributed geo- graphically as well as in terms of age. The countries with the highest incidence of diabetes are China, India, and the United States. The rate of increase is greatest in low- and middle-income countries. Until recently, type 1 was called juvenile diabetes because children were always insulin dependent. Only 7 percent of patients with adult-onset dia- betes require insulin. In the past several decades, children have started developing type 2 diabetes.12 Whether child- hood or adult onset, insulin-dependent diabetes occurs almost exclusively in people of European descent. African Americans, Native Americans, and Asians almost never suf- fer type 1. The rate of type 1 is somewhat higher among Latinos, but remains much lower than among whites, who are by far the most commonly affected ethnicity. This escalating problem is already creating pressure on healthcare budgets in countries that can least afford it. As of 2017, $720 billion or 12.5 percent of total healthcare costs was spent globally on diabetes. Increasing longevity will fur- ther compound the problem. When the age group is expanded to eighteen to ninety-nine years old, the total projected expenditure is estimated to be $958 billion annually. Financial challenges for people with diabetes are
- 52. 30 OUR BODIES OUR SELVES compounded by irresponsible pharmaceutical companies that are cashing in on the pandemic by excessively raising the cost of necessary drugs and medical supplies. There are reports of insulin costing up to $300 per vial. Accord- ing to Ken Alltucker, “the price of modern versions of a drug that more than 7 million Americans need to live nearly tripled from 2002 to 2013. Type 1 diabetics paid an average of $5,705 for insulin in 2016—nearly double what they paid in 2012.”13 This situation is forcing some patients to ration their insulin and others to travel to countries like TABLE 1.1 Global Epidemic Area Millions of cases 2017 Millions of cases 2045 Percent increase Western Pacific 159 183 15 percent South East Asia 82 151 84 percent Europe 58 67 16 percent North America and Caribbean 46 62 35 percent Middle East and North Africa 39 82 110 percent South and Central America 26 42 62 percent Africa 16 41 156 percent World 425 629 48 percent SOURCE: INTERNATIONAL DIABETES FOUNDATION, 2017
- 53. 31 OUR BODIES OUR SELVES Mexico and Canada where the same bottle of insulin can be purchased for as little as $40 per vial. Many people are being forced to ration their insulin and share syringes. In addition to the cost of insulin, test strips for testing the blood can cost up to $400 a month. The cost of the insulin pump and the continuous glucose monitor system and related supplies is even more extreme: Insulin pump $7,250 CGM receiver $845 Pump cartridges and tubing $645/three months Sensors and transmitter $4,200/three months Annual cost for pump and $27,475 CGM supplies Given the increasing rate of diabetes, these escalating costs are unsustainable. Diabetes is not a fashionable disease like AIDS and can- cer and thus does not attract athletes and celebrities who purport to show their concern by wearing buttons, ribbons, and pink clothes. This disease involves bodily organs and processes most people prefer to ignore. With dwindling government support, funding for research is increasingly difficult to secure at the precise moment scientists and engineers are on the brink of major breakthroughs. What makes this disease so devastating is that many of its vic- tims are children. While the diagnosis of diabetes is no longer an immediate death sentence, it does condemn its victims to a lifetime of vigilant management, which requires a degree of self-discipline that is difficult to maintain for adults, to say nothing of children and their parents. Diabetes
- 54. 32 OUR BODIES OUR SELVES is, nonetheless, a fascinating disease that reveals much about the body and the self as well as social, political, and economic forces at work in the world today. I have spent my entire professional life trying to under- stand the human self. Disease, I have suggested, shatters everyday life and forces you to consider yourself and your world anew. Diabetes awoke me from my dogmatic slum- ber; though I had written many articles and books, it was not until I developed diabetes that I came to appreciate the extraordinary sophistication and complexity of the body. As I have studied the biochemistry of the immune system and autoimmune diseases, I have discovered that scientists and physicians regularly describe diabetes as a “self-other dis- ease.” Indeed one popular textbook is entitled Immunology: The Science of Self-Nonself Discrimination.14 Diabetes reveals that the body is smart; more precisely, the body is an intri- cately calibrated information-processing and communica- tions network of networks that interfaces with the networks of the brain. The body and brain do not form a closed loop; rather, they are connected to networks that extend far beyond their ostensible spatial and temporal boundaries. The digital pancreas I wear on my belt and the disease it helps me manage transform assumptions about individ- uals by subverting many of the binary distinctions that have long informed our understanding of ourselves and thereby call into question what it means to be human. Self/Other, Subject/Object, Identity/Difference, Animate/Inanimate, Human/Machine, Natural/Artificial, Body/Mind, Private/ Public, Autonomy/Heteronomy. I no longer know what is mine and what is not, and I am no longer sure where “my” body begins and where it ends. Nor am I certain what is
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- 56. As I neared the line of cliff and rocks that formed the central ridge or back-bone of the island, the course of the stream bent to the north, and the forest was interspersed with small open glades where the great butterflies floated across through the sunshine, the metallic satiny blue of their lustrous wings glancing in the light. A flock of parrots with green, red, and blue plumage were chattering and screaming noisily in the bordering trees, and an occasional little green lizard would dash along the fallen trunks or over the rocks like a flash of emerald light. In one of these glades I found a quantity of shrubs growing about ten feet high and loaded with berries about the size of pepper-corns. The outside of these berries seemed covered with a greenish white wax. The leaf was somewhat like the myrtle. A sample of this, and of several other varieties of vegetation which were strange to me, I gathered to take home for identification in my manual of botany. I may here state that this berry-bearing shrub turned out to be the wax myrtle (Myrica cerifera of the botanists), and that the waxy coating of the berries was what is known as bay-berry tallow. This wax can be readily collected by boiling the drupes and skimming it off as it rises to the surface of the water; and a bushel of the berries will yield from four to five pounds of the wax, which can be employed to make excellent candles. Near the cliffs I came upon a fine bed of clay, and I was so delighted with this discovery that I immediately began casting about for means of transporting a good supply to my house. The bed was distant from the house, as nearly as I could judge, about two miles, and the labor of carrying such heavy material would be very great. The best plan would be to knock together a raft of dry wood and float the clay down stream as a cargo. Vines and creepers to serve as cordage to tie the dead wood together were abundant, nor did it take me long to collect the wood and fashion the raft. Indeed, the harder task proved to be the digging out of the tough clay, as the only implements I had for this purpose were pointed sticks. But I finally cut a sharp, heavy stake of hard wood, and by driving this into the clay, was able to pry off large chunks, and soon had a load ready. On the raft I laid some broad leaves and pieces of bark to serve as a deck, and on this placed the clay in a great heap, as much as the raft would carry in the shallow water. Tying a long creeper to the raft, by which to pull, guide, or hold it back, as the navigation might require, I started it off into the current, and wading in the shallow stream, followed it down, holding on to the line as it floated away. Barring an occasional grounding in the shallow places, my
- 57. raft floated serenely along at a good pace, and soon reached port, where I unloaded the clay and drew out the raft to serve as firewood. This was a good job well done, and I more than once regretted the time I had wasted in the lime-burning task, for had I found this clay sooner, a much better salt pan could have been made with it than with the mortar. This thought caused me to go and examine the salt pan. I found the mortar on the bottom dry and hard, so I opened the gate that the sea water might flow in at the next tide and fill it. The first use to be made of the clay was in the building of a fireplace and chimney for the house. My plan was to build up the structure of sticks, cob- house fashion, and then chink and plaster it with a good coating of clay. Before this could be done, however, it would be necessary to put the clay through some pugging process by which it could be rendered soft and plastic. This I accomplished by trampling the clay with my naked feet, adding a sprinkling of water now and then, until I had a mass of soft, mortar-like consistency. Then on the outside of the house I built up the fireplace close against the wall, and carried the chimney up about a foot above the highest part of the roof, plastering the sticks inside thoroughly with the soft clay. When this was done I cut through the wall to the fireplace, and plastered clay on the jambs to make all tight. The hearth I formed of harder clay, well pounded down and mixed with the sand. If no wind came until the structure was dry, it would become hard and strong enough to resist anything short of a hurricane. That the drying might be more rapid, I immediately built a good fire in it, and was rejoiced to find the draught excellent and the effect of the bright firelight upon the interior quite pleasant and homelike. This work occupied the whole day. In the evening I brought a good supply of clay into the house, and using the chest as a work-bench, busied myself until bedtime with moulding several vessels of different shapes and sizes for use in cooking and about the house. I fashioned a rude pot capable of holding about five gallons; a smaller one to hold a gallon or thereabouts; a water-jar with two handles by which it might be swung with a cord from the ridgepole, to contain drinking-water; and others of various shapes and sizes. All these I dusted over inside and out with dry sand and set aside where they might dry ready for burning.
