CHAPTER XIII

HOW THE ANSWER CAME

In Fiji we started out directly for cure and prevention, an active

campaign. Chris Kendrick was still with me, my gem of the first water;

Malakai was a newly discovered diamond.

On my first tour I saw filthy sanitary arrangements, or none at all.

By education we tried to induce the natives and oriental transplant

to use ordinary cesspit latrines; our efforts met with more success

after the discovery of a new internal remedy had rewarded us with

public approval and made the Fijians health-conscious. From then on

the pathway was cleared for all our efforts. Dr. Heiser, when he

visited us in 1928, introduced the bored-hole latrine, which was the

Foundation’s enthusiasm at that time. It was a twenty-five-foot hole

dug with an eighteen-inch auger, which was a practical benefit to the

East Indian in Fiji; but, for the native, the deep pit, covered with a

polished concrete slab--which we were by then making and distributing

by thousands--was by far the better sanitation.

Dr. Heiser came out again in 1934. In his _An American Doctor’s

Odyssey_ he was kind enough to report those two visits at some length.

On his latter trip we made the surveys together and looked over results

of our bored-hole work. I have a pleasant memory of our expeditions;

how he belied his sixty-third birthday when his long legs walked me

lame in Fiji, Tonga and Samoa. We argued like a pair of plumbers on

a holiday; subject, Bored Latrine versus Cesspit. I contended that

the deep auger-hole was all right for the delicately built Indian,

but, even then, in rocky or sandy soil it was no good at all. And for

Fijians it wouldn’t work. Why? In a land where the natives use palm

leaves, breadfruit leaves, stones, coconut husks and hanks of wild

grass for toilet purposes, a narrow tube in the ground gets stopped

up in less time than it takes to bore it. Then the chap takes to the

bush, as of old. It has nothing to do with science, it’s just practical

mechanics, plus tradition. Our debate had this effect at least; we

later modified the bored-hole latrine with a much larger hole, but

retained the concrete slab, which was admired by barefoot natives for

its reliable cleanliness.

* * * * *

But in 1922, as a newcomer in Fiji and with only such authority as I

could get by talking myself into it, this broken jigsaw puzzle looked

to me like something no mere human hands could put together. I was

a health officer on a rather large scale with nothing so much as a

dog license to show for it. It was pretty discouraging, at first.

I was like a fireman with a leaky hose, trying to stop a blaze at

one end of a building while an incendiary poured gasoline on the

other. The government health authorities had a right to mourn over

the Foundation’s recent attempt to kill the all-pervading parasite.

Everywhere I went I saw how little the good work had accomplished.

Chris Kendrick would come back from treatments in outlying districts

and smile ruefully. “They’re quite a mess out there.” Like all of us,

he was losing faith in chenopodium; and Chris Kendrick’s faith would

stand a good deal of punishment.

Nevertheless, I was working vigorously to educate the natives in the

nature of various parasites and the virtue of treatment. And I was

pumping up British enthusiasm with every publicity device I could lay

my hands on. As I tooted the Horn of Health they began to look upon

me as Barnum’s little brother with a rich strain of Rockefeller in me

somewhere.

One of my less dignified efforts along the line of health-advertising

was a window display I devised for Pop Swann’s drugstore, prominent

on Suva’s main street. Pop was a stanch friend of medical progress.

So it didn’t take long to convince him that an attractive display of

intestinal parasites would help both his business and mine. Most of

his customers were Fijians and East Indians, so nothing could be more

logical. “Anything in the world to push things along, my boy,” said

enthusiastic Pop. Between us we set up a charming arrangement in the

two windows on either side of his street door, where all who passed

could wonder and admire: worms of every variety in the big gallon

bottles they call “Winchesters.” Tapeworms of infinite length slithered

around in alcohol; families of _Necator americanus_ swam cozily beside

a jugful of oriental Ankylostoma; there was a large bottle devoted

to the fat roundworms, nearly a foot long, and to the screw-headed

whipworms, and to other, less notorious wrigglers. Pop Swann rubbed his

hands as we stood outside gloating over our work in the two windows

that fledged his main door. “Doc,” chuckled Pop, “that ought to draw

customers, if anything will!”

Then a very busy week, uphill and down dale, organizing the campaign

and pushing it along. One day, going by Pop Swann’s, my way was

blockaded by a semicircle of Indians and Fijians, standing at a

respectful distance from the great exhibition. Out of the door burst

Pop, hair on end. “Doc,” he shouted, “for the love of God take those

things out of my windows. The natives are so scared they won’t pass in

between those worms. You’re ruining my trade!”

So I dewormed the window and time marched on. But it wasn’t marching

well for me, or in the right direction.

* * * * *

One late afternoon in February, 1922, I keeled back in my office chair

and appreciated the soreness a middle-aged prize fighter must feel

after he has taken the count in round one. With a sanitary squad of

nine native and Indian assistants and the invaluable Chris Kendrick

I had again made a round and seen the dank hopelessness of two races

weakened by their own customs and by the unfriendly acts of nature.

It was just as Paley had shown: rainfall flooded their shallow wells

and mixed with the foulness of their latrines so that both wells and

latrines had the same bacterial flora. In some districts hookworm

infection ran as high as 98 per cent. This condition was not limited to

primitive natives by any means; the Hindu and Moslem of ancient culture

were quite as ignorant of sanitation, and more worm-laden than their

dark brown brothers.

This filthy stable must be cleaned, but the baffling thing was to find

the cure. Our International Health Board was sharing expenses with

the Government for a three-year campaign. The question of throwing

good money after bad had come up again. Officially, I should have been

pro-chenopodium. Actually that drug was the first word in my Hymn of

Hate. And the discouraging thing was this: despite the crucial need of

hygienic improvements, an effective cure must take first place as an

educational demonstration. If you destroy all the hookworms inside the

human body, no more of their eggs will fall to the ground to hatch the

larvae that make the worms that suck the blood.... The whole Jack-built

song of consequences with a tropical setting. Sounds very simple,

doesn’t it? So does astronomy.

I sat at my desk, facing facts and not liking a single one of them.

Evening was coming on and I should have been home for dinner. I was too

sick of myself and my work to move a muscle. Three more years of this,

and where would it get us? Nowhere.

Maybe it was my guardian angel who stole up and laid a still hand over

mine. Without knowing what I did or why I did it, I moved my hand

across the desk and woke, blinking. I had picked up the Journal of the

_American Medical Association_, a November 1921 issue, and an invisible

finger seemed to point the page for me. And there was the title: “The

Use of Carbon Tetrachloride in the Removal of Hookworm ... by Maurice

C. Hall.” Hall was the man who approved my experiment down in Rabaul

when I gave those injections to six cannibal prisoners. I respected

him, as most of the profession did. As Senior Zoologist of the United

States Bureau of Animal Industry, his researches had gone far in his

own field. He didn’t talk unless he knew what he was talking about.

Here was Hall’s report in the modest gray of scientific language,

revealing years of most careful observation. His tests had led him

to a novel drug--carbon tetrachloride. Queer, humble thing to have

fished out of the pharmacopoeia! Hitherto it had been useful only

in dry-cleaning fluids and fire extinguishers. He had observed that

patients under chloroform anesthesia frequently emit a number of

intestinal parasites. Chloroform, then, would be a successful vermifuge

were it not for its poisonous qualities. Hall made hundreds of tests

down the list of Hydrocarbons until he came to chloroform’s close

relation. Chloroform’s chemical initials are CHCl₃. Tetrachloride’s

laboratory name is CCl₄.

Tetrachloride touched the spot Hall had been looking for. He tried it

first on dogs, then on swine, horses, monkeys. He carefully gauged

the dosage to 3 cc. for every 10 pounds of animal weight; later he

found that O.3 cc. to every kilogram of body-weight expelled the

worms in surprising quantities. After treatment he had performed

postmortems on many animals and had examined internal organs which

showed no pathological changes that could be traced to CCl₄. In animal

experimentation it had been an unqualified success.

In animals, yes. But what of man?

The answer came like a clap of thunder out of Hall’s quietest

paragraph. _He had tried the stuff on himself._ Audaciously he had

taken a 3 cc. dose, gone to bed and wakened in the morning with no

pathological symptoms. The dangerous drops he had swigged the night

before had had none of the nauseous effects of chenopodium. His animal

experiments had shown him that it worked as fast, as safely and more

thoroughly. And here was another point in its favor: tetrachloride

tried on animals seemed to have no ill effects on pregnancy.

Chenopodium had always been a dangerous thing to give a woman with

child. It was, at times, among the unsafe abortifacients--often

effective if used up to the poison point.

The message of tetrachloride came to me like an answer to prayer. But

would the dog-cure turn out to be a man-killer? Probably not. _Hall had

tried it on himself._

* * * * *

With a hop, skip and jump I went to the laboratory used by the Medical

Officer of Health. Naturally old Carment, who presided over the

collection, wouldn’t have the drug. Why should he? Yes, but there it

was! A big, brown bottle with the label CCl₄. It had never been opened,

of course, and how it got there nobody knows. Strange, useless things

drift onto laboratory shelves.

When I went up to Dr. Montague’s office I had the brown bottle under

one arm and the _Medical Journal_ under the other. “Read that and look

at this,” I said. He read the article painstakingly, then turned the

bottle in his hand. “Lambert, try anything,” he sighed. That was about

the way we all felt those days.

We had been trained in the empirical school. Try anything, if evidence

is in its favor. Even the jungle medicine man, for all his black

magic, has herbs and simples which the respectable practitioner might

include in his remedies. A thousand years before Harvey demonstrated

the blood’s circulation Asiatic wizards were giving chaulmoogra oil

for leprosy--true, they gave it wrong, but they gave it. The Incas of

Peru taught us the value of quinine for malaria; they chewed the bark.

Before the Crusades, corner barbers were giving mercury to syphilitic

noblemen. Up to fifty years ago the medical profession depended pretty

much on the household remedies your grandmother used to choke down

you; as long as they worked they saved many a fine prescription in

abbreviated Latin.

The old empiricals had moved along that line. But men of the new

thought, like Pasteur, like Ehrlich, had set out deliberately to fit a

drug to a condition. And that was how Hall had worked.

So we were trying to cure hookworm disease with a cleaning fluid. A

veterinary had recommended it. True, he was about the greatest vet in

the world. I have to laugh now, remembering how we, as green young

undergraduates at Syracuse Medical, used to snoot veterinaries and

dentists as “hoss doctors” and “tooth yankers.” We didn’t take the

trouble to remember that modern anesthesia originated in a dentist’s

brain. And since we lacked the gift of prophecy, how were we to know

what a horse doctor would someday do with something out of a fire

extinguisher?

My mind was made up, but my heart wasn’t doing any too well when I

went to the native ward and picked out four hookwormy East Indians.

I wasn’t sure how these follows would behave, for Mr. Gandhi’s Civil

Disobedience had become their evening prayer. However, they felt pretty

sick and were ready, like Montague, to say, “Try anything.” I started

them off with a stiff dose of salts.

At seven next morning my faltering hand administered to each of them 3

cc. out of the brown bottle. The minute they swallowed it I felt like

a Borgia. It was too late to do anything about it, unless I gave them

a quick emetic. If tetrachloride went back on me I’d be responsible

for the death of a man, maybe four. Doctors have to become hardened to

death, otherwise they couldn’t remain in practice. But experimental

killing is a different thing. If any of these Hindus died I’d have the

weight on my soul. Not only that, I’d lose my job.... Already I saw

my resignation from the International Health Board being requested by

cable.

I steadied myself with an argument: If the Fiji campaign failed along

the old line that wouldn’t be any feather in my cap either. Well, I

was deciding something on a very long chance.... My stomach went back

on me, foolishly reflecting the pain of my victims. Solid food didn’t

appeal, so I breakfasted on a pint of coffee, embittered with a new

torment. Why hadn’t I taken tetrachloride myself, before I tried it on

those Indians?[3]

_Dr. Hall had taken a dose of it._

I had dosed my four Indians at seven, and time was wearing on.

Tetrachloride, which is a purgative, should have acted quicker. The men

were dumb and drowsy. Would this be coma? I felt their lean wrists,

listened to their lean chests; pulse and respiration normal. How soon

would they take a turn for the worse?

_Dr. Hall had taken a dose of it._

Yes, but Hall had been in the prime of health, able to throw off toxic

poisoning. These poor fellows were like dry leaves. The very thing that

made treatment necessary had weakened them to the exhaustion point....

Then I thought: Even if I had drugged myself with the stuff it wouldn’t

have proved much; what I was trying to find out was its actual effect

on hookworm....

* * * * *

I had wandered back to my office, hoping that solitude and a cigarette

might tell me what to do next.... The door burst open and Chris

Kendrick tumbled in on me. His look was grave as he said, “That

tetrachloride--”

“Are they dead?” I asked stiffly.

“Dead!” Chris waved his hands. “They’re all jumping out of bed, and

simply spouting hookworms!”

That was how the news came to me. I had been watching them for hours

while local medical officers passed their beds and made long faces

which said to my fevered imagination, “See what Lambert’s done now!”

Then the minute I turned my back CCl₄ had begun to work. For three

days while my Indians were, as Chris exaggerated it, “fairly spouting

worms,” the result was a constant wonder. Cordiality glowed in an

atmosphere which had been none too warm. Doctors gathered around our

hookworm count like baseball fans around the box score. The native

orderlies were as excited as the rest. First day, second day, third....

