“SO YOU’VE COME TO FIJI!”
I have such a collection of hurricanes that in self-searching moments I
call myself “The Storm King’s Target.” The wind that blew us around an
island, that time we were trying to make Rabaul, is an example. Another
was one hot day in Fiji, years later, when our half-caste skipper
demonstrated his share of brains: He saw the storm coming and poked our
cockleshell into a sheltering cove. For three days we “holed up” with
District Officer Bob and his wife Elaine, and watched a Fiji village
take wings; the big palm-thatched meeting-house looked like a flying
haystack. On the way home I searched for landmarks. Two rivers on Viti
Levu had plunged together; an East Indian village had been swept away,
everybody drowned. A Fijian town had vanished under a sliding mountain.
Once in North Queensland I saw a galvanized iron roof wrap itself
around a telephone pole as you wrap paper around a pencil. I’ve been
lucky; never has a ship gone down under me--quite. Several ships,
though, have been wrecked before I had time to get aboard.
Two refuges for the soul in a hurricane are the Power of Prayer and
the Power of Swear. Take your choice. Once the big wind roared over
a mission station, and the missioner, who didn’t care to go himself,
sent loyal converts down to bring in his launch, and they saved the
boat from the gale’s fury. Neighbors made scandal of the wanton risk,
but the missionary smiled, “Oh, no. It was no risk. I saw the Spirit
hovering over them when they went down to the water.”
Another hurricane met our ship coming toward Fiji from Sydney, and I
fell back on the Power of Swear. With every comber that plowed through
the dining saloon of the old 1,100-ton _Suva_ I dug up long-forgotten
oaths. My wife and child got through; Eloisa comes of a pithy stock,
otherwise she could never have followed me in my curious career. This
trip was a soul-shaker. The Fijians have a _meke_ song in which they
address the powers of the hurricane, “blown from the black mouths of
the Ladies of the West.” For three horrible days the Ladies of the West
gave it to us, straight. The captain tied our propeller-shaft in a
bowknot, heading straight into the volley, trying to drag us out of an
invisible grip.
I had my hands full, seeing that my eight-year-old Harriette wasn’t
drowned in our stateroom. An Australian lady furnished a touch “of
romance.” A hard one would shiver our timbers, she would cling to me,
her children would cling to her. “Oh, Doctor, I’m so glad”--she would
shriek above the tempest--“that you’re here on the ship. I feel so much
safer.” I imagined myself swimming with Eloisa and Harriette in one
hand and the Australian lady (with family) in the other.
When we limped into Suva harbor the sea had turned to glass. Hurricanes
have an annoying way of doing things like that.
There on our starboard hand lay the jumbled little waterfront; and
on our portside a craggy peak they call The Devil’s Thumb; perpetual
landslides had marked its face with a perfect =Y=, as though Yale
sophomores had been working overnight.
* * * * *
Suva, capital of Fiji, has advanced a great deal in the last eighteen
years. Nowadays occasional passenger liners dock there and allow
tourists to straighten out their sea legs. The men can buy their
favorite brand at Piccadilly tobacconists or London bars. The
debutantes can play tennis, while their mothers visit little jewel
shops and squander a few shillings on a small handful of silver-gilt
pearls that are lovely and have no respectable commercial rating, or
take in the museum and shudder at the collection of savage iron-wood
clubs which ex-cannibals traded for hymnals,--or buy a four-shilling
guidebook at the Carnegie Library,--or inspect the Government Building,
that cost about $1,500,000 and looks a size too large for Pittsburgh;
that structure was built after the gold rush of ’32 when the colony
went madder than Californians and started things on a grand scale--for
a while. Suva today is like any small colonial capital. Whiskered Sikh
policemen in staring red tunics guide the traffic; along the orderly
streets walk orderly Fijians, short white _sulus_ and bare legs under
English coats, their immense, smoothly cut headdresses of kinky hair
giving them the appearance of English guardsmen in regimental bearskin
busbies. Dignified, broad-shouldered, small-waisted, they seem to be
heading for some savage war-dance. Actually they are going to church,
or to the native motion picture palace.
