WHERE NEW GUINEA WAS NEW
Rounding the northern edge of the great island you come upon the
Territory of New Guinea, which was German New Guinea until 1914, when
Australia took it over. To simplify the confusion in a few words: the
eastern half of the island is Australian-governed, divided into Papua
and the Territory. The western half (roughly half) is Dutch New Guinea.
That was how the land lay in 1921. Perhaps the horrors of the Second
World War will change its geography again.
In May, 1921, when I boarded the _Melusia_, bound for Rabaul, the
capital, our decks and cabins were thronged with seventy officials
of the civil government, coming in to relieve a military government
of evil repute. The newcomers were centered by the Administrator,
Brigadier-General Evan Alexander Wisdom, C.B., C.M.G., D.S.O., V.D.,
whom his King later adorned with an added set of initials and a
knighthood. Despite this alphabet train, General Wisdom had a character
that went well with his name. He was an Australian Scot, veteran of
Gallipoli and the French campaign. I felt that he was a man who could
listen to reason and exercise his own. He needed all he had, for he was
setting out to face a tangle which would have confused King Solomon.
The physicians he had brought with him for public health work were
competently educated men, but inexperienced in tropical diseases.
Colonel Honman, the new Chief Medical Officer, was another Aussie-Scot
I didn’t forget in a day. A hard-crusted, soft-hearted old regular, all
he knew about tropical medicine was what he had learned as personal
physician to Prime Minister Billy Hughes. He wasn’t afraid of liquor or
anything else. For seven months I was to be very close to Honman, and
to love him for his contradictory qualities.
Aboard ship I had no sooner met him than he suggested that I give
them a talk on malaria. I felt that here on the _Melusia_ it might be
of service to the incoming officials. That night they gathered on the
main deck and I told them of my experiences with the disease. How the
_Anopheles punctulatus_, whose female is more deadly than the male,
travels in the Pacific with mankind in his restless journeying from
village to village, from island to island. How I had run my fingers
under the lower ribs of thousands of natives and felt the sagging
spleen which tells the tale. I went into a subject which the medical
men present knew as well as I did--through book knowledge: blackwater
fever. This quickly fatal disease gets its name from the dark
coloration of bloody urine, caused by the oxidization of hemoglobin,
and the bladder condition is called hemoglobinuria.
I had found very few cases of genuine blackwater fever, I told them.
Even when it occurs the patient is often dead before diagnosis. The
condition, when it comes, is frequently caused by a blind misuse of
quinine. Malarial people sometimes neglect the remedy for a couple
of months, then swallow a handful. And here I tried to drive home
my favorite point. I even had the temerity to quote a German; the
world-renowned Dr. Robert Koch had come to New Guinea in 1910 and
proved, for the first time in medical history, that epidemic malaria
can be reduced by _quinine alone_. Here I took my chance to say that in
fever-bitten countries quinine in regular moderate doses is an absolute
necessity. Liquor is no substitute. If you abuse your constitution with
a daily dozen bottles of beer or a habitual quart of whisky, don’t cry
“blackwater fever.” A white man in the tropics can remain as healthy as
in the temperate zones, provided he exercises and takes care of himself.
Wasn’t it Kate Douglas Wiggin who said, “It is hard to be agreeable
and instructive at the same time”? However, most of the medical men
seemed to like the talk. I heard one District Officer for the Admiralty
saying, “This quinine business is all bloody nonsense.” Perhaps I had
gone afoul of his prejudice. You can’t talk quinine without arousing
some bitter criticisms.
* * * * *
In contrast to Papua’s bleak capital I found Rabaul a picture of
tropical delight: regular streets were bordered with poinciana, royal
palms, coconut palms; betel-nut palms raised graceful, slender stems
and flaunted their feathery tops just above clusters of fruit that
were like hothouse grapes; Indian laurels loomed graciously over
thriving fig trees. The Germans had drained all this land, relieved it
of mosquitoes, planted the groves; they had set Government House on a
fine eminence overlooking a stretch of water that might have been a
Scottish lake.
