Rennellese, until I heard that Bellona was arrow-maker for Rennell, and
demanded her pay in iron. The chiefs might have been sharp traders,
but one of the Masters was pretty dull when he gave Crocker a royal
treasure out of respect to his rank as “Captain.” The gift might take
rank with Charlemagne’s scepter for its antiquarian value and its rare
material. It was a king’s mace, a shaft of wood with a knob of stone
on the end. To Rennell and Bellona real stone was worth its weight in
diamonds, for there was absolutely none of it between the beetling
coral cliffs. The piece that tipped this relic might have come from
Tucopia in olden times, or from undreamed-of distances. It was the last
king’s mace on either island, and there are only four in the world. The
other three are in museums: at Brisbane, Cambridge University, and the
British Museum.
Macgregor had tried sleeping in the tent on the beach, but had given
it up for uncanny reasons. He had set up an army cot, got into it--and
found that two local chiefs had decided to sleep on the coral floor
right under him. In the middle of the night his cot began to shake, and
he found the worried chiefs rousing him. “Master,” they said, “you must
go at once. In our dreams God spoke in our heads asking, ‘Who is this
that dares sleep above me?’” Macgregor didn’t argue the point, but went.
On Bellona there was one big native who seemed to double for Panio as
local nuisance. He had bothered me a great deal when we were there on
the _France_ expedition. Now he was on and off the _Zaca_, strutting
like a magpie and yelling his slogan in my ear: “Gimme, thank you!
Gimme, thank you!” I called him Mr. Gimme and tried to laugh him
off, which was pretty hard to do when I was giving injections on the
beach with him clinging to my elbow. Our last afternoon at Bellona I
told Maury Willowes how I should love to plant my foot on Mr. Gimme’s
sciatic nerve, and Maury grinned, “Why don’t you?”
We were safely near sailing time when Mr. Gimme came at me again and
had hardly opened his mouth for the familiar slogan when I put my
walking stick against his mid-section and firmly poked him halfway down
the accommodation ladder. He plunked into his canoe and his look was
demoniacal as he yelled his farewell curse: “Gimme, thank you!”
There were no reprisals. Peaceably the three kings came aboard to
shake hands all around and receive their final gift of hardware. They
were very cordial, glad that we were going so soon. I admired their
self-protective attitude, and hoped that they wouldn’t weaken, as
Rennell was weakening. They were fine people, and I didn’t hold Mr.
Gimme against them. There is at least one Panio in every neighborhood
that I know of.
* * * * *
Before the _Zaca_ pulled away from the White Sands and headed toward
Tulagi I had a farewell glimpse of a people who were turning too soon
towards ideals which could never work anything but harm for them. Over
on the beach Tahua was bossing a construction gang. They were putting
up the frame of his house, a big house, a fine house, a house that
would make Taupangi feel pretty small. Keeping up with the Joneses,
and a lap ahead of them.... When Taupangi came aboard to rub noses
and wish us all back soon, he reminded Gordon White that he had given
him a present of fine mats--but he was keeping them for him up at the
Lake, so that Gordon would be sure and return there with more medicine.
Competition was making old Taupangi canny as a Scot. Many of the
natives, who stayed with us until the ship’s propeller turned, came in
fashionable _lavalavas_.
Buia remained aboard until we were rounding Unga Unga, then a canoe
picked him up. Buia, I am afraid, was getting a touch of bighead. He
was too intelligent to become another Panio, but his reputation as a
cruise conductor had done him no good. Crocker had been annoyed with
his way of walking in on every party and taking possession. I was
more relenting, for I had a real affection for this heir to a Big
Mastership, and knew that he might rule with wisdom, if only he were
let alone to serve his native God. To him we were something to be
admired and imitated, and he had sought to adjust himself as best he
knew how. Hadn’t they all?
He paddled away in his canoe. The _Zaca_ turned out to sea; Rennell
Island became a faint blue shadow in the distance. I wondered what
could be done about these unique people, infinitely valuable to
scientific study. It was something like an emergency case; but in
the wide Pacific you can’t send a fast ambulance to emergency cases.
Relief comes slowly, biding its time for the Government to make up its
mind, for competent medical men to take over the work, for boats to
sail, for treasuries to cover the necessary expenses. Sometimes years
pass between visit and visit--especially to a small world like Rennell
Island, which needed protection far more than it needed medicine.
* * * * *
At last, graduate N.M.P.’s were sent to Rennell Island; they went one
at a time for a six months’ service, fully equipped, but alone. An
outstanding one was Eroni, a full-blood Fijian who gained a nickname:
“the only white man on Mungava.” Patient and responsible as only a
Fijian can be, he went barefoot over every coral snag and bog on the
island. Conscientiously he treated everything they had. Once he saw the
natives catch a shark according to custom; they wrestled with it in
the water, bound it with ropes and hauled it in. One man had his hand
bitten off, and Eroni saved him with a tourniquet. He was surprised
to find that the Rennellese themselves had always known how to apply
a tourniquet. Eroni was ever ready for emergency calls as well as
methodical mass treatments.
But one medical man, work as he might, could not enforce that ounce of
prevention which, on Rennell, would have been worth many pounds of cure.
Before the High Commission in Suva I tried to drive home the
necessity of government protection for these defenseless people. The
waters should be patrolled and mischievous ships kept away. Medical
authority should be carefully admitted, and a properly hand-picked
anthropologist. At the very mention of the latter profession I met
opposition. A number of vicious playboys who masked as “scientific
investigators” had put anthropology in bad odor. It used to be that
everybody’s hat was off to every wandering bluffer who claimed to
hold a key to the mystery of man’s origin. Too many of these fellows
had overstayed their time--usually on islands where women were the
prettiest. One “anthropologist” had just been ordered off the Pacific;
he had been charged with violating two little girls. So the High
Commission, although they quite understood my attitude, rather thought
that I should take the matter up in London. The snag was somewhere in
the Colonial Office, they said.
Here are a few lines from a letter I wrote His Excellency, the High
Commissioner; just an item in the literature that passed back and forth
in my long plea for the Rennell Islanders:--
Spiritually they have a gentle religion in which there is no
skepticism and no cruelty. Socially it would be hard to convince me
that these savages are not more highly advanced than we are. There is
almost a complete absence of crime. Morally they have a code which
suits them, and to which they adhere exactly. They themselves say that
they do not want government, missions or doctors....
The High Commissioner’s reply, in part:--
The Bishop of Melanesia has suggested that he should be allowed to
select young men from Rennell, train them as preachers, and send them
back. What is your view of this proposal?
My answer in brief:--
... Unfortunately, when anyone’s ideas on any subject differ from
those of a missionary, he is immediately put down as anti-missionary,
if not anti-Christian. The only question on which all of the Mission
Societies will unite is opposition to any attempt to limit in the
least degree, for any purpose whatsoever, the extension of mission
work. On all other questions they are drawn up in armed camps
against each other. I am not anti-mission in any particular, and any
reasonable man must be pro-mission, if he is acquainted with the
history of mission efforts in the Pacific, where they have been the
great humanizers and educators of the native races. However....
In 1936 the Foundation’s business took me to London, where I told
my story to three famous anthropologists: Elliot-Smith, Haddon and
Malinowski; their sympathy was all with my plan to protect the two
islands, Rennell and Bellona. The important man to see was Sir Thomas
Stanton, Briton’s Chief Medical Officer. Sir Thomas was easy to meet
and to talk to. He was one of the Central Medical School’s enthusiasts.
When I had finished my work in Fiji, he suggested, why couldn’t I go to
the West Indies and organize an institution on the Suva plan? And I was
delighted to hear that he had about decided to promote my friend, Dr.
McGusty, to the post of the High Commission’s C.M.O. Nothing could be
better luck for the Pacific, and I am proud if I put in a good word for
a good man. I hope I had a share in his appointment.
My main proposal, aside from a plan to protect Rennell from mischievous
influences, was to have a thorough anthropological survey made there. I
suggested that the Bishop Museum of Honolulu take charge of this, for
it had been founded in memory of a high-born Hawaiian lady, and her
husband’s wealth had made it pre-eminent in Polynesian culture. Dr.
Peter Buck, a Maori, was curator; the Museum could furnish just the
talent we needed.
I was referred to the Colonial Office, where I struck the mysterious
snag. Possibly the British objected because the Bishop Museum was an
American institution; if so, they were stretching a point, for its
leader was (and still is) a New Zealand Maori.
More likely it was the Church that stood in our way. When the news
spread that I thought the old-time religion of Rennell was good
enough for the people, and that the missionaries had only brought
murder, disease and discontent to the little island, the Bishop of
Melanesia sent a thundering message, declaring that he could “permit
no boundaries to the Empire of Christ.” Possibly the Adventists were
putting in an oar, too; for I had heard one of them say in objection
to the exclusion of his faith: “For we bring to the Rennellese God’s
greatest gift, the Bible.” And there was another who said, “I would
feel that I must go, even if I knew that as a result every one of them
would die.”
Governments and missions have been too often slandered, I think,
because they have failed to accomplish miracles. In the Pacific they
have been called upon to face hell and high water, literally, and my
hat is off to their many achievements for the good of humanity. But I
left London with the bitter knowledge that I had encountered the blind
side of Christian officialdom--the sort of bigotry which means lack of
understanding.
Perhaps I carried my message a year too late. As Barley said,
“Sea-changes are very sudden on the Pacific.”
Four years after the _Zaca_ cruise I received reports from Eroni,
saying that gonorrhea had spread from the White Sands to remoter
districts where white men had never gone. Malaria was everywhere--and
I had found no trace of it when I surveyed the island in 1930 and 1933.
Outwardly the natives were prospering. The chiefs were building more
and better houses with the handy tools for which they had traded their
racial integrity. In 1920 when George Fulton’s ship went there to
recruit, he had seen no houses at all; a healthy, contented people
were sleeping in caves or in the open. Now Rennell Island was having a
building boom, and her population was going steadily downhill at the
beck and call of every trading stranger.
* * * * *
About 1937 Dr. Crichlow made a survey there, and his worried findings
came to me roundabout, in a letter from the Solomons. Everything that
I had feared had come to pass. Gonorrhea had increased so that not a
child had been born on Rennell Island in the past eighteen months.
I lost all desire to go back. I didn’t care to see a splendid and
unique race dying on its feet.
CHAPTER V
SUCH A LITTLE SCHOOL
I don’t think that I am a sentimental man. I shouldn’t be, for my work
has not been along sentimental lines, and daily routine should have
tried all the sugar out of my system. But when the _Mariposa_ pulled
out to sea I seemed to be pulling against it, every inch of the way.
The races I had worked among for twenty-one years were not mine. Yet I
had a foolish feeling that they were my people. I had been with them so
constantly; even during my short leaves in the States they had seldom
left my thoughts. A public health physician is no missionary. He does
not starve for a Cause. He is well paid for his services, and if he is
honest he does his level best to earn his wages. Looking back toward
the last dot among the outlying Fijis, I hoped that I had earned my pay.