- 58. That night I slept for the first time in my hammock, and the change was a comfortable one, though in the early morning hours I felt the need of some warm covering. For however hot the days might be, the nights on the island were always cool. However, when it got chilly I turned out and heaped the dry grass of my former bed into the hammock, and was soon warm enough. In the morning, after setting my vessels out in the sun, I turned to the careful examination of all the samples of vegetation which I had collected, carefully looking them up in the Botany to find their names and properties, and also in the Dispensatory. The seed-bearing grass was undoubtedly canary grass. Besides this and the wax-bearing myrtle, the only other notable sample was a species of india-rubber-bearing artocarpus. As the canary grass was ripe, I thought I could not do better than to harvest a good supply of it at once. The whole of that day and the next were spent in gathering it and stacking it up near the house. The labor was very great, as my knife was a poor substitute for a sickle; but the necessity of some sort of farinaceous food spurred me on. I gathered in all a great stack ten feet in diameter and twelve feet high at the peak. This I thatched with grass, just as I had seen grain stacks thatched at home, that it might be protected from the wet. Great flocks of small birds were feeding upon this seed where it grew, and I trapped a dozen or more by unhinging the chest lid and using it propped up with a stick as a trap. To try the character of the seed as food, I parched a pint of it over the fire and then crushed it in a great bivalve shell with a round stone into a coarse meal. This meal I mixed with water and salt, and it made a very good sort of cold gruel. This, with the birds broiled on the coals, made quite the best meal I had so far eaten on the island. The salt pan had already begun to yield salt, which was crystallizing along the edges as the water evaporated. The smoked turtle meat continued good, and I relished it very much. The weather remained fine from day to day, and I had strong hopes that a vessel might heave in sight at any moment. As a preparation for such a chance I laid a pile of wood ready to make a signal fire, and as a permanent signal selected an isolated palm-tree and denuding it of its leaves, tied a great stick across it near the top,—an arrangement which, I hoped, might attract the attention of a passing vessel should I fail to see it. Of material to make a flag I had nothing to spare except the square of black focussing-cloth
- 59. belonging to the camera,—and this I needed every night as a covering, as it was all I had for that purpose. As soon as my pots and other vessels were thoroughly dry I built a great pile of dry wood over them and set fire to it. I greatly feared some of them might crack with the heat, but fortunately they all came out in a serviceable condition though by no means very hard. Now that I had a large vessel in which water could be boiled, I bethought me of the wax berries and made several trips to gather a store of them. These I boiled in my large pot, and skimmed off the wax until I had collected fully forty pounds of it, the product of about ten bushels of the berries. Of this wax I made candles, or rather rushlights, by dipping dry rushes into the melted wax and letting it cool on them. When one coat of wax set I would dip the rush again, and so on, until each rush had four good coats. One of these candles would burn about four hours and give a good steady light without sputtering or guttering, though the rush wick required occasional snuffing. These lights were a great comfort to me at night, for I could read and do light work until bedtime without the necessity of keeping up a hot fire. It was by candle-light that I made me a hat out of rushes as follows: Selecting about fifty of the cleanest and slenderest I could find, and all of about equal length, I tied them firmly together by a cord wound tightly around near the butts. Then I interwove stalks of the tough, heavy grass, spreading the rushes out into a conical shape until large enough to fit comfortably on my head. This was the body of the hat. The brim was produced in the same manner by bending out the ends of the rushes to a common horizontal plane and then interweaving the grass as before, finishing the edge of the brim with a grass selvage. This made a light, cool structure, sufficient to keep the sun off my head, and far more comfortable than the handkerchief I had worn wound about it as my sole head-covering up to this time. Now that the salt pan was doing its work, and a supply of salt within a few days was considerably more than a mere possibility, I felt justified in endeavoring to obtain a store of meat. My mind turned to the turtle and the pigs, especially the latter; for if I could by any means capture a pig, there would be several weeks’ rations, at least, of fresh, salted, and smoked pork. Visions of broiled ham and bacon troubled my dreams. I made an effort to capture another turtle, watching the beach for the good part of a night; but I saw none. The next morning, I determined to go upon a regularly organized
- 60. pig-hunt. The only method of capturing them was by means of a lasso or the bolas. The forty-foot line that came ashore around the chest would make an excellent lasso, and I rigged it at once with a slip noose. I also cut a hard- wood pole about eight feet in length, charred the end in the fire to harden it, and made it sharp for use as a lance. A bolas was contrived out of two stones tied, one at each end, to a stout cord six feet long. Thus accoutred, I struck off from the creek and made a détour through the dense jungle so as to force the game into the stream, or at least to be upon higher ground if they should prove to be in the mud, as I hoped would be the case. The labor of penetrating the dense scrub was very great, and the heat intense; not a breath of air could reach these fastnesses, and perspiration poured from me as though I were in a Turkish bath. After a two-hours struggle I found myself nearing the place, and it became necessary to move with the greatest caution. Every few minutes I would stop and listen. Presently I could hear the murmur of the brook, and crawling along cautiously, I came to a fallen tree, the trunk of which reached quite to the stream. By following this down carefully, I came to a point where I could see the wallowing-place. There, sure enough, were the pigs, a score or more in number, mostly lying asleep and half buried in the mud. I studied the whole situation rapidly but thoroughly. It seemed probable from the lay of the ground that if something could frighten the animals from the other side, they would naturally rush under the fallen tree just below me. Indeed, there was a well-beaten track at this place going under the trunk, which was at this point about five feet from the ground, and the stream, the canebrake, and the dense jungle made this by far the easiest route for the pigs. My plan was made instantly, thus: I would throw the bolas at a half- grown pig that was rooting about near the jungle on the farther side of the group, and take my chance of the herd coming this way when they broke. I unrolled my lasso and laid it ready for instant use, placed my lance where it could be grasped, and cautiously rising, that I might have free play, swung the bolas around twice and let it fly. Gyrating like twin planets, the stones sped fairly through the air, true to the mark; one passed under the pig, and the other swung behind him, wrapping the cords around the hind-quarters and legs, and bowling him over like a ten-pin. The little fellow set up a squeal, and then, whoof! whoof! with a grunt and a squeal, the whole herd sprang up, looked around, saw their overturned and struggling companion,