Rabaul was an extremely shaky Garden of Eden, geologically and
politically. Jolly earthquakes came and went with seismic whimsicality,
and were so frequent that every hotel, house and office had its heavy
furniture lashed to the walls. Otherwise, one might have waked up any
morning and found a large German wardrobe in one’s lap. Right inside
Rabaul’s port, Vulcan Island was a particularly bad actor. The Reverend
George Brown, the fighting missionary, records its beginning back in
1878 when it blew the twenty-mile channel full of pumice; thousands
of boiled fish were washed ashore, and great sea turtles with their
tortoise-shell cooked to a pulp. The next big show was in 1937, when
Vulcan covered the town with ashy vomit; after that there was talk of
moving the capital, but the colonial becomes a fatalist. He has to be.
One morning in 1921 I saw some lumber that had been piled on Vulcan
go scattering into the sea like a box of matches, and I saw the huge
sheet-iron D.H. & P.G. store curl like a withered leaf. After that
Eloisa and I agreed that at the next tremor we’d pick up little
Harriette and make for the hills.... And let’s not forget two very
wicked “Shaker ladies,” two tall peaks about three miles from town on
the mainland, and officially named Mother and Daughter. On the night
of Vulcan’s birth there was a volcanic growl at the mouth of the Bay,
and in the morning Vulcan loomed from the sea, shoved 600 feet from the
water and venomous as a newborn cobra. Vulcan is now popularly known as
“The Bastard,” and so he will be called until he takes a notion to sink
again.
* * * * *
Where Papua with her probable 500,000 natives had five official
medical men, New Guinea Territory, equally populous, had eight or
ten government doctors to serve it. The hospital at Rabaul I found
especially well equipped, thanks to a retired German medical staff. The
Australians had adopted a German expedient. Well-trained orderlies,
under the supervision of medical officers, were sent out to run the
lesser hospitals. These orderlies were called “_lik-lik_ doctors” or
“small doctors”--_lik-lik_ means “little.” They had a high sense of
duty and were remarkably competent. When I was there the natives were
being trained simply in bandaging, treating sores and administering
physic; then they were given a uniform cap and _lavalava_ and sent back
to their villages to apply their useful knowledge. They had the title
of “Tultul” and their salary was a pound or so a year.
The Medical Tultul was a modest beginning in an important system that
was destined to go on. I had studied the mind of the higher type
Melanesian and had begun to see that he was far from a fool. I had
watched the work of my head boys in the field--men like Ahuia, for
instance. What except race prejudice stood in the way of their being
educated in medicine and equipped to practise among their own people,
whose language and customs no white physician would ever understand?
Even in those days I heard reports of the more progressive Fiji Islands
where for a long time they had been giving a sketchy medical training
to Melanesians. Most of the South Pacific received the idea with a
cynical smile. In Papua I had broached the plan of sending out picked
natives, under the direction of laymen, to administer yaws and hookworm
treatments over a country so vast that the few white doctors were
ridiculously inadequate to cover it. This plan was later adopted. In
the Territory of New Guinea I had still better luck; crusty old Colonel
Honman had sufficient faith in me to permit the experiment at once.
The black boys I chose and instructed in the administration of oil of
chenopodium proved remarkably useful, considering the inadequacy of
their training.
Conditions we had to meet were similar to those in Papua, only the
people were far nearer to the Stone Age than were most of the Papuan
natives. Cannibalism was still practised within forty miles of Rabaul.
We had to move cautiously out in the bush, but we never carried
firearms--with the exception of Chris Kendrick, who faced one or two
situations where a pistol proved a very useful tool.
New Guinea Territory, in fact, was at that time harder to deal with
than it was before the abrupt political change of 1914. The coastal
native, more sophisticated than his brother of the jungle, was dumbly
wondering what had become of the Germans, who had ruled them well, all
things considered. Natives had been servants of the padroons, and had
learned to like them. And what was this new set of white men with a
new set of laws which they seemed unable to enforce?
The military administration, which came in with the first World War
and lasted for seven years, was a great political blunder, as the
best minds of Australia knew from the first; but what could be done
about it until Billy Hughes’s home Government decided on something
less fantastic? The whole business had the nasty look of any sudden
political overturn.