My older daughter Harriette, who was born in Mexico and whom Eloisa had
carried as a baby into every tropical port where we could make another
temporary home, was now grown. Sara Celia, born in Fiji, would be
nine pretty soon. After all Eloisa had gone through--and she had gone
through a great deal, practically and cheerfully--she didn’t look her
age, they told me. I was too near-sighted to tell very accurately, but
somehow I knew that she didn’t look her age.
My sight had very definitely failed, and that was what caused my
retirement in June, 1939. The faulty vision which had bothered me in my
student days was now far beyond a point where it could be corrected. I
should have retired a year before I did, but one all-important thing
held me in Suva--the Central Medical School.
* * * * *
“Such a tiny little school!” a very great lady had said, wasting a
patronizing glance on the small buildings and a knot of students going
into class. I had had no time to tell her that this little school had
cost one man seventeen years of ambitious planning. Webb Waldron, when
he was all too kind to me in his write-up in _Harper’s Magazine_, had
called it “unique in the world’s educational institutions.” He had done
me honor overmuch, as Robert Emmet would have put it; but I was vain
enough to believe that he had come nearer the truth than the very great
lady.
As my days in Suva were coming toward an end my trusted champion the
_Times and Herald_ also did me honor overmuch in obituary tones. “Dr.
Lambert brought to his work in Fiji, and in other adjacent groups, a
personal enthusiasm that seemed to grow the longer he stayed.... He
appeared to accept all the health problems of the Pacific as a personal
challenge to S. M. Lambert. Many of these problems have either been
solved or are in process of solution, and we ... have been given strong
reason to hope that the natural problems arising through the contact
of white civilization with native races need not necessarily mean the
gradual decay of these native races....”
Well, I wasn’t dead yet. Although I had caught some of the diseases
I treated, I had recovered. No crocodile had eaten me, no snake or
cannibal had done me harm. In all my years down there I had had but one
accident: a Ford door closed on one of my fingers, and I lost a nail.
I was still sufficiently alive to wish that I could stay longer and
drive home other nails which I had been hammering at for many years.
The day before I left, Sir Maynard Hedstrom, who had supported me in
everything, pointed to the School and said, “Next you know, Lambert,
they’ll be putting up a statue to you.” I said, “I don’t like statues.
But if I rate one, I hope it will be of solid brass and show me wearing
a pair of wrinkled shorts and carrying an armful of specimen tins. No,
in a year or so if anybody says ‘Lambert’ they’ll be asking ‘Who?’ I’m
not worrying about a sculptor. What does worry me is the chance of some
political thimblerigger coming along to undo everything we’ve done.”
* * * * *
I spoke with healthy pessimism, and only half-believed my warning. The
Central Medical School had been going for a little over ten years, and
seemed to have stemmed the tide. It was one of the three pet ideas
which Montague and I had hatched back in 1922: a model leper colony at
Mokogai, an advanced Medical School for natives, and a Unified Medical
Service to cover every island group in the Pacific. Two of these pets
thrived and grew to maturity. The Mokogai colony came in with a rush
of enthusiasm in 1923, and building began almost at once. The School
required seven years of wire-pulling before it began to operate at
the beginning of 1929. Up to then there had been but a poor little
makeshift, backed by the only funds the Fiji Government could afford.
I have told you of my disappointment in the buildings when the school
first opened. The Principal had to run his office in the physiological
and chemistry laboratory, which we also used for a classroom; lectures
on pathology were about ruined by the horrible overcrowding in the
postmortem room, which was a little death trap. The dormitory for men
was so inadequate that we had to limit students and hold the scholastic
course down to three years.
Then came more ambitious planning, and a long tussle with
Bacteriologist John Campbell, who insisted on a pathological
laboratory that would cost £5,500 and upward. Dr. Heiser visited us
in 1934 and saw our plans for the structure, 70´ × 33´ with floor
space for a postmortem theater that would seat the whole student
body; this building would be adequate for research work all over the
South Pacific, and serve as a teaching institution for our N.M.P.’s.
In 1934 the Foundation granted the money for this improvement. On
my return from a three weeks survey in New Zealand I had brought
back plans, drawn up by their experts, so that we could include a
biochemical laboratory in the plant. Dr. Macpherson, our newly acquired
bacteriologist, had meanwhile decided with Mr. Campbell that another
building must be added and that most of our old equipment must be
junked--these items would come to around £2,500 more.
Dr. Heiser had stipulated that the Colony should bear the cost of
equipment. Fiji’s wisely economical Chief Medical Officer, Dr. McGusty,
thought that £500 would cover everything. Campbell and Macpherson
finally convinced him that four times that amount would be needed,
and they were right, I thought. I was more or less a referee in this
argument between one Irishman and two Scotchmen. But we finally got
our beautiful laboratory for research and for practical instruction in
preventive medicine.
These facts and figures are just to show, in brief, the time and the
effort it cost us all to bring things to anything like a satisfactory
conclusion. In 1935 Mr. E. J. Theodore, an Australian mining man, gave
£5,000 for a children’s ward in the Hospital. That was a generous gift.
But in my absence somebody decided to place the addition right next
to our Central Medical School, so near that the noise would interrupt
lectures; the idea behind it was to create a nuisance that would
compel us to move the School off the Memorial Hospital grounds.... The
politicos had been playing with our plan ever since we began building.
It required the long arm of Sir Murchison Fletcher, Fiji’s fair-minded
and progressive Governor, to scotch the plot. In 1936, when I went
to London to confer with Sir Thomas Stanton, Britain’s Chief Medical
Officer, Stanton must have heard from Fletcher, for he asked me if I
was satisfied with the location of the children’s ward. I said, “No!”
explosively, and Stanton cabled Fletcher not to do anything about that
building until I got back and talked to him. Fletcher, aside from being
my good friend, was an excellent bridge player and one of the best
losers I have ever sat against--a rare virtue in the Colonies where
winning any game from the Governor “isn’t done,” or is done at the
risk of his friendship. It didn’t take long for Fletcher to settle the
matter of that spite-building, and in our favor.
* * * * *
The third of the schemes which Montague and I had formulated succeeded
“in effect” in 1927. That was the Unified Medical Service for the
South Pacific. We got another half-loaf there; the other half was
lost through Montague’s sense of honor, combined with the hen-minded
jealousy of Fiji’s very little Colonial Secretary.
My ruling ambition, all the time I was down there, was to tighten up
the loose and scattered medical authority on all the island groups. The
only hope was to centralize power, or nothing would ever get done. We
had centralized it in the Mokogai leper colony, an unqualified success.
We had centralized it more and more in the Medical School, where the
same professional education was being given to natives from the four
comers of Oceania. Suva had grown to be the South Pacific’s medical
center, and the one logical thing was to vest the whole public health
authority in Fiji’s Chief Medical Officer.
That seemed simple, for the Colonial Governors were behind us. Then
politics came in through the door and common sense flew out of the
window. My plan was to put Fiji’s medical chief at the head of this
wide service as Central Medical Authority with additional pay of
£300--little enough, especially when you take into consideration his
increased duties, which would involve personal visits of inspection to
all the island groups. The Foundation agreed to pay fifty per cent of
this sum for a period of four years.
All set to go. But were we? Dr. Montague’s honor chided him to a
decision that he would accept no money that was not paid to him by the
Empire that he served. Sir Eyre Hutson, then Governor, agreed that the
High Commission Group would pay it all; but Montague objected that he
did not deserve the extra stipend, as I would be doing practically all
the work. We were stuck on that point. The annual pay of £300, added to
Montague’s salary of £1,100, would have been an inducement sufficient
to attract an excellent man. But to ask anything like a first-class
physician to devote all his time and energy to the Unified Service for
£1,000 a year was simply out of the question.
When Montague retired, I raised the question again, and struck an
obstacle no larger than a gallstone, and quite as tormenting. It was
the little bureaucratic mind of Fiji’s Colonial Secretary, who sat
around all day worrying for fear that somebody in the Government would
be making a halfpenny more than he did. You know the type. There’s
one--at least--in every American county courthouse. Mr. Colonial
Secretary sat brooding, “Ha! If that rule goes through, the C.M.O. will
be topping my salary!”
Well, it didn’t go through. During my London visit in 1936, I discussed
the deadlock with Sir Thomas Stanton. He said, “It’s a splendid idea,
and it would take hardly any new machinery to put it over. It has my
hearty approval.” But Fiji’s Colonial Secretary belonged to another
branch of the service, over which Stanton had no power. Suva’s petty
politician held a strategic corner where he could pop a pinch of sand
into the wheel. Unfortunately all my suggestions have been pigeonholed.
In 1927 the Unified Medical Service had been voted in--on a small
scale. It was devised to control the High Commission groups only; five
in all. New Zealand, who had endorsed the idea from the first, was
clamoring to come in. But our Colonial Secretary couldn’t see it that
way. Somebody would be getting too much power, with the run of all
those islands. Therefore New Zealand was out.... All so like a chapter
from the history of New York’s Republican Party--or Democratic.
In spite of this I found myself appointed to the sonorous position of
Deputy Central Medical Authority, under the Chief Medical Officer as
Central Medical Authority, who controlled the health work of the five
groups. As he had never visited all these groups, and I had, I was
kept quite busy as his adviser. In 1934 the Medical Authority went
into fuller effect, so that the Chief could make the rounds and study
conditions at first hand. The other day Dr. McGusty, now Chief Medical
Officer, wrote me that these visits had become a part of his routine.
Here is something from my files. It is headlined “Memorandum for Dr.
McGusty.”
Based on personal experience with administrations in the South Seas
since 1916, I regret to record that nowhere in the world have I
found so large a percentage of doctors who discredited the medical
profession and the various governments that employed them. Poor
organization is another important factor.... I have been greatly
interested in the efforts of (Governor) Sir Murchison Fletcher to
bring about more effective aid. The plan to amalgamate the medical
services of Tonga, Gilbert and Ellices, Samoa and other groups with
Fiji is an important step to make the service more attractive and draw
to it the type of man and woman who may be counted upon to bring about
a vast improvement....
This document, in its original, was signed, “Victor G. Heiser.” When
last heard of, however, the local Colonial Secretary was still pouring
sand into the dynamo.
* * * * *
Facts, figures, politics--those were all long rows to hoe. Now back
to my School--I still call it mine, although it has passed into other
hands. When you watch young people grow in body and intelligence you
seem to grow with them. Despite my work in other fields, I was very
close to them all for ten years, marking their improvement and their
deficiencies. We had to make allowances for the first batch that
came to us when we opened for business; they had been sent rather
helter-skelter, but did surprisingly well under the circumstances.
