PART ONE

## CHAPTER I

SHORT NOTICE FOR A LONG CHORE

“Lambert, I’ve got a good one for you this time. I’m sending you to Papua.”

Dr. Victor G. Heiser, the Rockefeller Foundation’s famous Director of the East, made this announcement as if Papua were across the street.

“That’s fine, Doctor,” I said, “perfectly fine.”

Papua? Where was Papua? Vainly I fished for scraps of geography and pulled up impressions of palmy islands where black warriors asked guests how they liked their missionary, rare or well done.

Dr. Heiser sat behind a modest desk in one of the smallest rooms at 61 Broadway, delivering a sort of curtain speech to an act that had taken longer than a Chinese play, an act which had played through the war summer of 1918. I had finally found a successor and resigned my superintendency of the United Fruit Company’s hospital in Costa Rica; I was in New York to offer my services. But Uncle Sam wasn’t looking for medical officers with weak eyes.

Now Dr. Heiser’s kindly voice was praising and instructing one of the family, for at last I had joined up with the Foundation. There he was, kneeing his desk, telling me nothing about Papua, saying that my Costa Rican and Mexican experience had particularly fitted me for work with the International Health Board, not mentioning that war had taken away many of their physicians. He dwelt on the preparatory three months’ hookworm training I had already taken, under the Foundation’s auspices, among the hillbillies of Mississippi ... kept me moving, didn’t it, canvassing from door to door?... Lambert, you can work a lot faster down in the South Pacific, where you’ll lecture and treat in batches of from fifty to five hundred.... You’ll have to cover a lot of ground down there.... Take along plenty of khaki, and no evening clothes.... Get your family ready and start day after tomorrow.

“And on your way to Papua, Lambert, you’d better report to Waite, who’s in charge of our work in Australia. There’s quite a hookworm campaign going on in North Queensland. Good place to brush up on what you’ll need in Papua. You’ll find the Australians good fellows, like our Westerners, rough and generous and tolerant--they haven’t had to jam together in big cities and get small-minded.”

During our argumentative stage, I had told Dr. Heiser about a mining syndicate’s offer to take me down to Peru. I didn’t bring that up again, or mention General Gorgas’ half-promise to forgive my blinky eyes and commission me in the venereal section of the Medical Corps.

When I left that morning I was under the spell of the Heiser charm; a charm that has sent armies of scientific men, great and small, to follow jungle trails all over this planet, and work until they drop. In later years I walked with him along some of those trails, and my admiration for him increased every step of the way. There is a godlike something about Heiser that will never let him fall from the pedestal he deserves. Grant him clay toes if you wish, he is still a colossus who has bestridden the field of public health for twenty years--and been the target of much professional jealousy. In 1937 when I was at a League Conference in Java I heard an envious Yankee voice say, “Yes, I’ve read his _American Doctor’s Odyssey_, and I wonder why he didn’t call it _Alone in the Orient_.” Which gave me the luxury of a reply: “Did you watch him inaugurate public health work in the Philippines? _Alone in the Orient_ describes it rather well.”

* * * * *

I found an atlas and looked up Papua. Rather dully I was informed that Papua lay on the southeastern edge of New Guinea, the second largest island in the world--the Australian Continent’s hottest neighbor, no doubt, since its northern shoulder jogged the equator. The extremely savage names of its numerous tribes, the aimless fertility of its soil, its wealth of gold, copper and pearls, struck only dull fire on my imagination. I was going to a place called Papua, not to flirt with rubber-bellied brunettes in grass skirts, but to search sensibly for yaws, malaria, dysentery, tuberculosis and intestinal parasites. And to rout out the hookworm as tamely as I had poked him up in polluted Mississippi.

That was 1918, when a trip to Paris and back was something to talk about. The armistice hadn’t yet sent back a million doughboys with a smattering of obscene French. The world cruise hadn’t risen as a major industry. Today any debutante who has sauntered around the globe can tell you more about Fiji fire-walking and Arabian sword-swallowers than anybody but a professional explorer knew then.

* * * * *

No, the hereditary Lambert is not a geographer. We are a homebody family, and I often wonder how the colonial Lamberts ever found courage to cross over from England to seventeenth-century New Jersey. They certainly stayed put when they got here; nothing but hunger and Indian raids could budge them. My father, who was a tanner and often used his best leather trying to teach me civility, was looked upon as something of a sea rover because he once drove mules along the Delaware and Hudson Canal towpath. Relatives in Ellenville, New York, where I was born, paled when they learned that Father was moving us to Little Falls.

Our pious Methodists always regarded Father as a freethinker; and wasn’t it like him to want Sylvester to be a doctor? Mr. Babcock, head of our Free Academy in West Winfield, was even more radical. A boy ought to have a college education before he started studying medicine. I had worked with the tannery gang long enough, and had learned too many of the rich, brown oaths they spat out with their chewing tobacco. Hamilton College was the place to smooth me out for medical school. Hamilton College! My mother’s hands went up at the spectral idea of a place so remote that Sylvester would have to go overnight, by train.

I entered with the class of 1903, and the thought of all my father sacrificed to send me there made me a rather earnest student--that, and his threat of more tannery, if I didn’t make good. I am thankful that Hamilton and the Syracuse Medical, which I later attended, were both small, for in small classes the instructor knows the needs and failings of every student. I was a hard worker, but not a grind. I found time for football, which toughened the tannery boy for harder years to come. Trips with the team to rival colleges were early adventures in foreign travel. Colgate, swollen with toothpaste money, was easy fruit for us then. Williams rubbed our noses in the mud to the tune of 4-0--and I wept, limping off the field.

Sometimes in my late middle age I awake from sleep swearing. I have been dreaming of a game with the Carlisle Indians. That big Injun, Red Water, is on the line opposite me, tall as a church, never losing his grin. The ball is snapped and his long arm reaches tenderly over me, gets the seat of my britches....

In 1904 I was prepared for Johns Hopkins, but Mother wanted to know what I’d be doing with myself, ’way over in Maryland. Syracuse was in New York State, anyhow, and that was far enough for anybody.

Syracuse had a faculty disproportionately large and able for so small an enrollment. The ideal of scholarship was Spartan; if a student’s nose roved from the grindstone it was pushed back again. The quizzes were little inquisitions, the recitations no place for a sleepwalker. To study under Elsner, Jacobson and Levy was to appreciate Jewish respect for scholarship. Dr. Steenson, of the Department of Pathology, had a time-keeper’s complex and you missed his eight-thirty bell at your own risk. We called him “Johnnie Cockeye,” for his devotion to the gonococcus germ. I stared through the microscope for interminable hours, seeing but little on the slides. My eyes were already going, but I could read easily. Before I came to class I knew, theoretically, what I was supposed to see under the glass--and that’s how I coped with Steenson’s sudden quizzes.

* * * * *

The very distinguished Dr. Frank William Marlow, graduate of the Royal College of Surgeons, is dead now, but he crowned his career with a book called _The Relative Position of Rest of the Eyes_. A course under him put my eyesight, quite literally, on the blink. And this is how it came about.

Toward the end of my third year my brother became seriously ill, and I had to take him to Arizona. There I discovered, to my bald astonishment, that this Lambert had a wandering foot. In Tucson I obeyed a mad impulse and joined the crazy medical unit of a construction gang, working down the West Coast of Mexico. I had time to grow romantic when I came to the fine old hacienda of Mr. Eugene Tays, an American mining engineer. The dark eyes of his pretty daughter, Eloisa, melted my every ambition to go home and plug again at a stiff medical course. She was half Spanish, one of the influential Vegas around San Blas; but she had enough Scotch common sense to tell me to go home and graduate. When I had a practice of my own, she said, I could come back and marry her. She had to wait five years, but she kept her promise.

So I went back to Syracuse, weeks behind in my work and facing the final examination in ophthalmology. There were only three days and nights to make up lost time. I had nothing but a photographic memory to help me out. With a shrewdness born of despair I cracked the book at Marlow’s pet subjects. When I finally blinked my way into the classroom I had committed to memory a half-dozen picked pages. I was in luck; iritis, conjunctivitis, glaucoma and myopia were all there to be dealt with. I wrote the answers almost word for word from the pages my mind had photographed. Doctor Marlow was so impressed that he showed my paper around the faculty; it was fairly well decided that I had been cribbing. I might just as well have been, for after a long, tired sleep I found that I had forgotten half the stuff I had crammed. And my eyes were never the same after that ordeal.

No use going so early into the technicalities of my half-ruined sight. Microscopy became all-important to me over twenty-five years of service. I have been very fortunate in the assistants I found or trained to operate the lens for me. With glasses, my middle vision and far vision remained fairly good. And this was fortunate, too, for in my wanderings I have been required to look on many beautiful and horrible things.

Photographic memory-plates are apt to fade rapidly. Several years later, I was admitted to the Costa Rica Medical Faculty, after another feat of intensive cramming. Costa Rican professional standards are high, and not too friendly to Yankee doctors. Though I passed the very severe examination, I am not sure it was my learning that won my degree; my initiation included many cocktails with a great many influential medical officers. Those things help in Central America.

* * * * *

That was in the calmer period, following four years in Mexico, where I practised medicine between raids by Carranzistas, Villistas, Yaquis. Twice I established myself with my wife and baby on the West Coast, near Eloisa’s home. Twice, because the United States Navy ordered us to escape with our lives, we left the country as refugees.

Those years were heavy with adventure. There was the time when smallpox broke over the helpless people like a cloud of poison gas; I worked alone among hundreds of peons who were anti-vaccinationists to a man and died in their own stench, hidden under dirty clothes. Time and time again I performed emergency amputations on kitchen tables, my Chinese cook giving the anesthetic. I diagnosed malaria on myself, and found my mistake when I came down with a bug of an atypical typhoid group. I lost forty pounds from dysentery and Donna Angela nourished my convalescence with iguana stew. I brought an hysteria-stricken girl back from a state like death by scaring her with a sharp knife. One day I gasped with horror, seeing a native midwife promoting childbirth by tying a woman to high rafters and jerking her legs. One afternoon I barricaded my wife and baby behind sacked beans, and performed a tonsilectomy while the Yaquis broke into a liquor warehouse. Still, there were sweet, mild months under a benevolent Aztec sun; then there came a night when I smelled burning houses and heard the wild-horse squeal of women being raped by Indians.

* * * * *

One adventure I might record, if briefly. The dreaded Yaquis had joined forces with General Obregón. Colonel Antunez, like a good fellow, was bossing the Indians. They had been letting us alone at Mochis, but danger was always brooding in a place that never knew which side it was on. One day, to my discomfiture, this Colonel Antunez came limping in. He complained of pain in his groin, and a large swelling indicated an operation. He urged me to be quick; he had to be at the front, he was the only man whom Obregón trusted with the wild Yaquis.

When I got in with the knife I found a tumor that extended into the big blood vessels. Removing it was a serious major operation. As soon as he was out from under the anesthetic the war horse snorted again. He must be up and back at the front. I told him that his condition necessitated three weeks of complete rest; he got so excited that his temperature shot up and I had to stop arguing. As he recovered, his officers and their Yaquis were always around.

One morning I found his bed empty. They had smuggled him away in a jolting truck, through a cold rain. He died at Navajoa, of peritonitis or phlebitis, one of the inevitable results.

Next day I was called to the office of His Honor, the _Sindico_ of Mochis, and was surprised by a captain’s tap on my shoulder. I was under arrest. It was a long trip toward the death-house. They jailed me first at Mochis, where I managed to have three words with Meade Lewis, a little red-headed friend of mine who was American consul. I told him what I guessed: I was booked to be shot because one of Obregón’s most valued officers had died after my operation.

My tumbrel to Topolobampo was a track car, bristling with rifles; half the population and their dogs tagged along for a look at the gringo who was going to be tried--which was a synonym for being executed. I had been allowed one glance at Eloisa and our baby. The cell in which I spent ten days was a Yaqui butcher shop when it wasn’t occupied by the condemned. Into a fragrance of spoiled meat my jailor came at last to inform me that the trial and shooting were set for Saturday morning. And here it was Friday.

On Saturday morning I had prepared my sinful Methodist-born soul for a stern hereafter, when the officer in command swung wide the door, saluted deferentially and proclaimed, “Doctor, you are free!”

Not until I had rejoined my family did I learn what this, or anything else, was about. I had become an international affair, they said. Consul Meade Lewis had fairly pulled the cables loose between Topolobampo and Washington. William Jennings Bryan had sent a cruiser down from San Diego. The captain of that cruiser burned the wires to Mexico City with a Richard Harding Davis sort of message: “Release Lambert at once or I’m coming to get him.”

It made a ripping newspaper story. Away up in Newark my brother Fred had been visiting some Mexican friends who told him how wonderfully I was doing in Mochis. After the party Fred passed a subway newsstand and saw the black headline, “JAIL DOOR SWINGS WIDE FOR LAMBERT.” He was proud of the family when he read how William Jennings Bryan had taken steps.

* * * * *

I have jotted down these few facts about myself so that my readers may try to decide how well experience had equipped me to be an international health physician. I hope they’re not as unsure as I was that day in September, 1918, when I put my family aboard the train for our first long pull toward Papua.

## CHAPTER II

BY THE RAM’S HORN ROUTE

It was early May, 1920, before I saw the sterile hills and corrugated iron roofs of Papua’s capital, Port Moresby. As they traveled in those days it would have taken the ordinary voyager six weeks from San Francisco. I was no ordinary voyager, it turned out. The little stopover in North Queensland, which Dr. Heiser had suggested for me, held me there a year and a half in one of the most strenuous hookworm campaigns in the history of the parasite. The minute I saw Dr. Waite, who was our chief worker there, I was shocked by the picture of what the tropics can do to a man engaged in the benevolent business of public health. Malaria had yellowed his skin, and a horrid fungus called “sprue” had ravaged him so that he was going home to die. He didn’t die; but I did very nearly, of the same foul blight that lays bare a man’s intestinal tract from mouth to anus.

Fieldworkers for the Foundation don’t go about bragging of the bugs they pick up along the way. In twenty-one years I think I caught everything the tropics have to offer, with the exception of yaws, venereal and leprosy. I’m not sure about leprosy. It’s so slow to develop you can’t be sure you haven’t got it until you’ve died of something else.

* * * * *

We were leaving North Queensland at last, in the seagoing washtub _Morinda_, Papua bound. In the Australian hot country I had been the Buffalo Bill and the Jim Farley of a whirlwind campaign. I had acted as director there until October, 1919, when Dr. W. A. Sawyer came out to take charge of Australasia. Then there were six months of it, helping him organize.

The North Queensland campaign had offered the combined excitement of a _Blitzkrieg_ and a Methodist revival. I had shouted my sprue-sore mouth raw. I had ballyhooed a Yankee’s message to Australasia--privies and more privies! Our greatest popular hygienist, Mr. Chic Sale, could never have been prouder of his Temple of Necessity than I of my fly-proof, worm-tight w.c. when it was accepted as a model by the committees of North Queensland. I was preaching a crusade, and I was heeded. At Shire Council meetings, soil-pollution questions flamed like torches; labor unions called strikes on and off, excited by thousands of feet of lumber to be hauled and nailed together into latrines; commercial travelers took up the cause and were asking their customers, “Have you got one of those things the Yankees are peddling up and down the coast?”

* * * * *

Now it was May, 1920, and that was over. The little _Morinda_ was off Cairns; we would be moving, maybe, when the tide rose. I laughed wickedly, remembering what the shattered Dr. Waite said when he left North Queensland to my tender care. “Lambert, if you stick, you’ll probably go out feet-first.” Well, my feet were still under the deck chair where I loafed and totaled up eighteen months of hard campaigning.

We had supervised the building of 4,000 model latrines and repaired 4,000 more up to the standard. We had treated thousands and thousands of hookworm cases; from Proserpine to Cooktown we had examined 98 per cent of the population for intestinal parasites. We hadn’t found infection heavy, but I gloated over the change wrought in many people by the humble expedient of a decent privy behind every house. Brightness was coming back to eyes and skin. Healthy children were playing.

Yes, the Australians are like our Westerners. When there is work to be done they go at it wholeheartedly. Subsequent improvement in North Queensland’s health shows what these people can do.

* * * * *

The story of the hookworm disease and its cure is a twice-told tale, or a thousand times told in the medical libraries. But because the subject is pertinent to my years of work, let me say a little about a scourge which was so widespread in 1918 that it had but one rival--malaria. Just as Dr. Heiser said, one third of our planet’s inhabitants had hookworm.

It is one of the oldest diseases recorded in history. The Ebers papyrus, dating back to 1500 B.C., speaks of “worms in the abdomen” and makes the hieroglyphic guess that the trouble was caused by “much handling of sand.” It is more likely that the infection came from the sacred scarab, a creature so unclean that it is commonly called the “dung beetle.” Moses said to his wanderers in the wilderness, “And thou shalt have a paddle upon thy weapon; and it shall be, when thou wilt ease thyself abroad, thou shalt dig therewith, and shalt turn back and cover that which cometh from thee.” Without that wise precaution against the infesting parasite, the Children of Israel might never have seen their Promised Land.

The Greeks probably had a name for it; ages later an Italian doctor called it _Ankylostoma_, which is fairly good Greek for “hookmouth.” Caesar’s legions carried it from Africa into Italy. In 1838 Dr. Dubini of Milan found 105 infected post mortems, and a year later it was discovered that Italian laborers had conveyed hookworm into the Alps. Australia got her dose of it when she imported Orientals and Islanders to work her plantations.

Hookworm and his wife came to America with Africa’s compliments to slavery. No worm travels far on its own belly; it is the human belly, to mix a metaphor, that gives wings to the pest. During the Spanish American War Colonel Bailey K. Ashford of our Medical Corps studied “coffee picker’s anemia” in Puerto Rico; he segregated the hookworm in these cases and wired the news to Dr. Charles W. Stiles of the United States Health Service. Stiles became our pioneer investigator in the South, something of a martyr to science. He called this variety of worm _Necator americanus_ (American murderer), although he might more properly have named it _Necator africanus_. The Negro’s habitation of our soil could be proved by the infection he has left behind, even though the race should disappear. Scientific investigators like Darling have studied hookworm--content to trace great racial migrations.

Investigation and treatment of the hookworm disease is no job for a florist. Much of the work has to do with microscopic examination of human excreta. But the physician is a realist, and every function of the body has, for him, the equal rights of a true democracy.

Here is the life cycle of this dreadful little bloodsucker: Its eggs cannot hatch in the intestine, where the hungry mother clings and lays them by thousands. They must pass out with the bowel movement and lie exposed to moist, warm, shady air; under these conditions, they hatch in from twenty-four to thirty-six hours, and begin their progress as tiny larvae in search of human flesh. They infest the soil for several feet around the filth in which they have incubated. Enterprising ones crawl up weeds and will even bore their way into ankles under thin stockings.

Once inside the skin the embryo finds the blood stream and makes its long pilgrimage--through the heart, through the lungs, up the throat; then down into its destined home, the upper intestine, where it fastens its teeth and grows by what it feeds on, human blood. On one drop of blood a day it grows almost to the size of a pin and develops jaws as steely strong as wire-cutters. Multiply these blood-drops by a hundred, by a thousand, and watch the pale anemia that lays the sufferer open to the first epidemic that comes along.

In infected districts the health physician’s job was routine diagnosis and routine treatment. When we had to treat and survey whole villages and tribes within a limited time we gathered as many as we could into an audience and lectured them in whatever language they happened to speak. After the lecture we would hand them out small tin containers, each marked with a person’s name. We told them carefully how to put a small portion of each individual’s next bowel movement into the tin with his name. We urged that all tins be returned next morning. These specimens we usually examined by the “Willis salt flotation” method. This routine was invented by a brilliant young Dr. Willis, an Australian whom I broke in during the campaign in 1919. In the Willis test a specimen of excreta the size of a small filbert is mixed in a tin container with saturated salt solution. The solution comes level with the top of the container, and a glass slide is laid over it. The eggs concentrate by floating to the surface and are lifted with the salt solution when the glass is raised. Under the microscope the floating eggs can be seen. When the Willis test proved positive the patients were set aside for treatment--if we had the time and the drugs to finish the job. Those were the days of “the awful oil of chenopodium,” as it was often called. It was regarded as a specific; it was relatively ineffective, and dangerous to use with large groups. I shall go into that later.

Much of the work planned for Papua was the making of “surveys,” which means a medical census of vast areas as remote from our usual earthly experience as so many lunar landscapes. Perhaps I am running a little ahead of my story and putting too much stress on ankylostomiasis, the hookworm disease. Our later work carried us into investigations of every tropical malady, from ringworm to leprosy.

At last Papua and novel adventures lay ahead of me, if we ever got there. The _Morinda_ was poking her distracted snub nose into blue water, doing her darnedest. It was Sunday morning and our skipper was an old-fashioned practical joker. Captain Teddy Hillman, brief of bone and round of belly, solemnly invited me to his cabin to hear his phonograph play “Shall We Gather at the River?” Sadly he asked me how I liked it, and when I said, “Fine, you old so-and-so,” it was somehow the perfect reply, for he spatted my knee and crowed, “Then we’ll make you a member of the Gin Club!” Gin Club initiates ordered drinks by pushing buttons that had needles concealed in them. The drinks came in the sort of glasses you order at trick-stores; lift one and it squirts gin over your shirt-front. All very adolescent, but anything went on slow-going junks like the _Morinda_.

The job ahead was much on my mind. We had been given seven months to cover a Territory which, to a large part, had defied explorers, where the census had been little more than guesswork, where estimates placed a thousand natives for every two Europeans. The inspectors I brought with me were four of the six men I had planned to put in charge of separate surveys or use for laboratory work. They were Australian boys, except Chris Kendrick, a tropics-seasoned Englishman and one of the ablest helpers I have ever sent into the field; with a sort of planned recklessness he used his head so well that he might have gone through hell and brought back the Devil’s hookworms. With few exceptions all my inspectors had that sporting spirit--“Tomorrow, by the living God, we’ll try the game again.” The youngest of the ones who came with me on the _Morinda_ was Bill Tully, only eighteen; the oldest was thirty. A terrific shortage in tropical physicians had made helpers like these an absolute necessity. They had been trained to diagnose and treat a limited number of native diseases and to lead our dark safaris wherever the work called them, from gloomy swamp to savage mountaintop. A man’s job, and they were men.

* * * * *

We stood on a Port Moresby dock and blinked at a collection of hot tin roofs, the white man’s gift to the tropics. Sweltering, steaming. The town was on the dry fringe of an island famous for moisture; the merciless sun seemed to dry up everything but sweat. A crew of Papuans came to our relief, thunderously pushing along small flat cars to carry our freight and baggage. They were big blacks with oiled skins and nothing on but _lavalavas_. Their bushes of hair were two or three feet in diameter; jolly smiles relieved the savage look. These were the first Papuans I had seen, and already I was learning a word of their language. Glancing respectfully toward me they repeated it, “_Bogabada, Bogabada!_” This, I thought, was some native honorific. I took the salute gracefully. “Just what does _Bogabada_ mean?” I asked the Irish customs inspector. “Big belly,” he said.

Some of my 235 pounds I dropped in the strenuous months that were to follow. However, I knew that _Bogabada_ would still stick by me.

My Papuans rolled the luggage up a corrugated iron street to the corrugated iron hotel. Ryan’s Hotel became my headquarters. The bedroom walls ran about seven feet high; above them to the ceiling was a great open space which let in breezes, bats and mosquitoes. If elephants could fly they would have made it, too. These ventilation holes breathed the very breath of scandal, for you could hear every whisper, and wonder who were paired off now. Like most tropical hotels it was the home of dissatisfied customers; they drank excessively, they said, to drown the taste of Ryan’s food.

* * * * *

Almost at once I assumed the role of lobbyist for human health. Financial details had been arranged. Papua, Australia and the Foundation were to share expenses equally. When I saw Governor Murray I found him polite but vague, with a smile that let me know that our work had been thrust upon him, and that every hookworm we might find would be an added insult to his administration, something that would lead to trouble with the overlords in Melbourne.

He quoted discouraging figures, and said that census-taking in Papua couldn’t be much more than an estimate. When you put the population figure at 300,000 you always had to say “more or less.” There were so many places that white men seldom or never saw. How could you be accurate about a Territory that covered 87,786 square miles on the mainland alone, and 90,540 when you counted in the outlying islands? You had to tackle mountains that were practically unclimbable, streams that were unnavigable and tribes that even explorers couldn’t dig out. He stroked a graying mustache over a withering mouth.... Yes, his own medical service was quite adequate, he thought. (Fading eyes strayed a little, peering to see which way Parliament was going to jump.) Yes, Lambert, this Rockefeller idea might do some good here.... When could we dine?

I have had time to reverse my first opinion of Governor Murray, who lived to be over eighty and died with a fine administrative record. He didn’t happen to like us, that was all. So I had to go to the very competent Chief Medical Officer, who understood the situation exactly and gave us the most generous help. The planters backed us all the way.

* * * * *

I decided to begin with short surveys of plantations lying around Port Moresby. Heiser and Waite had told me I needn’t fool with the villages; all the parasites were on the plantations. I hadn’t been out a week before I realized they had reached this conclusion only because they hadn’t gone beyond Papua’s freakish little dry belt, where the Ankylostoma cannot thrive. I found the villages in the moist area alive with hookworm.

After our short tour was finished, we were to push into the wild interior. We had decided to give mass treatments where we could; otherwise we must leave medicine and instructions with planters and missionaries along the way. It was talk, talk, talk these first few days, and I was like a wild horse, rarin’ to go. I got plenty of going before my seven months were up.

* * * * *

There was a touch of madness in this little hot-spot of semi-civilization where Queenslanders had come to build up another Australia. The superintendent of the hospital, Dr. Mathews--(“Dr. Mathews, one _t_ in the name, please”) halted operations to quote a Biblical passage proving, to him, that the world would end in 1925. He had worked it out mathematically; exactly 144,000 souls would be spared from fire by a race-conscious Creator. These would be mostly Papuans, who would rise and inherit the earth from England. He hated England. His prophecy of destruction, he told me, had come to him when a boy of fifteen, in the midst of a football scrimmage.

Port Moresby, during the war scare of 1914, earnestly believed that German New Guinea might at any minute cross the border to burn and loot. At the Papuan Club they could laugh it off after the third whisky-soda. They told about native sentries posted around town, instructed to shoot at sight. One gray dawn a sentry spied an excessively smelly scavenger’s wagon rolling up, and took it for the enemy. The password was “_Vailala_.” The guard leveled his rifle nervously and said, “You no talkim _Vailala_ me shoot.” The baffled Motu driver replied, “Me no sabe _Vailala_. This no shoot-cart. This shit-cart,”--and rolled away into the mist.