Long before 1885, when the Kaiser’s Government officially occupied
German New Guinea, his thrifty subjects had been working the
plantations. This was no pumped-up Sudetenland, for the Germans were
honestly in control. They were good planters who studied the soil under
tropical conditions on this favored side of the big island. Their
colonial treasury showed a surplus; they had increased their acres and
become rich padroons; they lived luxuriously. Their Governor’s Palace
at Rabaul (which the new military administration seized) was a fine
example of tropical architecture. Out of a fever-ridden swamp they had
made a Rabaul that was malaria-free.
In our time Germany has committed so many crimes against civilization
that a crime against Germany may be worth putting on record. Its
criminality reacted on all concerned, and especially on hordes of young
war veterans whom the Australian Government “rewarded” with free grants
of land.
I was settled in Rabaul and enjoying the generous privileges which
Colonel Honman gave me in the fine German-made hospital when I learned
some details of that military occupation, which a hard working civil
administration was by now trying to live down. Everybody was talking
about a scandal which compared with our own postbellum days in the
South. Field-tried old soldiers were referring with scorn to the
“Coconut Anzacs” whom Australia, for lack of better men, had sent to
take possession in 1914. The Coconut Anzacs seemed to have been mostly
men who hadn’t gone to the real war, for one reason or another--raw
amateurs without the slightest sense of discipline. Military power
inspired many to wanton acts of cruelty and the stupidest sort of
blunders.
My daring young man Byron Beach was eyewitness to one outrage. He
presented himself as a medical officer to a punitive expedition,
and was taken along. A company of Coconut Anzacs had been sent
out to chasten a native village, accused of cannibalism. Led by
a hard-drinking officer, himself frightened of the poor, scared
cannibals, the troops surrounded a certain inland village to teach
the black beggars a lesson. Maybe they were pretty drunk when they
proceeded to shoot up everything they saw. Men were shot as they ran,
women and children were gunned out of trees. Beach saw the leader of
the party put a pistol to the head of a girl who lay flat on the ground.
And next day the commanding officer found that he had made a little
mistake. He had attacked the wrong village.
Another expedition went to see about a German anthropologist who lived
alone in the bush. He had been there for years and had a way of locking
his books and papers in the little house and going away on tours of
research. When war was declared he was so far away from his home base
that he didn’t hear the news. In his absence the frenzied patriots
broke down his door, found great stacks of carefully written papers and
made a bonfire of them. They didn’t understand German, and the writing
looked like spy stuff. On his return the scientist found his lifework
reduced to ashes. They say he went crazy.
Maybe the new civil government was too bitter, looking over the
mischief the military administration had wrought. There had been a
great deal of aimless sabotage. For instance, they had demolished the
apparatus in the great radio station. The excuse was that it might be
sending messages to Berlin. It hadn’t occurred to the conquerors that
they might save these costly things for their own use.
Now what to do with the German planters? Prime Minister Hughes’s
Territorial Government was taking care of that. When I established
myself at Rabaul in 1921 the farce was in full swing, and through
no fault of Governor Wisdom’s, who had to make the best of a policy
already framed. The policy was starkly this: Encourage the thrifty
Germans to improve their land with the promise that they might retain
it. In 1921 something called an Expropriation Board arrived, called in
the anxious Germans, and gave them vouchers enabling them to sell their
property back to the Territory, at their own valuation. But when the
Germans turned in these vouchers the Territory’s Treasury Department
paid for them in orders on the German Government--to be applied on
Australia’s reparations claim!
Bankrupt Germans were selling their household goods for anything
they could get. During my stay in New Guinea it was a commonplace
to see vessels departing for Australia, laden with pictures, rugs,
silverware. Returning ships were bringing back the same old load:
hard liquor and fresh contingents of war veterans to stray into the
plantations, sicken and go home.
