THEY WALK ALONG DREAMS
On those first short trips our main effort was to count and report the
diseased. I often had a deep sense of personal guilt when I left the
villages just as I had found them, crying out for the healing I had no
time to give. All I could do was lecture them, hand out the tins and
gather them up for tests in the next place I stopped. Sometimes the
containers were returned in fifteen minutes--such is the celerity of
the savage gut. Faces would be wreathed in smiles. They had filled the
magic boxes, just as I had ordered, had they not? To them that was all
that was needed for the cure; fill the magic boxes, hand them over to
the white medicine man who would say an incantation--and lo! sickness
would vanish from the tribe.
This was a sort of Heathen Science point of view which would have been
funny, had it not been so tragic. I got used to it, and left the people
with a smile as cheery as their own. After all, the drug would be
coming soon, and I had told the missionary or planter how to administer
it.
When we had sufficient oil of chenopodium we did not waste an overnight
stop in making diagnoses; in this district wherever there were villages
the infection was obviously so heavy that we could call it 100 per
cent. Therefore we lined them up and dosed every man, woman and child.
With great gusto they swallowed down the nasty oil, in a spoonful of
sugar, and smacked their lips. They laughed over the bitter purge that
followed. More than once they lingered to steal the leavings of Epsom
salts solution, on the principle that the more you take the sooner
you get well. Only the children held back. I won’t forget the naked
four-year-old who knew enough missionary English to yell, “Oh, Jesus,
no!” when his elders dragged him forward.
Many of these first trips took us no farther from Port Moresby’s tinny
orderliness than it would be from New York’s city hall to Trenton. Yet
with every mile we found some curious or savage twist to the human
animal’s makeup. There was always the white man, standing one against
five hundred natives, in an urge to develop a resisting wilderness.
Keep the tribes alive for another day’s work, that was the problem. My
early expeditions were all zigzags. There was a plunge into the sawmill
country along the Laloki River to inspect a mining company’s Kiwais,
big jolly fellows like Virginia Negroes; I stayed there long enough to
advise the operators on the use of their lumber for pit latrines. I
won’t forget the cleanest native village I ever saw. The Company had
surrounded it with a stockade fence and commanded the people to sweep
the streets and throw their rubbish away. I had only one fault to find:
the dark villagers polluted the trash-heaps they piled on the other
side. These people should have been crawling with hookworms. Actually,
the infection was extremely light. Another medical paradox....
I sometimes came upon pathological freaks. There was the paralytic at
Kabadi plantation, who seemed to have lost muscular control of one
side at a time; when he turned he grimaced horribly with the conscious
effort. His walk was like pushing forward two sticks of wood. I
wondered why they kept such a monster, then they told me. Oh, he was
very useful. The Koiaris were so afraid of him they didn’t dare raid
the place.
In the black belt of the South Pacific dreams are very real things.
When you sleep your soul goes walking into living adventures. If you
love a girl in sleep, then she is no longer a maiden when you meet
her in the morning. A nightmare murder is no mere fancy; you have
killed your enemy dead as dead. When you happen to meet him tomorrow
sauntering down the glen, that is nothing. What you are seeing is
merely a fancy. Your dream has killed the man you hate. And take
care how you treat that frightful paralytic who leers at you in the
hemp-fields. He may “walk along your dreams.”
Too many things I saw walked along my dreams. There was that pageant at
Boera....
Boera was a dismal beach and supported a London Missionary Society
station, presided over by two Samoans. Samoa was a far cry from that
lost spit of sand. Alien to the soil, these imported teachers grow to
be like many white missionaries, muddling along with Christ’s work.
Their impulses are as fine as their results are vague in a dingy
routine of bell-ringing, prayer-saying, Sunday school reading and more
bell-ringing. This pair, Mosea and Emma, were meekly discouraged, but
with the beautiful manners of the Polynesian aristocrat. Mosea was
already heavy-legged with elephantiasis. His cousin Samueli dropped
in to report with Christian cheerfulness that conditions were “very
bad.”... Queer how they travel. Years later this same Samueli came to
me on an Ellice Island beach far away from Papua, and made me a present
of a fresh-killed chicken. When I asked him how conditions were, he
said, “Very bad.”
At Boera I got my first real look at a yaws-stricken community. This
hideous thing was apparent on the bodies and faces of at least a third
of the people, men and women with noses reduced to yawning holes in the
middle of a flat scar. Fingers and toes curled like withering twigs.
Swarms of flies carried the filth-born germ. I looked into baby faces
and saw how the process of healing had drawn their lips together into a
featureless surface with an opening so small that you could hardly get
a lead-pencil through.
Yes, these Papuan specters walk along your dreams. The tropics are
dreamlands, released from the balance of Northern things. Life down
there moves between poetic loveliness and monstrous disgust. I have
since seen many other villages like Boera; and I should have become
callous, seeing so much of it. I could get used to the maimed adults,
but the children always wrung my heart.