The Motu is a tamed and pleasant savage who only murders when it is conscientiously necessary. In the Port he is quite a city fellow, wearing his great bush of hair with style, but not aggressively. His kind brown eyes hold no reproach for the white folks who set him to minor household drudgeries. He is inclined to be timid; but in Papua you mustn’t put too much faith in kind brown eyes. Even the butcherous Koiaris and the cannibal Goaribaris can look at you with winning gentleness when you visit their villages.

* * * * *

Viewed from all angles,--geographical, political, medical,--our situation was not easy.

Here were three thousand miles of coast, with mountains massed so near that roads by the sea were impossible; the nineteen-mile road that ran from Port Moresby to Sapphire Creek was the only one that wasn’t a goat path or a postman’s trail. The Governor’s yacht was out of my reach, and we hired or borrowed the canoes that took us up rivers; therefore, for transportation we were largely at the mercy of recruiters and planters.

We were only there on sufferance, for the Australian Government which ran the Territory chose to snub local authority. The depression of 1920 had set the planters yammering for subsidies to help a Territory which, for the tropics, is strangely unfertile. Governor Murray was at his wits’ end to carry on his pinch-penny policy with the aid of ships’ engineers and stewards whom he had made into roughly able magistrates and district officers.

The whole medical service was pared down to an excellent Chief Medical Officer with nothing to work with, a Judgment Day prophet in charge of the local hospital, and one physician for each of three far-flung districts. These five, with a couple of nurses and two European dispensers, were supposed to service the 90,000-odd square miles. The officer at Samarai was efficiently modern; the other three were elderly hacks. This was typical of the general medical situation over the South Pacific.

Sometimes I wonder how we ever got our units organized. At last we imported two extra inspectors from Australia and scattered like scalded dogs from a steaming kettle. In my weeks of preparation, I found that I had the Papuan Club behind me. That meant support from the ablest colonials in the South Pacific: Loudon, Bertie, Sefton, Jewel, Tom Nesbitt and a dozen more. I couldn’t have moved a finger without the help of these men and their friends. These were the forward-looking ones who wanted native labor restored to health, to revitalize races for whom, at that time, there seemed no future but extinction.

At the Papuan Club I couldn’t open my mouth for any fly-blown anecdote without there being wild laughter and shouts of “More! More!” A new man would come in. “Harrigan, have you heard the Doc’s latest? Doc, tell it again.” I was rather puffed up until I found out what they were laughing at: it was my funny Yankee accent.

## CHAPTER III

WHERE THE DEAD MEN TALK

Only a day by motor lorry from the galvanized iron of Port Moresby, and untamed Papua was pressing around us--a brute that could throw sudden tremendous cliffs into tangled drylands that were flat as your hand, a country where the souls of men seemed forever broken between gross materialism and fantastic belief in ghosts and magic. Perhaps the black man’s mystic spirit imparted to his white conqueror a shuddering faith in the walking dead.

Papua isn’t rich in the things that man needs. Either it is parched with drought or reeking with wetness that produces giant weedy growths with no nourishment in them. A hemp plantation, big as a Texas ranch, was one of a certain development company’s failures; almost every enterprise in Papua seemed to be on the downgrade. Over yonder, a closed and battered factory revealed the company’s vain attempt to manufacture a trade tobacco that would be foul enough to suit the native taste.

Everywhere in the Pacific trade tobacco is native coin and currency. A few sticks of it will buy a man’s labor for the week, a woman’s virtue for the night. Government regulations have set a standard ration: two sticks a week. But the natives will accept only the stinking twist that traders import from Virginia. The development company had a bright idea: they would make a trade tobacco of their own and corner the business. They spent £50,000 trying to reproduce that exquisite dung flavor. The black boys put it in their pipes, but couldn’t be fooled. “Me want tabac!” they yelled. So the company imported an expert from Virginia. That didn’t work either. Maybe the local tobacco was a grade too good. The factory shut down and more shillings dropped out of the pockets of hopeful stockholders.

* * * * *

On one trip to these regions I went with Inspector Chris Kendrick, a planter named Sefton, and Archie McAlpin, who was chief inspector for the big development. There was also my “boy,” Ahuia.

In Port Moresby I had designed a uniform for my native interpreters. It was a jumper and skirt in gaudy blue edged with bright yellow braid, and on the breast was a large yellow =H=. The =H=, of course, stood for HOOKWORM; but it made boys throw out their chests and strut as if it meant HARVARD at least.

Down there they call every male native a “boy”; Ahuia was my chief boy. Splendid in his new uniform, he had the look of a Malay pirate coming over the side with a big knife in his teeth. He wore more hair than I had ever seen on anything, living or dead. On special occasions he loved to decorate it with lilies. To the natives he was an oppressor, to me a tender guardian. He could wash clothes, hookworm specimens, camp dishes. He could cook and sew. He could put the fear of devils into the gang of carriers who bore our equipment. He spoke Motu fluently when he interpreted. Motu is the _lingua franca_ along the dry belt. In remoter villages they didn’t understand Motu. But in every settlement under government control Ahuia would engage the services of the village constable, usually a murderer who had graduated with honors from Port Moresby jail. Jail was the native’s university, where he could learn more in three years than the home folks could teach him in a lifetime. The authorities always had a job waiting for a good jailbird. Ahuia, who was a great traveler, knew that any constable with a Port Moresby jail degree could speak Motu. A handy boy was Ahuia, and, like most natives, as afraid of ghosts and magic as a rabbit of a hound-dog.

* * * * *

At the big hemp plantation, field hands thronged around our lorry to help us with our load--queer fellows with sloping foreheads crowned with tight Negro wool. Long beaked noses gave them an ironic look; they had the appealing eyes of beaten hunting dogs, and were not healthy men. Some of them showed the dreadful ulcers of that false syphilis we call “yaws.” Others were too pallid for brown men--hookworm infection and malaria.

“What name dis fellow?” I asked Ahuia.

“Him Goaribari.” Ahuia spat contemptuously.

Goaribaris! I had heard bloodcurdling stories of these savages. It must have been a long haul for them--seven hundred miles or so from the Delta country which they terrorized. Here they labored along with downcast eyes, or looked up almost fawningly.

The plantation manager arrived and invited me to his comfortable, balconied house. These planters have the generous hearts of all good Australians. “And it’s a God’s blessing that you Yankees are jogging the Government up a bit. Half a million natives, maybe, and not half of ’em fit to lift a bloody hand.” When I asked about the Goaribaris who had so sedately helped us with our gear, the manager said: “Cannibals? Well, just a bit. When they’re home they’ll eat anything, from maggots to raw eels.”

I inquired into hygienic conditions. He said, “When the recruiters bring these boys in they’re lousy with the diseases they’ve caught in their blighted villages. The ones you saw are newcomers. Six months on a good plantation and they’ll pick up.”

He looked at me studiously. “The plantation’s a bit seedy now, but we have two sanitary features we’re proud of.”

Back of the cabins he led me into one of those latrines designed by Dr. Strong, the Papuan Chief Medical Officer, who strove so well for the people and never got a breath of credit. It was built with a rough wooden rail and the pit was some twenty-five feet deep. Darkness below was unattractive to the dysentery-carrying fly, the sides too steep and high for the hookworm larvae to climb.

That was admirable, I said. And what was the second sanitary improvement in which he took so much pride?

Beyond the hemp fields untidy black women loafed in the shade, revealing their baggy breasts; they were spitting bloody streams of betel-juice or smoking short clay pipes. “We have fourteen now,” the planter said. “We’ve sent some away--gonorrhea, you know. Bring a few more in this week. Yes, they have the ration of trade tobacco, rice and tinned food. They’re all married, so it’s just a matter of seeing the husband.”

Admirable. But what had that to do with sanitation?

The manager held me with clean gray eyes, and said: “Do you know what happens to men without women? These natives are only animals. You’ve seen how animals behave, when they can’t get what they want naturally? Indenturing men, taking them in herds away from the wives and the whores, teaches them a lot of tomfoolery. Europeans don’t think that the primitive man goes homosexual. Humbug! The missionaries think the savages will live like Christ, and they’ve made it illegal to have prostitutes on plantations. Well, these ladies here are just good hard-working wives. Ask any of the big planters--and they’re he-men if ever there were any--ask ’em about the native boys that weave their hips and ogle at the work-gangs going by. We call ’em ‘queens,’ and they’re a nuisance we’ve jolly well got to get rid of.”

The planter’s idea was brutal, like Papua. But his object was kindly, and, in its way, scientific. Since then I have seen much of the turning of simple people to the ways of perversion. The hard-hitting Queenslander, manly as a frontiersman can be, was doing his best to square the vicious circle.

* * * * *

That night I saw my first ghost. We had sat up rather late with the manager, who mumbled in a corner with Archie McAlpin. Once I heard him ask, “Is it still around?” Heads were together, voices lowered. Finally Archie McAlpin, who had finished his share of whisky, and mine, rambled upstairs. I rambled up too, for I was tired. That evening there had been a long lecture before an audience of sedate cannibals, earnestly attentive to what I told Ahuia to say in Motu to a Goaribari interpreter.

The Papuan servant never wakes you harshly, because when you sleep your soul has left your body to wander among dreams. Wake the body suddenly, and where is the soul? Still loitering with a dream. Therefore you die. When Ahuia wished to rouse me he would move a chair or give a polite cough. His cough woke me and I saw him, shadowy in a patch of moonlight. His jittery voice was imploring the _taubada_ to “Look along veranda.... Devil-devil belong him outside.”

A voice was yammering somewhere. I looked out and saw a white figure that appeared to float as it gestured. I hadn’t many hairs to stand up, but they all stood. Yammering, yammering, the voice of the pale apparition beat out a long speech in Motu, then in English. “_No, don’t come here again!_”

The specter turned. It was Archie McAlpin. The voice hadn’t been that of a drunken man; under the white moon his look was sober. He shook his head, the debate was over. He didn’t see me, he appeared not to see anything as he went back to bed.

“Ahuia, what was he seeing?” I whispered, because the natives know so much of devils. Dark eyes were expressionless in the white night. “Maybe he see nothing, Taubada,” he whispered.

In three days I finished dosing two hundred Goaribaris. I had found that newcomers bore the heaviest load of worms, reversing a prevalent medical theory that plantations were infected and villages clean. Labor was bringing disease from the towns to the farms.

The plantation that was sanitated by prostitutes and model latrines, worked by tame cannibals and haunted by invisible things, disappeared in a dust cloud as our lorry rumbled away toward the unbelievable cliffs of Hombrom Bluff. When I spoke of ghosts to Archie McAlpin he turned his steel-gray eyes the other way.

We slept at the little inn at Sapphire Creek, where the specters wailed again, if only in the imagination of the English landlady whom I treated for a slight attack of alcoholism. Poor woman, she had raised two husbands and fourteen children, and had been a rough Florence Nightingale to the sick miners in the last flu epidemic. She stared up from her pillow and said, “No, Doctor, I’m not seeing things--only what’s all around us, all the time. Strange things happen in Papua.” She closed her eyes to shut them away.

* * * * *

Hombrom Bluff hangs over the seared scrub of flatlands below. All Papua is like that, a vast bear-rug, shaggy and tumbled in a hundred folds; man is the louse that must crawl up and down, down and up, to cross these endless entanglements. Craning my neck to look up Hombrom’s forehead I saw the change in vegetation from strangling tropic vines at the base to temperate evergreens that shagged its top. Blinking at three thousand feet of it, I said to Archie McAlpin, “How do we get around to the Sogari District?”

Archie said, “We don’t get around. We go over.”

They brought us horses and I mounted clumsily, being thirty pounds too heavy for the little shaggy animal. Then it was up, four breakneck miles of cliffside trail that was seldom more than a yard wide. It would have been a hard scramble for a man, but my Papuan horse must have been bred of a goat. On the one side we were elbowed by monstrous vines; on the other side loosened pebbles flew into empty air. At one high twist the forests were sliding down to Port Moresby harbor, where the reefs were fine spun lace, tattered over the expanse of lapis lazuli sea. Another turn and one of the world’s great waterfalls, Rona, joined diamond necklace to diamond necklace as it met the wild Laloki River, slicing through savage green.

Now at the top we dismounted on a narrow ridge. “What’s that lake over there?” I asked Archie McAlpin. The lake was a Venus’ mirror, framed in the lips of a dead volcano. Archie’s eyes were still as the lake; he stood silent at the marge of a cliff. Then I heard it again, heard the queer babble in Motu. I turned and saw that it was Archie, speaking to the sky. I whispered to Sefton, “Is he a bit off his head?” Sefton answered gravely: “No. But that lake over there is where dead men go. Archie’s saying the invocation. It keeps ghosts from following us. You can’t get a native to go within a mile of that lake. They know what’s good for them.”

Perhaps the lake had put its curse on me too; maybe it didn’t like to be photographed. When I was remounting my horse the saddle slipped and left me dangling in midair. Two hundred and thirty-odd pounds of me hung by a creaking stirrup. Quick-thinking Chris Kendrick caught me in time and shoved me back into the saddle. What I liked best about Chris was his way with an emergency.

Far away across a vertigo of green depths Mt. Victoria, a tall landmark in New Guinea, was in a misty shroud. On this silent trail the sudden flutter of a bird’s wing sounded like a shot.

“The mountain’s like a ghost,” I said to Archie McAlpin.

The trail had widened, we could ride closer together. “Along here I like it best in daylight,” he said. I asked him if he was afraid of Koiaris--for they were the killers with long spears. No, he wasn’t afraid of Koiaris. Their country was farther on.

Sefton stared into the pale mountain light. “There’s a trail that leads down from Jawavere where the Koiaris wait for anything that comes along. You don’t linger on the Jawavere trail.

“I have a station on the trail,” he said, “and always look for anybody passing to have a drink with me. It’s a bit lonesome. About four one afternoon, a native runs in and says he saw a _taubada_ (white man) who had been riding along there, taking his time, just staring ahead. His horse didn’t make any noise, the bush didn’t flutter. I thought that was a lot of native humbug, and was annoyed that the man didn’t drop in for a drink. I asked around among the other plantations. Yes, they’d all seen the rider, and at about four o’clock the same afternoon--in places miles apart. Finally we searched the bush and found the bones of a man and a horse, around some smoky stones. The Koiaris had done him in, weeks before we saw him riding.”

Archie said thoughtfully, “Yes, and there was the woman dressed in white. I couldn’t sleep one night, and there she was in the garden, bending over picking flowers. I spoke to her, but she didn’t look up. She was the Englishwoman who married that chap from Cairns. She made a little English garden, but it never suited her. Always wanted to go home; you know how the English are. Her man thought Papua was good enough for her, until she died. Then he shot himself.”

“Do you ever see his ghost?” I asked.

“No. He’s too deep in hell, I fancy, to get out.”

They believed earnestly in the horseman who rode over the bluff. They believed that lights appeared in the deserted house from which another woman had run away with her baby.

We were riding along silently when our horses stopped, snorted and sat on their tails. At first I thought it was a fallen vine, then I saw it wiggle. I slid off and threw a handy stone at eight black feet of snake; which was a diplomatic blunder, for the thing made straight at me. Sefton broke its back with a whip. “Venomous?” I asked. I hate snakes. “Rather,” Sefton said, and poked the poison sacks.

We rode on. Ghosts were real, snakes only a nuisance in a country where anything could happen. Except mules. According to the planters there was just one mule in Papua; and his long ears waved over a fence at the Seventh Day Adventist Mission. Natives marveled and fed him votive yams; because he was a member of God’s house, locally presided over by a missionary they called “Smiling Charley.”

The first time his celebrated animal strayed away, Charley organized his black men to search for it. They hunted until they were tired out. Smiling Charley went on over the brow of the next hill, and there was the mule. Charley thought this was an opportunity to demonstrate the power of prayer, so he went back and said, “Boys, let’s pray for guidance.” They prayed, and in a few minutes overtook the mule. A week or two later it strayed again, much to the chagrin of the boys who had to do all the carrying when it wasn’t there. Smiling Charley tried to organize another search, but the boys were unwilling. He questioned them and they said, “More better you pray first time, Taubada.” So Charley had to pray, but it didn’t work so well, for it was a week before the mule came home.

Dusk was falling when we left Smiling Charley’s Seventh Day joyfulness. After shadows began blackening the hills, Archie McAlpin said, “We’re in the Koiari country now, and we’d better push along. On the slope there, you can see the graveyard.” Stones were like skulls among the scrub. “Those are planters that the jungle got the best of.” Everybody who’s been a week in Papua knows how the jungle defeats all but the strongest--malaria, accidents, bites and infections, all take their toll of the pioneering white.

A mountain chill blew from the pale stones. A tall horseman came toward us, and I tried to forget the mounted ghost. But Archie McAlpin sang out, “Hello, Sam!” The horseman stopped. Archie said, “Seems to me, Sam, that you’re not giving this graveyard a very wide berth.” “Me? Archie, I never see ghosts.”

“Then I suppose, Sam, you wouldn’t mind sleeping among the graves?”

“I may be crazy,” Sam said, “but I’m not a bloody fool. If I see any ghosts there’ll be one more horseman riding over the Bluff. He won’t be back, either.”

He galloped on. No, people don’t loiter on the Jawavere trail. I was still thinking of the lonely Englishwoman who couldn’t go home; her poor shadow was earth-bound to Papua.

How about the ghosts of indentured natives, confused spirits that can never find their way back to the villages they loved because they were born there? Here’s a scrap from my diary, written from a survey which I made a little later:--

On Saturday P.M. gave lecture to natives. Back of the boys’ houses found evidences of gross soil pollution ... natives must be educated to some idea of sanitation.... Seem well fed and contented, save for a lot from the Dutch border, some of whom have died for no apparent cause, other than homesickness....

## CHAPTER IV

THEY WALK ALONG DREAMS

On those first short trips our main effort was to count and report the diseased. I often had a deep sense of personal guilt when I left the villages just as I had found them, crying out for the healing I had no time to give. All I could do was lecture them, hand out the tins and gather them up for tests in the next place I stopped. Sometimes the containers were returned in fifteen minutes--such is the celerity of the savage gut. Faces would be wreathed in smiles. They had filled the magic boxes, just as I had ordered, had they not? To them that was all that was needed for the cure; fill the magic boxes, hand them over to the white medicine man who would say an incantation--and lo! sickness would vanish from the tribe.

This was a sort of Heathen Science point of view which would have been funny, had it not been so tragic. I got used to it, and left the people with a smile as cheery as their own. After all, the drug would be coming soon, and I had told the missionary or planter how to administer it.

When we had sufficient oil of chenopodium we did not waste an overnight stop in making diagnoses; in this district wherever there were villages the infection was obviously so heavy that we could call it 100 per cent. Therefore we lined them up and dosed every man, woman and child. With great gusto they swallowed down the nasty oil, in a spoonful of sugar, and smacked their lips. They laughed over the bitter purge that followed. More than once they lingered to steal the leavings of Epsom salts solution, on the principle that the more you take the sooner you get well. Only the children held back. I won’t forget the naked four-year-old who knew enough missionary English to yell, “Oh, Jesus, no!” when his elders dragged him forward.

Many of these first trips took us no farther from Port Moresby’s tinny orderliness than it would be from New York’s city hall to Trenton. Yet with every mile we found some curious or savage twist to the human animal’s makeup. There was always the white man, standing one against five hundred natives, in an urge to develop a resisting wilderness. Keep the tribes alive for another day’s work, that was the problem. My early expeditions were all zigzags. There was a plunge into the sawmill country along the Laloki River to inspect a mining company’s Kiwais, big jolly fellows like Virginia Negroes; I stayed there long enough to advise the operators on the use of their lumber for pit latrines. I won’t forget the cleanest native village I ever saw. The Company had surrounded it with a stockade fence and commanded the people to sweep the streets and throw their rubbish away. I had only one fault to find: the dark villagers polluted the trash-heaps they piled on the other side. These people should have been crawling with hookworms. Actually, the infection was extremely light. Another medical paradox....

I sometimes came upon pathological freaks. There was the paralytic at Kabadi plantation, who seemed to have lost muscular control of one side at a time; when he turned he grimaced horribly with the conscious effort. His walk was like pushing forward two sticks of wood. I wondered why they kept such a monster, then they told me. Oh, he was very useful. The Koiaris were so afraid of him they didn’t dare raid the place.

In the black belt of the South Pacific dreams are very real things. When you sleep your soul goes walking into living adventures. If you love a girl in sleep, then she is no longer a maiden when you meet her in the morning. A nightmare murder is no mere fancy; you have killed your enemy dead as dead. When you happen to meet him tomorrow sauntering down the glen, that is nothing. What you are seeing is merely a fancy. Your dream has killed the man you hate. And take care how you treat that frightful paralytic who leers at you in the hemp-fields. He may “walk along your dreams.”

Too many things I saw walked along my dreams. There was that pageant at Boera....

Boera was a dismal beach and supported a London Missionary Society station, presided over by two Samoans. Samoa was a far cry from that lost spit of sand. Alien to the soil, these imported teachers grow to be like many white missionaries, muddling along with Christ’s work. Their impulses are as fine as their results are vague in a dingy routine of bell-ringing, prayer-saying, Sunday school reading and more bell-ringing. This pair, Mosea and Emma, were meekly discouraged, but with the beautiful manners of the Polynesian aristocrat. Mosea was already heavy-legged with elephantiasis. His cousin Samueli dropped in to report with Christian cheerfulness that conditions were “very bad.”... Queer how they travel. Years later this same Samueli came to me on an Ellice Island beach far away from Papua, and made me a present of a fresh-killed chicken. When I asked him how conditions were, he said, “Very bad.”

At Boera I got my first real look at a yaws-stricken community. This hideous thing was apparent on the bodies and faces of at least a third of the people, men and women with noses reduced to yawning holes in the middle of a flat scar. Fingers and toes curled like withering twigs. Swarms of flies carried the filth-born germ. I looked into baby faces and saw how the process of healing had drawn their lips together into a featureless surface with an opening so small that you could hardly get a lead-pencil through.

Yes, these Papuan specters walk along your dreams. The tropics are dreamlands, released from the balance of Northern things. Life down there moves between poetic loveliness and monstrous disgust. I have since seen many other villages like Boera; and I should have become callous, seeing so much of it. I could get used to the maimed adults, but the children always wrung my heart.

It is quite understandable that the early voyagers should have confused yaws with syphilis. That such confusion still persists is reasonable. For all we know of yaws, it may be syphilis modified by Stone Age conditions. We call it _framboesia tropica_ (tropical raspberry). When you speak of yaws you must always speak of syphilis--the two are so alike, with wide differences.

Captain Cook, who first visited the Pacific in 1773, wisely wrote: “Another disease of more mischievous consequences, which is also very frequent, and appears on every part of the body, in large broad ulcers, discharging a thin, clear pus ... it being certainly known and even acknowledged by themselves that the natives are subject to this disease before they were visited by the English, it cannot be the result of venereal contagion, notwithstanding the similarity of the symptoms....”

Here at least is illness you can’t blame on the whites.

The enlightened traders and missionaries who followed Cook sketchily jotted down “syphilis.” All my work in Papua and my following years of careful research over the whole Pacific failed to find one case of syphilis, although I have run across one or two rather doubtful diagnoses. I have never found the tell-tale chancre scar, which is the sure mark. The manifestations of the two diseases run so parallel that carelessness or ignorance have put a libel on the native races.[1]

Yaws is not a venereal disease, nor is it hereditary. It is usually acquired in early childhood. Native mothers expose their babies to it in hopes of “getting it out of their systems,” much as some Yankee mothers do when measles come around.

Now here’s the confusing resemblance. The yaws germ _Treponema pertenue_ is so closely related to the syphilis germ _Treponema pallidum_ that the two are hard to tell apart. Both diseases progress in three of four stages. The “mother yaw” first appears on any part of the body, and its secondary manifestation is a great number of “daughter yaws” which are widely distributed over the skin and progress into the third stage, which is remarkably syphilitic in appearance. Arterial changes and nerve lesions (as in syphilis) sometimes cause the general paralysis of the insane.

Missionaries have an easy way of accounting for yaws: it’s a curse inherited from cannibal ancestors. Certainly it is ugly enough to have come to the world through that black door.

And here’s another parallel. The treatment for yaws is exactly the same as the treatment for syphilis--arsenical injections. Framboesia was quite beyond the reach of medicine until Professor Ehrlich produced his salvarsan. There is nothing more dramatic in medicine than the almost visible growth of healthy tissue over a yaws sore after an arsenical injection.

The Pacific is the one place in the world where yaws is in no way complicated by syphilis. I am told that in Tahiti the two diseases thrive, but the same person never has both. On the Islands there seems to be a cross-immunity, so that the two germs cannot prosper in the same host. Certainly the native has been abundantly exposed to syphilis; East Indian labor, when it came to Fiji, brought with it 75 per cent infection. The Chinese and the white sailors fetched their share and did their amatory best to spread it, but nothing happened. Something had made the native immune, and that something is quite apparent.

The stamping out of yaws is largely a matter of intensive campaigning. But what will happen when the fight is won? Will syphilis slip in to take the place of the spirochete it could never meet--on equal terms? That is another doctor’s dilemma.

* * * * *

The morning after we heard the planters’ ghost stories I sent Kendrick to ride ahead for preliminary inspection of the rubber plantations. On a rough sea or a jungle trail, Chris was at home. I made short surveys along the trail, resting my raw posterior when I could. Then horseback again, clenching my teeth at every bump on the saddle-sores. Imagine a Coney Island roller coaster magnified a hundred times, and you have our slide and scramble, up and down, down and up, to attain an elevation of 3,000 feet. Down, down would go the coaster on a grade so steep that a fly, if he tried it, would fall over on his nose; and I marveled again at the adhesive footing of my horse. On the final upgrade I spared my buttocks and skinned my heels, for even the horse surrendered.

Now the rubber trees were all around, above and below me, their coarse, hard leaves like green glass that blinded the eyes in afternoon sun. Underneath was a grotto of soft light, upheld by pale trunks like pillars of snakeskin. Naked men worked in silent preoccupation, sharp knives making incisions in the bark; neatly they would rip down paper-thin slices, and the tree’s milk-white blood would trickle into cups. Watching, I was thinking: they are natural surgeons. Down the ages they have learned so much, dissecting human flesh with the razor-edges of split bamboo. Train men like these to use the knife to save instead of kill, and what couldn’t they accomplish for their people?...

The man nearest to me turned. His wooly hair, his sloping brow, his long, hooked nose told me that he was a Goaribari. I looked at his companions. All Goaribaris, with that undeniably Hebrew profile which gave them the name “the Lost Tribes of Israel.” But these were different from the scrawny cannibals I had seen on the hemp plantation. They were fatter, better-muscled, and their brown skins were beginning to show silk. They were not newcomers, and the planters had taken care of them. Back home, where they pursued the jolly business of going to war and dining on the enemy, they hadn’t eaten very regularly. On the farms the white man had fed them, and done his best to teach them sanitary ways; an uphill job among primitives who were naïve as cattle in their bodily functions. In subsequent surveys all over the Territory I could tell, almost at a sweep of the eye, the men who had been on plantations. They were the upstanding, healthy specimens.