Suva in 1922 had one dirt road that ran to Nausori, fifteen miles away.
The taxi fare was about $7.50. Your director, to save Rockefeller
funds, usually went there on the little _Andi Roronga_, which took
from 9 A.M. to 1 P.M. with a stop along the mangrove-tangled Rewa. She
started back at two. When you went by taxi you had to cross the river
on a funny pontoon with a submerged cable.
I was no longer under the loose-handed control of Australia. Now it
was the British High Commission that owned Fiji’s 250-odd islands, had
a grip on the Solomons, a tiny toehold on the independent Kingdom of
Tonga, controlled the Gilbert and Ellice Group and ran some curiously
distant isles, like Rotumah and Pitcairn and Christmas Island. The
Governor of Fiji was (and is) the temporal head of the High Commission.
However, the real government comes from London. Colonials as a rule
don’t understand Englishmen. Americans, after what happened about 1776,
can sympathize. The Yankee slides comfortably into the ways of the
Canadian, the Australian, the New Zealander or South African. The born
Englishman with his hauteur and peculiarity is another fish to fry. He
has ruled his far-flung dominions uncannily well, but his colonials
tender him more respect than love.
Yet down there I have worked with Englishmen for whom I felt the
deepest loyalty and friendship. Chris Kendrick is one of them. Barley
is another, and there are many more. Pretty soon I am going to tell you
of another, who was my associate for eight years in Fiji.
Colonials in Suva used to grumble, “Back in London they don’t know
we’re alive.” But the politicians knew. Fiji became a dumping place
for younger sons and Ministry favorites. Young chaps, green as grass
and fresh as paint, were called “cadets,” and there was always a new
cadet to fill the desk left vacant by retirement or promotion. Against
the cadet system the experienced colonial, who knew the land and the
people, hadn’t the ghost of a show.
Where the English are respected and not liked, the Americans are
liked but not respected. Colonials regard us as too evangelical,
too insistent on modern shower baths in every room and on having
everybody’s trousers creased in the same way. They speak of us as
rotten colonizers; and these arguments are in the face of our record
in Cuba, for instance, where we cleaned up yellow fever and gave the
island real sanitation.... I remember what an educated Cuban once said
to me, “Of course we don’t like you, Doctor. You found us dirty and
contented; now we are clean and unhappy.”
* * * * *
Naturally the British Empire must exact tribute from her dominions or
she could not survive. All over Britain’s Pacific empire “Buy English”
was behind the sale of all the machinery, all the material used in
public improvements. Yet it was astonishing how popular American
products remained, in spite of the high preferential tariff against
them. American cars, burdened with a 45 per cent duty, were eagerly
sought in New Zealand, Australia, Fiji. Loyal colonials had their
tongues hanging out in their desire to buy British automobiles, yet
pig-headed English manufacturers were sending low-powered, poorly
sprung cars, built for smooth, hill-less roads. Our own Henry Ford
would have adapted his article to geographical requirements. Not so the
British maker with his cry, “Buy English!”
Sunkist oranges were everywhere, an example of American trade-genius
under difficulties. New Zealand, with her own tropical possessions and
access to Australia’s and Jamaica’s supplies, displayed Sunkist oranges
in every remote village. It’s still an unfathomable mystery to me, how
these California go-getters can drag oranges eight or nine thousand
miles, and profit under adverse conditions. Maybe it is because their
fruit is obtainable all year round, or because its uniform size makes
it attractive.
As my work went on in Fiji I had to put up a fight for one important
drug, the arsenical derivative neosalvarsan, often conveniently called
“salvarsan,” although it is Ehrlich’s improvement on his own salvarsan
discovery. It is indispensable in the treatment of yaws. On one of my
brief trips to the United States I argued the high cost of neosalvarsan
with wholesale drug manufacturers who came to a meeting of the American
Medical Association. Could the price be cut down if we ordered it in
large quantities? I promised that if they would give us a good price
we could use $7500 worth a year. When our purchasing agent struck a
bargain I don’t think the wholesalers regretted it. We used the order
soon after the first shipment, and cabled for more. When we ceased to
buy in driblet lots, the cost of neosalvarsan was cut four times, and
each price was lower than that set by the Crown Agent in London--he
being the gentleman whom the Mother Country appoints to collect a
large part of the tax on colonies and dominions. Through the deal our
purchasing agent made with American wholesalers natives of the South
Pacific were saved more than the Foundation’s expenditure on building
programs, health campaigns and my salary.