Liquor and malaria, malaria and liquor--a vicious circle to worry the
public health physician. These brave soldiers, who never wanted to hear
the word “war” again, were taking Billy Hughes’s advice: “Just go to
New Guinea and pick out a fine plantation.” They didn’t know how to
eat, drink or live in the tropics. There were many stories, funny and
sad. One returned soldier was blithely dumped on the beach and sent to
the wilds with nothing more substantial than a case of tinned beef, a
case of mixed pickles and six cases of beer. Babes in the wood, what
did they know about malaria? Men who should have known said to them,
“Shaky in the morning? Then scoff off a tot of whisky or a bottle
of beer, and you’ll feel fit as a fiddle.” Green as grass, the poor
fellows thought that coconuts grew underground like potatoes or on
vines like grapes. They starved, they drank, they let the natives take
advantage of their ignorance. They swallowed the popular “fever cure”
and finally tottered back to the returning ship--if they could.
I looked over the annual import of alcoholic beverages--beer 102,204
gallons, spirits 7,534 gallons, wines 1,500 gallons, stout 1,056
gallons. This was to serve a European population totaling 1,265. The
natives didn’t drink, and you must discount the women, children and
missionaries.
* * * * *
I was hardly established in Rabaul when Colonel Honman began urging
me to take full charge of the hospital. That was a flattering offer,
which I at first declined. Between my medical units and myself, we had
to make some sense out of the half million neglected natives we had
come there to study. But I shall never forget the grand old Colonel’s
morning calls at my house. A soldier to the bone, he never complained,
but I could see that he was suffering from “New Guinea fever”--in
short, he needed a pick-me-up. It was a habit of my neighbors to borrow
a bottle of whisky in the morning, return it at noon, and borrow it
again at night. But Colonel Honman always drank his tonic on the
spot. Without a word I would administer the usual dose, a drinking
glass filled one third with gin and the other two thirds with French
and Italian vermouth. Straight as a ramrod he’d toss it off, smack
satisfied lips over his double row of false teeth, and bellow, “We
breed men in Australia!”
He had a leather stomach, a golden heart and a head that nothing seemed
to affect. Already we were sympathizing with Governor Wisdom’s job,
for he was breaking up a racket which was as crude as any invented by
Brooklyn union leaders. It was the bird of paradise racket--which may
sound fantastic, but it was there, and had been ever since the military
administration did its worst for New Guinea. In German days it had been
customary for newcomers to shoot and sell enough birds to earn the
price of a plantation. But the new Territorial Government passed a law
to protect the birds. Like all prohibitions this invited bootleggers
who, like all bootleggers, were followed by highjackers. It was so
easy to make a rich kill and pass it across the Dutch border, where
there were no game-protection laws!--and very convenient for a Chinese
trader to wait on the Dutch side and pay cash for the bag. Or you
could smuggle the feathered pelts into the hands of a ship’s steward.
Stewards were getting rich; one of them was able to run thoroughbreds
on the track.
District Officers were up to their necks in poaching. One of them came
back from the Dutch border with £10,000 in his pocket. He started
for Sydney, fell ill on the boat and had to be taken off at Cairns.
A sympathetic friend offered to take the easy money to the invalid’s
family. The “friend” was a highjacker, of course, and had arranged a
clever get-away. The poacher died in the hospital.
District Officers had been up to many things never dreamed of in the
philosophy of Tammany Hall. One of them revived “blackbirding,” the
old-time slavery. He got a little island offshore, made raids on
natives, stored his prisoners there and proceeded to sell them in job
lots. When this human meat ran short through brisk sales the official
used his police authority and arrested a lot more. Several succeeding
District Officers went in for this thriving trade. The military
administration tried to break it up. There were some records, for the
Keop (District Officer) always made the deals look very legal. But when
the Military Governor demanded these records, a handy filing clerk
confessed that they had been mislaid.
These abuses were on the wane when Wisdom stepped in, but, even so, he
had inherited a pretty kettle of fish. Colonel Honman’s principal worry
was a lack of doctors who knew anything about tropical medicine. If I
didn’t take over the hospital, he said, he’d have to draft my services.
Well, he did finally.
* * * * *
My right and left hands, Bill Tully and Chris Kendrick, were still
with me. Without those two I could never have got through Melanesia.