I had gambled with four lives, and won. I call that Tetrachloride

Experiment Number 2, since Hall swallowed the first dose; and

Experiment Number 2 was a surprising success. Between them my patients

had expelled 244 worms after a single dose. The following week we gave

them a test treatment with chenopodium--and only got four Necators. The

man I mark down as Case 1 expelled none at all. The other three needed

no follow-up treatment. In three days Case 1 had shed ninety-five

hookworms, and all were discharged as cured. One dose of CCl₄, mind

you, had proven 99 per cent perfect.

* * * * *

Mine was the embarrassment of riches. I had worked for the Foundation

too long to believe that they would approve of wholesale treatments

with so new and untried a drug. If I went on with tetrachloride, as I

felt I must do, the only way was to go ahead and say nothing about it.

Dr. Montague’s enthusiasm was as great as mine, but I moved

cautiously at first. The next set of East Indians I tried it on was

less satisfactory than the original four. It wasn’t the fault of

tetrachloride, but of Gandhi; his sick disciples were so independent

that they threw their specimens out of the window before we could make

an accurate worm-count. We recovered enough, however, to keep Kendrick

and his force of Fijian helpers pretty busy going over the thin

washings spread out on tightly stretched gauze.

I look over some of the reports of those experimental days and read:--

... Almost total lack of symptoms in the group that received the purge

after the drug. Not one of them was incapacitated for his regular

duties ... with no after-purge there were some who had minor symptoms.

Many were sleepy for several hours....

... Young Indian working in our office given 3 cc. at 7:45 A.M. ...

by 10:15 gave 85 hookworms. Total for three days 101. Test treatment

showed he was cured. This illustrates the rapid expulsion of worms by

this drug, which we have observed generally.

The time came when I felt that the whole thing was too important to

keep to myself, so I wrote a careful letter to the Foundation. The

answer from 61 Broadway with its code-name “Rockfound” was cabled back

so fast that it burned a streak across the Pacific: “FORBID USE. WE DO

NOT EXPERIMENT WITH HUMAN LIFE.”

I took the limp message to Dr. Montague and said, “Well, the jig’s up.

I’m forbidden to play with fire extinguishers.”

Montague thought a long time. Tetrachloride was God’s gift to Fiji, he

said, and he didn’t intend to give it up. He was recommending it for

all the institutions under his authority.

Then I found an out. I asked, “Do you authorize me, as your

subordinate, to continue its use? Would you O.K. a letter to that

effect?” He said he would, and he did. After that I heard no more

objections from the Foundation, whose administrators were only too

glad, of course, to have the drug tried out on a large scale, as long

as the Government of Fiji took the responsibility.

* * * * *

Up to the time when I grew bolder and dosed a whole large Indian

school, the new treatment had been tried very quietly. Then it got

too public to be kept away from the press. It was at the Dilkusha

Mission that we gave this first “mass treatment”--the only practical

way of administering a cure to the many. Before that it had been a

matter of tedious house-to-house canvas. At Dilkusha we lined up 400

children, and I was about as jittery as I had been when I tackled the

four adults at the War Memorial. But I went away smiling, a little

cocky about myself. One dose of tetrachloride had removed 99 per cent

of the infestation. Meanwhile in Suva Jail Dr. Kalamkar, East Indian

physician, had run up a score of 94.5.

All this was news, and Suva had an editor with a keenly developed

news-sense. His name was Victor Abel, and among other bold enterprises

he ran a paper called the _Pacific Age_. A daring young chap of a

good Anglo-Jewish family, he had raised mules in South Africa, made

a failure of it, then come to Fiji to raise hogs, and made a failure

of that too. His influential father-in-law was Sir Henry Marks, who

worried a great deal about the _Pacific Age_.

Sir Henry had set his cap for a place on the Executive Council, and

you never could tell what the incorrigible Victor would say next to

stir up the Government. The town was always agog, waiting for some new

outbreak in his personal correspondence column. It was a completely

open forum, that column; under all sorts of fancy _noms de plume_

citizens let each other have it, straight in the nose. Then, just to

keep the pot boiling, they would change their _noms de plume_ overnight

and start thundering on the left. When Victor decided to write anything

up he trimmed it artistically. For example, there was his famous

account of the government yacht left in Suva harbor with her seacocks

open. She gently sank, while the officers and crew were ashore seeing a

football game.

In the midst of our growing campaign Victor came to me and said he was

pretty sure he had hookworm. He had; and tetrachloride did its work

very nicely. “Listen, Doctor,” he said, “what about this magic stuff?

Where did it come from? What’s the story? Are you going to bury big

news like that in Suva? Tell me about it, let me put it on the wire and

I’ll have the whole world sitting up.”

By that time Fiji was certainly sitting up. Natives were clamoring for

treatment. Not until the gold rush of ’32 was anything more generally

talked about. I wanted Victor to have the story; I said to Victor, “You

can run the story provided you keep me out of it--and don’t mention the

Foundation, either. Just say that Maurice C. Hall’s treatment is being

given. If that’s understood, here are the facts.”

Victor kept his word in an appropriately sensational style, proclaiming

that Maurice C. Hall was curing hookworm with a thing called

tetrachloride. The news thrilled the medical world, scientific men were

mulling over the possibilities of a new and novel drug. How would it

come out in Fiji? That was the question.

When the tidings came to Washington, friendly biologists crowded

Dr. Maurice C. Hall’s office to congratulate him, and his reply was

characteristic. “You say I’ve been curing hookworm in Fiji? Hell, I’ve

never been near the place.”

* * * * *

In a month I had treated more cases than my predecessor had in fourteen

months, and with no increased expense. Tetrachloride worked with such

accuracy that there was no need of repeated doses, as with chenopodium.

By the end of 1922 the Rockefeller Foundation, which had untangled the

Hall-Lambert collaboration and duly forgiven my disobedience, reported

52,000 treatments by tetrachloride.

Of these 50,000 had been given in Fiji, under my supervision.

The history of public health cannot be written by the sure-cure

patent-medicine man. We had our bumps, at first, but they were

amazingly few. In every district where the Willis salt flotation method

showed a hookworm frequency of over 60 per cent we rounded the people

up and gave the treatment _en masse_. In regions like the dirty Rewa

and Navua districts infection was particularly heavy. In one place we

dosed 1,243, and came back in a month to find 1,111 villagers showing

negative--about the average sample of our work as it increased to large

proportions.

Primitive folk made a carnival of our coming; drums sounded and they

all reached out for the wizard drops. They called it “toddy” and said

it was fine because it made them drunk. Possibly it did, a little.

After a child’s-size dose small boys would run around like wild dogs,

tear up the flower beds in mission compounds, throw mud and have a

perfectly bully time. Full-grown “marys” would caper and dance like

Aunt Dinah at an old-fashioned revival; but when their big buck

husbands smacked them they would come back to normal with surprising

alacrity. Most of the demonstrations were merely put on; our patients

usually went wild before the drug could have had time to take effect.

However, tetrachloride has a mildly intoxicating reaction, especially

if it is not administered with some technical care. But these

demonstrations were mostly psychological--the native craving for a big

joy party. The British have been more than wise in keeping alcohol away

from these people.

After the first two years of wholesale treatments we had to report

seven deaths. Postmortems under the observation of able physicians

revealed the causes. These seven were all East Indians. One of them, it

turned out, hadn’t taken tetrachloride at all; it had been chenopodium.

One lad who died had a congenital malformation of the intestine, a

deformity which would have prevented his living to maturity. Another

was a woman who was addicted to the use of alcohol. The remainder were

children heavily infected with _Ascaris lumbricoides_ (roundworm).

When the deaths came, after forty thousand treatments, I took it pretty

hard. I had gambled for success with everything I had, my job, and

my professional good name. I felt as though I hadn’t a friend in the

world. Then who came unexpectedly to my support? Dr. Basil Wilson,

whom I had always thought of as a queer sort of Englishman with an

aversion to me, if any feeling at all. Stanchly Dr. Wilson did the

friendly thing; he postmortemed the bodies and developed theories as

to the cause of death so sound that they stand on record today. Among

his medical colleagues he became my champion. Worry was aging me years

in a day until Wilson’s support renewed my youth with courage. Funny

Englishman; I could have kissed his long, homely face.

Since that first setback tetrachloride has not caused one death among

the thousands of Melanesians, Polynesians, East Indians and Europeans

whom we treated.

The fatalities were limited to victims of alcoholism and roundworm.

That was interesting; more especially in Ascaris cases. Alcohol was

contra-indicated; a few drinks before or after treatment brought

complications. Lingering headaches which came to many of the

nondrinkers were easy to relieve with an after-dose of salts. But

what about the roundworm? Why did his presence in the intestine turn

tetrachloride into an active poison? I don’t think that question has

been settled yet. One theory says that CCl₄, while it does not kill

the Ascaris, irritates him to a point where he secretes lethal toxic

juices. According to Dr. Lamson and his collaborators, poisoning with

tetrachloride occurs in dogs when there is a lowered blood calcium.

This chemical poverty may have something to do with it; I make the

conjecture, without being able to substantiate it, that there is a

relation between a large number of ascarides and a lowered blood

calcium.

* * * * *

In the course of the next ten years 286,486 Pacific Islanders were

treated, under my personal observation, with carbon tetrachloride and

the later drug, tetrachlorethylene.

For the gifted Dr. Hall had come across with an improvement on

his discovery, and he asked me to give it its first tryout when I

campaigned in the wild New Hebrides in 1925. I used it extensively down

there, and optimism sounded in my conservatively worded report. Its

work was faster, its toxic effect less than that of his original find.

There is no 100 per cent in medicine, but Hall’s new polysyllabic drug

was hitting an average that was uncanny.

What a wizard he was, this pre-eminent zoologist, who was Washington’s

Number One horse doctor! Every pet dog wags his tail (or should) in

gratitude for his two deworming remedies. The dog’s pal, the human,

is Hall’s debtor--all but the fur dealers. The price of silver

fox has taken a terrific slump. Do you know why? Dr. Hall sent his

tetrachlorides to the fox farms where so many hookwormy bitches and

pups used to die that pelts had become a luxury for the wives of steel

barons. When Hall’s treatments came to Foxville the breed picked up

rapidly and its fur went to the lower department stores; so now every

stenographer can have her silver fox--and on her own salary, too. Ask

your furrier.

Dr. Hall is dead now. I know it’s trite to say that such men don’t

really die. He has put his own spark into millions of men, women and

children who would be in their graves today were it not for what he

freely gave. He was an untold benefit to the human race. Most of the

human race, of course, have never heard of him.

Then let’s sum up the work of tetrachloride over seventeen years since

the enterprising Victor Abel first put it on the wire. Dr. Heiser,

authority on public health, used to call hookworm the world’s most

prevalent disease; in all Earth’s population one out of three had it,

he said. Then the figures on tetrachloride (and tetrachlorethylene)

treatments went up and up; 654,896 in 1924; 3,000,000 in 1936. In 1937

I attended a League of Nations conference in Java. A group of us were

discussing hookworm treatments. I was pretty cocky about the 500,000

done in the Pacific; so I asked Dr. Chellapa of Ceylon how many they

were doing there. Last year had been a pretty bad one, he said--they

had only given 1,400,000 treatments on account of the malaria epidemic.

They usually got 2,000,000 he explained. I just said, “Very fine,

indeed,” in a manner I hope wasn’t patronizing. I never mentioned our

figures. However, in Ceylon they are using the same old Fiji formula

and dosage.

One statement may be simpler than these figures. Every year the

Rockefeller Foundation used to publish a bulletin of the number of

hookworm treatments. In 1938 hookworm was not even mentioned in the

Foundation’s report, except for data on some still undefined parasite

recently found in Egypt. The report had no general heading for

ankylostomiasis. The worm which had been the source and inspiration of

their world campaigns had dropped out of their ken.

My application of Hall’s discovery immediately heightened my prestige

all over the Pacific. I don’t claim credit. I happened to be the man

who stood at the crossroads when a wonderful sort of salvation came my

way. I would have been a fool if I hadn’t seized it and carried it

on. And what a lucky afternoon that was, early in 1922, when I read a

little article and found a brown bottle labeled CCl₄. It gave me the

courage I needed to strengthen me for a message of my own, which I knew

I must work out and make clear in the hard days that were to follow.

PART TWO

CHAPTER I

DEATH AND THE DEVIL

The relation between modern medicine and primitive witchcraft became

so important to me during my years of health campaigning in the

South Pacific that I think I should say something here to indicate

the islander’s daily reliance on sorcery’s touch with the powers

of darkness. During all my work among the remoter tribes I was not

received and respected as a university M.D., but as a novel sort of

witch doctor who had come among them with a stronger magic than the

old. Otherwise I could have made no headway at all. My assistants and I

were professional sorcerers, backed by Government; we were that, or we

were nothing.

It was some time before I got a glimmer of this native point of view,

then I began to take advantage of it. I had to. I had to let them

believe that I was a mystic with a ritual that would take away the

diseases with which sorcery had cursed them. When I gave tuberculin

injections to the wild men of Malaita they believed that I was doing

something to remove a wicked spell. In thousands and thousands of cases

which I have treated, either for cure or diagnosis, they have gone away

with the same simple faith. Good magic has been working against bad.

At first I worried about fooling all the people all the time. Then I

followed the only expedient that is practical in jungle medicine.