Because there were far more applicants than we could handle, we
stiffened the entrance examinations all along the line. No more
sentimentality in the choosing, and no political favoritism. We opened
with forty boys, but with increased accommodations we soon had fifty.
When we considered taking care of sixty there was a nervous murmur in
Suva: “Pretty soon we’ll be overrun with N.M.P.’s and not need the
School any more.” That was ridiculous, for the increase in graduates
was far behind Fiji’s increase in population. Not to mention the needs
of other island groups, clamoring for more places. I was always afraid
that the School would be voted out of existence, for some unreasonable
reason like the one I have mentioned.
Australia never sent any students from Papua or New Guinea; they
still maintained that these natives were too “backward.” I had worked
in the jungle with Papuan and New Guinea boys, and I knew that they
were no more backward than the inhabitants of the Solomon Islands and
New Hebrides, who were represented with us from the first. I still
feel that Australia, with her tremendous problem, will never make any
progress with native health until she establishes some institution
similar to the one in Suva--which is out of the question now, because
they haven’t the proper set-up. Sydney has an admirable school of
tropical medicine and hygiene--for whites. It lacks both the clinical
material and the stuff to cope with natives, and native conditions.
Once in a great while this school will take in a black boy, merely to
exhibit him as a curiosity.
Perhaps I am a co-educationalist; I have never settled that point with
myself. But I feel very sure that no race advances very far unless its
women advance with it. On the strength of that theory I made every
effort to improve the condition of native student nurses. When the
European nurses of the War Memorial moved to larger quarters I was
glad to see the native girls housed in the abandoned building, a great
improvement on what they had had.
Steps had been taken toward their advanced education. Before admission
the young girls were given a course in the Methodist mission school,
largely to teach them the rudiments of English. A Rockefeller
Foundation fellowship sent a European nurse to the States to educate
her in the modern theory and practice of training nurses. She returned
in 1940 to open a school for native nurses, which would synchronize
theoretical instruction with practical work in the hospital. Thus they
would attain as high a rating in their profession as the N.M.P.’s in
theirs. In outlying Fijian districts it was the policy to send out two
native nurses with each N.M.P., to take care of two very important
items: infant welfare and obstetrical cases.
I was pleased by the many marriages of these young women and our
practitioners; they were usually happy. I fondly believed that two
equal minds, mated in a common interest, would have all the advantages
from the start. I was seldom disappointed. In the field the young wife
was her husband’s busy partner. If she retired to her village to settle
down and have babies, she brought modern methods into her neighborhood.
For many of the boys the English language was a stumbling block,
especially at first. The Polynesian students both spoke and wrote it
well; New Zealand had taken care of that. But the Melanesians were
another matter; during the first years of the School they came to
us with nothing better than a smattering of English. We corrected
that in time by requiring a preliminary course in English for all
candidates. Even then they were handicapped, and it was interesting to
see the Melanesian patience with which they slowly struggled through
the mystery of our grammar, until they could rival their Polynesian
classmates.
As underclassmen the boys from the Cooks and Samoa, to whom English was
a second language, worked on the inferiority complex of Fijians and
Solomon Islanders. Then as years went on, we watched the Melanesian
lads begin to pull up. No, sir, they weren’t going to let a lot of
blithering Polynesians beat them at any game. They pored over books,
they wrote reams, they spoke English among themselves and corrected one
another’s compositions. Sir Maynard Hedstrom was offering a senior year
gold medal for excellence in Public Health studies. The Polynesians
were bright enough to win it more often than not, but as upperclassmen
they had to put up a lively fight to outdo the Melanesians. The earnest
and industrious black fellows clawed their way to the top, every hour
of that four-year course.
Here’s a classroom scene, picturing the competitive spirit:--
[_Numa, a Cook Islander, is pointing at a skeleton and asking
questions. He addresses Daniele, from the New Hebrides. Daniele is
blue black, but not negroid. His eyes are circled with white and his
white teeth glisten as he tries to concentrate on something he knows
perfectly well, but can’t express in English. Or if he can express it,
it will come hard. He has to mine it out. Daniele is the one I liked
to put on the front seat and rag, knowing that he would agonize over
the answer, but would finally get it right._
NUMA: How many bones in the human hand?
DANIELE: Eight. (_After an inner struggle._)
NUMA: Right! (_Daniele shows a thousand dollars’ worth of perfect
teeth._)
[_Numa turns to Mu, who is not very bright for a Samoan._
NUMA: What bones are affected by a Colles’s fracture?
[_Mu groans and hesitates. He won’t give up, but Numa is tired of
waiting, so he passes it to Tatoa, a dark, chunky Gilbertese who
usually knows the answer._
TATOA: The radius ulna.
[_Sounds of approval from the whole class, and a rather shocked
expression because Mu knows so little._
As an example of the steady, capable Fijian mind I think I should
select Sowani, born a chief and mentally so well endowed that he
became probably the outstanding one of the old School’s graduates.
He served in the Gilbert and Ellices for some thirty years, and had
been stationed there for a long time when I first met him. European
doctors might come and go, but most of the Europeans wanted Sowani
when they were sick. During the First World War he was made Acting
Senior Medical Officer, the highest medical position in the Group.
The Government appreciated his services by giving him a salary and
allowance which permitted him a European standard of living. About the
time I left Fiji he retired on a pension and was decorated by the King,
quite a distinction for a native boy. When I made my survey he had
completed his 20,000th operation for glands in the neck; his surgery
was beautiful. Incoming Senior Medical Officers in the G. & E. were
squeamish about being successors to the dark-skinned Practitioner. When
patients called for him in preference to the white doctors, poor Sowani
would remain the pattern of etiquette. “Mr. So-and-So had called for
you, Doctor,” he would say; but when the white physician called, the
patient was disappointed. One candid and sick Australian said, “Get
out, you Son of Something! It’s Sowani I want.” Sowani was always to be
counted on. He was a Fijian.
When I looked over the classes in our growing school, with no intent
to play favorites--for I think I know the contrasting virtues of these
two fine races--I could not help but see that in practical application
the Fijian was far superior to the Samoan and the Cook Islander. The
latter were brilliant in theory, but set a Fijian to reasoning a thing
out for himself and his conclusions were more apt to be right, for
the slow logic of his mind was almost Scottish. Principal Clunie and
I watched the work of one plum-colored Fijian named Ravuki. Ravuki
wasn’t worth his salt, at first, and was too lazy to put on his own
_lavalava_. But in his senior year he developed a burst of speed that
was quite astonishing. He fairly shone in the preventive medicine
course. He blazed his way forward at such a pace that he threatened the
performance of Alo, a Tongan boy who had been the School’s wonder and
had walked away with all the prizes. In the final examination Ravuki
seemed to have the edge on Alo. I was afraid that my affection for Fiji
had biased my judgment, so I ordered a second examination and called in
two European physicians to sit with me as referees. This time the Fiji
boy was so good that he was still talking when the two other judges
made up their minds that he had won hands down.
Ravuki became one of our most successful N.M.P.’s, and like most
Fijians, almost tragically conscientious. Right after graduation he was
sent out to the jungle to control a typhoid epidemic. In his work our
prize pupil picked up a typhoid germ--and was so ashamed of it that he
refused to visit the School, all the time I was there.
His upper-class rival, Alo, had a much more romantic story when he
went into practice. Principal Clunie--and a “damn good man” as we say
unofficially--was something of a prize winner himself. He started with
the rank of tutor, and before he was through with it Australia gave him
a gold medal for his work among native races. Well, if I unconsciously
played favorites with Ravuki, Clunie was much inclined toward Alo,
and had such faith in his ability that he gave him special favors in
surgery. Alo got to be as good a surgeon as you could ask for anywhere.
He was so capable that the C.M.O. of Tonga let him do surgery there.
When Alo was put in charge of the Haapai group, the medico of the
Vavau group was much annoyed, for all his surgical work began going to
Haapai. The young Practitioner had set eyes on a pretty girl of a noble
Haapai family, and was in despair because his sweetheart’s parents
objected to his humble lineage. All the traders and other Europeans
were in sympathy with the Romeo and Juliet situation, and from one of
the sympathizers Alo borrowed a sea-going launch and filled it with
gas. This was on Sunday night when all good Christians were at church.
Very conveniently the girl stepped out of church and into the boat.
When her family came out to give chase they found that all the launches
in the dock were out of commission. Somebody had drained off the gas
and crippled the engines.
The job of selecting boys for our School was never an easy one.
Different races and different environment had to be taken into
consideration. In Fiji we advertised for candidates, and the
competitive examinations included the three R’s, plus a certain
knowledge of English. We had to compromise between the over-young and
the over-old. Boys from fifteen to sixteen would graduate too young.
Those of twenty had been out of school too long. In the matter of
sending incompetents, I had to visit several island groups and lecture
the Europeans on their duty to keep up the standard. This brought
about the rigid tests we required, and with satisfactory results. Two
visiting English medical professors pleased me by saying that our boys
in daily recitation compared favorably with students of the same grade
in the University of London’s Medical School.
The matter of habit and custom had to be attended to. We had to
treat them all as equals, and strike some common denominator. The
lads from the Solomon Islands and New Hebrides--before well educated
half-castes came to us--had never eaten off a table or sat in a chair.
Their _milieu_ was the floor. To give them credit in the eyes of the
sophisticated Polynesians we must teach them certain rudimentary table
manners. The Samoan and Cook Island boys, on the other hand, often
showed up at the Grand Pacific Hotel’s dances in tail coats and stiff
shirts.
This was something of a situation, in the School’s first years. Our
Polynesians weren’t quite at ease with their low-browed associates.
Then, to their credit, they began to see what it was all about, and
things straightened out to a generally loyal corps spirit. We saw the
danger of over-Europeanizing them; for they must not return to their
homes and be discontented with island ways. We always put more stress
on cleanly, sanitary habits than “fussy fixin’s” like tablecloths. Some
of our students who had been too Europeanized by New Zealand before
they came did not turn out so well. They knew so much already that they
saw no necessity to work for what they got. It was another case of the
hare and the tortoise; or, more properly, the hare became the tortoise
and loafed on the job.
There was one of our Cook Islanders whose scholastic record was so
unusual that the Administration there wanted to send him to London to
complete his education, until I seriously objected. Such a precedent
would fill the School with jealous discontent. The Cook Islands, I
found later, had spoiled the boy so badly that he acquired vicious
habits. He had enough character to reform himself, but not until his
Practitionership was taken away from him.
His was an exceptional case.
* * * * *
My volunteer marriage bureau for Practitioners and native nurses
became an unqualified success. In Fiji the quality of nurses was
improving all the time, and before long an especially pretty one was a
marked girl the minute she got her diploma. There have been many such
marriages, and there would be still more if it were not for the native
missionaries, who are cutting ahead of our boys. In Samoa, where the
New Zealand system turns out Polynesian nurses who are sweet as sugar
and smart as chain lightning, it is almost taken for granted that an
N.M.P. will lead one to the altar, or make a brave try at it.