As laboratory assistant Bill used his fine eyes at the microscope,
to supplement my dull ones. I had Kenny Fooks too, always good for a
barefoot excursion into the swamps, gifted with a constitution that
kept him plump through months of hardship. And there was young Byron
Beach, an erratic fund of energy. I had picked up two new inspectors,
very competent men, whom I had sent out with the other field units. I
took out a unit of my own. Between us, we swept north and east over the
big hook formed by New Britain and New Ireland; we traveled west under
the Equator to Manus and the Admiralty Group; west again to the string
of flyspecks, Marou and Ninigo, Matty and Ana.
Chris Kendrick, through fat and lean--usually lean--remained his
quiet, reliable self. After his long absences in the bogs and streams
and jungles, he’d show up smiling and slap down his neatly written
reports, pregnant with a Britisher’s genius for understatement. “Had
to climb face of cliff. Waited between jumps till surf stopped pouring
over it, then jumped again. Tricky business.” “Horse broke leg in
volcanic rock. Had to shoot him. Too bad, fine animal.” “Had to use
a lawyer-vine stick on black assistant. First time I ever struck
a native. The _lik-lik_ doctor here brought me a boy he said had
beri-beri. It proved to be a champion hookworm case. In 5 days counted
1,237 worms. Dosed him again in a week. Chenopodium very slow. Got only
25 first dose. Second yielded 1,122. Score going up. Left assistant in
charge of patient, instructions to watch stools. When I got back I was
annoyed to find that the idiot had thrown the whole mess away. Jungle
housekeeping. I might have recovered 4,000 worms.” This item gave me
a bitter laugh. Things like that have happened to us so often, with
ill-trained assistants.
When Chris was with me in New Britain I saw him severely bitten--by
a parrot, pet of the Samoan wife of a German planter. Chris was busy
making friends when the bird nipped him square across the nose. I
treated it, and Chris’s diary tersely records: “You never know what to
expect down here.”
He jotted down one item which a garrulous explorer might have turned
into a chapter, and a thrilling one:--
Alone with native crew, big, sulky devils. Couldn’t understand
trouble. Maybe short on food. They turned on me, with spears and
paddles. Covered them with my service pistol, but was a bit nervy for
fear 2 or 3 would get me from behind. Finally the D.O. showed up with
police. It was rather tricky.
One day en route Kenny Fooks lost his temper and told a coastwise
skipper what he thought of him. The skipper retaliated by dumping
Kenny off on a sort of desert island. Nothing to do for weeks but
count the sparse hookworms and write a weather report. Most of that
diary read: “June 14, weather fine.” “June 21, weather still fine.”
“July 1, weather cloudy.” “July 9, raining like hell and glad of it.”
My other inspectors were more active, and I had to scold Byron Beach
occasionally for his daredevil tendencies. But he was learning fast and
his young vitality made him a splendid worker. My new acquisitions were
W. J. McErlane and R. V. Sunners. Fooks and Beach were later sent to
the mainland, and McErlane covered the field in Bougainville, an island
far to the east and formerly part of the Solomons. These men were not
heard from for half a year.
* * * * *
I had been studying pidgin English for nearly a year, but had not
reached the point where I could use it in my lectures, as I knew I
must. Until I had mastered the idiom I had to depend on a faithful
interpreter. Therefore I chose a very cross-eyed native named Jerope;
I got him because nobody else in Rabaul seemed to want him. Jerope was
so cross-eyed that when he poured my coffee I had to follow the spout
with my cup, otherwise he would have poured it in my lap. He was a bush
fellow with none of Ahuia’s sophistication, and was obsessed by every
witch and devil that flies over the Pacific. Before I could take him
into the field he got himself arrested for stealing a red lantern off a
sewer-digging in Rabaul. When the judge asked him what he wanted with a
red lantern he blandly explained. He thought the white men had put them
on the streets so that natives could use them to scare off devils. For
everybody knows that devils won’t attack a man with a lantern.
