The financial veto is a powerful weapon, but the check in expenditure

has been Tonga’s salvation. It is hard for Western civilization

to understand the Polynesian’s utter lack of money sense--or the

Melanesian’s, for that matter. From early childhood the European has

learned the art of getting and spending. Not so the Pacific Islander.

Although in many ways they may excel us intellectually, it is next to

impossible to make them understand that coined metal isn’t something

you pick off trees and throw around for the moment’s enjoyment. It’s

all great fun, while the party lasts. Only by hard knocks will the

native learn money economy. Oftentimes his education comes in jail,

where he can study at leisure the disadvantages of Western methods over

his old-time communal system.

Wild extravagances of Church and State forced Great Britain to set

up a protectorate to prevent Tonga from falling into other hands.

The British Consul, with keys to the treasury, had to span the great

void which is the Tongan money sense. Today I know of no other nation

so financially sound as Tonga--no debt, internal or external, and a

surplus of £150,000, about twenty-five dollars per head. For the United

States this would be a capital of well over three billions, with no

debts at all. Not so bad for Tonga, a land that saw iron for the first

time about 250 years ago. And the kingdom’s wealth is well distributed,

too. Every Tongan male at the age of eighteen receives from his

government eight-and-a-half acres of fertile land and a town lot to

build his home on.

The white man goes through these islands and sees many things that may

be comic from his biased viewpoint. But shouldn’t we turn the laugh

on ourselves in the light of New Deals and Planned Economies? While

Western civilization is eating its accumulated fat and beginning to

gnaw its own vitals, I wonder if some Tongan Brain Trust might not lead

us out of our wilderness of bureaucratic taxes, and teach us what the

Abundant Life really means.

In 1924 Queen Salote was in her young twenties, but her mind was

matured by experience in government, and she was quick to see the help

our Foundation could give her little realm of 25,000 souls. We were

working like devils to give Tonga an adequate water supply, and I wore

my diplomacy threadbare trying to convince the Scottish C.M.O. of the

obvious need. Although I am a chronic admirer of the Scots--and haven’t

I seen them survive and carry on in posts that would have demolished

a less sturdy breed?--this Medical Officer remained a prickly thistle

that drove me to distraction. I’m a peaceable man, as the Irish say.

Certainly I’ve managed somehow to get along with a great variety of

human types.

But not with this one. The few faint hairs that remained on my head

bristled at the sight of him. He bothered those hairs worse than

the Tongan flies that swarmed around breakfast at Bill Smith’s

boarding house; there I learned to cover my bald spot with a

knotted handkerchief. No handkerchief could shield me from the

Scot’s irritating perversity. I had to confer with him, of course,

or I couldn’t have worked at all. He was a very competent surgeon,

particularly skillful in eye surgery--a rare accomplishment in the

South Pacific. As a health officer he had done some splendid work,

especially with yaws. But I had got off on the wrong foot when I

disagreed with him about pig hookworm. His great fault--if it be

a fault--was his firm conviction that he was a final authority on

everything.

One of his assistants, a brilliant young fellow who suffered as long

as he could endure it, then accepted a high post in Australia, gave

me all the help he dared, and that was useful. But the Scot had an

anti-Lambert complex. We were trying to install model latrines all

over the Tongan Islands, and we had to choose a type that met with his

approval. Nothing I offered was satisfactory, and it was impossible to

find out what he wanted. If I hadn’t finally resorted to a “Tongafiti”

trick I feel sure that nothing would have been accomplished. At last,

in complete despair, I went to him with one of the plans he had

rejected and said suavely, “Well, Doctor, I’ve finally come around

to your original idea, and I’ll go with you on this plan.” Without a

murmur he accepted it. I had discovered a system.

Probably Tonga was fortunate in having so good a man at the helm. For

the kingdom had been hospitable to some quacks, both clerical and

medical.

A prominent trader was saying good-by to friends at the boat and

remarking, “Glad you’re going while you have so good an impression

of the women,” when a well-dressed stranger with a lady on his arm

strolled up and said, “No man is good enough for a good woman.” This

knightly champion’s name doesn’t matter, except that it went on the

Tongan medical register with the string of initials “M.D., Phy. D.O.,

M.S.R.U.I., S.A. and Harvard University D.O.” The S.A. might have

meant something, but his fantastic list of degrees remained as much a

mystery as why the Tongan Government appointed him to a high medical

post. Later on he admitted to me that he learned all his medicine as a

hospital wardsman.

He was the only physician available when Queen Salote gave birth

to the Crown Prince. His elegant bedside manner combined with his

official prestige had elevated him beyond criticism. The accouchement

took place, according to tradition, in the royal suite; following

old custom, the great nobles waited in an antechamber to hear the

birth proclaimed. Now and then the much-titled physician would pop

in to take a look at his patient, then pop out to smoke a cigarette

and shoot his cuffs. Finally a capable half-caste nurse, who had

been constantly in attendance, poked her head out and announced that

the baby was coming. The titled one hurried to the bedside a minute

late; the child was already born. He stepped over to the nurse and

whispered confidentially, “And what shall I do next?” It was his first

obstetrical case.

Well, the nurse must have taken care of it, for when I was in Tonga the

Crown Prince was a charming little boy. The obstetrical curiosity was

not dismissed; he served the kingdom for quite a while. When Fatafehi,

father of the late king, finally succumbed to his family’s hereditary

disease (old age) our hero was on something of a spot. He was told of

one royal funeral where the body lay so long awaiting the family’s

arrival that the pallbearers had had an unpleasant task in bearing away

the casket. It was decided to embalm the remains of Fatafehi--which

stumped the poor fellow again. Finally he compromised by filling the

lead coffin with formaldehyde solution. On the way to the grave the

pallbearers wondered why it was too heavy to manage. They had to bore

holes in the side and let out the solution before they could lower the

coffin into the grave.

At last the good doctor was faced by a flu epidemic. He couldn’t handle

it, so he went to Fiji for “medical supplies,” and never came back.

I didn’t know much about him when he came around to me in Suva and

impressed me with his charming manner. I wanted a competent doctor

to take my place while I was home on leave, and his fine talk almost

decided me to take him on. “All I want,” he said, “is a chance to treat

the natives. Just for my board and keep. I love the natives.” When I

asked the Tongan Consul about him the answer didn’t quite satisfy me,

so I changed my mind.

He went the way of all flash: a very minor sanitary inspector in Fiji;

then a job as little doctor on a little ship; then a move back to Tonga

to settle down to beachcombing with a native wife. He could at least

lay some claim to having brought a royal heir into the world. Even

though he hadn’t known what to do next.

If the Saga of Tropical Medicine has a comic section, some of the

Tongan M.D.’s legitimately graduated from the pick of the universities

deserve a place in it. One very able physician was a practical-joke

addict. In his office was a skeleton, jointed and movable, with which

he scared natives by jerking the strings. At night he would rub

phosphorus on his bony playmate and take him driving in his buggy; the

ghastly hell-light threw the town in a panic. When old Bridges was

Collector of Customs the fun-loving doctor brought in a “drug order”

which included a great many household furnishings. To dodge duty, he

gave the furniture large Latin names: like _Carpetorum brusselorum_ and

_Hattus rackus_. This got by the native inspector, to whom Latin was

all Greek, but Collector Bridges stopped the racket.

They told me of another doctor who was anxious to become C.M.O. Over

in Haapai he quarreled with Chief Israeli, who was a great swell in

Tonga and closely related to the King. Some minor skin disease took

Israeli to this doctor, who found his revenge in saying, “Man, you’ve

got leprosy!” He kept poor Israeli interned for six months outside the

village and started a dicker with the Tongan Government. He craved

promotion to Chief Medical Officer, he said, and if they handed him

that, Israeli would be pronounced cured. The doctor got what he wanted,

and proclaimed that his treatment had saved the patient from a leper’s

tragic end.

* * * * *

When I began hookworm treatments the royal family were the first to

take the medicine, as a good example to Tonga. For me that was a

delicate assignment. The household numbered forty in all, for Tongan

hospitality kept the palace bulging with relatives and near-relatives.

Keeping up the establishment must have been quite a drain, although

Salote had a competent income and Prince Tungi was well-salaried as

Premier; both had landed estates. But they were rich relations to two

large families, and feudal tradition imposed on their generosity.

Feudal tradition encountered modern medicine when it came to dosing the

Queen. The tetrachloride had to be mixed in a special mug; for custom

demanded that no common mortal should eat or drink from any dish or

cup that royalty had used. However, the Queen and Consort took their

medicine gracefully, and allowed themselves to be photographed taking

it. An anxious populace waited outside the palace, and there was a

murmur of relief when it was announced that our medicine had taken its

normal course.

As a special favor I was given “back-door privileges” at the palace,

and it was an honor I valued highly. Here on quiet mornings I would

find Salote sitting in loose, easy clothes, a relief from the

British-made silks and satins of her state appearances. Our talks got

me very close to her quick mind and her eager desire to learn what was

best for her people. Taufaahau, the heir apparent, and his two brothers

would be playing around the place. Sometimes I would see them riding

the giant turtle which has never left the palace grounds since Captain

Cook brought him from the Galapagos in 1773, a gift for the King of

Tonga. I always had chocolate bars or some other sweet for the children

to nibble when they decided to sit on my knee. That was sixteen years

ago. The turtle is still alive and the Crown Prince has graduated with

honors from Sydney University. He is going to Oxford to study law and

anthropology. Salote and Tungi have a right to be proud of this tall,

splendid young man. Lord, how time has slipped along....

Many and many times I talked my plans over with Salote, and especially

my fixed idea that there must be a modernized Central Medical School in

Fiji. She was a constructive listener. She looked upon the people as

her children, and was grieved by the tricks that had been played upon

them by alien races. Once I asked her if politics and religion weren’t

the same thing in Tonga, and she said: “Doctor, I think you’re about

right.”

A true Christian, she had an intense admiration for Queen Victoria.

Once a year, robed for the occasion, she would open Parliament, and be

seated in the red chair of state, with her adored Tungi at her side.

She insisted on ceremonial black for the parliamentarians assembled,

and before the great day there was a tremendous scrambling for European

clothes. Once a small boy scampered into a trader’s store and demanded

a pair of silk stockings. He was a Queen’s page and had to put on full

regalia.

Ancient suits were hired or borrowed for the occasion; dress suits,

dinner jackets, antique cutaways and obsolete Prince Alberts, anything

so long as it was black. Once I contributed my winter-weight dress

clothes to an appealing noble and watched him join the long, sweaty

line of lawgivers that filed in to the boiling ceremony. And the minute

it was over ministers of state sneaked away crosslots, suffocating

coats over their arms, tight shoes in their hands. They were stealing

home to their comfortable and sensible _lavalavas_.

Major-General Sir George Richardson, Governor of Western Samoa, told

me of his presentation at court when the Queen was very new to the

throne. Richardson, a crusty Britisher who had gone through the mill

at the Court of St. James’s, may have exaggerated the incident. In

the presence of young Salote, he said, he had approached the throne,

made the proper bow and backed the prescribed distance. Out of the

silence the Queen clapped her hands: “Johnnie, bring the gentleman a

whisky-soda!” She hadn’t yet learned all the European formalities, but

hospitality told her what a Britisher seldom refuses.

Salote, with the pride of an ancient dynasty behind her and the

problems of a modern world facing her realm, was the connecting link

between the old and the new.

Strangers, dropping off at Nukualofa, have looked over the ancient

stone relics there, have wondered at their monumental size and have

heard, perhaps, smatterings of their legend. They have seen the great

Haamonga (Burden on the Shoulders), a trilithon with side pieces

fifteen feet high; one piece is twelve feet wide by four feet eight

inches thick, the other is nine feet seven inches wide by three feet

eight inches thick. These are above-the-ground measurements, as they

are set very deep. They stand ten feet apart and are grooved at the top

to support a crosspiece that is fifteen feet long, five feet wide and

twenty-one inches thick. These stupid, literal measurements describe a

colossus, and nobody knows where the stones came from. Tradition says

that they were brought from Wallis Island in ancient Tongan canoes.

The great squared arch is the gateway to the old sacred _marai_ (family

ceremonial ground) where the Tui Tonga worshipped until the rise of

temporal power moved them to another _marai_, a few miles away. On the

old _marai_ where the Burden on the Shoulders stands there is another

relic important to the lost religious history of Polynesia. This is

called the Leaning Stone, and is a slablike pillar nine feet high, five

wide, two thick.

The Tongans, you must remember, were fast losing their old religion

when the white man came. They knew that the trilithon and the leaning

pillar were of sacred memory, but what they signified was not clear. It

was not until I visited the Cook Islands, where I saw similar relics

and heard the young chiefs recite their poetic myths, that I realized

what Tonga’s stone relics signified in the old paganism.

Almost everywhere in Polynesia the symbols were the same. The arch

represented Hina, goddess of fertility, and the leaning pillar was

Tangaloa her husband, god of life’s origin. After I found similar

pillars and arches on the Cook Islands I concluded that Tonga’s ancient

worship must have been phallicism. I submitted my theory to Prince

Tungi and he consulted with keepers of the old tradition; they all

agreed that this was probably the explanation. Tungi told me that

there were caves on Tongatabu which were called Hina because of their

archlike shape, and that on Vavau there was a very realistic cleft

stone, also called Hina.