It is quite understandable that the early voyagers should have confused
yaws with syphilis. That such confusion still persists is reasonable.
For all we know of yaws, it may be syphilis modified by Stone Age
conditions. We call it _framboesia tropica_ (tropical raspberry). When
you speak of yaws you must always speak of syphilis--the two are so
alike, with wide differences.
Captain Cook, who first visited the Pacific in 1773, wisely wrote:
“Another disease of more mischievous consequences, which is also very
frequent, and appears on every part of the body, in large broad ulcers,
discharging a thin, clear pus ... it being certainly known and even
acknowledged by themselves that the natives are subject to this disease
before they were visited by the English, it cannot be the result of
venereal contagion, notwithstanding the similarity of the symptoms....”
Here at least is illness you can’t blame on the whites.
The enlightened traders and missionaries who followed Cook sketchily
jotted down “syphilis.” All my work in Papua and my following years
of careful research over the whole Pacific failed to find one case
of syphilis, although I have run across one or two rather doubtful
diagnoses. I have never found the tell-tale chancre scar, which is the
sure mark. The manifestations of the two diseases run so parallel that
carelessness or ignorance have put a libel on the native races.[1]
Yaws is not a venereal disease, nor is it hereditary. It is usually
acquired in early childhood. Native mothers expose their babies to it
in hopes of “getting it out of their systems,” much as some Yankee
mothers do when measles come around.
Now here’s the confusing resemblance. The yaws germ _Treponema
pertenue_ is so closely related to the syphilis germ _Treponema
pallidum_ that the two are hard to tell apart. Both diseases progress
in three of four stages. The “mother yaw” first appears on any part
of the body, and its secondary manifestation is a great number of
“daughter yaws” which are widely distributed over the skin and progress
into the third stage, which is remarkably syphilitic in appearance.
Arterial changes and nerve lesions (as in syphilis) sometimes cause the
general paralysis of the insane.
Missionaries have an easy way of accounting for yaws: it’s a curse
inherited from cannibal ancestors. Certainly it is ugly enough to have
come to the world through that black door.
And here’s another parallel. The treatment for yaws is exactly the same
as the treatment for syphilis--arsenical injections. Framboesia was
quite beyond the reach of medicine until Professor Ehrlich produced his
salvarsan. There is nothing more dramatic in medicine than the almost
visible growth of healthy tissue over a yaws sore after an arsenical
injection.
The Pacific is the one place in the world where yaws is in no way
complicated by syphilis. I am told that in Tahiti the two diseases
thrive, but the same person never has both. On the Islands there
seems to be a cross-immunity, so that the two germs cannot prosper in
the same host. Certainly the native has been abundantly exposed to
syphilis; East Indian labor, when it came to Fiji, brought with it 75
per cent infection. The Chinese and the white sailors fetched their
share and did their amatory best to spread it, but nothing happened.
Something had made the native immune, and that something is quite
apparent.
The stamping out of yaws is largely a matter of intensive campaigning.
But what will happen when the fight is won? Will syphilis slip in to
take the place of the spirochete it could never meet--on equal terms?
That is another doctor’s dilemma.
* * * * *
The morning after we heard the planters’ ghost stories I sent Kendrick
to ride ahead for preliminary inspection of the rubber plantations. On
a rough sea or a jungle trail, Chris was at home. I made short surveys
along the trail, resting my raw posterior when I could. Then horseback
again, clenching my teeth at every bump on the saddle-sores. Imagine a
Coney Island roller coaster magnified a hundred times, and you have our
slide and scramble, up and down, down and up, to attain an elevation of
3,000 feet. Down, down would go the coaster on a grade so steep that a
fly, if he tried it, would fall over on his nose; and I marveled again
at the adhesive footing of my horse. On the final upgrade I spared my
buttocks and skinned my heels, for even the horse surrendered.
Now the rubber trees were all around, above and below me, their coarse,
hard leaves like green glass that blinded the eyes in afternoon sun.
Underneath was a grotto of soft light, upheld by pale trunks like
pillars of snakeskin. Naked men worked in silent preoccupation, sharp
knives making incisions in the bark; neatly they would rip down
paper-thin slices, and the tree’s milk-white blood would trickle
into cups. Watching, I was thinking: they are natural surgeons. Down
the ages they have learned so much, dissecting human flesh with the
razor-edges of split bamboo. Train men like these to use the knife
to save instead of kill, and what couldn’t they accomplish for their
people?...
The man nearest to me turned. His wooly hair, his sloping brow, his
long, hooked nose told me that he was a Goaribari. I looked at his
companions. All Goaribaris, with that undeniably Hebrew profile
which gave them the name “the Lost Tribes of Israel.” But these were
different from the scrawny cannibals I had seen on the hemp plantation.