This sudden attack on the high price of drugs caused a mild sensation
in London, which had governed the purchase of arsenicals up to that
time. The Crown Agent responsible for disbursements compared our
economical prices with those the colony had been paying. The reaction
was true to form. Representatives of the Home Government wanted to
know, unofficially, if we were in cahoots with some big Yankee chemical
firm. At first an attempt was made to discredit my drug; then the price
of salvarsan came tobogganing all through the British Empire.
* * * * *
My reception in official Suva, though polite, was never emotional.
There had been a short Rockefeller campaign there in 1917-1918, which
had left the Administration markedly unenthusiastic. The Governor, Sir
Cecil Hunter Rodwell, was a fine fellow, and I owe much to him and to
Sir Maynard Hedstrom, a wealthy merchant who could see much further
ahead of his nose than most I met; Hedstrom was with me in all my
endeavors.
The Suva Hospital was not stately--a creaky old shack tinkered up
somehow. The new War Memorial was finished a few months later when
the Medical Department took it over; in spite of its newness it was
a makeshift, and so small that it was overcrowded until the building
program of 1934. The native nurses, for example, were jammed into an
ancient wooden structure, where they had to carry their own firewood
and do their own cooking in most primitive style; and these were the
girls we must depend upon to raise Fijian standards of living.
There were between twenty-two and twenty-four medical officers whose
average brains and conscientiousness were of a high order. I called
them “the Old Guard” and was sorry that so many of them were retired
soon afterwards; younger ones who replaced many of them had neither the
social, educational nor ethical ideals of their predecessors. And it
seemed to me that cadets who came out for the civil administration were
also a step-down in quality.
There were forty Native Medical Practitioners--natives given a
three-year course in simple medicine and surgery. They had no
classroom, no charts, only one small book of simple medicine and
hygiene, and that was written in Fijian. Teaching paraphernalia was
practically nil. These boys attended out-patients, acted as male
nurses, attended the doctors on their rounds. Their lectures were given
at the hospital by the Chief Medical Officer and the Resident Medical
Officer. When these officers spoke Fijian and were interested, the
results were good; when they were not interested the formal education
was very sketchy.
I studied this system, developed for over thirty years, and wondered if
it wasn’t an answer to my prayer for something constructive. Some of
these boys, though taught so little surgical practice, developed great
ability; it was almost as though their cannibal ancestry had given them
a particular flair for human anatomy. One Native Medical Practitioner
(N.M.P.) was Sowani, who was lent to the Gilbert Island Colony and made
a famous reputation as a surgeon; I shall tell of him in the proper
place.
There was a system of native obstetrical nursing as well as a training
school for European nurses. The native nurses had lectures from a
Fijian with the same educational background as their own. One lecture
a week for six months each of two years, then the girls were sent with
N.M.P.’s to assist Fijian mothers in confinement. Bed-pan carrying for
European probationers, mopping, and doorknob cleaning made up their
only other training. They spoke no English.
* * * * *
The Chief Medical Officer sat pining at his desk when I made my first
call. He was about to retire, and that splendid Englishman, Dr. Aubrey
Montague, with twenty years of local experience, was about to take his
place.
The soon-retiring C.M.O. rose from his work, offered me his hand and
said mournfully, “So you’ve come to Fiji!”
Yes, we’d come to Fiji. The Chief Medical Officer retained the hairline
balance of politeness. The Foundation was a nice philanthropic
institution, and it was sweet of us to be interested and all that; but
there was no enthusiasm for chenopodium. I heartily agreed with him. We
compared notes--without profit. You can’t invent a cure-all overnight.
There was nothing to take the place of what we had, and nothing to do
but go on.