- 61. and started directly toward my place of concealment. In the mean time I had crouched down out of view, and spread my noose ready for business. Underneath they ran squealing and snorting in great panic, and I let them pass as I had my eye on a great boar who was very deliberate in his movements and appeared to disdain undignified flight. He slowly advanced, however, champing his tusks until they frothed, and shaking his great head. I thought it best, in view of his great size and weight, to take a turn of the lasso around a limb and give it a hitch as a holdfast, as my own strength would not be enough to stop the brute. I had scarcely done this when his head came under the tree, and I swung the noose deftly over it as he emerged, and then hauled in the slack. The astonished beast sprang forward with a great bound and jerked the rope from my hands with such violence that I was thrown to the ground. When I scrambled up I saw the rope tighten until it sung in the air like a bowstring, and then slacken again. I could not see the boar, as he was hidden in the long grass; but I seized my sharpened stick lance and ran toward where he ought to be. Suddenly the great brute emerged from the grass, facing me, and charged toward me, evidently bent on mischief, the flakes of froth flying from his tusks. There was no time to get out of the way, nor even get the lance around into position, and I thought I should speedily feel his sharp tusks. He was almost upon me before I could realize the situation. Just at this critical juncture I felt the lasso fly up under my feet, throwing me over backward, and I caught a glimpse of the boar as he turned a half-somersault and plunged down on his side. When he fell he was not two feet from me. The lasso had been doubled around a bush and had thus brought the desperate creature up just in time to save me. The lance was still in my grasp, and I got to my feet before my enemy could recover. Now it was my turn. Knowing he could not reach me on this side, I came close up to him as he was making the dirt fly with his legs in a vain endeavor to get up, and drove the sharpened stick with all my force and weight into his side, just back of the shoulder. This ended the battle as the stick went half-way through him. Panting for breath and with the perspiration fairly running into my eyes, I turned away and left him to die in peace, and went to look after the pig, thinking I had been a great fool to tackle the boar at all. I found the pig still struggling with the bolas wrapped around him. I immediately determined to keep this one alive. To do this, I must get my lasso loose from the dying boar. When I
- 62. went back I found him just kicking his last. With the lasso I secured the pig in such manner that he could not get away, and then removed the bolas and let him up, giving him very little rope as I had no mind to let him run into the brush and entangle himself. I then proceeded to flay the boar, cutting off the hams and choicer parts, and securing as much of the lard and fat as I was able. I carried this down the bed of the creek to the house. I then went back for the pig and endeavored to get him home alive; but I found it utterly impossible to do so, as the vicious, obstinate brute could not be made to go in any but the wrong direction. So I was finally obliged to haul him tight up against a tree and kill him. I now had a great store of pork, and the next thing was to cure it. Salt was now the important thing, and I went to my salt pan to see what the prospect was. To my great satisfaction, I found the water all dried up, leaving a fine layer of glistening salt, thickest in the lower part of the basin and gradually thinning away to a mere frosting at the edges. It was quite dry and caked, so that there was no trouble to get it up from the bottom, and when I had heaped it together in the centre, there were, I should judge, over fifty pounds. This precious commodity I carried at once to the house so that it might be under shelter from the dew and rain. I turned to at once to “dry-salt” the pork, rubbing each piece thoroughly on all sides, and piling the whole up in the now empty turtle shell with the breast plate weighed down on it with heavy stones. The only place where I could store this meat was in the single room of my house. But I determined to remedy this by building as soon as possible a lean-to at the back of the house, which I could use first as a smoke-house, and then as a storeroom for my provisions. The turtle meat, now perfectly cured, I stored temporarily in the chest. That night I lay in my hammock in position to see the starlit ocean through one of the ventilators, and thought over my situation. I could not now complain of lack of food, for there was a supply sufficient to last me two months at least, and there was reason to suppose that it would not be at all difficult to replenish the store. In my porous earthen jar, slung at the head of my hammock in the cool air-current, and by its slow evaporation cooling the liquid contents, was pure, cool, sweet water to drink, and outside was a running brook from which to fill it as often as required. I could safely hope to support myself here as long as might be necessary. But as I had no desire to remain indefinitely a prisoner on this island, I began to
- 63. turn my thoughts persistently upon the problem of building a boat to get away in. If in the mean time a vessel of some sort should heave in sight I was prepared to take advantage of the chance; and if none came I would still have my work started and no time unnecessarily lost. Before I went to sleep that night I had planned a method of building a boat which I thought would be within the possibility of accomplishment, and had determined to begin work on the morrow.
- 64. W CHAPTER V. BOAT-BUILDING. HEN I roused the next morning the first thought that came to me was about the building of the boat. It would be necessary to have a shed to work under, large enough to contain a boat, both for shelter from the rain and for shade from the pitiless tropical sun. The building of such a shed was therefore the first task. As a suitable shipyard I selected the side of the stream on the sands of the sea-beach, and far enough above tide to be safe from a possible storm. Here I put up eight posts in the sand. To get these posts (for they had to be hunted for among the fallen wood), to carry them one or two at a time for a distance ranging from half a mile to a mile and a half, and to set them up in holes dug at the proper distances apart, was a whole day’s work, and left me only time to overhaul my dry-salting before bed-time. I went over each piece of meat, rubbing it again with salt, and turning it the other side up, and finished by putting the weights on again as before. This salting and turning every day would be necessary for about two weeks, and then the meat would be ready for the smoke-house, which I would endeavor in the meantime to get ready to receive it. The next day I spent getting poles for rafters, and lashing them together to form the roof of my workshop. Then a rain storm set in and lasted three days, during which I was practically confined to the house, and busied myself indoors with making an easy chair out of a dry stick of cedar that split readily into straight pieces. It was a pleasure to work in this soft, straight-grained, fragrant wood, and I made a good, strong, comfortable arm-chair, dowelling and cording the parts together, and framing a sort of base for it so that it would stand firm on the sand floor. I could now sit and read with comfort, or look at the gray, rainy sea as it stretched its misty plane away before my door. It was at this time that I began to keep an irregular sort of journal, entering my thoughts and doings from time to time as the enforced semi-idleness of rainy weather prompted me. Besides pencils and pens there was paper enough in my stock, wet and stained and wrinkled though it had been, to last me indefinitely.