They were fatter, better-muscled, and their brown skins were beginning
to show silk. They were not newcomers, and the planters had taken care
of them. Back home, where they pursued the jolly business of going
to war and dining on the enemy, they hadn’t eaten very regularly. On
the farms the white man had fed them, and done his best to teach them
sanitary ways; an uphill job among primitives who were naïve as cattle
in their bodily functions. In subsequent surveys all over the Territory
I could tell, almost at a sweep of the eye, the men who had been on
plantations. They were the upstanding, healthy specimens.
Rubber plantations have a smell of their own, something like the aroma
of fried overshoes. It drifts from the factory where the sap is being
smoked and reduced to the wide, dirty-gray ribbons that go forward to
market. Here my cannibals worked like hiving bees, swarming in and out
of the door on the commonplace business of supplying crude material for
the raincoat trade. I looked around and saw Chris Kendrick, smiling and
self-assured, pushing his way through the throng.
“You missed something yesterday afternoon,” Kendrick said. “The Koiaris
came down and staged a raid on the Goaribaris. A lot of workmen were
loafing in a field, then a naked devil was in the midst of them, poking
away with a long spear in either hand. There was just one of him, mind
you, and there must have been twenty Goaribaris. They may be tough
bastards in their home towns, but here they were taking it like frozen
lambs--till somebody ran in with a shovel and a hoe handle. Next you
knew the Koiari was making for the woods, naked and howling, shaking
his long spears.
“But the Goaribaris caught him and--what do you think?--turned him over
to the management! What the hell did he care? He’d got his man.” Like
so many of the fiercer tribes, Koiaris kill because murder is a proof
of manhood, and a warrior who has not bloodied his spear is laughed at,
even by the women.
“I got a snapshot of the fellow he left behind,” Kendrick said, and
showed me the print he had developed. A broken body lay in the scrub.
The plantation manager came up just then and grinned, “We buried him
deep. His brother Goaribaris might take a notion to eat him, you know.
Of course, they’re pretty well fed, but.... Yo-hum, farming’s so full
of little problems like that!”
* * * * *
Yes, farming in Papua, even at its best, offered many problems never
dreamed of in the philosophy of a Secretary of Agriculture. The old
hands were far from hookworm-free, although vastly improved in general
health. New recruits were coming in with fresh loads of parasites
to be hatched from the filth they scattered in spite of managerial
watchfulness. Green laborers regarded the well-built privies as queer
traps set by the white man for their undoing ... pretty, but look out!
That night I lectured by the light of hurricane lanterns swung from the
beams of a great, empty warehouse. The audience sat cross-legged in a
wide crescent, their oily faces gleaming up at us. The front row was
solid Goaribari with natives of gentler tribes behind. These, being
more nearly civilized, understood Motu, which was so much Greek to the
Delta savages. Therefore it had been up to Ahuia to fetch the local
constable, a very ugly man in a G-string and a policeman’s cap.
Such occasions were Ahuia’s hour to shine. Out on the trail he went
stripped to the waist, but at lectures the gaudy yellow =H= on his
bright blue jumper stretched with every expansion of his chest. And he
hadn’t forgotten to put lilies in his hair. He had set the stage with
our regulation International Health Board chart, loosely bound pages
with simple illustrations of the hookworm’s course to the intestines;
there were drawings, greatly enlarged, of the male and female parasite
and the egg their mutual love produced. There were big photographs of
a sick boy and a well boy--something like the patent-medicine man’s
“Before and After Treatment.”
Ahuia quelled the Goaribaris with his pirate’s scowl, and in
impressive silence brought out our prize number, a large bottle of
adult hookworms, pickled in alcohol. This was a stage property which
we carried for purposes of demonstration. Cannibal eyes popped as the
collection was passed from hand to hand.
Ahuia was getting his lesson by heart, but I still felt it safer to
prompt him. “Tell them first,” I said, “that they must look carefully
at what is in the bottle.” He spoke Motu, straight into the mouth of
the interpreter: “_Tatau bona, memero, umui iboumuiai inai gaigai ba
itaia_....” The native constable was saying it after him, in the queer
lingo of the Goaribaris: “Men and boys, all of you look at these little
snakes.”
Education strained through three languages. The row of man-eaters sat
very still; their long noses, pointed up, were like the muzzles of
wistful hounds. Ahuia was telling them how the lady snake laid very bad
eggs that fell out of the black boy and the black “mary”; how the eggs
hatched tiny baby snakes that nipped the black boy’s foot and crawled
back into his belly. Now see the picture of the sick boy and the well
boy--they are both the same boy. The well boy took the medicine the
_taubada_ brings, and the snakes came out of his belly. Now he will
keep well, because he is a wise boy. He goes to the clean privy the
white man built him, so that the snake cannot come out and crawl into
him again.