When I describe the Cook Islands I shall elaborate a little more on the

Hina (or Ina) and Tangaloa myth, for the Cook Islander still remembers.

Tonga’s third wonder is the Royal Tombs, the Langi. There are five

Langi, generally pyramidal in shape, and covered with from three to

five layers of stone. They measure about two hundred feet on a side;

their outer stones, some of them twenty feet long, are nicely squared

and fitted. Each was built for a Tui Tonga.

During one of our back-porch conferences Queen Salote told me that she

had recently allowed one of her relatives to be buried there, because

he was of the Tui Tonga line. The Queen was also of the same ancient

family, so she was the only witness, except the Haatufunga, honorable

buriers of the royal dead. The chamber into which the body was to be

lowered was deep down in the center of the Langi. It was covered with

an immense slab that had lain there four hundred years, and was raised

with great difficulty. They found a vault, about twelve feet long by

four wide and three deep, walled with artfully fitted stonework.

I beg Her Majesty’s pardon if I misquote her, but this is what I

remember her saying: “I saw the body go down into the dark vault. When

it was first opened we found the skeletons of three men. One lay face

down, and must have belonged to a very powerful man. The other two

were more slender, and their bones showed that they died in a sitting

position.”

The seated skeletons were probably those of the Haatafunga, whose duty

it was to prepare the bodies and wrap them in fine mats. In the old

days they were permitted to remove the costly cerements and take them

away as perquisites of office--if they could work fast enough. They

were given just the time it took to poise the slab over the tomb, and

lower it. The pair squatted on either side of the noble skeleton had

been a minute too slow, and had been sealed in.

Later Tonga grew more humane, and the funeral workers were not

permitted to touch the mats; they were given safe exit before the lid

fell. Certain valuable things, equivalent to the funerary spoils,

were set aside as their reward. The Queen told me that Joeli, lineal

descendant of the Tui Tonga, had opened a tomb a short time before and

found a beautifully carved ivory pillow. She had wanted to present it

to the scientific world, but Joeli had re-interred it.

* * * * *

The Tongan people, always having lived under communism qualified by

an aristocracy, still offered an example of socialized medicine in

daily practice. Sickness was treated free. If it was often not treated

at all, that fact was partly due to the wide scatteration of little

islands, and partly to the incapacity of an understaffed medical

department. Voyaging around the small, forgotten islands I groaned

over dirt and flies and the ignorance of simple hygiene which spread

yaws, dysentery and typhoid. General weakening from these diseases had

made the people easy prey to the influenza epidemic of 1918, which

swept away eight per cent of the population. What they needed most was

proper soil sanitation, proper water supplies, _and education in these

necessities_. So many deaths were unattended by a physician that it

was difficult to estimate the mortality figures covering typhoid, for

instance.

The question of infant mortality--deaths of children under five--was

to grow less crucial year by year. I have learned that by stimulating

one branch of public health the physician is apt to stimulate many

others. Our hookworm campaigns in Fiji, for example, worked toward the

reduction of infant mortality; from 200 per 1,000 it fell below 100,

and in one banner year was as low as 89.

The Tongans were a pithy breed with a will to live and an eagerness

to learn--if you got around their ancient prejudices and the new

peculiarities imparted by various mission sects. Proselytizing Mormons

and Seventh Day Adventists had confused the issue. The Adventists had

been popular when natives found that this faith gave them two workless

days a week. They were less ardent believers, however, when their

preachers forbade smoking and the eating of pig. The Mormons were

anti-tobacco, too. Visitors at the mission stations of either sect had

to keep cigarettes and tobacco locked away from light-fingered converts.

I sometimes wondered if civilization had done these people any good

at all, except to shake off the abuses of the nobles. The ancient

communism with nobody rich, nobody poor in a self-contained island

group that fought away intruders--would that be the simple answer

today? Over a hundred years ago Mariner thought so, when he asked

good Dr. Martin to write into his book: “Captain Cook brought the

intermittent fever, the crooked backs and the scrofula.” (Probably

tuberculosis.)

And Vancouver brought the bloody flux, which in a few months killed a

great number of them.... To any man of humanity, nothing can be more

distressing than to cast his eye on the island of Otaheite, a spot

blessed by nature with everything that can make life pleasing ... but

now become a scene of general mortality, and a prey to disease, which

to all human appearance, will in a few years render it a desolate

wilderness.

But when you run a thumb over Mariner’s _Tonga Islands_ you are forced

to believe that the old cures were sometimes super-Spartan, although

the savage doctors recognized tetanus long before the discovery of

bacteria. Says Mariner:--

In all cases of considerable wounds produced by pointed instruments

the patient is not allowed to wash himself until he is tolerably well

recovered, nor to shave, cut his hair, nor his nails; for all these

things are supposed to produce _gita_ (tetanus).

Mariner reported that convalescents “happening to wash themselves too

soon, spasms supervened, and death was the consequence.” Observers

told him that “wounds in the extremities ... are liable to produce

tetanus.... They never allow females to be near men thus wounded, lest

the mere stimulus of venereal desire should induce this dangerous

complaint....” One man was “eight months without being washed, shaved

or having his hair or nails cut....”

Now for the old treatment of tetanus, an art they learned from Fiji,

where warlike habits made _gita_ very common.

... consists in the operation of _tocolo’si_, or passing a reed first

wetted with saliva into the urethra, so as to occasion a considerable

irritation and loss of blood; and if the general spasm is violent,

they make a seton of this passage, by passing down a double thread,

looped over the end of the reed, and when it is felt in the perineum

they cut down upon it, seize hold of the thread ... the thread is

occasionally drawn backwards and forwards, which excites great pain,

and an abundant discharge of blood....

Several times Mariner saw this cruel operation; the jaws, he said, were

violently closed for a few seconds, but lockjaw never developed. The

recoveries, he thought, were about forty per cent. They also let blood

in this way for ridiculous reasons, like wounds in the abdomen; but

they had a theory (rather in line with some of our advanced scientists)

that passing a reed into the urethra had a rejuvenating effect on the

debilitated. The King of Tonga, in Mariner’s time, had this operation

performed “and two or three days later he felt himself quite light, and

full of spirits.”

The operation called _boca_ was castration in cases of enlarged

testicles (probably elephantiasis). Tourniquets were skillfully made

of native cloth and the instruments were razor-edges of split bamboo.

Dr. Martin wrote:--

A profuse hemorrhage is mostly the consequence of this operation; it

was performed seven times within the sphere of Mr. Mariner’s knowledge

... to three of which he was witness. Not one of the seven died....

Sounds gory enough, doesn’t it? But those native sorcerers, working

with tapa and banana-leaf bandages, cutting with split bamboo,

displayed an art and a knowledge of surgery which had been cultivated

through generations of experience. This wasn’t just voodoo. It was

applied surgery, practised by men who needed only the touch of modern

science to equip them for the great work.

* * * * *

In contradiction to what I have said about native deficiency in money

sense, I found the Tongan developing into a keen trader in a small way.

The _Tongafiti_ game wasn’t lacking in his deals, and many European

traders were going bankrupt because the native was too sharp for

them. The old Tongan was a babe unborn when it came to expenditures,

and there are stories of primitive natives playing pitch-game with

shipwrecked trade dollars. Not so today.

Salote and Tungi were studying finance methodically, patiently, to

learn modern economics. Up and down the beaches their subjects were

sometimes sharpening their wits in a very practical way.

Trader Algy Slocombe told me of the only times he ever got around a

native in a deal. Living next door, a Tongan family let a couple of

their trees hang over his fence and interfere with his tennis. He

approached the native wife, who talked to her husband, and there was a

long Tongan dicker. The husband admitted that he was grateful for the

water he got from the Slocombe well; so that was something to bargain

with. Algy said to the native’s wife, “If you’ll cut down those trees

I’ll let you have all the coconuts that drop into your yard from the

palms on my side.” The Tongans say, “_Fa moli moli_,” when they mean

“Many thanks,” and there was a far-off look in the woman’s eyes when

she said it. For years she had been gathering those same nuts, and no

questions asked. But a trade was a trade.

A native from Vavau came to Algy’s office proposing to deposit some

tobacco against a loan of one pound. He said he was mayor of his

town, had a good plantation, dealt with Lever Brothers. Algy wanted a

day before closing this big transaction; just for curiosity he wired

Vavau and found that this man had never had credit there. The customer

returned--without the tobacco, of course--and said he must have the

money at once, as the boat was leaving for Vavau. Algy merely smiled,

“_Fa moli moli_,” and his applicant departed without the slightest sign

of ill-feeling. His five-dollar build-up had been as elaborate as that

of the New York confidence man. But that was all right. He’d find a

touch somewhere before the boat left.

Neither in Fiji nor Tonga did the natives have family names; though

some of the better-educated were beginning to affect the European way.

I ran across a Tongan named Joni Motocawiah. If you say it fast it

sounds like “Johnnie Motor Car Wire”--just what it means. The day Joni

was born his mother saw her first automobile, and a roll of barbed wire

was washed up on their beach. There was also a baby named Atalosa,

which sounded sweet. Before the baby came her mother had sniffed

something they told her was attar of roses; “Atalosa” was the way she

said it.

Remodeling the English language wasn’t confined to Tongans. Eloisa and

I were quartered for a while at Bill Smith’s boarding house, where

food was delicious and flies abundant. Bill Smith was the reigning Mr.

Malaprop. Once when he cornered me in a learned medical discussion he

referred to “A man’s tentacles and pinnace.” He knew more about the

cookbook than the dictionary, and told me how to bake ham under a layer

of mud so that it “brought out the intersticine juices.”

A Tongan’s own language served him well if he didn’t happen to like

you. Needy aristocrats, beginning to learn the value of money and

liquor, had perfected a little trick of giving a high title to visiting

Europeans and making them “members of the family.” If the European was

romantic snob enough for the game, he freely lent money and whisky to

the noble donor of titles. When money and whisky played out the titles

vanished also, and the once-honored one was unceremoniously removed

from the family. This old army game was a bit of _Tongafiti_ that

was practised in Samoa as well as Tonga. The generous Polynesian was

beginning to learn that you don’t give something for nothing in this

wicked world. Chief Ulukalala, a pretender to the throne, had titles

to give that sounded extremely noble. He gave one to an official, and

another to a resident doctor’s wife. Between the two honored ones there

was contention as to which should rank the other at native ceremonies.

Her title was _To’e Umu_, literally “Scraps from the Oven.” His was

_Kuli Haapai_, which in English is “Dog of Haapai.”

The relics of early missionary blue laws made it very easy to go to

jail. It was forbidden to do any sort of work on Sunday, even on your

own premises. When I was there Dr. Ruhen, a medical officer, was

arrested for breaking the Sabbath by picking a bunch of bananas in his

own yard. Despite his protest that he was only gathering food, he was

duly fined. Sunday games were prohibited. Algy Slocombe’s tennis court

got him into trouble with the puritans. We had some splendid Sunday

games there, and Algy felt secure because his court was screened by a

hedge. Some holy peeper caught him finally, and all his players were

haled before a native magistrate and fined. Fortunately that happened

after I went home.

All crimes lead to jail, or are supposed to. Going to jail in Tonga

seemed to be quite a merry social affair. Back in the days of old

George Tubou one of the royal relatives was a prisoner. Every afternoon

the King’s carriage would wheel up, take the culprit for a drive and

for tea in the Palace, then return him at six o’clock, the closing hour.

A friend told me that when he first saw the Vavau jail there was a

sign over the door “All prisoners not in by six o’clock will be locked

out for the night.” When I was there the jailers complained bitterly

because there were no prisoners, and they had to do all the work.

Tongan prisoners were great gadabouts. In one village there had been

several burglaries of provision stores, and the police were baffled

for days. At last they located the loot, hidden under the jail where

the inmates could delve in, when they pleased, for a midnight snack.

It seemed rather remarkable that such good boarding houses were losing

boarders.

* * * * *

That was Tonga as I saw it, going in and out for many years. Like all

Pacific groups, it was a land of marked contrasts. At sunset an old

witch woman would stand on the cliffs “calling the sharks.” She would

throw scraps into the water, then raise a high, queer chant and the

beasts would poke their noses through the surf. And in the palace at

Nukualofa an educated, civilized woman sat with her consort, planning

to meet the conditions which a new world had imposed on her kingdom.

Because their rule was good, and the British Protectorate a wise one,

Tonga continued to improve greatly, both in health and in understanding.

I never let Salote and Tungi forget that the native medical talent

was right there in the kingdom, waiting to be developed. Every time

I visited her islands I told the Queen how the pick of her young

men could go to Fiji for a first-class medical education, if we had

the money to back such an enterprise. There was always that big If.

Salote’s common sense and patriotism told her that I was right. Her

generous wish was not limited to her own realm; she saw how the native

races of Oceania could not be helped until they learned to help

themselves. But when I talked this problem over with her I realized

that little Tonga was not rich enough to effect a program that would

cover the whole wide Pacific.

* * * * *

One day in 1926 I was very discouraged when I came to Queen Salote with

my troubles. I told her of a letter I had just received from Heiser; he

had decided that I must abandon the School idea altogether. It was no

fault of his, he had done what he could. But the case was hopeless.

Queen Salote listened carefully to what I had to say. In her thoughtful

hesitation I saw that she was agreeing with Heiser. I had put up a

four-year fight for an impractical ideal.