- 65. As soon as the rain was over I took the first day to construct my provision and smoke-house, in order that I might store the meat in it. A doorway was cut from my living-room into this store-room, and I purposed fitting a tight door into it before smoking my pork. I busied myself after that on my work-shed until it was finished. This roof I covered with palm- leaves,—not leaves of the cocoanut-palm, but of the great, spreading fan- palm, a single one of which was often three or four feet in diameter. I had used these leaves in making my storehouse roof, and had secured a giant specimen in a horizontal position over my front door as a sort of porch, and to keep the sun out of the house when the door was open. The work-shed when finished was about twenty-four feet long by ten feet wide, with a shed or single-pitch roof, at the upper side about eight feet, and at the lower side—which was toward the sea—about five feet from the ground. Underneath was the clean sand of the beach. I was now ready to begin the actual work of boat-building, and my first need was a supply of clay,—so great a quantity, in fact, as would take me several days of hard work to raft down the stream to the boat-shed. You will see as I proceed what part this material was to play. After a great deal of labor, wading up and down the creek, digging, loading, rafting, and unloading, I at last accumulated a sufficient amount for my purpose in a great heap close to the boat-shed. I next proceeded to smooth the sand beneath the shed, and to compact it into a smooth, hard floor as follows: I took of perfectly dry clay several bushels in fragments, and crushed these to a fine dust; this dust I sprinkled evenly all over the sand floor to the depth of an inch or more, sprinkling and wetting the dust and the sand liberally with a bough dipped in the sea water. As the mixture grew dry I trampled it with my naked feet until it was smooth and firm, sprinkling a little dry sand on the surface and trampling it in. The result was a dustless, dry floor, hard enough to support my weight readily, and smooth enough for my purpose. On this floor, with a stretched cord rubbed with charcoal, I marked, as carpenters do with a chalk line, a straight line twenty-one feet long or thereabouts; this was to be the length of the boat, and its centre line from stem to stern. Using the cord as a measure, I laid off at each side of this centre line, the horizontal outline of my proposed boat. The greatest breadth of beam I made about six feet, and tapered both the stem and the stern alike, after the manner of a whaleboat. At each end of the centre line I drove a stake upright, and notched the top to carry a guide line stretched from one
- 66. to the other directly over the centre line. Then, with tempered clay, I marked the outline of the boat by building up a little wall about three inches in breadth and as many in height all around from stem to stern on both sides. The space inside this wall I filled with sand, sprinkled and compacted until it was level with the top of the wall. Then I added to the wall another course of clay and filled in again; and so kept on adding and filling and sloping in the wall, until I had a mound of clay-coated sand, shaped like a boat turned upside down. This labor, simple as it sounds in statement, took me over a week, and before it was done I was interrupted by the necessity for setting my smoke- house in order for curing the hams and bacon. I built for the smoking a slow fire of bark, which required attention only once or twice each day. The clay form under the boat-shed I left to get dry and hard. It was my design, as I have no doubt you have already guessed, to use this clay form as a core or groundwork, upon which to shape my boat. The next step was a most serious task; I had to procure a piece of timber for a keel, and shape it and fit to it two pieces, one at the stem, and one at the stern. The timber must be new and strong. There was absolutely no way to get this timber except by felling a tree which must be at least a foot in diameter. I could not hope to do this with a pocket knife except by an appalling amount of labor, and at the continual risk of breaking the blade; and, moreover, I did not want to subject this valuable instrument to any more wear than was absolutely necessary. I now carried it on my person tied securely to a lanyard as my most highly prized possession. But I thought I could manage to get down a tree by the aid of fire. Having selected the tree, I plastered the trunk with wet clay all around for a height of five or six feet, excepting a space of about two feet next the ground; then piled up dry fuel on the windward side and set fire to it. After an hour or two the trunk caught fire and slowly burned. I kept checking the fire from eating upward by dabbing wet clay on, until finally the tree burned through and fell. It was a much less difficult task to burn it in two at the proper length after it was once down. This done, the next thing was to reduce the stick to the correct lateral dimensions, which should be ten inches by three or thereabouts. As there was no saw, adze, or axe to be had, this reduction could be done in no other way so easily as by splitting the trunk with hard-wood wedges. I made several and charred them in the fire, then sharpened them and drove four of
- 67. them in a line into the wood of the trunk at equal distances apart. By judicious management, driving them little by little, one after another, the trunk was riven asunder, and a second split produced a piece of the right size when a little had been split off from each edge. The plank was not as smooth as if turned out by a saw mill; but it was strong and was smooth enough for my purpose. I dragged it down to the boat-shed, and went back to the log and split off in like manner a piece of suitable size to make the stem and stern posts. I set the keel timber up on edge on the clay mould, securing it temporarily with some lumps of clay until I could mark the correct length. The stem and stern posts I cut and halved on to the keel, pinning them on by pins. The drill by means of which I bored the holes for the pins was fashioned by inserting a piece of sharp chalcedony splinter into a split stick and securely wrapping the stick with a piece of cord. This stick or shank, which was about two feet in length, carried a ball of dry clay of three or more pounds in weight, and mounted about six inches from the chalcedony point. Through the upper end of the shank was a hole passing through which was a cord secured at each end to a loose cross-stick about a foot long. By twisting this cord around the shank the movement up and down of the loose cross-stick would cause the drill to revolve first in one direction and then in the other, the momentum of the whirling ball of clay causing the apparatus to continue its motion far enough to rewind the cord. This device is much used by primitive peoples, and it certainly proved a most effective instrument to me; for without renewing the drill point I bored five holes at each end, through the keel piece and the uprights. The gunwale I made by splitting cane into long, thin strips half an inch in width, and laying these in a bundle tied securely round every three or four inches with a wrapping of cord. By this means I produced a sort of stiff, untwisted cable. I secured the ends of these gunwale cables firmly to the stem and stern uprights by cord passed through holes. I next got a great store of a sort of long, slender-stemmed creeper, which I fancy must have been a species of climbing palm, though I am not sure; for there was no description of it in my books. The wood of this creeper was tough and exceedingly fibrous. Of it I proposed to make the ribs of the boat, setting them about three inches apart along the whole length of the boat. The creepers which I chose for this purpose were about half an inch in diameter, and smooth and uniform in size. Holes drilled through the keel piece close