Rubber plantations have a smell of their own, something like the aroma of fried overshoes. It drifts from the factory where the sap is being smoked and reduced to the wide, dirty-gray ribbons that go forward to market. Here my cannibals worked like hiving bees, swarming in and out of the door on the commonplace business of supplying crude material for the raincoat trade. I looked around and saw Chris Kendrick, smiling and self-assured, pushing his way through the throng.

“You missed something yesterday afternoon,” Kendrick said. “The Koiaris came down and staged a raid on the Goaribaris. A lot of workmen were loafing in a field, then a naked devil was in the midst of them, poking away with a long spear in either hand. There was just one of him, mind you, and there must have been twenty Goaribaris. They may be tough bastards in their home towns, but here they were taking it like frozen lambs--till somebody ran in with a shovel and a hoe handle. Next you knew the Koiari was making for the woods, naked and howling, shaking his long spears.

“But the Goaribaris caught him and--what do you think?--turned him over to the management! What the hell did he care? He’d got his man.” Like so many of the fiercer tribes, Koiaris kill because murder is a proof of manhood, and a warrior who has not bloodied his spear is laughed at, even by the women.

“I got a snapshot of the fellow he left behind,” Kendrick said, and showed me the print he had developed. A broken body lay in the scrub. The plantation manager came up just then and grinned, “We buried him deep. His brother Goaribaris might take a notion to eat him, you know. Of course, they’re pretty well fed, but.... Yo-hum, farming’s so full of little problems like that!”

* * * * *

Yes, farming in Papua, even at its best, offered many problems never dreamed of in the philosophy of a Secretary of Agriculture. The old hands were far from hookworm-free, although vastly improved in general health. New recruits were coming in with fresh loads of parasites to be hatched from the filth they scattered in spite of managerial watchfulness. Green laborers regarded the well-built privies as queer traps set by the white man for their undoing ... pretty, but look out!

That night I lectured by the light of hurricane lanterns swung from the beams of a great, empty warehouse. The audience sat cross-legged in a wide crescent, their oily faces gleaming up at us. The front row was solid Goaribari with natives of gentler tribes behind. These, being more nearly civilized, understood Motu, which was so much Greek to the Delta savages. Therefore it had been up to Ahuia to fetch the local constable, a very ugly man in a G-string and a policeman’s cap.

Such occasions were Ahuia’s hour to shine. Out on the trail he went stripped to the waist, but at lectures the gaudy yellow =H= on his bright blue jumper stretched with every expansion of his chest. And he hadn’t forgotten to put lilies in his hair. He had set the stage with our regulation International Health Board chart, loosely bound pages with simple illustrations of the hookworm’s course to the intestines; there were drawings, greatly enlarged, of the male and female parasite and the egg their mutual love produced. There were big photographs of a sick boy and a well boy--something like the patent-medicine man’s “Before and After Treatment.”

Ahuia quelled the Goaribaris with his pirate’s scowl, and in impressive silence brought out our prize number, a large bottle of adult hookworms, pickled in alcohol. This was a stage property which we carried for purposes of demonstration. Cannibal eyes popped as the collection was passed from hand to hand.

Ahuia was getting his lesson by heart, but I still felt it safer to prompt him. “Tell them first,” I said, “that they must look carefully at what is in the bottle.” He spoke Motu, straight into the mouth of the interpreter: “_Tatau bona, memero, umui iboumuiai inai gaigai ba itaia_....” The native constable was saying it after him, in the queer lingo of the Goaribaris: “Men and boys, all of you look at these little snakes.”

Education strained through three languages. The row of man-eaters sat very still; their long noses, pointed up, were like the muzzles of wistful hounds. Ahuia was telling them how the lady snake laid very bad eggs that fell out of the black boy and the black “mary”; how the eggs hatched tiny baby snakes that nipped the black boy’s foot and crawled back into his belly. Now see the picture of the sick boy and the well boy--they are both the same boy. The well boy took the medicine the _taubada_ brings, and the snakes came out of his belly. Now he will keep well, because he is a wise boy. He goes to the clean privy the white man built him, so that the snake cannot come out and crawl into him again.

Patiently drumming simple words into woolly heads, we tried to make simple men understand cause, cure and prevention of a disease they might have brought from Africa, ages ago; a disease so wasting that the mills, rivers, the plantations were calling upon half-invalids to furnish brawn for Europe’s driving ambition.

Sometimes in my early lectures as I looked over the stooped dark figures I would have moments of weakening. I would wonder if it was worth while to save these curious beings, so out of touch with anything our Northern civilization knew.

As time went on, I came to realize how very much worth while it was.

* * * * *

The lecture was over and I started alone across an open swathe of dim moonlight that pointed toward the plantation house. I was anxious to get to headquarters where I could write up my notebook and tumble into bed. On both sides of me rubber trees made high black walls, like something built of coal. My conscious mind was concerned only with the day’s work and tomorrow’s; somewhere in the back of my dreams I may have sensed the danger of another such Koiari spear as had butchered a man yesterday.

I looked up and saw the outline of three men, emerging out of the shadows. Even to my defective eyes they made a grotesque group, all locked together in a shambling stride. There was nothing for me but trust in the white man’s prestige. I was unarmed. If I had shouted for help it would have been a sign of fear, and these fellows, I knew, worked in a hurry. When they came closer I saw that they carried no weapons.

Two of them, who had been holding to the third, began jabbering in Goaribari, making friendly sounds. Was this a trap? Fortunately Ahuia and the native constable came swinging up with hurricane lanterns--even in moonlight they carried lanterns to scare away ghosts. Ahuia pointed to the man in the middle. “That fellow broke his hand in a fight. There were not enough women to go around.”

All right, let’s have a look at it. We led the foiled lover to my quarters where I examined the wrist and found a bad Colles’s fracture. In dim lantern-light I did a careful job of bonesetting, even though the fellow had just scared the living lights out of me. If he had shown up in the dispensary at Rochester with the pick of the faculty looking on, he couldn’t have had more meticulous surgical attention. I even took time to give him Doctor Moore’s famous dressing, which is fussy, but perfect.

“All right, boy,” I said, “run along.” He stood there patiently, holding out his unwounded hand. What the devil was he waiting for? “Does he want to thank me?” I asked Ahuia.

“No, master.” Ahuia looked fiercely sad. “He is waiting for you to pay him. That fashion belong this fellow.”

“What fashion?” My short temper was getting shorter. “What should I pay him for?”

“For mending his sick hand, Taubada.”

I growled and Ahuia shoved him out into the night. When I was around Ahuia feared neither ghosts nor Goaribaris. The incident seemed to be closed, but I was aware that the cubicle next to Kendrick’s, where I slept, was quite doorless and exposed to pale moonlight.

Next morning I was aroused by softly arguing Motu voices. Ahuia and Quai, who was with Kendrick, had missed something from our bags. Quite likely. For there was a gentleman’s agreement among Motuan servants: Never steal from your master--oh, that was very tabu. But you could take a little something from your master’s host, or from some stranger _taubada_, sleeping near you, if he happened to leave his bags open. It was honorable to snitch a handkerchief or a pair of new shorts and drop the small loot into your bag. When two white men were bunking adjacently, their boys working with the bags would watch each other as cat watches mouse. It was all right for the good servant to get away with a few of the stranger’s cigarettes, for personal smoking.

There were other guests on the plantation, and I was wondering whose boy had gotten by Ahuia’s watchfulness when a sleepy glance through the sunlit window awoke me to a real annoyance. There sat the Goaribari with the bandaged hand, serenely chewing betel-nut. “For the love of God, Ahuia, what does he want now?”

Ahuia’s funny English informed me, “Taubada, he still wishes to be paid. He has slept all night on the porch.”

I jumped out of bed, dragging the mosquito netting with me. Like a fishwife in a bridal veil I exhausted all the arts of profanity. With an amiable smile on his betel-red mouth the cannibal listened--and held out his good hand. Then I checked myself in mid-oath and laughed as I have never laughed before. This was socialized medicine with a reverse English.

“Ahuia,” I shouted, “give this cheeky bastard two sticks of trade tobacco.”

Quite unemotionally the savage accepted his fee and departed.

I was still laughing when the planter came in, and he grinned. “It’s the fashion--that’s all a bush fellow will say. They’re pretty much confused about money values. To them a white man’s a sort of cross between Simon Legree and Santa Claus; when he comes around it’s either to send ’em to jail or pay ’em off.”

I grumbled: “Next thing they’ll expect me to pass around free tobacco before every hookworm lecture.”

“Certainly they will,” he said. Then he rang the changes the planters had rung all along the line. “Anything can happen in Papua.”

## CHAPTER V

JUST THIS SIDE OF THE MOON

In July I decided to lead my own expedition as far into the interior as possible and get a proper picture of infestation in districts remote from the influence of white traders and planters. I had worked like a beaver along the coast, up rivers, into plantations, sea villages, hill villages. My inspectors were always away, leading surveys and campaigns that spread out fanwise across the country. Communications were crude. Canoes, whaleboats and jiggery launches plied their precarious way among the infinite shoals, or lost themselves under lush palisades where an all-wise Creator saw fit to turn on the shower at the slightest excuse.

I moved ahead of my inspectors, surveyed the districts, turned them over to my men and passed on to the next. Although the Government was inclined to look on me as a secret agent of John D. Rockefeller, they offered me a sort of mild indulgence. Our main handicap was supplies, as the Foundation’s Dr. Sawyer, then my over-director, could not believe that such great quantities of drugs were necessary to treat infected Papua. Where was all the stuff going? In Australia, where treatments had been comparatively few, expenditures had been small. Sawyer simply couldn’t grasp the immenseness of that sick population in the Territory. Yet to treat them _en masse_ would have been the only answer. At that time mass treatments had been tried among laborers in Java; but a wholesale curative campaign was unheard of.

Our work had been so heavy that we had exhausted Central Office supplies. Even in the following year there weren’t enough to go around. We had to carry on with what we had.

* * * * *

On July 21 I was more than glad to be setting out for Yule Island, a splotch of land some sixty miles from Port Moresby. This island is separated by a thin gut of water from the prodigious jungle-covered mountains that stalk beyond Mafulu to the mysterious border some still call “German New Guinea.” Again we were jogging along on the little _Morinda_, with Captain Teddy Hillman and his Gin Club in command. With me I had the two boys, Ahuia and Quai. We took with us a quantity of “gear,” which was our term for the variety of things we must carry with us into the field.

A white man, bent on an excursion straight into the thick of Papua, requires several swag bags--one for his bed, mattress and mosquito netting; another for scientific equipment; a smaller bag to hold incidentals. The number of tucker boxes for food depends on the time one spends in the field. There will be no chance to replace anything after the start is made. These must be included: frying pan, teapot, billy-cans, a tin opener, a lantern with kerosene, an ax and an assortment of tinned food. Absorbing topics around a Papuan campfire are the relative merits of different brands of tinned meats, and cunning ways to disguise the taste of tin.

The tins for hookworm specimens, packed by hundreds, were little half-ounce cylinders about the diameter of a silver dollar. The gear made a load for many carriers, burdened too with their own food for the whole trip. And don’t forget the trade tobacco that must be doled out everywhere as strike insurance. We were prepared for almost anything; the going up to Mafulu would be hard.

Getting carriers for these long pulls was always a part of Papua’s labor problem. Ask a Motu boy to pack and follow you into the jungle and he’d begin to shuffle, roll his big eyes and move away. There was _puri-puri_, bad magic, in those hills out there. It was not “our fashion” to go among the Mondo or the Kuni people. They have enchantments, you die under a spell. The same fear lay across every district border; we had to change our carriers as we went along.

* * * * *

Yule Island, flat and green as a dish of parsley, lay separated by a thread of salt water from the distant panorama of tumbled mountains that climbed the wilds of Papua. It was an exotic and frightening beauty over there, peak after peak, their height exaggerated by closeness to shore. The tallest looked taller than Mt. Everest, and more unattainable.

Three white men waited for me on flat Yule Island beach. I recognized two of my inspectors, the Orr brothers, Jack and Ron. Their food supply had been spoiled by surprise tumbles from canoes. They greeted me with unrestrained shouts of joy; they would eat again! The third greeter was Mr. Connelly, the jolly, hard-boiled District Officer. When I mentioned the giant mountains across the stream he said casually:--

“They’re a bit of a climb. When you’ve finished with Yule Island I’ll show you up, part of the way. Business and pleasure. I’ll have to push beyond Mafulu--after a batch of murderers, you know. Come over to the house and we’ll have a spot of tea or something.”

I was no sooner in Mr. Connelly’s house than I heard a strain of sweet, familiar music. An American accent! It was young Mrs. Connelly saying, “Pleased to meet you.” She was a native of New Jersey. How she came here to be the wife of a man who scaled crags to round up murderers was just another in the grab-bag we call marriage. My own wife, after all, was born in Mexico, educated in California--and was now waiting for me in a Port Moresby bungalow.

Connelly knew the ropes, as needs must be when one man combines the duties of sheriff, judge advocate, postmaster, tax collector and justice of the peace in a country where the people are hard to count as wild pigs. After an evening of bridge he told me, casually, that he’d fix me up with the forty-seven carriers I needed. How? Just leave it to him. “I’m Government, you know”--with a dry smile.

During our week’s survey of Yule Island the Orr brothers and I were lodged in the patrol officer’s house, walls and floors of split bamboo, ceiling of nipa palm thatch. The shower bath was two Standard Oil cans (“petrol tins” over there) hung one below the other. Can Number 1 is filled with fresh water, and when you pull a string a plug comes out and empties it into Can Number 2, which has been drilled full of nail-holes to give a fountain effect. The first time you use this Rube Goldberg invention you soap yourself carefully under the spray--and the water gives out. The next time you try soaping yourself in your own sweat, which can’t be done. The third try you just say “Oh, hell,” and pull the string.

* * * * *

The Mission of the Sacred Heart has a business name which I have remembered accurately: Company of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Ltd. Its holdings ran all the way from Yule Island to a point some 130 miles distant across the channel, up into the wild mountain-heart of Papua, and its practical label was a key to its practical Christianity. The Sacred Heart was, and still is, about the best mission establishment in the Pacific, and should serve as a model for the numerous jarring sects and creeds--Church of England, Calvinist, Wesleyan, Seventh Day Adventist, London Missionary Society and even Mormon--that confused the native mind with conflicting roads to salvation.

I grew to admire these curiously devoted Fathers, thirty-one in all, who usually put aside their priestly robes for the frontiersman’s rough khaki. Fierce beards relieved them entirely of the soft ecclesiastical look. In little convents, strewn along the broken trails up to Mafulu and beyond, there were twenty-six nuns living the same rigorous life.

There was almost every European nationality in this French order: French, German, Swiss, Dutch, one Italian, one Spaniard. They were understaffed, hideously overworked; in faces around the luncheon table I could see the look of men who were not going to last much longer. They were short-lived because they followed their incessant work without considering illness or the demands of a difficult climate. They all died in Papua. With them I visited two cases of typhoid which they said had been brought in from Port Moresby, despite their efforts to quarantine against the germ. I operated on one Father for a bad case of hydrocele, and on others for injuries and infections common to their hard life.

They had solved the food problem troubling the rest of Papua, which was stuffed with American and Australian canned goods. Here they had their own truck gardens, bountifully yielding, so that they could feed their 120 pupils wholesomely and at minimum cost. There were nearly a hundred half-castes in this school. The Sacred Heart method of dealing with mixed blood was practical.

The half-caste too often comes into the world with no father willing to attend the baptism. Bishop Boismenu, a fighting priest, carried this question to the Government; his persistence was responsible for a law requiring the registration of every half-caste child’s white parent. And, my word, what a hullabaloo! Major Jones-Smith and Judge Brown-White had to do some tall explaining when sons or daughters suddenly materialized at the Mission of the Sacred Heart. One high Government official had a hard time facing his wife and his public; one rich American decided that he had loitered too long and had pressing engagements back in the States.

The half-caste problem is increasing in Papua. When the Melanesian was 100 per cent cannibal his women were chaste; the husband carried an ironwood club, and the tribe was never lax in enforcing blue laws. Poaching lovers were firmly lashed together with vines and laid across the liveliest ant-heap in the neighborhood. Or experienced tormentors would hobble the wandering bride permanently; they would just tie a hot stone under one of her knees. Nevada in the early days was almost as rough with domestic incontinence (if female). And look at Nevada today.

It was a strict mission rule that half-caste children should speak no language but English. Britishers they were; the law had acknowledged them. When they came of age the girls and boys were encouraged to marry each other, or to go into orders. They were to have a respectable place in society, and no handicaps.

I take off my old white helmet to the men and women of the Sacred Heart. There was Sister Magdalena, aged seventy-six. I found her sweet old face bent over a busily clicking typewriter. She had been stone blind for two years. “It was hard at first,” she said, “learning the touch system. But it’s like playing a musical instrument. I write poetry when I have time, and letters home. I’m useful too. One of the girls dictates to me, and I keep accounts for the mission.”

And there was Brother Heinrich, the jolly undertaker. Sallow and malarial, he had the smile of the artist who loves his work and has plenty of orders. Papuan fevers never bothered him so long as he had coffins to build. Bang, bang went his lusty hammer, doing a neat hardwood job. “Don’t forget a solid lid,” I said, coming up to him. Brother Heinrich chuckled and said, “I try not to forget anything. For instance, Doctor, you’ll need lots of brass nails on those shoes, if you’re going up to Mafulu. Won’t you send that pair to me before you go? I’m a cobbler too.”

Mother Ligouri, who presided over the neat little hospital, was another jolly one, round and rosy in spite of hell and high water. Her housekeeping was immaculate; she isolated typhoid cases, and was always in comic despair over sanitary arrangements, primitive latrines, flies and mosquitoes that infected her patients. Brother Heinrich was one of her favorite pests. “I have to shoo him away,” she said. “When anybody’s sick he gets the measurements somehow. I never knew him to fail to have a coffin ready, and a perfect fit. That man Heinrich!”

The day before we set out for the mountains I let Brother Heinrich have my shoes, and asked him if he had me on his list of measurements. “Oh, I can tell your size from your shoes,” he said with a glow of professional pride. That night he presented me with a remarkably fine job of hobnailing.

During the week I had talked to the half-castes, and it gave me pleasure to lecture in English. Already I was looking forward to my surveys in New Guinea Territory, where, I was told, the people understood pidgin English. I carelessly believed that pidgin would be easy to pick up. I little knew.

All I saw of that enterprise on Yule Island, and of its far-flung stations among the peaks and gorges of Mafulu, never failed to remind me of what Herman Melville, who didn’t like missionaries as a class, had said of the South Sea Catholics a hundred years ago. They were to him the great missioners. And they are the great missioners still, as long as they live in the purity of self-sacrifice.

* * * * *

Ahuia came to me with the air of a certified cruise conductor; he was wearing his full-dress jumper with the =H=, and had lilies in his hair. Would the Taubada care to see the natives dance tonight? I wanted to know if it would be any good. Ahuia puffed his chest and shrugged away the commonness of all bush natives. Oh, pretty fair, he admitted, but the girls around here didn’t do a lot of things they did in the East. We passed between aristocratic trunks of betel-nut palms. With each step the drum-pulse was louder, that jungle beat which can stir the same animal-soul that bares its sensuality before the repetitious chant of a camp-meeting revivalist. A slow cadence, _tum_ teetee, _tum_ teetee, _tum_ teetee _tum_, speeding up to a rapid _tum_ tee-_tum_ tee-_tum_ tee-_tum_. Light shone above oily shoulders, things moved and tossed like shaggy pillows that had been dyed with every color in the rainbow. Musicians were slapping hour-glass drums.

Then with a gasp I realized what those moving pillow-things were. Headdresses.... Headdresses made of bird of paradise plumes, hundreds of the lovely things flowing and flaming in every bushy ball of hair. Parrot feathers--blue, fire-green and crimson--accentuated the unearthly hues; and cassowary feathers, built up into high crowns like glittering sheaves of wheat....

Men and women danced in two close lines, facing one another. Mouths were red with betel-nut, eyes were fixed, intoxicated. Golden skin flashed through stripes of gaudy paint adorning their hips; golden breasts bubbled through showers of bright shells. Yet this was no blatant exhibition. Each man faced his woman, and if he touched her it was according to the rote and rule of tradition; their passions are never on public show. Bright skins and delicate bodies revealed the Polynesian strain which gives the Motuan his urge to laugh and sin with every change of the moon. Melanesian women drudge at home and let their men wear all the feathers. But the Polynesian wife is nobody’s squaw.

Slim-waisted, straight, demi-nude, more handsome than grotesque in their paint, each man had his girl opposite him. Her arms and ankles were bangled with polychrome shells that tinkled with every suggestive movement. It was sensuality expressed in grace and rhythm. Under the least of grass skirts women’s buttocks wove with sly languor as couples moved in a curious shuffling gait--her hips quivering in retreat, his in attack: the sex struggle, the male forever in pursuit, the female always in flight, yet drawing him on by every allurement within her power.

A voice said, “It’s what Yankees call a Marathon dance. The people of Tsiria are competing with the people of Pinapuka. It’ll last until they drop--into each other’s arms, a lot of ’em.” I looked around to see Ron Orr, my inspector, who had been beating along the coast. “Watch that couple,” he said. A man and girl vanished under the shadowy palms. “They’ll be back after a while, maybe. During the Marathons here it’s the fashion for a man to take the one he picks. But only during this set period. If they forget and break the rule it’s just too bad. Sometimes a married man loses his head and takes his ‘mary’ away for a week end that lasts a month. Then there’s more trouble for the District Officer.”

“What sort of trouble?”

“Well, Connelly’s going up in the hills tomorrow after a bunch of murderers,” Ron said. “That’s the sort of trouble.”

There were no priests hovering about to give the pagan spectacle a disapproving eye. Protestant missionaries, Wesleyans or Church of England, might have broken up the performance, clothed the ladies in Mother Hubbards and sent them home to brood in sanctity--and secrete their vices. The people of Tsiria, possibly, were not among the Sacred Heart’s 8,000 converts; and if not, the Church of Rome, with its balanced system of discipline and tolerance, would bide its time before gathering them in. The people would still dance, maybe with a churchly curb on their orgiac moments--but they would still dance.

Night wore on, drums grew wilder. Everybody was chewing the betel-nut that natives can go drunk on. My good boy Ahuia was chewing, and his eyes were like live coals as he slavered red and gazed hungrily at the dancers. I smacked him on the arm and brought him to his senses. We were starting for the mountains tomorrow, and I didn’t want Ahuia to go native on me.

* * * * *

Next afternoon, as a floundering whaleboat took us across the narrow channel toward the looming mainland, I had a comfortable feeling that Brother Heinrich had secretly measured me for a coffin which he’d have to use on somebody else of my size and weight. I might as well say here and now that I have been the undertaker’s disappointment in twenty-one years of knocking about down there. I’m afraid that I offer pretty poor material for Hollywood.

Connelly and I, perched in our whaleboat, were off on a murder hunt; his quarry would be the human type of killer, mine the assassin-worm that yearly laid low more natives than cannibal wars could demolish in a generation. The looming mainland melted to a lace of Papuan bayous; we went on nosing up Ethel River, searching for Bioto Creek, a needle in a haystack of house-high tropical grass. Bloodthirsty mosquitoes welcomed us; we could find the miserable town of Bioto, if we could see it through that buzzing cloud.

Connelly had elaborated on a number of gruesome things which the Fathers had told me. Somewhere along this coast was the Pacific’s only native educational institution, a School of Poisoners, in the remarkably stinking village of Mou. _Puri-puri_ men graduated with honors and knew about arsenic and strychnine to the last dying gasp. They were accomplished in “dead-man’s-poison,” which was a spearhead dipped into a rotting corpse; they made toxic applications by sticking spears through a floor to pierce the sleeper on his mat. If the natives built their houses on stilts to keep out evil spirits, the _puri-puri_ men would crawl under and prong them from below; if they built on the ground, the first malevolent ghost that came along would walk in and do his dirtiest. They were between the devil and the deep blue spear.

Postgraduates of the Mou school had a specialty which required much study, and they prided themselves on it accordingly. It was the snake-in-bamboo trick, worked like this: First get on the confidential side of a certain venomous yellow-striped wriggler, and train him to lie inside a hollow bamboo wand; then look around for a client who wants somebody killed. When the time comes, drop your poison pet into an uncomfortably heated earthen jar; work him up to a frenzy; throw in scraps of clothes or bodily material from the chosen victim. The striking, tormented snake confuses these things with the cause of his pain; so he is ready, he has the scent. Pop him back in the bamboo and turn him loose in the accustomed path of the man who is about to die. The snake, like the elephant, never forgets, according to Connelly and Father Gerbout. By scent he can pick his man from a long file on the trail.

As we fought our way through the mosquitoes defending Bioto Creek the District Officer gestured toward the mountains. The Kuni people were up there--bloody little dwarfs, rather cook a man than fry an egg. The Government holds ’em down a bit, Connelly said, and the priests have tamed a few. But never trust a Kuni behind your back.

Bioto, when we found it, was a tumbledown huddle of huts. At first we couldn’t see a living thing but mosquitoes, then crocodiles, wallowing in the stream or basking on the mudbanks. All the way up the Ethel River we had counted them by half-dozens, too bold and too lazy to roll off the sandspits when we came within thirty feet. Bioto was almost a deserted village because of the mosquitoes. D’Albertis, an early Italian explorer, was the first white man to sleep here; after one night he told his father confessor that he wasn’t afraid to go to hell.

At last a few scrawny natives, naked except for a coating of mud, came ambling in. Their chief made a melancholy speech, but the message was cheery enough. We shouldn’t worry, we’d have our forty-seven carriers in the morning. He repeated this sententiously, as though announcing bad news. The energetic anopheles pecked their way through the netting when we crawled under for protection. Even Ahuia as he cooked our supper looked reduced and crestfallen. He vented his spite by throwing a billycan at a baby crocodile under our house.

Morning blossomed hot and bright; the chief was back with a motley collection of nudes. I saw Connelly marching up and down and telling the interpreter dirty words to say to the chief. “Call him a pig’s tit--no, better go easy on that--but ask him if he can’t count. I said forty-seven and he’s only brought twenty-three. Where’s the rest of ’em?” There was some mysterious form of native strike. Connelly ordered his police to beat the grass for the absentees. When we got up to Kubuna Mission Station, he said, he’d hold court and sentence those bloody runaways to work for me. And at Kubuna that was what he did. The thirteen or so he sentenced might or might not have been the deserters, but they were with me for the balance of that strange month.