A cross-eyed Samoan named Tongamau, one of our brightest and best,
married a native nurse. Both he and his young wife had specialized
on infant feeding, so after the baby was born and had attained a few
months’ growth Tongamau took him off breast-feeding and decided to
bring him up entirely on native food. On that basis the Tongamaus
worked out a whole formula of infant diet and composed careful
instructions for preparing the ingredients, the change and weight
of meals from week to week, and so on. Tongamau’s account of this
successful experiment was first printed in our school publication
_The Native Medical Practitioner_ and was widely reviewed in standard
medical journals.
N.M.P. Okeseni also married a native nurse, and his article in the same
publication reveals another Practitioner’s cleverness in the use of
materials at hand. (Okeseni, by the way, is the Samoan pronunciation
of “oxygen.”) Okeseni’s essay is entitled “Coconut Fiber Used in
Ligatures,” and says, “... I was thinking ... that the fibers of the
husk could be used instead of silkworm gut; for they are protected from
any outside contamination....” He employed them successfully in many
operations.
Any copy of the _Practitioner_ is worth looking over for interesting
articles, written in businesslike professional English. “General
Practice in Native Villages of Fiji,” by N.M.P. Ieni; “Foodstuffs
in the Gilbert Islands,” by Third-Year Student Arobati Hicking; and
there’s one called “Medical Work on Rennell Island” by N.M.P. Hughie
Wheatley which I especially remember. He is the half-caste son of
Norman Wheatley, the yacht-collector; and Hughie’s article tells how he
adopted a four-months-old Rennellese baby whose mother was too feeble
to nurse it; he saved the child with a diet of native food, somewhat
after Tongamau’s formula.
I have watched the lives of all my boys, going out into the world.
There was Tau Cowan, a half-British Cook Islander who married out
of his profession. The girl he picked was a daughter of the King of
Rarotonga; she had been beautifully educated in New Zealand, and has
made him a good wife; Tau has become one of our outstanding graduates.
John Numa, on the other hand, found his wife in an insane asylum. She
was far from crazy; in fact she was the native warder’s daughter. It
was the warder’s reason that was endangered, for John’s courtship was
so hot and heavy that I was called in, and a minister was immediately
summoned. Some of the whites wanted to make a scandal out of John’s
behavior--which was not scandalous according to the native code--but
the couple went to the Cooks, where Mrs. Numa was a great social hit
and became the successful rival of a lady who had long ruled the roost,
a half-caste official wife. John Numa made an outstanding survey of the
leper situation on Penrhyn.
* * * * *
We went in for athletics, of course, and a school band. Ielu Kuresa,
a Samoan, organized the band, and as he conducted the popular tunes
his pale scholar’s face was filled with the spiritual earnestness that
finally led him to his death. Mesalume, the husky Fijian, was a Lau
boy, and a contrast in character. We taught him to box, and when he
was matched with Helu, a Tongan about twice his size, Mesalume put him
out in the third round with a stiff one on the chin. This Fijian was a
natural athlete, and the mainstay of our football team.
Ielu and Mesalume--contrasting types of contrasting races, they met the
same end in the line of duty.
I have a sort of father’s affection for the natives of all the
groups, but my admiration always turns back to the Fijian, a tower of
strength, who never lets you down when you need him. I have seen so
many of them go out into the field and do far more than their share,
far better than their competitors,--dignified, ethical medical men.
Mesalume had great force of character, and an intellectual
independence. Once I had to intervene when he got into an argument
with an Australian nurse in the War Memorial. The delicate point was
that Mesalume was right, but a colored boy was not supposed to have
an opinion of his own. It took diplomacy to get him out of that mess.
His reaction was very Scottish. “I still think so,” he told me in
confidence.
Early in the School’s career we organized their teams, intramural
affairs. True, it was not American football, but the more open Rugby.
With the gusto of old gridiron experience, I saw that their play could
be just as rough as ours. Men like Mesalume played for the glory of
Fiji, for the Fijian is “unco’ proud” of his strength and skill. The
only disharmony that ever arose in the Medical School was when the
boys were choosing players; the Polynesians all ganged up against the
Fijians, and vice versa, most definitely. When we crystallized into a
unit we played against the Police Team, the Agricultural Department and
about six other organizations. The pick of our boys got the “shield,”
and some were chosen for the much coveted All Fiji Team. The chosen
ones were Fijians, with no exception. And Mesalume, of course, was one
of them.
In a series of inter-island battles the All Fijis met the famous New
Zealand Maoris, who had bowled over about everything they had met,
wherever Rugby was played. When Fiji met Maori it was a different
story, “all blood and guts,” as an Australian critic expressed
it. Our native boys had the advantage because they could kick
barefoot--wonderful, how they could do it. They would come on the field
in the regulation Rugby uniform, but after the first scrimmage the air
would be full of shoes and stockings--the Fijians were rushing into
battle as their cannibal grandsires did, with naked toes and tiger
hearts. Then larger objects would come soaring out of the huddle;
the bodies of Maoris, falling with a deadly plunk. In reprisal the
flying Maoris would come back with a thud that was like a convulsion
of nature. Their convulsion was more deadly in the last game of one
series. We of Fiji were small-minded enough to say, “Well, let ’em have
it this time. The officials were all New Zealanders, and they couldn’t
let their champions go home again with nothing to show for it.”
Pride of race takes some queer turns. The one Negro in Fiji was a
coal-black American who said, “Yassa, I was de first white man on the
Mba River.” Pride of race was rampant in Peti, one of our Samoans, who
never failed to boast of his American blood. His grandfather was a
Negro sailor. On the strength of this distinction he won the hand of a
well-born Fijian half-caste and took her back to Samoa. He was another
one who did great credit to the School.
Our Fijian N.M.P. Eroni came from Lau, where the people are
fair-skinned as Polynesians. When he worked alone on Rennell it was
quite understandable that he should have gained the reputation of being
the first “white man” who had penetrated half the island. Eroni’s
success among white residents of the Solomons was so great that one
lady wrote to a Sydney paper to thank him for saving her life and her
sister’s. Such achievements are a commonplace in Fiji; Britishers in
the back country argue about the attainments of an N.M.P. as we people
at home discuss the family doctor.
* * * * *
One of these days, a Fijian basso will sing Otello’s role in the
Metropolitan Opera House. If you have ever heard their deep, true
voices you will agree with me. And if you have ever watched the action
of their mighty thews on the playing field, you may well believe that
a world’s heavyweight champion will also emerge from one of these dark
islands. So far, however, they have much to learn. I read of one who
went to London to meet a middleweight; but since the sports columns are
not featuring him, I think he may not have done so well.
There is a gigantic fellow named Ratu Mbola who has degenerated into
a half-Europeanized show-off, and throws out his chest when the boats
come in in hopes that somebody will buy him a drink. To distinguish
himself from the common herd he wears golf socks, and tennis shoes, and
carries a fly-brush over his shoulder. “Bar Fly” is the name both he
and his brush have earned.
In days gone by when Jack Johnson became champion of the world by
defeating Tommy Burns in Australia there was rejoicing in every Fijian
village. “One of our race has conquered!” was the cry. At that time
Ratu Mbola was in his prime, a muscular chief of Mbau. On the way
home from his defeat Tommy Burns stopped off at Suva and the hushed
word went through the villages, “He’s running away from the black man
who beat him!” So Ratu Mbola came forth as a local black hope, and
challenged Mr. Burns. The evening of the fight the arena was packed
with natives who thronged in to see a white man crumple under a volley
of Fijian blows. But somehow Tommy didn’t crumple. He played cat and
mouse for two rounds, pretending to be groggy from Mbola’s blows. In
the first minute of the third he got tired of making false passes and
floored Mbola with one heartbreaking uppercut. The referee did not
render a decision. He didn’t have a chance. Mbola went through the
ropes on all fours, and when next seen was running down the street,
waving his boxing gloves.
* * * * *
All of this was quite unfair to the Fijian. It was like taking him to
the piano and asking him to play a Bach fugue. Mesalume, as an athlete
and professional man, was of a quite different pattern. We sent him
to the New Hebrides, a field that would try the soul of any man. His
reports came in; he was administering medicine in feverish jungles that
had been beyond the reach of government officials. He was treating
thousands for every disease under the tropical sun. Mr. Paton, always
the stanch friend of my N.M.P.’s, took him in when he could and worried
because the boy was so overworked.
Suddenly Mesalume’s reports stopped coming in. What had happened to
him? Then a letter from Mr. Paton:--
... Mr. Siller, an Austrian, at South West Bay, Malekula, had
blackwater fever. Dr. Mesalume treated him, and thought that he was
on the mend. But Mr. Siller died next day. Dr. Mesalume contracted
blackwater fever. Mr. Corlette was most kindly and attentive, but Dr.
M. died. We are all deeply grieved. He was always so willing and keen
to help.... I remember what pride he had in his Medical College, and
I think that he would have increased its usefulness.... He earned the
respect of the natives, so that the nearest village of Tatau had made
a yam garden for him, without pay....
I went to the New Hebrides and found the place where he had died on
duty, in a remote corner of the jungle. Mesalume, like all the men
of Lau, had a passionate love of home, and this was so far away, so
completely lonely.... Wild black faces had stared in at the window,
wondering what he was saying in his delirious ramblings. Blackwater
fever might have killed him; nobody really knew. I did the sentimental
thing, I suppose, when I asked the Condominium Government to mark his
grave. They put up a handsome concrete block with some of his history
on it and the epitaph, “He Died in a Foreign Country.” Yes, he had
given the best he had to save life, and when his time came he had died
the death of a lonely dog. I had always thought that something like
that would happen to me. But, God, here I am!
After this death we could have got a dozen to go up there and take his
place. That’s the Fijian for you.
* * * * *
Ielu, his Samoan classmate, was another story, just as tragic. When
he died on duty Dr. Heiser said it was one of the greatest losses
imaginable for the Pacific. Ielu had worked for his own people with the
fiery zeal of a priest. Through all his training in the Medical School
he sweated his way upward with one ambition: to go home and bring help
to his own Samoans. His tall, slender figure was forever bending over
books, his luminous brown eyes drinking in the useful facts that would
contribute to his future. He was monastic in his self-effacement. He
should have been a lonely type, but underneath his detachment there was
a warmth which made him popular with his classmates, and he became a
leader in student activities.