- 68. to the clay mould permitted the passage of these ribs over the mould from gunwale to gunwale, where they were fastened by being inserted in the mass of cane splints and securely tied there with several wrappings of cöir. Of course I had to stop this work from time to time to manufacture the necessary supply of cöir. Such interruptions were a relief to me, and I would sit in the shade of the palms spinning away and thinking of my Mohawk Valley home, or gazing out upon the broad sea, where the perfect shading from deep blue to faint cobalt and fainter green, the long swell, and the transparent, curling breakers, the restless sea fowl, and the serene, cloud-flecked sky, formed a view of which I never tired. It is a mistake, it seems to me, to speak of the sea as a lonesome thing. Its ceaseless motion, its constant change of color and of mood, never exactly alike and yet never entirely unlike, all lend to it an indefinable charm. It may, indeed, be filled with solitude, but it also is filled with companionship for the solitary, as I learned then to realize. The island was the home of an astonishing number of species of small birds; several different varieties of the parrot family flew from tree to tree in flocks; different kinds of finches, many of bright plumage, in great numbers haunted the bushes about the stream; larks, flycatchers, gorgeous scarlet tanagers, little wrens, and tiny humming-birds were very numerous. The bird that I took most interest in was a daring little fellow, perhaps some sort of wren, of a brownish color, specked with pearly white spots. This self- contained and self-satisfied little fowl had a habit of carrying his tail stuck straight up in the air and cocking his head to one side in a most comical manner. This species seemed quite fearless of me, and I often saw them come hopping up on the ground near to where I sat, as though bent on ascertaining what sort of creature I was. Scarcely bigger than a walnut, with a tiny “chirp, chirp,” these dainty creatures seemed to be introducing themselves politely to me, and deprecating any possible unfriendliness that might have arisen, or might thereafter arise between us on account of an occasional seed stolen from my stack. At one time I had the notion to capture one or more of these little birds and train them as pets; but their courage and confidence utterly disarmed me. When all the vine ribs had been fitted to the boat the next thing was to apply an exterior sheathing. This also I constructed of the long smooth creepers, uniform in size and laid close together each piece extending the whole length of the boat. I secured the ends of these vines to the stem and
- 69. stern pieces by setting them into a groove or rebate, and dowelling a piece of wood down firmly upon them. At intervals I sewed or tied the rib and plank vines together with strong thin cord. When this was done I had the form of a boat, but of course it would leak like a sieve, and moreover would be crank as a basket. The next thing was to procure some sort of gum or resin, with which to coat the whole structure and thus bind it all together and strengthen it, as well as to make it water-tight. There were trees of the pine or fir species growing on the island, high on the rocky backbone. I could see them distinctly, and had little doubt that they would furnish me with at least some of the ingredients for a sort of pitch, that might be made to answer my purpose. Up to this time I had never ascended the precipitous rocks and cliffs which formed a miniature mountainrange running north and south through the centre of the island. Now I resolved to make the attempt and to ascertain definitely what could be found there in the way of pitch or resin, among the several species of evergreens. To ascend these cliffs and rocks through the thickets and tangled vines was no easy task. Giant beds of fern, fallen tree-trunks, jungles of thorny bush, barred the way apparently at all points. The most feasible route seemed to be up a chasm through which came a tinkling rivulet to join the stream, with many a fall and leap, boiling now, and now dashing in spray over the fern-embowered rocks. It was a hard, hot climb. The humming-birds, like flying jewels,—rubies, topazes, amethysts, lapis lazuli,—darted to and fro in a dozen varieties, pausing to hover over the deep, scarlet chalices of the trumpet flower. Far above in the clear, deep blue of heaven slowly swung a circling vulture on motionless wing, a mere speck against the light. At last I reached the top, a sort of broken rocky plateau covered with trees among which were numerous evergreens. After a brief rest to recover breath, I examined some of the trees, and found to my great delight a species of pitch pine among them. The scaly, reddish bark was bedewed with tears of gum which I knew would with a little boiling or drying be converted into a hard resin. Without losing any time I went to work with my knife upon the trees. I bared a place of its bark on each of a dozen trunks, about three feet in height and six inches in width, and cut a notch at the bottom to collect the gum, scoring the bared place with cross cuts at intervals of a few inches. This occupied me until it was within two hours of
- 70. sunset, and I dared stay no longer that day, for fear of being benighted on the way home. Early next morning I returned with my lasso, an earthenware vessel, and my burning-glass. The wounded trees had already begun to yield a supply of sticky sap or gum, which I scraped down and collected in the earthen pot, until it was quite full. I placed this to melt and boil over a slow fire and proceeded to wound about a dozen more trees. That night I slept on the summit, and worked hard all next day collecting and boiling the resin, so that when I went the next night to the house I was able to carry with me twenty-five or thirty pounds of the material,—a hard, dark resin. At this labor I spent about a week longer, sometimes going home at night, and sometimes sleeping on the rocks, until I had got together, as I thought, sufficient for my purpose. Now I wanted some grease to mix with the resin, and concluded to kill a pig for this purpose. I had to wait two days to find the herd, but finally succeeded in capturing a fine young porker, which yielded a good store of lard and fat, much more indeed than I needed for the pitch kettle, as well as a fine supply of fresh pork-chops and some meat for the smoke-house. I melted the resin in my five-gallon pot, and added to it sufficient melted pig-fat, so that the pitch when cold would be quite stiff and hard, but not brittle. With this hot, tenacious pitch I payed the whole exterior of the boat with a good thick coat, penetrating and filling all the interstices. When this was hard and cold I tried to lift the boat from the clay core in order to turn it over. To my disgust I found that the pitch had stuck it fast to the core in a thousand places, so that it could not be moved. There was nothing to do, therefore, except to undermine the whole structure, dig the sand out, and take out the dry, hard clay from below, piece by piece,—an immense labor, as you may well conceive. But this was finally accomplished without injury to the boat. I found that the structure was entirely too flexible for practical navigation, and that it would be necessary to deck over the greater part, if for no other reason than to stiffen it. I decided to make an air-tight compartment at each end, extending about three feet, and carry a deck fore and aft over the entire boat, excepting a well hole in the middle, six feet long by three feet wide, which was to be surrounded by a washboard, or raised edge, about six inches in height. Having cleared away the débris, I turned my boat right side up.