We left the bulk of our gear with the corporal’s policeman and went on through reed-grass so tall that it arched over our heads. It was suffocating between those swishing walls, but we were well quit of Bioto. I don’t know whether Ahuia or I was gladder to get away. The priests of Yule had filled me with crocodile stories. The beasts were bolder at nightfall, they said, and they had a bad habit of putting their front paws over the sides of a canoe and grabbing the first native who fell into the water. Once a fifteen-footer, basking in the sun, had challenged Brother George, who was riding a bicycle. Brother George turned his wheel just in time, and for a long span felt the monster’s breath puffing behind. Saint George and the dragon in modern clothes, only this time the dragon had the saint on the run.

Two hours in sweltering grass, then because it was Papua we had to climb 800 feet of ridge and climb down again before we could reach the knoll which was Father Rossier’s mission, all scattered wooden houses around the chapel’s simple cross. Father Rossier, kind, bearded and khaki clad, showed us a little stream down the glen which they had dammed to make a swimming pool. Connelly, Ron Orr and I undressed, cackling that the last one in was a nigger. Then plop! Ron Orr dove into crystal water--and was out again in record time, swearing under his breath. Some bloody fool had left a log in there. Just look at the way it had skinned his wrist. Yes, the wrist was certainly skinned....

Slowly, languidly, a crocodile rose and appraised us with cold green eyes. We decided to go to dinner a little dirty.

Around the mission table with its bare boards and coarse crockery we were gratefully aware of being among Frenchmen; they could have broiled the crocodile out of their pool and given it the flavor of filet mignon. In the kitchen were two Sisters who worked Parisian marvels with taro and yams and a surprisingly good native asparagus. No canned goods here, everything fresh, and that included heart of palm salad pepped up with lime juice. There was some sort of idealized pork, two kinds of birds, a rich, sound claret, and black coffee far too good to come out of a French kitchen. The mission grew its own coffee, and the berries were ground hot from the oven every morning. Incidentally, chicory doesn’t thrive in Papua.

Sipping my share of Australian wine--and it can be good--I was thinking irreverently, “The Fathers manage to do themselves pretty well up here,” when I noticed that Father Rossier had watered his glass to a thin, pale ghost of what every Frenchman must have with his meals or starve. They drank sparingly because wine cost money. They ate well--it cost only labor to raise good crops. On their penny-saving system they smoked trade tobacco, and had learned to love its rank kick. They refused our cigarettes politely.

Father Rossier gathered in the people, and to a scanty audience I gave a lantern-light lecture which Ahuia interpreted to an interpreter. When I lectured the priests on their own infections and commented on the sparsity of the population Father Rossier told me that they were slowly increasing. “And that’s because we have discouraged cannibalism, infanticide and abortions.”

I had heard many stories of some magic weed which the native women used to promote race suicide. I suppose now I wore a cynical smile. “Oh, but it’s so,” he said solemnly. “I have seen it happen too often.” He showed me curled dry leaves powdered in his hand. “Fortunately European women don’t know about this.”

I asked him if he knew the relation between yaws and syphilis. These closely related diseases affect the procreative functions so that abortions are apt to occur. Now these dry leaves that the witch doctors supply might or might not have a mild action. Certainly they could not effect an abortion on a normally healthy woman, because modern medicine has never found a non-poisonous drug that can. I was making up my theory as I went along, but my later observations proved that it was sound.

Next morning, the carriers Connelly had sentenced to serve me took on their loads as Ahuia was going through the last motions of packing my bags. “Look, Taubada!” He held up my extra pair of shoes. One of the priests had spent the night hobnailing the soles.

* * * * *

You read of tropic beauty and smile at the flourishes with which a writer attempts to put ecstasy on cold white paper. There are no words in our dictionary too fantastic or farfetched to describe that man-killing climb to the valley of Popo Popo. Milton would have funked it in his blind visions of Paradise, and De Quincey would have given it up for lack of words and opium.

The region takes its name from some jungle-hidden bird that cries “Popo-popo-popo-popo,” a bell-like sound that gives a thrill of music. Paradise as we saw it on those days of puffing and scrambling was always joy to the mind and pain to the body. Thousands of feet up, thousands down, with hardly room for a tiny house on any of the razor-sharp ridges. Down in a Valley of Eden the “Popo-popo-popo-popo” sounded, ringing a welcome to the mission’s resthouse somewhere in the sky.

Up through the giant mass of lawyer-vine with knotted trunks thick and hard as a walking stick and supple as a morning-glory; from their stems exotic orchids hung so richly that blossoms whipped your face as you struggled through greenish twilight. Tree ferns were fine as cobwebs. The trail was like a slippery stairway running through a tunnel of opalescent gauze. Rain sifted over clothes that were bogged in perspiration. Then a small clearing. An awful shriek--What was that? The air was all trailing plumes and angel wings, flying colors that you can’t believe, even when you see them. Birds of paradise, dozens and dozens of them, whirling away to the mysterious nests which no hunter-ornithologist has ever found.

With every hundred feet of climb we seemed to see a new variety, plumed with white and rose and gold. Much higher were the rare blue ones, which they say are worth twenty-five pounds--if a hunter dares shoot protected game. With every flight there was that fierce, dissonant “Caw-caw-caw.” My eyes were tired of miracles; I was aware of the oozing blisters on my heels, the miserable wetness of my shirt. “Oh, go along!” I scolded. “You’re nothing but a lot of painted crows.” We appreciate beauty best from a padded chair.

One afternoon, dead to the world, we flopped down in the resthouse 2,400 feet in air. These resthouses are among the mercies which the priests have scattered for their own long tours and for the comfort of travelers. Little bamboo huts are closed with combination locks; the Fathers give you the combination before you start on a trip. Houses are provided with chairs and beds, and set at distances that measure off a strong man’s endurance for the day. No Alpine traveler, coming upon a hospice of St. Bernard, could have been more gratified than we, sitting in real chairs while we opened blisters in our heels and covered them with adhesive plaster. Tea revived us, and we squatted around the door.

We were over the clouds. Far above them was the crazy pattern of zigzag points and ridges. Everything was angled into steeps without even a hand’s breadth of level ground. Waterfalls cascaded through the glossy jade and emerald. People go crazy in Papua. Why not? All that journey, we had struggled past cliffs honeycombed with caves that were stuffed with orchids and draped with crimson begonias; birds of paradise flew, arabesques through slanting sun. Now that I am an older man, retired and with time to think it over, I wonder if I really saw it. This was not the land of human beings. When I was a small boy my mother used to scare me, singing:--

Up the airy mountain, Down the rushy glen, We daren’t go a-hunting For fear of little men.

We didn’t meet the little men until the day we scaled a higher ridge toward Dilava. Dark figures were stealing toward us across a breakneck stretch of open ground. “They’re Kunis,” Connelly said. This might have caused a shudder, but these tiny people--the tallest was no more than midget-size--were unarmed and mostly women. They carried loads on their backs, suspended by straps across their foreheads; baskets of vegetables, bundles of firewood piled on top, and on top of that a baby. The women were naked except for a G-string. They had chic, pretty little faces; their bodies were curiosities of distortion: powerful thighs, short legs, pigeon breasts, sway backs. Their feet were stranger still, with toes that spread out like the claws of clutching birds. The few men who were with them showed the same anatomical freakishness, the same G-string.

They made gestures toward their fallen loads and let us know that they had come to sell vegetables and not to eat us. I studied them and learned the secret of their odd shapes. The Kuni people never follow the zigzag trails as other tribesmen do. When they cross a ridge they go straight up it, straight down the other side. The continual strain of hillside walking had thrown their whole skeletal structure out of line. When I saw them walking across one of the few level places in the district I was struck by their clumsy waddling gait. Yet give them a mountainside and they speed up like so many goats. They are a study for evolutionists; the effect of environment on physical characteristics. I wonder if their babies are born that way?

During our last day’s approach into this incredible Kuni country some of the trails were no more than wrinkles across mountain brows that were all but cliffs; the soil, where there was any on the surface, had a greasy texture in the wet, and the least slip might grow into a skid, then a giddy fall into the milky fog. The mountains had a way of breaking suddenly into gaping ravines, a thousand sheer feet down to the pouring river.

At last we saw Dilava mission station, like a collection of birdhouses nailed to the crags. It perched on a mat of ground which the priests had blasted off the peak. Away up there, when we had panted to the height and our sweating bearers had thrown themselves down beside their loads, we could look over range after range, up through thin air to Mount Yule and Mount St. Mary--maybe 100 miles away, looming 12,000 feet into calm evening like tall queens, with cloaks of mist that foamed from the cavernous valleys.

(Note from my diary: “If I stay here a week longer I’ll go stark mad and take to writing poetry.”)

Father Chabot had just come from the valley, where they were setting up a sawmill. He pointed down the slopes where small square gardens stuck like colored rags. Naked Kuni people, forgetful of the days when human flesh was their meat, worked like beavers among their growing vegetables. “It’s good for them to work,” Father Chabot said; an echo of the old monkish _Laborare est orare_.

It was time to gather them for the lecture, so Father Chabot sent messengers to various high points around the ravines. They yelled from cliff to cliff--high, echoing cries: “Come to the mission station! The Doctor is at the mission station!” Nature’s telephone, connected by the shortest way, took hours to bring the people in; they had to go roundabout, because the cliffs were too steep for even Kuni feet to climb.

Father Chabot said much the same thing that Father Rossier had said in the station below. “Before the mission came this district had dwindled to less than two thousand. The Kunis would have disappeared if we had not discouraged cannibalism, infanticide and abortion.” I wondered if the good priests were not fooling themselves. Abortion and infanticide may reduce a population, but cannibalism and continual tribal warfare may be blessings in hideous disguise. They keep the tribes apart. Warfare is a sort of rough quarantine. _In times of peace strangers wander in and out, and bring infections with them. Native races die off not through their own suicidal customs, but through diseases introduced from the outside world._

Lecturing that night, my attention was caught by something that gave my audience a troll-like look: several little pigs followed the women with the affection of lap dogs. When the women sat down the pigs jumped in their laps. And what in the world was that one doing? I stopped talking to look again--one of the women had picked up her pig and was holding it to her breast, nursing it. There was a second woman doing the same thing, and a third. This might have taken a deal of explaining, but its reason was purely economic. A sow had died in pig-birth and left an orphan litter.

Taller, darker people who came in for the second lecture--we gave three that night--were as curious to me as the pig-nursing women. The young bucks were wearing corsets, tight-strapped arrangements of bark that squeezed them to the perfect hour-glass figure. I asked Father Chabot if these were effeminates and he chuckled, “The fellows in this tribe never do a lick of work--the women are the field hands. Well, if a woman sees a man with an especially small belly she says, ‘He doesn’t eat much. He ought to be easy to support.’ But he takes off his corset the day they’re married--and she goes on working.”

I had to change carriers again before we went on to Deva Deva. No use arguing; these fellows knew that there was very bad sorcery over the mountains. I paid them off with three sticks of trade tobacco per man. But the thirteen who had run away and been rounded up again stayed faithfully by me. They had to. Before Connelly pushed on he said, “Hang on to that bag of salt. From now on trade tobacco’s no good.” Everywhere I went I found the people stampeding for salt. They would put it in water, rank, and drink it as you would lemonade. When I doled out a spoonful in payment for something there were always children reaching up in hopes that I would spill some. The priests of Yule had warned me not to be too generous with the precious stuff. I might start a high-price epidemic. A Kuni or Mondo or Mafulu man who had his own bag of salt might retire on what we’d call a million dollars. They say that these mountain people drink themselves sick with sea water whenever they get to it. But the Government has forbidden the practice of recruiting them for labor; most of the few who ever reached the coast died of malaria.

The high-price epidemic had already struck Deva Deva. For an assortment of food which included sweet potatoes, yams, taro, pumpkins, bananas, sugar cane, pawpaws and two chickens they unreasonably asked two tablespoonfuls of salt. That wasn’t right. Last year the price had been one teaspoonful, and glad to take it. They were getting spoiled. But had they known it, I would have given bushels of solid brine for one of the delicious okari nuts which they usually threw in as a bonus. These things, in the husk, are as large as lemons; crack them open and you have something the size and shape of a cigar, with the flavor of an almond, only twice as good.

All along the tumbled way I tried to investigate recent epidemics of dysentery. The germs were probably fly-borne to a large extent; also one might blame the local habit of eating with dirty fingers. Though soil pollution was common enough to cause a large hookworm infection, there was stream pollution too, because like many other Melanesians the mountain folk stand in water to perform their natural functions; otherwise, they tell you, the _puri-puri_ man will get some of their bowel movement for his black magic.

In giving out tins to these villagers I encountered a kind of shyness new to me. They hadn’t the least prejudice or tabu against our form of examination, but when Ahuia asked this man or that what name should be written on his specimen he would simper and wriggle and shut up like a clam. Ahuia told me grimly, “He shamed to tell name belong him.” Finally he would manage to cajole the reticent one into whispering his name to his neighbor, who passed it on, whispering. In the land of ghosts frightened men will change their names, often two or three times, to fool the evil spirits of their dead relatives who come searching in the dark. Fiend-haunted natives have so many aliases that they can’t remember the last one, if asked suddenly. I lost a great deal of time trying to pump the name from one blushing warrior. Finally a mission boy bawled out, “Oh, Joni!” (meaning Johnnie)--and the man stepped up.

I found the Kunis only too anxious to listen and obey instructions. They were firm believers in the “se-nake in bell’” theory, and we were magicians who had come to relieve their bellies. There were old women, they said, who could remove the snake by sucking it from your ears, your nose, your navel. Did anybody ever see the snakes? No, Taubada, such magic only removed “the ghost of a snake”--and the serpent was so very tabu that you would surely die if you even looked at him as he crawled out of you.

Jestingly one of the Sacred Heart priests said that the witches were working in competition with the Rockefeller Foundation. That sounded funny; but I discovered that it was true.

* * * * *

Ahuia told me that a magician was coming to a house “over there” and had asked to have me see him cure a woman of her snake. It was like a call to a medical consultation. The house over there was a leaf-thatched hut, spooky with faint lights through mountain dark. Among the branches queer birds croaked like frogs.

Inside the dirt-floored room, lit by a hurricane lantern, a nude woman lay on her back. Her abdomen was puffed; it looked like a gastric case, superinduced by intestinal parasites. There were other witnesses, men in the all-prevalent G-string, and among them the black local constable whose services I might appreciate. Dead silence reigned, except for the woman’s painful breathing.

A wizened little man came in quietly. He wore no paint or feathers, and his air was professional, as if he intended to put on rubber gloves and lecture before a class in surgery. A small boy followed with an earthen pot and a basket; he set these near where the woman lay. The witch doctor was businesslike, striking a trade match and dropping it into the pot, his face lit by the red flame. Daintily he reached into his basket and took out dried leaves, which he scattered over the fire. The room was fragrant with smoke. He crouched and said an incantation. Even though he was speaking in the strangest of strange languages his voice had a thick sound, as if he were talking through a mouthful of yams. Suddenly he sprang to his feet, went over to the patient and put his mouth tightly on her navel. There was a series of sucking sounds. He lifted his head and out of his mouth fell a little brown snake. It wriggled across the swollen abdomen, then glided to the floor.

The wizard rose and turned to me with a professional bow. “How was that, Doctor?” “Very good indeed, Doctor,” my eyes replied. The native constable asked the woman how she felt now, and she said, “Oh, so much better!” Even in the dim light it was easy to see what the sorcerer had done. It isn’t hard to carry a small snake in your mouth, if you don’t mind understudying Bosco.

The next day I was giving my own exhibition of magic. We had lingered here long enough to administer chenopodium and Epsom salts and to wash the specimens for observation. In the throng I recognized my rival physician, and he was a long time studying the slides. At last he turned away with a stony face. Was he convinced that my method was superior to his? I doubt it. It takes a great deal to change the mind of an old-school doctor.

* * * * *

I was surprised to find that Dilava, Deva Deva and Mafulu ran over 90 per cent infections. This upset all my previous convictions, but when I stopped to consider it, this was not so remarkable. One carrier, coming in from the outside world, could easily infect a village, for these settlements were perched on narrow ridges not over twenty feet wide. In Okaka, for example, there was barely elbow room and no attempt at sanitation. Here, when the natives left home, they must all follow the same trail. They lived like animals, and like animals they died.

If I were a sentimentalist I would think of Father Fastre with a smile and a tear. He was the giant priest who presided over Popolo Mission; he was all brawn, with the great red beard of a bush frontiersman. Sometimes a fey look would come into his eyes; for here is tremendous loneliness for a white man, which neither work nor prayer can quite banish from a mind that consorts with spirits and grows more morbid year by year. But Father Fastre had a sense of humor which saved him, I hope.

When he first talked to me he braced his big shoulders against the guest house porch and told me about the sacred G-string. The G-string is not only a stingily concealing garment; in these mountains it is the mark of a “true man.” With it he is respected, a tribesman in good standing; without it he is a pariah--he isn’t properly dressed, that’s all. With Biblical simplicity they say of the G-string wearer, “He is a true man and belongs to the true people.”

Now Father Fastre and a colleague were the first white men to penetrate this Kuni country, and they were great curiosities because they came in their priestly robes, to impress their faith upon the savages. At Deva Deva they were shown to a native house which was about as private as a goldfish bowl; they were no sooner in it than the dwarfish Kunis came crowding in, gibbering and peering at the strangers in the long skirts. After a spell of whispering one of them stole up behind the priest, who had just leaned over to tie his shoelace. Slyly the little savage lifted Father Fastre’s robe, and went suddenly across the room, propelled by the Frenchman’s big fist. The situation was tense. The onlookers were all armed killers. A dread silence fell. Then the crowd burst into a gale of laughter.

“They were trying to find out if I was a man,” Father Fastre grinned.

One afternoon he told me to take a good look at an approaching native. “A few years ago he brought his little boy to our school and we dressed him up for mass in clean European clothes. His father saw him and flew into a frenzy. ‘I want to take him home,’ he said, ‘he’s not properly dressed.’ When I asked what was indecent about a nice white shirt and trousers the man gasped, ‘But where’s his G-string?’ and made a terrible scene. He wasn’t going to let neighbors say that his son wasn’t of the True People.”

The Mafulu folk divide the world into three parts, Missionaries, Belitan (British) and True People. Up here crocodiles have been killed at an altitude of 5,000 feet and the natives “know their name.” True People have an annoying way of high-hatting unfamiliar things. They merely say “We do not know its name.” They have a name for salt, which is _ama_. Once they ate it the way native traders from the coast palmed it off on them, mixed with sand. When white salt came they “did not know its name”--but brine hunger got the better of them and they learned to love it. In their gardens mere women are not allowed to plant yams because these are “true gardens,” and women are considered too dirty either to plant or eat the precious vegetable. They are permitted to plant taro, but yam work and yam eating are for True Men. It’s all very confusing, and as ridiculous as some of our civilized conventions.

Ahuia was never quite the man of the world among these stranger tribes. Father Fastre’s jolly Mondos were piling lumber, down below Popolo. The first night we stopped there Ahuia and Quai came creeping up to my door. “Taubada,” they whimpered, “we scared, we like sleep along you.” With no further explanation they curled up on the floor and slept the velvet sleep of the native.

When I asked Father Fastre about this he laughed. “My Mondo boys acted the same way last night. They wouldn’t come within a mile of your boys. You know why that is, don’t you? Witchcraft. They ‘do not know the name’ of strange people, and keep away from them for fear they’ll cast some evil spell.”

Father Fastre could smile at evil spells, but Papua was getting him. One night he stood in front of his mission and looked down over a veil of moonlight. He seemed to be talking to himself. “Ten years ago I could count ten thousand people along those hills. They are gone. Sometimes I hear their voices.”

He told me that he often heard voices. The Bishop had better send him home for a while, I thought.

* * * * *

We were a hundred miles inland when I decided that the mountains beyond would offer no new health problems. We had found hookworms enough for ten years. There were plenty of mosquitoes, but no malaria, although conditions were ideal for it. But the _Anopheles punctulatus_ of the coast had not penetrated so far inland. There were no enlarged spleens. Only one reasonable conclusion offered itself--malaria must be a recent importation to Papua.

How Father Fastre’s big Mondo boys could sing! What a splendid chorus of rich, deep voices, the only really native harmony singing I heard in the South Pacific. In other tribes, and on other islands, too often they chant monotonously in unison; or they borrow syrupy chords from mission hymnals and Tin Pan Alley. Here among the Mondos their ballads and war songs were beautiful, soul-stirring things. One of the priests, Father Morin, who was an able musician and a nobleman in France, tried in vain to set down these songs; he failed because the Mondo has quarter-notes which the European scale does not recognize. But it is true harmony--I say this in the face of many learned anthropologists who have decided that there are no chords in primitive music. A troop of naked Mondos, war dancing, swinging sticks as they used to swing spears, filling the air with their big organ-notes, is a sound and a spectacle that fills the heart with rapturous fear.

They marched with me to their boundary singing and holding both my hands as we swung along. I could have done without the hand-holding, for I had heard of a certain honored custom: two men hold the stranger’s hands while a third steals up behind him with a club. Not so these merry fellows, who left me with a cheer and marched away, still singing.

When I left the tuneful Mondos my stride was snappy and sure-footed. The priests had put a brand-new set of hobnails in my shoes.

* * * * *

I have snake stories to remind me of that mountain trail. The last three feet of an anaconda was visible in the slippery mud; my foot missed him by an inch; if I hadn’t stopped suddenly with one leg in air, he might have squeezed out my life. Again, when I wandered a little ahead of my carriers--they usually thrashed around so that they scared _gaigais_ away--I felt a whirring under my foot, and something like a tack-hammer struck my leg. It was one of those deadly little striped fellows that the _puri-puri_ men train to bite. Fortunately I was wearing heavy leather puttees....

A crocodile bade us farewell at dusk as we were swinging downriver in a frail canoe. We were moving philosophically along when a native paddler pushed me flat. A scissor-like snout horned up, a foot from where I had been sitting. He had been attracted by my white shirt, extremely tempting bait. Brother Heinrich might have used my coffin after all.

We didn’t go back by way of Bioto. I’d rather die of one crocodile than a million mosquitoes. We went over to the Aropiquina sawmill and picked up a whaleboat for Yule Island.

* * * * *

Among the priests of Yule I found Brother Heinrich grinning away his disappointment. I was a pretty tired doctor when the good men put me to bed. Brother Heinrich managed to get hold of my best heavy shoes, and looked ruefully at the soles when he mentioned pulling out the hobnails. In the morning he brought them back. He hadn’t stopped at hobnails. He had resoled them, and beautifully.

All that month of tramping, up to Mafulu and back again, the priests of the Sacred Heart had showered me with these simple kindnesses. They refused all payment and modestly waved aside my thanks. Hereditary Methodist though I am, I honor them as the best missionaries and the best hosts in New Guinea.

## CHAPTER VI

A CHAPTER ON CONTRASTS

In Papua the dryest statistician might easily burst into the literary style of Sinbad the Sailor. At the time of year that folks back in Utica call “autumn” I had traversed great areas of ragged mountains and boggy shores, and had done my best to hold on to my statistical mind in a land where census figures were evasive as blowing chaff. Meanwhile my field units had been working all over the Territory, and the inspectors who led them were often lost to me for months at a time. Aside from my fact-finding studies of hookworm I was following the course of malaria, which is Melanesia’s deadliest blight.

Field technique may seem monotonous to the reader, for it is just a matter of making the same tests over and over, moving on and continuing the motion in another tribe or village. But it was never monotonous to me.

* * * * *

Compare the mountains of Mafulu with the delightful little village of Gaile, not more than twenty-five miles from Port Moresby. The Gaile folk lived Venetian-style, their houses stilted over tidewater. They were gentle, industrious and generous Motuans, and with no evil history behind them. An invading maritime race, they had built over water to avoid their savage enemies; and the water had always been their blessing, for it carried away the bodily waste that breeds so many worms and germs. Gaile I remember as one of the few truly restful spots I have visited in the Pacific. There were no diseases worth worrying about.

Then, since I’m dwelling on comparisons, let’s look at Tepusilia, a few miles away. My whaleboat got stranded there on the way to Gaile, otherwise I should never have seen the row of dirty chicken coops that leaned crazily over the inlet. I hadn’t much time to look into their case, but I found the inhabitants covered with tropical ringworm that had turned their skins into a brownish crêpe. But there was no hookworm, because they evacuated into the sea, as the Gaile folk did. A few miles inland, where the people had no access to the water, ankylostomiasis was very prevalent.

I can’t pass Tepusilia by without mentioning the lone policeman there. Because his house was the only clean one, I was glad to sleep in it. He sat in a chair not quite wide enough for Shirley Temple, and kept me awake with a constant stream of questions. How had the World War come out? (That, mind you, was 1920.) Sleepily I informed him that Britannia still ruled the waves, and he seemed surprised. He told me that he had served his time in Port Moresby jail, and had come out well-educated. Then he looked wistfully at my chin and asked if I shaved with a razor. “Yes,” I said, “and don’t you?” “No,” he said, “I shave with a shark’s tooth.” He showed me the shark’s tooth and asked me if I wouldn’t give him a real razor, a nice sharp one. The subject was growing a bit morbid, so I sat up and asked him what he had gone to jail for. “Oh,” he sighed, “I was falsely accused of killing a man. Taubada, don’t you think you can give me a razor?” “No,” I said softly and turned my face to the wall.

* * * * *

From pleasant Gaile I followed the course of the lakatoi for 700 miles across the Gulf of Papua into the land of the Goaribari savages. The lakatoi was already growing extinct. From time immemorial the watermen in the Motu district had been building these giant vessels, from five to ten long canoes lashed side by side and covered with a platform that would support houseroom for maybe twenty men. Every spring, when the wind blew toward the northwest, Motuan traders would carry a load of pots and jars over to the wretched Purari Delta and exchange them for logs and sago. They would stay until Christmas, when the hot monsoon could blow them home again. During the trading season there was a truce between the peaceful Motuans and the man-eating Goaribaris. The annual voyages in these raft-ships were among the strangest things that charmed a Polynesian wanderer.

* * * * *

Unromantically in a chugging steamer I crossed the Gulf and came upon the terrible land of terrible people. The business of public health called me there; Kenny Fooks had been surveying the Delta region for months, and was so lost to me that he might have been sucked into the prevalent mud. The Delta region is ravaged by rivers that pour mud upon mud or throw up shifting sand banks that wallow and stink like dead sea monsters. As I came ashore with Ahuia, long-nosed faces stared hungrily. These were the type of Goaribaris I had seen on the plantations, but dirtier, skinnier. You think of cannibals as tiger men, fierce-faced and lusty. But these were brothers to the jackal.

