Meanwhile anthropologists debate the subject: Do men eat men to satisfy

an animal hunger, or has cannibalism a religious significance? Scholars

who associate the Christian Church’s sacramental bread and wine with

the ancient custom of devouring a sacrificial hero will appreciate the

remark of one big black convert. It was Communion Sunday, and when the

wine cup was passed to him he drained it and shouted lustily, “Fill um

up anudder time, Master. Me like im dis fellow Jesus too much!”

* * * * *

Perhaps at times I have given the missionary less than his due. I

stand rebuked by a letter I picked out of a recent _Pacific Island

Monthly_. It quoted an eminent authority who wrote in the middle of

the eighteenth century and reminded his readers that the missions had

appreciably reduced “the power of an idolatrous priesthood--a system

of profligacy unparalleled ... infanticide ... bloody wars where the

conquerors spared neither women nor children.... In a voyager to forget

these things is base ingratitude; for should he chance to be at the

point of shipwreck on some unknown coast, he will most devoutly pray

that the lesson of the missionary may have reached thus far.”

The letter-writer reminds us that the author of these words was no

missionary, nor was he rated a good Christian. Many called him an

atheist or freethinker. He was Charles Darwin.

I have criticized some missionaries as I have criticized some of my

own profession. But I have stumbled so often, late at night, into

little lonely mission houses, to be welcomed by their poor best; I have

depended so much on the missionary’s co-operation in my medical work,

and so frequently seen his eagerness to learn the nature and the cure

of diseases that were afflicting the tribes, that I do not wish to seem

unfair.

I am speaking of the best. And I shall not take back a word I have said

in disparagement of the others. Even among the best there was frequent

jealousy and backbiting. Opposing missionaries were too often “sheep

stealing.” Once on Ambrym I heard Smith-Rewse ask a missionary why he

hadn’t been to Vila lately. “I can’t get away,” he said. “Every time I

leave, those Seventh Day Adventists steal one of my villages.”

Missionaries are excellent men, average men, poor men and evil

men--about like the rest of us. I do not agree with their claims of

making such large numbers of _true_ converts; but their claims as

educators, humanizers and civilizers are often justly founded. Not

so long ago in the Pacific the whole burden of education was left

to them. And as humanitarians I praise the Presbyterians in the New

Hebrides--without their intervention over the past hundred years the

last native there would have died. And I have seen the quiet work of

the Melanesian Mission in the Solomons where the workers are High

Church, yet drudge and slave with evangelical zeal. The Melanesian

Mission, I think, is doing better medical work than any of the other

sectarians down there. And, not excepting the devoted Fathers of the

Sacred Heart in Papua, I would call the Presbyterians of the New

Hebrides the best religious civilizers.

In the Melanesian Mission were educated men and women giving their

lives and all for the Cause, which paid them £40 a year. They were

often short on equipment, but their hospitals were better than could be

expected. Brave people, mostly celibates. I can almost forgive Bishop

Baddeley for helping to wreck a great humanitarian plan by writing,

in effect, “I will accept no boundaries to the Kingdom of Christ.”

Baddeley had served as a colonel in the First World War, and he guarded

his boundaries with a soldier’s sense of duty.

* * * * *

Let me offer the Reverend Frederick J. Paton as the best example of a

Presbyterian missionary. A frail-looking man of fifty-eight, crippled

by a missing leg and a twisted arm, he took me in his creaky little

motorboat over to Onua on Malekula. Before he had unlatched his gate I

caught a scent of roses and verbena. The rich soil of the New Hebrides

had grown a garden that might have smiled in Kent or Massachusetts. But

his fragrant little garden contrasted with the awful untidiness inside

his house. Items in the litter were too numerous to mention, except to

say that he dined off one end of a long table in his big living room,

and the rest of the table was given over to books, binoculars, scraps

of food, discarded watches, a typewriter, some clothes--in fact about

everything that Mr. Paton had put there and forgotten. He usually did

his own cooking, but in our honor he brought in a couple of native

teachers who stirred up a frightful mess in a very dirty kitchen. He

had a bathtub, which Malakai insisted on giving a triple scrub with

disinfectants before he would let me get in. I don’t know where Mr.

Paton bathed, but he was always neat and clean, if shabby.

When I talked with him I realized why he was the most useful

missionary in the New Hebrides. His father before him was the famous

missionary-bishop, and his son Frederick’s life was devoted to

distributing the John D. Paton Fund. Mr. Paton was too busy with good

works to bother about his surroundings. His doors were always open to

stray natives, who wandered in day and night; they just curled up on

the floor and slept. While provisions held out Paton never let them go

away hungry. This Australian Scot had inherited some money; however,

his pocket never held two pennies to rub together.

I think it was his ambition to die poor; but when money was needed for

his work he could be shrewd. He would pack and go to Sydney, where a

Mission Board was never quite able to resist his plea.

Medical experience had taught me that a pure spirit often dwells in a

broken body. When he was a baby a careless nurse had spoiled one of

his arms; he had lost a leg when a motorboat fouled a hidden rock,

during an emergency call. His success in handling natives was envied,

even by his co-religionists. His converts were nearer Christians than

most I saw.... I don’t know why I speak of him in the past, for as I

write he is very much alive, seventy-three and going strong. We have

been corresponding for years, and I bless him for the way he took up my

cause for the Central Medical School. His daily work had shown him the

need of it.

I can’t forget the way Mr. Paton had the laugh on me one night when

I was lecturing the natives in a church at the quaint village of

Pangkumu. With unique co-operation he had assigned the contribution box

to receive hookworm specimens. The people were pretty badly infected,

so I strained my pidgin English to express the horrible fecundity of

the female Necator. See the hundreds of snake-eggs she could lay in

twenty-four hours.... “Look out!” Paton whispered. Right in front of me

a woman with scared eyes was holding a baby. In her fright she let it

drop. I had to stop the lecture to look over the casualty, and when I

found that no bones were broken Paton laughed softly, “It doesn’t pay

to be too sensational.”

Paton knew his natives, and he knew the Condominium well enough to

have an incompetent district agent removed now and then. When my

Native Medical Practitioners ran afoul of European prejudice Paton

never failed to take their part. A French physician objected to our

N.M.P. Peni visiting the villages when a whooping cough epidemic was

raging--and whooping cough can be deadly down there. The Frenchman

wanted the sick to come to his hospital, to sleep outside in leaky

shacks until he was ready to treat them. Paton advised Peni to go

straight to the villages and save the patients from the shock of being

moved, and he acted on that advice. When Mesalume was there--the poor

boy who died on duty--Paton often got out his motorboat at small hours

in the morning and hurried him to emergency calls. The Government had

no launch to send.

During my first visit to Onua I treated 300 hookworm cases, and nearly

half of them were women; a remarkable record in a land where women

were especially guarded by the feces tabu. Whenever I found a people

susceptible to medical advice I always found a good mission in charge.

Paton’s was 100 per cent.

The New Hebrides needed dozens of Patons. And Patons don’t come in

dozen lots.

* * * * *

I had finally the meager satisfaction of knowing that the population

was taking a slow turn upward--but too slow to hold its own. The men

still outnumbered the women; there were not enough of the latter to

carry on the breed. In some regions where public health was beginning

to pick up I found that the sex balance was working toward a normal

equilibrium. That was a good sign, though all too faint. Its promise

was dimmed by graver threats of racial annihilation. You can’t draw

clean water from a stream that is polluted at the source. The New

Hebrides, with no enforced quarantines, no concerted effort to look

into the causes of epidemics, no program for restoring the best and

healthiest of the native customs, no educational system, and apparently

no sincere wish to divorce the savage from liquor and firearms, were

well on the road to racial extinction. The slum-scum of the Orient

would take over all the jobs of the sick islanders, and succumb to the

same diseases. That’s a gloomy picture--but an illustration of what may

befall any community, tropical or temperate, where public health and

education are not enforced by a strong central authority.

When I was working among the plantations around Male I stayed with M.

Peletier, who owned a wide domain, 800 acres of it rich with coffee,

cacao, cotton and copra. M. Peletier was equally rich in children from

wives and concubines. He had come there as a stranded French sailor,

and in middle age his ambition was to retire and live in Los Angeles.

The sanitary habits of his laborers were fairly well looked out

for--which was refreshing, since I had just seen indescribable filth on

near-by plantations.

Well, on Saturday night I retired early in one of M. Peletier’s clean

rooms, and had just fallen asleep when the quiet was shattered by

drunken native voices. Next morning the natives who had promised to

come for a lecture failed to show up. They were sleeping it off.

In the afternoon I drove with the Peletiers to the home of M. Margot,

who had the usual store in the back of his house. We were having a

glass of wine on the front porch when a crowd of natives appeared and

began to file around toward the store. They were none too steady and

it was obvious that they had come for more liquor. The Margots gave

me an embarrassed glance. _Comme c’était embêtant!_ With a Foundation

doctor looking on, knowing that they were selling grog to the heathen!

M. Margot rose to the emergency and staged a powerful scene. Blue

with indignation, he faced the rioters and asked them what they meant

by coming on Sunday, of all days, to buy kerosene and tobacco? Then,

turning to me, he explained gently, “They’re just children. If they

happen to want kerosene and tobacco they pay no attention to my rules.

Such children!”

Meanwhile the children were howling some island French word that

sounded like “Poison,” or maybe “Boisson,” but obviously referred to

booze. Their college cheer, “Me want Boisson,” was pointed-up by one

big voice in the bedlam: “Suppose you no pay me my five pounds wages

along grog--me want Boisson!” And the Margots were loudly protesting

that they had never heard of such a thing. Neighbors ought to be

ashamed to give grog to those poor boys.

We left in the midst of the embarrassing scene; left Margot to unbolt a

side door and begin serving the customers. I let out a vulgar American

horse-laugh. How furious the Margots must have been at Peletier for

taking me there on Sunday! Peletier drove moodily away and tried to

continue the argument about natives wanting kerosene and tobacco. When

I asked him if I looked like a jackass he changed his tune. You had to

sell grog, he said, if you wanted to keep anybody on your plantation.

Even the British did it on the sly.

M. Margot’s side-door trade was mild compared to what I saw on another

island. Saturday night again. Nude figures were dancing around a fire.

In the center of the group was a fat Frenchman, naked except for a

grass skirt. He was leading them all, contorting and howling. The

ground was strewn with empty bottles. I asked the man with me if this

fellow had “gone native.” “Oh, no,” he said, “he is the owner of a big

plantation. But he prefers to dance with the people. It keeps them

contented.”

In going among the islands we would come occasionally upon scenes of

well-being that raised our hopes for the future. Even now I stroke

my waistcoat, remembering the large hospitality of F. J. Fleming’s

plantation at Bushman’s Bay. Here was a New Zealander who had

succeeded against all odds. His acres were lush with luxury. Blooded

cattle grazed in his fields, his yards were filled with fancy ducks,

turkeys, chickens and guineas. One native boy was devoted to a single

job--supplying Matevan Plantation with fish. Dinner at Mr. Fleming’s

table was something I often remembered on hard cross-island hikes. It

was here that I made the tetrachlorethylene experiments, for in spite

of the plantation’s prosperity there was much disease.

Mr. Fleming dwelt in the Land of Canaan and knew all the ropes. He

kept his plantation clean with blooded Herefords which multiplied so

rapidly that there was a surplus over the needs of his menage and his

labor quarters. Once a week he had a young bullock slaughtered, and he

knew how to keep the meat tender and wholesome. The only provisions he

had to buy were tea, sugar, wine and flour. Matevan baked its bread

in its own ovens, and was not bothered by labor shortage, because the

good eating was famous among the natives. This project flourished on

dangerous Malekula, a smiling picture of what the New Hebrides offered

to the right man.

While Mr. Fleming fed on the fat of the land discouraged planters over

the hill were starving on tinned beef.

* * * * *

This survey didn’t end with very cheerful conclusions. The New Hebrides

group offered a picture of a race being murdered by European invasion.

Fiji and Samoa had been invaded too, but their conquerors had set about

making amends. Outside of sporadic attempts to discourage cannibalism,

what had the pale-faced intruders done to improve this race whose labor

they so bitterly needed?... I had worked my level best and given all

the advice I had to give.

We were coming back to the New Hebrides someday, with all the medicine

and all the knowledge at our command. I told that to Mr. Paton just

before I left, and he was mightily pleased. I couldn’t prophesy any

results, but now that I look back on our subsequent years of work down

there I know that in many regions we turned the tide of health. Yet it

has still not turned fast enough to restore a dying population. And if

it dies, what then? Well, the Axis Powers can always pour in slaves to

upset Oceania’s racial and economic balance again. I hate to think

of that as a solution. But the Condominium Government as I saw it was

inviting its own fall.

I didn’t dwell on doleful things when I said good-by to Mr. Paton and

told him that we were coming back to cure and not to question. Before

we shook hands he smiled and said, “Mr. Rockefeller has given us so

much in the work you are doing for my people that I want to give him

something in return.” He brought a package and when he opened it I

saw a roll of tapa cloth, very old and unusual with a faded velvety

texture. The markings were so faint and frail that he had to trace them

out. He said, “This came from Efate over in the east where there’s

quite a mixture of Polynesian. The missionaries who first touched there

over a hundred years ago found the natives worshiping this cloth.