- 71. I was very anxious to get this boat completed, and had been working hard at it every day for over a month. I wanted to know if it would at least float properly, and therefore labored from early dawn to dark without cessation. One night I had been restless and wakeful, and got up without appetite for parched seed and smoked meat. Fancying this was merely from excitement about the work, and from want of variety in diet, I concluded that the next day I would knock off work for a time and go fishing. But when I went down to the shed and got to work I felt tired and languid. There was a great pain in my head, chilly sensations ran up and down my back, and pains in the limbs and a general depression of spirits warned me of an approaching illness. Fearing a collapse I started for the house, when suddenly I grew faint and fell on the sand, and lay there for several hours, a fierce fever raging through me. An intense thirst stimulated my feeble energies to make one or two attempts to reach the house; but I failed and crawled back to the shed. Once I managed to reach the creek and get a drink, but it was preferable to suffer thirst, I thought, rather than make the attempt again. About sundown the fever left me, and though much weakened I felt well enough to get to the house, light a candle from the last sparks of my neglected fire, and turn into my hammock. Evidently I was seized with some malarious disorder. Anxious to know what I could do for myself in the way of medicine, I got the Dispensatory and began a search for febrifuges. I could not hope to find Peruvian bark on the island as this region was, I conceived, out of its habitat. However, I made pencil notes of everything I could find mentioned as a febrifuge. Among other things I noted that it was customary in the Campagna near Rome for the fever-stricken inhabitants to make a sort of tea of sliced lemons, which was said to cure the Campagna fever. Now I remembered to have seen wild limes growing along the upper part of the creek, and thought if I could get strength enough to gather some the next day I would try an infusion of them. That night I slept pretty well, and in the morning got up feeling fairly well. But warned by yesterday’s experience, I dreaded a recurrence of the chill and fever, either that day or the next. So I went immediately and gathered a quantity of the ripest of the limes. These I sliced thin with my knife and poured boiling water over them in a small vessel, and set them aside to steep. As soon as the infusion was cold I took a small sip to see what the effect would be. I found no bad consequences, and in an hour took
- 72. another larger sip. This I kept up every hour all day, and did some work on the boat. That night I drank about a quart of hot water, and buried myself in a bed of dry grass in the house, with a small fire going. I was soon in a profuse perspiration, and after a while fell sound asleep and awoke in the morning hungry. Whether the lime tea checked the fever, or whether the attack was no more than a passing biliousness, I do not know. At any rate I soon recovered, and was not ill again while on the island. I now resumed work persistently on the boat, and finally the air-tight compartments and decking, made like the rest of the vessel of vines coated with pitch, were done. I got some rollers under the boat and pushed it into the creek, where it floated true and buoyant as I could desire. Mooring it securely I got on board and found it stanch, and every way much better than I had hoped. To my great joy it did not leak a drop, though I had expected to have a great deal of patching to do. My next task was to rig a mast and sail. The mast I had already brought down from the heights, in the form of a slender evergreen, trimmed and peeled of its bark. Nor was I long in stepping and rigging it with the necessary stays. The making of the sail was a much longer matter. I had given this question a great deal of thought, and while at work on the boat had carefully weighed several different devices, but had been unable to hit upon a feasible plan. Therefore I deferred it until the very last thing, fitting on a rudder and even making and burning a water jar and a cover for it to contain a supply of fresh water on board, before regularly beginning work on the sail. Finally, however, all was finished except the sail, and I was forced to the task. The best thing I could think of for the purpose was strips of bark woven on cord after the fashion in which some window blinds are made from wooden slats and cord; and as this could best be used with what I believe is termed a latteen rig, that is to say a single short mast in the centre of the boat, with a long yard suspended at its top and inclined upward from the bow aft, upon which the sail is hung, I changed my mast and stepped it to suit such a rig. Then I procured a long, slender, tapering pole for a yard. I found a tree with a smooth, flexible inner bark, and after a great deal of labor secured a sufficient quantity, cut in strips one and a half inches in width, and some of it as long as the boom. Then I spun a great quantity of cord, and tied doubled lengths of it to the boom at intervals of a foot. Then laying the boom down on the beach I placed a strip of the bark alongside it and tied it there with all the cords; by the side of that I added another a little
- 73. shorter and tied it, and so on until I had built up a triangular sail of the bark strips attached to the boom by the cords, the strips running parallel with the boom. In order to make it hold the wind better, I punched holes in the edges of the bark strips, and tied the edges of adjacent strips together. When I had this sail complete and rigged to the mast the wind was blowing away from the shore, and I had to wait until the next day to give it a trial. But I made everything ready, including food and water and a ballasting of stones, and on the next morning, the wind blowing quietly on shore, I went on board, cast off, and poled the craft out of the creek, watching a good chance to push her through the breakers at the bar. I got safely out, and hoisted the sail. For a moment she fell off and rose and sunk with the swell, but taking the wind fair, presently leaned down until the lee gunwale was nearly buried in the green water, and began to forge ahead rapidly, fairly sliding through the water, with the wake running away behind and a white curl of foam racing from the bow. I tried her on all tacks, on and off the wind, ratching and running before it, and found that the best point of sailing was on the wind. This was entirely satisfactory. So delighted was I with the operation of the boat that I tacked away in stretches of two or three miles until I had beat up a good league from the island, and then turned and ran before the wind straight for the creek, where I arrived safe, and moored the boat securely in her snug harbor. The building of this boat had taken me three months; but it was at last finished, and offered me a means, at the first fair wind, of sailing away for Martinique or some adjacent island, a port which I could fairly expect to make in two or three days at farthest. I went to bed that night in a happier and more contented frame of mind than I had theretofore experienced on the island.
- 74. A CHAPTER VI. “DUKE 2D, PROPERTY OF H. SENLIS.” S the wind next day was in the wrong quarter, I set deliberately about lading my new boat, as far as my means went, with all the provisions and appliances that seemed necessary for the voyage. This was all done by noon, and I sat down idly to wait for a wind that should promise settled weather, and be in the right direction. The first, second, and third days passed without any prospect of change, and I grew very impatient. Things seemed to have lost their interest for me. The one idea of getting away drove all else out of mind. I walked to and fro along the beach like a caged animal, overhauled my cargo, added to it, changed the water in my storage jar, and did a hundred useless things. Still the breeze blew softly and steadily from the south of east,—a head wind, which would oblige me to ratch all the way to Martinique. On the third night, as I was sitting out on the beach in the moonlight, I bethought me of the ancient rhyme of the mariner who, cursed by everlasting head winds, toiled on day by day only to be blown back night after night. There was plenty of time now to plan what I should do when I reached Martinique. Up to this time I had not thought it out very carefully. So to pass the dreary hours I began to go over the whole programme mentally. The more I thought about it, however, the less prospect could I see of getting at Martinique what appliances and assistance I wanted, even if I had possessed money enough. I should have to go clear back to New York to get another diving apparatus, and that of itself would consume the greater part of my funds. When this conviction forced itself on my mind, I was aghast. Must I give up the search for the treasureship merely for lack of funds, after all my trouble and expense? I sprang up and began walking up and down the sand at the very edge of the breakers, like a wild man. Abandon my enterprise? Never, never! I would rather stay and die on the island than do that. Why not, indeed, stay on the island and take my chances. I had built a boat out of nothing, and why could I not contrive some means for at least finding the