I was interested in something curiously inhuman that wagged from the buttocks of the queer fellows. The old men around Port Moresby had told me that Goaribaris grew tails as long as monkeys’ tails, and let them hang down through holes bored in their floors; and the way to catch a Goaribari was to sneak under the house, tie a knot in his tail then run up top and grab him at your leisure. This story, unfortunately, is another nature fake. What this Delta savage wears at the stern of his breechclout probably gave rise to the yarn. It is a sort of dangler, not unlike a horse’s tail, and, with his long hair done in ringlets stuck together with mud, adds to his mildly demoniac look.

The customary nude policeman, distinguished by a cap and an entirely empty cartridge belt, told Ahuia that his house, where we would sleep, was in Dopima where the famous martyr missionary, James Chalmers, was murdered in 1901. But our policeman gallantly assured us that we needn’t be afraid now, because Government took care of everything. The house was stilted very high to keep devil-devils out. A sickly looking native stood at the foot of the ladder, wistfully waiting. In the background were a pack of the most repulsive women I have ever seen. Their breasts hung like empty bags, their greasy black faces were puckered to an animal look--a picture of lost femininity.

Kenny asked the policeman to go tell the fellow that it wasn’t the fashion to solicit white men. I looked at Kenny’s soiled legs and remarked that he was inviting hookworms. “Inviting them? They accepted the invitation weeks ago, and I’m all fed up with chenopodium and salts. My score was twenty-six good ones--Necators, of course. You’ve got to go barefoot in this bloody country or you’ll be sucked under, feet-first.”

The popular name for these Delta people is Goaribari, but there are really several related tribes, many of them of a somewhat higher type. They are named after their principal or central village--like the Kaimares, for instance. The Kaimares are much the better builders, but they get none of the benefits of over-water sanitation and live quite innocent of anything like a latrine. The hookworm infestation was probably much less general in the old days of unchecked cannibalism and warfare. Even when I inspected various sections and compared notes with Kenny Fooks I found that some places reeked with worms, others were comparatively free. It was spreading, I could venture. The Goaribaris no longer hunt each other openly, and they do a great deal of visiting around.

A village consists of three houses, one of them 100 to 150 yards long and 30 yards wide. These are “crocodile houses”; the main entrance is a gaping mouth, the rear narrows to a long tail. A corridor runs full-length; small cubicles open on either side, in the less pretentious dwellings, and each cubicle suffices for an entire family. But the largest of the houses is a sort of clubhouse where the men live and teach pubescent boys the arts of Delta manhood. In this building there is a smaller door halfway down the passage; beside it a niche contains an altar painted with the frightful face of a devil-devil, and in front of it is an offering of human skulls.

I did not quite believe the grisly tales of peddling women’s hacked bodies around the sandspits and offering choice cuts to willing purchasers. They said a lot of things about these miserable creatures. As to cannibalism, the Government had hanged so many of them for it that if they ate “long-pig” at all they must have conducted their banquets with Masonic secrecy. Yet I saw the pile of skulls around the devil-devil altar. The interpreter told me they were “skulls of ancestors.” Perhaps.... I had a mental picture of Missionary Chalmers, whose bones had been very hard to recover, according to one eyewitness.

We were quite unarmed. The man with the cap and cartridge belt seemed to exercise a remarkable control over the other natives. Along the line of publicity he was another P. T. Barnum. After his fireside chats the people came slinking in, droves of them, milling around the imported magician who could take snakes from the belly. We didn’t recover many snakes, for our job was to make microscopic examinations and determine the ratio of infection. However, from a lad named Komo, I recovered 107, and Kenny Fooks did better still. Now and then as I looked over my scrawny audience I would see a man with clean skin and good muscle; and I would know that he had just returned from indentured service on one of the plantations.

Kaimare houses looked more like crocodiles than the Goaribari jumbles. In going through one of their larger buildings I found a sort of sanctum, completely shut off. As I started through the door my guides, who had been pleasant enough, suddenly showed their teeth and attempted to block my entrance. I pushed my way through; perhaps my prestige as a magician saved me from rough handling. Then I jumped back. The room was full of crocodiles, big ones, little ones, on the floor, crawling up the walls. I blinked, and saw what these things really were--woven of some sort of pliable reed, they were artfully modeled; and as I sighed my relief I remembered scraps of what Cushing, who lived among the Zuni Indians, had written: “Primitive peoples generally conceive of everything made ... as living ... a still sort of life, but as potent and aware nevertheless and as capable of functioning....”

There were more human skulls. I decided to get out.

* * * * *

In the Bamu country beyond, I saw the most repulsive people in all Papua. The Bamus live in mud, and nature seems to have fitted them for their environment. They are as skinny and long as dead eels, and appear to be split clear to the breastbone in order to give their storklike legs a chance to hoist them out of the muck.

No white man can stay long in this blighted country without a feeling of extreme depression and hopelessness for the ill-favored branches of the human race. It was fortunate for my peace of mind one morning when our canoe swept into a deep estuary and I saw something that blossomed like a flower garden in a city dump: a lakatoi from the Gaile region! A big, seven-canoe one, and a crowd of laughing, gesturing, bargaining Motu men busily trading with the Delta folk. The shore was bright with pots and jars, the water was jammed with loose logs which the savages had floated down from faraway hills, hundreds of miles from Mudland. A curious trading.

There was a carnival air. Even the Goaribaris puckered their jackal faces into a smile. I asked a Motu trader if he wasn’t getting tired of it; and didn’t he want to go home? He laughed and answered in effect, “And how!” Soon the hot December wind would be blowing homeward to fill their coco sails and take them blundering back to their clean little Venice. Then the long truce would be over and the Goaribari would be his old sweet self again.

I was glad when the Purari Delta and I parted company. If professional work had called me back I would have gone, but not without a secret wish for some cleaner, greener land. This is probably the lousiest place that God ever made and didn’t quite finish.

* * * * *

I had been closely watching the principal carrier of malaria, a lady mosquito of the _Anopheles punctulatus_ tribe, and the odder varieties of flies and mosquitoes I had been sending to Dr. Francis Root, biologist of Johns Hopkins. Since quinine was malaria’s one known specific, I was rather fussy about teaching my inspectors to take their daily dose. I knew what a delirious wreck an attack can make of a white man in the jungle, and I had impressed upon my young inspectors that I would not forgive any carelessness about quinine--five grains a day as a prophylactic, and at the slightest symptom increase the dose until the temperature swings back to normal. Those were written orders.

Then as I worked down the coast on the last leg of my Papuan adventure, I came down with malaria, in spite of large precautionary doses of quinine which swamp and jungle conditions had made necessary. I was too miserable to laugh at myself when I got to the snug little settlement on Samarai, the eastern tip of Papua’s tail. I was a bilious wreck; I saw yellow. The neat British town was pretty as a bride, but I was in no bridegroom mood. One of my inspectors, a new one who had already proven shiftless, also showed up with malaria. I had to be restrained from throwing him downstairs. Why? Because he hadn’t taken his quinine, and had allowed himself to get sick. At the Widow Henderson’s hotel, the town’s only meeting place, I invited another fight. A one-armed planter and I sat in the barroom, the only possible place to talk, and were discussing a survey in his district when a dough-faced stranger poked his head between us and asked if the planter was afraid of him, or what? Instead of brushing him off I kicked over my chair and reverted to common Australian: “Open your mouth to say one word and I’m inta you, right now!” The stranger departed. A couple of days later the Widow Gofton, who served the bar, said: “When that man gets tough around here now I just say to him, ‘Look out, or I’ll call the Doctor.’”

I saw Samarai through jaundiced eyes, and biliousness gave me a sort of malign power when it came to an argument. However, I managed to be diplomatic when I found that Samarai was having a City Beautiful campaign and didn’t want its view spoiled by a row of over-water latrines. To the health officer, of course, that was nonsense; Paradise might be lined with those coquettish little shrines and he would call it perfect--at least, that was what the esthetes implied when I argued.

Swallowing bile, I combined architecture with diplomacy and devised some dainty palm-thatched sanctums to sit over the tide, with rustic bridges running out to them and clumps of croton to act as screens. I became an engineer and sketched out plans for deep pits to be dug into the coral and filled with rubble so that the contents would be sifted gently out to sea. I left too soon to find out whether or not they followed my plan. It was just another quarrel between Hygeia and Mrs. Grundy. In such a fracas Mrs. G. usually comes out the winner.

* * * * *

The two fights in Samarai were more than counterbalanced by two fortunate meetings. One night I came into Bob Whitten’s sheet-iron trading store and saw a figure quite out of harmony with the smelly hurricane lamps and piled-up canned goods. His smart dinner suit gave him a clubby look which stirred the old bile, for I had been out in the field and was a mass of dirt and scratches. He turned a wind-hardened business face and a pair of Scotch-gray eyes. “Are you Dr. Lambert?” he asked. I said that I was. “My name’s George Fulton,” he said. George Fulton was executive head of the powerful Lever Brothers firm, who bought and sold islands, controlled supplies and shipping, over a great watery empire. He began popping keen, intelligent questions at me, and I forgot his evening clothes after one exciting revelation.

“Know anything about Rennell Island, Doctor?” I had heard of it sketchily from a skipper who said that nobody ever went ashore, for fear of the natives, and that there was nothing worth trading for.

George Fulton said: “It’s just off the blue-black Solomons, but the people aren’t black. Nobody knows what they are. They’re primitive as monkeys, but rather superior humans. Sleep in caves, worship an invisible god, have traditions that may be either Polynesian or Caucasian. Since the white man came to the Pacific, there hasn’t been a landing party that’s penetrated Rennell farther than the beach. They simply won’t let strangers get in. Why? Maybe they’re protecting themselves against foreign disease, or maybe it’s the same old tabu. For ages they’ve been practically untouched.

“Missionaries tried it not long ago, and three of them got knocked on the head. I know more about this island than most. It’s a sort of lost world, terrible cliffs all around it, one small beach protected by a reef. Last year we were short on labor and thought we might recruit some of the men. Fine, strapping fellows--incidentally, the women are very pretty. Well, we picked up a handful of laborers, bribed them with hatchets and jackknives. They’re crazy for steel and iron. They do their carving with shells.”

I asked what became of the men he took away; I was afraid he’d stop talking and go to somebody’s bridge table, but he said:

“Around the Solomons we would put a few of them ashore here and there to work on the plantations. Before we could up-anchor they would plump into the sea and swim back to the ship. Finally we gave them up and took the survivors home. Interesting folk? Rather! They’re not castaways or newcomers. They’ve been there since God made them. They might be worth a scientific man’s time.”

He moved away but I almost tripped him up. “Mr. Fulton, if they are an untouched people, they must be free from imported diseases. I’ve pretty well decided that the natives are dying off from the worms and germs that white men, orientals, and friendly tribes bring in.” He nodded approvingly, and I plunged on, “It would be very valuable to me, and to the world too, if I could study these Rennellese. Hookworm, for instance ... If they have it at all it might be a variety we have never seen ...”

“Well, Doctor--some time when one of our boats swings your way....”

George Fulton was a super-businessman. I decided not to let him forget his offer, and for half a year I showered his Australian office with remindful letters. Finally my insistence bore fruit--of a mixed variety.

* * * * *

The young inspector whom I had found guilty of idleness and malaria and ejected from my staff had been scheduled to survey the Trobriands, two or three days sailing to the north. The shortage of help compelled me to take my headache and a supply of quinine and cover the job myself. But in the South Pacific you don’t just buy a ticket and start. You play Micawber until something turns up. In this case the turn-up was the fantastic little cutter _Bomada_, owned in partnership by a professional butterfly collector and a hairy-chested planter-adventurer named Bob Bunting. The butterfly collector had a German name and looked rather Chinese. Bob Bunting was something of a slave driver when he managed plantations; if native laborers lay down to die of witch-doctoring he revived them with a bull-whip. Bob’s sort survive in the tropics.

So we were off in the crazy craft, which promptly broke down in a mushy, drizzly rain. And that was where I had the other pleasant meeting. Out of the glazed mist loomed a whaleboat, steadily rowed. A gorgeously American voice yelled, “Hey, can I do anything for you fellows?” A young man sprang aboard; almost before he spoke again I was thinking, “I just kicked out an incompetent, and there’s the boy to take his place.”

His name, he said, was Byron Beach. Enthusiastically he scrambled into his whaleboat and brought back an outdated pile of _Saturday Evening Post_ copies, and Theodore Roosevelt’s book on the “River of Doubt.” Americanism stuck out all over the boy. He had graduated from one of the better New England preparatory schools, then war broke out and he decided to “travel.” Possibly he was a conscientious objector; but Byron Beach was no slacker. His headlong bravery and resourcefulness in a later adventure proved that.

Bob Bunting, who knew everybody, accused him of being too keen for the Milne Bay traders; they were ganging up against him. Beach had been out after copra and had bought so much under competitive noses that local dealers were swearing vengeance. An enterprising lad. When the old engine came to life again I said, “Beach, if they make it too hot for you here, why not join my outfit?” His young face flushed with pleasure. “Golly, Doctor, that would be swell!”

I was afraid that would be the last I’d ever see of him.

* * * * *

Our breakdown at Dobu gave us a view of the geyser field at Seymour Bay which matches the Yellowstone. The greatest spouter is Seo-seo-kuna, which roars like a hundred menageries. Beside one of the boiling pools I saw a group of natives kneeling reverently. Ah, this would be something worth seeing; the primitive heart bowed down to some powerful goddess of fire and water.... When I came closer I soon found what they were doing. They were cooking yams.

Probably they did say a little heathen prayer--if the missionary was not looking. Unofficial paganism is the custom everywhere in the Christianized Pacific. In choosing my native assistants I usually rejected the mission-trained boys, who were too often slackers, liars and hypocrites. “Him Mission” meant “He’s a Christian,” and was a scornful term.

I do not underrate the work of missionaries, the best of them; I have known so many who tackled their problems cheerfully on the pittance doled out by Foreign Boards. They had volunteered for a life so bitterly hard and so meagerly paid that it might easily have brought out something more petty than the helpful generosity which the best of them showed me. But the days of the great missioners like Chalmers and Brown, who fought and died in the midst of ferocious savagery, have passed away.

The man of God down there, when he went in for selfish profit, usually made his investments in his wife’s name and took advantage of special concessions allotted by the Government for legitimate mission work; or he used the funds from good Christian collection plates at home. Professional traders had a right to complain of unfair competition in the labor market, for the business-missions often secured labor for nothing under a forced system of “donating” work. Among the missions which “came clean” were the Catholics, who were accustomed to look to Europe for their support; but when 1914’s war came on that support was cut off. They faced the music manfully, and did their bit toward paying their own way. The fruits of this labor were turned back to the native, in the form of an intelligent attempt to better his condition. But too often the missionaries were wrapped in a dream of heavenly perfection, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, smelling nothing. It was refreshing to meet an honest-minded one, who could be fair enough to rationalize his ideals....

Our cutter _Bomada_ had staged her terminal breakdown in one of the Trobriands’ divine lagoons which seemed to take its color from the pearls that lay below. The _Bomada_, I felt, had killed every noble impulse in my heart. Especially that rainy day when we tried to hoist sail and saw the rotten thing--which hadn’t been looked at for two years--fall to pieces in the first breeze. And now I was taking afternoon tea in the pleasant garden of a pleasant missionary. The prettily formed native girls who served us wore single garments, brief fiber skirts. The only shamed person present was the missionary’s wife, who kept chirping, “Isn’t it disgusting, Doctor!” Her husband, who had entered the ministry from Oxford, had educated these people in cleanliness and right living. He had taught them many things that natives must know in order to meet the perils of European civilization. On purely scientific grounds he had opposed the missionary custom (encouraged by the traders) of dolling the women up in disease-breeding clothes.

I asked this sensible messenger of Christ, “How many converts, in our sense of the word, have you made here?” He rubbed his tired forehead and replied, “Doctor, not one in twenty years.” I honored him for that, and was willing to wager that he had won his way many times over a “civilizer.” He was human, and he knew humanity.

He was in refreshing contrast to at least one luxuriously living Christian who had entertained me in Samarai. He “instructed” the natives in collecting nuts, cutting copra and building boats. His fine house and teeming acres revealed how well he had profited by his instructions. If he had made any attempt to civilize the people, the effect was not apparent. Except in the case of the lone missionary who honestly despaired of making converts, there seemed to be no attempt to teach the natives English.

But there must have been another exception once, for on a small Trobriand island a native boy addressed me primly: “Undoubtedly, sir, you will find more clement weather for the remainder of your voyage.” Startled, I asked, “Where did you learn to talk like that?” The boy said, “My missionary taught me. Unfortunately he expired in an insane asylum. He had been irrational for quite a long time.”

The Trobriands, land of pearls and parrots, were romantic. The fertile soil put the rest of Papua to shame and the delightful lagoons abounded in fish and oysters--also sharks. I shall not compete with ten thousand travelogue-poets in describing lagoons, but I never went in an outrigger over one of these beautiful sheets of crystal without a feeling of complete rest and detachment.

However, when you go on medical inspection you had best leave romance outside. I wish that a crew of Jack London’s admirers had followed me through the local hospitals and seen the cases of venereal granuloma, a disease still called “tropical.” I wish they had helped me count the cases of hospitalized gonorrhea, and helped me guess at the prevalence of that disease in villages and on plantations. I have heard sentimentalists say that the islanders are morally like ancient Greeks. Perhaps. But when Greek meets Greek, see what the doctor sees.

Dr. Bellamy, the District Medical Officer, took me over to look at the wreck of a sturdy Scot, once a wealthy pearl trader. When hard luck came with tropical ulcers he had squatted in one position so long that his joints ankylosed, and he was now unable to move except on all fours. An un-Scottish generosity had been the cause of his downfall. Because he had married a native wife and had several children, he thought of the natives as his own people. When famine came, he gave everything he had to relieve hunger. White friends warned him of native ingratitude, but it was too late. Sick and useless, he didn’t notice how his wife and children sneered when they passed him. He had taken to chewing betel-nuts because they were a cheaper anodyne than gin. A look into his eye-sockets made me ashamed of my race.

In the Trobriands, the pearl was the beautiful breeder of disease and crime. Every trading store had pearls to sell, and French buyers from Parisian jewelry firms came every year to bargain. The Government protected native fishers from the traders’ rapacity; most of the stories of greed and treachery had white men or half-castes as principal actors.

There was the one about the Britisher who married an extremely pretty half-caste and had a collection of pearls ready to show the Parisians. His little wife, who was French on the white side, was extremely fond of the short, tight-waisted corsets then in style. After her husband found that she had flaunted that corset up and down the beach to the gratification of many, he did what white men too often do there under strain. He shot himself. His wife disappeared; so did his pearls. A couple of years later the authorities found her in Sydney, living rather too well. But oh, what an innocent little lady! She had inherited the money, and what were they accusing a poor, sick widow of doing? A Sherlock Holmes could have told her how she had sneaked into the house right after the suicide, hidden some rich double handfuls inside her corset, and flitted away. The case was dropped; after all, she was the man’s legitimate widow.

I summed up this trip with a line or two in my notebook:--

Trobriands rich prize for trade. Hence heavily diseased. Am feeling much better, letting up on quinine. If I had not stuck to regular dosage feel sure that I would have died.

To economize on my budget I paid Skipper Billy Carson of the _Ruby_ enough fuel to take me back to Samarai. When we came up from the beach the Widow Henderson’s barroom piano was thrashing out a music hall ditty, and an American voice in the doorway said, “Hello, Doctor! Gee, it _is_ the Doctor! I was just telling the guy in there that you’d forgotten all about me. You _are_ going to take me along, aren’t you?”

I caught young Byron Beach’s enthusiasm. I was well again, resolved that when I got back to Port Moresby I’d go on with the Foundation for another campaign, or a dozen. It was wonderful work after all, and I wasn’t going to let the tropics lick me.

After a good supper I asked, “How many of us can sing?” They all could. We were a male quartet with Beach’s pleasant voice to carry the air against Carson’s sad bass, my raw baritone and the squeaky tenor of the young man at the piano--he was the one Byron Beach called “the guy in there.” “Guy” is sufficient name for him. Drink didn’t interfere with his fingers on the keys, and he seemed to know the old standard tunes, “I’ve been working on the railroad,” “I was see-eee-ing Nelly home,” and “Farewell, my own true love.” We were happy as four men can be, making close harmony in the shadow of an admiring bar. It was late when the guy at the piano banged a fist on the keys and muttered, “That’s enough.” We had been singing about any little girl being a nice little girl.

I asked Beach what was the matter with him. He said, “Back from the war, living on booze. He’s really quite a nice guy.”

That night the guy shot himself, but his aim was ineffective. I took care of him long enough to tell him that liquor is a poor substitute for quinine. I heard later that he sobered up and married some little girl who was a nice little girl. I like to record one story with a happy ending. But Billy Carson, who sang bass for us, had a grimmer finish. He had married a wealthy half-caste, and when he sent his children to Australia to be educated he had found that they were being set aside as “blackfellows.” One morning on Samarai wharf a loiterer found a neat bundle of clothes. Billy was always methodical.

In our tidy Port Moresby bungalow, comforted by my dear wife, whom I had seen too little during my restless months in Papua, I told my senior, Dr. Sawyer of the Foundation, that I would undertake a year’s survey of what some still called German New Guinea. Sawyer said, “Lambert, you’re certainly a hard man to kill!”

My farewell to Ahuia may supply a good finishing scene. Eloisa, like the perfect housekeeper she is, always packed and unpacked my boxes in his presence. She would give him the keys; when we returned from the field he would hand them over to her for inspection. On this day of

## parting the boy was proud as a chancellor, delivering the keys. How

could anything be missing? Hadn’t he served the best doctors in Papua and acted as the Governor’s orderly? And when he started out on his expeditions with me hadn’t he stopped his ears against the wail of his friends, howling that he’d never come back alive?

Counting the wash, Eloisa giggled. Mine was all there, plus many unidentified shirts, socks, shorts and singlets. It was hardly worth while asking him the names of various hosts he had borrowed them from. Ahuia had conveniently forgotten.

When he was about to depart with my bonus of cash and tobacco he maintained his fierce expression, but there were tears in his eyes. Melanesians weep rather easily. Could he serve the _taubada_ again? He would so like to serve the _taubada_ if he came back....

I was a little rough, pushing him out of the place. I didn’t want him to see that white men can also weep. I would miss Ahuia.

* * * * *

So ended the Papuan chapter, with a few hard figures. I had covered 2,284 miles on foot and horse, in motor cars, canoes, whaleboats, sailing boats, motor launches and steamers. Fourteen miles of it I had done in the quaint vehicles they call “track cars,” iron-wheeled bone-breakers pushed by cannibal labor. With my inspectors we had covered 8,461 miles. Nor did my official report include the few miles we swam when our canoes heeled over. In villages and plantations we had examined people by tens of thousands. We had marked down a grand total of 59.2 per cent infection. We had upset an old theory that hookworm is carried from the plantations into the villages; our survey had gone to prove that quite the reverse was true.

The Papuan people by the Government’s reckoning of 1920-21 had been roughly estimated at 300,000. More likely, in the light of what a few explorers had found among the lost mountains, the population figures should have run nearer 500,000. The estimate of 166,721 for New Guinea Territory was ridiculously low; it was more reasonable to put it around the half million mark. The immense Dutch end of the island held something like a million more; but Dutch New Guinea was outside my itinerary.

The tens of thousands we inspected and the thousands to whom we gave first treatment may be just a splash in a huge puddle of disease. But the very careful instruction in treatment which we offered to planters, officials and missionaries (in fact to everybody whose heart was in the work of bringing back a failing population) might have been more important than anything else we did. I hope so. Month after month we had been hammering into the white man’s head the grave necessity for pollution-proof sanitary arrangements under conditions which varied between mushy swamp soil and solid rock.

## CHAPTER VII

WHERE NEW GUINEA WAS NEW

Rounding the northern edge of the great island you come upon the Territory of New Guinea, which was German New Guinea until 1914, when Australia took it over. To simplify the confusion in a few words: the eastern half of the island is Australian-governed, divided into Papua and the Territory. The western half (roughly half) is Dutch New Guinea. That was how the land lay in 1921. Perhaps the horrors of the Second World War will change its geography again.

In May, 1921, when I boarded the _Melusia_, bound for Rabaul, the capital, our decks and cabins were thronged with seventy officials of the civil government, coming in to relieve a military government of evil repute. The newcomers were centered by the Administrator, Brigadier-General Evan Alexander Wisdom, C.B., C.M.G., D.S.O., V.D., whom his King later adorned with an added set of initials and a knighthood. Despite this alphabet train, General Wisdom had a character that went well with his name. He was an Australian Scot, veteran of Gallipoli and the French campaign. I felt that he was a man who could listen to reason and exercise his own. He needed all he had, for he was setting out to face a tangle which would have confused King Solomon.

The physicians he had brought with him for public health work were competently educated men, but inexperienced in tropical diseases. Colonel Honman, the new Chief Medical Officer, was another Aussie-Scot I didn’t forget in a day. A hard-crusted, soft-hearted old regular, all he knew about tropical medicine was what he had learned as personal physician to Prime Minister Billy Hughes. He wasn’t afraid of liquor or anything else. For seven months I was to be very close to Honman, and to love him for his contradictory qualities.

Aboard ship I had no sooner met him than he suggested that I give them a talk on malaria. I felt that here on the _Melusia_ it might be of service to the incoming officials. That night they gathered on the main deck and I told them of my experiences with the disease. How the _Anopheles punctulatus_, whose female is more deadly than the male, travels in the Pacific with mankind in his restless journeying from village to village, from island to island. How I had run my fingers under the lower ribs of thousands of natives and felt the sagging spleen which tells the tale. I went into a subject which the medical men present knew as well as I did--through book knowledge: blackwater fever. This quickly fatal disease gets its name from the dark coloration of bloody urine, caused by the oxidization of hemoglobin, and the bladder condition is called hemoglobinuria.

I had found very few cases of genuine blackwater fever, I told them. Even when it occurs the patient is often dead before diagnosis. The condition, when it comes, is frequently caused by a blind misuse of quinine. Malarial people sometimes neglect the remedy for a couple of months, then swallow a handful. And here I tried to drive home my favorite point. I even had the temerity to quote a German; the world-renowned Dr. Robert Koch had come to New Guinea in 1910 and proved, for the first time in medical history, that epidemic malaria can be reduced by _quinine alone_. Here I took my chance to say that in fever-bitten countries quinine in regular moderate doses is an absolute necessity. Liquor is no substitute. If you abuse your constitution with a daily dozen bottles of beer or a habitual quart of whisky, don’t cry “blackwater fever.” A white man in the tropics can remain as healthy as in the temperate zones, provided he exercises and takes care of himself.