When we regard the native tribe as a unit we must not push the witch

doctor aside as a buffoon and a faker. Let’s give the devil-man his due

and mark the fallacy of the smug European who sits among dark races

with the idea of “giving them good laws” and “teaching them morality.”

This white man forgets that from the dawn of time the medicine man

has held a position that is both useful and important to the tribe.

Communities with no prison system must be controlled by a hand which,

to them, reaches into the Invisible. In the old days sorcery was the

prerogative of the chief, and sorcery was a hereditary and honored

profession. And even today the wizard, either a chief or a commoner,

is there to fend the people from epidemics, to cure their ills, to

curse the enemy and to shield his flock from the invasion of evil

spells--“and to sustain all those subtle influences that go to form the

social cement that marks the difference between a community and a horde

of men,” as Pitt-Rivers expressed it.

The sorcerer occupies, in his way, the same position as the Christian

priests who bless the armies and the harvests and metes out spiritual

justice to the sheep and the goats. When he tells the natives of

ancient Christian miracles, why should they value his words beyond

those of their own miracle workers?

* * * * *

I have remarked on the crude killings of the _puri-puri_ men, and their

more subtle methods of removing unwanted tribesmen by what seemed to

be the power of suggestion; the Pacific native is almost universally a

believer in ghosts and devils. Am I going too far when I say that man’s

first religion was a form of spiritualism? Life departs, but the soul

lingers, and the simple believer listens to hear the testimony of the

grave.

I had been working in Melanesia for years before I began to appreciate

how much they are governed by the powers of darkness, by the casting

of spells to kill or cure. In the days when cannibalism and war were

unchecked, tribal and personal grudges were settled in a more horrid

way. In these milder times it is enchantment upon which the clansman

depends for vengeance.

I wrote to Dr. Walter Bradford Cannon of Harvard’s Physiology

Department, in reply to a query of his:--

“Your letter brings up a very interesting question which is much in

dispute. Dr. A. Montague, Chief Medical Officer of Fiji and a resident

in the group for thirty years, did not believe in ‘voodoo death,’ that

is, death caused by fear. Personally, I believe he was wrong, as I know

of several instances.

“Dr. Phillip S. Clarke, of North Queensland, formerly practised just

north of Cairns where he had a kanaka come to his hospital and announce

that he was going to die; that he had had a spell put on him, and there

was nothing that could be done about it. Dr. Clarke had been acquainted

with this man for some time. He gave him a most thorough examination

including examination of stool and urine, and found everything normal.

The man kept on eating and smoking, but lay in bed and gradually seemed

to grow weaker. Clarke was friendly with a better-educated kanaka, a

foreman, whom he brought to the hospital ward; this man leaned over the

patient, then turned to Clarke and said, “Yes, Doctor, close up [soon]

he die.” The bewitched man died at eleven next morning, lying in bed

with a cigarette in his mouth. Clarke did a postmortem on him and found

nothing that could in any way account for the death.

“I stayed ten days at a Seventh Day Adventist mission station, Mona

Mona, a few miles above Cairns. On the outskirts was a group of

non-converts, among them Nebo, a famous witch doctor. The missionary’s

right hand man was Rob, a convert. I had been there before and knew

Rob. Now the missionary told me that Rob was ill in bed and wanted me

to see him. I found that he had no temperature, no pain, no symptoms

or signs; but he was evidently quite ill. He had told the missionary

that Nebo had ‘pointed a bone’ at him, therefore he was going to die

‘close up.’ We got Nebo in, put the fear of God in him and--more

important--told him that his supply of food would be shut off if

anything happened to Rob; so Nebo leaned down and assured Rob that it

was all a mistake, a joke, and that he had never pointed a bone at him.

The relief was almost instantaneous; that afternoon Rob was back at

work.

“The witch doctor can ‘point a bone’ from a great distance and the

bone is supposed to pierce his victim’s body. However, it is necessary

for the victim to know that he has been worked upon. Volumes have been

written upon this subject, and I can recall endless illustrations of

this magic, many of which have come under my personal observation.

“Among native medical students in the senior year I devote one

period to the subject of magic, partly because of personal interest

in the reactions I get, partly for the emphasis I try to lay on the

foolishness of sorcery. There are records of Native Practitioners

themselves having died of _draunikau_, and the medical class is always

composed about half of Fijians and the rest Polynesians with an

occasional Micronesian. The Polynesians of the present generation do

not know this magic; but to the Fijians, even to the educated ones,

_draunikau_ is a dreadful word. When it is mentioned the student’s face

becomes a mask; I catch the look of worry and fear.

“The practice is still in evidence back in the hills and remote places

where in Christian Fiji, with 93 per cent literacy, there are still

famous witch doctors. _The only Fijian I have ever known to be unafraid

of draunikau[4] is a man named Malakai, who has been working for me now

for thirteen years._ He has actually defied one of the most powerful

witch doctors in Fiji to do him any harm. Incidentally, the native

theory is that magic cannot affect the white man.”

_Ndrau-ni-kau_ is the Fijian word meaning “magic-of-leaves.” You might

call it the foundation of the old-time religion. No Melanesian believes

that he can grow ill or die from natural causes like dysentery or

influenza--look for the enemy who has hired a sorcerer to lay you low.

Even the diagnosis of the District Medical Officer will not change the

native mind. The curse is on him, therefore the cursed will die unless

some more potent witch doctor is called in to magic away the spell. The

Melanesian’s ghost-religion is dreadful. When a man dies and is planted

underground his soul loses its kindly nature; your sweet and gentle

mother or father or grandfather turns into a _tevoro_, a fiend plotting

mischief to his own. And the _tevoro_ becomes a principal actor in the

long ritual which brings a plague on your house.

The professional making of a _draunikau_ is as complicated a process

as that used by the demonologists of medieval Europe. As in the cruder

magic of the _puri-puri_ men, the practitioner obtains a bit of

clothing or hair or feces from his victim’s person. These things, mixed

with leaves, are shut up in a bamboo joint--or more modernly, in a

bottle. The mage who follows this craft is merely employed by the hater

to work evil on the hated.

Although the approved methods might be roughly classified as the Seven

Ways of Cursing, one general practice is for the performer to take

his bottle of _draunikau_ to some chosen graveyard where the _tevoro_

lies underground. The curse called _tava vatu_ is said to be the most

difficult to beat. Among the graves grows a special plant called _uthi_

whose leaves the magician roasts on hot stones, and calls out that this

is the _draunikau_ by which So-and-so must die; out of the smoking

leaves the voice of the victim cries aloud. Then the _draunikau_ is

buried and the victim will die in about four days, unless the curse is

prayed off by a rival expert, who sprinkles his own special brew on

the hot stones and repeats, “This is the _sorosorovi_ by which the man

shall live.” The _sorosorovi_, wrapped in leaves, is taken to the sick

man’s house and displayed so prominently that the _tevoro_ will mistake

it for the _draunikau_ and float into it. So now he’s caught, and the

benevolent witch doctor throws the package into water. The devil is

foiled, and becomes so angry that he will enter the body of the witch

doctor who first summoned him, and this man will die in four days.

_Kena balavu_ is a slower torment; every time you heat the _draunikau_

the object of hatred becomes ill; when it cools he becomes better. The

patient’s sickness is determined by the mixture put in the bottle.

If it is a hair from his head, then he will have head-sickness, if

parings from his toenails, then foot-sickness, and so on. A rival

doctor may lift the spell by finding the bamboo where the hell’s broth

is buried; he will heat the bamboo and rinse it in salt water, then

dose and massage the sufferer with magic leaves. The sorcerer who comes

to cure is called the “antagonist.” Before the antagonist digs up the

_draunikau_ he must pour kava for four nights over the spot where it is

buried. But if the patient dies, then the witch doctor who cursed him

must save his own life by stealing to the victim’s body and jabbing it

with some sharp instrument, or, after the man is buried, he must pierce

the grave with a spear. Otherwise the magician will die in four nights.

And if friends wrap a breadfruit in mummy-apple leaves and put it under

the corpse’s arm, the evil wizard will die of heart disease.

_Kena leka_ is another hot-stone _draunikau_, very swift because the

death ritual has been said by moonlight. The _tevoro_ floats from the

grave to some large tree by a lake or river. _Sova yanggona_ is among

the most popular of the curses. On the grave of one of the victim’s

ancestors a libation of kava is poured, with supplications for death.

_Tei nia_, the coconut curse, is said to have no antagonism. The

operator waters sacred ground with kava, then plants a coconut. When it

sprouts he transplants it--and his man is dead.

_Ndrimi_ is a Solomon Island importation. Dip your finger in the

magic-of-leaves and touch the hated one. The more potent _ndrimi_

doctors can bring sickness by pointing a finger. This power gives

Solomon Islanders a prestige in Fiji. If a black boy from Bougainville

wants a pretty local girl he merely says _ndrimi_--and gets her.

The classic forms have often inter-pollenized, and Christianity

and water-front trading have added comedy. There are a number of

specialists who mix whisky and the Bible with their efforts to kill

or cure. Hard liquor is forbidden the natives, so a full bottle adds

charm to necromancy. One of our native medical practitioners witnessed

the work of an up-to-date witch doctor, called in to antagonize a

_draunikau_. He prescribed a tablespoonful of whisky and a verse from

the New Testament, then began taking his own medicine, in liquid form.

As our N.M.P. reported it, “He seemed quite drunk.”

This modern technique, plus the dreadful _sova yanggona_, had to do

with a recent _cause célèbre_, which I am leading up to. Here the

magicians used the lantern-and-mirror technique. They went by night to

an ancestral cemetery where one man held a lantern, another a mirror

and the third poured kava with the death-prayer. Pleased with his

drink, the _tevoro_ awoke.... Look in the mirror and see his cruel

face! See, he is shaking the grave-dust from his body! Now ask him to

follow you!

* * * * *

What I have heard has come to me after much curious prying. I had been

down there nearly twenty years before I could dig any of it out. It is

not general knowledge among the whites. The missionaries should have

known, but too many of them never turn to see what’s going on behind

their backs. Superior natives, especially Fijians, have furnished

the most valuable data. Benuve Vakatawa, N.M.P., whose work had been

among his people, became quite an authority. Once I asked him how the

native reconciled the two religions, the old gods and the new God. Did

they not call upon Jehovah and Jesus to protect them from the evil

old Fijian divinities? He shook his head. I asked, “What is the true

religion in Fiji, Christianity or Magic?” He said unhesitatingly,

“Magic.” Christianity was just a cloak, held up before European eyes

to hide the worship of devils and satanic miracles. The people did

not want Europeans to interfere with ancient demonology, he said, but

Christianity had its place--it was “society,” as the European knows it

in his dances, theaters and ouija-board parties. It had an amusement

value.

* * * * *

I have told how native medical students reacted to my lectures on

magic. Vakatawa, however, thought that the old-time religion was losing

ground; that the N.M.P.’s as well as the native pastors were drifting

away from it. The pastors, for instance, had learned to keep a little

iodine and a few simple home remedies around the house and were going

to the N.M.P. for medical treatment. But many of these native Christian

teachers still saw the witch doctor first, and only got around to the

scientifically trained practitioners when the old way didn’t seem

to work. However, the Native Medical Practitioner with his better

education and better methods is getting about, and modern medicine is

slowly commencing to take its place in Fijian lives.

What Pitt-Rivers said in defense of the witch doctors is certainly

true of the influence they still exert. The old tribal habit of

killing strangers because they had “salt water in their eyes” probably

dates back to sorcerers who noticed that epidemics followed visitors.

Let’s say this for the primitive medicine man. He had his own kit

of remedies, many of them effective--probably herbs, massage and

hydrotherapeutic treatments. He knew about fractures and their care;

even today you rarely find there a deformity following a fracture, yet

in native life there are many cracked and broken bones.

The witch doctor still bolsters the old moral code. Vakatawa has seen

a witch woman tell a sick girl that the gods had cursed her for loose

living. The girl was weak with dysentery and confessed that she had

cohabited with more than twenty youngsters. The witch said, “Tell

everything or you will die.” But the poor child died with the last

sin unconfessed. Here was a recorded failure in magic in a district

where Vakatawa had his hands full; the inhabitants were going to the

witch doctor and the medical doctor at the same time. If the patient

recovered the magician was praised; if he died the physician was blamed.

* * * * *

Who is the god of gods to whom the Fijian secretly prays for harm

to his enemies? Maybe he is Dengei, most powerful of their evil

pantheon--yet who is to say, when there are so many? Several of them

appear as great sharks, making mischief, bearing ill tidings. There are

the two siren goddesses, Yalewamatagi, who lure handsome young men to

sin with them, then leave them dead in the bush. Daucina, an oversexed

man-god, is the dread of young girls who wander by night. Death often

follows his brutal ravishing.

During the gold rush on Viti Levu in 1932 many natives were afraid

to go into the mines. Wasn’t it known to all magicians that Tui

Mateinagata, the Snake-bodied One who hides in gold, was lurking in

a cave at Tavua, and that his seven heads of gold and silver would

destroy all trespassers? And the witch doctors whispered that the

veins would soon play out, for Tui Mateinagata knows how to hide his

treasure. There’s the old crab-goddess, too, whose bite is poison; but

it is to Dengei, lord of origins and of evil, that the magicians fondly

turn. He too is a great serpent, and frequents the caves of Nakauvandra

in the north. His magic made and populated Fiji. The god admired two

eggs in the nest of the kitu bird, and decided to hatch them himself;

the issue was a boy and a girl, whom he separated for five years by the

trunk of a giant tree. One day they peeped around the tree and said,

“Great Dengei has hatched us that we may people the land.” Dengei,

complimented, produced growing things for food, flowers for adornment,

fire for cooking. The first humans would have been immortal, but they

disobeyed their god and were punished with sickness and death.