- 75. sunken galleon and locating it accurately? Then, with something definite in prospect, it would surely not be difficult to go to Martinique and there interest somebody else to furnish the necessary funds for the enterprise, and divide the proceeds. There seemed to be wisdom in this course, and I resolved to adopt it forthwith. Even as I made this resolution a heavy cloud passed over the moon, a faint breeze stirred through the rattling palm-leaves, and putting up a moistened finger I found the wind had changed to the southwest; soon it began to increase, and in an hour there was a fine steady breeze blowing exactly from the best quarter for my voyage, if I had chosen to take advantage of it. I was thankful at that moment that it had not come sooner. I looked long and musingly upon the darkening water and it must have been nearly midnight when, after seeing carefully to the security of my boat, I turned into the hammock with a contented mind, and buoyed up by a firm resolve to succeed. In the morning, as I was going down to the stream, I saw approaching along the sands a dog. Nothing could have been more astonishing to me than this sight. What could a dog be doing on this island? When and how did he get here? Where dogs are, there also are men. This dog could never have come here alone. The animal saw me as soon as I saw him, and came running up wagging his tail in the most friendly way, running around in half-circles, and barking with delight. I called him up and stroked his head. He was a fine black Gordon setter, with an intelligent high-bred appearance. Around his neck a chain collar bore a plate engraved “Duke 2d, property of H. Senlis.” “Duke, good Duke,” said I, “where is your master?” But the only answer Duke could make was a series of delighted contortions, jumps, and short barks. I went to the house and got some dried turtle-meat, which he ate voraciously, and seemed to call for more. When I had fed him all he seemed to demand he curled up on the sand as contentedly as though this was a long sought resting-place. With his head over one paw and one eye occasionally opening to look at me, he was the very picture of contentment and satisfaction. As I sat eating my breakfast of parched-seed gruel and broiled bacon, and looking at the dog curled up on the sandy floor of my house, I speculated on the method of his arrival on the island. Was he shipwrecked like myself, or left by some hunting party? Was he here alone, or were those to whom he belonged still on the island; and if so where were they? The
- 76. whole island was not above six or seven miles in length, and three or four in breadth. Yet the dense forest growth, the jungles and cane-brakes, the central ridge of precipitous rocks could easily conceal the presence of other people, especially if they were on the other side. At any rate I thought it high time for me to take a careful survey of the entire domain, and this, if for no other purpose, to satisfy my curiosity aroused by the startling advent of Duke 2d. When I first saw the dog he was coming up apparently from the southern end of the island, and I concluded to start in that direction down the beach, and go as far as possible along the sea,—quite around the whole island if that were practicable. With this view I packed my haversack with provisions, and filled my large bottle with fresh water, and swung it by a cord under my arm. Taking my lasso and lance and burning-glass, I started down the beach. Duke followed or ran on before, as much pleased apparently as though we were on a gunning expedition. The beach extended south from my house for a distance of about three miles, and then terminated in a low, rocky shore covered with cactus and thorny shrubs. Beyond this the southernmost extremity of the island extended in a rocky headland, and there were some low rocks detached from the shore and covered at high tide, forming dangerous breakers, to which a navigator rounding the southern cape would wish to give a wide berth. In the sand and among the rocks where the cactus grew I captured an armadillo. This harmless little creature, about the size of a sucking pig, was called to my attention by the dog, which had discovered it and seemingly did not know what to make of such a strange customer, covered with its curious, horny armor. Duke was sniffing and jumping back and barking, when I caught sight of the hindquarters of the armadillo just disappearing in the sand. The animal was burrowing itself out of sight with astonishing rapidity in the loose soil. At first I could not conceive what it was, as it appeared from the view I had more like some sort of a reptile than an animal. But I speedily recognized it, and pulled it bodily out of the tunnel it was excavating. The little fellow did not attempt to run away, but curled itself up into a ball with its head and feet tucked out of sight. Duke went up to it and turned it several times over with his paw, but evidently could have inflicted no injury upon it had he been minded to make the attempt. However, as roast armadillo is noted as a savory dish I speedily put an end
- 77. to its life by inserting my knife blade between the joints of its armor, and it was added to our larder at once. We now crossed over through the rocks to the west shore, which was formed, so far as I could see, of rocks and cliffs, which rose bolder and higher toward the north. The travelling along these cliffs was very bad, and at a break I descended to the narrow margin of sand and rocks at their feet, left bare by the receding tide. Here the walking was fairly good, and we made our way along at a good pace for a mile. Now the shore rose boldly up in a sheer cliff nearly a hundred feet in height, and the beach was little more than a mass of fallen rock. In a shallow indentation or bay we, or rather the dog, discovered bubbling up through the sand a spring of cold, pure water which must have been under the sea at high tide. There was also an abundance of small oysters attached to the rocks, and I ate of them for my lunch. At this spring I refilled my water bottle and sat down to rest in the shade of the rocks. The dog seemed very uneasy for some reason, and thinking there might be some animal about, I got up and looked around. To my great alarm I soon discovered that the tide had risen so far as partly to submerge some of the rocks that were dry when I had passed a half-hour before. It would be no trifling matter to be caught in this place by the tide; but whether it were best to go on or go back I could not tell. However, as I knew the road behind me I determined to retrace my steps. I had not gone a quarter of a mile before I found that it would be impossible to pass in that direction. Whether it would be practicable to proceed in the other I could not foresee; it was so doubtful that I had no time to lose. So I hurried back again to the spring, where a margin of sand was still uncovered by the rising waves. Here I soon found that advance as well as retreat along the water was cut off. Above me frowned the perpendicular cliffs. The situation seemed full of desperate peril, and was grave enough in all reason. I felt much as one might fancy a rat feels when the door of the trap snaps on him, and breathless he circles about and finds no exit. Duke was crouched down and shivering as with an instinct of apprehension. There was a sense of numb despair with it all—a sickening sense of giving up the fight, as though it were useless to strive against brutal ill fortune. Why did I ever come into this rat-trap? Now a man should not waste any time or thought on vain repinings, self indignation or accusation, under such circumstances, but turn his attention to the real question, and keep his eye
- 78. fixed firmly and singly on the main chance. But it is not always easy to think when and of what you ought. Indeed, I found myself speculating as to how the end would come. Inch by inch the water would creep up. Duke would first be swept under, unless I chose to support him for a while. Then little by little I would be submerged, knees, middle, chest, shoulders, neck, chin, lips,—and then the final struggle. I cast my eyes up to see how far above my height the water would rise. The marks of high water were there plain on the cliff, and I calculated that I should be submerged at least eight feet at high water. All along, the rock rose sheer up without a break to the very top. There was one place, however, where the cliff, undermined by the waves, had split off and fallen down, making a ledge about twenty-five or thirty feet above the water’s edge; but there seemed to be no way of climbing up to this ledge,—indeed it overhung the base. Upon it grew two or three small trees, and one of them leaned out over the sea. When my faculties once more began to assert themselves, it occurred to me that it might be possible to cast the end of my lasso over this projecting tree-trunk and thus perhaps haul myself up to the ledge hand over hand. The conception of this idea was almost equivalent to its execution; I felt that I was saved. To one end of the lasso I tied a stone, and secured the other end firmly around the body of the dog. This stone I cast easily over the tree trunk, and swung the rope in such a manner that the weighted end would twist several times around the body of the rope. I pulled and tested it with my weight, and it held firm. Casting my lance up on the ledge, I climbed hand over hand up the rope, occasionally steadying myself with feet against the rock, until I had a firm grasp on the trunk and was safely on the platform. Leaning over I called to the dog, and when he came up close to the rock I spoke to him kindly to allay his fears, and then hauled him up. The platform was at least ten feet wide at the middle part, perhaps forty feet long, and tapered away to a mere ledge at each end. There was plenty of dry dead sticks and wood which had fallen down from above, and, as the afternoon sun shone hot and bright in the western sky, it was not long before I had kindled a fire with my burning-glass, and had spitted the armadillo for a roast. I now sat and watched the sea rise and wash in breakers on the base of the cliff, and shuddered to think what would have been my fate but for the lasso and the timely aid it afforded me. I watched a glorious sunset wherein