Wasn’t it Kate Douglas Wiggin who said, “It is hard to be agreeable and instructive at the same time”? However, most of the medical men seemed to like the talk. I heard one District Officer for the Admiralty saying, “This quinine business is all bloody nonsense.” Perhaps I had gone afoul of his prejudice. You can’t talk quinine without arousing some bitter criticisms.

* * * * *

In contrast to Papua’s bleak capital I found Rabaul a picture of tropical delight: regular streets were bordered with poinciana, royal palms, coconut palms; betel-nut palms raised graceful, slender stems and flaunted their feathery tops just above clusters of fruit that were like hothouse grapes; Indian laurels loomed graciously over thriving fig trees. The Germans had drained all this land, relieved it of mosquitoes, planted the groves; they had set Government House on a fine eminence overlooking a stretch of water that might have been a Scottish lake.

Rabaul was an extremely shaky Garden of Eden, geologically and politically. Jolly earthquakes came and went with seismic whimsicality, and were so frequent that every hotel, house and office had its heavy furniture lashed to the walls. Otherwise, one might have waked up any morning and found a large German wardrobe in one’s lap. Right inside Rabaul’s port, Vulcan Island was a particularly bad actor. The Reverend George Brown, the fighting missionary, records its beginning back in 1878 when it blew the twenty-mile channel full of pumice; thousands of boiled fish were washed ashore, and great sea turtles with their tortoise-shell cooked to a pulp. The next big show was in 1937, when Vulcan covered the town with ashy vomit; after that there was talk of moving the capital, but the colonial becomes a fatalist. He has to be.

One morning in 1921 I saw some lumber that had been piled on Vulcan go scattering into the sea like a box of matches, and I saw the huge sheet-iron D.H. & P.G. store curl like a withered leaf. After that Eloisa and I agreed that at the next tremor we’d pick up little Harriette and make for the hills.... And let’s not forget two very wicked “Shaker ladies,” two tall peaks about three miles from town on the mainland, and officially named Mother and Daughter. On the night of Vulcan’s birth there was a volcanic growl at the mouth of the Bay, and in the morning Vulcan loomed from the sea, shoved 600 feet from the water and venomous as a newborn cobra. Vulcan is now popularly known as “The Bastard,” and so he will be called until he takes a notion to sink again.

* * * * *

Where Papua with her probable 500,000 natives had five official medical men, New Guinea Territory, equally populous, had eight or ten government doctors to serve it. The hospital at Rabaul I found especially well equipped, thanks to a retired German medical staff. The Australians had adopted a German expedient. Well-trained orderlies, under the supervision of medical officers, were sent out to run the lesser hospitals. These orderlies were called “_lik-lik_ doctors” or “small doctors”--_lik-lik_ means “little.” They had a high sense of duty and were remarkably competent. When I was there the natives were being trained simply in bandaging, treating sores and administering physic; then they were given a uniform cap and _lavalava_ and sent back to their villages to apply their useful knowledge. They had the title of “Tultul” and their salary was a pound or so a year.

The Medical Tultul was a modest beginning in an important system that was destined to go on. I had studied the mind of the higher type Melanesian and had begun to see that he was far from a fool. I had watched the work of my head boys in the field--men like Ahuia, for instance. What except race prejudice stood in the way of their being educated in medicine and equipped to practise among their own people, whose language and customs no white physician would ever understand?

Even in those days I heard reports of the more progressive Fiji Islands where for a long time they had been giving a sketchy medical training to Melanesians. Most of the South Pacific received the idea with a cynical smile. In Papua I had broached the plan of sending out picked natives, under the direction of laymen, to administer yaws and hookworm treatments over a country so vast that the few white doctors were ridiculously inadequate to cover it. This plan was later adopted. In the Territory of New Guinea I had still better luck; crusty old Colonel Honman had sufficient faith in me to permit the experiment at once. The black boys I chose and instructed in the administration of oil of chenopodium proved remarkably useful, considering the inadequacy of their training.

Conditions we had to meet were similar to those in Papua, only the people were far nearer to the Stone Age than were most of the Papuan natives. Cannibalism was still practised within forty miles of Rabaul. We had to move cautiously out in the bush, but we never carried firearms--with the exception of Chris Kendrick, who faced one or two situations where a pistol proved a very useful tool.

New Guinea Territory, in fact, was at that time harder to deal with than it was before the abrupt political change of 1914. The coastal native, more sophisticated than his brother of the jungle, was dumbly wondering what had become of the Germans, who had ruled them well, all things considered. Natives had been servants of the padroons, and had learned to like them. And what was this new set of white men with a new set of laws which they seemed unable to enforce?

The military administration, which came in with the first World War and lasted for seven years, was a great political blunder, as the best minds of Australia knew from the first; but what could be done about it until Billy Hughes’s home Government decided on something less fantastic? The whole business had the nasty look of any sudden political overturn.

Long before 1885, when the Kaiser’s Government officially occupied German New Guinea, his thrifty subjects had been working the plantations. This was no pumped-up Sudetenland, for the Germans were honestly in control. They were good planters who studied the soil under tropical conditions on this favored side of the big island. Their colonial treasury showed a surplus; they had increased their acres and become rich padroons; they lived luxuriously. Their Governor’s Palace at Rabaul (which the new military administration seized) was a fine example of tropical architecture. Out of a fever-ridden swamp they had made a Rabaul that was malaria-free.

In our time Germany has committed so many crimes against civilization that a crime against Germany may be worth putting on record. Its criminality reacted on all concerned, and especially on hordes of young war veterans whom the Australian Government “rewarded” with free grants of land.

I was settled in Rabaul and enjoying the generous privileges which Colonel Honman gave me in the fine German-made hospital when I learned some details of that military occupation, which a hard working civil administration was by now trying to live down. Everybody was talking about a scandal which compared with our own postbellum days in the South. Field-tried old soldiers were referring with scorn to the “Coconut Anzacs” whom Australia, for lack of better men, had sent to take possession in 1914. The Coconut Anzacs seemed to have been mostly men who hadn’t gone to the real war, for one reason or another--raw amateurs without the slightest sense of discipline. Military power inspired many to wanton acts of cruelty and the stupidest sort of blunders.

My daring young man Byron Beach was eyewitness to one outrage. He presented himself as a medical officer to a punitive expedition, and was taken along. A company of Coconut Anzacs had been sent out to chasten a native village, accused of cannibalism. Led by a hard-drinking officer, himself frightened of the poor, scared cannibals, the troops surrounded a certain inland village to teach the black beggars a lesson. Maybe they were pretty drunk when they proceeded to shoot up everything they saw. Men were shot as they ran, women and children were gunned out of trees. Beach saw the leader of the party put a pistol to the head of a girl who lay flat on the ground.

And next day the commanding officer found that he had made a little mistake. He had attacked the wrong village.

Another expedition went to see about a German anthropologist who lived alone in the bush. He had been there for years and had a way of locking his books and papers in the little house and going away on tours of research. When war was declared he was so far away from his home base that he didn’t hear the news. In his absence the frenzied patriots broke down his door, found great stacks of carefully written papers and made a bonfire of them. They didn’t understand German, and the writing looked like spy stuff. On his return the scientist found his lifework reduced to ashes. They say he went crazy.

Maybe the new civil government was too bitter, looking over the mischief the military administration had wrought. There had been a great deal of aimless sabotage. For instance, they had demolished the apparatus in the great radio station. The excuse was that it might be sending messages to Berlin. It hadn’t occurred to the conquerors that they might save these costly things for their own use.

Now what to do with the German planters? Prime Minister Hughes’s Territorial Government was taking care of that. When I established myself at Rabaul in 1921 the farce was in full swing, and through no fault of Governor Wisdom’s, who had to make the best of a policy already framed. The policy was starkly this: Encourage the thrifty Germans to improve their land with the promise that they might retain it. In 1921 something called an Expropriation Board arrived, called in the anxious Germans, and gave them vouchers enabling them to sell their property back to the Territory, at their own valuation. But when the Germans turned in these vouchers the Territory’s Treasury Department paid for them in orders on the German Government--to be applied on Australia’s reparations claim!

Bankrupt Germans were selling their household goods for anything they could get. During my stay in New Guinea it was a commonplace to see vessels departing for Australia, laden with pictures, rugs, silverware. Returning ships were bringing back the same old load: hard liquor and fresh contingents of war veterans to stray into the plantations, sicken and go home.

Liquor and malaria, malaria and liquor--a vicious circle to worry the public health physician. These brave soldiers, who never wanted to hear the word “war” again, were taking Billy Hughes’s advice: “Just go to New Guinea and pick out a fine plantation.” They didn’t know how to eat, drink or live in the tropics. There were many stories, funny and sad. One returned soldier was blithely dumped on the beach and sent to the wilds with nothing more substantial than a case of tinned beef, a case of mixed pickles and six cases of beer. Babes in the wood, what did they know about malaria? Men who should have known said to them, “Shaky in the morning? Then scoff off a tot of whisky or a bottle of beer, and you’ll feel fit as a fiddle.” Green as grass, the poor fellows thought that coconuts grew underground like potatoes or on vines like grapes. They starved, they drank, they let the natives take advantage of their ignorance. They swallowed the popular “fever cure” and finally tottered back to the returning ship--if they could.

I looked over the annual import of alcoholic beverages--beer 102,204 gallons, spirits 7,534 gallons, wines 1,500 gallons, stout 1,056 gallons. This was to serve a European population totaling 1,265. The natives didn’t drink, and you must discount the women, children and missionaries.

* * * * *

I was hardly established in Rabaul when Colonel Honman began urging me to take full charge of the hospital. That was a flattering offer, which I at first declined. Between my medical units and myself, we had to make some sense out of the half million neglected natives we had come there to study. But I shall never forget the grand old Colonel’s morning calls at my house. A soldier to the bone, he never complained, but I could see that he was suffering from “New Guinea fever”--in short, he needed a pick-me-up. It was a habit of my neighbors to borrow a bottle of whisky in the morning, return it at noon, and borrow it again at night. But Colonel Honman always drank his tonic on the spot. Without a word I would administer the usual dose, a drinking glass filled one third with gin and the other two thirds with French and Italian vermouth. Straight as a ramrod he’d toss it off, smack satisfied lips over his double row of false teeth, and bellow, “We breed men in Australia!”

He had a leather stomach, a golden heart and a head that nothing seemed to affect. Already we were sympathizing with Governor Wisdom’s job, for he was breaking up a racket which was as crude as any invented by Brooklyn union leaders. It was the bird of paradise racket--which may sound fantastic, but it was there, and had been ever since the military administration did its worst for New Guinea. In German days it had been customary for newcomers to shoot and sell enough birds to earn the price of a plantation. But the new Territorial Government passed a law to protect the birds. Like all prohibitions this invited bootleggers who, like all bootleggers, were followed by highjackers. It was so easy to make a rich kill and pass it across the Dutch border, where there were no game-protection laws!--and very convenient for a Chinese trader to wait on the Dutch side and pay cash for the bag. Or you could smuggle the feathered pelts into the hands of a ship’s steward. Stewards were getting rich; one of them was able to run thoroughbreds on the track.

District Officers were up to their necks in poaching. One of them came back from the Dutch border with £10,000 in his pocket. He started for Sydney, fell ill on the boat and had to be taken off at Cairns. A sympathetic friend offered to take the easy money to the invalid’s family. The “friend” was a highjacker, of course, and had arranged a clever get-away. The poacher died in the hospital.

District Officers had been up to many things never dreamed of in the philosophy of Tammany Hall. One of them revived “blackbirding,” the old-time slavery. He got a little island offshore, made raids on natives, stored his prisoners there and proceeded to sell them in job lots. When this human meat ran short through brisk sales the official used his police authority and arrested a lot more. Several succeeding District Officers went in for this thriving trade. The military administration tried to break it up. There were some records, for the Keop (District Officer) always made the deals look very legal. But when the Military Governor demanded these records, a handy filing clerk confessed that they had been mislaid.

These abuses were on the wane when Wisdom stepped in, but, even so, he had inherited a pretty kettle of fish. Colonel Honman’s principal worry was a lack of doctors who knew anything about tropical medicine. If I didn’t take over the hospital, he said, he’d have to draft my services. Well, he did finally.

* * * * *

My right and left hands, Bill Tully and Chris Kendrick, were still with me. Without those two I could never have got through Melanesia. As laboratory assistant Bill used his fine eyes at the microscope, to supplement my dull ones. I had Kenny Fooks too, always good for a barefoot excursion into the swamps, gifted with a constitution that kept him plump through months of hardship. And there was young Byron Beach, an erratic fund of energy. I had picked up two new inspectors, very competent men, whom I had sent out with the other field units. I took out a unit of my own. Between us, we swept north and east over the big hook formed by New Britain and New Ireland; we traveled west under the Equator to Manus and the Admiralty Group; west again to the string of flyspecks, Marou and Ninigo, Matty and Ana.

Chris Kendrick, through fat and lean--usually lean--remained his quiet, reliable self. After his long absences in the bogs and streams and jungles, he’d show up smiling and slap down his neatly written reports, pregnant with a Britisher’s genius for understatement. “Had to climb face of cliff. Waited between jumps till surf stopped pouring over it, then jumped again. Tricky business.” “Horse broke leg in volcanic rock. Had to shoot him. Too bad, fine animal.” “Had to use a lawyer-vine stick on black assistant. First time I ever struck a native. The _lik-lik_ doctor here brought me a boy he said had beri-beri. It proved to be a champion hookworm case. In 5 days counted 1,237 worms. Dosed him again in a week. Chenopodium very slow. Got only 25 first dose. Second yielded 1,122. Score going up. Left assistant in charge of patient, instructions to watch stools. When I got back I was annoyed to find that the idiot had thrown the whole mess away. Jungle housekeeping. I might have recovered 4,000 worms.” This item gave me a bitter laugh. Things like that have happened to us so often, with ill-trained assistants.

When Chris was with me in New Britain I saw him severely bitten--by a parrot, pet of the Samoan wife of a German planter. Chris was busy making friends when the bird nipped him square across the nose. I treated it, and Chris’s diary tersely records: “You never know what to expect down here.”

He jotted down one item which a garrulous explorer might have turned into a chapter, and a thrilling one:--

Alone with native crew, big, sulky devils. Couldn’t understand trouble. Maybe short on food. They turned on me, with spears and paddles. Covered them with my service pistol, but was a bit nervy for fear 2 or 3 would get me from behind. Finally the D.O. showed up with police. It was rather tricky.

One day en route Kenny Fooks lost his temper and told a coastwise skipper what he thought of him. The skipper retaliated by dumping Kenny off on a sort of desert island. Nothing to do for weeks but count the sparse hookworms and write a weather report. Most of that diary read: “June 14, weather fine.” “June 21, weather still fine.” “July 1, weather cloudy.” “July 9, raining like hell and glad of it.” My other inspectors were more active, and I had to scold Byron Beach occasionally for his daredevil tendencies. But he was learning fast and his young vitality made him a splendid worker. My new acquisitions were W. J. McErlane and R. V. Sunners. Fooks and Beach were later sent to the mainland, and McErlane covered the field in Bougainville, an island far to the east and formerly part of the Solomons. These men were not heard from for half a year.

* * * * *

I had been studying pidgin English for nearly a year, but had not reached the point where I could use it in my lectures, as I knew I must. Until I had mastered the idiom I had to depend on a faithful interpreter. Therefore I chose a very cross-eyed native named Jerope; I got him because nobody else in Rabaul seemed to want him. Jerope was so cross-eyed that when he poured my coffee I had to follow the spout with my cup, otherwise he would have poured it in my lap. He was a bush fellow with none of Ahuia’s sophistication, and was obsessed by every witch and devil that flies over the Pacific. Before I could take him into the field he got himself arrested for stealing a red lantern off a sewer-digging in Rabaul. When the judge asked him what he wanted with a red lantern he blandly explained. He thought the white men had put them on the streets so that natives could use them to scare off devils. For everybody knows that devils won’t attack a man with a lantern.

Jerope languished awhile in jail and improved his education. Because the boy was brighter than the average the Keop who ruled the jail put him in charge of the bulla-ma-cows (cattle herd) and Jerope was faithful to his trust. The day I called and accused him of milking the cows, his eyes crossed in great sadness when he replied, “No, master, him no woman cow, him man cow.”

Jerope was not a mission boy; he despised their kind for a lot of sissies. Once when we were inspecting Ninigo away up in the northeast we had with us a well-known English anthropologist, nephew of a great one. Like the Catholic missionaries he had a soft voice and a full beard. He was far too dainty. The Australians called him “Birdie” because he wore a feather in his Alpine hat. Birdie shrank from cold baths, so every morning he minced back and forth across the deck, carrying a little bowl of hot water for his tub. Once when the bowl-bearing Birdie minced by, Jerope turned and spat into the sea. “Him mission!” he growled.

From a medical point of view the Ninigo group was interesting. I made a count of palpable spleens and found an index of 54 per cent; considerable malaria for so remote a spot. In fact this was about the same proportion that I found among the assorted natives brought to the hospital in Rabaul. Hookworm, on the other hand, was only 8.4 per cent as against 74.2 for the whole Territory. Why? Because the group was made up of narrow atolls, where the beaches were the latrines and the tide carried the infecting material away. Malaria and elephantiasis are both mosquito diseases (if you can call elephantiasis a disease--it is merely a symptom of filarial infection). On one of the islands here I saw a woman’s breasts so enlarged that when she sat they touched the ground.

Ninigo might serve as a type example of a region with no protection against the insect carriers that are today scattering plague among all the sons of Adam. Rapid transit, open ports, borders wide open.... It’s the same old story, to us of the Health Service.

Do you remember the alarm of ten years ago--how our most modern instrument of speed, the airplane, had carried the deadly _Anopheles gambiae_ from Natal in Africa across to Brazil? Brazil was too busy with a revolution to fool with mosquitoes until three or four years later when death-without-bullets felled the population in wet areas. Fortunately the infection reached a comparatively dry belt, so that the mosquitoes were slowed up. Then Brazil joined with the Rockefeller Foundation in a gigantic campaign. In 1939 a million dollars was spent down there, and this year they expect to double that sum in an attempt to check the scourge before it spreads, heaven knows how far....

Dr. Marshall Barber, the great authority on malaria, says: “There is no doubt that this invasion of _gambiae_ threatens the Americas with a catastrophe in comparison with which ordinary pestilence, conflagration or even war are but small and temporary calamities.” I have had no experience with the _gambiae_ in my corner of the tropics: but I am using him as a bogie to make a point. How tropical are “tropical diseases”? Germs and worms love to visit around. The northern-born influenza has swept away thousands in the South Pacific; neglected, its germ may bide its time for a plunge back into the North. Amoebic dysentery is a “tropical disease”--yes, and a few years ago it appeared in Chicago. The distinctly tropical filariasis (often manifested in elephantiasis) has been identified in several cases in an incomplete survey of the Carolinas. Dr. Boyd, investigating in Florida, asserted that our temperate-climate mosquito can carry a tropical strain of malaria. I saw how inguinal (venereal) granuloma spread from island to island in the Pacific; recently I was not surprised to hear of cases in the United States. Leprosy, which curses the Polynesian, was brought to him by the oriental; the Polynesian may pass it around--there is plenty of it in New York today. The white man gave tuberculosis to the black Solomon Islander, who awaits an opportunity to return the generous gift.

A few millions of Rockefeller dollars, a few hundreds of Rockefeller scientists, have gone forth into the seed-beds of disease, to work and study, and cure, if possible. I say this for the benefit of smug stay-at-homes who ask us, “Why do you waste your time and money on these niggers, who live in another world from ours?” Yes, but do they? Our little planet is moving faster every day. If sanitarians go on bungling their way through bogs and forests and mountains, maybe it is to save you from a peck of trouble some fine morning, Mr. Homebody. Or at least we can wave the danger flag.

* * * * *

In the Kaiser’s day, I was told, the German planters sent to Ninigo to replenish their harems. Certainly the people were terribly thinned out. I found an island where they were reduced to thirteen, one girl and twelve men; and all eaten with venereal granuloma. The Hermit Islands had lost their hermit; a friendly planter had taken off the last inhabitant, a healthy young fellow who became a personal servant, too gentle to meet the invasion.

The Admiralty Group is north of the mainland, under the Equator. Manus, a fairly large island, is the center of a wealth of little dots. Some villages here were built over water in the Venetian style of Gaile. Paradoxically, the women were chaste, domestically speaking, yet in Manus I found the only public prostitution I ever saw in the South Pacific. It was an ancient custom here. Discouraged by the Germans, it had come back under the military administration. The incoming civil administration crushed it for a while; but when I was there the custom was flourishing again.

Manus had a certain Gaile-like charm, especially noticeable in the houses. Your canoe entered in the front through a covered opening, so low and narrow that once in you had to crawl on hands and knees. The object of this was simple and practical; if you were an enemy you could be conveniently clubbed as you poked your head into the living room. The houses set aside for young girls were quaint, too. With almost Spanish sternness the maidens were watched over by local duennas, and were carefully caged to the age of puberty. After sunset they were permitted to take the air, still under guard. At first I thought that this was the Manus method of preserving chastity; then I found that it was a mere matter of complexion. Indoor living bleached the skin, and in Manus a pale young bride was quoted at rather a high figure.

A weakness for canoes increased my fondness for this pretty Admiralty Group. I snatched every minute to drop my trouble in the serenity of bright lagoons; great Manus outriggers were wide enough to hold comfortable deckhouses below their coco sails.

Contrast this lagoon-bound holiday with my return trip on the cutter _Siar_, a capable craft with a capable captain; Skipper Bell was the best of the Australian type, raw-boned, handsome, brave. We had reached the New Hanover Group when a hurricane came down on us with a sudden ferocity that seemed to bring sea and sky together. That we stayed afloat those three mad days is one of God’s mercies. Our engine was drowned out, we lost all sense of direction, all sense of everything except what was needed to hang on and pray--or swear. When a calm came, almost as violently sudden as the storm, we found that we had drifted over reefs and banks and heaven knows what--we had been blown clean around the large island of New Hanover and were lying in an inlet between it and New Ireland, which we had passed three days before. There wasn’t a dry thing on the boat; our cookstove had been doused with the first wave that swept over us.

I have been caught in more tropical storms than I can remember, but this was the worst. With quaking Jerope and such of my gear as I had recovered I went ashore and flagged a schooner bound for Rabaul. Bell and his staunch little ship deserved a better fate than that which later overtook them. The battered _Siar_ was towed to Sydney, where she fell a-prey to a favorite island trick: the calkers stopped the leaks with concrete, to save the expense of honest calking. On the return voyage she struck another storm and went down like a flatiron--with poor Bell at the wheel. He was a fine, clean young man who adored his pretty new bride. Well, he was one of the many.

* * * * *

My American medicine frequently competed with native witchcraft, which though it was never an open challenge, was something I felt all around me. Here and there I would catch whispers of this and that laborer who had sickened and died in the field; some _puri-puri_ doctor had “pointed a bone” at him. Belief in magic, black and white, had penetrated into some odd places.

There’s an elegant little chain of islands off New Britain which old-timers called “Queen Emma’s Kingdom.” Emma was a self-made queen, the half-caste Polynesian daughter of an American consul. She bought a domain for a few guineas and made a prince consort out of the German nobleman she married. Her descendants were educated in European schools, married Europeans of good family, and came home to enjoy their share in the inherited kingdom. I talked with one of these descendants, a lady who knew Wagnerian opera and Ibsen plays. When it came to medicine her faith was all bound up in the old family witch doctor. Earnestly she told me about some herbs which worked the medically impossible. She was offended at my incredulous smile when I transposed from what Lincoln said of General Grant: “I’d like to know the bottle he gets it from.”

No wonder, then, that cross-eyed Jerope was anxious to carry a lantern after dark.

One evening we paused for rest on the tangled brow of a high mountain in New Britain. Incidentally, that had been a most interesting day; I had found rather puzzling evidence of modern sanitation. The tribe here was fierce, savage, cannibalistic--and surprisingly free of intestinal parasites. At some risk I searched behind the village houses and found latrines as scientifically constructed as if endorsed by the International Health Board! The pits were dug twenty-five to thirty feet into the soil, and over them was a support of timber. The deposit fell so far underground that hookworm larvae had no opportunity to invade the surface. The common housefly, bearer of dysentery and typhoid, dared not penetrate that dark well. Rude screens separated the men’s latrine from the women’s. My compliments to the wise old witch doctor who invented that.

Byron Beach had been to this mountain before me, with a punitive expedition, armed to chasten man-eating. They had climbed 7,000 feet and had forced themselves among tribes that had never before looked on a white face. Beach reported that every village he entered had been equipped with these deep cesspits. They were not mere archaic ornaments, either; the people were using them.

I tried to find out who had taught them, but all I got was “It is the fashion.” I had to remember what the immortal Captain Cook said of the New Zealand Maoris when he first saw them--that this primitive people were obeying sanitary laws when the housewives of Paris and Madrid were emptying chamber pots into the streets. It set me thinking. Was not the islander, before the whites came to unsettle his traditions, reasonably self-preserving in his daily habits? My visits to lost Rennell Island, some years later, confirmed the theory.

But that evening, lolling on the mountain brow, I talked with Jerope about dream magic and heard the beginning of a story which, when it was finished, touched me deeply. I looked up and saw that his crossed eyes were not funny any more.

I had asked him if evil spirits could “walk along dreams” and curse you while you were awake. Oh, yes, master, they could do that. But devil-devils can do your dreams great favors, he said. He gazed crookedly at the sunset and told me, quietly as you tell of a proposed subway trip, how tonight in his dream he would visit his mother in the little local heaven. He explained the witch charm which would bring this about. From a great magician, who had been to the Evil One’s home on the wild Sepik River, Jerope had bought the skin of a great bat, the enchanted flying fox that could carry you into the land of the dead. “Tonight,” he said, “I shall burn the bat’s hairs and paint the ashes on my eyes. Then I shall go.”

Next morning I asked him if he had gone to his mother. Yes, he had gone; and he told me how, earnestly:--

“Master, me fastem head belong bat close under head belong me, then rub eye belong me along ashes and make fass (shut) eye belong me, and then me tink, and tink, and tink, then me like sleep....”

Jerope’s head had begun to whirl then--“Me all a same pidgeon.” The flying fox became a swift-winging god. “He catch me allesame pickaninny. Me hang on fass too much, then he go up and up and he go quick-feller too much. Him quick allesame nothing.

“Bym-by me come along place where Mamma belong me stop; this one place belong people who die finish.” Heaven was filled with Jerope’s dead kinsmen. “Master, this place he good feller too much. All man he got good feller garden, good feller house, plenty dog, plenty pig. Mamma belong me he come, he kiss me.” (Throughout he referred to Mamma as “he,” which is correct pidgin.) “Now me go inside along house belong him. Mamma he got good feller house too much, and yam he big one allesame tree. Suppose altogether people along Heaven he like kaikai fish, he tink, dass all, and good feller fish he must come along saucepan. Man dis place, Mamma dis place he no can work. Suppose Mamma like ’em something; he tink, dass all, and altogether something he tink, he must come.... Dis heaven belong Mamma him good feller too much!”