Another story of origins is not so flattering to the Fijian who,

according to the tale, was born before all others. But he acted

wickedly and his skin darkened, so he received little clothing. The

people of Tonga,--Polynesians, by the way,--were not so naughty with

Dengei, who rationed out clothes to them which kept their skins much

lighter. The white man was the great beneficiary. He was born last,

behaved like a perfect gentleman, and Dengei rewarded him with so much

to wear that his complexion became the beau ideal.

The Polynesians of Tonga say that the gods held a meeting and decided

to create humanity. They baked three figures of clay. The first to come

out didn’t seem to have baked long enough; he was disagreeably white

and looked half-raw. The second was a Tongan, a beautiful olive-brown,

and the gods admired him so much that they forgot the third figure

until a voice from the oven cried, “I am burning!” Sure enough, the

poor fellow was roasted nearly black; so they sent him west and he

became a Fijian.

* * * * *

The absent treatment of sorcerers has no effect on the white man, so

natives say; but old Thakombau, inwardly infuriated by a snub, might

or might not have been the instrument that changed England’s royal

succession.

In the early ’80’s, _H.M.S. Bacchante_ brought two royal midshipmen

to Fiji. They were the Duke of Clarence, heir to the throne, and his

younger brother Prince George, who later became King George V. Ex-King

Thakombau was the nearest thing to a monarch that Fiji could produce,

and now he was a Christian. He entertained the visitors at a great kava

ceremony where the long line of _meke_ singers sat cross-legged and

clapped hands to the chanted welcome, “_Mbula, mbula mai!_” Dancers had

impersonated the animals, birds and fishes, comedians had impersonated

dogs quarreling over a bone, long lines of men had coiled across the

green in the contortions of the snake-god Dengei, or undulated in the

beautiful surf dance. There was the presentation of the _tambua_. To

the Fijian this sacred whale’s tooth is the prize of prizes; it is

gold, it is magic. If a tribesman offers a _tambua_ to you, you may

refuse the gift; if you take it you must grant any boon the giver

asks--even the murder of your best friend, the yielding up of your

favorite wife. There’s a long tale of crime and punishment connected

with the giving of the _tambua_.

This was royal ceremony. Maybe in the back of Thakombau’s sly head

there was a picture of another _meke_ over which he had presided often

in his days of power. The Dance of the Cannibals.... Massed warriors

were roaring out the notes to the boom of heavy drums.... Human meat

was about to be cooked.... High voices in a savage tenor would cry out,

“_Puaka balavu!_”... The bodies were ready for the oven.... Then, “_Sa

rawa tu!_”--“It is prepared.”

The English royal visitors had settled under the flower-pavilion and

the makers of _yanggona_ were at work. They were making kava by the old

method--chew the root and spit the juice into a great bowl. The drink

was ready. The honorable cupbearer knelt and received a portion in a

polished coconut shell, rose and bore the cup to the more important

guest. Offering it, he knelt before Britain’s heir apparent. But

Clarence, who had seen native saliva go into the bowl, was not amused,

so the story goes. He pushed the cup aside and made a wry face. Grim

silence followed. The cupbearer rose and knelt before young George,

whose tact was equal to the occasion. He took the shell and tossed

his portion off with gusto; then reached down and spun the cup across

the mat--the highest compliment. Loud clapping of hands with cries of

“_Mbula vinaka!_”

The time came for King Thakombau to make his speech. With florid

generosity he dwelt upon the greatness of England and the benefits

Victoria had conferred upon his people. Then abruptly he turned to

the Duke of Clarence and said, “You have been afraid to drink the

_yanggona_ of Fiji. A true man knows no fear. Because you are not brave

you will never become King of Veretania.” Then pointing to George, “You

are a brave young man, you are not afraid of our customs. You will be

the King, and a great one.”

The Duke of Clarence died without succeeding to the throne. George

became King of England. Yet they say that the native _draunikau_ has no

effect on a white man, and that puts a big hole in the story. From time

immemorial, on the other hand, the chief has had the right to bewitch.

Thakombau, on or off the throne, was a king; and there is some reason

to believe that he used his ancient right.

* * * * *

A recent case of witchcraft struck in high places and involved two of

Thakombau’s grandsons, Ratu Pope (pronounced _Pope-ee_) and Ratu Sukuna.

Ratu Sukuna graduated from Oxford with a degree in law. Caucasian in

feature, handsome by any standard, Sukuna offered himself to the Empire

in 1914; because his Empire refused the service of natives, he enlisted

in the Foreign Legion, gained his sergeancy and a decoration, and came

home with a well-earned wound-stripe. He was one of the few properly

educated Fijians. True, Ratu Devi, his brother, later studied medicine

in New Zealand. Devi’s annoyance was his great personal charm with

women in the wards, who wouldn’t let him alone. In Fiji he is now an

unusually successful District Medical Officer.

Ratu Sukuna holds important government positions in Fiji, where he

is in the anomalous position of one who tries to carry two races on

his shoulders. In England and France he adapted himself to foreign

languages and customs. In his heart, under the borrowed gloss of alien

culture, he is still sufficiently Melanesian to avoid the ancestral

graveyard after dusk; the educated half of him scoffs at the idea of

ghosts, yet he admits freely that when he passes the family plot in

the dark of the moon he feels an unpleasant something clawing at his

shoulders.

His cousin, Ratu Pope, was a famous character in Fiji, and was always

intimate with Sukuna, whom he admired prodigiously. By nature a

sportsman, in youth he was a great cricketer. He was schooled at the

Methodist College in Sydney, but had the accent of the English country

gentleman. His athletic figure was impressive in the short, white

_sulu_, above sturdy bare legs and feet; from the hips up he dressed in

the British tradition, sports coat for the morning, dinner jacket or

tails for ceremonial occasions--much as the well-born Highlander wears

his kilt with all the conventional fixings.

He had the charm and wit which we associate with exiled kings. When

the Duke of Windsor visited Fiji as Prince of Wales he was delighted

with Pope. Pope was, by courtesy, banished for many years to Mbau, the

enchanting island his wise ancestors had chosen for their capital;

soft winds cool it, blow away mosquitoes; above the royal _bure_ looms

a great rock, the little Gibraltar where Grandfather Thakombau was

supposed to have been hemmed in before he gave his domain to England.

Governor Sir Eyre Hutson decided to exile Pope because he had rather

innocently defaulted. As chief of his province he had been Assistant

District Commissioner, hence a tax collector. It was his free-hearted

Melanesian generosity that put him on a bad spot: When you have money,

spend it on your people and your friends. Generosity is godlike,

stinginess is for the worms. Let me tell it in Pope’s own way:--

“I had no trouble at all collecting the silly taxes. Tax gathering is

a royal prerogative. So the Government sent me up a little iron safe,

to put the money in, you understand. Well, months went by and one day

a chap from the Government came in a launch--rather a blighter, I

thought. We had a spot of whisky and a cigar and he said, ‘Ratu, the

tide’s turning and I must be pushing on. I’ve called, you know, to take

back that tax money.’ I said, ‘I’m rather afraid, old boy, that I can’t

lay my hands on it now.’ He seemed a bit miffed and said, ‘But didn’t

we send you an iron safe to put it in?’ ‘Oh, yes,’ I said, ‘it’s over

there in the corner. If you look at it you’ll see that the door’s wide

open.’”

Royal prerogative had scattered the money in several ways--but always

for the good of the people of Mbau. Ratu Pope had set up shower baths

in all the village houses, and built a reservoir to supply fresh water.

The reservoir remained dry while an offended Government interned Pope

on his ancestral isle--until he paid the bill. “It’s only a few hundred

pounds,” he complained, laughing at himself, “and as all I have is

invested in rather poor coconuts, I’ll be Methuselah, I fancy, before

I’m free again.” However, a relenting Government allowed him to come to

Suva to see the cricket matches--he’d have died without that. Also they

let him meet the tourist boats, the best possible advertisement for the

Fiji Islands.

When the late Martin Egan and his traveling partner Wallace Irwin

were his guests at Mbau, in 1927, they brought back stories that

illustrated Pope’s quick come-back. One night they were sitting by

lantern light under the breadfruit trees, smoking the long Coronas Pope

adored. He said, “It’s a bit tiresome, being cooped up here. One longs

for travel. I am very fond of the _National Geographic Magazine_.”

He called for copies, turned to a back page. “I think I prefer your

clever advertisements. Look at this, for instance”--showing the New

York Life Insurance Company’s stock advertisement, the one with the

modest skyscraper. “My word, it seems to go up twenty-five or thirty

stories!” Martin Egan told him that Al Smith and his pals were building

a skyscraper that would be about a hundred stories high. Pope objected,

“But doesn’t one get blood pressure, going so high in a lift?” Egan

said that everybody in New York had high blood pressure so what was the

difference?

Ratu Pope looked at him gravely. “That fellow Frederick O’Brien who

wrote the White Shadows twaddle visited me last year. When he left I

wondered if all Americans were such damned liars.”

He showed his guests Thakombau’s cannibal temple, the one he preserved

for sentiment’s sake. The shaggy thing, on a base of high stone

terraces, is immensely out of scale with the low village houses. Pope

took an honest pride in the deeds of his grandfather, much as Grant’s

descendants might in the surrender at Appomattox. He pointed out a

hole in the ground, right in front of the temple, and said, “The stone

of sacrifice used to stand here. It was built rather like a very wide

gravestone, with a depression in the top for the--er--victim’s head.

I gave it to our local church to use as a baptismal font. Would you

like to hear the ceremony of a cannibal execution? Grandfather sat on

the second tier and the people formed a semicircle below. Around the

stone the priests drew lots as to whether the poor fellow was to be

buried or--er--eaten. The latter usually won, I’m afraid. It was purely

economic, you see. Well, four powerful executioners came along carrying

the victim lashed to a plank. They held him in the correct position,

and when Grandfather gave the word they would bash the fellow’s head

smartly against the stone. They were so very skillful that I doubt if

the poor chap even felt it.”

That was Ratu Pope, playboy king who spoke up-to-date King’s English,

liked American magazines, excelled at cricket, brought European ideas

to a cannibal capital, and then....

Late in 1936 he was taken to the hospital in Suva, far gone with

diabetes and cirrhosis of the liver. He should have had faith in the

British doctors; he knew them all, and respected their work. As he

weakened he called for his wife, Andi Torika, and whispered, “I have

been bewitched. They have put a _draunikau_ on me.” His wife nodded.

But who was working the black magic? Pope whispered, “My cousin Sukuna.”

The accusation, by way of native grapevine telegraph, soon reached

the ears of Ratu Sukuna, who was horrified. Why in the world would he

want to put a _draunikau_ on good old Pope? What silly nonsense! They

had been pals ever since they were knee-high. Sukuna went straight to

Ratu Pope’s bedside. A gifted speaker with a feeling for the niceties

of language, he sat beside the dying man and strove with him, gently.

At last Pope nodded and asked forgiveness. No, Sukuna could not have

brought about the evil spell. But somebody had paid a witch doctor for

this _draunikau_. Yes, agreed Sukuna, and went sadly away from the man

who had been cursed--by somebody.

A short time afterward Sukuna was in his schooner, sailing from Viti

Levu to Lakeba. Suddenly he called out, “Turn back!” For in the water,

skimming along his course, he had seen the family totem shark. That

could mean only one thing--death of a near relative. When he returned

to Suva, his cousin Ratu Pope was dead.

There followed a battle of magic and countermagic, ghost against ghost,

throughout Thakombau’s old empire. The persons concerned in it were

too noble to be ignored. All this, mind you, happened only about three

years ago. It began with Ratu Pope’s dying whisper into the ear of his

faithful wife, Andi Torika. She belonged to the same _matangali_ as

Ratu Wailala, powerful sub-chief in Taveuni. To Wailala the widow sent

a present of ten _tambuas_, a dangerous gift, for under the eyes of the

gods the recipient must grant a favor. Ratu Lala, Lord of Taveuni, was

on Andi’s bad books; he stood in royal succession; if he lived his son

might sit on Pope’s shadow-throne.

This was politics, in a conflict between two branches of an old ruling

family. Seventy-five years ago it would have meant war. Today it was

_draunikau_. Ratu Wailala took Andi’s _tambuas_, which had come with

a request to put a _draunikau_ on Ratu Lala, accused of Pope’s death

by magic. Wailala was also jealous of Lala’s title, and went about the

curse in classic style. He presented a _tambua_ to another chief, with

the request that a _draunikau_ be arranged for Lala. This chief took

the _tambua_ to Mosese, a very able witch doctor.

That was in mid-April, 1938. In the dark of night Mosese and Kalepi,

his assistant, with a local chief, stole over to the grave of Ratu

Lala’s grandfather and carried with them the proper leaves and kava

root for the _Sova Yanggona_ (the Pouring Kava) ritual. They crouched

at the foot of the mound where the dead man’s legs would be pointing.