It was a boon to me and to Fiji when Dr. Aubrey Montague took over the
desk of the Chief Medical Officer. He was the best of the Anglo-Saxon
breed, one of the most helpful influences that ever touched my life.
Clear-headed, clear-eyed, he was spiritually incapable of lying even to
himself. I never knew him to do an underhand thing or go back on his
word--quite a record for an official in the tropics. He was one of the
three ablest men I have known in the Pacific and he didn’t take third
place. A naturally shy man walls himself in. I put a high value on the
intimacy we formed when the wall was broken and I could look in on his
well-controlled intellect.
His clean life and ideals were free from intolerance; he judged
men leniently. I have often seen them fail him, and be forgiven
tomorrow after he had weighed them in his kindly practical mind. His
administration opened an era of large expansion, especially along lines
of preventive medicine. A routine politician would have thrown money
around. Montague was economical, almost parsimonious. It was a wondrous
thing in those days to see government funds protected by a gentleman’s
deep responsibility to King and Country.
Governors continually came to him with questions outside his
department; advice from his clear mind was never less than valuable. So
it was a great shock to me when Montague, after thirty years of service
to the Empire, was allowed to retire and to die without the honors
he richly deserved. He had done his job unobtrusively and lacked the
self-seeking qualities that bid for titles. The only monument he left
behind him was an unfillable gap.
* * * * *
Through those first few months we agreed on three ambitious plans.
Montague wanted an improved native medical school for his Fijians, a
real one instead of a makeshift. His wish was mine, and uppermost in my
thoughts; but I wanted this educational project to reach out over all
the South Pacific. It was a big idea which might have seemed audacious,
but we discussed its possibilities from every angle. He saw clearly the
advantage of sending competently educated islanders back to their homes
to work among their own people.
We went into the subject of asylum for lepers at Mokogai,[2] a near-by
island where the old establishment had been moldering for years. I
pointed out that all the poor, small Pacific groups might combine their
resources co-operatively and make Mokogai the center, a modernized and
enlarged plant where patients could be cared for at minimum cost and
with maximum results. Here would be teamwork, the thing most needed
over those wide blue waters.
And we agreed on another design for teamwork. High Commission control
should be centralized more, particularly in health matters. Quick
communications, radio especially, were bringing the islands together.
We saw a far vision of a unified medical service; one that would make
sense out of the bedlam that existed from New Guinea to the Society
Islands. Montague and I were for this plan, and before our preliminary
talks were over we had decided that he, Montague, was to secure the
backing of the Fiji Government and that I was to bring in the financial
and moral support of governments controlling the many Pacific groups
around us.
These were long, long thoughts. But before his retirement Montague
saw two of his dreams, and mine, come true. The third was partially
realized and may be worked out fully in the end. I hope so, for the
sake of a million patients.... I know that no man was ever more
generously helped than I was, with the friendship of Montague on
the Government side and with Sir Maynard Hedstrom backing me in the
Legislative Council. Hedstrom, by the way, always stood ready to act as
interpreter for my Yankee lingo and Yankee methods when I had to argue
before cautious governors.
The practicability of a modernized native medical school came home
to me. I had had a white man’s peep into the Melanesian mind;
anthropologists rank him as the mental equal of the Caucasian; the
Polynesian stands a grade higher intellectually, with the Japanese;
while the Chinese heads the list. Environment, geography and tradition
have held so many races back that it is impossible to compare them with
our own ingenious and self-destructive civilization.
* * * * *
I had gone over all this when Malakai, N.M.P., was sent to me, and my
mind was made up.
Malakai had been made Native Practitioner by the hit-or-miss of the
old school. More than half self-educated, his inquisitive mind would
never let a subject go until he had mastered it. He was a cannibal’s
grandson, I have no doubt; so many of the best ones were. His favorite
dish was scientific books, which he devoured.
He came to me, a slim young man of twenty with the fine bronze skin
of the Melano-Polynesian mixture. Something of a dude, he wore a silk
_lavalava_ down to his good Fijian knees. His English was imperfect
then. In 1924 when I went out on my series of group surveys, I showed
him around as a model for the proposed Native Medical Practitioner. He
became the best microscopist among the thirty-odd I have trained; his
accurate eyes became mine in a work for which poor sight unfitted me.