Well, he went back to Samoa, and I was a bit nervous about what might
happen to him. The Mau Rebellion was in full swing, and with his
zealous temperament I was afraid that he would be in it up to the
ears. Instead of that, he became the bellwether that kept the sane
ones in line. He was there as a doctor, and never for a moment did he
forget his duty to the Medical Administration. I have one vivid memory
of Ielu in action. It was on a Samoan back porch, none too roomy at
best, and the patient’s relatives were crowded around the table with
the usual prayers and palaver. Dr. Hunt, the C.M.O., was with me to
watch the operation, which was for an elephantoid scrotum. With people
threatening to jog his elbow, with relatives yammering in his ear, Ielu
handled his instruments with concentrated exactitude. When it was over
and Ielu was washing up, Dr. Hunt said softly, “I wish I could get as
good a job as that in the Apia Hospital.”
In March, 1936, an epidemic of influenza broke out in Upolu and Ielu
came down with it. He was always working on the hairline of his
strength; and with the emergency of the epidemic he was called from
his sickbed to give aid. He put in days of long hours before his
exhausted heart gave out. He died in Dr. Pat Monaghan’s arms. The
Samoan obituaries did not need to tell me that they had lost a surgeon
who was on his way to greatness. A Samoan student, writing about him in
our _Native Medical Practitioner_, told the simple truth when he said,
“He died in harness.... He was kind to the human race and all loved
him.” The Samoan Administration established the Ielu Kuresa Gold Medal
in his memory, and generously marked it _For the best Fijian of the
year_. That was their gratitude to us for giving them Ielu.
* * * * *
The passing of these brave and devoted men still touches me so deeply
that I seldom speak of them. Another one who died is still more tragic
to me, for that death was not so long ago. Last summer a letter from
Fiji came to me at my California home. It was from Malakai and told
me that Vakatawa, who had been my assistant, had committed suicide. I
couldn’t understand it. Vakatawa had stood like a rock and worked like
a hero in every assignment I had given him. An expert on tuberculosis,
he had examined all the chests in the Colos, and his reports were
works of art in their scientific accuracy. He had his sense of humor,
too. Once I sent him on a survey over a far corner of Viti Levu, and
he came back with nothing but a tattered _lavalava_ and his boxes of
equipment. It turned out that a fishing party from Mbengga had met him
on the coast and stripped him of every rag he had on; they gutted his
suitcases, relieved him of five pounds cash, left him naked on the
beach. Pretty rough work, but it was an old-time custom when the people
of Mbengga met the people of Lau, and vice versa. Vakatawa had fought
so hard for his microscope and other scientific items that they decided
to let him keep them. Quite unembittered, he had borrowed a _lavalava_
and come home smiling. When I said, “I guess I’ll go out and survey
Mbengga myself,” Vakatawa chuckled, “Better not, Doctor. They’ll strip
you too, because you’re with me.”
Those who knew him well said of Vakatawa, “He has the mind of a
first-class white man.” That remark was a bit patronizing, but it
expressed the general confidence in him. He had gone very deeply into
the study of magic, and to his reports I owe a great deal of what I
learned about _draunikau_ and the ritual of the seven curses.[7]
Did Vakatawa end his life as the result of some magic wish? That was
out of the question. Time and again, he had outfaced the witch doctors
with practical lessons in modern medicine, and he was too well-loved
among the villages for anybody to put a curse on him. I have looked
into Vakatawa’s case as best I could from where I sit and where he
lies, and I think I know the reason why he locked himself in his room
and put a razor blade across his wrists. Always a sensitive man, he had
a sensitive man’s high temper, which his racial courtesy seldom allowed
to get the better of him. But that hot temper got him into some sort
of brawl, and after it was over he felt that he had disgraced himself
and had not lived up to his responsibilities as a Practitioner. He was
inordinately proud of his profession, and when his brooding mind told
him that he had let the School down, he decided that there was no use
living any longer.
I give Vakatawa an honored place among those who died in the line of
duty.
* * * * *
Our little School has grown, and is growing. My constant hope is that
its roots have gone so deep into the soil of Fiji that no political
whim or Anglo-Saxon prejudice shall ever blast it in some clumsy
attempt at transplanting. Already we have sent out well over a hundred
competent medical men; not many, perhaps, in the millions of ocean
miles which their work must cover. But their efficiency shows in the
general improvement in health wherever they have operated.
To the outsider it may seem a bit incredible that the descendants of
cannibals--and the majority of them are just that--should be devoting
their young talents to saving life, where their ancestors were bent on
destroying it. But to me the protean change is a very logical thing.
The cannibals were anatomists, and their gruesome habits made them
familiar with the set-up of the human body. Just as Roman surgeons
studied the victims dragged from the arena, so the wiser of the
anthropophagi observed and learned. Neither ways were pretty roads to
knowledge, but strange things have happened in the Martyrdom of Man.
As I lectured the students in the postmortem theater I often paused in
interest at the skill of this one and that, plying the knife. No one
of them had ever seen cannibalism in practice; but ancestral voices,
turned friendly and benevolent, seemed to be telling them what to do.
I have a photograph which I took down in Santa Ana, Solomon Islands.
It is of a brown woman, practically nude, with shark’s teeth around
her neck and a long clam-hinge sticking through her nose. I think I’ve
told you how I took this picture of Mrs. Kuper, the trader’s wife. She
was holding up one small, naked boy, and another stood at her side. I
have another picture; it is of a good-looking boy, very collegiate in
a tweed suit and striped necktie. He would be hard to recognize as the
naked child in the first picture.
Geoffrey Kuper’s father was sufficiently well-to-do to send him for
study in New Zealand. He graduated from our Central Medical, class of
’38, and Sydney gave him a prize “for the most distinguished scholar
of the year.” Before he took up his duties as N.M.P. in the Solomons,
he dropped in on his old school-friends in Auckland. A reporter got
hold of him and Geoffrey told of the first scholastic prize he ever
received, an honorary belt which his mother’s tribe gave him as an
introduction to manhood. It was a hard initiation. For six months he
had stayed in the ceremonial house, among the ancestral canoes and
family skulls. Priests came to his pagan retreat to instruct him in
tribal duties, which included house-building and the preparing of a yam
and dalo garden.
Then he was put in a fishing canoe where the priests angled until they
caught a great bonito. It was the boy’s task to wrestle with the fish
and hold it until it ceased to flap. Boy and fish were taken to the
pagan altar where priests squeezed the bonito’s gills and let drops of
blood fall into the initiate’s mouth. At the end of the long ceremony
Geoffrey was taken to a high tower and allowed to throw food down to
the admiring populace. “That part was fun,” he said.
A graduate Practitioner, Geoffrey had been away from his mother’s tribe
so long that he had forgotten her inherited language. But his father,
a very progressive European, wanted his son to have the best of our
civilization. He was right, I think, for Geoffrey is doing fine work in
the Solomons.
CHAPTER VI
IN RETROSPECT
As the Pacific’s halfway house, Suva has become more and more of a
stopping-off place for the great and the near-great. Royalty, inquiring
novelists and scientific bigwigs have come in the regular way, by sea.
The first visitor from the sky was Kingsford-Smith, and because he must
have trees cut down from the parade ground to make a safe landing, Suva
was in a dither. The residents loved those trees so fondly that they
didn’t start to fell them until after they learned that the aviator’s
plane was well on its way from Hawaii. Then down they came, and when
the giant bird roared in it was probably the high moment in Fijian
history.
English princes and royal dukes weren’t exactly a commonplace. Their
comings and goings threw the colony into a patriotic frenzy. Before
the then Prince of Wales decided on “the woman I love” Suva all but
gave him a coronation. The Duke of Gloucester’s visit in 1935 caused a
social upheaval among the natives, who were preparing a colossal dance
in his honor. Many of the boys, in imitation of European styles, had
been cutting off their great bundles of hair. The master of ceremonies
gave it out that no dancer would be eligible unless he wore the high,
round hairdress of classic Fiji. One of the high chiefs of Mbau, whose
hereditary privilege it was to act as cupbearer in the kava ceremony,
defied the rule and came to the dance in his college cut. He was
incontinently rejected. The Duke had two Scotland Yard men with him,
but that didn’t interfere with his efforts to be democratic. He was
especially fond of the bacon-and-egg parties common in young Suva
society after the ball; these were at about dawn, when the Duke’s
watch-dog equerry was sound asleep. After many stiff-collar affairs in
the larger colonies Gloucester found his release, I think, in Suva’s
simple, kindly hospitality.
His voyage was bothered, however, by people who were less considerate
of royal democracy. As _H.M.S. Australia_ was leaving Samoa, the
little yacht _Seth Parker_, owned by an enterprising radio star, sent
out an S O S. When the _Australia_ came about for rescue work the yacht
announced: “Open your wireless set and you can hear a broadcast all
over the U. S., saying that the Duke of Gloucester has come to the
rescue of the _Seth Parker_.” Another coy one followed: “Won’t the Duke
come up on the bridge so that we can take his picture?” Gloucester’s
sulphuric words must have raised a storm, for an hour or so after the
royal cruiser went her way a hurricane blew up, and the battered _Seth
Parker_ sent out another S O S, a real one this time. Dutifully the
_Australia_ turned back again, and stood by for two days until a vessel
from Pago Pago came and picked up the offensive little yacht.
Before the present King and Queen of England even dreamed of wearing
crowns they paid us a visit as Duke and Duchess of York. We met them on
two occasions, an official ball at Government House and a more informal
affair in the Grand Pacific’s ballroom. The Duke of York said that his
father had visited Fiji and had drunk the kava which they “spit in the
bowl.” So that party with old Thakombau was family history. The Duchess
was what we Americans call a “nice girl,” and her poise never seemed to
get in the way of her good humor. I liked the way she handled a young
cadet, whom the occasion and the champagne had somewhat exhilarated.
It was contrary to custom, but he wanted to win a bet when he asked
her for a dance. She said, “Sorry, my card’s full.” Well, so was the
young cadet; he took another drink and asked her again. Again she was
sorry. Next afternoon he woke with a headache and moaned, “Lord, what
did I do?” His pals were all too ready to tell him, and with flights of
imagination. He prepared himself to be cashiered, but nothing happened.
It would be romantic to say that the Duchess intervened in his behalf.
I doubt if she remembered his name.
When the School was well started and I could spend more of my time in
Suva’s civilized environment I occupied a crossroads position where I
met many, going and coming. Earl and Lady Beatty were guests at Sir
Harry Luke’s dinner party, and I was much flattered when I found that
the Earl knew quite a lot about the School. This contact was more
impressive, perhaps, but less engaging than the one I made when the
yacht _Caroline_ came in and her owner asked me to come aboard with
some medical advice. The owner was Douglas Fairbanks, and the tall,
blond lady with arched eyebrows was his future wife, Lady Ashley. I
remember him as a charming, unassuming host with the finest yacht I
have ever visited--the _Zaca_ not excepted. It was air-conditioned, so
that the temperature in a dozen luxurious staterooms could be lowered
to taste. Fairbanks said that he slept under blankets every night in
the tropics. Suva, always broad-minded about the holy bond, made quite
a fuss over them, and Ratu Sukuna gave them a native dance. “Doug”
wanted me to go with him on a voyage to Singapore, but I had other
irons in the fire.