Mosese, seated between his two associates, lifted the bowl to his

lap, then six times raised it to his head. Kava was made according to

ceremony. Now it was ready. The performers clapped three times; Kalepi

filled a drinking bowl and presented it to the dead chief with the

request that Ratu Lala’s life be taken away. Six times the libation was

poured on the head of the grave to fill the mouth of a thirsty _tevoro_.

The tattler was a woman who had started out before the break of day

to fish for prawns. She lost her way, shuddered by the cemetery,

then paused in a paralysis of fear. There were voices by the grave

of Nagolea, there was the scent of _uthi_, the graveyard flower. She

peered, she saw three crouching figures making _draunikau_. For days

she was too frightened to tell.

Then, on April 15, 1938, Ratu Lala went to Suva and grew dizzy as he

walked. He knew why, and sent for the powerful sorcerer Ngio from

Ngau, whom he employed to combat the evil magic. Ngio told him that

his sickness started from Taveuni, and there the _draunikau_ would be

found. That night Ratu Lala had a dreadful dream. A chief who had been

dead twelve years came in and poked him with his walking stick, saying,

“Who is this man sleeping in my house?” Lala returned to his home in

Taveuni, and when another sick spell came on he heard gossip about the

three men who had made _draunikau_. He sent for the sorcerers, ignored

their pleas of innocence and had them beaten with ropes. They went to

the hospital, still denying their share in black magic. Wailala also

feigned innocence, but a constable included him with the others.

Ratu Lala’s witch doctor, the gifted sorcerer from Ngau, assembled his

colleagues, hoping that their combined magic would offset the dreadful

_Sova Yanggona_. One night Lala dreamed that he saw the gods in a

meeting; a short man knelt at Lala’s doorway, holding up a _tambua_

with the request for death. A voice wailed, “Ratu Wailala’s _tambua_

cannot be returned with mercy on Lala’s life!”

It was on September 17, to be exact, when I was with Dr. Strode,

inspecting the hospital at Suva. We found Ratu Lala in bed with an

abscess of the neck, and his morale completely shattered. He had told

the world that he expected to die of a _draunikau_.

On Wednesday, September 21, Dr. Strode and I went to a luncheon at

Government House. And what did we see? Sitting calmly beside Mr.

Monckton, Secretary of Native Affairs, was Ratu Lala. Only four days

had passed since he had about given up the ghost, and now he was in

high spirits, telling the Governor fine stories and eating with gusto.

His explanation was straightforward. Oh, that witch doctor, Ngio

from Ngau, had an antagonism that was too strong for black magic to

withstand. He had worked from the Bible, and that was big medicine;

he would open the Good Book at random and interpret past, present and

future; but invariably he would return to the Gospel according to Saint

Matthew, and from that he could foil any ghost or devil that ever flew

over Fiji.

Ngio the gospel-wizard came to Suva later and boasted of his holy magic

to all and sundry.

* * * * *

Exhibitions of fire walking, given by a priestly cult from the island

of Mbengga, are too well known now to permit much discussion. Before

these shows became popular features for tourist ships and visiting

royalty I saw them dozens of times on their native ground. There have

been any number of scientific treatises written to account for the

phenomenon of bare Fijian feet which remain unscorched after contact

with burning stones. As a physician I have studied the condition of the

fire walkers before and after the ordeal, and I have always gone away

with the feeling that I have seen a miracle. The old Mbengga myth which

says that Ra Duna the Eel taught the hero Koma how to do the trick

seems about as good an explanation as any I have heard.

Among the dark islanders magic things are usually grim, although there

is a faded myth about the _neli_ people, a race of elves with long

golden hair. They dance by moonlight, and if one of the golden hairs

touches a peeping mortal he forgets how to find his way home. They say

that native boys and girls who stayed out late usually blamed it on the

_neli_. But belief in the little folk is passing.

The giving of curses is a serious everyday affair. In groups less

advanced than Fiji the witch doctor commits simple murder. I have

mentioned the Poisoner’s College at Mou. And there is the celebrated

case of Captain Bell, Government tax collector, who went out in the

Solomons on his unpopular errand and was speared by savages, sent to

carry out a practical _draunikau_.

Inspector Bill Tully was down in the primitive New Hebrides. One

morning his breakfast had been laid on a veranda; below many natives

were gathered for a lecture. Tully sat down to breakfast when a witch

doctor, in full paint, stepped up and flourished a bamboo wand, telling

the world he held the magic that would kill. “Go ahead,” challenged

Tully, so the magician tapped his wand on a plate. A little powder

sifted out. Scornfully the young inspector blew it away and ordered his

boy to bring bacon and eggs.

Bill finished his breakfast in full view of a very watchful audience.

So far so good. But he had scarcely bolted the last scrap when he felt

a griping in his stomach; cold sweat broke out, and he knew that he had

turned pale green. He must have been a sickening sight, for the gawping

natives screamed and scampered to the woods. It took Bill some minutes

to recover equilibrium. Then he remembered. He had taken a rather large

dose of calomel, and the darned stuff had begun to operate shortly

after the wizard tapped his plate.

Polynesian magic is not so black, perhaps, as that you’ll find all

over Melanesia; but it is always there, hiding behind Christianity

or even higher education. In the Cook Islands a father cursed his

pretty daughter. He had elephantiasis, and she had jeered him for his

“big-leg.” “Very well,” he said, “and may your especially beautiful

legs, which have caused too much trouble already, swell up and become

big as mine.” Accordingly her legs swelled, and she was disfigured.

True, she had been sleeping in her father’s house for years, and the

filarial mosquito is no respecter of persons.

The Maoris of New Zealand are superior Polynesians. When I was making

a survey there Dr. Ellison, himself half Maori, told me of a case that

had come under his direct observation. The Polynesians, he reminded me,

are practically all spiritualists, and the average Maori has forgotten

more about spiritualism than the European medium will ever know. Among

the Tohunga cult there is power to bring death by a secret wish; in the

Melanesian _draunikau_ the victim is not affected until he knows that

the curse is on him. But the Tohungas never telegraph their punches.

Dr. Ellison told me that a Mr. Haberley, half-Maori and an acquaintance

of mine, was interested in the Wellington Museum and in search of fine

Maori carvings. The quest took him to the region where Rua the Prophet

held forth. Haberley found many neglected and rotting relics, but Rua

defied him to lay hands on them. However, the collector took them to

the museum. It wasn’t long before a serious illness overtook Haberley,

who fell back on the customs of his mother’s people. He was of the

Taranaki Maoris, so it was all in good form when he called in another

Tohunga necromancer from Taranaki. Out of Mr. Haberley’s suavely

educated lips came the command, “Save me if you can, and if you can’t,

finish off Rua.” Very promptly the Tohunga put the bee on Rua the

Prophet, who died during my survey of New Zealand. Haberley also died.

CHAPTER II

GILBERT AND SULLIVAN, 1924

My share in the application of carbon tetrachloride had been a decided

step forward for me, and I had spent two very busy years in Fiji,

campaigning both for cure and prevention. But what most engaged my

heart and mind was the plan for an improved medical school for natives.

Through thick and thin I preached my crusade and hung to the idea like

a terrier. In this plan I saw the only salvation for the island peoples.

In February, 1924, when I set out for a brief survey of the Gilbert and

Ellice Islands, the idea was still foremost in my thoughts. That was

the first time I took Malakai along, just to show them.

The G and E Group, as it is conveniently called, is satirized by young

cadets over the Fiji Club bar as “Gilbert and Sullivan.” It has a

certain comic appeal. Dr. Walter E. Traprock, America’s glamour boy

among nature fakers, chose these dots on the sea for his _Cruise of

the Kawa_, where the national bird of the Filbert Islands was supposed

to lay square eggs and cackle “Ouch!” Robert Louis Stevenson was far

more serious, describing scenes of blood and beauty along the threading

atolls.

Samoans, who once stigmatized as ghosts and slaves all folk who lived

beyond them, called their islands “The World’s Navel.” In this they

were somewhat off their bearings, for their Samoa is a bit too far

southeast to center the earth. The Gilbert and Ellice group is strung

in faint tattoo marks along the very middle of Earth’s belly. In all

it covers 1,000 miles of sea, with islands so sparsely scattered that

the easternmost is some 600 miles from the westernmost. A white man’s

government has combined these two archipelagoes, but as a matter

of geography they lie about 100 miles apart. The Gilbertese are a

Micronesian stock, the Ellice folk are typically Polynesian and have a

physique, a language and a social organization entirely different from

the Gilbertese.

The Gilberts, which have been the meeting place of the races, have

become the meeting place of the anthropologists. Originally, these men

agree, the inhabitants were a black, smallish, flat-nosed mouse-eared

people, called “the Spider Folk” because their divinities appeared in

the form of spiders--also of turtles. The Spider Folk were supposed

to be dreadful magicians, therefore they were avoided. Then came the

invaders, great of stature, red of skin (that is, light brown), who

fought them like devils, but still feared the Spider Magic. Songs

survive, telling of the conquerors’ prowess as sailors; in them they

are extolled as Children of the Sea, Fierce Fish of the West.

* * * * *

The mystery of Polynesian or other Pacific migrations is a puzzle

that may never be solved. The Gilberts formed a bottle neck through

which many waves of migration must have come from the ancestral home,

Hawaiki--from which are derived the modern names Hawaii and Savaii.

Some pressure, some social convulsion on the continent must have driven

them off of the southeast tip of Asia and sent them out in migratory

waves--no turning back, a fierce starving horde in a quest for land and

a home in the Pacific. Another stream undoubtedly crossed the Behring

Sea and traveled southward along the coast; Mexican legends told of

their coming from the north. Probably they passed as far as to South

America. Our red Indian race must be the mixture resulting from these

invasions. They must have reached the continent across the Pacific, or

some must have returned from the west coast of the Americas, to have

brought the sweet potato to the Pacific. In this time we can appreciate

the thrill of horror that went over the peaceful Pacific islands,

waking to see strange fleets of enormous canoes pouring forth their

hordes of death-driven warriors.

In the sterile Gilberts the invaders found little that they

wanted--except women. They lingered for a generation or so, then

conquered the Ellices, captured Rotumah, fought their way into Savaii

and Upolu in Samoa.

Tradition and genealogy tell the story plainly. About twenty-four to

twenty-eight generations ago a return invasion rolled back from Samoa,

moving northward. It overwhelmed the Ellices, but was repulsed by the

Gilbertese; except that small Nui in the Ellices still retains much of

the Gilbertese language and customs.

In total area the Gilberts won’t measure much more than 170 square

miles. They hardly seem worth fighting over, these bare coral rocks

with an occasional drift of soil where coco palms can just hang on.

The people must subsist largely on fish and coconut products; in

addition, they have the stringy, unsatisfactory fruit of the pandanus

and _babai_. The latter is a bastard taro, eaten in other groups only

when famine drives the people to it. Yet it takes a mighty struggle for

the Gilbertese to raise even these poor things. Over 28,000 population,

crowded together on a little land, are never more than a jump away from

starvation. Rainfall is sparse, and on the islands nearest the Equator

droughts may last for two or three years; at times even the coconut

palms have died, and the people have been reduced to sucking the few

drops of moisture from fish-eyes. Even after large churches have been

built, with a competent watershed from the roofs, many have died of

thirst, because they were afraid to drink the water from holy places.

Yet what did I find in the Gilberts? Very healthy specimens,

strapping copper-colored fellows with hair from straight to curly;

big-shouldered, but not particularly tall. They had the look of men

who grow what they eat, and work for it. Their average health was in

contrast to that of the naturally handsome, pale-skinned Polynesians

in the Ellices to the southeast. To these food came more easily from a

richer soil. And must I say it again? There were fewer missions in the

Gilberts, whereas the Ellice Islanders were all nominally Christian--as

witness once more the greasy Mother Hubbards, layer on layer, pressing

oil and germs into their beautiful bodies. Dirt and laziness seemed

to have followed the Cross into charming lagoons which once inspired

Stevenson’s prose poems.

* * * * *

We were traveling on the High Commission yacht _Pioneer_, where Printer

Johann Sebastian Bach’s son Bill shared the cabin de luxe with me;

we had a bathroom of our own, but when the portholes leaked in one

direction the toilet leaked in another. I envied Malakai, who bunked on

deck. It was one of the morning’s ceremonies for Malakai to come down

and see to it that young Bach got his bath. Bill was of the age when

all boys are anti-soap, and it was worth getting up to see a cannibal’s

scientific grandson enforcing hygiene on a great composer’s descendant;

Bill’s treble, “Ow, ow!” against Malakai’s grim bass, “You aren’t

finished till you wash the other ear!”

That got us to Rotumah, an island which for some mystic reason is

considered a part of Fiji, but lies nearer the Ellice group. Because

public health is concerned with sociology, politics, geography, history

and anthropology as well as worms and germs, let me use Rotumah as an

example of what lavish Nature can do to a people.

The Rotumans were among the world’s laziest, their island among the

world’s richest. Crops grew while you slept; therefore the natives

slept or went to a party. This was coconut wealth, prodigal and wasted.

Up in the volcanic mountains it took a little work to get at the palms,

so they were never gotten at. Nuts ripened, dropped, rotted or fed the

island’s expensive pigs. Ask an owner about his wealth in coconuts and

he’d guess he had plenty.