Nobody knows where it came from, but there’s a myth that it was brought

in a foreign canoe.” Mr. Paton rolled up the tapa and handed it to me,

with a letter to John D. Rockefeller. “Just to thank him,” he said. “I

don’t think there’s another tapa like it in the world.”

* * * * *

On my way for a month’s leave in the States I went by Sydney, Fiji

and Tonga, carrying the old tapa back along the course it must have

followed centuries ago. At Tonga I unwrapped it and showed it to Queen

Salote. She looked it over carefully, and so did the wise old ones.

They all said that it must have come from Futuna, one of the French

Polynesian islands just north and west of Tonga; they told me that it

was of a type made nowhere else. “It must be very old,” Salote said,

“because it was not pounded with a stone, as they do it nowadays. It

was scraped with a shell, and that gives it the velvet texture. And the

stenciling is finer than the modern style.” She marked out the graceful

feather design, almost indistinguishable. “They never made feather

designs in Tonga. Tapa is still scraped in Samoa,” she said, “but this

one is a double tapa, and they do not make that kind.” The old people

pointed out the thin reddish color that still tinted the surface and

said that it was _lengo_, which is turmeric, a sacred plant-juice worn

only by chiefs. Futuna was on the old route where traders brought in

turmeric for the body and garments of royal personages. “The feather

design is royal too,” the old people said. “This tapa was worn by a

king. So a king must have visited Efate.”

I went on my way, carrying something that amounted to a lost crown

jewel, a proof that Tongafiti conquerors had once touched the New

Hebrides. When I reached New York I sent that tapa with Mr. Paton’s

letter to Mr. Rockefeller, who dropped me a note saying that he was

putting the relic in a museum. I hope he did. I hope it wasn’t tucked

in the family attic where a housekeeper would junk it someday among

unidentified family scraps. If that should happen, the Rockefeller

estate would lose a unique treasure.

CHAPTER VI

NEW ZEALAND’S LITTLE SISTER

Before I take you into the Cook Islands, where our war on disease

landed me late in 1925, I must deal briefly with Polynesia’s humane and

thoughtful big sister, New Zealand. The kinship of her native Maoris

with those she was called upon to govern in the Cooks is so close that

one can scarcely refrain from naming the two in the same breath. I have

made several visits to the Dominion, both to learn and to teach, and

have written hundreds of pages of reports, never without admiration for

the Government’s progress in rehabilitating a magnificent race which,

but for a generous conqueror, might have perished from the earth.

I grant you that their program for education and health has been

marked by errors of judgment, and that their pioneering was like most

Pacific conquests, selfishly concerned with taking away a native

people’s God-given right to its own land and its own way of life.

Perhaps New Zealand’s temperate climate worked on the temperate mind

of the Anglo-Saxon when he finally set himself to govern the greatest

number of Polynesians in any of Oceania’s racial zones. This might have

brought about the bright change. But I am more inclined to believe

that it came largely through the native Maori’s natural genius for

government.

Consider the lusty fighting Maori of two centuries ago. They numbered

perhaps between 200,000 and 300,000 souls. In 1896, when Government

conscience awoke, the Maoris had fallen to 40,000. Then came the

resurgence, forced through channels of education and public health,

so that today the Polynesians on the mainland have passed the 85,000

mark and are steadily increasing. In the year 1937 the Dominion spent

well over £1,000,000 on education, building, sanitary improvements

and pensions for the Maoris. Public schools were thrown open to their

children. Industrial training fostered the Maori’s natural ingenuity

with tools. Too much, perhaps, was being done for the native; it is

only human for a spoon-fed people to do as little as possible to lift

the spoon.

On the Pacific New Zealand is unique: her million-and-a-half Europeans

outnumber her natives by tremendous odds. This may sound easy for the

Dominion, but Government, every step of the way, has been forced to

tackle a variety of problems: ancient and well-earned grudges against

the _Pakeha_ (white man), a tendency to lean on a dole, carefree

indifference to modern hygiene--a hundred and one cross-currents.

I have seen the subsidized Maori farmer on the East Coast, dressed

in British clothes, looking like any tanned European and proud of

modern farm machinery. I have seen the model dwelling houses which the

authorities set in the back yards of native schools to inspire the

Maori housekeeper. I have seen British ladies striving to teach back

native arts which the natives had forgotten. I have seen lazy boys

playing pool during work hours and pertly asking, “Why work when the

_Pakeha_ pays?” And all this time, in the primitive village which he

ruled with a rod of fear, Rua the Prophet lay dying of a rival witch’s

curse; when he died his followers sat for days, expecting him to rise

again.

In 1926 New Zealand was governing her own Maoris, their cousins on the

Cook Islands and beautiful Niue, and had control of Western Samoa. She

was ruling 152,000 Polynesians. It would be better for the Polynesians,

I think, if she were to govern them all.

The British New Zealander is not especially race-tolerant, nor has he

always been an idealist. The surprising thing is that the Maori’s rise

from death to life came about largely through the genius of certain

Maoris, of one generation at least, who seized the opportunity and so

brilliantly improved it that their zeal revived the flagging soul of a

conquered people.

Let me name a few of that generation. Some had a light strain of

British blood, but their minds and hearts were Maori. There was “Jimmie

Taihoa,” later knighted as Sir James Carrol, a lawyer whose scarifying

logic so outmaneuvered Parliament that the _Pakeha’s_ unjust land laws

were enfeebled by _reductio ad absurdum_. Sir Apirana Ngata, probably

the greatest of these Maoris, deliberately set himself to learn

European ways that he might protect his race against the _Pakeha_. With

a cabinet portfolio he served for years as Minister to the Maoris. When

his fire blazed too hot the Prime Minister put him out. But only to

invite him back, because as an outsider he was even more destructive.

His land laws stand today, a bulwark between the Maoris and the

land-grabbers. He is still living and fighting. Highly Europeanized,

his great wish is to have his people return to their tribal ways.

Dr. E. P. Ellison, a Maori, was last Director of Maori Hygiene, and

served in the Cook Islands with distinction as Chief Medical Officer.

Dr. Peter Buck (Te Rangiheroa) began in the same post, developing later

into one of the world’s great ethnologists. He was visiting professor

at Yale for two years, and in Honolulu he became director of the famous

Bishop Museum. I have heard that he is returning to New Haven.

These distinguished Maoris graduated from Te Aute College, and the new

generation has not produced such leaders. Possibly it is the fault of a

changed educational system for natives. Possibly it is because unusual

men are born, not made.

Sir Maui Pomare died a few years ago. We were close friends from the

day I met him with Lady Pomare, also a Maori aristocrat. He held down

three ministerial positions at one time; but for his racial origin he

would have been Prime Minister. Graduate of an American medical school,

he began his career as Maori Medical Officer. Once young Dr. Pomare

handled a three months’ typhoid epidemic without a soul to help him.

As Director of Maori Hygiene he treated a whole race over scattered

areas. His preachment of modern sanitation and racial self-respect were

lasting things. Often Pomare’s theories ran counter to Ngata’s, for his

great desire was to close the gap between two races.

Memories of an ancestral thoroughbred always pleased Sir Maui. About

the time the Ministry of Health for New Zealand and the Ministry of

the Cook Islands were conjoined under his authority, there was an

anniversary service in one of Wellington’s oldest churches. Eloquently

the preacher dwelt on the Christian beatification of a certain old-time

savage, Pomare’s great-granduncle, who had given the ground the church

was built on and money to endow it. The sermon so honeyed the good

works of the converted barbarian that the news got around to Pomare,

who asked the clergyman to come to his office and hear the real story.

Great-granduncle, a cannibal and head hunter, had led the first Maori

War and held the British at bay so long that an embarrassed Crown

Governor put a price of five hundred pounds on the rebel’s head.

The Maori King called in a few chiefs, who might have been a bit

pro-British, and made this counter-proposal: “I am honored by the offer

of five hundred pounds on my head. Five hundred pounds is a lot of

money, and if any of you want my head, suppose you come and get it.”

The chiefs made no reply. “Well,” said the King, “I think I know the

value of heads. Suppose I put my price on the Governor’s, an exchange

of courtesies. My offer is sixpence.”

Sir Maui informed the clergyman that his ancestor had endowed the

old church after he had laid aside his well-worn spear and become a

Christian. The gift had to do with horse-racing. The British had built

their race track in Wellington, and the craze had spread among the

more prosperous chiefs. The retired King, old and feeble, had imported

a thoroughbred and entered it for the great meeting of the year. The

elderly Maori lay on his deathbed too ill to go near the track, so he

posted relays of runners all the way from the course to his bedside.

When a messenger proclaimed that the horse had won, the old man

straightened up, shouted, “A victor to the last!” and fell dead. His

success on the track enriched a church endowment, and a winning horse

had crowned his string of victories over the white man.

With relish Sir Maui told me how the old gentleman did a stroke of

business. He sold the present site of Wellington to the granduncle of

Sir Francis Bell. The deed is recorded, and the price was something

like this: two kegs niggerhead tobacco; three dozen red flannel

nightcaps; a dozen pipes; a dozen umbrellas; two flintlock pistols;

assorted muskets with powder; half a gross of jew’s harps.

When I asked Pomare if it didn’t make him sick to think of his ancestor

selling the site of a great modern city for a mess of junk, he said,

“It was only a fraction of the land Great-granduncle had. And he got

what he wanted. Can’t you imagine the old man walking away, wearing

his red nightcap, hoisting his umbrella, playing his jew’s harp and

laughing over the way he stuck the white man in that deal? Everything’s

relative in this world, and when it came to money-sense--well, he was a

Polynesian.”

* * * * *

It was at Pomare’s request that I visited the Cook Islands toward the

end of 1925 and into the early months of 1926. He asked me especially,

as a director for the Foundation, to look into the hookworm situation

there, but also to include in my survey the general aspect of native

diseases. He had not then been long enough in office to organize the

public health work as thoroughly as he desired, and there was the usual

shortage of competent doctors. Sir Maui had a special affection for the

Cook Islanders, as he was closely related to them. He often suggested

my looking into the pre-Christian religion on the Cooks and the relics

it left behind.

Medically speaking, the Cooks were a great relief after the New

Hebrides. Although conditions were far from perfect, I found no

serious problems. Public health was above the Pacific average, but

there were some indicated dangers, and I was obliged to raise the

red flag. Population had begun to fall in the eighties, but had been

slowly coming back since 1900, when New Zealand took over. Up to then

the group had been utterly neglected, save by the usual despoilers.

Twenty-five years is too short a time to work a radical change in any

people. The Maoris on these tiny, graceful clumps of land now numbered

over 10,000. The group lies some twenty degrees below the Equator,

cheek-by-jowl with Tahiti--too close, perhaps, for health.

Rarotonga, so often described by romantic novelists, has suffered some

injustice from flights of imagination. It is the main island in the

little Cooks and is a collection of small towns, one of which harbors

Government Headquarters. To the native mind it had the lure of Paris

for the Peorian. Cinemas, public entertainment and private vice drew

with the loadstone’s charm, and the combination was probably dangerous

for the pleasure-loving Maori. Gonorrhea, imported from generous

Tahiti, was on the increase. That was true of Rarotonga, but not of the

less populated and more primitive islands. The Polynesian is a great

gossip, and when an infected townsman came home from his big spree the

whole village knew it, and shunned him accordingly.

Dr. Ellison was working like a beaver with an understaffed department,

yet what could he do but just shuffle along and make the best of it? I

had Malakai along, my Exhibit Number One. At once he became a popular

idol, a social and scientific success. When Ellison saw his work and

realized what a native physician could accomplish, and I told him that

our Central Medical School, once it got going, could turn out hundreds

like Malakai, Ellison was all for the School; he’d do anything to put

it through.

My hopes were running high then. Dr. Montague had just written a

letter, announcing that all the High Commission groups, five of them,

and all the groups controlled by New Zealand were ready to sign on

the dotted line. And there was Sir Maui Pomare, clear-thinking and

powerful in his faith that the native mind was receptive to the highest

education.

My hope was to be blasted by an act of Pomare himself. He had suffered

a slap in the face, something no well-born Maori will endure. I shall

go into that later.

* * * * *

In Rarotonga it was pleasing to see the young people, the boys in white

trousers, the girls in simple frocks, throwing their souls into the

dances of 1925. European clothes and European ways seemed to be their

destiny, and the Government had encouraged innocent dances, away from

the temptations of bush-beer and petting parties on the beach. This

music and youthful pleasure was in sharp contrast with the plight of

the unhappy New Hebridean, robbed of his tribal ceremony and given

nothing to take its place.

In less conventional surroundings girls were still dancing the hura,

more graceful than the Hawaiian hula, but they were contorting for the

leer of visiting sailors. Gonorrhea, already gaining in 1925-1926, was

not entirely blameable on that old scapegoat, Tahiti. The Hollywood

movie had become the popular notion of European behavior. Imitate

clothes, imitate morals. The local girl had acquired a craving for silk

stockings and high heels, things that must be paid for with _Pakeha_

money, however she got it.

Disease-bearing Tahitian boys were coming over with a bribe which

few Rarotongan girls could resist--bottles of French perfume. For

this the girls deserted their local sweethearts and husbands, flew to

the scented strangers, and were sorry afterward. The bright lights

of Rarotonga were luring so many from surrounding islands that

overcrowding threatened a higher infection of tuberculosis. Polynesian

hospitality invited the germ, for relatives came pouring to be packed

like sardines in the coral houses. They ate so much that many hosts

went undernourished between parties.