Then suddenly she raised her kind eyes and asked, “Doctor, is it such a

tremendous amount that we can’t bear our share?”

It wasn’t a spendthrift Tongan speaking. It was the voice of a woman

who had considered the question carefully, and had come to see the

road to a sick kingdom’s recovery. She knew that there was a competent

treasury balance. She had been with us from the first. Her influence

had helped reduce Tongan infant mortality until it had become the

lowest in the Pacific; she had encouraged mothers to come to doctors or

government dispensers for supplies of baby food; this had given medical

officers a chance to check up on the condition of young children.

Salote had encouraged war on tuberculosis, and had seen that every

house in her realm should have sanitary arrangements, even if they

were still crude. The medical men she backed with moral support were

cleaning up yaws with arsenicals. No one more than Salote knew the

health situation in Tonga.

And couldn’t Tonga bear its share in our School, so that the Pacific

would at least have competent native medical service? Before she had

spoken, my School had been taking its last gasp. Now it was alive again.

I went to Samoa and quoted her offer to the old Governor, Major-General

Sir George Richardson. “Well,” he grunted, “if Tonga is willing to do

that we’ll come in too.”

The fight wasn’t over, even then, but the wall was breached.

* * * * *

When I left Tonga for the last time the Crown Prince Taufaahau was

on the ship with us. He had come home to the celebration of his

twenty-first birthday and had been given the high title of Tubou Toa.

He was a splendid boy, one I would have been proud to have claimed

as my son. Two young anthropology professors from the University of

Chicago were with us and were charmed with his conversation, always

on an intellectual footing with theirs. Gigantic as his ancestors, he

kept fit by exercising with fifty-six-pound dumbbells. He laughed,

remembering the chocolate bars I used to feed him. I was telling him

about a chief of a lost Pacific island who had asked me to come back

and be his guest for life; the Crown Prince fell into a long study, the

way his mother did when she was deciding something for herself. Then he

said, “Doctor, I invite you to make your home with me in Tonga. But of

course,” he said, “that will be after I have assumed my place in Tongan

society.”

I know of no happier place for my old age.

CHAPTER IV

THE LAND OF THE TALKING MEN

I only stretch the long-bow lightly when I say that Western Samoa’s

political troubles began with a small medical problem and ended with a

great one. Certainly the finish of the Mau Rebellion was a picture of

hatred’s reaction upon public health.

The _malanga_ of 1924 was in full swing, and I was one of the party.

From days of old the _malanga_ has been a royal progress, an annual

window-dressing on the march, as it was in England when a grateful

populace turned out to greet Henry VIII with polished hauberks and

freshly dry-cleaned plumes. In Samoa’s year of plenty, 1924, the

_malanga_ was still an impressive show. His Britannic Majesty’s

proconsul, Governor of New Zealand’s ten-year-old Mandate, had

full-costumed a military display and was accepting the feasts or

listening to the bands and musical orators all around Savaii.

Since Samoa’s dawn of time the _Tulafale_ (the orator or “talking man”)

had commanded leadership. No funeral, wedding or political controversy

in the _Fono_ (meeting place) has been official without a competition

of orators, first on one side, then on the other, showering palaver

or threats neatly wrapped in compliments. In the years of the Mandate

the Talking Men were still importantly featured, and that wolf-gray,

bullet-headed old British soldier, Major-General Sir George S.

Richardson, had made many stops along his two weeks’ march, to examine

the well-being of a people he governed all too kindly.

Under this _malanga’s_ careless pageantry I witnessed a small pregnant

incident. It dropped another of the seeds which, in a few years,

sprouted into the wicked flower of an insurrection already germinating.

In my report to the Foundation I described this official tour as

“unique in my experience and remarkable for its results in obtaining

the confidence of the native and his co-operation in measures for his

own benefit. In the party there was the Governor, the Commissioner for

Native Affairs, the Resident Commissioner of Savaii, the Chief Medical

Officer, the Collector of Customs and Taxes, the Governor’s A.D.C.,

Dr. Buxton and myself.” Fau’mui’na, high chief, led thirty Boy Scouts

called “_Fetu o Samoa_,” the Star of Samoa; there were native police,

carriers and attendants. The Fetu went in front, beating a drum, behind

them was the flagbearer, next the Governor with his retinue, then the

endless queue of followers. It was a parade to touch the imagination of

a people susceptible to pomp and ceremony.

In the village reception house there would be the usual kava ceremony,

the food presentation, the long hour devoted to exchange of courtesies.

Then the _Tulafale_, the professional orators, would unlimber their

eloquence for the benefit of the Governor: “We in our ignorance and

humility turn to you for the light of your wisdom, as the flower turns

to the sun. We are the children, you are the father upon whom we depend

for guidance. We know that you love us, and we return your love....”

When you hear this doled out day after day you begin to believe the

Orator. The simple Samoan child of nature--and watch out or he’ll have

the shirt off your back. Witness how his shrewd diplomacy all but had

the United States, Germany and Britain tearing at each other’s throats

in 1900. When Germany got her cut in the colony the Samoan’s connivance

worried her to a point where she only tried to control them with

punitive raids....

But in the Governor’s _malanga_ of 1924 the Orators were laying it on

thick. They would look into every gift-basket, call out the donor’s

name with praise if the taro were big and the fish well-cooked. If the

contribution looked stingy they would be very frank about it, amidst

popular mirth.

Public health was never relaxed in this bright journey of inspection.

The Boy-Scoutish Fetu, wearing nothing but the _lavalava_ and a

cap with the emblem Star, would give the people exhibition games,

object lessons in simple sports that would keep the villagers away

from picture shows and dissipations in Apia. The Administration was

sensible in showing the all but naked bodies of the young Fetu, to

illustrate the health advantages of light clothing in the tropics. The

Administration was always rational and kind.

At one of the settlements the orations and ceremonies had been

unusually long. As in every place we stopped, the doctors had lined

up the population for quick inspection of ulcers, skin lesions, eye

conditions, enlarged spleens, or any other sign of disease. Our time

was more than up, we had to be pushing on. What happened then was

certainly no fault of Dr. Ritchie, a Medical Officer whose patient

and enlightened work in restoring a failing race had earned him a

crown in Heaven, twice over. It was a fault of tact, reacting on that

interesting intangible, the Samoan temperament.

We had been there long enough for the natives to report any sickness

in the region. Now we were hurrying to board the launch. What happened

then was characteristic of Samoan dilly-dally. Several natives came

running up with the cry: “There’s a woman who has been having a baby

for five days! It’s half in, half out!” (They were describing, I

suppose, a “hand presentation.”) All Savaii had known that we were

there, but it had just occurred to them to call a doctor. Dr. Ritchie,

on the march, had no instruments with him, and experience told him

that the woman was as good as dead. To examine her would mean an

out-of-the-way trip, and Governor Richardson was impatient for the

pompous _malanga_ to move on. So it moved.

Even then I felt the seriousness of that diplomatic blunder. Here was

a chance for the Administration, out for show, to make a beautiful

gesture. Of course there was no hope for the woman, but it would have

made an immense impression of kindness if the party had turned their

launch around and wasted a day with the dying mother. It would have had

the dramatic effect they wanted.

But the mistake was made among a people who were nursing many

grievances, most of them imaginary. When the calamitous Mau Rebellion

broke in 1927 that incident was remembered. Years later, after the

messy thing had subsided, one of the Mau leaders, Fau’mui’na--since

promoted to a good government post--told me that official neglect of

the woman did much toward fomenting revolt. That and the shooting of

Tamasese, exiled as a nuisance and a royal pretender....

* * * * *

No war-captured country ever had a better government than these islands

enjoyed after New Zealand’s soldiery took over in 1914 a group which

the League of Nations later changed from German Samoa to the mandate of

Western Samoa. It was in refreshing contrast to Australia’s early rule

in New Guinea. Even before the uniformed Anzacs had left Samoa there

was a clear-headed scientific attempt to look into social and health

conditions. New Zealand, with her high cultural standards, had long

studied the splendid race of Maoris, whom she had governed well. At

home a million-and-a-half New Zealanders lived alongside 70,000 Maoris

whose population had increased and whose rights had been maintained

under a benevolent rule. Yes, Western Samoa was fortunate in her new

government which had never shown a selfish financial motive behind any

of its acts. But the Mau Rebellion came, and its “cruel oppressions”

have been so sensationalized by newspaper propagandists that the

average reader asks: How did the administrators come to grow hoofs and

horns overnight? Well, they didn’t.

In 1923 Dr. T. Russell Ritchie came in as Chief Medical Officer and

his four years there were as remarkable for scientific achievement

as anything accomplished by Gorgas in cleaning up Cuba and Panama.

In civil administration you’ll find mistakes everywhere this side of

Heaven. But even the mistakes were motivated by a fiery zeal to show

the world New Zealand’s disinterestedness. Education and public health

were the features in a program so thorough that it should not be

forgotten.

It was a demonstration of preventive medicine unexcelled in the

tropics. By 1926 a death rate of over thirty per thousand was reduced

to twenty in four Samoan districts. Yaws was practically eliminated,

infant welfare work had brought down the average mortality under five

years to the lowest in the Pacific--before Tonga worked out that

problem. Soil sanitation had become the rule instead of the exception;

in 1921 New Zealand had sent a commission to Australia to study the

Foundation’s hookworm campaigns there; Ritchie had adapted it to

Western Samoa with marvelous results. He was bringing in pure piped

water; on islands like Savaii, which is very rainy but so lava-porous

that it has no streams, he had overridden Polynesia’s superstition

and used church roofs as watersheds for storage tanks. New Zealand’s

successful medical work was becoming a model for other island groups.

There could not have been a better one. Germany’s last census in

1911 showed a population of 33,476. In 1917, after three years in

possession, New Zealanders counted 37,196. In 1918 pandemic influenza,

a scourge that baffled world medicine, mowed the natives down. But the

Mandate’s care brought them back so steadily that in 1933--despite the

hellish work of the Mau Rebellion--our yaws campaign workers counted

48,300. This last estimate, I think, was about 1,500 short of the

actual number. Confused conditions, following years of revolt, made

the count extremely difficult. In 1936 the census showed 55,000.

From 1921 to 1931, half of those years consumed by the Mau’s hateful

destruction, New Zealand had given to Samoa between £12,500 and £14,000

annually for medical purposes alone. None of this was in the form of

a loan; it was free as a birthday present. Add to this New Zealand’s

gifts of public works,--like the native piped water supplies, for

instance,--and you have a total of some £250,000 devoted to Western

Samoa with no expectation of any return but the moral satisfaction of

seeing a race revived.

Then what was the matter with Samoa that she wanted to rebel?

* * * * *

Samoa has been plowed over so often by romance-hawkers, big and little,

that it would hardly be worth my time or yours to try to revisualize

the moonlight and song, the deep-grooved valleys, the lacy waterfalls

infested by golden girls with tumbled raven hair. On my frequent

professional visits I saw their unromantic side, yet always admired

a people who refused to be coaxed or slave-driven into the sort of

work which, to them, seemed unnecessary. Don’t dismiss the Samoan as

a happy good-for-nothing. On sterile Savaii I have seen them carrying

farm produce on their backs, mile after mile; it was the old way, and

they were working their own land. If Samoan racial pride seems to you

to be no more than backwoods vanity, remember the Polynesian brain,

one of humanity’s best. And remember that in both Samoas, Western and

American, there are as many people, perhaps, as you’ll find in one of

New York’s longer streets. The old days are done for; the days of brave

canoe-voyaging over uncharted blue waters. Among their ancestors were

baffled Alexanders, weeping for more worlds to conquer. The worlds they

found were so small, so scattered....

They have settled down to a small-town complex. For hours on end they

sit around the kava circle, talking, talking. We are outnumbered,

they say, but we are still Samoans. The New Faith is well enough. We

must still observe our ancient ceremonies, our rules of courtesy, our

carefully graded social distinctions, and every complication of our

political structure. Listen to that old chief over there. He can recite

his ancestry for thirty or more generations back. He is an aristocrat,

and his memory is long, they say. All our memories are long.

This is not all poppycock. The Samoan is a born gentleman. Although

books have been a stranger to him since the dawn of history, he is

reading now. He is a nationalist and his reasoning mind has told him

that his nationalism will have international support. Inwardly he

believes that he is smarter than a European, and he wants a Samoa that

is governed by Samoans. He looks across toward the Kingdom of Tonga and

asks, “If they govern themselves, why can’t we? Tongans don’t work for

Europeans. They hire them.”

All such ideas are splendid, if impractical and slightly ridiculous.

They had much to do with the disastrous Mau.

The good Samoan mind is still factional. When the Dutch explorers first

saw Apia they found a people who lacked the solidarity that welded

Tonga. Each of Samoa’s three main islands had its own complicated

aristocracy and tribal intrigue. It was Japan without a Mikado. You

would have thought that the descendants of voyaging warriors would have

developed the leadership that pulls a country together. Perhaps the

Samoans were too innately civilized to crave a Hitler and a generation

of massacres. It was the European’s job to drag them out of the Stone

Age into the Bomb Age--all in a century and a half. By 1900 they could

use rifles well, as witness the small butchery of Marines that led to

the partition of the two Samoas between Germany and the United States.