Patiently drumming simple words into woolly heads, we tried to make
simple men understand cause, cure and prevention of a disease they
might have brought from Africa, ages ago; a disease so wasting that
the mills, rivers, the plantations were calling upon half-invalids to
furnish brawn for Europe’s driving ambition.
Sometimes in my early lectures as I looked over the stooped dark
figures I would have moments of weakening. I would wonder if it was
worth while to save these curious beings, so out of touch with anything
our Northern civilization knew.
As time went on, I came to realize how very much worth while it was.
* * * * *
The lecture was over and I started alone across an open swathe of dim
moonlight that pointed toward the plantation house. I was anxious to
get to headquarters where I could write up my notebook and tumble into
bed. On both sides of me rubber trees made high black walls, like
something built of coal. My conscious mind was concerned only with the
day’s work and tomorrow’s; somewhere in the back of my dreams I may
have sensed the danger of another such Koiari spear as had butchered a
man yesterday.
I looked up and saw the outline of three men, emerging out of the
shadows. Even to my defective eyes they made a grotesque group, all
locked together in a shambling stride. There was nothing for me but
trust in the white man’s prestige. I was unarmed. If I had shouted for
help it would have been a sign of fear, and these fellows, I knew,
worked in a hurry. When they came closer I saw that they carried no
weapons.
Two of them, who had been holding to the third, began jabbering in
Goaribari, making friendly sounds. Was this a trap? Fortunately Ahuia
and the native constable came swinging up with hurricane lanterns--even
in moonlight they carried lanterns to scare away ghosts. Ahuia pointed
to the man in the middle. “That fellow broke his hand in a fight. There
were not enough women to go around.”
All right, let’s have a look at it. We led the foiled lover to my
quarters where I examined the wrist and found a bad Colles’s fracture.
In dim lantern-light I did a careful job of bonesetting, even though
the fellow had just scared the living lights out of me. If he had shown
up in the dispensary at Rochester with the pick of the faculty looking
on, he couldn’t have had more meticulous surgical attention. I even
took time to give him Doctor Moore’s famous dressing, which is fussy,
but perfect.
“All right, boy,” I said, “run along.” He stood there patiently,
holding out his unwounded hand. What the devil was he waiting for?
“Does he want to thank me?” I asked Ahuia.
“No, master.” Ahuia looked fiercely sad. “He is waiting for you to pay
him. That fashion belong this fellow.”
“What fashion?” My short temper was getting shorter. “What should I pay
him for?”
“For mending his sick hand, Taubada.”
I growled and Ahuia shoved him out into the night. When I was around
Ahuia feared neither ghosts nor Goaribaris. The incident seemed to be
closed, but I was aware that the cubicle next to Kendrick’s, where I
slept, was quite doorless and exposed to pale moonlight.
Next morning I was aroused by softly arguing Motu voices. Ahuia and
Quai, who was with Kendrick, had missed something from our bags. Quite
likely. For there was a gentleman’s agreement among Motuan servants:
Never steal from your master--oh, that was very tabu. But you could
take a little something from your master’s host, or from some stranger
_taubada_, sleeping near you, if he happened to leave his bags open.
It was honorable to snitch a handkerchief or a pair of new shorts and
drop the small loot into your bag. When two white men were bunking
adjacently, their boys working with the bags would watch each other as
cat watches mouse. It was all right for the good servant to get away
with a few of the stranger’s cigarettes, for personal smoking.
There were other guests on the plantation, and I was wondering whose
boy had gotten by Ahuia’s watchfulness when a sleepy glance through the
sunlit window awoke me to a real annoyance. There sat the Goaribari
with the bandaged hand, serenely chewing betel-nut. “For the love of
God, Ahuia, what does he want now?”
Ahuia’s funny English informed me, “Taubada, he still wishes to be
paid. He has slept all night on the porch.”
I jumped out of bed, dragging the mosquito netting with me. Like a
fishwife in a bridal veil I exhausted all the arts of profanity. With
an amiable smile on his betel-red mouth the cannibal listened--and held
out his good hand. Then I checked myself in mid-oath and laughed as I
have never laughed before. This was socialized medicine with a reverse
English.
“Ahuia,” I shouted, “give this cheeky bastard two sticks of trade
tobacco.”
Quite unemotionally the savage accepted his fee and departed.
I was still laughing when the planter came in, and he grinned. “It’s
the fashion--that’s all a bush fellow will say. They’re pretty much
confused about money values. To them a white man’s a sort of cross
between Simon Legree and Santa Claus; when he comes around it’s either
to send ’em to jail or pay ’em off.”
I grumbled: “Next thing they’ll expect me to pass around free tobacco
before every hookworm lecture.”
“Certainly they will,” he said. Then he rang the changes the planters
had rung all along the line. “Anything can happen in Papua.”