Early in 1938 (I think it was) I was off on field work when somebody
tapped on the screen porch of our house and Eloisa went out to see who
it was. A beefy gentleman looked through the wire and wanted to know
if Dr. Lambert was home. No, said Eloisa, but wouldn’t he come in? “My
name’s Morgan,” he said, and stayed for tea. It didn’t require a signed
photograph for Eloisa to recognize him as J. P. Morgan. In fact I had
rather expected him one of these days, as Heiser had written me, saying
that when Mr. Morgan showed up I might outline a trip for him through
the islands. He stayed for a couple of hours, talking about Fiji and
the School and our work in the Pacific.
Later I couldn’t resist the temptation of writing him a letter, which
began something like this:--
Dear Mr. Morgan:--
For years my brother Fred and I have had a standing family joke. When
either of us started on a trip we would say to the other, “If J. P.
Morgan calls up before I’m back, tell him I won’t sell under fifty.”
I’m afraid you’ve turned the tables on us....
Such meetings, even if they were only by proxy, made bright passages in
the doctor’s notebook.
One of life’s greatest moments for me was Richard Crooks’s concert in
Suva, given for the benefit of our School’s athletic fund. I cherish
this program among my fondest possessions, for on the cover it says:
“RECITAL: RICHARD CROOKS.... IMPRESARIO: DR. S. M. LAMBERT.” I wasn’t
chosen for my musical genius; somebody argued that as it was for the
School, and as I had wangled Mr. Crooks into the generous gift of his
voice, I ought to furnish the American ballyhoo for an American singer.
For a day I knew how Gatti-Casazza must have felt all the time.
Suva had a right to be music-hungry, for Crooks was only the second
opera star who had stayed there long enough to sing, and instrumental
performers had fought shy of us. Our single connection with the
musical great was our former Government printer, Johann Sebastian
Bach, inheritor of an illustrious name. When Paderewski came to Suva
he didn’t play his piano; in fact he just got off the boat and got on
again. In Suva royal visitors have ceased to be a novelty. But Richard
Crooks was of the Metropolitan Opera!
When the job of taking care of him fell to me I rather dreaded it,
fearing that I had to deal with some sort of seraph. However, he turned
out to be much more human than many grocers I have known. Lunching
with us, he said he never ate much before concerts; but when Eloisa’s
special crab casserole came on he helped himself twice and sighed,
“That’s the best crab I ever ate.” Watching him eat, I was afraid
that his voice would suddenly go back on him. When I brought him to
my home from his hotel my Buick had had a puncture--and singers are
highly sensitized. It didn’t seem to faze him. Then we were off for the
concert hall--and the Buick had another puncture. I think about that
time he was telling me that the Firestone Tire people were paying him
$3,000 a broadcast. Apropos of punctures, perhaps.
The seraph sang; Handel, Haydn, Stradella, Moszkowski--I remember the
composers, for I still keep that program. While Suva sat spellbound
he topped the performance with Lehar’s “Yours Is My Heart Alone,” and
the impresario was too emotionally touched to count the profits, which
turned out to be something over £100. Many have been generous to our
School, but his generosity came in the form of beauty, which made it
doubly precious. He sang for me again in 1939, on his way to Sydney.
When he repeated “Yours Is My Heart Alone” I was glad that my eyes were
hidden behind tinted spectacles. That was my swan song in Fiji; I was
going away in a few weeks.
* * * * *
A misunderstanding prevented my visiting Tahiti, which would have
fascinated me as a study of what not to do with a native people. The
French are notoriously poor health administrators, and Tahiti has long
been a model example of disease breeding among a dwindling population.
I know nothing about it at first hand, but from what I have been told
there is little hope for the remaining Polynesians there.
Perhaps this sounds pessimistic. The public health worker has often
been called the Cinderella of the medical profession; he must get used
to adversity, and his story too often ends before Prince Charming
comes along. I have no complaint to make on that score. The work has
never been drudgery, and the long waits for results have been rewarded
according to my personal merits--and demerits. In medicine there is no
such thing as the Perfect Result. We leave that to the Pelmanites.
I am no Cinderella, but I am worried because my readers may think of me
as a sort of medical Cassandra, moaning doom for the Pacific peoples.
If that is your impression, I feel that I must say a word to change
your minds before I leave you.
Too many cocksure lecturers and writers have made a free-handed
flourish from Borneo to Tahiti and proclaimed, “The people are dying
off.” And they have referred to the main killers--alcohol; imported
disease; food and clothing; the wreckage of their ancient habits with
no wholesome and attractive substitutes to take their place.
All too true of the past, and mildly true of the present. I have told
you how I watched the New Hebrides decline under a vicious form of
colonial government, and how Rennell Island was blighted for lack of
protection; and how the natives of the world’s second largest island,
New Guinea, must inevitably fall off in numbers and weaken in physique
unless their case is handled with more honesty and intelligence than
the home Government has seen fit to give it.
All this is on the dark side of the canvas. Let’s look at the brighter
picture. I quote myself, from an article in the _Pacific Island
Monthly_:--“The problem of depopulation of natives in the Pacific need
no longer exist. The formula for turning declining into increasing
populations has been devised and put into operation by British
Administrations in Central Polynesia, in Polynesian New Zealand, in
British Micronesia (the Gilberts), and in Melanesian Fiji. American
Samoans are increasing under the operation of the same general formula.”
THE FORMULA: Native doctors and nurses to care for current illnesses
and educate their people in the prevention of disease, especially
in soil sanitation and pure water supplies; attention to infant and
child welfare; reliable census-taking to check results--all under the
supervision of competent European physicians and nurses. Add to this a
careful study of native customs on the part of civil administrations,
so that they may learn respect for the more wholesome of the folk ways
that have given life’s zest to the people.
Where this formula has been applied native populations have increased,
and are continuing to increase. It has only failed where it has been
pigeonholed by incompetents.
The work down there is unfinished, and may remain so until the horn of
Judgment awakes some of the living dead. I have been only a very minor
spoke in the Rockefeller Foundation’s great wheel of health, which
moves with the Earth’s axis. I should like to see the task completed
over that 6,000,000 square miles of island-sprinkled sea where I made
the doctor’s rounds; but I know that Methuselah couldn’t live long
enough to supervise that task. I only know that wherever we worked
with progressive governments the vital statistics began to swing
upward, however slowly and whatever the temporary setbacks. I have
spoken little of the Maoris of New Zealand, for my only work there was
concerned in making surveys. But as an example of the above formula,
well carried out, let me say that the Maoris of New Zealand have
almost doubled their numbers in twenty years. The Cook Islands have
done fully as well. And there’s Western Samoa, which has outlived the
filthy horrors of the Mau Rebellion, and has come back. The Fijians,
too, have risen from the epidemic of 1918, which threatened their
extinction. In the black islands of the Solomons nobody knows whether
the birth rate is keeping pace with the mortality. We have treated
these people on a grand scale and results are being shown in the
generally improved condition of plantation labor; tuberculosis is still
the reigning terror, and that’s a difficult enemy to cope with. In the
Gilbert Islands the brown Micronesians are most certainly reviving; our
N.M.P.’s have been working there for years.
Nineteen years ago, when I voyaged hurriedly through the Solomons
on the way to my destiny in Fiji, I was already experienced enough
to draw my fixed conclusion: Depopulation follows the visitor. The
immortal Captain Cook guessed this over a hundred and fifty years ago.
A century ago keen observers like George Turner marked the locust swarm
of imported diseases, eating their way along the islands. But later,
investigators broached a comfortable theory that the natives had begun
to die off before the white man came. Nonsense. White men, in the
malign form of looters and slavers, Spanish, Dutch and Portuguese, were
there two hundred and fifty years before Cook came.
When I first saw the Solomon Islands they served as a type example.
In the northwest islands near New Guinea, where shipping, trading,
recruiting and missionizing were plentiful, the disease rate was high.
As we traveled to the southeast into areas less accessible to visitors
the so-called “native diseases” steadily diminished. Twelve years
later showed me the change: The Southeast was sick from tuberculosis,
dysentery, pneumonia and venereal, which strangers had carried there
and spread among non-immune natives. I have mentioned the incidence of
these seemingly unaccountable plagues, burning like fire in dry grass.
The old-time voyagers, who did their share to spread infection, have
noted the evil effects. These things are still going on in the remote
corners of the Pacific.
The recruiting of contract labor was once a curse, but more enlightened
government has turned it into something of a blessing; wise labor
laws have made it so that a worker usually leaves the plantation with
his health better than when he came. The New Hebrides, where French
planters serve drink, drugs and firearms to their native helpers, is an
exception.
There is a school of thought which points to the “decay of custom”
as depopulation’s main cause. The native has ceased to take interest
in a warrior’s physical well-being. The missions have discouraged
those picturesque ancient ceremonials which were the background of
tribal life. The Rivers Theory argues that boredom creates a psychic
depression which actually decreases reproductive power; that it also
encourages abortion and infanticide amidst the cry, “Why grow slaves
for another race?” Undoubtedly this theory works out in some regions I
have seen, where Christianity has been an ineffective substitute for
the war club and the tribal dance. The warrior grows flabby. His wife,
a squaw, slaves on.
But the main cause of depopulation in the Pacific, let me repeat, _is
the introduction of diseases to which the natives have no immunity_.
Even in the heart of Papua, where the Fathers of the Sacred Heart
performed practical miracles among ferocious mountain cannibals a
hundred miles from the coastline, working a non-malarious soil that
produced bountiful nourishment, I heard the death-knell. I can’t forget
how I heard Father Fastre’s bemused voice speaking under the moon:
“Doctor, when I first came here I could stand at my doorway and see ten
thousand people.” Where had they gone? The nearest village was four
hours away, and from where he gazed the good priest saw only moonlit
ghosts.
Cannibalism and head-hunting were rough blessings, because they
quarantined tribe against tribe. Cannibalism is a shocking habit, as
Herman Melville, if I remember correctly, pointed out, adding, “I ask
whether the mere eating of human flesh so far exceeds in barbarity
that custom [hanging, drawing and quartering, perhaps] which only
a few years since was practiced in enlightened England?” I am not
pro-cannibal, but medically speaking I can see how well it worked to
keep the other fellow in his place.
* * * * *
And what of it? asks Mr. Homebody as he walks toward the old parking
lot off Main Street. How in the world will it affect me or the boys
around American Legion Hall if those sun-kissed yahoos on the Isle
of Gumbo do happen to curl up and die? Head-hunters are all right in
side-shows, but they don’t affect business on Main Street.
Main Street is the very point, Mr. Homebody. I once told you how
far-off contagions might someday travel to your front door and disturb
your parochial calm. But here’s another side of it--something which
might upset your business, because you’re a partner in world business,
whether you know it or not.
