Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language

Abstract

For many generations on Martha's Vineyard, deafness was no bar to a full social life.The fifth of April, 1715, had not been a good day for Judge Samuel Sewell of Boston.2Onhis way to the island of Martha's Vineyard there had been trouble finding a boat to cross Nantucket Sound.The vessel then lay for hours without wind, and once it was across, the horses had to be pushed overboard to swim for shore on their own.Sewell and his company reached shore at dusk-cold, hungry, and in bad humor.Finding a group of local fishermen nearby, the judge engaged one of them to guide him to Edgartown and later noted in his diary: "We were ready to be offended that an Englishman . . . in the company spake not a word to us.But, " he continued by way of explanation, "it seems he is deaf and dumb."This Englishman was indeed deaf, as were two of his seven children.His is the first recorded case of what we now know to be a form of inherited deafness that was to appear consistently within this island population for more than 250 years and affect dozens of individuals.Probably one or several of the small number of settlers who originally populated the area brought with them a trait for hereditary deafness.As long as the "gene pool" remained limited in the small island population, this trait appeared with high frequency in subsequent generations.Put another way, the founders of this isolated society had a greater likelihood of perpetuating the trait for congenital deafness than if they had been part of a larger, changing population.Martha's Vineyard offers what I feel to be a good example of the way in which a community adapts to a hereditary disorder.Lying some five miles off the southeastern coast of Massachusetts, the island was first settled by Europeans in the early 1640s.The population, of predominantly English stock with some admixture of indigenous Wampanoag Indian, expanded rapidly, owing to a tremendously high birthrate.Families that had fifteen to twenty children were not uncommon and twenty-five to thirty not unheard of.Although several hundred households are listed in the census records of the mid-eighteenth century, only about thirty surnames are to be found, and during the next century and a half only a handful more were added to the original group of names.After the first generation, marriage "off-island" was rare.While Vineyard men sailed around the world on whaleships, merchantmen, and fishing vessels, they almost invariably returned home to marry local girls and settle down.Women married off-island even less frequently than did the men.Contact with the mainland was said to be more sporadic than with foreign countries.In the nineteenth century, islanders claimed that more of their men had been to China than to Boston, only eighty miles away.Even today, many islanders have never been to the island of Nantucket, barely eight miles to the east.Throughout then seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, marriage patterns on the island followed the customs of any small New England community.Most of the islanders, however, can trace their descent to the same small nucleus of original settlers, indicating that although they were unaware of it, considerable "inbreeding" took place.The result was during these two and a half centuries, within a population averaging little more than 3,100 individuals, hereditary deafness occurred at a rate many times that of the national population.For example, in the latter part of the nineteenth century, an estimated one out of every 2,730 Americans was born deaf.On Martha's Vineyard the rate was closer to one out of every 155.But even this figure does not accurately represent the distribution of deafness on the Vineyard.Marriages were usually contracted between members of the same village, creating smaller groups within the island's population characterized by a higher frequency of deafness.The greatest concentration occurred in one village on the western part of the island where, by my analysis, within a population of 500, one in every twenty-five individuals was deaf.And even there the distribution was not uniform, for in one area of the village during this time period, one out of every four persons was born deaf.

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