Speaking of forced sophistication, a little native nurse in one of

the best hospitals approached me shyly and asked for an examination.

I brought in assistants, had her put on the table and ignored her

protests over the delicate job at hand. When I had finished I asked her

why she had made such a fuss; she ought to be used to doctors. “Oh,

but Doctor,” she said, “I thought you were going to examine my chest!”

She had expected me to use a stethoscope. It was the same all over the

Cooks. Put a stethoscope to a native’s chest and he thought it was

magic to cure whatever ailed him. What ailed the little nurse happened

to be pregnancy.

Here’s another example of the naïve sophisticate. I was with a local

merchant, admiring the beautiful sunset, when a pretty native girl

stopped her bicycle. She was trig and slim in a white duck dress,

white shoes and a flaming red scarf around her neck. What she said

sounded like something you learn by rote: “I-am-looking-for-the-doctor,

to-come-to-my-mother, who-is-very-ill.” I asked my friend if her mother

was ill and he said, “That’s something she learned at school and is

trying on us.”

She smiled primly and my friend asked her where her lover was. She

said, “Luff? That is no good. Some boys talk luff, I say ‘Go way, I am

too strong. I no go down to the beach.’” Her name, she told us, was

Ngapuku, and she was sixteen, fancy free. “I am a Girl Guide,” she

announced. With every breath she went on talking about “luff,” which

did not interest her because she was a proper Girl Guide. Where and how

she guided the stranger came out in the next sentence. Last week when a

New Zealand gunboat came in she met a sailor who talked “luff” and was

indignantly repelled. However, since Jack ashore wished to be guided,

she took him around to the other sort of girl and charged a fee of

twenty-five shillings, five for girl friend and twenty for herself.

The Cook Islands had no half-caste question because there were

no half-castes, socially speaking. All were members of the local

community, and a light-skinned baby was a welcome arrival. There was

no slightest stigma on illegitimacy. Married natives were eager to

adopt such children. One British trader I knew had a native wife and

four daughters; long before a newcomer was born a delegation came

to the house and begged for the privilege of adopting the baby. The

prospective mother finally promised it to a childless couple, if it

should be a girl. But if it was a boy she would keep it. She had no

boys.

I heard of one native who quarreled with his wife and left her. But

when he learned that she had been living with a white man he returned

and implored to be taken back. He wanted the privilege of fathering

her expected child. The Maori here seemed to be moving toward another

race, and I hoped that it would be for his betterment. Children with

a European strain usually got ahead faster, not because they had more

brilliance or character, but because their lighter skin seemed to cast

an aura of superiority. Parents favored them, schoolteachers, however

fair-minded, unconsciously moved them toward the head of the class.

I am not sure that the full-blooded Cook Islanders were not the best

type I saw in the Pacific. Although the women were inclined to sloth

and fat, the men were thin and well-muscled, hard workers and innately

industrious. All day long they labored in their gardens, or carried

produce miles to load it on the steamers offshore. At home they did the

cooking for their lazy wives, who, like most Polynesian wives, were

spoiled by their husbands.

As an inquiring physician I noted the fine condition of the men;

handicapped by imported disease, inadequately defended by a medical

system not yet well organized, they seemed to be building up their

bodies against many of the ills that attacked them. The principal

occupational disease among them was hernia, result of lifting heavy

loads.

On my second visit there, 1932, I wrote to the Secretary of the Cook

Islands, urging him to take advantage of the larger number of Native

Medical Practitioners we were then able to offer. I pointed out one

paradox: sophisticated Rarotonga showed less confidence in European

physicians than I usually found in the primitive outlying islands.

Everywhere there was a faith in witch-doctor remedies, which was

astonishing considering that these places had been in contact with

Europe for over a hundred years. During my first visit I used Malakai

more than once to scold and wheedle sick natives away from their

ancient superstitions. He could talk to them as man to man, which was

more than any European could ever do. I missed him on my second trip.

Some of the impressions I am giving deal with my later stay on these

islands, but they are mainly true of the Cooks as I saw them in

1925-1926.

* * * * *

Captain Andy Thompson of the _Tagua_, which took us from atoll to

atoll, was a Yankee from Minnesota. As confirmed fishermen, Andy and

I were soulmates. In those waters you might land anything from a

minnow to a hammerhead shark. What happened one afternoon might serve

as a Polynesian parable, and Andy was the philosopher to interpret

it. Andy’s line grew rather taut, and as he pulled it lazily in he

said, “Just a little one!” The fish was halfway in when the line

started out to sea. “Guess it’s a big one,” Andy decided, holding on.

Then as suddenly the line slacked; there was some dead weight on it.

Andy pulled it in, 300 pounds of kingfish, which might have weighed

considerably more if half its tail end hadn’t been bitten off while

it was being hauled into the boat. Put me down for a liar, but this

is what I saw. The big fish had swallowed the hook so deeply that we

had to slit its belly. In the postmortem we found a thirty-pound cod

attached to the hook, which it had just gobbled when the kingfish

grabbed it. Further scientific curiosity caused us to open the cod and

find a two-pound mackerel. “Well,” drawled Andy, “that’s the Pacific

all over again! England swallows New Zealand, New Zealand swallows the

Cooks....” He was like a Roman augur, interpreting guts at the altar.

I studied the kingfish and wondered what sea monster had eaten its

tail. And would this be the fate of Pacific empire when its shrinking

population had grown too feeble to serve European needs and hordes

of orientals swarmed over the plantations to overthrow the economic

balance until some monster military machine would swim up and kill a

fish it was not quite able to swallow? 1940 was to threaten the world

with that very thing.

This fishing interlude came when we were approaching low-lying Mauke,

where I was entertained by hospitable traders, many of whom had native

wives. The Cook Islands might well be named after the prevalent good

cooking; the tenderly roasted sucking pig and Mitiaro eels, found

nowhere else, are something to recall with watering mouth.

Our work in the New Hebrides was sometimes delayed by native hostility,

but more often it was native hospitality that set us back, in the

Cooks. Not all native, either. On the beach at Aitutaki was Whiskey

Smith, reputed to be the Pacific’s most disagreeable trader. Sourly he

defied us to have a drink of his home-brew bush beer, and in vain hopes

of establishing cordial relations I tasted it. Whenever I think of it

my head begins to ache. In subsequent meetings Smith refused to know

me, then one day he barked, “Come in and meet the wife!” He produced a

dingy grotesque of womanhood and said with a flourish, “Ah, a perfect

type of native beauty!”

As soon as our ship was sighted whole islands would put on gala dress.

They were going to have official visitors, a chance to entertain

company! Everybody turned out, from the schoolmaster to the village

idiot. Houses were decked with flowers, pretty girls wore fashionable

dresses that traders had brought from Wellington. Out came the local

string orchestra, playing American jazz and British hymn tunes.

Then the anticlimax. What a blight fell over the festival scene when

it was known that the foreign doctor had come only to examine them for

hookworm! That was a tedious test, likely to spoil any party, for it

required forty-eight hours of dull dosing and unpleasant purging; when

it was over we should have been about as popular as Mussolini after

his castor-oily march on Rome. But the Maori has a reasoning mind. One

of my patients, a chief with a wide white smile, said, “Now we’ll feel

better, so we can go on with the dances in your honor.” They would line

up the girls and regale us with remarkably loose-muscled huras. Then

the orchestra would play prewar tunes from Broadway or Piccadilly.

All over the Cooks, wherever I found boys and girls who co-operated

in my treatments, I would give them lessons in the fox-trot, the

latest wrinkle. I carried this fancy step with me, like a message from

another world, and gave dancing lessons on every island I visited. If

I wasn’t popular as a doctor, I was a toast as a dancing master. And

there was always a feast. Stuffed with tender pork, chicken, turkey,

fish, tomatoes, taro, native oranges, I politely ate my way through the

islands. This was no place for a fat man.

In Rarotonga’s hard-working, understaffed hospital they were beginning

to work out the New Zealand plan of visiting nurses. There were two

European nurses, one who supervised the Rarotonga hospital, another who

took care of babies and other things at Aitutaki. One schoolmaster’s

wife was a Government Nurse.

On that first trip I was covering the ground and studying the needs,

and on the later visit we campaigned for a latrine back of every house

in the Cooks. It was all prearranged and set to go; and it did go

in all the lower group. The Foundation was sharing in the overhead;

otherwise a paternal government paid for the whole job, with the

exception of the labor which the natives contributed. The buildings

were made according to the best economical design, and the islanders

rivaled one another in producing decorative effects. They were becoming

esthetically health-conscious.

Speaking of esthetics, I must mention a social event among the

Europeans, known as “the Privy Tea-party.” Its host was Mr. David

Brown of the Cook Island Native Store. It was an official opening of

the model latrine which had been endorsed by New Zealand and built

on the Foundation’s plans. The building, garlanded with flowers, was

set up on one end of the lawn while at convenient tables tea was

served to Rarotonga’s élite. The ceremonial unlocking of the door was

spectacular. Then the master of ceremonies delivered his speech from

the throne. This was horseplay, but splendid propaganda; for the whole

official personnel was there and heard a clear outline of the benefits

which more little throne rooms would bring to the Cook Islands. There

were some jokes at my expense, but I didn’t mind in the least. The core

of the speaker’s argument was something that I had preached a thousand

times: “When you build a house, build a sanitary latrine first, then

a sanitary kitchen; then parlor and bedroom arrangements to suit

yourself.”

* * * * *

On Mauke, above-mentioned for its hospitality, I lived with the

Resident Commissioner, Mr. Dwyer, who not only showed me that young

octopus served with sauce of salted ground coconut can be a dish for

the sea gods, but made us the guests of the island. Mana, son of King

Tamuero the Second, made a fine point of Polynesian courtesy when he

moved in with his wife and took charge of the household, to see that

we were comfortable. Like most good husbands, he was confidential only

when his wife wasn’t listening; if she heard him explaining things to

me she would warn him not to talk to strangers. However, he found a

chance to tell me about the three kings of Mauke who built the London

Missionary Society’s famous old church.

Remembering what Sir Maui Pomare had said about the old religion and

the new, I was anxious to see that church. Mana took me there and

showed me the big structure of coral and lime with two separate paths

leading like low causeways up to the door. He pointed and said, “That

path is for the men.” I looked again. Two fourteen-foot stone phallic

pillars were planted on either side of it, and on top of each was a

roughly hewn stone hat. The other path was for the women; across it was

a heavy stone arch, Ina’s phallic sign. Strange wedding of paganism and

Christianity.

Inside the church, the altar rail was set with hand-carved panels of

hardwood; there were thirteen panels, and each was studded with a

silver disk. Looking closer, I saw what they were--old Chilean trade

dollars. Figures of the sun and moon were painted on the ceiling,

symbols of the procreative divinities, Tangaloa and Ina. I have

mentioned the priapic images, male and female, which I saw in Tonga.

But here, in the sanctity of a puritanical church....

Mana, son of Tamuero, explained. The first missionaries who came to

Mauke did much prosperous trading. Their store paid Chilean trade

dollars for copra, then got them back when the natives bought axes and

calico. The Maoris saw how the good men cherished the silver tokens. So

when the natives built the edifice out of respect for the missionaries,

they finished the chancel reverently--and into the panels they set the

dollars, each one an image of what they considered the white man’s God.

The pillars and the arch outside had their own story. The three kings

were converted and the people followed _en masse_, as Polynesians will.

The leader of the kings studied his Gospel devoutly. But in the back

of his head he wondered what Tangaloa and Ina would think of these

doings. Well, it was safe to drop an anchor to windward. So he set up

the pillars for the men to touch when they went in to church, and the

arch for the women. Thus they could worship the new God and still give

no offense to the old divinities.

And how about the stone hats on top of the pillars? The business

missionaries gave English straw hats to the three kings with the

understanding that hats were something like crowns; only kings and

Englishmen could wear them. King Tamuero, the most enterprising of

the three, decided that he might offend Tangaloa by wearing a royal

headdress when the god had none. Therefore he wove two coco-fiber hats

in imitation of his own and set them on top of the twin pillars. So the

god was again appeased. It took a generation or so for the missionaries

to realize what the strange stones outside the church really stood

for, then they were so shocked and grieved that they ordered them torn

down. A common-sense New Zealand government was in control by that

time and protected the Maori’s right to do as he pleased with a church

he himself had built. Tangaloa’s two straw hats had worn out after a

while, and admiring natives had replaced them with permanent stone

ones. I hope they are still there.

It would require a Homer to recite the endless myths of Tangaloa and

Ina. Like the Greek Apollo, Tangaloa could walk the earth as a man or

ride the heavens as a god. He had two wives. One controlled the sun,

and since Tangaloa was the sun, she darkened the land to wintry gray

when she took him on pleasure trips. His more illustrious wife, Ina,

had a father named Rangomatane, the Club.

This information, and a great deal more, came from Mana, who was at

first extremely reticent. It wasn’t cricket for a Christian Maori to

talk too much about things which, in his heart, he believed. When I

journeyed to Atiu, second largest island in the group and magnificently

walled with coral cliffs, Mana referred me to a man named Maka, who

would know more. The aristocratic young Maka served as sergeant of

police for the District Agent, and was heir to the chieftainship. He

was outwardly so missionized that it was hard to make him talk--at

first. But Maka was too much of a goodfellow Maori to offend me with

secrecy, and he was renowned for knowledge of the old ways. One

afternoon he led me down among the coral walls on the beach and showed

me two curious niches cut in the formation. Deep inside these recesses

were the Tangaloa and the Ina symbols, sculptured with anatomic

realism. On this island, and others, I saw women bowing to upright

stones, offering up prayers for fertility.