Moreover, he was father, mother, son and valet to me. It was unseemly
to set him to small drudgery. Malakai settled that question; when we
were in the field he invariably laid out my clean clothes, and did
laundry work among savages who were too ignorant for such things. At
night he gave me my quinine, and he was always the first up in the
morning. The old-time missionary who spoke of the Fijian as “inclined
to indolence” should have met Malakai. Once when we were out in the
jungle my model N.M.P. fired the native cook and took over the job.
Could he cook? Of course!
I’m showing you Malakai, but not as a great exception among Fijians.
There are thousands of him on his home islands, only awaiting their
chance; they’re the handiest people I’ve ever seen, adaptable, clever,
willing, loyal, dependable in emergency. Never once has a trusted
Fijian let me down, or failed to put up with hardship and smile in
adversity. Treat them with the consideration they deserve, trust them
as they should be trusted.... Well, I’ve seen many of their fine young
men come on, and I’m watching many on their way up....
On my return visit to Sikiana I was troubled by the number of enlarged
spleens I found among the people. Malakai was the first to suggest a
wide infection of malaria, but I pooh-poohed. Where were the anopheline
mosquitoes? Malakai disappeared and came back smiling. “Doctor, I’ve
let them bite me. They stand on their heads to feed, and they have
spotted wings.” He showed me several captured anopheles and saved me
from being ridiculous in my report.
I shall never forget his appearance when he came back from a later
mission to the New Hebrides. He had served for a year and a half as
the only purely Condominium medical officer. Suddenly there came a
cable: “HAVE QUITTED CONDOMINIUM, MALAKAI.” It was a matter of color.
A newly-appointed official had been born on an island where nobody was
exactly lily-white; so he was extremely race-sensitive, and insisted
on putting the boy from Fiji in his place. We welcomed Malakai back to
Suva because we had let him go at a sacrifice in order to demonstrate
the efficiency of native doctors.
The picture of his getting off the boat was something to remember. He
had discarded the proud _lavalava_ for a pair of trousers. He merely
said he liked them, and nobody could pry the real reason out of him.
About a year later he showed up with a new silk _lavalava_, and was
ready to tell about the trousers. Down in the New Hebrides he had
experimented once too often with mosquitoes; an attack of malaria had
made his legs so thin that he was ashamed of them. The Fijian dandy’s
pride is in his swelling calves and slim ankles.
In 1926 when I was going from the New Hebrides to Sydney on the
_Makambo_, Captain Tom Brown moved Malakai from second class to the
captain’s table, a gesture of respect. On my return to the Cook Islands
in 1932, the natives asked only two questions: Where was Malakai and
what had I done with my big camera? I had been the fifth wheel in the
wagon. For three years Malakai ran our yaws unit in Fiji. A European
doctor couldn’t have done the work as well with four times the money.
Malakai’s unit was a model.
A European Medical Officer on the Ellice group went alcoholic, so I
sent Malakai down for six months. After we had to call him home the
local District Officer almost challenged me to a duel; he was going
half-crazy, he said, because deputations from surrounding islands were
pouring in, clamoring for Malakai’s services.
My young doctor’s addiction to silk neckties, silk shirts, silk
_lavalavas_, fine coats, wrist watches, mandolins and guitars, once
ran him afoul of a Fijian custom called _kere kere_. The clans are
communistic, and if you happen to be a clansman anything you have is
theirs by divine right. That’s why he returned from his home town
looking like a cat that had been dipped into the sea. His family
had trimmed him down to a ragged shirt and a cotton _lavalava_. The
highest-born Fijian may get this rummage sale welcome if he ventures
into the land of his birth. It quells ambition.
That, of course, belonged to the private life of Malakai. So did his
marriage to a handsome wife, who used to accompany him on his trips.