Cloying praise has shared in spoiling the native Samoan. Robert Louis

Stevenson was the worst sinner. It was too easy to sentimentalize

their sweet and gentle women, their courteous patriarchal chiefs, the

waterfalls that sang like fountains day and night. Before Hollywood

went South Sea and flattered them with the camera, Stevenson had told

us in charming, balanced sentences how he had lived among Greeks in

Eden’s Vale. Samoan conceit became elephantoid under this pretty

coddling, and the abundant orators around the kava ring told them

again that they occupied the Navel of the World. It was never raucous

boasting. As I have said, the Samoans are a race of gentlefolk.

* * * * *

The medical problem in Western Samoa was more than a matter of lining

them up, treating them, sending them home. In American Samoa, our Navy

tried the efficiency method, but it didn’t work very well with a people

who live on ceremony as much as Japan did under the Shogunate. A sick

Samoan, if he has rank, pays for his operation a thousandfold before he

is home and recovered.

The Samoan social system could ramify its way across a hundred library

shelves. To be brief, its core is the _Matai_, or master. This title

goes to the head of the _Ainga_, or family, and is handed down like an

heirloom. The title _Tufunga_ is high, and carries with it the greatest

dignity, and the honors that go with it have always been recognized.

To the practical modern doctor the old ceremonial is what can’t be

cured and must be endured. Take the ceremonial journey they call the

_malanga_--if a Samoan goes visiting relatives and takes the whole

village along, it becomes a _malanga_, and the visitors are apt to eat

the host’s provisions down to the last taro, while he bites his nails

in secret and publicly implores his guests to stay longer. But this

generosity has a true Christmas spirit--you give something and expect

something back. Pretty soon the host will be on a _malanga_ of his

own--then it will be his turn to do the feasting, and yours to pay for

it.

Treating a sick Samoan is an ordeal for the doctor and it is not always

so easy on the patient. N.M.P. Ielu Kuresa, an honored graduate of our

School, wrote an article for our medical journal, the _Native Medical

Practitioner_, in which he described the rigmarole which surrounds a

simple surgical operation. This is his account, in brief:--

“To be operated on by a doctor does not mean the doctor’s bill only.

Custom and etiquette must be complied with. In the first place,

the scene will be at the patient’s own home.... Having come to the

conclusion that he must be operated on, he will first inform his

immediate family of his intentions. At this stage a daughter or son,

perhaps residing some distance away, will have to be sent for in order

to participate in a family meeting to decide whether the sick person’s

wishes should be carried out, or whether a further try of other

native medicine or treatment be applied.” Every Matai, under these

circumstances, must make peace with his kinsmen; otherwise “it means

carrying with you bad luck and perhaps better chances of dying. Samoans

are very particular about their selection of physicians and will travel

miles to get to a good surgeon, leaving another doctor who might be

close to their village.”

All the related Matais are informed of the coming event. Then the

Orators are brought into play. They assemble at the sick man’s house,

and there is a contest of eloquence, wishing the patient “all good

luck and God’s never-failing help....” So the Orators must get their

pork and the sympathizers must feast--“... food in such a quantity as

befits the title of the sick person ... a whole roasted pig, or even

two, bread or biscuits and of course taro by the score ... the first

installment on operating expenses.” Any other stricken member of the

_Ainga_, a wife or child, gets the same ceremony, scaled down to the

social importance of the sufferer.

“The first expense, then, can be from £1 to £5, to be conservative.”

If the Matai happens to be hard up he must borrow pigs from his

in-laws. “At times, just to conform with Samoan customs, if no pigs are

forthcoming from the son-in-law or the daughter-in-law, or the sister,

the _Ainga_ must resort to parting with a share of the family lands, or

some other form of property.”

This blow-off ends the first scene. A boat is probably necessary

to carry the patient to the hospital. The crew offers its services

free--But wait. The expedition is called _ole si’ingama’i_,

“party-carrying-the-sick.” The boating expedition swells to a

heavy-laden fleet. And don’t forget the _Tulafale_, the all-pervading

Orators, bringing their wives and children and in-laws.

Etiquette demands that there shall be a stop or two on the way.

Etiquette also demands that leading families provide a splendid

barbecue. Samoan hospitality, carefully gauged by the family code,

holds the patient long enough to get well--or else. The visitors know

that it is their ancient right to demand food, and that their hosts

will be their guests someday and there’ll be another big picnic. The

visitors make gifts, too; usually fine mats and tapa cloths. These

gifts are a part of the prevalent gentleman’s code.

The patient gets to the hospital--alive, let’s say.

“Parties-carrying-the-sick” are not allowed in wards, so they are

settled in a base-camp in a near-by village, as guests of the _Ainga_

there. The visitors contribute more pigs, and mats which cost from one

pound up, according to historic value. These expenses, Ielu writes,

“will no doubt appear absurd to the European mind.... It may all be in

the course of life, according to the Samoan way of living, yet a pig is

a pig and a fine mat is a fine mat.”

Then comes the operation. The native pastor and an Orator have been

at the patient’s bedside. The parson and the _Tulafale_ have said

their prayer, made their speeches. Back in the camp there is wholesale

cooking. The occasion demands ... “something to mark the occurrence.

The presentation will be done publicly and the food announced aloud

wherever it is being presented. The announcing is usually done when

the patient has been brought back to the ward after the operation.”

The sick man, if he got well, was in for such an entertainment bill

as never faced Lucullus. If he died the funeral would be on the same

lavish scale and his family would have to pay for it.

Ielu tells of operating on I’inga, an aristocrat. Ielu was a brilliant

surgeon, and the patient’s elephantoid scrotum was such a simple matter

that he let him walk a short distance to the hospital. That should have

cut the cost. He didn’t need boats or a base camp or a lusty entourage.

However, this proud I’inga was compelled by custom to make a large food

presentation every day of his illness; daily 100 loaves of bread with

sugar and butter and two whole roast pigs went down to his account. His

title of Matai was a high one, therefore he had to pay in fine mats for

the daily _sua_ (pig) presentations. The party cost him five pounds in

bread, and pigs were worth about seven pounds apiece. The whole job set

him back forty-four pounds, thirteen shillings.

Surgical and hospital fees came to four pounds.

* * * * *

One night in 1924 I was dining at Vailima with Governor Richardson,

who lived in the romantic house which Robert Louis Stevenson used to

occupy. Above it loomed the steep hill which is topped by Stevenson’s

tomb. So many tourist-ladies have climbed the mud-slippery trail to

visit this shrine that I blush to mention it.

Governor Sir George had risen to high office by force of sheer ability.

War had advanced him from the rank of drill sergeant to general

command. A born Englishman, he had immediately won New Zealand’s

respect for his Mandate administration. You had to admire him. He had

the middle-class Englishman’s anti-Yankee prejudices; a brush with

our United States Navy control in American Samoa hadn’t helped. Don’t

think that he was any martinet when it came to native administration.

Devotedly, honestly he wished to be the father of his flock. But he

seemed rather too self-satisfied. Touchy Samoa politely resented

his attitude, “See what we are doing for you. Come to us if there’s

anything you want done.” I longed to tell him that he was doing too

much for the Samoan, feeding him with modernism faster than he could

digest it. But you didn’t tell things to Governor Richardson. He told

you.

At that meeting, as at many others, we had discussed the need of a

modern native medical school in Fiji, and as usual Richardson had been

favorable to the plan. The expenses of governing a country that had

3,000 chiefs to 40,000 population was the only thing that held him back

until Queen Salote’s generous offer in 1926, when he pledged Samoa to

share in a scheme in which he had always heartily believed. During

that long evening’s talk in 1924 I didn’t mention the woman on Savaii

who died in childbirth. But if a competent Native Medical Practitioner

had been on the spot that day the story of Richardson’s administration

might have had a happier ending. I think he had a right to feel proud

of the medical situation, for the Mandate was already training native

nurses in the model hospitals, was using one of our old-school Native

Medical Practitioners, and had socialized medicine to a point where

every Samoan paid a head-tax of about five dollars a year for all

treatments.

* * * * *

Years of administering that model colony bred a certain smugness in

the good Governor Richardson; and smugness is always dangerous in

handling native affairs. Early in 1927 he went to the New Hebrides on

a Royal Commission with Governor Sir Eyre Hutson of Fiji. Richardson

was on the crest of the wave, feeling his oats in every pore. When

the party got back to Fiji I wanted to return his Samoan hospitality,

but Richardson’s mind harbored a single thought: go up to Government

House again and tell Sir Eyre how to run Fiji. Hutson was one of the

smoothest products of the colonial school, and he had learned enough

about the treatment of native races to have made Fiji a model for

all students of island administration. However, Richardson got to

Government House and told Hutson; and Hutson smiled rosily, suavely

agreeing that he ought to study Samoa and get some tips on how to run

Fiji.

When Richardson finished telling Hutson and returned to Apia, the Mau

Rebellion broke right in his face.

* * * * *

As a doctor I cannot diagnose Samoa’s illness without looking further

into the causes that led up to it. The status of the half-caste in

Polynesia was at the root of the disturbance. While in dark-skinned

Melanesia a touch of white is often a stigma, it is a matter of pride

to the peach-tan Maoris, Cook Islanders and Samoans. The European may

turn his shoulder on the half-caste, but the Polynesian forgets his

insular pride in an eager mating with Europeans; every child with a

trace of Northern blood is looked upon as something which approaches

the racial ideal. The Samoan highly respects the child of a mixed

union--provided the native mother has not been deserted by her husband

or mate. There is the case of one distinguished British scientist

who experimented with going native, chose a Samoan woman, wore a

_lavalava_ around his belly and a hibiscus flower over his ear. Called

back to London to account for himself, he left the girl where he found

her--and the baby. It was no disgrace that she had to do washing;

needy aristocrats often do that. Nor was she ashamed that she couldn’t

show a marriage license. She hung her head because Johnson (I’ll call

him) had deserted her, and before the baby was born. Johnson wandered

to Chicago, where he died; but his beach-widow carefully guards her

beautiful son for fear that some of his father’s relatives may come

along and claim him.

I heard two half-caste boys quarreling. One howled, “Jonisoni!” and

the other yelled, “Anisoni!” They were not accusing one another of

bastardy, but raising the accusation that their mothers had been

deserted by Johnson and Anderson.

When Germany ruled Samoa every man whose father was registered as a

European could himself register as a European. Some so classified were

less than one thirty-second white, and many of them could not speak

a word of English. When New Zealand took over she had to accept the

Made-in-Germany rule. The mental and moral worth of these mixed bloods

depended, of course, on the quality of their parents. The product

varies; but the more I travel the more I see the brilliant results when

two superior beings of opposing races are bred together. After a while

I’m going to tell about a few New Zealanders who are legally classed as

Maoris.

The fuse that led up to the Mau explosion carried one very dangerous

combustible--half-caste jealousy of European social prestige. The

jealousy was mutual, I think, for the European wife grew watchful of

the lovely half-caste girl with her soft, long-lashed eyes and velvet

skin. This girl was getting an education and her parents were grumbling

because she could not step into the social sphere which her mind, her

manners and her beauty demanded, in all fairness.

Insurgency centered in O. F. Nelson, a half-caste who possessed genius

both for business and for political leadership. The chain of Nelson

trading stores had bulked him about $1,500,000, an unthinkable fortune

to be gathered out of Samoa. Like Nelson, the discontented half-castes

had educated their daughters in colleges and upper schools, yet had

gained no status for them in European society. The full-blooded Samoan

looked up to Nelson, one derived from their own race and so powerful

that the Government had to come to him for favors. When he rode out in

his handsome car he displayed a coat of arms as large and gaudy as the

Governor’s own, and his A.D.C. was in uniform. The native majority was

under his control.

_Mau_ means “Stand Fast,” and the stand was against real and fancied

wrongs. Trouble brewed when Western Samoan traders howled because

American Samoa was outbuying them in the copra market. The quarrel

became a crazy patchwork, with Richardson trying to patch the patches.

Half-castes were clamoring to be counted as Europeans, even though

the change would have endangered their rights. Then Prohibition, that

indomitable mischief-maker, raised its old silk hat. Because the

Customs House, through an error, got more than its share of liquor on

one consignment, the League of Nations, which controlled the Mandate’s

thirst, ordained that Western Samoa’s Europeans should have liquor

for medical purposes only. Up to then strong drink had been wisely

forbidden the natives. Under Prohibition, indignant Europeans taught

Samoans to make a vile intoxicant called “bush beer,” and to help

themselves to a share of it. All this added native drunkenness to the

pattern of revolt.

The Orators were putting their heads together. At every _Fono_ the

Talking Men intoned “Samoa for the Samoans” and suavely asked the

aristocrats, “How can nobles and chiefs serve under this common fellow

Richardson?” The mess, which largely interests me from a medical

point of view, harked back again to the Governor’s _Malanga_, which I

described at the opening of this chapter; it included two officials

who were later accused of corrupting Samoan youths. A schoolteacher

who showed us around Savaii was also involved. Two suicides resulted

from the scandal, which set the Talking Men off again, asking why the

Europeans sent such people to teach them morals.

On top of these grievances, and dozens of smaller ones, came the Mau.

At first it was passive resistance, then in 1928 there was bloodshed.