I made no attempt to deny anything, his whole tone was so convincing. He hadn’t been dreaming; he had been there and seen a worn old woman having the fine rewards that come by wishing.

## CHAPTER VIII

I SAY IT IN PIDGIN

At last the time came when my vanity was tickled to the verge of hysteria; I had actually learned pidgin English. To the native English is pidgin, and if you do not speak it with classic exactitude he simply fails to understand you. Once I had thought that I could pick it up in a week or two, it sounded so like laundry Chinese. Studying it, I learned how iron-bound its rules of idiom and grammar actually are. Twice, before I had mastered the lingo, I had tried it on native audiences and had been, as the actors say, laughed off the stage. But I was tired of having my lectures hashed by casual interpreters; I knew that I must talk straight to the people in the trade language which was common over the larger part of Melanesia. It took a year of hard grinding to learn it. Superior natives, kindly missionaries and District Officers were my tutors.

I must be fair to the reader and show him a few of the simpler twists in the language, and interpret a few peculiarities. Otherwise, the forthcoming sample of what became my standard pidgin hookworm lecture might be difficult to understand.

The verb “go,” for instance. The future is “by-and-by me go,” and the past is “me go finish.” “Finish” is trickily used to express finality. When a boy is “dead finish” he is dead. When you bury a body you “plant ’im finish.” (When a houseboy says he is “killed” it merely means that his mistress has taken a stick to him.)

“Him” is masculine, feminine or neuter, generally pronounced “im,” but sometimes “um.” “Im” may be joined to a verb, as in “lookim,” or separated as in “look im,” (“look at him”).

“Fellow” or “feller” is another tricky one. “Feller” precedes almost every noun--“One feller house,” and so on. “Me go three feller Sunday” means “I was gone three weeks.”

A man is usually a “boy,” a woman a “mary.” But often, linguistically, a man’s a “man,” for a’ that. The personal pronoun is always masculine: “Dis feller mary he go.” Repetition gives a verb an increasing value. When you say, “He go, go, go, _go_, GO,” that’s a long, tired journey. Then for effect you add, “long way too much.” “Too much” means “very.” Example: “Him good feller too much”--quite a compliment.

“Senake” is “snake” or “worm,” and in hookworm lectures you refer to hatched larvae as “pickaninny senake.” “Gelass” is “glass,” and refers to a microscope, telescope or anything else with a lens in it.

The frequent use of “belong” (or “belonga”) is confusing, and “along” is worse. Loosely speaking, “belong” is possessive. “Knifie belong me” is “my knife” and about the only way to translate “Dis fellow knifie belong dis fellow mary belong house belong Keop” would be “The knife of the native woman who lives in the Captain’s house”--a pretty clumsy way of making your point. “Along” generally expresses movement or approach: “Ship stop along place.” On some remote islands, God is expressed by “Big Feller Walk along Top.”

“Blut” is blood (German), and is combined with “sabe” (Spanish) in “You altogether fellow, you sabe string belong blut?” when you want to know if everybody understands the nature of the blood stream. “Altogether fellow” expresses “everybody.”

“Kaikai” is “eat.” Your heart is a “pump,” your lungs “wind,” and when you show a hookworm picture in your lecture the “illustration” is a “ficshure.”

Their use of “behind” doesn’t express much until you are informed that it may mean either “afterward” or “pretty soon.” “Behind me show you dis feller” equals “After I have shown you this.”

To the uninitiated, pure pidgin does not make the slightest sense. German priests have learned it--and naïvely used its Chaucerian obscenities--without knowing a word of English.

In giving you just a flash of my first public success with the language, I assure you that I have anglicized it down to a point where the pidgin-wise native would have a hard time making head or tail out of it. But head or tail would be lost to the reader if I gave the unedited version.

* * * * *

When I returned to the native hospital at Rabaul and told Colonel Honman that I was prepared to lecture in pidgin, he gnashed pleasantly and said, “Try it on them.” Honman was behind me in everything now.

A packed audience was gathered that night to hear my attempt at a new and dreadful language. I mopped cold sweat from my bald spot. Jerope had hung the hookworm chart to a post; it was like nailing your flag to the mast--fight or sink, no turning back. Assistants had passed around our two property bottles, pickled hookworms and ascarides. The natives always admired the bottled ascarides most; they were larger and looked more dangerous. The pause settled my stomach. My natural brazenness returned and I bawled for order.

“You altogether boy, you listen good. Me come talk along one big feller sick....”

I felt the listening silence. They were taking in every word.

“Altogether boy he got um plenty senake he stop along inside bell’ belong boy, he kaikai bell’, blut he come, he kaikai blut. Blut belong boy him kaikai belong senake.

“Place belonga me him stop long way too much. You ketchum one feller steamer, you go one feller Sunday, now you come up along Sydney. Now you ketchum one feller steamer, big more (larger), now you go, go, go three feller Sunday, now you come up along place belong me....”

In the native mind I had visualized the distance I had traveled from New York to New Guinea. And now for a word picture of John D. Rockefeller, Senior:--

“Master belonga me him make im altogether kerosene, him make im altogether benzine. Now he old feller. He got im plenty too much belong money. Money belong him allesame dirt. Now he old feller, close up him he die finish. He look about. Him he tink, ‘Me like make im one feller something, he good feller belong altogether boy he buy im kerosene belonga me.’ Now Gubment (Government) he talk along master belonga me. Master belonga me him he talk, ‘You, you go killim altogether senake belong bell’ belong boy belong island.’”

(I passed around the bottle of pickled hookworms.)

“Now, you boy, lookim good along dis feller bottle. Dis small feller senake he bad feller too much.... He got im tooth belongim. He kaikai bell’ belong altogether boy. Blut he come he kaikai blut....”

(Turning chart to enlargement of male and female hookworms.)

“You look along dis feller ficshure. Two feller senake. You look; one feller he man-senake, one feller him he mary-senake. Dis feller mary, him he bad feller too much. Him he stop along inside bell’; him he kaikai blut; him he makim too much small feller egg. Boy he makim something along ground. Egg he come out. Dis egg he small feller too much....”

Open eyes and open mouths confronted me. And now to describe a microscope in pidgin English:--

“He no allesame glass belong Keop (Captain) belong steamer--he nother kind. Glass belong Keop, he make one feller something he stop too far, more big; glass belonga me, he make one feller something too small, more big. Behind (pretty soon) you sabe lookim along dis feller glass....”

(Attentive eyes followed the microscope, and I told of the dropping of the egg, the birth of the larva and its destiny....)

“Now boy he make im something along ground, egg he come out. Rain he come down. Egg, him he stop. Now sun he cookim. Now small feller pickaninny (larva), close up he broke-im dis feller egg. Him, he walkabout along ground, quick feller too much. You no sabe lookim--he small feller too much. Eye belonga you no good. Now boy he come. Him he putim foot belongim along ground. Now pickaninny senake him come inside foot belong boy, quick feller too much. Boy he scratchim, but he no can catchim dis feller senake. Now he go along string belong blut. Now he go, he go, he go, he go go go go, now he come up along pump belong blut; now he come to wind; him he come up along troat; boy he kaikai him....”

(Pointing to internal organs outlined on the chart.)

“Now he come along bell’ belong you, now he big feller little bit; now he gettim tooth belong im; now he sabe kaikai bell’ belong boy; he sabe kaikai blut. Suppose you gottim plenty good kaikai--dis feller kaikai no belong you; him belong senake. You eatim, senake he catchim first time....

“Senake him kaikai blut belong boy, now boy he no strong; he weak feller too much; him he no like walkabout; him he no like work; him he like sleep all time. Bell’ belong him no good, skin belong him no good, leg belong him allesame stick, him rotten altogether because senake he kaikai bell’ belongim.... Blut belongim water; quick time boy he die finish; now he go along ground.

“Now master belonga me he gottim one good feller medicine. You drinkim one time, behind (afterward) you takim one salts medicine; senake he die finish, he come outside. Now, kaikai belong boy, he no belong senake. Now quick time skin belong boy good, now he sabe walkabout, him he strong feller too much....”

When at last I had finished I heard the frightened sigh that fluttered through my audience. A heavy load seemed to fall from my shoulders. I had said it in pidgin, I had made them understand!

* * * * *

This was the hookworm lecture which, with some improvements, I gave hundreds of times throughout Melanesia, wherever pidgin was spoken; in New Guinea, in the Solomon Islands, in the New Hebrides. Yes, and I took it to New York in 1922, and demonstrated it to the Rockefeller Foundation. When I was asked to address a body of extremely dignified scientific men, Dr. George Vincent encouraged me to repeat my hookworm lecture, for its fame seemed to have arrived before I did. “Give it to them straight,” Dr. Heiser suggested when I took the platform. If my performance added nothing to science, it was at least a comedy success. It panicked ’em, as the actors say. When I came to the part that described Mr. Rockefeller as “Master belonga me him make im altogether kerosene.... Now he old feller.... Money belong him allesame dirt,” solemn scientists who hadn’t smiled for years had to be held up to keep them from falling into the aisles.

## CHAPTER IX

“ME CUTTIM WIND, ME CUTTIM GUT!”

The conquest of pidgin cheered me up mightily; and I needed cheering. Toward the close of the New Guinea campaign (October, 1921) I began to realize more and more, through daily practice, that oil of chenopodium was inadequate for the mighty job cut out for it. To do it justice, it did remove worms, quantities of them. The standard method of administering chenopodium was to starve the patient the night before and give him a purge in preparation for next morning’s treatment, which was 15 minims, given at two-hour intervals, at 6 A.M., 8 A.M. and 10 A.M. This was followed by another purge at noon, and he was not permitted to eat until the purge had taken effect.

In North Queensland I had found that even these heroic measures had not reduced the rate of infection, because the people were not taking the drug. Then I decreed that no treatment would count unless inspectors stood by and saw the medicine swallowed. In the early morning hours one could get track of a treatment unit by the sight and sound of front doors bursting open and children running wildly down the street. So I decided to modify the dose by one half, followed by a purge. Re-examination showed somewhat better results.

Old-timers who ran the standard chenopodium campaigns were unsung heroes, and the grinding disappointments drove many good men out of public health work. Examination, treatment, re-examination and retreatment--repeated half a dozen times in any given area--made up a method so extremely slow that by the time work in one region was completed the unremoved female worms had again laid eggs inside our patients; eggs which fell with the excreta to infect the soil once more and permit another horde of larvae to crawl back to the human intestine.

When Colonel Honman at last drafted my services and put me in charge of the native hospital at Rabaul, I was given an ideal chance to experiment and observe. Groups of native patients were chosen and locked behind barbed wire; each was given his dose and a gasoline can for his stools. The latter were washed every twenty-four hours for three days, and the worms counted. After an interval each man would be given a very large dose to remove the remaining worms, so that a percentage of effectiveness of the first dose could be estimated. We tried various combinations of chenopodium: thymol, betanaphthol, even betel-nut (which has a certain degree of vermifuge action). We studied the relation of purge and drug, to find out on what ratio they could be given. At best chenopodium was nauseous and produced many severe symptoms like tingling toes, temporary deafness, vomiting; and there was always the danger of profound poisoning inherent in the powerful drug,--untrained dispensers might grow careless and omit the purge,--and that might prove fatal.

To sum up chenopodium, it was about as popular as the Hammer and Sickle at a Republican rally.

* * * * *

Taking charge of the native hospital, although it was added to my duties in the field, was the job I liked best of all I had--new things turning up every day, and plenty to swing to.

I swung to Colonel Honman with ever increasing faith, for he was my mainstay when it came to an argument with Governor Wisdom. The Governor’s troubles were piling up on him, and I never blamed him for his stubborn spells. If Wisdom’s moods interfered with urgent medical work, it was the Colonel’s delight to set his artificial teeth firmly and jump into the scrimmage. He wasn’t afraid to go to the mat with the Governor, and at the finish he usually came out winner. I cannot forget his loyalty to me any more than I can forget a set of eccentricities peculiarly his own.

Here is one of my favorite pictures of the Colonel in action. I was in charge of quarantine while he was away, and always on the _qui vive_ for any alarm that might come in. Early one morning a disturbing cable came: bubonic plague had broken out in Brisbane, and we must keep a strict lookout for ships from that port. The Colonel was away, making a trip around the group, so when the regular boat from Brisbane pulled in I went aboard and talked it over with a worried skipper. How was he to unload her? Certainly it would be inconvenient if he had to dump his cargo on lighters and move it piecemeal to the dock. I saw his point, and was wondering if I should take chances and let her come in before dark, when I saw the Medical Chiefs ship poking around the heads. I went over to it and found the Colonel in his pajamas. I asked him what we were supposed to do about the caller from Brisbane. He hadn’t put in his false teeth yet, and his mouth was sunken like a dead crater. “Keep her out in the thtream,” he lisped. So I carried the orders back to the Australian skipper, and went home to breakfast. But I said to my wife, “Eloisa, I’ll bet that ship will be alongside the wharf before noon.” It was; and I knew why. Down in the Australian’s hold there was a new Ford sedan for the Colonel, and he wasn’t going to risk having it unloaded on a lighter, away out in the stream.

Colonel Honman had his faults, but I grew to love and admire them, with the firm belief that “even his failings leaned to virtue’s side.”

* * * * *

We had more and more cases of yaws sent in and were administering intravenous arsenicals. The natives called these injections “needla,” and it became a popular craze with them--a craze which spread over the South Pacific. It was better than magic; a native would gladly have anything poked under his skin through a needle, no matter what. In Rabaul the native orderlies were always there on injection days; their tongues hung out with eagerness to get a shot of any salvarsan solution that happened to be left over. I have heard them arguing, “Why waste that bully stuff on a lot of ignorant bush fellows who are no good to anyone?” White men were queer in their preferences.

* * * * *

The primitive Melanesians have a holy horror of mutilation--except when they mutilate their noses for decorative purposes, or their foreskins from custom. The man who has lost an arm or leg is damned eternally, for he must go to the local heaven armless or legless and be the laughingstock of the gods. This belief is a nuisance to the surgeon down there. A native with a gangrenous limb will fight against the knife, tooth and claw. Slow and painful death by blood poisoning is far preferable. Die with both your legs on and you can walk into Paradise, a true man....

When a white man has anything artificial, like a glass eye, a realistic wooden leg, or a set of false teeth, the back-country fellow looks upon him as a miracle worker. One of the oldest stories along this line originated in Papua--how the plantation manager took out his glass eye and put it on a stump to glare at his lazy field hands while he was absent; it kept the crew busy until a native genius thought of just the right thing--he put a hat over the magic eye, and they all went back to sleep.

Toward the end of my term in New Guinea a situation arose in a native ward which compelled me to take advantage of this popular dread of mutilation. Influenza had flared up on the plantations. The plague that laid our soldiers low in American training camps had visited the South Pacific also, in 1918-1919, and played havoc with these non-resistant people. Since then, it had broken out sporadically; but health officers had learned more about it and were holding it down better than before.

I had returned from the field and found the native hospital filled with flu cases; many were dying in the collapse from pneumonia. The sudden deaths among seemingly mild cases puzzled me, until I probed into the cause. Our native attendants hated to lose sleep; as soon as they were snoring, the sick men, hot with fever, would sneak out of a side door and go down to lie in the sea and cool off under the stars. Then they would sneak back to bed and die of shock.

I put a stop to all that. Native attendants had told them how I slit open dead men’s bellies. (I had performed thirty-three postmortems to determine the average native content of whipworms.) My ogreish fame had spread among a simple folk who would far rather lose a life than a leg. To them I was master of life and death--_and_ the postmortem table.

Therefore I profited by my foul reputation and marched through the ward brandishing a large amputation knife, and as I passed along rows of quaking cots I shouted: “Suppose you no stop along bed, you sons of bitches, suppose you no takim medicine good feller, now you die finish, me cuttim bell’ belong altogether, me cuttim heart, me cuttim wind, me cuttim gut belong you feller. But suppose you good feller altogether, now you die finish, me no cuttim you.”

Dark faces turned green. If they died in a state of disobedience their bodies would go to butchery on the postmortem table; what chance would their gutted souls have in a heaven where true men walk high, wide and handsome?... After my threat they turned into completely docile patients, and we had hardly a case of pneumonia when they were dying of it elsewhere, all over Rabaul.

Twenty men in this ward had been rounded up and jailed for cannibalism. I went to Colonel Honman and described an experiment I wished to make. We all knew of Dr. Heiser’s brilliant success in the treatment of leprosy. Chaulmoogra oil was no new thing; lepers had been given it _by mouth_ for a couple of thousand years. When Heiser experimented with it in the Philippines he didn’t change the remedy--_he changed the method_. He tried chaulmoogra oil in intramuscular injections, with tremendously improved results.

I didn’t expect to obtain any such startling effects. What I wanted to know mainly was whether chenopodium acted directly on hookworms in the bowel, or whether it was absorbed into the blood stream first and was then ingested by bloodsucking.

The twenty cannibals were on the road to recovery from influenza, and for experimentation Colonel Honman selected six who were heavily infected with hookworm. They had already been condemned to hang as an example to their outlaw village, so it didn’t matter whether the poor devils died in bed or at a rope’s end. My plan was to try intramuscular and intravenous injections of chenopodium.

The result proved harmless to the patients and surprising to the rest of us. In our tests on three of the patients chenopodium was mixed with camphorated oil and resorcin, following Heiser’s formula for preparing chaulmoogra oil. These three men were given intramuscular injections in this form, followed by purgatives, and their stools were examined for a period of six days. From Case Number 1 we got only four hookworms in five days; from Case Number 2 two hookworms and one Ascaris. But Case Number 3 offered the main interest. To him we gave an intravenous injection of chenopodium undiluted. After six days we had recovered twenty-two whipworms and only three hookworms, although this patient, like the other two, was heavily infected with hookworm. In Case 3, then, injections of unmixed chenopodium had a far greater effect on whipworms than on hookworms.

In the three who were given intravenous injections results were:

Case 1:--Hookworms: None. Trichuris: 11. Case 2:--Hookworms: None. Trichuris: 19. Ascaris: 2. Case 3:--Hookworms: None. Trichuris: 30. Ascaris: 2.

Our experiences with all six cases showed that injections of chenopodium have little effect intramuscularly on hookworm, and no effect on that parasite when given intravenously. But in both ways it had a marked effect on trichuris.

Why was this? Obviously the answer must be in the habits of the two parasites. The hookworm is a superficial feeder, sucking blood from the surface of the gut. The whipworm has a very long head which he buries half an inch into the intestinal wall; possibly he fed only on lymph, which may have taken up a heavier charge of the chenopodium. Ordinarily the whipworm is very resistant to chenopodium, as to all vermifuges. Yet here he showed a high mortality to the drug when it was administered through a new route. Whereas the hookworm, which is affected by chenopodium given in the usual way, showed a high resistance to it in the new method.

I had no time to continue experiments, which were interesting because they were the first attempt to give anthelmintics by intramuscular or intravenous injections, a new route for treating intestinal parasites. Superficially at least, I had settled an argument which had arisen among investigators with more claims to learning than my own. I had established that the action of chenopodium is by direct contact with the hookworm in the gut, not by absorption in the blood stream and subsequent absorption by the parasite. The experimental cases showed that fact clearly, and still more clearly revealed that chenopodium in intramuscular and intravenous injections has a decided effect on whipworm. For the latter there is no other satisfactory treatment. I made these tests without the sanction of the Rockefeller Foundation, whose letterhead should bear the motto, “We Do Not Experiment with Human Beings.” When 61 Broadway learned of what I had been doing there might have been trouble for me, but Dr. Maurice C. Hall, chief of the Bureau of Animal Industry at Washington, became my advocate. In a later

## chapter I shall have much more to say about this Dr. Hall: we are

indebted to him for one of the world’s great medical discoveries.

And by the way, my experimental cannibals never went to the gallows. After leaving New Guinea I learned that another flu epidemic had struck the hospital. I was rather glad that the six of them died in bed and could go to the Happy Land with all their vertebrae in good order.

* * * * *

I hated to leave the native hospital, which had taught me so many valuable things with which to carry on. I had been working in team with the _lik-lik_ doctors and was more than pleased with the technical progress they were making.

Nobody could have blamed Governor Wisdom if he had gone stark staring mad under the pressure of territorial politics. He kept his reason, did his work well, and was retired with a title. The white population was more of a problem than the black; this new government was still in the grab-bag period, every hand feeling out for a prize--anything from an island to a fruit cake.

At one of the Governor’s receptions, the fine house on the hill was all in party trim. At an end of the great hall there was a long table, heavy with cakes, sandwiches and bon-bons. After a pleasant hour, Eloisa and I were about to say good-by, but were waiting for our car to drive up in the rain. A minor official’s wife sidled over to the big table and said to Eloisa, “Look at those beautiful cakes. I’m going to give a party myself tomorrow.” Fitting action to words, she slipped an eighteen-inch fruitcake under her raincoat. We were at the door, telling General and Mrs. Wisdom what a nice party it had been, when the lady with the raincoat joined us. “Oh, Governor, such a lovely time....” Her hand went out and the fruitcake slipped. _Splunk!_ it messed all over the polished floor at the Governor’s feet. Still holding his hand, she trilled, “I wonder where _that_ came from!” And fluttered away to her car.

* * * * *

Our little house at Rabaul was a meeting and eating place for my inspectors, drifting in from the field. For a week or two before we left, the lot of them were at my table. In the kitchen their boys gathered around Jerope, matching their tall stories against his. We were a busy, uproarious family, getting ready to push on or say good-by. We had added up our mileage for that New Guinea campaign: 9,958 for all of us, traveling on everything that would walk, pull or float. My score was 3,523, not counting steamer trips to and from Australia--and Beach came next with 1,893.

When young Byron Beach joined our farewell house party he looked like a schoolboy fresh from tennis and a shower. He didn’t show a scratch, although by all the laws of chance he should have been dead. For our young adventurer had gone alone 165 miles up the Sepik River, a region so wild and dangerous that only armed expeditions dared it in 1921, and they came back with shuddering horror stories. Beach had tackled it in a frail canoe, paddled by jittering natives--he wasn’t literally alone, but he was the solitary white man. Beach had no business risking his fool neck without a white companion. If he had waited for me I would have joined him.

Almost his first act when he came to our house was to hand Eloisa £400 for safekeeping overnight. He grinned nonchalantly next morning when he took the money back, and doubled it in a tortoise-shell investment. The boy had heroic qualities, but he never forgot that he was a trader.

I wish I had the space to show you the diary he kept on that fantastic trip. I had sent him up to inspect Father Kirschbaum’s mission, not far from the wide brown mouth of that mysterious river whose upper waters lie in the howling darkness of the unexplored. With the good Father praying for his soul Beach set out on July 17, carrying plenty of tins for hookworm specimens and blandly intending to offer his wares to a jungle full of naked killers. The lad had the cheek of the devil, and that probably saw him through.

Some of the villages were unexpectedly friendly. In one of them the men were fiercely armed and hideously painted, awaiting another attack from an enemy who had burned half their houses and carried away thirty-seven villagers just before lunchtime. Beach distributed tins among these people, and told them, through a scared interpreter, how to use them.

When the Sepik folk were good to Beach they let him sleep in a Tambarand House, which is a tribal chamber of horrors, decorated with the skulls of relatives and valorous foemen. Artists decorated the family skulls to a semblance of life, and the good tribesmen took them to bed with them.

The natives were disappointed when they found that Beach’s specimen tins did not contain red paint for sale. Some of them punched holes through the tins and hung them around their necks. He had to scold them for this.

There were days of paddling into queerer and queerer regions. Time and again Beach saw headless corpses floating down stream. Probably they were the bodies of relatives; enemy meat would have been otherwise disposed of. In another village, bristling with spears, Beach made so bold as to prick a boy’s finger for a blood test. At sight of blood the warriors began to howl like wolves, but Beach was there with his everready salesmanship. He smiled winsomely as he presented the tribe with a collection of mirrors and fishhooks. As he wrote in his diary, “I’ll say I was thankful. Things were almost jolly when I left.”

At Timbunke, twenty-five miles farther up, it wasn’t so jolly. On the shore was a reception committee of 200 painted devils, brandishing spears and yelling at the top of their lungs. “I tried not to be in a hurry getting back in the canoe,” he wrote, “but the boys paddled for their lives, with all that bellowing mob scampering along the shore. Perhaps they were just wishing me a safe journey. No white man has ever slept there.”

All along it was playing poker with death. A fire on the shore might mean that friendly people were guiding your canoe to a safe landing. Or it might mean that the oven was heating up for a neighborhood roasting. Beach visited dozens of these places, and in most instances carried away the specimen tins, properly filled. Some of the villagers were timid, in deadly fear of their neighbors; others were so dangerous that Beach never let them get behind his back. In one of the tamest villages he was knocked down--by an earthquake. At the tip end of his journey 165 miles up the Sepik, he scored his triumph. He cajoled a warrior into submitting to the whole treatment, and recovered 105 worms.

On his swing back, he revisited some of the spots which had seemed especially hostile. At Moim, for instance, he had used his diplomacy, plus a liberal gift of gimcracks, and distributed 95 tins. When he returned a few days later he got them all back in good order. On August 11, after having his canoe swamped in a gale, he reached the mouth of the Sepik and paid off his canoe boys. They charged him thirty shillings apiece, and Beach rounded off his diary by saying that it was no trouble at all to handle the Sepik natives, if you used a little common sense.

Well, the young cub got back to me, smiling and cheerful. It was a mad trip, but I rather envied him the adventure. I think its outstanding feature was Beach’s nonchalance in returning to the savage villages and collecting the tins he had left behind.

Now about that roll of £400 which he left in Eloisa’s keeping, just overnight. I learned about that later. In approximately three weeks of voyaging to hell and back, he had found time to shoot down a collection of birds of paradise which he sold to a handy trader somewhere on the way home. I sometimes wonder if poaching didn’t motivate that fearless voyage.

Byron Beach left me as picturesquely as he had come into my life. One fine afternoon, off the Solomon Islands, he sailed into the sunset in a trim little schooner that he had borrowed for the joy ride. He had also borrowed a trim little native girl. Neither Byron, boat nor beauty ever came back to that port, or any other that I know of. But I am inclined to believe that wherever he landed he landed on his feet.