Jerope languished awhile in jail and improved his education. Because
the boy was brighter than the average the Keop who ruled the jail
put him in charge of the bulla-ma-cows (cattle herd) and Jerope was
faithful to his trust. The day I called and accused him of milking the
cows, his eyes crossed in great sadness when he replied, “No, master,
him no woman cow, him man cow.”
Jerope was not a mission boy; he despised their kind for a lot of
sissies. Once when we were inspecting Ninigo away up in the northeast
we had with us a well-known English anthropologist, nephew of a great
one. Like the Catholic missionaries he had a soft voice and a full
beard. He was far too dainty. The Australians called him “Birdie”
because he wore a feather in his Alpine hat. Birdie shrank from
cold baths, so every morning he minced back and forth across the
deck, carrying a little bowl of hot water for his tub. Once when the
bowl-bearing Birdie minced by, Jerope turned and spat into the sea.
“Him mission!” he growled.
From a medical point of view the Ninigo group was interesting. I
made a count of palpable spleens and found an index of 54 per cent;
considerable malaria for so remote a spot. In fact this was about the
same proportion that I found among the assorted natives brought to the
hospital in Rabaul. Hookworm, on the other hand, was only 8.4 per cent
as against 74.2 for the whole Territory. Why? Because the group was
made up of narrow atolls, where the beaches were the latrines and the
tide carried the infecting material away. Malaria and elephantiasis are
both mosquito diseases (if you can call elephantiasis a disease--it is
merely a symptom of filarial infection). On one of the islands here I
saw a woman’s breasts so enlarged that when she sat they touched the
ground.
Ninigo might serve as a type example of a region with no protection
against the insect carriers that are today scattering plague among all
the sons of Adam. Rapid transit, open ports, borders wide open.... It’s
the same old story, to us of the Health Service.
Do you remember the alarm of ten years ago--how our most modern
instrument of speed, the airplane, had carried the deadly _Anopheles
gambiae_ from Natal in Africa across to Brazil? Brazil was too busy
with a revolution to fool with mosquitoes until three or four years
later when death-without-bullets felled the population in wet areas.
Fortunately the infection reached a comparatively dry belt, so that the
mosquitoes were slowed up. Then Brazil joined with the Rockefeller
Foundation in a gigantic campaign. In 1939 a million dollars was spent
down there, and this year they expect to double that sum in an attempt
to check the scourge before it spreads, heaven knows how far....
Dr. Marshall Barber, the great authority on malaria, says: “There is
no doubt that this invasion of _gambiae_ threatens the Americas with a
catastrophe in comparison with which ordinary pestilence, conflagration
or even war are but small and temporary calamities.” I have had no
experience with the _gambiae_ in my corner of the tropics: but I am
using him as a bogie to make a point. How tropical are “tropical
diseases”? Germs and worms love to visit around. The northern-born
influenza has swept away thousands in the South Pacific; neglected,
its germ may bide its time for a plunge back into the North. Amoebic
dysentery is a “tropical disease”--yes, and a few years ago it appeared
in Chicago. The distinctly tropical filariasis (often manifested in
elephantiasis) has been identified in several cases in an incomplete
survey of the Carolinas. Dr. Boyd, investigating in Florida, asserted
that our temperate-climate mosquito can carry a tropical strain of
malaria. I saw how inguinal (venereal) granuloma spread from island to
island in the Pacific; recently I was not surprised to hear of cases in
the United States. Leprosy, which curses the Polynesian, was brought to
him by the oriental; the Polynesian may pass it around--there is plenty
of it in New York today. The white man gave tuberculosis to the black
Solomon Islander, who awaits an opportunity to return the generous gift.
A few millions of Rockefeller dollars, a few hundreds of Rockefeller
scientists, have gone forth into the seed-beds of disease, to work
and study, and cure, if possible. I say this for the benefit of smug
stay-at-homes who ask us, “Why do you waste your time and money on
these niggers, who live in another world from ours?” Yes, but do they?
Our little planet is moving faster every day. If sanitarians go on
bungling their way through bogs and forests and mountains, maybe it is
to save you from a peck of trouble some fine morning, Mr. Homebody. Or
at least we can wave the danger flag.