They were a delightfully mixed race. Their ancestors had been generous

to ships that stopped there to “refresh” their crews. In the unwritten

history of Oceania the Tongafiti conquerors used Rotumah as one of the

steppingstones that let them spread the Polynesian race over the South

Pacific. As I found Rotumah, there was little evidence of that fierce

and noble background.

To get things done they hired Fijian labor at eight or ten shillings

a day. If a Rotuman ran into debt he merely sent his hirelings out to

gather a few more nuts--or that was what they were doing when I got

there. Some 900 acres of land produced 2,000 tons of copra annually.

Mild efficiency could have boosted the output to 6,000 tons. But why be

efficient?

Did you want to buy a pig? Well, he would cost you about fourteen

pounds. What a price for a pig! Yes, sir, but remember that he’s been

fed on very expensive copra, and has already eaten twice his value. But

why not fatten him on something else? That would be a lot of trouble,

sir, and our pigs are used to copra. There’s plenty of copra. And

maybe, sir, we couldn’t afford to sell you a pig anyhow. We’re giving

another feast tomorrow, and what’s a feast without a pig?

In the Rotuman’s Melano-Poly-Malay-European veins there was a dash of

Negro, and right royal. In the blackbirding days an Afro-American,

probably a slave himself, was cast ashore and proceeded to make himself

king. He seemed a kindly monarch, and didn’t have the tragic finish

of the other Emperor Jones. He taught the people how to work,--they

say,--but he’s been a long time dead.

When I got there they were all Christians; maybe that was because it

was so easy to find a church. The Catholic church had a £600 belfry

and a splendid mosaic altar. Things like that were prosperity’s

blow-off, and when the Rotumans didn’t know what else to do with

their surplus they built another fine concrete monument. There were

monuments everywhere, mortuary, honorary, sumptuary. It was like our

wealth-parade in the Coolidge Administration. Rotuman pig-feasts were

costly milestones in every life. It cost £100 worth of celebration for

a baby to be born, £200 for a man to die, £800 for him to be properly

married.

And on the doctor’s side of this generous picture I found Rotumah

heavily laden with hookworm, yaws, tuberculosis and leprosy. Over 90

per cent of the inhabitants were covered with scabies. A sticky, hot,

fly-and-mosquito-ridden island, with hardly a breeze to break the dead

monotony of climate.... A stone wall, built along the shore road, kept

in the pigs and kept out whatever breeze might blow. That didn’t matter

much in Rotumah, where the people seemed too lazy to draw a deep breath.

Most of the elderly men, by the way, had elephantiasis.

* * * * *

Because elephantiasis was something I had to meet as I went along,

it may be apropos to explain what I have mentioned before: that it

is not a disease, but the manifestation of a disease. The disease is

filariasis, caused by the filarial worm, a long, threadlike creature

that lives in the lymphatic glands. The eggs pass into the lymphatic

and blood streams and hatch into microfilariae. The low power of a

microscope will show them in a drop of blood, but their sex cannot be

distinguished. They take on sexual form in the body of the mosquito

which has drawn up infected blood, and the mosquito injects them into

the veins of the next victim.

Now definitely male and female, they make their way into the lymph

glands, grow and breed by millions. The female lays her fertile eggs,

which complete the cycle by becoming microfilariae. Because there is

much destruction of microfilariae in the mosquito’s body, and because

there is much wastage of the parasites in the reinfection of a human,

the disease is rather slow to develop. Mosquitoes may bite millions of

times before enough male and female worms accumulate to cause symptoms.

It usually takes years of residence in a mosquito-infected native

community before these ideal conditions meet.

With the proper number of parasites comes filarial fever, which

is accompanied by inflammation and abscesses in the lymphatic and

subcutaneous tissues. The inflammation subsides, but some of the

swelling remains in dependent members of the body, arms, legs, breasts,

vulva and scrotum. These swellings may be caused by dead filaria worms,

which block the glands whose function it is to drain a dependent area;

thus the dead worms might impede the return flow of lymph and cause an

overgrowth of skin and subcutaneous tissue, slowly piling up to a huge

size. The skin grows rough like an elephant’s hide, and the monstrous

limbs add to the elephantine look.

Filarial fever seems to have little effect on longevity, but causes

a lassitude which results in a great labor loss. And when it becomes

elephantoid it impedes any form of activity.

An interesting phenomenon is connected with these minute organisms.

The activity of the microfilariae which the mosquito puts into the

blood stream is similar, in one way, to the habits of the mosquito that

has carried them. That is to say, if the mosquito is a night-biter,

the microfilariae are active during the night only. During the day

they seem to rest quiescent, deep in the recesses of the body. But

if they have been introduced by a day-biting mosquito their behavior

is just the reverse--they are day-active. In the Pacific the disease

is transmitted by the _Culex fatigans_ and by members of the _Aedes_

family. The Pacific branch of the _Aedes_ clan is a daytime feeder

while the _Culex fatigans_ is a night worker. So afflicted island

people suffer from an infection that does twenty-four-hour duty.

In the Ellice group so many elderly husbands were disabled by

elephantiasis of the scrotum that they often asked for surgical

operations in order to restore domestic harmony; for it was “the

fashion” for old men to marry young wives. At Funafuti Dr. Mac Finney

told me that one swollen applicant, who had come quite a distance,

gave his age as ninety. (They date their ages from the coming of the

missionary.) The patient looked a trifle passé, but Mac Finney did a

clean job, and hoped he would recover.

On a return voyage Mac Finney saw the old boy coming back on the boat

to Funafuti. The ancient confessed that he was on his way to jail. Why?

Well, when he got off the boat for home, he felt so vigorous that he

had attacked the first woman he saw.

The twin groups, Gilberts and Ellices, were a special problem in the

spread of this disease. The dark-skinned Gilbertese, living a hundred

miles northwest of the light-skinned Ellice Islanders, seem to have

been free of filariasis until modern civilization arrived, although

the Ellices had been infected for a long time. The writer found this

disease moving slowly northward in the Gilbert group. Primitive

savagery and that thin strip of water had long kept the Gilberts in a

state of quarantine. Then barriers were down, and filariasis reached

the Gilberts. The British administration made several attempts to

re-establish quarantine, but conditions made it difficult, and they

probably knew that it was a bit too late; the mischief had already been

done. Only recently has the machinery of infection been understood. In

several groups British medical authorities have made valiant efforts

to check the blight. Their problem has been made more difficult by the

fact that the principal carrier is the “wild mosquito,” a creature that

lives and breeds in the bush. The domestic mosquito is easier to run

down.

* * * * *

In those ten weeks of inspection we covered 6,500 miles, crossed the

Equator six times and touched the globe’s four hemispheres. In both

groups the islands are so low-lying that a few miles away they are

invisible; first you see a plumage of palms, then the border of white

sand; then the glory of lagoons, some of them looking no bigger than

your hand, others stretching a quarter of a mile, brushing their faint

pastel colors against the feathering reef that divides them from the

Pacific’s royal blue. I love lagoons.

Other white men have loved them too. At Funafuti, for example, one of

the boys who helped us ashore had a tinge of red in his hair and said

his name was O’Brien. The headman of the town and the native magistrate

were also O’Briens. O’Briens flocked from every corner until I hoped

to hear a trace of the brogue. But the original O’Brien, who must have

been a broth of a boy, had long since passed away and left good deeds

behind him. In the wicked blackbirding days he had promptly deserted

his ship and taken up with an island girl. He saved the people with the

advice that they had better stick by him, as his vessel had come to

take them into slavery. Blessings on his red head. To keep his Irish

memory green, fifty-four O’Briens flourished in Funafuti, out of 250

inhabitants.

Except for Funafuti all the Ellice Islands had closed lagoons, and to

come ashore one must run the surf in native canoes, which usually

meant a ducking, and always a wet bottom. I have never seen so many

churches to the square mile, for the Ellices are highly Christianized,

as witness the layer upon layer of dragging Mother Hubbards that

cover the women. On small Vaitupu I counted three expensive concrete

churches, and found that the London Missionary Society’s Samoan teacher

hadn’t liked the acoustics of the first two, so he had had a third

built to suit his voice. In one year, the Ellice Islands had sent

$6,000 to _foreign_ missions! And $60,000 had been devoted to the piety

of 3,000 inhabitants. Churches were objects of superstitious awe. It

would be sacrilege, they said, to drink rain water from church roofs,

and something awful would happen if they did; their livers might swell

up and burst, for instance.

Up in the Gilberts, on the other hand, they were only a few years

removed from the absolute savagery of an era when one island waged

fierce war against another. As it was, about half of them were

nominally Christianized. The Sunday parade to church was a sight worth

while. The native ladies wore short fiber skirts and nothing else,

except dinky little English hats perked on top of their bushy heads.

For hadn’t St. Paul said distinctly that no bareheaded woman should

enter the House of God?

At Tabatauea on the Gilberts I made a postmortem examination of a

dead king. Since the king had been dead a thousand years, I was not

surprised that the results were spectacular.

I was led to a palm-thatched shrine where the bones of Korave, heroic

ancestor of the island’s chiefs, were held in veneration; legend tells

of his gigantic size and heroic strength when he led the people of

Beru to the invasion. Before I could be admitted District Commissioner

Anderson had to get the consent of Korave’s entire family connection.

We came in a canoe, waded through mud, and as very wet spectators got

at last to the assembly hall, the _muniapa_.

The whole village had turned out. The Gilbertese converse in shouts,

and the palaver around us sounded like a football game until Mr.

Anderson silenced them to explain how important this occasion was. I

sat there, looking as majestic as a large fat man can after a dousing

in sea water and a sweaty walk. Then the big question. The exalted

visitor wished to see great Korave’s bones. Immediately the people of

Tabatauea went into noisy conference. Abruptly the huddle parted. A

headman came forward and said yes, we could see the bones.

Hung to the ridgepole was a large basket decorated with white shells.

Two men carefully washed their hands and lowered the great chief’s

remains. After one glance at the bones, which they had spread on a mat,

I had a keen desire to examine them for myself. But could I? There was

a terrible hubbub, every branch of the Korave family yelling at each

other. Then the headman said “all right” with variations.

There was a remarkably fine skull, indicating that somebody had had a

generous brain pan with plenty of room above the eyebrows. At first I

found two thigh bones and two tibias, just as any hero should have.

When I got around to the two fibulas, the small leg-bones, I found

them smaller than their mates, and was tactless enough to ask if

their ancestor didn’t walk with a limp. Indignant denials. I was more

impressed still when I picked up another fibula and tibia--golly, the

man must have been three-legged! Also three radii and extra pelvic

bones turned up. It looked as if the late king had three of everything

to the common man’s two. There was a collection of small ribs that

might have fitted a great many people, but if they had been assembled

on Korave’s skeleton they would have presented a new problem in anatomy.

I disturbed Tabatauea’s faith as gently as I could by asking if they

were _sure_ these bones all came from the same man. They were very

positively certain. Hadn’t the relics been carefully passed down

through the generations? And this simple faith may cast light on some

of the holy relics worshiped in our Christian churches.

Anderson’s flowery introduction had won much respect for my opinion,

it appeared, for they asked what I could tell them about their mighty

ancestor. Already they had allowed me to sit, just for a moment, on

the enchanted stone where Korave used to sit; it was supposed to have

a magic quality of coolness. Sure enough, it was quite cool. So I

must tell them of their ancestor. The safe bet was to fall back on

generalities. I told them that he was a very big man indeed, much

bigger than one of his very large descendants whom I saw in the

audience. Quite truthfully I praised the size of great Korave’s head;

no commonplace man could have worn a skull like that. But my praise

of the bones _in toto_ made the hit of the day. Not only was Korave

remarkable in other things, I said, but he had more bones than any man

I had ever seen. After Anderson translated this he told me that they

were very grateful for the information, which would be treasured among

their legends of the hero.

* * * * *

On Kuria it was my professional duty to confer with one of Robert

Louis Stevenson’s least appreciated characters, District Commissioner

Murdock, who had emerged from the days of piracy. Stevenson had

actively disliked Murdock; somewhere in his tales of Apamama and

King Timbinoka, the novelist had referred to Murdock as “a rat-faced

Scotchman with a secretive disposition,” and “Timbinoka’s cook.” The

feud stemmed on Murdock’s refusal to tell of a thousand and one nights

he had been concerned in. He had plentiful reason to keep his mouth

shut, for at the time the other Scot was snooping for adventure stories

Murdock was a sort of business manager to the savage king who conquered

Kuria and terrorized all surrounding islands. Murdock had also acted

as contact man between the terrible Timbinoka and the terrible Bully

Hayes, pirate and blackbirder extraordinary.

All the pirate I saw in Murdock was his flaring white mustache; the

mouth below it stayed pretty tight, and he only grunted, until I won

him over with a fancy new spinner for his fishing. Then he opened up

and talked about himself.

As a consumptive lad of nineteen he had come there on a sailing ship

and won Timbinoka’s heart by cooking him a good meal of vittles,

and was hired on the spot. From frying fish he had graduated into

diplomacy, mostly with Bully Hayes and his slaving deals with

Timbinoka. Hayes, who probably hailed from San Francisco, would clean

out whole islands and carry away the inhabitants to die in the fields

and mines of Australia, Fiji, South America. As a side line, he would

swoop down on the pearl fisheries, gathering the pearls and the girls.

Out at sea he would repaint his ship with a new set of colors, to fool

pursuing naval vessels. He often baited his trap with pretty girls; the

ladies of Aitutaki were especially tempting, so he would take on a load

of them and keep them in full view as he loitered by various islands.