Maka told me more of the myth than I could translate and put down in

that short visit. _Tanga-loa_ meant Man Everlasting. His first-born son

was called The Beginning. Tangaloa gave fishing tackle to this god-boy

and bade him cast his line into outer darkness. The lad gave a mighty

tug, and when the Cook Islands came to the surface he cried, “Father, I

have brought up the land!” In another aspect Tangaloa was called Maui

(He Baited the Hook). The first name he gave the Cooks was Nukatea

(Fruit of the Land), but he changed it to Tepapa (Firm Rock) for this

reason: proud Tangaloa bade the land to come to him, but it defied him

saying, “I am the firm rock.” Then the angered god seized hold of Ina’s

father, The Club, and beat the land until it split open and his second

son, god of southern winds, came forth. Tangaloa had seven sons with

mighty names like The Shelter, The King of Peace and The King of Heaven.

The aristocrats of Mauke and Atiu claimed divine ancestry. Ina loved

best her youngest son, Ariki, and for ages the islanders favored

him. Maka knew that his heavenly ancestor was Rangomatane, the Club,

and spoke of him as you would of a distinguished grandfather. The

lordly sergeant of police took me up to the flat ground and showed

me an interesting relic of the old cult, ruins of Tangaloa’s Worship

House, two long stone walls some half-mile apart, one side shorter

than the other. And here had been the sacred _marai_ called Arangirea,

or Heaven, where the people gathered, calling out the names of the

heavenly sons, and of Tangaloa, and of Ina. They sacrificed pigs, and

cried, “Tangaloa, Everlasting, Everlasting!” When the great priapic

sign was raised the women danced the hura, sacred to the god.

One point in his long story confused me, and I wanted to know who was

the mother of all Tangaloa’s sons. He looked self-conscious, and I knew

I was treading on delicate ground. I had touched the family skeleton,

for Maka was descended from Rangomatane, the Club, therefore Ina was

his ancestress. Once upon a time Tangaloa was so insistent in his

husbandly demands that Ina descended from the moon on a banyan tree;

look at the full moon and you will see the shadowed banyan. Ina fled

in vain, for Tangaloa followed her, and seven sacred sons were the

result. Maka told me earnestly that he only revealed the scandal in the

interest of truth, and it was nothing to be proud of. By many signs, he

said, you knew when Ina was near. White clouds were her tapa, and when

they grew red it was her father’s signal, “Come to earth.” Thunder and

lightning meant that she had obeyed and her divine feet had touched the

ground. The rain was her tears, the emerging sun meant that she was

drying her clothes.

Maka told me how Ina, like the Phœnix, renews her youth--but not by

fire, by a dip into the sea. When I asked him who created Tangaloa he

puzzled a moment, then said, “He was the son of the Unknown God. And

nobody will ever know who created God.”

* * * * *

The prevalence of leprosy on the Cook Islands interested me

impersonally, as a medical investigator; as a human being it interested

me because of an unpleasant incident which threatened to wreck my plans

for the Central Medical School.

Twenty years before my first visit there Dr. Maui Pomare made a leprosy

survey and took some interesting notes. Penrhyn Island was a notorious

type case; five per cent of the inhabitants were afflicted when I

saw it in 1926. On Penrhyn the great Maori physician looked into the

local history of the disease and found that a Penrhyn Islander who had

lived with a leprous woman in Samoa brought it back with him in 1885.

Forty-four cases stemmed from this man; over a course of twenty years

thirty-one of them had died, for leprosy is a slow killer. One boy

came down with itch, was declared “unclean” and shut away with a real

leper for many miserable years. When the sick man died his companion

buried him. Pomare found that this boy showed no trace of leprosy.

At that time lepers were isolated on the rim of Aitutaki as well as on

Penrhyn, where through fear of the disease they received no medical or

surgical care, and scarcely any food. Once a month a whaleboat would

dump rations on the beach. The only contact the sufferers had with the

outside world and their families was a few words shouted to the boys in

the boat, lying safely offshore. An inlet on Penrhyn lagoon, connected

with the main island at low tide, had become a trash-heap for lepers.

Pomare wrote:--

The poor unfortunates do not get enough to eat. There will be no need

to ask for a volunteer keeper, as we have already an unrecognized

Father Damien, in Meka and his young wife, who volunteered to live

on the island in order to be near their adopted son. I really do not

know what would have happened to these unfortunate British subjects

if Meka had not volunteered. He does all the fishing and looks after

the sufferers; for this he receives no recognition from the civilized

world in either funds or praise. Perhaps when the great Master will

call His own He will say unto him, “Good and faithful servant, enter

into the rest of the Lord.... Greater love hath no man than this, that

a man lay down his life for his friends.”

World-wide experimentation has shown us very little of the etiology of

this disease. The cause of infection remains almost as mysterious as

the cause of cancer; but unlike cancer it is definitely contagious.

For thousands of years it has been treated with chaulmoogra oil, taken

by mouth, which showed better results than any other drug, but was

so nauseous that an adequate dose was impossible. In 1900 Dr. Victor

Heiser, working at Manila, gave it in injections intramuscularly, and

made the first step forward in the long history of the disease. Today

modified chaulmoogra oil is the chosen treatment.

Conventionally, we shrink away from leprosy. Biblical stories of the

“unclean” and lurid passages from popular novels like _Ben Hur_ have

played upon the imagination until we have given leprosy leadership

among the bogies. Among primitives, where the treatment is not

understood and the extremities gradually slough away, growing so

anesthetic they do not respond to the touch of a red-hot instrument,

the picture is unpleasant. But the disease is so leisurely that

it takes years for it to arrive at its final horrifying aspect.

To the experienced physician diagnosis in the early stages is a

matter of routine, and the modern method is simple. Today, if I were

forced to choose, I would rather have leprosy in an early stage

than tuberculosis. But the world was slow in taking up preventive

work. Isolation and treatment were everything until recently when

the American Leper Association began to study the mode of leprosy’s

transmission. They could only find a few old men who knew anything

about the disease, so the Association had to train young investigators

to look into the causes.

Its transmission is a knotty problem. We know that infection is general

in leprous communities, but how does it infect? Medical martyrs have

tried to infect themselves by wearing leper’s clothes and sleeping in

leper’s beds, but these tests have brought no results. Natives have

lived with leprous women for twenty years without contracting the

disease, but Pomare found forty-two cases that had been conveyed to

Penrhyn Island by a man who had lived with a leprous woman. There is

a theory that it is acquired in early infancy and does not manifest

itself until later life, under circumstances favorable for the disease.

But what are favorable circumstances? Nobody seems to have found out.

It takes a keen expert eye to mark out leprosy in its early stages;

the experienced sisters on Makogai can spot it at once; slight

discolorations, slight skin anaesthesias. In the Pacific where

civilized early treatment is given you see no such horrid sights as

meet you at every turn in India and China. In 1926 we were rounding up

Cook Island lepers and sending them to the Mokogai colony.

Leprosy is not indigenous to the Pacific, and there are evidences

of its rather recent importation. It has been there long enough to

have a folklore, and natives generally believe that a leper can will

his sickness on an enemy. These natives know that the disease is

transmissible, but if the patient is your friend you can live and eat

with him. If he is your foe, do not touch anything he has touched. In

Tahiti they tell of a goatherd who was caught in a sudden rain and

borrowed a shirt from his pal, who happened to be a leper. When people

asked him if he wasn’t afraid of catching it he said, “Why? He’s my

best friend. Why should he want to pass it on to me?”

Aitutaki offered a plain picture of two diseases which have only

recently scourged the Cooks--elephantiasis and leprosy. They seemed

to have no native name for the disfiguring offshoot of filariasis;

it was too new for them to have given it a name. Aitutaki’s burying

places showed that they had been a larger race only a few generations

back. The bones were longer and sturdier and the skulls showed clean

white teeth. Among the living, I found all too many cases of dental

decay. Their white-toothed forefathers had not tasted sugar, nor become

dependent on the trader’s white flour. From what I could find out, the

Aitutaki of 150 years ago had known no serious infections except yaws,

which they called _tona_, as all Polynesians did.

About seventy-five years ago a man from Tahiti imported leprosy and

nobody could make out what it was. Then the belief grew that the curse

came to those who defiled the sanctity of those family ceremonial

grounds, the _marai_. They tell of a European who burned a trash-pile

on an ancient _marai_, and was cursed. Nobody felt sorry for him; they

had warned him of what would happen. The _marai_ was so sacrosanct

that none but members of the family were allowed to weed the plot,

and _nobody_ could build a fire on it. One on Amuri was so vengeful

that its black stones poisoned the nuts falling from surrounding

trees. Those who ate these nuts would be afflicted with swollen lips.

Ancestral ghosts are jealous guardians.

On Christmas Day, 1925, I gave a party for the natives who had helped

me generously with my work. To foster competition and please myself

with a pretty show, I offered a prize for the best hura dancer among

the girls. One of the prettiest creatures that ever shook a grass skirt

was a light-colored native named Ann Masters, winner from the start.

After her lovely hura she put on European clothes, and looked as though

she had just walked off Park Avenue. In my role as dancing master I

taught her the fox-trot. We danced for two hours, I imagine.

Afterwards, one of the residents asked me if I knew about Palmerston

Island. Palmerston? Well, yes; it had a bad reputation for leprosy. And

my friend asked if I knew that an Englishman named Masters had brought

the disease there, and that his descendants were known as “the leprous

Masters”? Did I know that Ann was the daughter of a Masters who had

moved to Rarotonga? I wasn’t much flustered, hearing about Ann. Why

worry the doctor who had given reward-of-merit fox-trot parties all

over the Cooks?

Two years later I went with Dr. Heiser to inspect the rapidly improving

leper colony at Mokogai. The island was divided into a “clean” side

and a “dirty” side. On the clean side lived the resident natives and

the hospital staff, a respectful distance from where the lepers were

kept. I had no sooner crossed the deadline to the “dirty” than I heard

a sweet voice in the peculiar jargon of Palmerston calling out, “How do

you do, Doctor?” It was Ann Masters, still trig and young to outward

appearances. The doctors said she was too far gone to get well, but

later I was happy to hear that she was on the road to recovery. I

have a photograph of her, one I took at the Christmas party. Today,

with my increased experience in spotting the symptoms, I can see many

indications of the disease in that pretty face.

On that same visit to Mokogai I had another surprise. Two familiar

figures strolled down the beach and waved their hands at me. I

recognized the cook and housemaid who had served me so well when I

lived on Aitutaki in 1932.

Certainly it is a slow, conservative germ, and I stand as a human

example. A dozen years ago I must have been exposed to it a number of

times, yet I show no leprous symptoms.

One woman I examined on Atiu haunts my dreams. Because she showed

suspicious signs I made a hasty bare-handed examination--conditions

were too crude for the physician to protect himself with rubber gloves.

My fingers went under her arm to examine the ulnar nerve--and struck a

big, mushy ulcer. I couldn’t find soap or even fresh water, so I walked

for nearly an hour until I could wash my hands.

In 1938 Dr. Ellison conducted New Zealand’s last big roundup in the

Cooks, combing the islands for lepers. On Penrhyn he was entertained

by Phil Winton, a wealthy pearl trader. Winton fed Ellison royally,

and at the end of his stay the Doctor went to thank the cook for her

distinguished meals. He took one look at her and said, “You’d better

pack up and come with me on the boat.” Winton had made the mistake of

forgetting that leprosy could come in by the back door.

* * * * *

A few months after my return to Fiji I went on leave to the States, to

be gone until the beginning of 1927. Meanwhile Sir Maui Pomare, always

anxious about the leper situation in the Cooks, had chartered a ship

and gone there to take patients off for Mokogai. Leaving Suva for home,

I was on the crest of a wave. The Central Medical School was an assured

fact--practically. Now I could boast to New York and Utica that four

years of propagandizing and wire-pulling had achieved the unachievable.

All the groups controlled by the High Commission and by New Zealand

would send the money, send their quota of students. Soon we would be

breaking ground for the long-deferred project.

It was a case of crowing before you are out of the woods.

When I returned to Suva Dr. Montague’s long face proclaimed bad news.

What had happened in my absence was worse than I had expected. The Cook

Islands had withdrawn from the Medical School scheme, and not through

any fault of parliamentary politics. It was Sir Maui Pomare himself

who had suddenly quit the game. But when I learned the truth I held no

resentment against the great Maori.

It seemed that Pomare had gone in his rescue ship to a spot in the Cook

Islands where they dumped lepers and left them to die in their own way.

Under his administration the situation had bettered somewhat, but it

was still a poor makeshift. Pomare’s one desire was to get the poor

devils to the modern leper colony.