When he started sailing alone I was afraid of trouble; Malakai,
temperamentally, would have made an ideal guardian for a very old
Turk with a very large harem--no outside assistant would have been
necessary. Then there was the matter of his savings. Like all Pacific
Islanders he had no idea of a money economy. Why save for a rainy day?
The sun will come out; it always does.
Love came to Malakai’s life and money flew out of the window. I had
badgered him into putting £119 in a savings account; but Malakai got
hold of the book. He was having wife-trouble. The first Mrs. Malakai
was barren, and the Fijian who hasn’t fathered a child is jeered at as
something less than a proper man; sterility is grounds for divorce.
Malakai had gone courting a native nurse, and the romance had dug
deep into his £119. He blew his whole remaining balance on a party to
proclaim an approaching heir--on the sinister side. His fiancée was far
from sterile--but how to give an honest name to the unborn Malakai,
Junior?
Well, I talked to Magistrate Burrowes, who obligingly called two
divorce hearings--and dismissed them both because neither Malakai nor
his friends, for inscrutable Fijian reasons, would testify to the fact.
At a third hearing Burrowes was in a sour temper. Bari and Rafaeli,
Malakai’s friends, remained mum, but Malakai loosened up a little.
Annoyed, the magistrate penalized him three pounds a month out of his
N.M.P. salary of nine pounds--probably the first alimony ever paid by
a Fijian. On the first of every month the retired Mrs. Malakai showed
up to collect. She bled her ex-husband white as a Swede; then came
to me for six months’ payment in advance to take her on a holiday
trip. I argued that three months’ cash in hand is worth a lifetime
of installments in the bush. She fancied the idea, and finally for
fifteen pounds spot-on-the-counter surrendered Malakai for life. Now
she could buy presents, buy clothes, go home, save her face. And, quite
naturally, pick out a husband. Honor was satisfied. Another instance of
native money psychology.
In 1936 Malakai went to the Gilbert and Ellice Islands as Senior
Medical Practitioner. When he left there, it required two Europeans
to fill his post. He came back to Fiji in 1939, a few days before I
retired.
* * * * *
In his ability and in his foibles Malakai was all Fijian. He settled my
determination on higher education for such men. Dr. Montague was in the
mood for it. If we could have taken that bull by the horns in 1922-1923
our enthusiasm might have swept in the political consent and money
backing of at least eight great island groups. All we needed was the
partnership of the Rockefeller Foundation. That, I guessed, was merely
a matter of asking.
My guess was wrong. I wrote a detailed letter to Dr. Victor Heiser and
outlined our plan. Just a little school with forty undergraduates, to
start with. It could be an adjunct to the new hospital in Suva, but
need not be an expensive set of buildings. Dr. Montague’s plans were
modest in price and extremely practical. Governor Sir Eyre Hutson was
enthusiastic. Administrators on distant island groups were begging for
it. Now was the time.
Ardently I wrote:
The Foundation gives cheerfully to help medical schools for Chinese,
Spanish, English and what you please, to people who are better able to
help themselves than these poor blacks out here who are as eager for a
chance of this sort as ever a white man was. The Board could give this
school and fund half of a teacher’s salary; the other half might be
made up by the different groups ... the money would produce results at
a far higher rate than in England or Canada....
The reply came from 61 Broadway. Dr. Heiser with his usual sagacity
had found the plan reasonable and practical. But the Foundation is so
vast that it must be zoned into many divisions, such as a Division of
Medical Sciences, a Division of Social Sciences, a Division of the
Humanities, and so on. And the Division of Medical Sciences was dead
against us; it was out for ambitious projects, and thought mine very
third-rate indeed. Rockefeller millions were going into the great
establishment in Peking. No use throwing good money after bad, on
little squirt schools in the Pacific. After years of my dinging away at
the subject, Heiser himself grew cold and asked me to forget it. Peking
and many others were the big health investments....
Well, where is Peking today, after the Japanese have finished? And
Fiji? I’m saving that information for dessert.
It is one of the ironies of our times, and a quaint one, that the
Rockefeller Foundation mailed the Japanese a large check for their
Public Health School on the same day the Mikado’s army bombed to powder
a beautiful library which the Foundation had given to Chungking.