* * * * *
In the Kaiser’s day, I was told, the German planters sent to Ninigo to
replenish their harems. Certainly the people were terribly thinned out.
I found an island where they were reduced to thirteen, one girl and
twelve men; and all eaten with venereal granuloma. The Hermit Islands
had lost their hermit; a friendly planter had taken off the last
inhabitant, a healthy young fellow who became a personal servant, too
gentle to meet the invasion.
The Admiralty Group is north of the mainland, under the Equator. Manus,
a fairly large island, is the center of a wealth of little dots. Some
villages here were built over water in the Venetian style of Gaile.
Paradoxically, the women were chaste, domestically speaking, yet in
Manus I found the only public prostitution I ever saw in the South
Pacific. It was an ancient custom here. Discouraged by the Germans, it
had come back under the military administration. The incoming civil
administration crushed it for a while; but when I was there the custom
was flourishing again.
Manus had a certain Gaile-like charm, especially noticeable in the
houses. Your canoe entered in the front through a covered opening, so
low and narrow that once in you had to crawl on hands and knees. The
object of this was simple and practical; if you were an enemy you could
be conveniently clubbed as you poked your head into the living room.
The houses set aside for young girls were quaint, too. With almost
Spanish sternness the maidens were watched over by local duennas, and
were carefully caged to the age of puberty. After sunset they were
permitted to take the air, still under guard. At first I thought that
this was the Manus method of preserving chastity; then I found that it
was a mere matter of complexion. Indoor living bleached the skin, and
in Manus a pale young bride was quoted at rather a high figure.
A weakness for canoes increased my fondness for this pretty Admiralty
Group. I snatched every minute to drop my trouble in the serenity
of bright lagoons; great Manus outriggers were wide enough to hold
comfortable deckhouses below their coco sails.
Contrast this lagoon-bound holiday with my return trip on the cutter
_Siar_, a capable craft with a capable captain; Skipper Bell was the
best of the Australian type, raw-boned, handsome, brave. We had reached
the New Hanover Group when a hurricane came down on us with a sudden
ferocity that seemed to bring sea and sky together. That we stayed
afloat those three mad days is one of God’s mercies. Our engine was
drowned out, we lost all sense of direction, all sense of everything
except what was needed to hang on and pray--or swear. When a calm
came, almost as violently sudden as the storm, we found that we had
drifted over reefs and banks and heaven knows what--we had been blown
clean around the large island of New Hanover and were lying in an inlet
between it and New Ireland, which we had passed three days before.
There wasn’t a dry thing on the boat; our cookstove had been doused
with the first wave that swept over us.
I have been caught in more tropical storms than I can remember, but
this was the worst. With quaking Jerope and such of my gear as I had
recovered I went ashore and flagged a schooner bound for Rabaul. Bell
and his staunch little ship deserved a better fate than that which
later overtook them. The battered _Siar_ was towed to Sydney, where she
fell a-prey to a favorite island trick: the calkers stopped the leaks
with concrete, to save the expense of honest calking. On the return
voyage she struck another storm and went down like a flatiron--with
poor Bell at the wheel. He was a fine, clean young man who adored his
pretty new bride. Well, he was one of the many.
* * * * *
My American medicine frequently competed with native witchcraft,
which though it was never an open challenge, was something I felt all
around me. Here and there I would catch whispers of this and that
laborer who had sickened and died in the field; some _puri-puri_ doctor
had “pointed a bone” at him. Belief in magic, black and white, had
penetrated into some odd places.
There’s an elegant little chain of islands off New Britain which
old-timers called “Queen Emma’s Kingdom.” Emma was a self-made queen,
the half-caste Polynesian daughter of an American consul. She bought a
domain for a few guineas and made a prince consort out of the German
nobleman she married. Her descendants were educated in European
schools, married Europeans of good family, and came home to enjoy their
share in the inherited kingdom. I talked with one of these descendants,
a lady who knew Wagnerian opera and Ibsen plays. When it came to
medicine her faith was all bound up in the old family witch doctor.