Then the native men, poor fools, would swim out to be captured and

chained.

On one occasion, at least, Murdock went as the King’s agent to an

island where Bully Hayes had carried a shipload of Timbinoka’s warriors

to punish some of His Majesty’s disobedient subjects. When Bully took

captives he had the privilege of buying them from Timbinoka. The

monarch prospered on this industry, and was a tyrant of the old school.

Once he sent Murdock with 300 slaves for coffee plantations in Mexico

and Guatemala.

The King’s harem was extensive, and uninvited males were promptly

slain. A splendid rifle shot, Timbinoka kept in practice by pinking

disobedient wives, usually on the run. He owned every blade of grass,

chased competitors out of his trading stores, forbade missionaries.

He could be hospitable, but when he said, “Get out!” his guest said

good-by. He bought liquor, boats and gadgets wholesale. His grand

passion was sewing machines; he had a royal collection in various

stages of decay; and a trader with music boxes to sell received a royal

welcome. European clothes charmed him, and he couldn’t wait for the

latest styles to come by boat. So he sent two natives to Auckland to

learn tailoring. Alas for Timbinoka’s vanity! He got so very fat so

very soon that the broadest coats and trousers split on him. He spent

his declining years in an ornamental Mother Hubbard. Murdock showed me

a photograph of him wearing one; so fat he couldn’t walk, he was being

carried by eight men.

Once he sent Murdock to investigate a wreck on Apamama. The crew was

found in a sorry plight; natives had given them food and shelter--but

they had run out of liquor. So Murdock got a large demijohn and filled

it with rum from one of the King’s hogsheads. He reported this to

Timbinoka, who asked, “Where you catch im dis feller rum?” Murdock

identified the hogshead and his King said, “Hum hum, hum. One time one

feller man belong Sydney he like im one feller head belong kanaka. So

he pickle him along dis feller rum.”

In short, Timbinoka had severed some enemy heads which a trader bought,

pickled and sent to a scientist in Australia. After this transaction

the enterprising trader sold the rum back to Timbinoka. The monarch

found out about it, so he didn’t use the liquor. But the shipwrecked

sailors got their share of it and His Majesty was vastly amused when

he told them what they had been drinking and saw them get sick. He

commissioned Murdock to buy their ship for five pounds. Timbinoka

assembled the whole kingdom with everything that would float. By main

strength and awkwardness they raised the ship, which was repaired and

became the Royal Navy. With a regal gesture Timbinoka sent the crew

back to Australia, at his expense.

Before his death the King got his useful cook a job as District

Officer, a post he served well the rest of his life. Once, he told me,

he found an extremely leprous village, so he burned it down and moved

the inhabitants to new quarters. From these particular people, he said,

he never heard of leprosy again. It sounds a bit fishy, for to this day

no experimenter has found out how the leprosy germ is imparted.

* * * * *

One of Timbinoka’s royal descendants was at Kuria when we were there.

A big man, he had once been handsome, but he was going to fat and his

baldness rivaled mine. His morals were everybody’s business, even among

the Gilbertese, who are remarkably sophisticated for so primitive

a folk. Maybe their vices had drifted in from Tahiti, or from an

especially low crop of beachcombers. Possibly the discouragement of the

harem system had demoralized them. At any rate, the Royal Descendant

was no match for a nice girl.

He served as background for a story that came to me as island tales do.

Years later I found a Frenchman, Mr. X, looking for a job, and wondered

why a man of his education and intelligence should be out of work.

He seemed so pitifully anxious that I pulled wires and got him a job

managing a trading station. He didn’t keep it very long. And this is

why:--

He had been a priest, serving faithfully on these islands. Marie

was an extremely attractive half-caste girl in his school. With his

Bishop’s consent he encouraged her wish to become a nun; she preferred

this choice to marrying the Royal Descendant, her family’s selection.

If Father X was in love with her, it was a passion he religiously

denied, although he went on with her education while she was a novice.

The European nuns in the convent made her life especially hard; they

disliked the idea of a half-caste in the intimacy of full sisterhood.

She worked for years as a drudge, scrubbing floors. Meanwhile her

family were constantly nagging her to leave the convent and marry the

aristocrat.

One night she went to Father X, who had been her only earthly friend.

Her tears and his efforts to console her were too much for both of

them. The Devil he had downed so long came forth. A few weeks later

Father X went to his Bishop, a wise and worldly churchman. “Don’t take

it so seriously,” said the Bishop, “those things will happen. Let me

transfer you to Australia until it blows over.” “No,” insisted Father

X, “she’s going to have my baby, and my child must be legitimate.” The

Bishop shrugged it off; he shrugged off Father X’s priestly frock, too.

Father X, now a layman, went out into the world. The first thing he did

was to marry Marie, and when the baby was born he did his level best to

raise and educate the child. That might have been easy in a land where

clever white men are scarce, but Mr. X came up against a stone wall.

He was an unfrocked priest, he had married a half-caste under queer

conditions. He wandered from pillar to post, getting small jobs, losing

them, feeding his family as best he could.

Then things brightened for him. With his wife and child he wandered

to Australia. A clever agriculturist, he invented a cure for some

prevalent tree blight, and cashed in. He was now laying aside enough

money to support his family; then he would go back to France to reenter

his order.

* * * * *

An ambassador without portfolio, a doctor without a license, I went

over the leper situation on the Gilberts and Ellices. The twin groups

had their small share of the disease, but when I spoke to certain

authorities and asked for co-operation in the model colony we were

planning for Mokogai, the response was not too encouraging. Years later

a sort of compromise affair was started on Tarawa on the Gilberts, but

it proved such a dismal failure that we finally got our way and had the

patients transferred to Mokogai.

On this first G and E survey I had gone on preaching my crusade for

modernized native practitioners. Government schools in the two groups

were effective, although European training can be overdone; the scope

of the native mind is circumscribed by the shadow of the coconut tree.

Gilbertese intelligence was high. When I looked over such schools as

the one at Bairiki and saw bright faces knit in an earnest desire to

learn, and when I observed their steady progress, I knew that here were

potential N.M.P.’s. They were the sort who could learn medicine, and

could return to their home islands to practise and to teach. Malakai

was with me everywhere, an object lesson to them.

At Funafuti one of our old school N.M.P.’s, a giant from Tonga named

Josaia, came aboard ship. I had known him as a pharmacist’s assistant

in Auckland before he took up medicine, and we were renewing our

friendship when Josaia paused and scowled at a well muscled native

who had shuffled around me. Josaia said, “You have just insulted the

Doctor. You have walked across his shadow.” Whereupon Josaia picked

the man up, tossed him over his head and through an open door. Josaia

was something of a storm king, and he was temporarily out of a job.

He was an excellent surgeon. If he operated too often for tubercular

glands in the neck, it was because of his lack of proper training. In

those days many practitioners confused yaws with tuberculosis and acted

accordingly. Josaia had been on the G and E group for a half-dozen

years, working his head off for six pounds a month.

* * * * *

In the highly missionized Ellices there was much religious confusion,

although I cannot vouch for the current story about the London

Missionary Society lady. She kept her girls carefully guarded on a

small island with a lagoon. When several showed signs of approaching

maternity she asked who was to blame. “The Holy Ghost,” they replied.

Immaculate conception was all right, they thought, and didn’t mention

boys who crossed the lagoon in the dark of night.

On the less missionized Gilberts, religious affairs once took a more

violent turn. An island had been having the usual squabble between

Catholics and the London Missionary Society--the latter prevailed,

controlled by native teachers. A native preacher fanned up a religious

mania which swept the people. Self-appointed “Apostles and Angels of

God” took over the works, led by a local “Virgin Mary.” The Angels

rounded up all the Romanists they could find and killed several. They

had locked up the native Catholic magistrate, were marching on him

with a cross, and would have used it had it not been for the courage

of one villager who went by canoe for the District Officer and white

missionaries. The rescue, a few Europeans facing a mass of howling

savages, required tactful argument. Subsequent investigation, which

resulted in the island’s paying a fine, revealed scandal among the

Angels. John the Baptist had been intimate with the Virgin Mary.

Where the religious problem puzzled the righteous, the medical

questions confounded the doctor. Ocean Island, one of the world’s great

phosphate bonanzas, was headquarters for the Gilbert and Ellice groups.

A British syndicate mined the product. Arthur Grimble, Cambridge M.A.,

was acting District Commissioner and an ethnologist who had made useful

discoveries.

From the doctor’s point of view too many Chinese had been imported

to Ocean Island, although the Government’s very good hospital was

doing more than its share. The trouble was that Gilbertese and Ellice

Islanders worked beside the orientals; they caught the imported

diseases and carried them home. All through the twin groups I saw

evidence of infections which the strangers were bringing to a lovely

people. Pathologically, the march of disease was beginning to show.

Yaws, which seemed to have been brought by civilization, was making

heavy inroads. Tuberculosis was working its way into handsome youths,

who lacked the European’s immunity. Filariasis was a vexing puzzle,

because it seemed impossible to control the mosquitoes that carried it.

Intestinal parasites were fortunately few; the people lived near the

beaches, and tidewater is Nature’s handy sewage system.

* * * * *

In my notebook I jotted down “interesting items”:--

Gilbertese stick-throwers.... One man with wreaths of flowers over

head and shoulders, the other with pointed, fire-hardened stick

about a yard long. Stick-thrower stood away from wreath-bearer only

five yards, poised the stick, and _after it had left his hand_ named

the wreath that would be cut off. He never missed. If a man is

accidentally killed by this, there is no legal penalty....

Concrete-topped graves to keep the _tevoro_ from getting out. Graves

decorated with dear possessions of deceased, derby hats, bottles,

bicycles, spectacles, pipes. Saw one piano....

Wreckage that had floated to Tarawa from San Francisco ... common

occurrence because of ocean currents....

Spiritualistic séance ... two old men and a hag sit in a one-room

native house ... smoking short pipes, they go into a trance ... you

ask them to make prophecies, simple ones like what’s tomorrow’s

weather or when will the boat get in ... there’s a short silence, then

you hear the queerest, eeriest whistling along the ridgepole ... pipes

never leave their mouths. You run out to see if there is somebody

on the roof ... bright moonlight, no accessory visible ... their

prophecies are all wrong. They say it will rain tomorrow, but it’s

clear, and the boat they name for Tuesday is a week late.... Probably

ventriloquism....

All over the Pacific you hear brave stories of divers who cut the

throats of man-eating sharks. When I ask about it they usually say

“They do it in the Gilberts.” Made a standing offer of £5 for anybody

who could do the trick. No takers. In Santa Ana, Solomons, I once saw

boys thump sharks on the nose and take fish away from them. Here,

when a canoe upsets, the natives climb into the wet sail, to avoid

sharks....

But wonderful canoeing. Government is reviving the old custom of giant

building. Saw one 109 feet long, sheer as a knife blade and with an

outrigger float big as a young canoe. Could carry 150 natives; same

people that once steered vast distances by the stars and with charts

made of twigs and string. Gilbertese boys now prefer bicycles, but

they’re making canoes on a grand scale....

District Officer of Tabatauea has one with accommodations like a

yacht. I went out in a 30-footer, very fast. When they tack they

disengage the mast in the stern and step it into a socket in the bow.

Outrigger lifted clean out of the water, three men on it to keep it

steady.... I got on to add my heavy weight. As we neared the ship,

showing off, the outrigger’s framework stood almost upright, like a

fence. We scooted around again and one of the native “captains” ran

around on the uplifted outrigger. Seeing is believing. The swiftest of

these canoes can make 18 knots. At the regatta in Sydney Harbor they

rule them out--too fast, they always win....

I also made notes on the white inhabitants, and with a touch of

sadness. Many of them had been so long away from the outer world

and were so hungry for the sight of new faces that they joined the

_Pioneer_ at the slightest excuse until the boat looked like a picnic

excursion. The resident physician was with us. A young cadet named

Jones kept sending messengers, saying that he must be seen at once, as

he’d had a serious accident. In mercy’s name we went to his island,

200 miles off our course--and found that he had nothing worse than a

splinter in his leg and a slightly wrenched back. What he really wanted

was an invitation for himself and his wife to join the joy ride, and I

certainly sympathized with them. But the ship was already crowded to

the gunwales.

The island group’s treasurer made the trip to check each island’s

finances. He was a pleasant man, with a decided character of his own.

Somehow I wasn’t surprised when he mildly informed me that he was a

grandson of the frightful Bully Hayes. I had my phonograph along and

delighted him by turning on the latest ditties from New York. Yes,

he had a Victrola, he said, but the tunes it played were so mildewed

that even his children were tired of them. When he got off the boat I

gave him a record of “Mr. Gallagher and Mr. Shean,” and he was ever so

grateful.... About the time our ship was turning back toward Fiji I

heard of his death. For some morbid tropical reason he had taken his

own life.

His story had a ghostly finish. When I reached my office in Suva I

found a letter from him, dated a few weeks back, thanking me for the

record. It had given the children so much fun.

* * * * *

I was forced to conclude that white colonists of the Gilbert group

needed a doctor more than the natives did. Monotony of life there must

eventually depress the health of every European. The food was a trial

to the civilized stomach; nothing but coconuts, fish and that stringy,

tasteless root, the _babai_; and for variety whatever tinned goods the

trader happened to have. If the Devil gave me a bad choice, I should

rather live on the Ellices than the Gilberts--and rather on Rotumah

than on the Ellices. Those are the three spots on the Pacific that I’m

least fond of.