The boat you charter for the haulage of lepers isn’t exactly a luxury

liner, and the trip to Mokogai was slow, dirty and dangerous. At last

he got them there, some thirty patients, and was taking the greatest

care to see that they were properly landed. When that job was over he

came down the gangplank, not a very presentable Cabinet Minister; rough

travel in a rough boat had soiled his clothes, exposure had darkened

his complexion and he hadn’t shaved for a week. Down on the wharf he

was stopped by a dandified young Medical Officer, obviously fresh from

London, who held up an arresting hand and twittered commandingly,

“Colored people this way, please!” I don’t know how many kinds of hell

New Zealand’s Minister of Health gave the efficient youth, but plenty I

imagine. Pomare inherited temper from a long line of Maori chiefs.

Pomare took the next boat to Suva, went straight to Montague, then to

the Governor. To both he said that the High Commission hadn’t sense

enough to keep these brats away from responsible positions. He had seen

what he saw on Mokogai, and he was through. So long as he remained in

office, he declared, no health project favored by the High Commission

would ever get the shadow of a red cent out of his ministry. And that

broad ultimatum withdrew the Cook Islands’ co-operation from the

Central Medical School. Without the Cooks, we were just where we had

been before, helpless to go on.

* * * * *

Children say, “He’ll get over being mad.” With a strong and stubborn

character like Pomare’s, this softening of the temperament was

not so sure. I tried to steady myself with the knowledge that at

least six important Pacific groups were still behind our plan. I

remembered Queen Salote’s generous question which had given me the

first big encouragement: “Are we too small to do our share?” But time

was precious now, and whatever we did must be done at once. Pomare

controlled a section of Polynesia which we must include, or quit.

It was January, 1927, when Montague retailed the bad news, and I

gave myself a few days to worry. Then I went over to his office and

asked, “What about it?” He said, “Lambert, you know Pomare, and I

don’t. You’ve worked with him, he likes you and he’ll probably respect

whatever you have to say.” I had already thought over what Montague

proposed next. “Why don’t you take the boat for New Zealand, see Pomare

and try to talk him over? It won’t be easy, but I can’t see any other

way.”

In about two weeks I was in Wellington, where I went straight to

Pomare’s office in the Government Building. I hadn’t announced my

coming, and when I reached his desk I saw his look of friendly

surprise. (I made the mental note, “At least he’s smiling.”) Well, he

said, he didn’t know I was in New Zealand; and what had brought me

there at this time of year? I said “I have come down to get better

acquainted with you. The last time I was here it was so cold that I

went to Auckland to write my Cook Island Report. Now I just want to

visit.” Impulse was urging me to bring up the subject which I knew was

foremost in both our minds. But it would be fatal to seem too eager.

Our conversation drifted into impersonal channels; Dominion politics,

welfare work among the children, native health problems--a little of

everything except what had brought me there.

I wasn’t going to play the first card. Then gracefully, as if there

had never been the slightest difference between him and the High

Commission, he asked me how the School was progressing. This was my

opening. I eased into the subject, as though he had never heard of it

before. He listened for an hour, interrupting occasionally to make his

own comments. In every detail this great Maori showed the same grasp

of essential points that he displayed on a later visit to Fiji when

we gave him the honors of a chief and Eloisa cooked her best dinner;

Montague was there, a superb physician himself, and was convinced at

last that a Maori could excel. He was even more convinced when we took

Pomare over to Mokogai and landed him, in state, at the same spot where

a whippersnapper had once said, “Colored people this way.”

... After that hour with Pomare in his Wellington office the difference

was surprisingly smoothed out. He was cordial, beaming. Why, of

course the Cook Islands would be in on the Medical School. Of course

well-trained Native Practitioners would be the only solution. Of course

the Cooks were in.

When I left his office, dazed by this splendid turn of luck, I could

not restrain a chuckle. Had Pomare ever intended to hold aloof? Hadn’t

he withdrawn from the High Commission scheme merely as a demonstration,

to show the _Pakeha_ that he could not insult a Maori without the

danger of reprisals? He had shown them that he held the power, and that

he could use it. Then with a magnanimous gesture he gave them what they

asked for.

Out on a Wellington street I mopped my brow and tried to realize that

we had crossed the last bridge. The hard pull of four years was over.

I was going to have my School. Now ground-breaking would begin in

earnest. Now we could send all over the Pacific, bring in eligible

native boys and teach them what modern medicine really means.

CHAPTER VII

HALF A LOAF AND A SLICE OFF

I should be sloppily sentimental and call the scene which is to follow

“My Dream Come True.” The dream had backed in a little crookedly,

knocking over a few ideals and dumping at my feet a short measure

of fine gold. But who was I to complain? Something substantial had

materialized out of six hard years of constant hammering for results.

I think I was excited, for I could scarcely follow the earnest,

dedicatory voice that rang through the new lecture hall, fragrant with

fresh paint and plaster.

That was the morning of December 29, 1928. I sat on the platform with

bigwigs of the Colony: Sir Maynard Hedstrom, U. S. Consul Roberts,

the Secretary of Native Affairs, the Colonial Secretary and sundry

others. His Excellency Sir Eyre Hutson, Governor General of the High

Commission, was making a speech.

“It is fitting that there should be this meeting today to record the

opening of the new Medical School in Suva, which has really been in

being for some weeks, from November first, but officially as a Central

Native Medical School in the Western Pacific will enter on its career,

which we hope can be no other than a successful one, from January

first, 1929 ... had its origin some years ago with Dr. Lambert, a

member of the Medical Staff of the Rockefeller International Health

Foundation ... whole-heartedly supported by Dr. Montague.... And the

various Administrations in the Pacific, who have co-operated in the

scheme, owe a deep debt of gratitude to Dr. Lambert for his strong

faith, for his persistent advocacy of the proposal with the governing

body of the Rockefeller Foundation ... without which we should not be

in this building today....”

I looked over the upturned faces, brown and white. I counted the

eight native boys of the graduating class, and thanked God that all

the undergraduates wouldn’t have to sleep in the little firetrap of

a dormitory, which would only accommodate twelve. The new dormitory

could pack in twenty-eight, and there was room for forty in the dining

room. The new main building, over which we were making such a fuss,

would be fairly cramped quarters. It needed space for laboratories,

pathological, bacteriological, biochemical. And the dissecting room

wasn’t much bigger than my grandmother’s cupboard....

Just the same, my dream had come true, even with a string on it. The

modest buildings we had achieved were modern-built and filled with

students.

Now the Governor, his kindly, eupeptic face rather flushed with

December heat, was addressing the student body:--

“... You are receiving opportunities with limitations, which are

unavoidable, of becoming members of a very honorable profession, not

only for your personal benefit but mainly for the good of those men,

women and children to whom you will be called on to give medical

and surgical aid and treatment to the best of your ability and

knowledge....”

Then it was over, everybody had shaken hands, and I was being

interviewed by the press. I told the reporters what I felt, that his

Excellency had been too modest in disclaiming his own important share

in bringing the School to life; how the project had been a partnership

between Dr. Montague and myself, and how I might have given up early

except for his quiet persistence; and how Queen Salote of Tonga and

her Prince Consort had offered financial aid in my hour of deepest

discouragement; how their loyalty to all the South Pacific had inspired

other groups until at last they had touched the purse-strings of the

Foundation....

Outside on the half-finished grounds I saw students filing into the

classrooms. There was a score of dark-skinned Fijian boys with shocks

of kinky black hair, sport shirts and _sulus_. They had the look I

have always admired in their race, that of intellectual honesty and

will to learn. The Polynesian boys were in _lavalavas_, and like

the Melanesians they were bare-legged and unshod; some of them had

the pale, even features and straight hair of Caucasians. There were

a couple of boys from the Solomon Islands, wooly-haired and almost

plum-black. The light-faced, worldly-looking ones were from the Cooks.

There were a couple of well-dressed East Indians. The Condominium

was sending us New Hebridean students, but they hadn’t come yet. The

Fijians outnumbered the others, for there were twenty in all, and

twelve of them were graduating from the old school, which had only

accommodated sixteen students in all. Almost overnight the enrollment

had increased to forty, and I was wondering how the boys from far-off

groups would get on with the Fijians, when more of the outsiders came

in. The fair-skinned boys from the Cooks and Samoa had one great

advantage; they knew more English, whereas the Fijians were handicapped

there and would have to learn hard lessons in a strange tongue. For

the same reason all the Melanesian lads would have a tough time at

first. New Zealand had been wise in giving her mother tongue to the

Polynesians.... But I knew the Fijians, men like Malakai and Charley,

who had mastered every hard subject that came their way.

More boys would be eligible for the school. We would have to refuse

some for lack of space, and look very carefully into the mental

qualifications of every applicant.... There would be a tendency on

the home islands, I knew, to play favorites for political reasons.

Some of the officials would promote candidates because they were “good

batmen”--meaning that they had served them well personally.

All that must be straightened out, for we would never have room for

slackers.... I wondered how soon we could promote a decent school for

native nurses; that was a part of my plan for enlargement. Now they

were living in a crazy shack where they did their own cooking, and in

the hospital they scrubbed and emptied slops for dainty British nurses.

Samoa was giving her native girls an adequate training. We could do no

better than follow her lead.... I wondered if students would ever come

from Papua and New Guinea, where N.M.P.’s were dreadfully needed. The

Canberra Government was standing pat on White Man’s Australia, and the

“blackfellow” was not supposed to have a head on his shoulders. Papuan

and New Guinea natives, they said, were not adequately prepared for

higher education. I knew better, for I had seen those boys, and worked

with them.... According to Australia’s yardstick students from the New

Hebrides and the Solomons were also inadequately prepared; but they

were entering our first class. Australia forgot that her Territories

had been missionized by Fijians, Tongans and Samoans.... Dr. Strong,

the progressive C.M.O. at Port Moresby, had offered to pay the expenses

of Papuan students, if Canberra would consent.... But why argue the

point? Australia was jealous of little Fiji’s rise as a medical center,

and had decided not to send a student or to permit an N.M.P. to work

in her possessions.... I wondered if she would ever change her mind.

* * * * *

Up to the day I retired the Foundation was always a little nervous

about what I was going to do next. They were usually asking, by

inference, “Where is Lambert going to pop up now?” Dr. Heiser’s

immediate reaction to whatever I put up to him was a simple, “No,” and

I had to pound away at him until he gave up. As I have said before, he

was very careful with Mr. Rockefeller’s silver dimes, and his honest

stubbornness deserves great credit. Dr. Sawyer, who bossed me during

my early days in the Pacific, was a strong advocate of the Central

Medical School, for he knew the needs of the islands. Sawyer is now

the Foundation’s Director of the International Health Division, and

still a little nervous about me. He wants me settled on a Californian

farm where I’ll be out of mischief. Sawyer is one of the most brilliant

research scientists of our time. Considering his environmental

background he is extremely broad-minded--he comes of a family of

clergymen. I shall never forget the time I led him up to a North

Queensland bar where the Australians were sneering “Wowser!” at every

prohibitionist. Sawyer ordered ginger ale, drank it and made them like

him. With the same puritanical gusto he backed me up in the Medical

School. I shall always be grateful to him.

I had estimated that it could be financed by a contribution of £1,500

each from seven island groups. Fiji’s sudden decision that she could

start a School of her own on a one-horse scale had given more point

to my argument when I went back to the States and put it up to the

Foundation. I had talked pretty steadily for half a year, informing the

unsympathetic ones that Fiji’s stingy plan would set the School back

about twenty years.

In 1927 I had come back to Suva with the Board’s promise in my

pocket. They would fund half the expense of the larger plan. This was

economical still, and hardly adequate for what we needed; but we had

enough now to get things going. I had wrestled with the Foundation’s

Department of Medical Sciences, to whom I had to appeal for the sort of

funds required. To give out money to the very finest medical schools

and raise their already high standards was the Department’s end and

aim. To finance a little idea like ours gave them an almost physical

nausea. I didn’t get anything out of them, except to make them admit

that some lower grade of medical education might be useful, until their

high-flown notions had time to turn out crack specialists to serve the

teeming millions who lacked anything but witch doctors to care for them.

The Department of Medical Sciences remained adamant. I finally got

the money from the International Health Board itself. This was the

first time they had given financial support to the building of medical

schools. Up to then it had always been in the hands of the Department

of Medical Sciences.

The time would come when we would need more buildings and equipment,

that was obvious. The time might also come when some jealous local

politician would attempt to wreck the School, or drain it white. A

little man can do big mischief, as we found later when a domestic

colonial secretary worked his political best to destroy our planned

Unified Health Commission, for the petty reason that Fiji’s Chief

Medical Officer would head it with a few pounds larger salary than his

own. He was of the old anti-American type, which has done so much to

promote ill feeling both between England and her colonies and England

and America. His kind, I hope, is passing. This little man was not

quite able to interfere with co-operation in the Mokogai Leper Colony,

which we started back in 1923 and saw built into one of the finest

leprosaria in the world.

But the School was open, and we were down to the realism of immediate

figures. We could admit forty, and the cost per student would be ninety

pounds. There was a wooden dormitory, a main building seventy-six by

thirty feet, and the Principal’s house. We were well staffed with the

Chief Medical Officer, the pick of the government physicians and local

practitioners. We also had the Government’s pharmacist, a dentist,

the Government’s bacteriologist and chemist, and the Rockefeller

Foundation’s modest representative. We had plenty of textbooks and

scientific instruments. In fact we had about everything but room to

turn around in.

* * * * *

I wasn’t dissatisfied that afternoon in 1928 when I made another

inspection of the buildings. Our feet were on the ladder, we were going

up. The other things would come, though there was plenty of fighting

ahead.