The European seized the Pacific, and that’s an old story. In spite of
the horrible example of bombing and burning which European civilization
is showing today to the uncivilized, the settled holdings of various
national governments over a quarter of the globe’s surface, the
Pacific, must remain _in statu quo_. Unless it does, you will hear
something you will not like, Mr. Homebody. The _status quo_ over that
vast empire is all-important, and it cannot be maintained unless the
white man takes up his burden and carries it through.
Why? Because tropical products have become world business. The lands
down there, including immense Australia, vast New Guinea and big
New Zealand, make up a territory comparable in size to our Western
Hemisphere. The failure of mines, plantations and fisheries on one
side of our quarrelsome Earth cannot fail to react banefully on the
other side. Copra, hemp, cotton, sugar, gold, spices, fruits, pearls,
innumerable varieties of oils and drugs which have been discovered,
or will be, are only items among the tropical products which have
entered the international market. They are burdening ships in enormous
quantities, and the tonnage will grow greater, unless....
If native labor fails, Oceania’s production will fail. Healthy,
contented native labor is indispensable to the producer. The
importation of Asiatics will not answer the question. Regard the Fiji
Government’s experiment with East Indians, who are today outbreeding
the Fijian, and have brought him no benefits. Observe Japan’s
taking-over of the Marshall Islands, and the subsequent infiltration
of yellow men all over the Pacific. These strangers came because
the native was too sick to work the land. The oriental’s peaceful
penetration is already doing mischief down there; he brought with him
a set of political and social ideas which inevitably hook up with his
homeland prejudices, and extend into every intrigue of _Weltpolitik_.
He has nothing in common with the simple islander whom he is pushing
aside.
What will come of it all? Supply and demand are cruel partners. The
planter must work his plantation, the shipper fill his ships; and if
there is not enough healthy native labor to do the work, then send away
to Shanghai or Bombay for what you can get. These fellows may not last
long, either, but they will stay long enough to disturb the economic
balance. South Sea industry will grow anemic, an easy prey to whatever
Axis happens to be grinding blood out of the human race.
That, Mr. Homebody, will mean another war; and even if you are a year
or two too old for military service, your Main Street will rumble
with the jar of an economic balance overthrown. Before that breaks
right in front of your office building, maybe you will agree with the
Rockefeller Foundation’s theory of economics. Keep the native alive,
restore his health, give him enough European knowledge to fend him
against the evils of Europe, then he will go happily ahead cultivating
the soil for the world and himself.
* * * * *
Perhaps in these pages I have dwelt too much on the savagery of certain
backward tribes. Have I said enough about the self-sufficing social
pattern which these so-called barbarians had built around themselves
before the pale invader came to fuddle them? Have I said enough of
the ideal family life and wise social laws that prevailed over old
Polynesia? It needed no British or American schoolmaster to teach them
the kindness and neighborly generosity that are the aim of higher
civilization. They had these things, which are at the heart of social
happiness.
Definitely, I am not a Cassandra. The islander, I feel, will survive to
achieve great things in a brave new world. Already he has contributed
to science and statecraft, and in some cases has dominated in a
business world which yesterday was a closed book to him. He will
make his way in the arts, literature, music, painting. He had been
misled and fooled for generations, but his intellect is overcoming an
inferiority complex which the pale overlord once foisted on him. Island
governments have become humane and understanding, more missionaries
are letting fanaticism yield to common sense. Utopia is always a long
way off, but I’ll risk a prophecy. Guide the native with sympathetic
intelligence, and the time will come when he will cease to be our
pupil. He will become our teacher. Not in the science of war, God
deliver us, but in the more difficult art of living together in harmony
and peace.
* * * * *
So the Lamberts have bought a house in California. Eloisa tells me that
she will soon have the best rose garden in Walnut Creek. We are a bit
too far inland to see the Pacific; but I can feel it, over in the west.
Fiji doesn’t seem so far away.
THE END
INDEX
Abel, Victor, editor _Pacific Age_, 139, 140
Admiralty Group, 86
Ahuia, 20, 22, 33-36, 38, 44, 52, 56, 72
Aitutaki, 257, 263, 265
Antunez, Col., 8
Aseida, Toschio, 316, 344
Ashford, Col. Bailey K., 12
Ashley, Capt., 286, 287, 311, 323, 324
Atchin, 223, 227, 239
Atiu, 261, 262
Babcock, Dr., 5
Bach, Bill, 166
Bamus, 63
Barber, Dr. Marshall, 85
Barley, J. C., 106, 115, 323, 326, 327, 332, 339, 355
Beach, Byron, 67, 71, 78, 79, 82, 83, 88, 101-104
Beatty, Earl and Lady, 378
Bell, Skipper, 86, 87
Bellamy, Dr., 70
Bellona Island, 308-310, 347-353
Bertie, Mr., 18
Big Nambas, 222, 226, 227, 231
Bioto, 45, 46
Blackwater fever, 75
Boera, 28, 29
Boismenu, Bishop, 40
Boyd, Dr., 85
British High Commission, rule of, 115-117
Bryan, William Jennings, 9
Buck, Dr. Peter, 251, 355
Buia, 326, 330, 334.
_See also_ Rennell Island
Bunting, Bob, 67
Bushman’s Bay, 229, 232, 233, 246
Buxton, Dr. P. T., 220, 233, 234
Campbell, John, 359
Cannon, Dr. Walter B., quoted, 148-150
Carbon tetrachloride, Hall experiments, 134-136;
Lambert experiments, 136-144
Carrol, Sir James, 250
Carson, Skipper Billy, 71
Central Medical School (Suva), opening, 269-276;
expansion, 357-360;
work of, 362-376
Chabot, Father, 50, 51
Chaulmoogra oil, for leprosy, 99, 263
Chenopodium, administering, 95, 96;
intramuscular and intravenous injections, 99, 100;
a disappointment, 112
Clarence, Duke of, in Fiji, 154-156
Connelly, Mr., 39, 43-49, 52
Cook, Capt., 382;
quoted, 29
Cook Islands, 249-251, 382;
medical survey of, 252-269
Corlette, Ewan, 239, 240
Corney, Dr., 275
Crichlow, Dr., his survey of Rennell, 356
Crocker, Templeton, 284, 285, 291, 296, 297, 302, 307, 311-316, 318,
321-323, 326, 327, 330, 332, 337-339, 343, 344, 349, 352
Crooks, Richard, 379, 380
Crosby, Commander Paul, 218
D’Arbousier, M., 223
Darling, Dr. S. T., 304, 305
Deck, Dr. Northcote, 286, 293, 306, 350
Deva Deva, 51-56
Dilava mission station, 50, 51, 54
Dilkusa Mission, 139
Dopima, 61-63
Duffs, the, 318
Dysentery, epidemics of, 52
Egan, Martin, 128, 157, 158
Ehrlich, Professor, 30
Elephantiasis, 84;
manifestation, 168, 169;
in Ellice group, 169, 170
Ellice Islands, 164, 165, 170, 171, 177-180;
elephantiasis in, 169, 170;
leprosy in, 176
Ellison, Dr. E. P., 251, 253, 266
Fairbanks, Douglas, 378, 379
Fastre, Father, 54-56, 383
Fiji, 114-117;
racial decline, 125-127;
natives, 128-130;
sanitation, 131-133.
_See also_ Suva
Fijians, 382;
characteristics of, 128-130
Finney, Dr. Mac, 169
Fleming, F. J., 246
Fletcher, Sir Murchison, 360, 362
Fooks, Kenny, 60-62, 82, 83
Fosdick, Raymond, Lambert interview with, 279-283
Fox, Dr., of Melanesian Mission, 324, 325
Fulton, George, 65, 66, 105, 106, 356
Funafuti, 170
Gaile, 59, 60, 86
George, Prince, in Fiji, 154-156
Gilbert Islands, 164-166, 171, 177-180, 382;
elephantiasis in, 170;
leprosy in, 176
Gloucester, Duke of, 377, 378
Goaribaris, 20, 21, 31, 60-62
Gonorrhea, in Rarotonga, 254-256;
on Rennell Island, 343
Gorgas, Gen., 4
Graciosa Bay, 107
Grimble, Arthur, 177
Hall, Dr. Maurice C., 100, 140, 231;
experiments with carbon tetrachloride, 134, 135, 137, 142-144
Halloran, Lieut. Comm. P. J., 220
Hamlin, Hannibal, 286-291, 294-300, 307, 308
Hedstrom, Sir Maynard, 117, 120, 270, 358, 364
Heinrich, Brother, 41, 42, 57, 58
Heiser, Dr. Victor G., 3, 4, 10, 11, 16, 124, 200, 266, 273, 359, 373;
his treatment of leprosy, 99, 263;
in Fiji, 131;
memorandum to McGusty, 362
Hermit Islands, 86
Hetherington, Dr., 323, 330
Hillman, Capt. Teddy, 14, 38
Hombrom Bluff, 23
Honman, Col., 74, 77, 78, 80, 81, 91, 92, 95-99
Hookworm, history and treatment, 11-13, 342;
in Papua, 16-18;
in Ninigo group, 84;
in pigs, 137n., 183;
in Tonga, 182, 183;
in New Hebrides, 226;
tetrachlorethylene treatment, 231, 232.
_See also_ Carbon tetrachloride; Chenopodium
Hughes, Billy, Prime Minister, 74, 78-80
Hutson, Sir Eyre, 124, 157, 211, 270, 271, 361
Hynes, Dr. John B., 316, 323, 341
Irwin, Wallace, 157
Jerope, interpreter, 83, 84, 87-89, 92
Jewel, Mr., 18
Kaimare Houses, 62, 63
Kendrick, Chris, 14, 20, 24, 31, 32, 77, 115, 131-133, 137;
his reports, 82, 83
Kingsford-Smith, at Suva, 377
Kirschbaum, Father, 102
Koch, Dr. Robert, 75
Koiaris, 24
Kungava Bay, 288, 294, 335
Kuni people, 49-53
Kuper, Geoffrey, 324, 376
Kuria, 173-176
Lakatoi, 60
Lala, Ratu, 159-161
Lambert, Fred, 9
Lambert, Dr. S. M., interview with Heiser, 3, 4;
education, 5-7;
failing eyesight, 6, 7;
Mexican experiences, 7-9;
in North Queensland, 10, 11;
first survey of Papua, 16-18;
statistics of Papua survey, 72, 73;
hookworm lecture, 92-94;
mileage for New Guinea campaign, 102;
summary of South Sea experience, 110-112;
collection of hurricanes, 113, 114;
joins British Medical Association, 125;
Foundation’s attitude toward, 273;
interview with Fosdick, 279-283;
formula for checking population decrease, 381;
summary of work in Pacific, 382-386
Lambert, Mrs. S. M., 72, 76, 101-103, 113, 269, 285, 313, 314, 356,
379, 386.