- 79. long bars of purple cloud edged with molten gold, and fleecy flakes of burning vermilion melted on a sky of gray-green light, over an ocean of dark blue shot with violet, and here and there tinted and gilded with crimson and gold from the red, flaming ball that was just dipping to the horizon. And far into the night I sat awaiting the rising of the moon, the novelty of the situation driving all inclination for sleep from me. Duke was a good companion, and inclined to sit out the company. He lay with his head on my knee, occasionally looking up into my face in a truly sociable and friendly manner. About nine o’clock at night, there being then a dead calm, I heard distinctly the beat of a screw propeller, accompanied by the regular blowing at slow intervals of escaping steam. I looked all about for the vessel, and presently made out her mast-head light, like a star quivering on the horizon. Gradually it lifted above the water in the southern sky, and I knew it would pass me quite near at hand unless its course were changed. There were still some embers of my fire alight, and nothing would have been easier than to make a signal which doubtless would have been seen on board. But though I gathered the embers together instinctively, I took no step toward making the signal. She drew nearer and nearer, and finally passed along the coast not half a mile distant, trailing a long plume of smoke. So near was she at one time that in the starlight and upon the light of the sea I could distinguish her form and build, and conjectured that she was some ocean tramp, sliding along stern deep down, and nose cocked out of the water, looking for a cargo from port to port,—an iron steamer, such as are sent out by thousands now-a-days to wander over all the seas and oceans, and which, going from port to port, finally return to the home port, perhaps when it is time to lay their sides and ribs into the junk heap for old iron. When the moon rose the steamer was a pale, gray spot at the end of a long stain of dark smoke far in the northern horizon. It finally disappeared, the smoke fading away and mingling with the faint mist-wreaths that stole up from the sea under the moonlight. I went to bed on the rock with Duke coiled up beside me, and slept until broad day. I found the water still too high for me to descend safely to the sand; the tide had apparently gone out and was coming in again. I did not much like the idea of descending again to the foot of the cliff if it could be avoided, because there was no telling whether I could safely proceed farther to the north; nor was I yet ready to
- 80. go back home, for I intended, if possible, to make the complete circuit of the island. Therefore I turned my attention to that portion of the cliff that rose above my ledge. After a careful scrutiny I concluded it would be possible to reach the top by climbing a tree that grew close to the rock. A narrow ledge could be reached from the upper limbs, and it led along the face of the rocks for a few steps to a sort of crack or chasm up which one might easily clamber to the top. I climbed down to the beach as soon as the water was low enough, and filled my bottle anew at the spring, Duke howling and barking all the time, as though in great distress at being deserted. I returned to the ledge, fastened the end of the lasso around the dog, and climbed up the tree with my lance, haversack, and water bottle. With some difficulty I reached the chasm safely, and proceeded to haul up the dog. From there the climbing was not difficult to the top. Here was a considerable forest, similar to the growth on the central mountainous plateau of the island where I went for pitch. Indeed, as well as I could then see, and as afterward I found to be the case, this line of cliffs was connected with the central plateau by a ridge running east and west. There was a valley between the cliffs and the plateau, divided into two parts by this transverse ridge. The travelling through the woods on the cliff was not difficult, as there was very little undergrowth. I made a discovery in this wood of several lofty trees which bore nuts of the triangular variety known as Brazil nuts. They grow enclosed in a hard outer casing like a small cannon-ball. One of these fell as I passed beneath the tree. If it had struck Duke or me there is no estimating the hurt that would have been occasioned. It fell fairly on a projecting root, and burst open, scattering the loose nuts about. I gathered a haversack full and filled my shirt and pockets, casting uneasy glances the while up into the trees in fear of a possible bombardment from above; nor did we linger long under those dangerous limbs. Pushing along, as near the edge of the cliffs as possible, we came, near the middle of the island, north and south, to a well beaten path leading down toward the sea through a break in the cliffs. Duke immediately bounded down this path, and I followed him anxiously; for it did not look as though made by pigs, but rather as if trodden by human feet. The narrow gorge speedily widened out into a little bowl-shaped valley, open to the sea
- 81. on one side, and on three sides walled in by the cliffs, which were hung with luxuriant vegetation,—a most lovely spot. A gently sloping sward extended nearly to the pebbly beach, and a little stream of clear water, which came frothing in haste down the glen, paused in a quiet sweep and curve through the meadow, the long grass bending over its narrow course, and dipping into the limpid surface, till finally it flowed down over a bed of bright-colored pebbles to the little bay in front. Here and there a wide- spreading tree cast a broad, purple shadow, and many flowers sent forth fragrance to the pure, warm air. It was truly a sylvan paradise. What specially interested me, however, was the white gleam of canvas shining through the foliage. A tent was pitched near the stream. I called out to announce my presence, but nobody appeared, and going up to the structure, I found it vacant and deserted. The tent was made of a huge mainsail, stretched over a pole and secured to the ground by pegs. It evidently had been long deserted, perhaps a month; the rains had washed the ashes of a fire nearly all away. In the trunk of an adjacent tree stuck an axe, buried to the helve as though by a powerful hand. The metal was all covered with red rust, and so firmly imbedded in the gash that I could not release it until I had pounded it out with a stone. A further search disclosed a dish broken in half, a rusty case-knife, a hand-saw, an iron kettle, a frying- pan, which lay in the tent, and fragments of old newspapers and letters strewed about. In one corner were two blankets rolled loosely together and somewhat mildewed. I hauled these blankets and also an old topsail out of the tent, and spread them in the sun to dry. Then I wandered about seeking some clew as to who had been here and how long since; but conjecture was idle. At the mouth of the creek there was a tree with the marks on it of a mooring line; and the trace of the line was still faintly visible on the earthy bank. The most probable supposition was that a party of pig-hunters had landed here, and for some reason had been suddenly called away. That they had left hurriedly was evident both from the standing tent and its contents, and also from the fact that a garden had been planted, which was now grown up to rank luxuriance. In this garden was a great quantity of yams and sweet potatoes, most of them just in a condition to be gathered; also peas and beans quite dry and ripe, and some Indian corn, the last still green. A rusty shovel and hoe were lying there just as they had been left. I made no scruple to help myself to what I wanted of this abundant harvest that chance had placed in my hand. It was
- 82. not long before I had a fire built and the kettle on, and some of the yams and sweet potatoes boiling. These vegetables eaten hot, with salt and bacon, were to my unaccustomed palate more delicious than I can describe. Duke also ate of them ravenously. About two o’clock in the afternoon, after packing up the new-found property in the tent as securely as I could, I hurried away to the north along the cliffs, anxious to reach home in order to get my boat and return for these treasures; for treasures indeed would this abundant supply of food as well as the other things be to me. About a quarter of a mile north of this little haven, which I named “Farm Haven,” the cliffs ran back from the sea, leaving a broad, smooth beach which gave an excellent road quite to the northern extremity of the island, excepting at one place where I was obliged to wade waist deep across the mouth of a deep indenting cove. At the northern end were isolated rocks, one of which rose boldly up to a height of fifty or sixty feet and was surrounded by the water even at low tide. After clambering over the rocks for an eighth of a mile I struck again the smooth, incurving beach that margined the eastern shore, and before dark reached home. Everything about the house was just as I had left it, and the boat was gently heaving to the modified swell that penetrated in gentle undulations to its safe harbor in the creek. I sat long that evening enjoying the cool air, and speculating on the events of my journey. I had not found Duke’s master, but could account at least in some measure for his presence on the island; for he had been undoubtedly forgotten in the hurried departure of the party whose camp I had just visited.
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