I had to reflect on the slow and painful beginnings of the Native

Practitioner system, some forty-two years before. In 1875 the Colony

was frightened by the measles epidemic which burned the Fijians down,

and with only the puniest attempt at medical aid. Thirteen years later

the British residents were appalled by the danger of smallpox, brought

in by the East Indian invasion. The Government well knew that the most

important medical need was vaccination, but the expense of European

vaccinators in this work seemed overwhelming. Health in those days was

in the charge of Dr. Corney, Fiji’s second great Medical Officer. Sir

William Macgregor, later Governor of Papua, was the first, and Dr.

Montague was the third of the great ones. In Corney’s day the Colony,

in desperate need, was sending out natives to administer vaccine to an

endangered population.

Corney saw how dextrous these men could be with instruments and how

quickly they won the confidence of half-wild villagers. Perhaps the

Colony’s financial embarrassment was what touched off his imagination.

At any event, in the late eighties, after the Government had voted

small sums for vaccination purposes, Corney surprised them all by

suggesting that the native boys be given some systematic medical

education. In January, 1889, eight Fijians passed the examination and

were given certificates.

These early students got only the bare bones of a living. They were

huddled together in a _bure_ in the old Colonial Hospital grounds,

and spent a good deal of their time working their gardens for enough

vegetables to keep going. They had no lecture room, no models or

diagrams; postmortem examinations were not easily obtained and almost

the only apparatus for anatomical study was a set of bones. When

medical officials had time to teach these boys they casually handed

them some practical work in the Hospital. Most of the nursing duties

fell on their shoulders, as the Matron was the only trained nurse

in Fiji. There was some improvement in 1900, when a lecture room

was built. Somewhat later improvements advanced as far as a wooden

students’ quarters.

In 1898 the students went on strike, which resulted in the improvements

of 1900. As a body they called upon the officials and announced that

they wanted the whole-time services of a cook, otherwise they were

going back home. The authorities concluded that they were probably

human beings, so the point was carried. After several years the

eight-student school had turned out approximately twenty Native Medical

Practitioners. These men were working for something like seven pounds

a year, all told, but they were given free gardens to cultivate for

themselves. They earned two pounds ten as Provincial Vaccinators, and

in 1905 their salaries jumped to between eighteen pounds and fifty

pounds. Seven years later their usefulness was recognized by another

increase in salary; this time they were divided into first, second and

third class. A first-class N.M.P. was getting as much as one hundred

pounds a year. When the new School was opened, they were making around

one hundred and fifty pounds.

The products of this low-paid, rough-and-ready education won their

spurs early. In the devastating influenza epidemic of 1918 three of

the old students died at their posts as dispensers in the Colonial

Hospital. Eight in all died, out of a total of forty-eight. In no case

was there any complaint that an N.M.P. had failed in his duty so long

as he was able to lift a hand.

In December, 1928, a new order was coming to pass, I hoped. The door

was open, not too wide, but young men were passing through with a

keen desire to get the best that modern methods could give. That door

would have to swing wider. It mustn’t close again. Neither politics

nor prejudice nor indifference must slam it shut in the faces of those

who had come so earnestly to learn. I was canny enough to suspect that

there would be the same percentage of failures you will find in any

college anywhere--ten following years of experience taught me that the

average was less. They had something more than the desire to get on

in the world, which inspires so many European professional students.

That December evening I talked with several of the incoming class, the

boys who were not too shy to speak out. Why did they want to go into

medicine? The answer I got from them was usually the same: “Because I

want to do something for my own people.”

It was about then that I pulled in my belt and promised myself that so

long as I was alive and in Fiji I wouldn’t let them down.

PART THREE

CHAPTER I

OLD BRANDY AND NEW EGGS

First let’s try to peg the story down to the spring of 1931, when I put

a bottle of rare old brandy under my arm and went up a very New Yorkish

elevator to see Mr. Raymond Fosdick. The brandy, worth its weight in

gold, if you could price it at all, had been given to me in exchange

for three dozen fresh eggs.

Mr. Fosdick, as legal advisor to the Rockefellers, was also an

important trustee of the Foundation, therefore my business with him was

legitimate. So was the brandy, although America was then in the throes

of Amendment Eighteen.

As I waited outside his office I almost asked his amiable secretary if

I hadn’t better smuggle the bottle under her desk and say nothing about

it. I was conscious that Mr. Fosdick’s brother was the Reverend Harry

Emerson Fosdick, pastor of Mr. Rockefeller’s great temple of sobriety

on Riverside Drive, and the Rockefeller family were honestly in favor

of prohibition. And how about the big Rockefeller executive in his

office over there? Representative of a great temperance family, brother

of a great preacher.... No, I had better hide that bottle somewhere....

Then his secretary said “Dr. Lambert,” meaning me, so I picked up the

bottle and went into his office. I had been told that I would meet one

of the most charming men on earth, and I wasn’t disappointed. But our

conversation hadn’t gone very far before I noticed his eyes straying

toward the wrapped bottle I was holding in my lap; he was wondering,

I suppose, if South Sea doctors always carried their own liquor.

Maybe I was getting off on the wrong foot, but something had to be

done. I pulled off the wrapper and handed him the brandy. I began, “I

don’t know how you stand on prohibition. This happens to be rare old

stuff--but if you have any prejudices--”

“Prejudices!” He stared at the faded label. “It’s 1835! Yes, I have

prejudices--in its favor.” Relieved, I said, “Well, it’s for the black

sheep of the Fosdick family.”

Still nursing the bottle, he laughed, “My brother Harry is so strict

I have to balance the ship. Now let me uncover a family skeleton. My

great-grandfather was a distiller before he became a preacher. His

distillery failed because he endorsed bad notes for friends, so he

turned to the Baptist pulpit for consolation. In those days they had

high pulpits with a steep stairway in the back. My ancestor used to

keep a bottle under those stairs, and before sermons he would brace

himself with a couple of good spots; then he would mount the ladder

and give his congregation and the distillers hellfire for two solid

hours.... No, Doctor, I don’t mind your telling all about the family.

I’ve often said to Brother Harry that it would be a good thing for him

if he imitated the old gentleman. But Harry seldom listens to my wiser

suggestions.”

The brandy perched on the desk like a silent diplomat, opening the

way to confidences. Mr. Fosdick had studied at Colgate when I was at

Hamilton, and when I told him that I was on the team that knocked the

living perfume out of Colgate our entente was established. He asked

about progress over my six million square miles of sea. Maybe he had

read my reports, but there were so many reports blowing in from all

points that I sought briefly to refresh his memory. With education and

tetrachloride, I said, the hookworm disease was getting under control

and populations were on the upgrade, where the High Commission and the

Foundation had a free hand. Wherever we worked with the New Zealand

health authorities we got fine results. We expected the Cook Island

natives would show an increase of 20 per cent in the decade between

1926 and 1936. The Mau Rebellion had set back New Zealand’s work in

Western Samoa, but they were making good headway again, the Foundation

doing its share. The awful Condominium was still making a mess of the

New Hebrides; and the Australians--well, they weren’t playing ball.

The Central Medical School had graduated two classes, but without the

thorough curriculum which the new students would have. Soon we would

be able to throw more well-educated N.M.P.’s into the work.... I am

not sure that Mr. Fosdick remembered our little School at all. Fiji

is a long way from lower Broadway. When he had commended our modest

project, a few years before, he had thought of it as romantic; yet

when he fixed his signature to the plan, buried among the vaster

projects, it was one of the most fruitful acts of all his useful life.

Many Rockefeller millions, for instance, had gone into the great school

in Peking, and into field work in China. Five or six years later the

Sino-Japanese war blasted away those handsome contributions. The little

school at Suva was destined to grow steadily and bear an annual crop of

trained native talent.

I told him that our work was now directed toward mass treatments for

both cure and prevention. The big, shaggy Solomon Islands were black

spots in the Pacific which we were doing our best to penetrate with

modern medicine, and with what few responsible white men we could find.

They were injecting thousands with neoarsphenamine, for yaws, dosing

thousands with tetrachloride and tetrachlorethylene for hookworm. I

had made a short survey of the Solomons in 1921 and later on, through

Montague, had started things going that way. I had visited there

again in 1930 and this trip had taken me at last to the lost Rennell

Island.... I tried to tell him about Rennell Island, small as a mustard

seed in a pond, yet unique in all the world because it was inhabited by

a people who were 20,000 years behind our modern times....

I told him of two of our excellent men, working in the more attainable

Solomon Islands--if anything down there is “attainable.” Gordon White

and Dr. Steenson were outstanding. White was an Australian small doctor

made over from a pharmacist, and he was doing wonders with the hardest

assignment in the world, “blackfellow treatment.” Dr. Steenson was a

scientist of large caliber, although physically he was about vestpocket

size. The Dean of the New Zealand Medical School knew what he was about

when he recommended Steenson to me.

These men would send me their journals, written from the field when

they worked up and down the double chain of six or seven big, wild

islands. There were plantations and missions around the edges, but the

interiors were usually inhabited by unregenerate killers. Malaita,

for instance, was a little larger than Long Island, and twice as

tough. When black Malaitamen worked on the plantations they had to

be carefully watched; they had a nasty habit of turning on their

straw-boss. No Malaitaman ranked as a true male until he had killed

his man. There was the case in 1927 which newspapers played up as

“The Malaita Murders.” Captain Bell, a tax collector, with his white

assistant and fourteen native police, fell under massed spear-points,

and when the guilty ones were tried for murder they made no attempt to

deny anything. Hill-grown Malaitamen don’t know how to lie. Somebody

had “sent” them to do murder--a witch doctor, most likely. Without a

sign of fear they walked up to the hangman.

Dr. Steenson had drawn a very accurate map of Malaita, in four colors.

The colors, he explained, had been made for him by mission boys, out

of plant juices. He and White both carried phonographs, and when

patients came in too slowly the white medicine men would turn on stale

music-hall pieces. “Show Me the Way to Go Home” was a favorite. Mission

boys learned it, formed male quartets and butchered the tune horribly,

far into the night. Malaitamen loved the needle--sick or well, they

demanded it. But on adjacent islands they would run and hide, scared

to death of it. When audiences failed to show up the interpreter would

say, “Big kaikai”--whether they were eating men or pigs was never

revealed. Earthquakes were a commonplace, leaf houses tumbling, young

parrots falling out of the trees, natives scrambling under a barrage

of coconuts. Lollipops were always in demand; stalwart warriors would

wait for a dole of candy before they would talk business. Sometimes a

native, who had never been near a treatment, would curl up and die of

a heart attack or gallstone colic or whatever ailed him. Invariably

his fellow tribesmen would blame the death on “stick medicine,”

hypodermics, and it would take a wealth of diplomacy to argue them

down. This situation was never less than dangerous. Steenson carried

his Bible with him, and on Sunday mornings, when the missions enforced

leisure, he would open it at Genesis and pull out a file of papers

entitled “Yaws Campaign Notes.” He wrote me: “There is one thing

in this Bible with which I do not agree. I refer to a sentence in

‘The Equipment and Working of a Yaws Unit (Samoan Experience).’” Dr.

Steenson was basically religious.

Quaint letters came from native mission teachers, White and Steenson

sent them to me as comic bits: “_My deer friend Dr. Steenson_, I am

David Ikala write this letter to you, about all your boys, on this

night, you put Goaril to look after all your things, now behind you he

went down to Raresu, he going on Mother’s house and he do a trouble

there, he catch hold the girls.... And another time he brake the roof

of there house....”

This letter was signed “With a great love.”

It was a horse of a darker color when surreptitious notes were slipped

into Gordon White’s hand, saying, “Don’t go down to Wanderer Bay,”

and telling how the natives there were waiting to club the white men.

Gordon White wrote casually, “Wherever I go the local lads come along

with their various relations, and there is no sign of trouble or

discontent.”

White had the services of Charlie One Arm, the policeman, who with his

single arm could knock out all comers. Charlie’s maxim was “Treat ’em

rough.” Around mission stations he would shock the pious by shouting

to women who wouldn’t take their medicine, “Listen, you sunnabitch

fellow!” But when I read White’s reports of threatening letters I saw

Montague; we had White, Steenson and Charlie One Arm moved to safer,

tamer ground. We couldn’t afford to have another Malaita murder....

Gordon White rounded off his report by telling how a flock of

naked cannibals, well armed with clubs and spears, swarmed down

and surrounded his tent. Had they come to finish him off? No, it

turned out, they were bearing gifts. Gordon wrote, “The Malaitaman

generally wants as much as he can get for anything he has to dispose

of, and giving things away he looks on as sheer madness. But here

they were showering me with presents, and with no apparent strings on

them--cowrie shells, kai-kai spoons, a bow and a few arrows, a basket

of fruit, and a middle aged rooster--I should say about forty-five.”

Just a little tribute to modern medicine, and no flowery speeches;

solemnly the Malaitamen strode back to their jungle....

* * * * *

I did not tell all this to Mr. Fosdick, a busy man on a busy day. But

I had time to outline enough of it to hint at the problems we had

to face among the howling pagans of the Solomon Islands, where the

missionaries, good, bad and confused, were merely nibbling around the

edges. Tuberculosis was prevalent in the Solomons, and we expected to

tackle it on a grand scale when there were more N.M.P.’s.

Before we shook hands Raymond Fosdick asked: “But what about this

wonderful 1835 brandy? Is it so easy down there to get hold of such

rare stuff?”