Tamasese, a justly exiled pretender to Samoa’s shadow-throne, came back

to Apia with a howling demonstration. Richardson, tired and sick, had

resigned in favor of Colonel Allen, a New Zealander with a cool blue

eye and guts to spare. When the mob battered in Officer Abram’s head

with a stone Allen’s police fired on them, as they were ordered to do

in case of violence.

That was all the blood spilled; but it might have been better for the

Samoans if the rebellion had been stifled by force of arms. It went

on for years, passively. Nelson was banished to New Zealand, where he

managed his revolt by wire. After the quarrel was settled, over the

festering carcass of Samoa, there came Nelson’s Napoleonic return. But

there was no Waterloo; only a popular clamor to give him the place of

leader in the native parliament as well as to admit him to the European

Legislative Council. The new Administration refused him this bi-racial

privilege with the remark, “You can’t wear trousers and a _lavalava_ at

the same time.”

* * * * *

As you study small life under the lens and watch the microcosm work out

its cycle, so you can look at Western Samoa and see the after-effects

of war over this wrongheaded world. The doctor rushes in afterwards

and tries to patch up the innocent and the guilty. Samoa, when the Mau

subsided, knew a terrible aftermath. The Samoans hadn’t got back Samoa;

all they had received was a resurgence of the native diseases which a

careful Mandate had struggled so valiantly and successfully to cleanse.

Devoted men had worked for many years to accomplish what five years of

rebellion had undone.

It was five years after the Mau began before co-operation between

the Government and the Rockefeller Foundation could begin salvage

operations. When I returned to Samoa to have the Foundation’s share

in cleaning up the Mau pigsty, I shook my head at the sorry change.

The beautiful Samoan children--and nothing can be more beautiful--were

pitiful little things, their skins a scab, their faces eaten with yaws.

The tea-rose skin had faded to gray; intestinal parasites were sucking

again at their blood and lymph. The Mau had turned against its own

people instead of its enemy. Argument had triumphed over reason, the

Polynesian had junked his high intelligence and become an Intellectual.

Samoa for the Samoans! Ignore every order of the white intruder with

all their nosy medical men, dinging away at keeping clean, keeping the

water pure, reporting sickness. Ignore their impudent instructions

about repairing fly-proof latrines. Ignore vital statistics. Tear them

up. Ignore everything but Samoa for Samoans.

The latrines rotted or were torn down by the indignant. Water supplies

festered. Clean in his habits from days of old, the Samoan jettisoned

the ancient tabu and gave over mischievously to soil pollution. Fields

and villages stank with a foulness which defied the Administration

while it killed the Samoans. It was hard to approach some of the

settlements, they were so odorous of decay. Samoa had certainly cut off

her nose to spite her face.

It was impossible to collect vital statistics during that spell of

madness. The death toll was a matter of eye measurement. We plunged in

with rolled-up sleeves to give all possible help. Tragic as it was,

the devastation proved to be less than that of the influenza epidemic

in 1918. Yaws was the principal problem, almost universal with the

young. A giant campaign was organized, our combined workers gave 89,000

injections, including treatments and re-treatments. For experience

has taught medicine that this disease is stubborn and may reappear in

deep-seated conditions after the superficial symptoms have vanished.

However, in our wide mass treatments our main effort was to cure the

open sores which spread infection.

In 1933, when New Zealand took its yaws census of Samoa, the figures

showed the population on the upgrade again. The forward march will go

on, I think, unless some Liberator decides to turn these islands over

to Germany or Russia or Italy. Then again there will be hell in warm

water.

* * * * *

American Samoa, Uncle Sam’s split in the three-cornered deal of 1900,

I did not survey until my Pacific adventures were nearing a close,

although after 1926 I visited it briefly every year. The reason for my

delay is simple; I had to wait for Uncle Sam’s invitation. Working so

long on the other side of the line and rather feeling the American lack

of interest in an American enterprise, I’m afraid that I was rather

prejudiced against the administration of our lovely little possession,

centered in Pago Pago.

In many ways I was happily disappointed when I came at last to make

a short survey--all in spite of the fact that I was annoyed by the

unfairness of our home folks in their comparison of the two Samoas. So

many sweet lady-tourists from Boston and Keokuk have sailed into Pago

Pago’s bright waters, which lie smooth as a lake inside the leafy oval

of a dead volcano. There’s the old Flag again and our gallant sailors

in white. Why, this is the naughty land of Miss Sadie Thompson! Why,

we’ve all seen that lovely, wicked play called “Rain”--but the scenery

doesn’t do Pago Pago anything like justice.... It’s all so peaceful

and orderly, isn’t it? Quite different from Western Samoa over there,

where they’ve certainly made a hash of it. See the handsome Commandant,

who seems to boss Pago Pago with a velvet glove. Let’s call him “Uncle

Samoa”!

This is a sort of autopropaganda, born of national pride. Overnight

trippers cannot see--how can they?--that Uncle Sam has guinea-pigged a

race, or that part of a race which is identical to the people on the

western islands. The tourists haven’t had time to find out that the New

Zealand Administration, working against great odds with a population

about four times as large as that which America controls, is a shining

example of government for the people who must be governed. And in

spite of the Mau Rebellion, New Zealand is building up a better racial

spirit. The people in their Samoa are better educated, better prepared

to meet civilized conditions. They speak better English and are far,

far better mannered.

Uncle Samoa, in fact, is an honest quarterdeck hero. His real interest

in his share of the islands is to maintain a naval base; and that, in

all common sense, is extremely necessary. He salutes the Regulations

and does the best he can. It is certainly no fault of his if some

antediluvian chapter in the book limits his service to eighteen months

and orders him to sea duty or paper work or rolling hoops. Orders is

orders, and tomorrow he’ll be saluting the next man that comes along

to hang his cap on the official hat-rack. It’s the same all down the

line. The Governor is just getting the swing of his job, then he’s off;

the Chief Medical Officer is just beginning to organize his theories

of native diseases--then good-by. In the schools there’s a continual

change of teachers, hence a general sloppiness of instruction. The

impermanence affects the enlisted man, often not unpleasantly. He

chooses a temporary mate, raises a few children, and when the time

comes to sail back to the States he hands his family over to some newly

arrived buddy. Pago Pago is full of wistful college widows, scanning

the sea with dreamy Samoan eyes and wondering what the next ship will

bring.

A great many of our “administered” natives, I found, were enlisted

in the Marines with the same pay as American boys. The results were

often unfortunate. Certainly it was another move toward taking away the

Samoan’s national character.

This is all on the black side of the slate,--to mix a metaphor,--the

white side showed a great deal to American credit. In 1918 our Navy

successfully quarantined influenza when it was almost decimating

Western Samoa. But I must remind you that only one ship arrived in our

Samoa during that year, whereas the New Zealanders’ group had the job

of overhauling vessels from all the Seven Seas. However, our work was

thorough and promptly quelled the scourge.

It was remarkable to me how well the Navy’s medicos carried on, in

spite of handicaps. The newcomer would pick up his predecessor’s

unfinished business, work it out in his own way, and hand the job over

to the next one. Of the twelve thousand inhabitants whom he was there

to supervise he would find twelve thousand spoiled by coddling on the

one hand, unexplained discipline on the other. We had been pursuing

the American way, serving them large doses of democracy overnight,

forgetting that democracy to the aristocratic Samoan is like raw

whisky to a newborn babe. From the chiefs down to the humblest kanakas

a “Hello, buddy” attitude was all too general. Nobody could tell the

natives anything. False prosperity had come with the Navy’s colossal

expenditures, and among a people to whom a handful of pennies had once

meant fortune this easy money was demoralizing. The native official and

the native houseworker clamored for higher pay and shorter hours. The

“gimme” habit was an ubiquitous nuisance.

Four Chief Medical Officers, coming and going, had developed some good

teamwork. The first of the four had very sensibly framed a policy

he could hand on to the next one, and the results were good. The

indifference of the people was always a stumbling block. It was up to

the Navy to install a decent latrine system, and no native would lend a

helping hand. They expected everything to be done for them--and it was.

I admired the field and hospital work of the chief pharmacists’ mates

and the petty officers under them. Most of them were university

graduates, technicians in dentistry, entomology, pathology,

bacteriology, X-ray and all the other necessaries. Watching their

performance, you had to bulge your chest and say, “That’s a Navy job.

No American parents could ask a better training for their sons.”

One superior of these medical gobs had had rather a crude way of

distributing benefits. If natives didn’t show up for treatment they

were hauled out and given the get-well-damn-you orders. In case an

inhabitant refused to be hauled out, lusty police came and hauled him

properly. Education by force stopped a general yaws infection, which

was good. But it dampened Samoan confidence in America’s kindly rule,

which was bad.

There was an organized body of trained Samoan nurses; the regulation

pay was fifteen dollars a month, increased by a monthly dollar for

each year’s service. Good pay, but the tendency was to get married and

go home. This wasn’t at all bad, since it brought new blood into the

work, and those who retired formed an alumnae body and became health

missionaries in their villages. Their training was excellent and

included the all-important items, baby feeding and dietetics.

An acute conjunctivitis generally called “Samoan eye” was prevalent in

both groups. One school of thought still maintains that it is a form of

trachoma. When you say “_Fa’a Samoa_” down there you are saying “Samoan

fashion,” and that style of treating the eyes isn’t so good. When

natives go blind, as so many do, it is usually due to their inherited

witch-doctoring. They use a _Fa’a Samoa_ treatment, which consists in

scrubbing the eyes with coco fiber soaked in salt water. After a good

course of this the entire eyeball is destroyed. It was encouraging to

see how the chief pharmacists’ mates, who ranked as District Officers,

were going at the problem. Every newborn baby got its drop of argyrol,

and school children had their daily treatment. Adults were harder to

handle; they were apt to wander away and try _Fa’a Samoa_, then come

back stone-blind.

_Fa’a Samoa_ for deafness was another medical annoyance. It consisted

in tucking small shells into the afflicted ear and, in most cases,

destroying the drum. Commander Paul Crosby, then Senior Medical

Officer, deserves high praise for his supervision of eye and ear cases,

and for the improvement all around in native health.

* * * * *

The Mau was shorter in American Samoa than on the other side, but

it came to the Naval Administration before it reached New Zealand’s

mandate. Part of our Mau was a sad story, and promptly hushed-up for

the good of the Service. Trouble started among half-castes and traders.

Then it was known that some of the Naval staff were in the conspiracy.

Zealots even confined Governor Terhune in his house. I knew Terhune

back in the days when I practised in Mexico, and remembered him as

an upright officer and a square-shooter. But a Board of Inquiry came

sailing down to Pago and would have called Terhune to account for

something or other, if he had been alive. Over his dead body he was

absolved of all blame. The guilty officer was punished; and I hope that

tardy justice cleansed the memory of poor Terhune, who had decided to

die like an officer and a gentleman.

But it was a curious finish for the ruler of what one colonial news

lady headlined “A Kindly Despotism,” commenting on the Governor who

happened to be in office, “With astonishing disregard of American

constitutional principles he combines in his person executive,

legislative and judicial authority.” The lady otherwise flattered our

Naval Administration, and made allowances for the difficulties it had

overcome. I make allowances too. It’s a bitter thing to be responsible

for the work of colonial empire.

Along Miss Sadie Thompson’s haunted beach I was reassured by a fringe

of modern privies, built firmly. Tourists might have been offended by

this, but to me it was far more beautiful than if the beach had been

left to pure romance and soil pollution, which have combined to destroy

so many tribes.

I was glad to scribble in my notes:--

Medical conditions excellent--have never seen schools so clean as at

Ofu and Olosenga under Chief Pharmacist’s Mate Campbell. _Ta’u_ under

Harris far better than the average, but not so good as Campbell’s

work. Little or no ringworm and no conjunctivitis among 300 school

children. Campbell and Harris had reached independent conclusion that

eye manifestations in Samoa can be controlled by argyrol, therefore no

trachoma. Teachers instill drops daily in children’s eyes. Scars on

lids and cataracts are due to native treatment....

And to go on:

Mrs. Harris told about The Sanctified in L.M.S. mission here. If

you’re Sanctified it means you’ve led a pure life, so you’re socially

exalted and allowed to wear a hat to church. You’re not in the Club

unless you keep up your dues, $1.50 every six months. Before communion

The Sanctified meet and confess, to find out if they’re still fit

members. The ones who admit that their morals have slipped during

the month are fined twenty-five cents, which entitles them to be

re-sanctified and take communion. Mrs. Harris tells of her servant who

had been wrestling with her soul. Question: Should she blow $1.50 to

get herself sanctified, or save her money and have fun? Finally she

decided to have fun.

These two Samoas, because the population was so small, were like

handy laboratories for the study of racial breeding, its decline

and its rise. They offered such opportunities for new knowledge on

the subject of one all-important disease--filariasis and resultant

elephantiasis--that I suggested to the International Health Board a

special study there, as the debility caused by filarial fever was

cutting into labor efficiency all over the Pacific. Commander Phelps,

an extraordinarily able physician, found that in Samoa the daytime

microfilariae did not differ from the night variety. Dr. Buxton of the

London School of Tropical Medicine thought the _Aedes variagatus_ the

principal offender. No satisfactory cure has been found, but Commander

Phelps experimented with intramuscular injections of chenopodium, and

with good results. These were much the same as the ones I gave the six

cannibals down in New Guinea, with a decided effect on whipworms.