_See also_ Tays, Eloisa
Lambert family, 5
Leprosy, cure and prevention, 99, 111;
in G and E group, 176;
on Cook Islands, 262-268;
Melanesian Mission colony, 325, 328, 329.
_See also_ Mokogai
Lewis, Meade, 8, 9
Ligouri, Mother, 41
Little Nambas, 226, 231
Loudon, Mr., 18
McAlpin, Archie, 20, 22-26
McErlane, W. J., 83
Macgregor, Dr. Gordon, 316, 318, 325, 336, 340, 341, 344-347, 349-351
Macgregor, Sir William, 275
McGusty, Dr., 125, 355, 359, 362
Macpherson, Dr., 359
Mafulu, 54, 55
Magdalena, Sister, 41
Magic. _See_ Witchcraft
Malaita, 281, 282, 316, 325, 327-334
Malakai, Native Practitioner, 120-123, 131, 164, 166, 222, 233, 234,
239, 253, 316, 319, 321, 326, 339, 344
Malaria, precautions against, 64, 75;
in Ninigo group, 84;
in the Americas, 84, 85
Malekula, 222-232, 236, 239, 240, 242, 246
Malo, 224
Manus, 86
Maoris, of New Zealand, 249-252, 382
Mariner, his _Tonga Islands_ quoted, 195-197
Marlow, Dr. Frank W., 6, 7
Matevan Plantation, 232, 246
Mathews, Dr., 16
Mauke, 257, 259-261
Mau Rebellion, 202, 204-206, 211-214, 218, 219
Melanesian Mission, in Sikiana, 241, 242, 318-321;
its leper establishment, 325, 328, 329
Mexico, Lambert’s experiences in, 7-9
Minty, Dr., 181, 182
Mission of the Sacred Heart, 39-42
Missionaries, Pacific, 68, 69, 241-244
Mohawk Bay, 107, 108, 333, 334
Mokogai, leper colony, 119, 120, 266-269, 358, 360
Mondos, 56, 57
Montague, Dr. Aubrey, 118-120, 125, 135, 138, 139, 253, 267-269, 271,
275, 283, 358, 360, 361
Morgan, J. P., 379
Morin, Father, 56
Motu, characteristics, 17, 60
Mungiki. _See_ Bellona
Murdock, District Commissioner, 173-175
Murray, Gov., of Papua, 15-17
Mutilation, native dread of, 97, 98
Nambas. _See_ Big Nambas; Little Nambas
Neosalvarsan, cost of, 116, 117
Nesbitt, Tom, 18
New Britain, 87, 88
New Guinea, 74;
medical service, 76, 77;
military administration, 77-79, 86;
German planters, 78, 79;
abuses in, 81
New Hanover Group, 86, 87
New Hebrides, 222-248, 383;
pig ceremonies, 222, 223, 228-230
New Zealand, Maoris of, 249-252
Ngata, Sir Apirana, 250, 251
Nicholson, Dr., 236
Ninigo, 84, 85
North Queensland, 10, 11
Nukualofa, royal operation at, 181, 182;
stone relics, 192, 193
Obregón, Gen., 8
Okaka, 54
Onua, 242-244
Orr brothers, 38, 39, 43, 46
Paganism, Polynesian symbols of, 193
Pago Pago. _See_ Samoa, American
Palmerston Island, 265, 266
Papua, 3, 4, 10, 13;
arrival at, 14, 15;
organizing work, 15-20;
hookworm in, 16-18;
sanitation, 21;
ghosts, 22-26;
first surveys of disease, 27-36;
a trip to the interior, 37-58;
contrasts, 59-72;
statistics of survey, 72, 73
Parker, Pastor, 225-227
Paton, Rev. Frederick J., 242-244, 246, 247, 372
Peletier, M., 244, 245
Penrhyn Island, 262, 263
Phelps, Commander, 220
Pidgin English, 90-94
Pig ceremonies, in New Hebrides, 222, 223, 228-230
Pomare, Sir Maui, 251-254, 259, 262-264, 267-269
Pope, Ratu, story of, 156-159
Popolo Mission, 54-56
Port Moresby, 10, 14-18
Purari Delta, 60-64
Quai, 35, 38, 56
Quaibaita, leper colony, 328, 329
“Queen Emma’s Kingdom,” 87
Rabaul, 75, 76
Rarotonga, 253-256
Reef Island, 107
Rennell Island, 65, 66, 105, 106, 281, 284-308, 310-313, 335-356;
racial origins, 341;
health survey, 342, 343
Richardson, Maj. Gen. Sir George, 192, 201-204, 210, 211, 213
Ritchie, Dr. T. Russell, 204, 205
Rivers, W. H. R., his _History of Melanesian Society_, 225n.
Rockefeller, John D., 247, 248;
a pidgin portrait of, 92, 94
Rockefeller Foundation, 85, 124, 214;
and tetrachloride treatment, 139, 140, 143;
attitude toward Lambert, 273, 274
Rodwell, Sir Cecil Hunter, 117
Root, Dr. Francis, 64
Rossier, Father, 46, 47, 51
Rotumah, 167, 168
Rubber plantations, of Papua, 31, 32
Salote, Queen, 268, 271.
_See also_ Tongan Islands
Samarai, 64, 65
Samoa, American, survey of, 215-221
Samoa, Western, 382;
seeds of revolt in, 202-204, 211-214;
Government, 204, 205;
medical problems, 205-211, 214, 215
San Cristoval, 107
Sande, Black Daniel, 318-322
Sanitation, in Papua, 21;
in New Britain, 88;
Fiji, 131-133;
Samoan, 215, 217, 220;
in Cook Islands, 258, 259
Santa Ana, 107
Santo, 224, 225, 233
Savaii, 206
Sawyer, Dr. W. A., 10, 37, 72, 273
Sefton, 18, 20, 24, 25
Seymour Bay, geyser field, 67, 68
Sikiana Group, 108-110, 318-323
Smith-Rewse, Mr., 223, 225, 226, 230, 236, 237, 241
Solomon Islands, 105, 106, 316-334, 382, 383
Stanton, Sir Thomas, 354, 360, 361
Star Harbour, 107, 333
Steenson, Dr., 6, 281-283, 311
Stiles, Dr. Charles W., 12
Strode, Dr., 161
Strong, Dr., 21
Stuart, Norton, 316, 344
Sukuna, Ratu, 156, 159
Sunners, R. V., 83
Suva, 114, 115, 117;
hospital, 117, 118;
famous visitors, 377-380.
_See also_ Central Medical School; Fiji
Syphilis, and yaws, 29-31, 47
Syracuse University, faculty, 6, 7
Tabatauea, 171, 172
Tahiti, 380
Tahua. _See_ Rennell Island
Tai Harbor, 329
Tanna, 235, 236
Taupangi. _See_ Rennell Island
Tays, Eloisa, 6.
_See also_ Lambert, Mrs. S. M.
Tays, Eugene, 6
Tepusilia, 59, 60
Tetrachlorethylene, 142, 231, 232
Tetrachloride. _See_ Carbon tetrachloride
Thakombau, Fiji king, 129, 130, 155, 156
Theodore, E. J., 359
Thompson, Capt. Andy, 256, 257
Tinakula, 317
Tobacco trade, in the Pacific, 19
Tongan Islands, 181-201
Trobriands, 68-71
Tuberculosis, on Tai Lagoon, 329-332
Tubous, 186
Tucopia, 317
Tully, Bill, 14, 82, 107, 162, 231, 239
Unified Medical Service, 360-362
Vaitupu, 171
Vakatawa, Benuve, 152, 153, 374, 375
Vanikoro, 317
Vanua Levu, 128
Vila, 223, 233, 237
Vincent, Dr. George, 94
Viti Levu, 128
Vulcan Island, 76
Waite, Dr., 3, 4, 10, 11, 16
Waldron, Webb, 357, 358
Western Samoa. _See_ Samoa
Wheatley, Norman, 324
Whipworm, treatment for, 99, 100
White, Gordon, 281-283, 287, 288, 293, 295, 296, 299, 307, 316, 321,
326, 329, 341, 346, 347
Willis, Dr., 13
Willowes, Maurice, 315, 338, 339, 351
Wilson, Dr. Basil, 141, 142
Windsor, Duke of, 157
Wisdom, Gen. E. A., 75, 79, 81, 96, 101
Witchcraft, and modern medicine, 147-163
Yaws, characteristics, 29-31;
treatment, 97, 116, 281;
in Samoa, 205, 215;
in Tanna, 235, 236
York, Duke and Duchess of, 378
Yule Island, 37-58
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Recent Wassermann tests on the Maoris of the Bay Islands, New
Zealand, have revealed 13.05 per cent syphilitics. There is no yaws in
New Zealand.
[2] Pronounced “Mokongai,” and would be so spelled, except for the
typographical feat described on pages 129-130. In most Fijian words
I have used the correct Fijian spelling instead of the fantastic
anglicized form.
[3] Some months later I did penance for that moment’s slip in courage.
A learned man who had studied tropical medicine in London announced
that the human hookworm could infect the pig and be carried by him.
This was a serious claim, likely to upset all calculations; especially
since he declared that he had proved his theory on a South Pacific
island. I wanted to find out for myself, so I went to a friend whose
wife had a pet pig that she had raised on a concrete floor to avoid
that curse of Fiji’s swine growers, intestinal parasites. I examined
the pig, found it negative, then hog-tied it and laid it, several
times, on a bed heavily infested with human hookworm larvae. It got a
severe “ground itch,” first symptom of infection. In due time I did
a postmortem on the animal and found many abscesses in the liver and
kidneys, but no worms in the intestines--fair evidence that human
hookworms do not infect pigs.
Then I did the experiment in reverse: got a pig that was extremely
heavy with pig hookworm and tied a poultice of the hatching material
on my arm. Result: “ground itch,” but no infection. Showing, at least,
that pig hookworm couldn’t thrive in a tough bird like me. I cut open
this tender young pig, and a good look at its wormy insides sickened
me. As a martyr to science I only suffered through my pocket. The lady
had been saving the animal for Christmas dinner, and she charged me
five pounds for it.
[4] The word is pronounced _ndraunikau_, the Fijian _n_ being sounded
before the _d_, as usual. For convenience I spell it _draunikau_.
[5] _The History of Melanesian Society_, by W. H. R. Rivers, describes
the fantastic genealogical tabus on marriages inside the family line.
[6] Rotumah is one of the steppingstones of the ancient Polynesian
Invasion, over 1,000 miles from Rennell. See Part Two, Chapter II.
[7] Described in Part II, Chapter I.
Transcriber's Notes:
Italics are shown thus: _sloping_.
Bold type is shown thus: =strong=.
Variations in spelling and hyphenation are retained.
Perceived typographical errors have been changed.