“It is,” I said, “if you find the right man. I got four bottles of it

in exchange for three dozen strictly fresh eggs.”

Then I told him how.

CHAPTER II

ANOTHER ISLAND NIGHT’S ENTERTAINMENT

Late in 1930, shortly before I broached the egg-and-brandy riddle to

Mr. Fosdick, the beautiful yacht _Zaca_ pulled in at Suva. Templeton

Crocker, who had inherited richly from banks and mines in California,

was taking friends on a world cruise. He had a thirst for anthropology

and scientific exploration, and it was rumored that he might later

equip his fine ship for research in far places. I am afraid my sigh

was a bit envious as I watched the _Zaca_ steam gracefully in. I had

scoured the southern seas in so many tubs, junks, bumboats, leaky

launches and cockroach-ridden steamers that my bones ached at the very

thought of them. Crocker’s explorations were _de luxe_; most of mine

had been _de louse_.

Templeton Crocker came to my office, a well-favored man in his late

forties, pleasant and almost boyishly anxious to learn. He seemed

much impressed because I was just back from Rennell Island and its

little neighbor, Bellona. Did they come up to my expectations? Yes, I

said, when you fly to the moon you may be sure it will come up to your

expectations. His curiosity was on edge; had I taken notes, could he

see some of them? I handed him a small batch of rough dictation, not

enough to tell him all by any means. I could see by his excitement that

Rennell Island had the same pull on his imagination that it had had on

mine all the eight years that I had awaited an opportunity to see it.

When we dined on the _Zaca_ the owner showed me around and explained

that she was an enlarged “bluenose.” The main dining room was also

the lounge, but the Crocker party ate mostly on deck, tropical style.

Everything was roomy, the cabins plain but comfortable, equipped with

electric lights and fans. Gus Schmidt, who managed the galley, was

a real chef, and there were quantities of refrigerators to help him

out. The ship carried what they called “frozen foods”--Idaho steaks,

Long Island duck, fresh peas and strawberries--about all the luxuries

for which we tropicals were hungry. Crocker had a plentiful supply of

wines, used with judgment; when there was an occasion for it he could

surprise you with a rare vintage.

He was at our house a great deal, always asking about Rennell Island.

When he didn’t dine with us he dropped in for a rum cocktail. We played

bridge, and I was surprised to find that he was making money; a rare

feat in Suva, where the game is sharp as a razor blade. When we dined

on the _Zaca_ my inner mind kept exclaiming, “Think of following a

health campaign on a ship like this!”

The night before his boat sailed he came around with my notes; I knew

he couldn’t have made much out of them, the stuff was so scrambled.

At dinner I complimented him on the _Zaca’s_ cook, and he said the

great trouble was getting fresh eggs. On the _Zaca’s_ long hauls even

refrigeration wouldn’t keep them fresh. I mentioned doing something

about it--then Eloisa gave me the matrimonial look. Wherever Eloisa

settled down, she started to raise chickens; she had a way with

chickens.

But on Crocker’s mind there was something heavier than an egg. It was

Rennell Island, I knew before he had said a word. Finally he said,

“I wish you would tell me all about that trip.” He and I were having

coffee on the veranda, and I said, “You remember that girl of the

Arabian Nights who had to tell the sultan a story between dark and

dawn--or else? Well, we’d better have a fresh pot of coffee, because

this story is going to be pretty long.”

“I can stand it,” he said, and waited for me to begin.

* * * * *

Last May [I said] I was in Tulagi, capital of the Solomon Islands,

looking over our health campaign. I don’t have to tell you how long I

had waited for a chance to see Rennell Island; and mine wasn’t all an

explorer’s curiosity. When George Fulton told me, back in 1920, that

the Rennellese were “practically untouched” I had wondered if these

seemingly archaic people were infected with one of the known varieties

of hookworm. Or if they were infected at all, would it be a variety

hitherto undiscovered? If so, I might be able to furnish valuable data

on the origin of a race that had been so long lost to the world.

From inquiry and general reading I knew that Rennell Island, and its

tiny companion Bellona, had been visited in the past; but those visits

were few and far between, even in the Pacific sense of the term. Some

sailors might have penetrated to the interior. Two brave bishops,

Selwyn and Patterson, touched there in 1856, and fifty years later

C. M. Woodford and A. G. Stephens had made geological surveys around

the shore. Dr. Northcote Deck, of the South Sea Evangelists, visited

several times with a companion missioner, between 1908 and 1911; Deck

made a gory mess of proselytizing. Resident Commissioner Kane, on his

official inspection of 1925, might have been the first white man that

ever went into the interior. A few years before that, the powerful

Lever Brothers had “recruited” some labor from offshore; but the

natives were so unresistant to disease that the recruiters had decided

to take back the ones who survived. In 1928 Stanley and Hogbin made a

geological survey for the High Commission, and reported that they had

found absolutely nothing of commercial importance.

The next year the Whitney South Sea Expedition went there collecting

birds for New York’s Natural History Museum. The young men from this

expedition, on its second trip, were the ones who brought me into the

story. Rennell lay only 150 miles to the southeast of Tulagi; it was

hard to realize that it was so near, or that in 1930 one could turn

back the book of mankind’s history for thousands of years and read the

living page; that the voyager of today might thrill as Captain Cook

thrilled when he first saw a Pacific island.

Well, I talked about Rennell to Captain Ashley, Resident Commissioner

at Tulagi, and he offered to take me there on his next cruise. He’d

have to drop me on the beach and pick me up when his yacht swung around

that way again. But Rennell Island wasn’t very safe for strangers, he

said. A few years ago when Dr. Deck of the South Sea Evangelists had

sent three native missionaries there the Rennellese had killed them

off; eaten them, probably, for nobody ever found the bodies. No, the

safest way to see Rennell would be behind an armed guard.

Time was precious and there was no telling when Captain Ashley’s boat

would take a notion to come. Then I saw a stout but battered little

auxiliary schooner lying offshore. It looked like a turn of Providence,

for she was the same _France_ that had taken the Whitney Expedition to

Rennell three years before. A crowd of young men came ashore, looking

more like hoboes than naturalists. Their leader was Hannibal Hamlin,

grandson of Lincoln’s Vice President, and an old Yale football player.

I pricked up my ears when Hamlin said that they were heading the

_France_ for Rennell Island again, if they could make it. My ears stood

higher still when he said that he was the second white man, perhaps, to

have gone inland as far as the Lake.

I wasted no time, you can well believe, in asking them what dicker I

could make to go along. Hamlin showed true American generosity. They

were indebted to Captain Ashley for a lot of things, and if I was his

friend they’d do anything to oblige me; only trouble was the Whitney

Expedition backers hadn’t come across with their check. They were out

of provisions. All right, said I, provisions and trade were on me.

Let’s take them on and get started. At the Burns-Phillip Store Hamlin

took on some very odd supplies, including a great number of adzes,

hatchets and trade knives with wooden handles and blades six inches

long. When I asked him if we were going to use them on the savages he

said, “No, but that’s what they’ll want.” I could understand the jumble

of cheap mirrors and scissors. When he called for calico and beads

he always asked for red. Why red? “That’s the color they’ll want,”

he said, and started dickering for three pasteboard trade boxes with

flimsy locks.

Our only stop was at Gaudalcanar where Gordon White was heading one

of my Solomon Islands treatment units. He was an especially valuable

addition to the party, as he had been to Rennell Island on the Stanley

Expedition, two years before. On this trip he was to act as my

microscopist.

We were a careless, happy company, getting dirtier every hour. We had

with us a youngish German named Walter--I can’t remember the rest of

it--who was a shell collector and looked the part. Our skipper was an

ancient Scot, sour with religion. Gordon White had brought on three

Solomon Island attendants, and he lent me a very black one named Ga’a,

four feet high, aged fourteen, and proud as Punch to be serving a white

gentleman. Service consisted mostly in opening tinned food and throwing

the empty tins overboard--or letting them roll. The main cabin was

so small that you couldn’t stretch without banging your elbows; here

we ate amidst fumes from the engine. We only used the engine in dead

calm, when it could make four miles an hour. We had a small lavatory

and a shower, neither of which worked. I was more than grateful to

my companions when they allotted me--out of respect to my superior

girth--the largest berth on the ship. It was right off the cabin, and

there was no privacy. But privacy was a stranger to the _France_.

There was a place for nothing, and nothing in its place. Walter the

German strewed shells, Hamlin and Coultas stuffed birds and scattered

feathers so that some of them always managed to get into the stew. Our

native deck-hands slept in places where you couldn’t help stumbling

over them. Gordon White, when he wasn’t trying to find where he had

stowed his microscopic outfit, turned on the phonograph and shouted.

We were on our way to Rennell Island--maybe. And just another touch

to our oddity: We had a stumpy black Hercules who helped the cook by

spilling soup, waited on table by dropping dishes, cleaned the cabin by

pushing the dirt across into another corner. He was an ebony figure of

the Masculine. And his name was Bella.

* * * * *

When the report came that we would reach our destination next day

I began looking into the physical condition of all aboard. If the

Rennellese were as primitive as I had heard, any introduced germ would

catch like wild fire, and we might spread a scourge. Harry, our Solomon

Island cook, had developed a nasty eye condition; he was a spectacle

in the galley, with that dirty rag over his eye. White and I treated

him and he began to improve. Still I was worried, wondering how his

infection would react on the people we were about to visit.

I looked them all over. There were no common colds, and that was

satisfactory. How about that quick-moving venereal contagion,

gonorrhea? To the embarrassment of some, and the merriment of many,

I lined them all up, from black crew to white captain, and gave them

what the Army calls “short-arm inspection.” They were all negative.

Satisfactory again. Also there were no visible signs of skin infection.

We seemed to be, all told, a very healthy lot.

Then I got my thrill when Hamlin called me on deck, pointed over the

bow and said, “There she is!” It lay isolated in the sea. I saw a

straight line of cliff, sheer as a prison wall, lifted some 400 feet

and running as far as the eye could travel. Scraggly foliage showed

faintly at the top. What except an airplane could get anybody up there?

Hamlin, all out of patience, told me that there was only one dent in

the cliff, a narrow passage called Kungava Bay, the “White Sands.”

If the Scotch skipper hadn’t been so stubborn we could have sailed

straight into it. As it was that day was gone and most of the next

before we made our final tack and found the opening in the cliffs which

marked Rennell’s only landing place, a pin-point approach to an island

that was fifty miles long and some fifteen wide. Those guardian cliffs

were relics of a strange volcanic action which pushed the Pacific’s

largest atoll into high prominence. The island was so tightly ringed

with a collar of coral-stone that Sinbad himself could not have found

the entrance without a chart. Fortunately Hamlin had one which his

navigator on the former trip had made for him.

We shot through the reef and found anchorage inside a beautiful,

sheltered bay; it was especially serene because the cliffs protected

it on two sides; below their impressive height the beach curved like a

white necklace. Things began to move. Two rudely built outrigger canoes

came paddling up to us, and I got my first glimpse of these strange

people. There were two men, a woman and a couple of small boys. They

were not like anything I had ever seen before, and I remembered what

Fulton had said: “About twenty thousand years behind modern history.”

At the risk of being trite, let me say that the men, very tall and

handsomely muscled, had the figures of Greek gods. Around the loins

they were swaddled in folds of clumsy tapa (_kongoa_), made grotesque

by a palm-leaf fan stuck in the back. The fans, I learned later, were

for protecting the hair when it rained, or for brushing away flies when

it shone. Their heads were impressive, dark as to hair and brows, and

with strong, well-modeled features. Their hair, almost straight, was

coiled in a bun at the back. Their dark, expressive eyes were somewhat

slanting, but not Mongoloid fashion, more like the American Indians’.

Although they wore small tortoise-shell ornaments stuck through the

septum, their noses were slenderly arched. There was nothing negroid

about their gracefully cut mouths. What were they like? Somehow you

couldn’t call them either Polynesian or Caucasian. Yet there was

something indefinitely Caucasian in their features.

The woman was shorter, nude save for a long strip of tapa, bound so

tightly around her hips that it seemed to hold her legs together.

Those legs were her imperfection, for they were short, stocky and

knock-kneed. I wondered if this peculiarity, which I saw later in

the majority of the women here, had something to do with the tight

binding of the thighs. Or was it an occupational distortion, caused

by carrying heavy loads? In the Kuni dwarfs of Papua I have remarked

on another sort of occupational distortion--they were pigeon-breasted

and duck-footed from climbing hills all their lives. This Rennellese

wife, like the man, was well tattooed except for her face and back The

designs seemed to be all in the same pattern.

They had hardly gotten aboard before they were all over the ship,

prying into everything, handling everything, including ourselves.

Delicate, dirty fingers felt of our shirts, felt of the buttons on

our shorts, patted us all over to see if these strange beings were

real. One of the small boys patted my stomach, not satirically, but in

admiring surprise that it could be so big. One of the men went into the

galley where he tunked the tin pans and chuckled strange words in a

dialect which was not quite Polynesian.

Hamlin and I went down the ladder to look at their canoes, strange

hulks gnawed from thick logs--gnawed is the word, for they had been

hollowed out in the most primitive possible way.

Hamlin said, “Yes, they char the wood and hack it with shells. But

these canoes are better made than the ones I saw before. I gave them

some hatchets, and they’re working with them. They’re crazy to get iron

and steel. They’ll do anything for it, give you anything they’ve got,

and that isn’t much--mostly women.”