CHAPTER III

A LITTLE KINGDOM AND A GREAT QUEEN

The Chief Medical Officer of the Tongan Islands was away on leave.

Dr. Minty, his competent assistant and the only other medical officer

on Tongatabu, called me in to assist in an emergency operation on Her

Majesty, Salote Tubou, monarch of the last surviving native kingdom on

the South Pacific. This was at Nukualofa, the capital.

Dr. Minty had no anesthetist, and asked me to help him out; it was a

job I didn’t relish, for the responsibility would be pretty heavy,

and surgical operations in the hot tropics are always something of

a gamble. The Queen lay on a bed in one of the royal chambers. Her

beautiful eyes turned toward me, her friendly lips said that she was

glad that I had come. Her consort, Prince Tungi, bent his huge Tongan

frame over her, consoling her and buoying her courage. It was my first

personal medical service to reigning royalty, an adventure among

giants, for the Queen of Tonga was two-and-a-half inches over six feet

and weighed over 300 pounds. She came of a family of giants; her father

had been even larger, and her great-grandfather George Tubou the First

had been over six feet five inches and built in proportion. She wasn’t

fat, either. The breadth of her shoulders showed tremendous physical

strength. She was a woman of heroic size, a proper mother of Polynesian

kings.

Everything was ready. I said, “Your Majesty, breathe regularly, and

deeply. If you find the anesthetic is coming too fast, raise your

hand and I’ll give you a breath of air; but not too often.” I started

the stuff going and she raised her hand. I gave her air and started

again. Again she raised her hand and kept on raising it until I said as

deferentially as I could, “Remember, Your Majesty, there is no royal

way of taking an anesthetic.” After that she was still as a mouse, an

ideal patient. Her marvelous chest expansion, breathing in the vapor,

was like the opening and shutting of a great accordion; her chest

seemed to lift a foot.

Getting her in her bed was no job for a weakling. Prince Tungi was for

carrying her in his arms; he was quite capable of it, but I wanted to

keep an eye on her breathing and said, “Don’t be a hog, Tungi, move

down and give me a share.” My arms hardly reached under her shoulders

and I was relieved when the move was completed safely. She was one of

the handsomest, biggest women I have ever seen.

Minty’s rapid, efficient job should have been nobody’s business; but

an operation on royalty is always of great national moment, and the

kingdom was agog. Especially in the European section; for Tonga was

prosperous enough to employ a great many foreigners to fill government

posts. Next morning Bob Denny, the picturesque Scottish postmaster,

gave me the first inquisition. “Doctor, didn’t the Queen have an

operation? What was it for?” I said, “I only gave her the anesthetic.”

He couldn’t understand my obtuseness and shouted, “BUT WHAT WAS

THE MATTER WITH HER?” I said, “That’s the Queen’s and Dr. Minty’s

business.” I knew that if he asked Minty he would be rounded up with a

short turn.

In the South Pacific, where everybody’s business is your own,

Aesculapian secrecy was never quite understood. When Postmaster Denny

found that I wouldn’t talk about the royal operation he generously

forgave me by offering me some pamphlets addressed to a lady who was

away. “They might be interesting,” he said, “but you’d better get them

back in a week. She’s due about then, and she’s cranky about her mail.”

For my share in the much-discussed operation I was rewarded in royal

Tongan fashion. The house we lived in was loaded down with gifts

of appreciation: rolls of fine tapa, huge chunks of roast pork and

quantities of selected Tongan fruit.

These gifts had become familiar to me; in May of the previous year I

had accepted an invitation to make a hookworm survey of the Kingdom

of Tonga. I spent three months there the first year of the survey.

My family and Malakai accompanied me. We showed the Foundation film

“Unhooking the Hookworm” with great effectiveness in the local movie

theater to large crowds which assembled, docile to the Queen’s command.

In the remoter areas we fell back on the hookworm charts. The response

in specimens was splendid. This was what the Tongans liked--they were

already interested in health, and here was something new for nothing.

Our examinations yielded little noteworthy in the way of hookworm

disease. The infection rate was low and the number of worms per head

was low. I judged this was because the Tongans still obeyed the old

Polynesian tabus about the disposal of excrement; we also found that

most houses in community groups had latrines of a sort, though these

were inadequate. But their water supplies were awful. There are almost

no running streams and the drinking water was largely obtained from

shallow wells, which were subject to great contamination because pigs,

fowls, horses and humans shared them.

The pig question came up right away. The Chief Medical Officer wanted

me to say that pigs carry hookworm to human beings, and that theory ran

afoul of my conviction to the contrary. The C.M.O. and I ceased to be

friends after I refused to agree with him. He was a Scot. Scots have

about the best medical minds. When they find that a theory is right

nothing can budge them. You seldom run across one who will devote all

his native stubbornness to a shaky hypothesis.

Well, I’m a bit stubborn myself, and on the question of pigs I had my

reasons. One of the weaknesses in native diet is the shortage of meat,

fresh or otherwise. Europeans coming into native life immediately

want to put pigs in corrals. I knew an Irish doctor who didn’t rest

satisfied until he had enforced such a regulation. He hailed from a

land where, according to legend, “they keep the pig in the parlor”; but

to the native such intimacy isn’t good form. My observation has been

that when pigs are enclosed in the corral, the meat supply soon runs

out. Why? Because one man objects to feeding the other man’s pig; keep

them in a common enclosure and they are gradually killed off, with no

replacements. When pigs are allowed to run loose in the villages they

pick up their own food, or most of it. This is the native way. Much as

I have looked into the subject, I know no Pacific island disease that

is carried by pigs. Had I agreed with statements to the contrary, to

satisfy the esthetics of a few foreigners, I could not have been honest

with my own convictions.

Tongans are notably robust and resistant to disease, as we shall see,

and I attribute it in no small measure to a generous supply of pork,

added to their other foods.

Tongan good feeding and abundant hospitality almost made a wreck of a

visiting Fijian football team. I saw the first match of that series,

much to my sorrow, for I am Fijian to the bone. When the boys came

to Tonga they were regarded as much the superior team, and when I

talked with Native Practitioner Savanada, one of the players, all

was confidence. But on the field of glory Fiji was dull and heavy as

lead. Then the saddened Savanada told me why. On the thirty-six-hour

steamer trip to Tonga the Fijians had had little to eat. The minute

they stepped ashore they were confronted with a feast. Poor, starved

Fijians! There were more roast pigs than they had ever seen at one

time, heaped up with trimmings of yams and succulent breadfruit, and

chickens and fish to fill in the crevices.

When they went on the field they were a little like Mark Twain’s

Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, artfully weighted down. The crafty

Tongans, by the way, played on empty stomachs. All over the South

Pacific, a sharp trick like this is known as “Tongafiti.”

Tonga won the second game, too, with me yelling my head off for the

glory of Fiji. This time Savanada explained it away with a dignity

worthy of his chiefly rank: “Queen Salote was present, and it wouldn’t

have been courteous for us, as her guests, to win.” But Fiji won the

last game hands down, and every time the Tongan team came to Fiji the

kingdom’s athletic pride was lowered a hitch.

* * * * *

Speaking of “Tongafiti,” as far as I can find out the word is a

compound of _Tonga_ and _Viti_ (Fiji), and it is probable that the

Pacific’s ancient conquerors took Fijian warriors along with them in

the days when they were the Huns and Vandals of their time.

Sikiana had been cleaned out by “Tongafiti” people; there was evidence

that they had fought their way via the fringing Polynesian islands

to the west, conquering as they went; at the tip of the Solomons the

people of little Rennell Island had beaten these warriors by luring

them up on the sharp coral, which mangled their bare feet. One end

of Rotumah is still settled by a chief who is descended from Tongan

invaders, so is one end of Mangaia on the Cooks. For two or three

centuries the Tongans made slaves of the Samoans; at last Malietoa

drove them off, and they promised never to return except in peace. Then

Tonga forgot the arts of war, but in the seventeenth century it became

fashionable for their chiefs to go over to Fiji and join forces with

one or the other of their warring provinces. These trips were a sort

of Grand Tour, a part of their education. They were always welcome

because they were unafraid of charging a fortified position, something

that the Fijian always dreaded. Chief Ma’afu, descending on Fiji, would

have unseated Thakombau had the British not intervened.

Contact with Melanesia has given the Tongan a slightly browner coloring

than the golden skin of the pure Polynesian; those portions of dark

Fiji where Tongan warriors and mission teachers were most frequent can

still be picked by lighter skins and other Tongan stigmata. Tongans

have a stoutness, a fiber, that excels that of all other Polynesians.

In many ways they are the superior natives of the Pacific.

Captain Cook discovered them in 1770, although seventeenth-century

navigators had sighted them. Because of their kindly reception Cook

called them “the Friendly Islands”; he didn’t know that he would have

been butchered and his boats seized if the chiefs had not disagreed

among themselves. A few years later the _Port au Prince_ was less

lucky. A young boy appropriately named Mariner was the only one saved;

Finau Ulukalala, the leading chief, happened to take a fancy to him.

Mariner lived there for four years, and after his escape a Dr. Martin

took down his enthralling story, which reads like a dime novel.

The missionary followed the white trader, and Tonga was a cockpit for

religious factions. The last chapter of that bitter feud was written

as late as 1924. It was Methodist against Catholic at first; finally

Methodist against Methodist--actually Wesleyan against Wesleyan.

Taufahau, a giant chief of the Kanakupolu family and destined to be

king, first saw the writing on the wall and joined the Wesleyans; by

that time the Tongans had lost their old religion, the worship of

Polynesian deities. Taufahau may have yielded to a greater magic than

he knew. He may have become a true Christian, although this seems

difficult to believe. Certainly he seized the opportunity to weld the

group into a political unit. A great warrior, a great strategist, a

great man, he was enthroned in 1826 and lived until 1894. Under his

kingship all Tonga became Christian, mostly Wesleyan.

In his later years, around the seventies and eighties, scandals arose

in the Church. Much money was exacted in religious offerings, and

after the missioners had feathered their own nests, the balance was

sent out of the country. Tonga, mind you, was just emerging from the

Stone Age--yet she was supporting foreign missions! Finally Taufahau,

now King George the First, decided to head his own state Church, the

Free Church of Tonga. There were cruel persecutions of Wesleyans who

wouldn’t recant; many were killed, thousands driven out of Tonga.

George the First had a renegade Wesleyan missionary named Baker as his

guide, and the guide became Prime Minister. Although Prime Minister

Baker served the kingdom with some permanently wholesome laws, his rule

degenerated in the course of years. As much appears to have been wasted

through him as through the former rule of the missions, and things

came to such a pass that the British High Commission had to intervene

and institute a protectorate over Tonga. The Free Church pursued its

erratic way through the reign of George the Second of Tonga, who died

in 1918, and into the reign of Queen Salote. In 1924 she joined the

Wesleyan Church, and the Free Church ceased to be Tonga’s official

faith. The Free Church left a bad financial record, and had little

regard for honest business practices. For many years Tongan religion

had been largely a matter of politics. Whenever a monarch switched his

religion there had been a corresponding switch in the opposition to the

Crown.

The Tubous are the sole survivors of numerous native dynasties which

the first white men found in the Pacific. The Tongan kingdom has

outlived the greedy gobblings of Western powers, and the people have

kept their identity through every political crisis.

The Tubous have a past longer than that of any other ruling dynasty

today. Their kings first came from Eastern Samoa, probably from Ta’u,

which seems to have been the cradle of great Polynesian kings. The Tui

Tonga was the spiritual and temporal head of the state, and Aho’-itu

was the first of the Tui Tonga. A later Tui Tonga wearied of the double

burden and turned temporal affairs over to his brother Tui Haatakalaua,

and Haatakalaua finally passed his power over to another brother, Tui

Kanakupolu. When King George the First took the throne, he abolished

the title of Tui Tonga. Joeli, last claimant to that ancient title,

died after my first visit to the kingdom.

This seems a pretty sketchy way to pass over a thousand years of

history. When I first saw Tonga its two great historical strains were

joined in marriage. The Haatakalaua and the Kanakupolu families united

in Tungi and Salote. The royal wedding was in 1918. With three sons the

dynastic succession seemed safe.

In 1924 the reigning couple were more highly educated than most of

their subjects. Salote had studied in Auckland and Tungi had gone to

an excellent school in Sydney. Ata, one of the great nobles, had also

been to Sydney for his education. Otherwise only a few half-caste

children had enjoyed foreign advantages. Generally speaking, the people

knew only a few words of English.

The Tongans were great nationalists with a mortal dread of being taken

over by one of the Powers. They were even afraid of England, although

they seemed quite safe in that direction. The British protectorate over

the kingdom was (and is) a very light one. Great Britain was selecting

Chief Justices and Auditors for them, and quite naturally the Tongans

paid the salaries. The British Consul and Agent acted as adviser to the

Queen, and it was his duty to approve any financial expenditures. With

these restrictions, Tonga is today a free constitutional monarchy, with

a parliament and the Queen’s privy council.

The point of friction has always been the British Consul’s right to

veto expenditures. If he was well trained in the British civil service

the plan worked out well. But the job occupies not more than an hour

of the Consul’s day, and too many of them have used the leisure to

indulge in petty statesmanship and tyrannies far beyond their official

authority.