The roundworm question was an important one in Samoa, and always had

been. An early observer, nearly a hundred years ago, remarked that

the natives were infested with “_lumbrici_.” In my time the Governor

himself vomited one up, much to the sailor’s delight. Strangely enough,

hookworm was scarce; moisture, heat and soil pollution invited the

pest, which did not seem to respond. In spite of Pago Pago’s handsome

fringe of waterside latrines, the building of them was a problem among

the islands. If they were made of wood, fierce winds blew them down.

Concrete was fairly expensive. Lieutenant Commander P. J. Halloran came

across with the best idea yet for tropical arrangements, and although

the humorists called them “Halloran’s Privies,” many were set up and

proved entirely satisfactory. A unit cost $400 and would accommodate

ten, five on a side. Molded in quantity--for they were practically all

concrete--they would cost about $250 per unit, built over a concrete

trough with an automatic flushing system. I lack space to go into

detail, but to tropical administrators of public health this plan ought

to be a boon.

The Navy was going at the job in its own way, and in many regards was

extremely thorough. In the hospitals it even made blood tests to

determine Samoa’s racial origin. Hawaiians, as blood-examination has

found, are in Group A, the world’s largest racial stock, the Caucasian

or Caucasoid. But some of the Pacific blacks are also heavy in “A.” The

aborigines are usually in Group O, as witness the American Indian. But

blood donors in the hospital at Pago Pago revealed such a predominance

of Group O that, from that angle at least, it would prove that the

Polynesians are of a mixed stock.

Mixed in blood or mixed in ideals, I still have faith in the

Polynesian’s ability to survive against a civilization that has been

thrust upon him. To our credit, the native population of American Samoa

has about doubled since we took command. In 1900 it was 5,679, and in

less than forty years it had risen to 11,638. America’s experiment is

restoring health to our Polynesians. In doing so, I hope we have not

lost them their way of living, which was a very good way indeed.

Although quite unfortified, American Samoa, centering in Pago Pago,

is a powerful link in that chain of steel we are drawing across the

Pacific. And what if an aggressor should happen to want it? Well, it’s

one of the great fueling stations, and oil is the food of war nowadays.

CHAPTER V

PIG ARISTOCRACY

The Adventist pastor who had only two converts led me into a dark,

gnarled jungle. With every step I was forced to remember that this was

not Samoa with its kindly government and courteous natives. We were

on one of the blackest spots in the New Hebrides, and right across

the stream was wild Malekula where the Big Nambas had added liquor

and firearms to the ancient art of man-eating. “This way, please,”

whispered the Pastor, as if it were a prayer meeting. Ahead of us broke

a light from many torches, moving ceremoniously around a great square.

Now and then a rifle cracked. Musicians were whistling on reeded Pan’s

pipes; _oom, oom_ sounded the enormous wooden drums. Over the spectacle

towered graven images, demoniacal human shapes and forms of swooping

birds. It was a barbaric choral scene, everything centered on the star

performers. Then I turned my eyes--and saw it. A painted man stood on

a high stone pulpit, gesturing and counting. Below him another painted

man wielded a mallet. Victims were being hauled up, screaming, only

to be silenced by a crack on the skull. There was a chanted hymn of

praise. The donor, who had contributed the sacrifice, held an honored

place apart. Crack went the mallet again. Another body was dragged

away....

They were killing pigs.

* * * * *

This is a glimpse of the New Hebrides as I saw them in 1925. On other

groups we had already launched curative campaigns as wide as our

numbers would permit. My plans for an advanced School to train Native

Practitioners had not come to anything definite, and there I stood

alone on one of Oceania’s plague spots. Well, not alone, for I had

Malakai with me.

I had come full of curiosity, hoping to check up some of the causes

of racial decay in the New Hebrides, that unfortunate double chain

of islands where the population had been dwindling for well over a

hundred years. Jogging shoulders with suave Samoa on the one hand

and tamed Fiji on the other, these thirty wild islands remained the

lawless stepchildren of a bad government called the Condominium

(aptly nicknamed “Pandemonium”), a sort of Siamese-twin arrangement

made between England and France in 1907. There was a Frenchman in one

Government House, a Britisher in the other. The only occasions I ever

saw the Condominium get together were on the King’s Birthday and July

Fourteenth.

The heroic pig-killing was a rather open session of one of the native

secret societies, which have controlled the New Hebrides from time

immemorial. In my study of depopulation I was glad to have seen it.

Because it was a cause of racial decline? Quite to the contrary. For

uncounted generations it had been the social pulse of tribal life.

European meddling was weakening the fabric of these mystic orders and

giving the native no substitute. Let me remind you again that races

die out for three established reasons: imported disease, the decay of

custom, and a lack of will to live. Imported disease is easily the most

important of the killers, but the three together produce results dismal

to behold.

It was on the tiny island of Atchin, off wild Malekula, that I saw the

pig ceremony. My survey was half over, and I had already seen enough

demoralization to understand what happens when the ruling white man

is too indifferent or poorly equipped to take up his burden. In Vila,

the little capital where M. D’Arbousier, a cultured mulatto gentleman,

governed for the French, and Mr. Smith-Rewse, a kindly Britisher,

did his lonely best to hold up his end, I had seen a comic-opera

demonstration of authority. The French half of the twin, it seems, was

selling the natives their worst enemies, liquor and firearms. It wasn’t

lawful, but what of the law? The native liked to drink and shoot, so

why not accommodate him? The British pretended to frown on this. How

much their frowns meant is herein illustrated:--

We were playing tennis behind the neat British Residency when a police

official was suddenly called from the game. He sauntered away and

found the trouble, a noisy altercation over a police patrol which, for

unexplained reasons, he had set in front of a trading store. Trader Le

Meskime was in a dither; the show of arms was scaring away natives who

had come to buy toddy. A large number of them, mixed with Tonkinese,

were huddled outside, not daring to approach. _Incroyable!_ What an

outrage to keep an honest Frenchman from his honest profits! So the

accommodating British police official moved his guard and the dark

customers filed in to spend a week’s wages on a Saturday-night jag, as

usual.

The sale of booze and bullets to a Stone Age people made the French

very popular, you may be sure. French ships with supplies of opium

for the Tonkinese, and some for the natives, were popular, too. Ask

a discouraged official if there were no laws in the New Hebrides and

he’d groan, “Plenty of them.” Perhaps he would show you a “Joint

Resolution,” passed in May, 1922, for the Island of Tanna and

beginning, “The Joint Order of January 2nd is repealed.” It was a nice

piece of paper, which seemed to cover everything in the way of land

claims. The only trouble was that the French and British settlers

between them had put in more claims for property than there was land

in the New Hebrides. In the old days any pioneer who came along would

trade a bauble with a native chief for “all the land from here to there

and as far back as I can see.” The native, who probably had no claim on

the land, would cheerfully make his mark on a piece of paper, call in

a friend as witness--and another rainbow sale would be more or less on

record.

The Joint Court was supposed to settle the quarrels that rose over

shaky claims. But since the Court postponed its meetings from year to

year, the witness who opposed a claim was usually dead before they met.

The judicial body could not function unless all members were present,

and some were always on leave. Soreheads proclaimed that the Court

preferred it that way--the fewer witnesses the less trouble.

The French had a way of shooting the natives off land on which a

“legal” claim had been filed. The dazed aborigines, of course, hadn’t

the vaguest idea what it was all about. But the canny Frenchmen knew.

They always raided native plantations where the trees were bearing and

gathered the nuts until their own newly planted acres began to yield.

Black men on Malekula, Santo, and Malo were doing as little as possible

to help the unwelcome white man, though their murderers ran to the

missions to be handily converted and missionaries often sheltered

refugees from the rough work of “recruiting” for contract labor. French

planters were tricking men into service, holding them indefinitely in

the chains of drink and debt. Only about 13,000 of the possible 50,000

inhabitants were under any semblance of government control. There were

eight government agents to enforce what order they could with a handful

of sketchy native police. In a perfect climate, blessing a soil that

flowed with milk and honey, there were but four British plantations.

The French had crowded the others out.

The public health physician must study a population from all angles,

and New Hebridean angles were odd. It would require volumes of

anthropological data, with charts, to outline the cobweb of family

structure on these islands.[5] In one rough sentence: The northern

and more Polynesian half of this double archipelago was matrilinear

(inheriting through the mother) while the negroid folk of the south

were patrilinear (inheriting from the father’s side). Among the bearded

natives of Malekula the wives were squaws, while their lords slept with

rifles and bottles of toddy. Women were forbidden the men’s sacred

enclosure. A true man cooked for himself and never let female hands

defile his food.

Women had their value, however. On one island off Malekula I watched

native boats every morning, being shoved off; the women were rowing

across to work the “gardens” (truck farms) on the opposite shore. Their

husbands sat at bow and stern, bristling with rifles; they took no

chances on their drudges being picked off by rival Nambas, sniping from

the bush.

* * * * *

In a roundabout way I have Mr. Smith-Rewse, the British Resident

Commissioner, to thank for Pastor Parker’s hospitality and for the

pains that earnest Adventist took to show me the cannibalistic

pig-killing. With the Commissioner’s party I had set out from Vila on

an inspection tour of Malekula and Santo, for health conditions on

these notoriously savage islands demanded my attention.

Except for two excellent physicians in the Presbyterian hospitals,

overworked and always embarrassed by a shortage of medicine, I found

white men in the New Hebrides grossly ignorant of the causes, cures

and prevention of tropical diseases. In Papua plantations were places

where sick men came to be cured; in the New Hebrides plantations

were seed-beds for infections that the workers carried back to the

villages. Natives had become so enfeebled that the French were

importing Tonkinese. These yellow strangers were contributing a new

disease-picture to a land that had not yet set up an immunity to the

scourges brought in by Europeans 100 years ago.

As to hookworm, the _Necator americanus_, I found the prospects pretty

doleful. I was told that if I asked for specimens on Malekula the Big

Nambas would either take a pot shot at me or run howling to the jungle.

Even the missionized ones feared that I was collecting fragments of

excreta for purposes of witch-doctoring. One of them, whom I tried to

convince to the contrary, shook his bushy head stubbornly. “No, master.

Dis would spoil me fellow altogether.” However, through the help of a

few responsible white residents, I made enough worm counts to suspect

that the general infection in the New Hebrides would run to something

over 94 per cent. That meant that on our future curative campaign we

would have to treat the whole population.

On the way to Malekula the government yacht _Euphrosyne_ touched at

little Atchin. The mission bell was ringing lustily, but when services

were over only four sad natives came out of church. Pastor Parker took

us to his house and fed us on the fat of the land--strictly vegetable

fat. After dinner we smoked pipes and cigarettes around the table, and

neither the Pastor nor his wife said a word. The Commissioner’s sins

were to be respected. Anyhow, we’d be off for Malekula in a day or so.

But on the hour when the _Euphrosyne_ was about to depart Smith-Rewse

said to our host, “Parson Parker, I expect you to see that Dr. Lambert

doesn’t go into the Big Nambas country.” A bush war was going on over

there, and the Commissioner’s word was law.

The Big Nambas and the Little Nambas, let me explain, are two savage

cults among the innumerable divisions and subdivisions in the New

Hebrides. They go naked, except for a wrapping of dried banana leaves

around their genitals. This wrapping, called the _nambas_, is large

with the Big Nambas and small with the Little Nambas. Both cults were

rather untamed in those days. Mr. Smith-Rewse told me about his last

trip to Malekula, and the murderer he brought back. The man couldn’t

understand why he was arrested, although he had just buried his infant

daughter alive. All the way back to Vila he pleaded, “Master, me no

like go jail. More better you make me belong police.” That happened in

peacetime, the Commissioner said. In wartime Malekula needed a major

general more than it needed a doctor.

Later on I saw plenty of Malekula.

So I was left alone with Pastor Parker. I went out on the veranda, lit

my pipe and heard his gentle voice saying, “Doctor, I’m afraid you’ll

have to stop smoking in the house or on the veranda. I must enforce

the rules of our faith.” A chronic smoker, I struck a compromise.

I’d move to the lawn and let the Pastor talk to me from the veranda,

if he didn’t mind shouting. This was quite satisfactory, except when

it rained. I had much idle time on my hands. Atchin was too small to

afford many conclusions, except that the people were pretty heavily

infected.

Mostly in shouts, Pastor Parker unloaded his peck of troubles. How

his predecessor had moved to another station and all his converts had

backslid when he stopped paying them a salary. He had worked on the

patronage system, and his expensive conversions had drained the mission

exchequer. Pastor Parker had never had enough money to make a wide

appeal. In several years of purely spiritual effort he had only made

two converts, a pair of primitives who were living in sin with heathen

wives. The wives always accompanied them to church.

Trouble had been waiting for Pastor Parker when he took charge. The

week they moved in, the place was raided by Big Nambas, who had plenty

of guns and did plenty of shooting. The barricaded Parkers might have

furnished long pig for the pig lovers but for a rescuing party of

Presbyterians. To Parker’s Adventist mind Presbyterians were limbs of

Satan, but they saved him just the same, and advised him to move out.

The Pastor informed them that he had come there to preach the True

Gospel, and by Jehovah, he’d stay.

He was brave according to his lights. Once, in a desperate appeal

for converts, he went alone among the Big Nambas and invited them to

shoot him. It was a sort of sanctified attempt at suicide with all the

charm of martyrdom. The savages laughed and sent him home. Either they

admired his courage or they thought he was “touched.”