Back on deck I saw the woman making up to Bella, the cook’s powerful

helper. There was danger ahead, I feared. Not the danger of being

clubbed to death, as they had clubbed the mission teachers; but the

trouble that comes to any island visitor when crews go ashore to

“refresh.”

The people who had come aboard spoke a little queer pidgin English,

just a word here and there which they had picked up God knows where.

They didn’t know much of it, for when we first spoke to them they

returned a polite, blank stare. Then the woman saw an empty beer

bottle, and said “Me want,” in a pretty, husky contralto. But when we

tried more pidgin on her she was dumb. “What does she want with an

empty beer bottle?” I asked Hamlin, and he explained, “The men break

them up to shave with. Until beer bottles came the older men were all

bearded. The young bucks pulled ’em out by using clam shells, like

tweezers. I guess you could buy the island for a dozen razor blades.”

Then a few more canoes straggled out to let men, women and children

clamber aboard, to make themselves at home. They had never heard of

privacy. Why should they have heard of it? They were the primitives

of primitives, therefore naïvely communistic. They poked their

fingers into every hole in the main cabin, turned up our mattresses

and wondered what they were, tried to find out why locked boxes and

cupboards wouldn’t open. Occasionally they would slip some small thing

like a shoelace or a beer-bottle cap into their tapa sashes. A few of

the girls could say, “Me want knifie,” putting a caress into their

voices as they handled our shirt collars. Late that night unmistakable

sounds from the crew’s quarters indicated that some local beauties had

remained to earn a knife or bottle.

* * * * *

(Here I paused to give Templeton Crocker the last cup of coffee in the

pot. Then I went on.)

* * * * *

When we were at meals they’d leave us alone--and that was the only

time, why I don’t know. Right after dinner or breakfast they’d be back.

We tried to play cards, but with beautiful torsos pressing against

our shoulders, backs and arms, it was hard to concentrate.... Two new

arrivals came into the cabin, and Hamlin recognized a friend of his

former trip. He got up and rubbed noses solemnly with a bright-eyed,

nuggety little fellow, whose look was quick with intelligence. “This

is Buia of Kanava,” Hamlin said, and then of the taller, younger one,

“he’s named Buia too. He’s Buia the Bastard. Buia of Kanava is heir to

one of the Big Masters--that’s what they call their chiefs here--and he

speaks a little pidgin.”

At once I decided that Buia of Kanava should be my very own for the

duration of the trip. His pidgin was quite bad, but intelligible. When

I asked him how he learned it, he said the Japanese sailors had taught

him. He was a progressive spirit, far beyond the island average. One

day he had swum out to a Japanese pearler, lying offshore, and offered

his services for a trip of a few hundred miles. He was there to learn

the white man’s ways; Japanese or Swedes were all the same to him.

To bind his service securely I took Buia to my cabin and laid an

offering out on my berth; an adze, a hatchet, a trade-knife with a

six-inch blade and one of the pasteboard lock-boxes Hamlin had been

foresighted enough to buy. He gazed, dumb with fascination; he was

like Aladdin at first sight of the jewel-filled cave. “Belong me?”

he murmured. Yes, they were all for him, _if_ he would be goodfellow

boy, show me everything and tell me everything. When I got a key and

opened the box Buia was mine for a lifetime, if I wanted him that long.

I replaced the treasures in a cupboard, but every afternoon while we

were on the island he would appear in my cabin and beseech me to let

him look at them again. I would lay them out on the berth and watch him

gloat, rubbing his hands. He would be a very rich man.

By piecing Buia’s words together I gained some knowledge of a religious

and social structure which had only moved forward a third of the

distance from the Glacial Period.

* * * * *

Buia told me that Rennell Island was divided into five districts, each

ruled by a kingly chief called a Big Master. The two most powerful Big

Masters were Tahua, Lord of the White Sands, and Taupangi, Lord of the

Lake--the lake was Tenggano, lying in the center of the island. The

people did not worship images and they had few devils. They adored

an unseen God (Big Master Walk along Sky, according to pidgin). The

Big Masters were the most powerful because God lived in their heads.

(“God does _what_?” I asked.) God lived in their heads, Buia insisted

earnestly; so they were wiser and stronger than other men. Once a

year, at the harvest festival up by the Lake, Tahua and Taupangi could

wish God to leave their heads, just for the period, and dwell behind

the brows of some chosen subordinate. Then the subordinates were very

strong and wise, but God always came back to the Big Masters. The

harvest festival was being celebrated right now, Buia said, and that

was why Big Master Tahua was not on the White Sands.

Then Buia came out with a scandal which somewhat alarmed me for the

future of these “untouched” people. It was a real-estate deal with more

of Hollywood’s flavor than Rennell’s. Probably the five big chiefs were

descendants of five sons of the early conquerors, and Taupangi, Lord of

the Lake, was of the eldest line; at least he was the most powerful.

Once he ruled both the Lake and the White Sands; but the beach looked

useless to him. Perhaps God told Tahua of Kanava that beach property

had a future. At any rate Taupangi was induced to give Tahua temporary

use of the White Sands, but when he saw vessels anchoring there, with

good trading in iron, Taupangi realized his mistake and ordered Tahua

out. This started a war, and the enterprising Tahua must have won it,

for when we got there he was well established as Lord of the White

Sands.

The yams on the Lake were small and poor, but the beach was a different

matter. Iron was gold. Iron would put Rennell on its feet. Rennell had

girls, the incoming ships had knives, axes, scrap iron. With a corner

on iron Tahua could become master of the Big Masters.

As a public health physician I didn’t like the sound of this. Trading

love for iron was going to work havoc with these natives, unless this

form of commercialism was soon discouraged.

Since the main object of my visit was to look into hookworm infection,

if it existed, and to study the nature of the parasite which, if they

had it, must have been borne by their ancestors generations before

the dawn of our modern history, it was necessary to use Buia as a

go-between. If he could get it through his head that we were here to

examine feces specimens, he could explain it to his people. But after

two patient hours of careful pidgin I saw that I was making no headway.

Buia simply didn’t understand what I wanted. I had been using the lingo

almost daily for thirteen years, and had never before had such trouble

in making myself clear. Then it dawned upon me that it wasn’t entirely

the man’s faulty knowledge of pidgin. He had no conception of disease,

as we view it. All sickness was punishment from their offended god,

penalizing the evildoer. That was the only reaction that I got from him

after steady pegging away. Finally we changed the subject.

Gordon White and three boys went ashore and erected a tent and fly

where we could go properly to work on our examinations. Walking along

the sparkling beach I was surprised to find only one house, such as

it was, a leaf-building with a steep-sloping roof, eaves that almost

touched the ground and no doors. But where did the people sleep? In

caves? On the bare ground, with the rain sifting over them? When I knew

them better I found that was what they did.

I got around to the subject of murder, for I never quite forgot Dr.

Deck’s three murdered evangelists. I asked Buia what he would do if

somebody tried to kill him. “Who would want to kill me?” he asked,

surprised. Suppose somebody should steal his land? “But who would want

to steal my land?” Then I got around to Mr. Deck’s slain teachers;

Rennell people had certainly killed them--and I had heard that they had

eaten them, too. Buia’s face clouded. “Those mission boys were very

bad fellows. They asked our people to build them a house, and when the

work did not suit those mission people they were very cross. They gave

no presents although they were rich. So our people killed them.” And

ate the bodies? “No!” Indignantly. “My people have never eaten men. It

is not the fashion.” I knew he was telling the truth. Cannibalism might

be like many another curse, imported. The Rennellese had never acquired

a taste for long pig, or for pig of any kind. Their diet was simple in

the extreme: the small variety of fruit and vegetables they could grow,

what fish their clumsy wooden hooks could bring in, what birds their

arrows reached. They ate just one thing at a meal. If it was fish, it

was fish and nothing else. If it was yams, it was yams alone.

There were many things they couldn’t understand, but their bright minds

were quick to learn. Our ornithologists were out for specimens, and

Hamlin had given a few native boys their first lessons with a shotgun,

half an hour’s target practice on the rare birds flying about. Then he

had casually handed guns to the boys and told them to go to it. They

came back loaded with feathery game. What was still more wonderful was

that nobody had shot himself in the foot.

So I sat down at my typewriter to write a report, something that

couldn’t be done in sociable Kungava Bay. The boat was swarming. Native

heroes and their women had gone into about everything on board, and

were helping themselves rather freely. It was neither politic nor

polite to offend these charming people by telling them to go home and

stay there until they were invited. As a counter-attraction I had set

the phonograph up in the bow and ordered little Ga’a to keep the needle

going till it wore out. The ghost-music attracted part of the crowd

part of the time, but they always came back to me. The phonograph was

all right as a miracle, but what really puzzled and charmed them was my

portable typewriter.

A baker’s dozen of the brown-skinned young things lolled over my

shoulders, touching the keys as they flew, drawing their fingers over

the ribbon to see the ink come off. What was this strange box that made

such straight tattoo marks across a very white sheet? Finally I gave

up all pretense of working and called Buia. His eyes, like all the

others’, were fixed on my portable. He said that they all wanted to

know what I was doing. I told him that if he would push the girls back

a few inches I would try to show him. This machine, I said, made talk.

Those things I was tattooing on the white sheet were words; if Buia

were to carry the sheet as far as the albatross flies, a man on the

other end would just look at it and the words would talk to him. Buia’s

bright eyes were standing out of his head as he murmured, “Me no sabe

dis fellow talk.” “I’ll show you,” I said, and tick-tacked on a piece

of paper, “_Hamlin, please give Buia a tin of cigarettes_.” I told what

the paper would say to Hamlin, and sent Buia below.

Presently he staggered back, a tin of Chesterfields shuddering in his

hand. Furtively he whispered the miracle to the huddled islanders. And

it _was_ a miracle in a land where there had never been the slightest

trace of a written language, not even picture writing. In their excited

faces I saw a hungry eagerness to learn. Experimentally I lined them

up, and as each one told me his name or hers I would typewrite it and

have the bearer take it down to a man in the engineroom, who would read

it out to them. This game lasted until my fingers were tired of hitting

the keyboard. Some of them tried to help me; mischievous fingers

would poke at random, and the ship would be a gale of rough contralto

laughter when a key flew up and struck the paper.

That night I wrestled with Buia again over the subject of hookworm.

Carefully I told him of the snake that hung to the human intestine and

sent its eggs out with the bowel motion. In my jungle campaigns I had

informed the most backward and savage Melanesians that they had “senake

in bel’” which their witch doctors could not cure because they only

removed the ghost of a snake, but we could fetch the real thing. I had

worked in safety among tough cannibals and found that they were afraid

to attack a man who could do such magic.

I thought that my detailed explanation had at last got under Buia’s

skin. He was politely impressed, and I felt sure that he would act as

my friend and interpreter tomorrow when I would begin the delicate work

of collecting specimens of feces.

Next morning Gordon White and I went to the beach with our microscope

and little tin containers; the first thing I did was to give a

container to Buia, and ask him if he remembered what I had told

him. Now Buia seemed unable to understand. Gordon White came to my

rescue and said, “Doctor, I’ll go and demonstrate to these bastards,

personally.” With Buia and a retinue of small boys he retired into the

bushes. Silence. Then a perfect bedlam of frightened yells. Small boys

came scampering out, hands in air, mouths open, screaming. And Buia

followed the panicky retreat. They ran as though a mad dog were after

them, nipping.

At last Gordon came out, dejectedly holding a tin. “When I put the

specimen in and closed the lid,” he said, “they stared as if they were

accusing me of an atrocious crime.” The natives of the beach kept away

from us for a bad half-hour; we were isolated among a lot of savages

who had interpreted our well meant attempt as the grossest insult.

These men carried spears and clubs; we knew how they dealt with those

who offended them. Whether or not they had eaten Deck’s missioners was

only of academic importance. What happens after you’re dead doesn’t

matter much. The main thing was to keep alive....

Then Buia came sidling back to our tent. His look was portentous. He

said, “Master, dis fellow he something altogether tabu. Him he tabu too

much. Suppose Big Master Tahua sabe something belong dis fashion, he

altogether too bad along you fellow me fellow”--Meaning that if we went

on with our search for hookworm eggs Tahua would kill us all, including

Buia. We heard the noise of people scrambling down the precipice. Buia

told us that they were from Lake Tenggano. And as we valued our lives,

he said, we mustn’t even hint at what happened in the bushes. Otherwise

terrible things would befall us for breaking their tabu.

Well, there we were, on the third day, absolutely bunkered on the main

object of our trip. When I went back to the _France_, feeling that my

investment had turned out a total loss, I found the people of the Lake

swarming over everything, and among them a grandee of the White Sands,

an adopted son of Tahua. And there was Tamata, too, adopted son of

Taupangi. They seemed to be a reception committee from the Big Masters,

inviting us to the harvest festival at the Lake.

Hamlin had warned me of difficulties going overland to the Lake. But

our failure of that morning had roused all the mule blood in me. If I

went to the Lord of the Lake and prevailed on him to cancel the tabu

and let me make the necessary examinations I might accomplish the

purpose of my visit. After all, it was only a walk of seven or eight

miles, I was in fair condition, and impatient when Hamlin argued that I

had better not try it. I didn’t know what I was in for....

* * * * *