Earnestly she told me about some herbs which worked the medically
impossible. She was offended at my incredulous smile when I transposed
from what Lincoln said of General Grant: “I’d like to know the bottle
he gets it from.”
No wonder, then, that cross-eyed Jerope was anxious to carry a lantern
after dark.
One evening we paused for rest on the tangled brow of a high mountain
in New Britain. Incidentally, that had been a most interesting day;
I had found rather puzzling evidence of modern sanitation. The tribe
here was fierce, savage, cannibalistic--and surprisingly free of
intestinal parasites. At some risk I searched behind the village
houses and found latrines as scientifically constructed as if endorsed
by the International Health Board! The pits were dug twenty-five to
thirty feet into the soil, and over them was a support of timber. The
deposit fell so far underground that hookworm larvae had no opportunity
to invade the surface. The common housefly, bearer of dysentery and
typhoid, dared not penetrate that dark well. Rude screens separated the
men’s latrine from the women’s. My compliments to the wise old witch
doctor who invented that.
Byron Beach had been to this mountain before me, with a punitive
expedition, armed to chasten man-eating. They had climbed 7,000 feet
and had forced themselves among tribes that had never before looked
on a white face. Beach reported that every village he entered had
been equipped with these deep cesspits. They were not mere archaic
ornaments, either; the people were using them.
I tried to find out who had taught them, but all I got was “It is the
fashion.” I had to remember what the immortal Captain Cook said of the
New Zealand Maoris when he first saw them--that this primitive people
were obeying sanitary laws when the housewives of Paris and Madrid were
emptying chamber pots into the streets. It set me thinking. Was not the
islander, before the whites came to unsettle his traditions, reasonably
self-preserving in his daily habits? My visits to lost Rennell Island,
some years later, confirmed the theory.
But that evening, lolling on the mountain brow, I talked with Jerope
about dream magic and heard the beginning of a story which, when it was
finished, touched me deeply. I looked up and saw that his crossed eyes
were not funny any more.
I had asked him if evil spirits could “walk along dreams” and curse
you while you were awake. Oh, yes, master, they could do that. But
devil-devils can do your dreams great favors, he said. He gazed
crookedly at the sunset and told me, quietly as you tell of a proposed
subway trip, how tonight in his dream he would visit his mother in the
little local heaven. He explained the witch charm which would bring
this about. From a great magician, who had been to the Evil One’s home
on the wild Sepik River, Jerope had bought the skin of a great bat, the
enchanted flying fox that could carry you into the land of the dead.
“Tonight,” he said, “I shall burn the bat’s hairs and paint the ashes
on my eyes. Then I shall go.”
Next morning I asked him if he had gone to his mother. Yes, he had
gone; and he told me how, earnestly:--
“Master, me fastem head belong bat close under head belong me, then rub
eye belong me along ashes and make fass (shut) eye belong me, and then
me tink, and tink, and tink, then me like sleep....”
Jerope’s head had begun to whirl then--“Me all a same pidgeon.”
The flying fox became a swift-winging god. “He catch me allesame
pickaninny. Me hang on fass too much, then he go up and up and he go
quick-feller too much. Him quick allesame nothing.
“Bym-by me come along place where Mamma belong me stop; this one place
belong people who die finish.” Heaven was filled with Jerope’s dead
kinsmen. “Master, this place he good feller too much. All man he got
good feller garden, good feller house, plenty dog, plenty pig. Mamma
belong me he come, he kiss me.” (Throughout he referred to Mamma as
“he,” which is correct pidgin.) “Now me go inside along house belong
him. Mamma he got good feller house too much, and yam he big one
allesame tree. Suppose altogether people along Heaven he like kaikai
fish, he tink, dass all, and good feller fish he must come along
saucepan. Man dis place, Mamma dis place he no can work. Suppose Mamma
like ’em something; he tink, dass all, and altogether something he
tink, he must come.... Dis heaven belong Mamma him good feller too
much!”
I made no attempt to deny anything, his whole tone was so convincing.
He hadn’t been dreaming; he had been there and seen a worn old woman
having the fine rewards that come by wishing.