He told me that he believed there was a great deal of cannibalism

on Atchin. Offered a meatless Adventist diet as an alternative to

man-eating, I could well understand their attitude. Flatulent with

three windy meals a day, I gazed morbidly at my host. I asked him

if the pig-killing ceremony he had shown me was not a symbol of

cannibalism. He thought so, vaguely. Later talks with ethnologists

assured me that my guess was right. In the Pre-Pig Era, when man-eating

was the rule instead of the exception, human beings were led up to the

sacrificial stone, and with every stroke of the mallet were counted off

to the credit of the fortunate donor. The pig is a comparative newcomer

in the Pacific, but the ritualistic ceremonies are old as Time. It is

remarkable how the pig took center-stage in New Hebridean life. He

became the unit of wealth, of social position, of tribal power. When

I was there, although his cult was vanishing with other folk ways, he

was still being bred in strange shapes for sacrifice. Wives were still

valued as swineherds, chiefs exalted for the number and odd variety of

their hogs. Murders were committed more often over pigs than over women.

It was something out of _Gulliver’s Travels_. Up to the time when

misapplied Government and applied Christianity had weakened the pulse

of the tribe, the secret society ruled these islands with a power that

was super-Masonic. There were numerous lodges, each designated by some

emblem-leaf and special tabus. A boy coming of age passed the harsh

initiation, which included circumcision or, more often, incision. Among

the incisionists the medicine men were still operating on the young

initiate by standing him in water up to his waist, thrusting a blunt

stick under the prepuce to stretch the skin and using a feather-edge

of split bamboo to cut the foreskin longitudinally from end to end.

The wound was packed with herbs, which might have been astringent and

antiseptic. The boys, treated _en masse_, were locked away for long

days of fasting. I never heard of one who died.

The ceremony I first saw was to celebrate the return of a boy from

the sacred island of Aoba, where he had gone through the cruel final

tests which would admit him into the lowest rank of the secret order.

He might work for years, maybe a lifetime, to accumulate enough pigs

to raise him a degree in native Masonry. Now he was distinguished

by a woven strip of fiber, worn something like an apron. Initiated

boys danced in front of him. Yams were stacked like cordwood around

the space where torches flared. Musicians pounded ten-foot wooden

drums, shaped like fat cigars. The tops of the drums were painted with

identical faces; the face of Tamaz, the Unseen God of All.

The ambitious native bought his way into high position in the order,

and to chieftainship, through his contribution of pig monstrosities,

especially raised for sacrifice. It was near Bushman’s Bay, Malekula,

that I first saw one of these freaks, a boar with artificially curled

tusks. These tusks had grown toward the upper jaw, then turned in

a circle backward as far as the lower jaw, where they were growing

upward again to form a spiral. He was fourteen years old; if he lived

to be twenty-one, he would be prized beyond money valuation--the pig

with the three-curled tusks. The curl is produced by knocking out what

correspond to our eye-teeth. With these gone, the teeth below have full

play, and begin to twist backward at the end of the climb. Sometimes

the curving ivory grows into the lip and tissues of the jaw, sometimes

into the jaw itself. The animal must suffer constant pain. By the time

he is ready for the altar he is fairly tough food, yet the man who

can offer such a sacrifice to the noble dead is well on the way to

mastership of his lodge.

The donor of several boars with curled tusks is immediately exalted.

Such things are important to the great Tamaz; for when a high-grade

native dies his soul goes to a high-grade heaven. The commoner, known

as “man rubbish,” must do with a pretty cheap Hereafter. Spiritual

merit is achieved at the great ritual, but there is a minor ceremony

known as “killing small,” which is more practical. Here the donor

merely taps his pigs on the back, to show that they will be sacrificed

when the time comes. The idea is to hold a surplus of pork, which might

otherwise all be eaten at one grand party.

The Big Pig Ceremony goes on for weeks of splendidly rhythmed dancing,

warriors chanting the saga of the tribe, grandees parading in elaborate

masks while many curl-tuskers die for glory.

Sometimes a white man with an eye to business has gained chieftainship

through feats of pig culture. One I knew attained high nobility by

offering his collection of freaks. He took his rank seriously and went

about in complete undress, save for a _nambas_ and a pair of curled

tusks around his neck. A friend who had known him in his other life

asked him aboard his yacht, and was so shocked by the white chiefs

fashionable nudity that he wouldn’t let him stay to dinner unless he

put on a bath towel.

All through the New Hebrides there is a carefully guarded strain of

sows which produce a certain number of pseudo-hermaphrodites with every

litter; they produce them consistently and have a special name among

breeders. I didn’t believe this until I saw several alleged bisexuals

being tenderly cared for. Undoubtedly they had both male and female

characteristics, but in every case one sex or the other predominated.

They could not breed, of course; but I was informed that they were

amorous. There was a general opinion that only the matrilinear people

bred these _ragwe_ for high sacrifice and that the patrilinear groups

shunned them as devil-devils.

The communistic New Hebridean builds a stockade around his vegetable

patch in order to keep out the roving pigs. With no knowledge of

crop rotation he moves his garden every year. Neighbors pile in to

help him break ground, and he reciprocates. He cleans his patch when

the _neurav_ blossoms and harvests his yams when the cicada sings.

And here’s where the pig comes in, literally. Tribal law permits the

yam-grower to shoot the low-bred trespassing hog. But if the interloper

happens to be a tusked boar, hands off. Shoot him and you’re fined in

pigs of equivalent value; or else the owner goes gunning for you. Hence

many very ugly pig wars.

The pig-poor commoner can’t afford polygamy; women are scarce. Multiple

marriage is a luxury for the rich, and for surprising reasons. I asked

a wealthy chief on Aoba how many wives he had. Oh, about six, he

guessed, but one of them might have died “of a pain in the heart.” He

had about a hundred pigs to take care of and they were increasing so

fast he’d need at least two more wives.

Pigs were increasing, humans thinning out. That was true of almost

all the islands I visited. In most districts the birth of boys far

exceeded the birth of girls--a danger signal that marks the decline of

population.

* * * * *

Finally we were working into the forests of Malekula which Mr.

Smith-Rewse thought too dangerous for a white doctor to tackle. Shaggy

black men, each wearing a chronic scowl and a beard that would rival a

Scottish terrier’s, lurked and peered or trooped down on us with their

handy muskets. To make even an approximately accurate hookworm-survey

was like trying to pry buttons from a live rattlesnake. When it came to

yaws I found the men more obliging, for here as elsewhere they admired

the needle, which New Hebridean pidgin called “stick medicine.” It was

a trifle disconcerting, however, to “needle” a man who squatted with a

loaded rifle across his knees, ready to repel a surprise attack from

Little Nambas or to rebuke a Foundation doctor whose technique proved

unsatisfactory.

A few years earlier the Nambas, Big or Little, had fallen upon white

planters, butchered and eaten them. Then an Anglo-French naval force

landed on a punitive expedition. They made about fifteen miles inland,

burned some houses--and never saw a native. Another night came on,

and the Commander knew that people were hiding in the bush; there was

desultory firing and a few casualties. The landing party retreated

in the early morning, the bush-fellows picking them off as they ran

helter-skelter for their ship and safety. Their retreat was scattered,

with wounded men and abandoned firearms. The forest cackled its jeering

laughter, “Why don’t you come and get us?” The hidden savages had tied

guns to the trees so that muzzles covered the trail. They had fastened

long strings to the triggers and sheltered themselves behind rocks

where they could pull at a safe distance--an old Malekula trick. There

was plenty of meat for the ovens that night; and when the bad news

straggled back to Vila the bi-national Government decided that there

should be no more reprisals. Natives must be approached with tact.

That was about the only policy the Condominium ever decided on, and we

followed it, you may believe, in our subsequent task of cleaning the

uncleanable. Working on my findings of 1925, I sent Inspector Tully

down there, and later some of our best N.M.P.’s. What they accomplished

in the face of native perversity was quite remarkable, and they had

good government backing. Tully reported that one mission body rather

resented his coming into their areas, because they had been charging a

fairly stiff price for yaws injections, and we were giving them free.

The missionary attitude was understandable, for we were buying the drug

much cheaper than they could; and after we furnished them our source

of supply and gave them the advantage of exchange, the difficulty was

ironed out. When the missionaries charged for treatments the natives

were more than willing to pay. The “needle” was always immensely

popular with them.

Before I left Suva for the 1925 survey Dr. Maurice C. Hall had

requested me to try his latest discovery, tetrachlorethylene, on

hookworm patients. I was the first to use it. Malakai and I selected

a number of patients at the Residency at Vila, treated them, counted

the worms, then re-treated them to see the percentage of efficiency.

Results were splendid, and physical reactions to the drug were few.

Later on a shipping strike in Sydney stranded us at Bushman’s Bay,

Malekula, and there I was able to make a field test to determine how

well tetrachlorethylene would work if given by laymen. On the fine

Matevan Plantation I examined 102 laborers and found 97 infected with

the Necator. We were working all over the island, so we had to move

into the interior, but before I left Matevan I gave Fleming, the

planter, a supply of the new drug with instructions as to dosage.

Malakai and I got back in two weeks; again I rounded up my 97 patients,

and was delighted to find that only 16 of them were even lightly

infected with the worm. When I considered that the work had not been

done by medical men, the results were very gratifying.

On this Matevan plantation I found that filariasis was so general that

one force of 69 field hands had lost a total of 34 days in the past

month. No wonder the French were importing Indo-Chinese. But a bad

compromise.... The natives seemed to enjoy it when we took blood smears

and let them peer through the lens at swimming microfilariae. “Snakes

in the blood!” they shouted admiringly. Back in the bush villages, when

we were making hookworm tests, the old snake-in-belly argument always

worked. What worked still better was the growing opinion that our

medicine was some sort of booze. Results were often disconcerting. With

thirty Big Nambas milling around, flourishing guns and shouting praise

to Tamaz, it was up to your director to sit very tight and remember

what the Government had said: Use tact.

Hookworm lectures in the villages, when we could drum up an audience,

never lacked the element of surprise. One day we expected a fair number

of natives but nobody showed up. Then a shy pagan sauntered in and

explained that they couldn’t come today “because an old man had to hang

himself.” We set out with police and missionaries, but the party was

over when we arrived. The old man had had all his pigs slaughtered and

given the neighbors a splendid feast. In the flush of revelry he had

gone into the house, put a noose around his neck and thrown the end out

of a window. His friends had obligingly pulled the string, then gone on

with the free feed, vowing that he was a nice, generous fellow, but too

old to be much good.

In the back country the old and feeble were often buried alive. A

Catholic priest told me how he had started his congregation. He dug up

an antiquated couple who had just been dug in, revived them, baptized

them and gained two splendid converts.

On Santo I saw one man who had been arrested for planting his father in

a deep hole. This patricide was just as puzzled as the Malekula fellow

who had buried his newborn child.

* * * * *

As a divertissement in pandemonium we had on our hands Dr. P. T.

Buxton of the London School of Tropical Medicine. A distinguished

scholar, Buxton was often a thorn in the side because of his definitely

pro-Buxton opinions. I first met him in Samoa where he was patronizing

New Zealand’s great medical work, then London sent him with us to the

New Hebrides. Before our boat touched land he endeared himself to his

fellow passengers by remarking, “Aren’t colonials quare people!” At a

tea party in Vila his hostess asked, “Which of the Colonies do you come

from, Doctor?” Buxton’s eyebrows went up. “I only come from England!”

Malakai, who had been busy as a bird dog, was guardedly polite to

this very learned entomologist, and I wondered what black revenge was

simmering in the Melanesian heart. Malakai owed Buxton a grudge; up in

Samoa the Londoner had twitted him about having hookworm. To disprove

the accusation Malakai had examined his specimen by our regulation

field method, and had found his case negative. “Suppose you try my

Clayton Lane technique,” challenged Buxton--this method was splendid

for hospital examinations, but too complicated for fieldwork. Malakai

was game. He tried Buxton’s method on himself--and got one solitary,

smallish hookworm. So Dr. Buxton had told the world how he had the

laugh on a poor N.M.P.

Malakai bided his time. The malaria situation was not acute, because

May to November is the “dry season” in the New Hebrides--meaning that

it doesn’t rain very hard and mosquitoes are comparatively few. We were

on Malekula, and Dr. Buxton had returned from a month’s tour, combing

the islands for anopheles. In all his search he had only found two

damaged-looking specimens. Where were the mosquitoes? Malakai looked

over the sad little exhibit and never turned a hair.

Then one morning on Bushman’s Bay my favorite N.M.P. turned up with a

large number of anopheles in his specimen case. Buxton wanted to know

where he got them. Oh, explained Malakai, he had just cut a hole in

his mosquito net and used himself for bait. Having had their fill of

blood they had gone to rest inside the net, so in the morning Malakai

had gathered them in. With a pretty gesture he handed the scientist

eighty-seven specimens to carry back to London. I wonder if this gave

our visitor a little more respect for the N.M.P.

This neat rebuke was all too subtle for a land where murder was the

popular way of showing annoyance. If I wished to get rid of anybody in

particular I would just lure him to the New Hebrides, push him off a

boat and forget it. Should anybody get around to questioning me--which

they probably wouldn’t--I would blame the disappearance to “blackwater

fever,” always a handy explanation for missing persons. Or if I were a

native I would shoot first, then run to a mission and get converted.

