Blafard

The word arrives in a book, not a forest. It is printed in Berlin in 1768, or claims to be, on a title page that lies about where the sheets were actually run off, and it belongs to a Dutch-born abbé named Cornelius de Pauw who had never crossed the Atlantic and never intended to. In his preliminary discourse he promises the reader a great deal, and among the promises is this one: that in describing the wan or blafard men encountered at the Isthmus of Darien, he has supplied every light necessary to explain the origin of the white Negroes. A monster is being born in a study, by candle, from other people’s travel books. It will take about a century to die.

Something real stands behind it, and the real thing is better than the invention. In 1681 a young English surgeon named Lionel Wafer was left behind in the Darien forest when a companion’s powder-horn ignited and burned his knee open. The buccaneers went on without him. He lived for months among the Guna, learned what he could, and when he finally got home to write it up he described a group of people he had never seen anywhere else. Their skin, he said, was not the fair white of a fair European but a milk-white, lighter than any European’s, much like the colour of a white horse, and their bodies were beset all over with a fine short milk-white down that added to the whiteness. Their hair grew white too, and their eyebrows, and their lashes. Their eyelids bent open in an arch, a downward-pointing crescent at the corners. In daylight their eyes ran with water and they went about squinting, and they preferred not to go abroad at all unless the day was overcast. On a clear moonlit night they saw perfectly well. Wafer and his shipmates gave them a name for that: Moon-Eyed.

Wafer was describing albinism, and he was describing it accurately, which is more than can be said for what happened to his description afterwards.

It fell into the hands of theory. Buffon, the greatest naturalist in Europe and the author of the vastest encyclopaedia of nature ever attempted, was assembling a catalogue of human varieties, and pale, weak-eyed, night-seeing people kept turning up in it. He had them from Java, where a nation called the Chacrelas came out white and blond, with feeble eyes that could not bear the full day, walking with their heads down and their lids almost closed, and seeing well after dark. He had them from Africa and Ceylon under other names. Somewhere in the same decades Buffon was also working out the idea that made him famous and would eventually make him ridiculous: that the New World was colder and wetter than the Old, and that cold and damp diminish everything they touch. Animals found on both sides of the ocean were smaller in America. Animals found only in America were feebler than animals found only in Europe. The conclusion he drew was that they had degenerated.

De Pauw took the theory and pushed it as far as it would go, which was considerably further than Buffon had gone. It was not only the animals. It was the people, and it would be the colonists too: Europeans who settled in America would degenerate, and so would their children. His method is visible on almost any page. Panama is afflicted with serpents, he writes, and Cartagena with clouds of enormous bats, and Portobelo with toads, and Surinam with cockroaches, and Quito with fleas, and Lima with lice and bedbugs. A continent is being assembled out of vermin. And into that continent walks the blafard, ashen and squinting and hiding from the sun, precisely the sort of ruined creature the argument required, delivered as proof rather than proposed as an example.

The blafard’s power was entirely rhetorical, and it was real. Buffon’s Natural History was a bestseller; Frederick the Great read it; the theory of New World degeneracy became one of the things educated Europe simply knew, and it supplied a scientific-sounding reason not to emigrate and not to take the young United States seriously. By 1806 an English compiler was selling a volume of extracts from de Pauw with the blafards and the white Negroes advertised on the title page alongside the Patagonian giants, two American impossibilities marketed as a matched set. That is the strange arithmetic of the degeneracy writers: the same continent could produce men too small and men too large, and either way it proved the place was wrong.

What killed it was an animal. Thomas Jefferson, who had answered Buffon at length in Notes on the State of Virginia and got nowhere, decided that argument was insufficient and arranged for a moose to be shot, stuffed and shipped to Paris. It took years. Friends were pressed into service, General John Sullivan tramped through New Hampshire after a suitable specimen, and the thing that finally arrived in October 1787 was somewhat the worse for the crossing. Jefferson had already told Buffon over dinner that a European reindeer could walk under the belly of an American moose. Buffon, hearing that, said he would give up the question if such a moose were produced. It was produced. He died shortly afterwards, and the theory limped on for a while without him, and then it stopped.

The blafard had no defence against evidence, because it had never been anything except an argument wearing skin. Its weakness was that the people it was drawn from could be visited, and looked at, and asked.

They still can. The Guna of Guna Yala, the island chain along the Panamanian coast where Wafer lay up with his burned knee, have one of the highest recorded rates of albinism of any population on earth. They call their albino children sipu, children of the moon, and where the eighteenth-century philosophers saw degeneracy the Guna saw something closer to the opposite: a role, a place, often a position of standing. The sun is still the problem it always was. Children with albinism in the comarca burn badly, cannot take an uncovered gym class, sit and watch the volleyball. Panama passed a law in 2021 to protect them and named a day for them in June. Nobody there is a monster. Somebody in Berlin, working late with a stack of borrowed voyages, simply decided they were.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a blafard?

A blafard is an imaginary creature invented by eighteenth-century European writers, described as a pallid, weak, night-seeing human variety supposedly found on the Isthmus of Darien in present-day Panama. It was not a folk monster from any American tradition. It was a category created in European books, chiefly by Cornelius de Pauw in 1768, and used as evidence for the theory that the New World caused all living things to degenerate.

Was the blafard real?

No. The blafard was a distortion of something real: the Guna people of Panama include an unusually high number of individuals born with albinism, and European travellers had been describing them since the seventeenth century. The surgeon Lionel Wafer, stranded in Darien around 1681, wrote an accurate account of milk-white skin, white hair, weak daylight vision and good night vision. Later writers turned that account into proof of a defective race.

Who invented the blafard?

The word and the argument belong to Cornelius de Pauw, whose Recherches philosophiques sur les Américains appeared in 1768 and promised to explain the origin of the “white Negroes” by describing the wan or blafard men of the Isthmus of Darien. De Pauw built on Buffon, who had already argued that the cold and damp of the Americas made all life there smaller and weaker than life in the Old World.

What does blafard mean?

Blafard is an ordinary French adjective meaning wan, pallid or washed-out, the colour of something drained. De Pauw used it alongside blême, another word for pale, and grouped these men with the “white Negroes” and with the albino populations reported from Java, Ceylon and Africa under names such as chacrela, kakerlak and dondo.

How was the theory of New World degeneracy disproved?

It was disproved slowly, and then it was embarrassed by a moose. Thomas Jefferson refuted Buffon in print in Notes on the State of Virginia and, when that failed to move him, had an enormous American moose shot, stuffed and shipped to Paris, where it arrived in 1787. Buffon had promised to give up the question if such an animal existed. He died soon after seeing it.

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