To bask in righteousness was always fairly safe for the escaped

trigger-man. (At one mission service the Nambas lurked in the woods,

well supplied with ammunition for a couple of sanctified runaways,

while the congregation inside was singing with much fervor: “Anywhere

with Jesus I may safely go.”)

Another, if less popular, refuge for the guilty was to “recruit” into

contract labor. Women offered themselves to recruiters, too, but for a

different reason; they were usually in flight from “old men” husbands

or embarrassing family troubles. I saw one big black girl approach

a house and ask the planter’s wife to take her on indefinitely. She

was a runaway, quaintly wild, naked except for a G-string pad and a

small mat on her head; she used the mat for a pillow. Down her back,

suspended from her forehead, she carried a calico bag and there were a

few coppers in a leaf-purse at her throat. The bag contained all her

earthly possessions encased in sections of bamboo (_bahbu_). She showed

us her treasures: a piece of taro and a hatchet. She was all ready to

set up housekeeping.

At the British Residency in Vila there was an excellent servant I

called “Bush-Fellow Santo,” just to watch him grin. A few years before

a chief had ordered him to shoot a rival chief, so obedient Santo had

poked a rifle through the bush, a foot from the doomed one’s head. Poor

Santo pulled the trigger, and the thing missed fire. The annoyed chief

picked up the fallen gun and Santo made for the shore under a rain

of bullets. Luckily the Government’s yacht lay in the stream. He was

pulled aboard, swearing eternal devotion to the white man. And he kept

his word.

The general practitioner, who attends one patient at a time, must know

something of the sick man’s habits, environment and psychic condition.

The health physician in primitive countries has these problems

multiplied by thousands. He must regard mass behavior--and examine the

files for the rate of tribal advance or decay. He must know something

of the history of his multiple patient to form a workable theory

concerning the dangers or benefits of foreign contact. He must strive

to be a diplomat and make whatever contact he can with the Government

in power.... Then he must work with the best tools and knowledge that

are at hand.

In the mad Condominium, where there was no reliable census, we had to

pit fact-finding against an estimated population of around 55,000.

The real figure, as we estimated it, was under 45,000, and steadily

sinking. Evidences of depopulation showed in the long-deserted villages

and in the discontinuance of many tribal ceremonies because there were

so few old men left who knew enough of the mysteries to perform the

rites. Long since these grand masters had been swept away by epidemics.

Old planters would point out spots where they had seen tribes almost

blotted out in the course of thirty years.

Yaws was second to hookworm and malaria. On pleasant Tanna, to the

extreme south of the group, it was a painful sight to see the poor

fellows hobbling to the fields, as though walking on hot coals. They

were suffering from “crab yaws,” which causes the feet to split

oddly. Others, further gone with the disease, were given sitting down

jobs, cutting copra near their quarters. Little attention--except in

the hospital here--was paid to the condition and its cure, but what

information I gave was welcomed. In more settled sections of the island

a few injections with arsenicals were being given with the usual

striking results. On parts of Tanna I found the natives themselves so

eager for a cure that they were paying for the cost of salvarsan, and

so earnestly asking for it that the supply was constantly giving out.

When our outfit returned on later visits to give mass treatments the

people were so grateful for the improvement in their health that they

took up a collection and tried to present Tully with thirty pounds.

Everywhere we were busied by a variety of cases. We discovered an

odd dozen of lepers and decided that the disease was spreading

through the unprotected shores; there was no attempt to segregate

the patients, although two at the Presbyterians’ Tanna hospital were

being successfully treated with chaulmoogra injections. Queer cases

swam into our ken. Here was a sick warrior who had tried to dry up his

yaws by smoking them over a fire. Here were patients being treated for

tuberculosis when they were suffering from tertiary yaws, or treated

for malaria when they were sick with filariasis. Here were missionaries

complaining of prevalent syphilis--and it was yaws again. Here we

became emergency dentists and examined pyorrhea, one result of anemia.

Here were Christian teachers who wondered why so many children died,

especially girls in a land where more women were needed. We tried to

lecture them on the rudiments of infant feeding; the Presbyterians

were doing their best to supply milk. On Tanna I found that good Dr.

Nicholson had been breeding goats and teaching the babies to suckle

the nannies, direct from producer to consumer. It was a sensible idea,

since there was no effective way of storing milk out of reach of

filth-carrying flies. The nannies had come to regard the youngsters

as their own kids. Once, experimentally, I picked up a small baby and

growled at it. There was a worried “_Baah!_” and the mothering she-goat

came at me, tail up and horns down. No foreigner was allowed to fool

with _her_ children.

Where there was a scarcity of drugs there was always a plenitude of

witch doctors. These wizards lacked the dignity of the ancient tribal

seers, who undoubtedly exerted a certain protective influence over the

flock. Now they had degenerated to annoying rain-makers, windmakers,

sun-makers, generally called “poisoners.” If rain, wind or sun failed

to appear on schedule, the Nambas had a jolly habit of shooting these

specialists and calling in new ones.

I went with the Commissioner to round up a couple of wizards at

Malua Bay, Malekula. They had been making mischief, setting family

against family; then shooting had begun. Mr. Smith-Rewse, personally

conducting the arrest, said that he would have let it blow over if the

Adventists hadn’t kicked up such a row. We went up to a plateau where

the missioners were starting a village, and there was Pastor Parker,

offering his services. Natives hung around in a wide circle, but they

had left their rifles in the bush. They were not allowed to carry guns

to public meetings.

If they had wished they could have picked us off like tender fowls

for Sunday dinner, for nobody knew how many were hiding behind cover.

We were entirely unarmed, except for four policemen in dungaree

uniforms--opposed to a whole island of untamed savages who openly

boasted of cannibalism. It was surprising to see their frightened faces

as they came up and shook hands with the missionaries; they were too

shy to talk to government officials. Then with the suddenness of all

savage things a thin, tall old man appeared. His beard and his eyes

were somehow alike, wildly roving. He was the first of the accused

wizards. I had expected an arrogant figure, threatening us with all

the powers of sea and air. He slunk up, a picture of abject fright.

The other, who followed soon after, dragged back at every step like a

schoolboy about to be spanked.

They had fallen into a trap. The Resident Commissioner had given it out

that he had come to discuss some abuses on the part of the “recruiters”

who haul in contract labor. The natives huddled around, hanging on

Smith-Rewse’s words--then abruptly he turned his questions on the two

witch doctors, who seemed to have lost the power of invisibility. Four

policemen seized them, and as they were dragged to the boat the air was

filled with pleas for mercy. I was only sorry for them.

For three days, going toward the Vila jail, the older one was just a

plaintive, seasick old man. He gave me a nicely curled pig’s tusk, a

pledge of friendship, and admitted with the artlessness of a child that

he had planned to kill off the converts in the new Adventist mission.

He grew more and more downcast, and as we neared Vila he asked in

quavering pidgin, “How soon will you eat us?” I didn’t know whether to

laugh or to cry. The poor old devil thought that our expedition was a

cannibal raid.

The Vila authorities sentenced him to a jail term long enough to

untwist his imagination. When I saw him in the jail yard he was

very docile. He even allowed me to treat him for hookworm. That was

something of a triumph for modern medicine.

The witch-doctor affair didn’t end with the arrest. Nine days later an

Adventist convert named Harry, working in his garden, was shot from

ambush. He had been spokesman for Mr. Smith-Rewse during the capture

of the magicians; also friends of the sorcerers accused him of having

informed on them. After the shooting he lay for a long time on the

beach; riflemen in the bush dared the rescuing Adventists to come

ashore. Then one missionary recognized an acquaintance and arranged a

truce. I don’t know whether Harry lived. He had gone to the village

of the magicians to assure the women that the wizards were only under

arrest and would come back. The villagers had decided that he was there

to seduce their wives--or that was the story they told.

I offer these scenes as samples of a country where a Foundation

doctor was trying to make medical sense. Later on, when I made my

return visits, we met every possible condition, good and bad--mostly

bad--and often went alone among the most backward savages. None of

us was murdered, but there was still a chance of a white man’s blood

being shed, if some fanatic should arise with a crusade against the

oppressor. It had happened before.

For instance, there was the prophet Ronivira. Once in the early yam

season he awoke to find that his navel was blown out. The uninitiated

would have put it down to too much yam, but Ronivira arose and

proclaimed that ghosts in his belly had given him power to raise the

dead; price one pound to revivify a male relative, ten shillings for a

female, five bob for a child. He didn’t do any revivifying, but made a

huge impression. His platform was the Bible, his program anti-white. He

built warehouses to receive goods from a sympathetic United States--for

the New Hebridean believes that all Americans are black men.

Finally the Resident Commissioner took him aboard the government yacht.

In the midst of cross-questioning a storm broke with a clap of thunder;

and thunder was so unusual in those parts that the Commissioner, so I

was told, lost his nerve and let Ronivira go. After a time doubting

Thomases began asking the prophet why he didn’t raise any dead. When

his wife died he stood over the corpse and made all the passes in his

repertory, but Mrs. Ronivira didn’t respond. To bolster his falling

stocks he said that white magicians were working against him. Therefore

all white men and their sympathizers must die. A high mast was erected

on the beach for the hanging of all native skeptics; and when a white

rag fluttered from the yard-arm it meant a European must die before

sundown.

They murdered one white, at least, ate part of the body and threw the

rest to the dogs. Finally the Resident Commissioner arrested Ronivira

in earnest; but the yacht taking him to Vila met a storm that all

but wrecked it. Although his trial was prolonged by witnesses afraid

to testify, the authorities finally hanged the Great Resurrector.

Otherwise the Condominium’s frail hold on the native might have

collapsed.

* * * * *

Any white man’s stories of cannibal revels should be checked with

care. The primitive is a shy bird, and he knows that cannibalism has

been blacklisted. Therefore he works cautiously. Old-timers in the New

Hebrides say casually, “Oh, yes, it is going on.” But I have never

found one who has actually seen it.

When Bill Tully was running our yaws campaign in a remote part of

Malekula, guards appeared around his house one day and forbade his

going out. Through the chinks he could see a glow of fire, hear

drumming and fierce cries. Bill knew, as if he had seen it, that they

were cooking long pig. The patients who came to him next day were

especially quiet and subdued.

One afternoon, on Atchin, Malakai came back from an inspection across

the island and said that work had been delayed by a ceremony. The

messenger of a chief on Malekula had come with a gift for a chief on

Atchin. It had come carefully rolled in pandanus leaves. Maybe the

chief was less secretive than he would have been before a European, for

he allowed Malakai to look on while he opened the package. It contained

a human hand.

What Malakai saw was part of an old courtesy-custom. When a chief

makes a kill he sends some part of the body, like a hand or foot, to a

chief bound to him by kin or friendship. Within a certain period the

recipient is supposed to return the gift in kind. There is a delicate

code: If the meat of a common native is sent to A, then in due time

A sends to B flesh of a similar social status. If the cut is from a

chief, then chief-meat is expected in return. In old days when white

men were easy game the exchange was often in white-man’s flesh. But

nowadays bagging Europeans is a dangerous sport, so the meat of a

“clothed man” takes the place of this delicacy. A “clothed man” means

any native who has been educated to European dress.

This pernicious round-robin, I was told, had got on the nerves of

some chiefs, who had learned to prefer peace and pig. But when the

pandanus-wrapped package came they knew what was expected of them.

Man-eating is far from an everyday amusement in the New Hebrides,

but in 1923 even white men were not entirely safe. Ewan Corlette,

a planter on Bushman’s Bay, Malekula, sent his native wife to the

neighboring island of Santo to visit at the home of his friend,

Klapcott, who had a trading store, and a native family. Later the place

was found a shambles, a welter of blood. Klapcott had always kept a

rifle handy, but evidence proved that, when he turned to take down some

goods, one of his native customers had brained him with a hatchet.

Evidence also showed how the women and children had run, trying to

escape, before the savages finished them.

Traders didn’t like to tell cannibal yarns because it “gave the place a

black eye.” They were something like the San Franciscans who saved face

by calling their earthquake a fire. The face-savers along the beach

were inclined to scoff at tales of white men having taken photographs

of man-eating revels, although some such pictures, I am told, have been

shown to the public.

The Negroid folk, if they ever talk about man-eating, will tell you

that it has a religious significance. The merrier, slightly Polynesian

people to the north and east are more candid. One of their chiefs, who

had probably finished a quart of bad French wine, said simply, “Me like

im long pig too much.” He just liked what he liked. His people had a

record for cruelty. In the bad old days their trained garroters went

on long hunts, stole upon sleeping islands and strangled the sleepers,

quietly, with a looped vine. They were reputed to have kept their

prizes in pens to fatten them. Island peoples with a higher mental

capacity than their neighbors have often been the bloodiest cannibals

and tormentors. Witness Fiji, witness the New Zealand Maoris. Cruelty

seems to be the brat of young imagination. The ape-man bashes his enemy

with a club; he can think of nothing cleverer. His more gifted neighbor

becomes a virtuoso in the art of giving pain. Yet superior peoples like

the Samoans and Cook Islanders have not been notorious man-eaters;

whereas the flat-headed Goaribaris are still at it. In spite of this

paradox, I have found some of my most enlightened native friends among

grandsons of cannibals.