## CHAPTER X

KING SOLOMON’S GOLD

New Guinea was my jumping off place for the Solomon Islands, and “jumping off” well describes my first trip around that great island chain. I had only a few weeks to work in, and to draw conclusions which were to lead up to years of campaigning along 700 miles of that wild archipelago. If you will recall George Fulton, the man in evening dress whom I met in a smelly trader’s store, you will remember his half-promise to send me down to lost Rennell Island on the Lever Brothers’ yacht. Well, he had kept his promise--with reservations--and I was at last on the Levers’ _Koonakarra_, heading southeast. I had planned to go on the Government’s _Bellama_, but she was wrecked in a hurricane. To be transferred to George Fulton’s boat seemed like a stroke of luck. Now I could see Rennell Island....

It was nine years before I saw Rennell, for the very good reason that George Fulton didn’t want me to see it. He had changed his mind since I talked with him. Rennell might turn out to be a phosphate island, one of those volcanic freaks which quantities of bird guano and submersion in sea water have loaded with valuable crystalline fertilizer. Fulton didn’t want Rockefeller people snooping around his potential bonanza. A few years later he found that Rennell’s wealth was just another myth of King Solomon’s gold.

Alvaro Mendaña, who found these islands in 1568, returned to Spain and told King Philip that he had discovered the place where King Solomon got his gold. Philip rewarded the naughty liar by sending him on a second expedition; but when he returned to the isles of specious wealth he found that they had disappeared. Just another case of bad Renaissance navigation, but Mendaña died hunting for the vanished Solomons. They were lost for 200 years. Monsieur de Bougainville found them again in 1768.

As far as Rennell Island was concerned, for a long while I felt that I had been cheated of my gold. It was not idle curiosity which drew me toward that mysterious spot. If the people had been, as George Fulton said, “practically untouched for ages,” I might find there a clue to the origin of the Polynesian race. Many of the ancient invasions have been traced through the evidence of the hookworm. The public health physician, you see, must be a bit of an anthropologist, a bit of a politician and a bit of a historian....

But I had to wait until 1930 to see Rennell Island.

The _Koonakarra_ of 1921 was so busy trading, recruiting and supervising plantations that I had to pick up what information I could get between stops. I had an opportunity to draw one large conclusion: that natives from the big islands to the north, near the infesting trade routes, were much the more heavily diseased. Disease diminished steadily as we moved down toward the less frequented parts. My superficial look at a population which, for lack of an accurate census, was estimated at 100,000, verified my theory: _Epidemics are the fruits of island hospitality._

In those days little could be done to improve conditions. That group of a half-dozen enormous islands, and the many little outlying ones, was served by one lone Medical Officer, and some missionary doctors who strove with a bravery against conditions that should have broken their valiant spirits.

Among the unsung heroes--but no missionary--was my friend J. C. Barley, Oxford M.A., who had voluntarily given his life to a God-forsaken post at Kirakira. In his jungle house he was like something out of Kipling, dressing for the evening, having his spot of gin and bitters before dinner, his sound cigar afterward. He might have gone anywhere in the colonial service, for as a young Oxonian he had outranked hundreds in competitive examinations. But he was too clean a sportsman to play politics. His passion for ethnology and his affectionate responsibility for the natives kept him where he was. He had become the people’s advocate, and knew more about the Solomons than any official report could ever tell. His trips for inspection and research were his only relief from solitude.

I only speak of Barley because he was so useful to my future work and because of pleasant memories of his charming mind; in fact I should not write at all of this brief survey, except that I wish to point out a few spots where in later years I returned and marked the changes wrought by contact with the outer world.

Bill Tully and I worked mostly at night, lecturing by lantern light. The ship would be off in the early morning. At Star Harbour on San Cristoval, the largest island on the unfrequented southeast, the naked people carried candlenut torches as they wound down the mountain trail. It was like something out of “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream,” that twisting stream of light. Few traders and no missionaries had come to them, and they showed a low rate of infection. A friendly, backward Negroid people, they were endangered by their own hospitality. Charley One Arm, the policeman, our fierce black guide, couldn’t understand us when we refused the temporary gift of two island daughters. I went away dreading what might happen when more trading ships came in.

Santa Ana lay so near that one of their canoes, bastard ebony with mother-of-pearl insets, could take you there in an hour or two. Yet the Santa Ana folk were light-skinned and their features almost Caucasian. They wore bones in their noses and shark’s teeth around their necks. There was more trading, hence more hookworm. I gave treatments to Trader Kuper’s two little half-caste sons. It was a good investment, and later I shall tell you why.

Graciosa Bay was so wild that Mr. Mathews, Lever Brothers’ representative who had lived there fifteen years with an armed guard, warned us not to come ashore. With knives and fishhooks we lured a few of the untamed to come aboard the launch and be examined. In fifteen years the population had dropped from 3,000 to 500. Somehow, in spite of their savagery, they had allowed vicious malaria and tuberculosis to get in.

Near-by Reef Island showed a different, lighter breed. Somewhat missionized, largely pagan, it had a murderous reputation. It was in its harbor, Mohawk Bay, that an incident occurred which I remembered for twelve years. After a lantern-light lecture I was resting in the whaleboat. In the dim moonlight a naked man came floundering toward me. I reached for a hatchet, and a mild voice told me that it was only Sam, the Christian teacher. I had made a mistake, Sam told me, and gone to a heathen village. His was the Christian village I should have given my magic tins to. And wouldn’t I come? It was too late for that, so I let him stand waist-high in the water while I taught him the outline of my pidgin English lecture. I gave him tins and told him to bring them back to me in the morning. He brought them to me at dawn, and I admired his Christian fortitude. Poor devil--like the others, he thought our tins were magic boxes that would cure the people. I waited twelve years to hear the sequel to that story....

At Mohawk Bay I found that a young native was selling the services of his fiancée to our sailors. Brides were expensive there, and he had formed a syndicate to buy her, then rent her out until she had earned the price. It was “the fashion.” Not as a moralist, but as a doctor I asked the question: Who would educate people like these, upon fast-opening trade routes? Who would teach them self-protection? The missionaries? Perhaps. But the doctor must follow, or there would be nobody left to educate.

“Recruiting,” that legalized form of contract labor, might act as an educator. The High Commission Government was already requiring that plantation hands should be well-cared-for medically and sufficiently fed.

In a lonely bay I saw recruiters at work. One man with a rifle lay flat in the bow of a cutter, covering every movement of another man who approached the shore in a whaleboat. The whaleboat backed water all the way, and the man sent to parley stood up, carefully facing the naked savages who waited on the beach. All during the long powwow the hidden rifle was carefully aimed. These labor conferences were no job for a coward. So many lone recruiters had been killed on duty that the Government had made it a law that they must hunt in pairs.

Considering the vast work which we must soon undertake in the Solomon Islands, I was encouraged when I found that the intelligent native looked upon indentured labor service as a blessing, just as it had been in Papua. An island boy said to me, “I wish the _Hawk_ would come soon.” The _Hawk_ was a recruiting ship. I asked him why he wanted it to come soon, and he said, “There are so many sore-legs in the village.” This boy knew what was good for his people, and I hoped that there would be many more like him.

* * * * *

I never think of Sikiana without a little sadness. Three small atolls all but link. The Sikiana Group was the last land to be discovered in 1791 and since then very few vessels had touched there. The inhabitants were pure Polynesian people; and because our crew was composed of Sikiana men our landing was a joyous homecoming. Every man-jack in the village was lightly lit on homemade toddy; the Ellice Islanders, their blood-cousins, had taught them how to cut the central spathe of the coconut, catch the drip, and trust in fermentation. Unfermented, it makes a fine baby food. In toddy form, it is intoxicating.

There was some heathen religious festival going on, hence the bibulous hilarity. The women, who never drank, couldn’t speak pidgin. Much gesturing, and the aid of our Sikiana sailors, who were sharing the toddy, sent swimmers and canoemen to the neighboring atolls to spread the news. And the people danced. Not lewdly, but with the natural grace of unspoiled bodies. They were completely pagan. No missionary had ever settled here. Traders hadn’t debauched them; the soil was too poor to produce anything worth trading for.

The girls were lovely with their long, fine, glossy hair; they hadn’t learned to bob it as they were doing on the missionized islands. They wore modest _lavalavas_ from waist to ankles, and a kerchief which they knotted around the neck and drew under one arm. Some of the men wore their hair long, too, in ancient Polynesian fashion. I made friends with a splendid young fellow named Lautaua, who talked fair pidgin and told me how “in the time of his grandfather” (that might mean a thousand years ago; they had a habit of reckoning time by grandfathers) the Tongafiti had come to Sikiana and killed everybody except the women, and how succeeding migrations from Ongtong Java and the Ellices had drifted there in lost canoes.

I only mention their drinking because it was something of a freak in that corner of the Pacific. The Sikiana folk only made toddy on festival occasions, and never took it beyond the point of exhilaration. Later on, taking the advice of Mr. Barley, who was always their generous friend, they stopped making and drinking toddy. In Sikiana they were gay enough without false stimulation--a friendly, virtuous, lovable people; perhaps their custom of keeping women away from liquor helped maintain their racial self-respect. By and large, I have found the tribes on comparatively sterile islands superior in health and character to their neighbors who had little to do but lie in the shade and catch bananas. It’s the same the wide world over; those of Adam’s sons who work for a living are better fitted to cope with the cruelties of life.

Young children held our hands and drew our arms around them. The moon swung high over the lagoon and our returned sailors, quite sober now, daintily walked with their girls, up and down the beach. As we sat on the sand, waiting for the lecture audience to come on, young girls put garlands around our necks, chains which would bind our memories to Sikiana; these were ropes of hair, a strand from the head of every girl.

I had given lectures under odd conditions, but never before like this. White moonlight, pretty, laughing faces, simple people who took it all as the greatest joke in the world, but were so kind-hearted that they followed our instructions faithfully, as one might indulge a feeble-minded person of whom one is fond. Everybody smiled, even the dignified patriarch whom we called Old Number One; he was an unsalaried official representative of the Government. Between Old Number One and Lautaua, everything was arranged for us. Next day when we departed all was in order.

A simple people, allowed to grow up in their own way. Were they the uncivilized ones, or were we? They were not entirely free from tuberculosis; but they seemed to have set up an immunity. Here was a Government without the need of officialdom; no discord, no poverty, no distress, no taxes, no clothing to speak of; and no vices more obnoxious than a little toddy-drinking on national holidays.

I left happy Sikiana with a certain fear for its future. I saw it again in 1933....

* * * * *

I returned by way of Sydney to pick up my family. In a week or so I would be pointing toward Suva, which was the cultural center of the South Pacific--if you disregard the scientifically advanced universities in Australia and New Zealand. Suva was to be headquarters for the rest of my professional career.

Thus far I had worked toward proving my favorite point: Depopulation follows the visitor. I believed what I still believe--that the item which looms over everything else in the question of failing native races _is the introduction of diseases to which they have no immunity_. I had seen its effects so often, right under my eyes.

Moving toward Sydney, I took stock of my South Sea experience, which had covered less than four years. I was beginning to see that one bad old theory was losing ground--the belief that the native, especially the Melanesian, is an economic unit to be exploited till he dies. Governments once blind and cruel were beginning to see light. The British High Commission, controlling five island groups, was struggling toward better things. So was progressive New Zealand with her mandates and possessions over wide stretches of Polynesia.

I considered the stumbling blocks in the way of curing sick Oceania. The Rockefeller Foundation, a vast scientific machine tuned up to deal out mercy in a practical, businesslike way, must have a co-operation which the Pacific administrations of that day were not offering. There must be teamwork, or nothing could be accomplished. Medical authority must come from a central brain. As things stood, the health physicians were political appointees, either lazy and incompetent time-servers or good men baffled by overwork and the whims of local government. When one good health officer retired a successor would come in to undo whatever he had begun. It was medical chaos, and I felt that the Foundation’s liberal share in cleaning up the Pacific must be backed up by some unified control. Else the work would be as futile as sweeping fog off a back porch. Suva, capital of Fiji, was headquarters for the British High Commission, and the Governor of Fiji was its head. Suva would be the ideal center for such medical authority.

I considered the problem of leprosy. All along the way I had encountered this imported disease, but there was no census to tell whether or not it was increasing. The cure and prevention of leprosy is methodical treatment with the one known remedy, and segregation of the infected. In all the South Pacific except Fiji there was nothing like a modern leper colony. The island governments should combine to support one.

The shortage of doctors had been very discouraging. Few competent white men cared to endure tropical hardships for starvation pay. From sheer boredom and despair many of them became quacks and drunkards--even if they hadn’t started out that way. The answer to that was educated native medical men.... I have talked about that a great deal, because that idea never left me. And now I was going to Fiji, where there had already been a crude attempt to teach medicine to Fijians.

As our ship neared Suva, a larger worry was in the back of my mind. Through years of study, from North Queensland to Papua, from Papua to New Guinea, from New Guinea to the Solomon Islands, I had found that oil of chenopodium was not working well enough or fast enough to relieve the million patients who reached out for a cure. In Rabaul’s hospital I had given injections of it, hoping to make the drug more effective through a new channel. The experiment had removed whipworms, but almost no hookworms.

I had to look these facts in the face. Chenopodium, on which we had relied as a cure for one of the world’s most prevalent blights, was not coming up to our expectations. There seemed no answer to that, until help came from an unexpected quarter.

## CHAPTER XI

“SO YOU’VE COME TO FIJI!”

I have such a collection of hurricanes that in self-searching moments I call myself “The Storm King’s Target.” The wind that blew us around an island, that time we were trying to make Rabaul, is an example. Another was one hot day in Fiji, years later, when our half-caste skipper demonstrated his share of brains: He saw the storm coming and poked our cockleshell into a sheltering cove. For three days we “holed up” with District Officer Bob and his wife Elaine, and watched a Fiji village take wings; the big palm-thatched meeting-house looked like a flying haystack. On the way home I searched for landmarks. Two rivers on Viti Levu had plunged together; an East Indian village had been swept away, everybody drowned. A Fijian town had vanished under a sliding mountain.

Once in North Queensland I saw a galvanized iron roof wrap itself around a telephone pole as you wrap paper around a pencil. I’ve been lucky; never has a ship gone down under me--quite. Several ships, though, have been wrecked before I had time to get aboard.

Two refuges for the soul in a hurricane are the Power of Prayer and the Power of Swear. Take your choice. Once the big wind roared over a mission station, and the missioner, who didn’t care to go himself, sent loyal converts down to bring in his launch, and they saved the boat from the gale’s fury. Neighbors made scandal of the wanton risk, but the missionary smiled, “Oh, no. It was no risk. I saw the Spirit hovering over them when they went down to the water.”

Another hurricane met our ship coming toward Fiji from Sydney, and I fell back on the Power of Swear. With every comber that plowed through the dining saloon of the old 1,100-ton _Suva_ I dug up long-forgotten oaths. My wife and child got through; Eloisa comes of a pithy stock, otherwise she could never have followed me in my curious career. This trip was a soul-shaker. The Fijians have a _meke_ song in which they address the powers of the hurricane, “blown from the black mouths of the Ladies of the West.” For three horrible days the Ladies of the West gave it to us, straight. The captain tied our propeller-shaft in a bowknot, heading straight into the volley, trying to drag us out of an invisible grip.

I had my hands full, seeing that my eight-year-old Harriette wasn’t drowned in our stateroom. An Australian lady furnished a touch “of romance.” A hard one would shiver our timbers, she would cling to me, her children would cling to her. “Oh, Doctor, I’m so glad”--she would shriek above the tempest--“that you’re here on the ship. I feel so much safer.” I imagined myself swimming with Eloisa and Harriette in one hand and the Australian lady (with family) in the other.

When we limped into Suva harbor the sea had turned to glass. Hurricanes have an annoying way of doing things like that.

There on our starboard hand lay the jumbled little waterfront; and on our portside a craggy peak they call The Devil’s Thumb; perpetual landslides had marked its face with a perfect =Y=, as though Yale sophomores had been working overnight.

* * * * *

Suva, capital of Fiji, has advanced a great deal in the last eighteen years. Nowadays occasional passenger liners dock there and allow tourists to straighten out their sea legs. The men can buy their favorite brand at Piccadilly tobacconists or London bars. The debutantes can play tennis, while their mothers visit little jewel shops and squander a few shillings on a small handful of silver-gilt pearls that are lovely and have no respectable commercial rating, or take in the museum and shudder at the collection of savage iron-wood clubs which ex-cannibals traded for hymnals,--or buy a four-shilling guidebook at the Carnegie Library,--or inspect the Government Building, that cost about $1,500,000 and looks a size too large for Pittsburgh; that structure was built after the gold rush of ’32 when the colony went madder than Californians and started things on a grand scale--for a while. Suva today is like any small colonial capital. Whiskered Sikh policemen in staring red tunics guide the traffic; along the orderly streets walk orderly Fijians, short white _sulus_ and bare legs under English coats, their immense, smoothly cut headdresses of kinky hair giving them the appearance of English guardsmen in regimental bearskin busbies. Dignified, broad-shouldered, small-waisted, they seem to be heading for some savage war-dance. Actually they are going to church, or to the native motion picture palace.

Suva in 1922 had one dirt road that ran to Nausori, fifteen miles away. The taxi fare was about $7.50. Your director, to save Rockefeller funds, usually went there on the little _Andi Roronga_, which took from 9 A.M. to 1 P.M. with a stop along the mangrove-tangled Rewa. She started back at two. When you went by taxi you had to cross the river on a funny pontoon with a submerged cable.

I was no longer under the loose-handed control of Australia. Now it was the British High Commission that owned Fiji’s 250-odd islands, had a grip on the Solomons, a tiny toehold on the independent Kingdom of Tonga, controlled the Gilbert and Ellice Group and ran some curiously distant isles, like Rotumah and Pitcairn and Christmas Island. The Governor of Fiji was (and is) the temporal head of the High Commission. However, the real government comes from London. Colonials as a rule don’t understand Englishmen. Americans, after what happened about 1776, can sympathize. The Yankee slides comfortably into the ways of the Canadian, the Australian, the New Zealander or South African. The born Englishman with his hauteur and peculiarity is another fish to fry. He has ruled his far-flung dominions uncannily well, but his colonials tender him more respect than love.

Yet down there I have worked with Englishmen for whom I felt the deepest loyalty and friendship. Chris Kendrick is one of them. Barley is another, and there are many more. Pretty soon I am going to tell you of another, who was my associate for eight years in Fiji.

Colonials in Suva used to grumble, “Back in London they don’t know we’re alive.” But the politicians knew. Fiji became a dumping place for younger sons and Ministry favorites. Young chaps, green as grass and fresh as paint, were called “cadets,” and there was always a new cadet to fill the desk left vacant by retirement or promotion. Against the cadet system the experienced colonial, who knew the land and the people, hadn’t the ghost of a show.

Where the English are respected and not liked, the Americans are liked but not respected. Colonials regard us as too evangelical, too insistent on modern shower baths in every room and on having everybody’s trousers creased in the same way. They speak of us as rotten colonizers; and these arguments are in the face of our record in Cuba, for instance, where we cleaned up yellow fever and gave the island real sanitation.... I remember what an educated Cuban once said to me, “Of course we don’t like you, Doctor. You found us dirty and contented; now we are clean and unhappy.”

* * * * *

Naturally the British Empire must exact tribute from her dominions or she could not survive. All over Britain’s Pacific empire “Buy English” was behind the sale of all the machinery, all the material used in public improvements. Yet it was astonishing how popular American products remained, in spite of the high preferential tariff against them. American cars, burdened with a 45 per cent duty, were eagerly sought in New Zealand, Australia, Fiji. Loyal colonials had their tongues hanging out in their desire to buy British automobiles, yet pig-headed English manufacturers were sending low-powered, poorly sprung cars, built for smooth, hill-less roads. Our own Henry Ford would have adapted his article to geographical requirements. Not so the British maker with his cry, “Buy English!”

Sunkist oranges were everywhere, an example of American trade-genius under difficulties. New Zealand, with her own tropical possessions and access to Australia’s and Jamaica’s supplies, displayed Sunkist oranges in every remote village. It’s still an unfathomable mystery to me, how these California go-getters can drag oranges eight or nine thousand miles, and profit under adverse conditions. Maybe it is because their fruit is obtainable all year round, or because its uniform size makes it attractive.

As my work went on in Fiji I had to put up a fight for one important drug, the arsenical derivative neosalvarsan, often conveniently called “salvarsan,” although it is Ehrlich’s improvement on his own salvarsan discovery. It is indispensable in the treatment of yaws. On one of my brief trips to the United States I argued the high cost of neosalvarsan with wholesale drug manufacturers who came to a meeting of the American Medical Association. Could the price be cut down if we ordered it in large quantities? I promised that if they would give us a good price we could use $7500 worth a year. When our purchasing agent struck a bargain I don’t think the wholesalers regretted it. We used the order soon after the first shipment, and cabled for more. When we ceased to buy in driblet lots, the cost of neosalvarsan was cut four times, and each price was lower than that set by the Crown Agent in London--he being the gentleman whom the Mother Country appoints to collect a large part of the tax on colonies and dominions. Through the deal our purchasing agent made with American wholesalers natives of the South Pacific were saved more than the Foundation’s expenditure on building programs, health campaigns and my salary.

This sudden attack on the high price of drugs caused a mild sensation in London, which had governed the purchase of arsenicals up to that time. The Crown Agent responsible for disbursements compared our economical prices with those the colony had been paying. The reaction was true to form. Representatives of the Home Government wanted to know, unofficially, if we were in cahoots with some big Yankee chemical firm. At first an attempt was made to discredit my drug; then the price of salvarsan came tobogganing all through the British Empire.

* * * * *

My reception in official Suva, though polite, was never emotional. There had been a short Rockefeller campaign there in 1917-1918, which had left the Administration markedly unenthusiastic. The Governor, Sir Cecil Hunter Rodwell, was a fine fellow, and I owe much to him and to Sir Maynard Hedstrom, a wealthy merchant who could see much further ahead of his nose than most I met; Hedstrom was with me in all my endeavors.

The Suva Hospital was not stately--a creaky old shack tinkered up somehow. The new War Memorial was finished a few months later when the Medical Department took it over; in spite of its newness it was a makeshift, and so small that it was overcrowded until the building program of 1934. The native nurses, for example, were jammed into an ancient wooden structure, where they had to carry their own firewood and do their own cooking in most primitive style; and these were the girls we must depend upon to raise Fijian standards of living.

There were between twenty-two and twenty-four medical officers whose average brains and conscientiousness were of a high order. I called them “the Old Guard” and was sorry that so many of them were retired soon afterwards; younger ones who replaced many of them had neither the social, educational nor ethical ideals of their predecessors. And it seemed to me that cadets who came out for the civil administration were also a step-down in quality.

There were forty Native Medical Practitioners--natives given a three-year course in simple medicine and surgery. They had no classroom, no charts, only one small book of simple medicine and hygiene, and that was written in Fijian. Teaching paraphernalia was practically nil. These boys attended out-patients, acted as male nurses, attended the doctors on their rounds. Their lectures were given at the hospital by the Chief Medical Officer and the Resident Medical Officer. When these officers spoke Fijian and were interested, the results were good; when they were not interested the formal education was very sketchy.

I studied this system, developed for over thirty years, and wondered if it wasn’t an answer to my prayer for something constructive. Some of these boys, though taught so little surgical practice, developed great ability; it was almost as though their cannibal ancestry had given them a particular flair for human anatomy. One Native Medical Practitioner (N.M.P.) was Sowani, who was lent to the Gilbert Island Colony and made a famous reputation as a surgeon; I shall tell of him in the proper place.

There was a system of native obstetrical nursing as well as a training school for European nurses. The native nurses had lectures from a Fijian with the same educational background as their own. One lecture a week for six months each of two years, then the girls were sent with N.M.P.’s to assist Fijian mothers in confinement. Bed-pan carrying for European probationers, mopping, and doorknob cleaning made up their only other training. They spoke no English.

* * * * *

The Chief Medical Officer sat pining at his desk when I made my first call. He was about to retire, and that splendid Englishman, Dr. Aubrey Montague, with twenty years of local experience, was about to take his place.

The soon-retiring C.M.O. rose from his work, offered me his hand and said mournfully, “So you’ve come to Fiji!”

Yes, we’d come to Fiji. The Chief Medical Officer retained the hairline balance of politeness. The Foundation was a nice philanthropic institution, and it was sweet of us to be interested and all that; but there was no enthusiasm for chenopodium. I heartily agreed with him. We compared notes--without profit. You can’t invent a cure-all overnight. There was nothing to take the place of what we had, and nothing to do but go on.

It was a boon to me and to Fiji when Dr. Aubrey Montague took over the desk of the Chief Medical Officer. He was the best of the Anglo-Saxon breed, one of the most helpful influences that ever touched my life. Clear-headed, clear-eyed, he was spiritually incapable of lying even to himself. I never knew him to do an underhand thing or go back on his word--quite a record for an official in the tropics. He was one of the three ablest men I have known in the Pacific and he didn’t take third place. A naturally shy man walls himself in. I put a high value on the intimacy we formed when the wall was broken and I could look in on his well-controlled intellect.

His clean life and ideals were free from intolerance; he judged men leniently. I have often seen them fail him, and be forgiven tomorrow after he had weighed them in his kindly practical mind. His administration opened an era of large expansion, especially along lines of preventive medicine. A routine politician would have thrown money around. Montague was economical, almost parsimonious. It was a wondrous thing in those days to see government funds protected by a gentleman’s deep responsibility to King and Country.

Governors continually came to him with questions outside his department; advice from his clear mind was never less than valuable. So it was a great shock to me when Montague, after thirty years of service to the Empire, was allowed to retire and to die without the honors he richly deserved. He had done his job unobtrusively and lacked the self-seeking qualities that bid for titles. The only monument he left behind him was an unfillable gap.

* * * * *

Through those first few months we agreed on three ambitious plans. Montague wanted an improved native medical school for his Fijians, a real one instead of a makeshift. His wish was mine, and uppermost in my thoughts; but I wanted this educational project to reach out over all the South Pacific. It was a big idea which might have seemed audacious, but we discussed its possibilities from every angle. He saw clearly the advantage of sending competently educated islanders back to their homes to work among their own people.

We went into the subject of asylum for lepers at Mokogai,[2] a near-by island where the old establishment had been moldering for years. I pointed out that all the poor, small Pacific groups might combine their resources co-operatively and make Mokogai the center, a modernized and enlarged plant where patients could be cared for at minimum cost and with maximum results. Here would be teamwork, the thing most needed over those wide blue waters.

And we agreed on another design for teamwork. High Commission control should be centralized more, particularly in health matters. Quick communications, radio especially, were bringing the islands together. We saw a far vision of a unified medical service; one that would make sense out of the bedlam that existed from New Guinea to the Society Islands. Montague and I were for this plan, and before our preliminary talks were over we had decided that he, Montague, was to secure the backing of the Fiji Government and that I was to bring in the financial and moral support of governments controlling the many Pacific groups around us.

These were long, long thoughts. But before his retirement Montague saw two of his dreams, and mine, come true. The third was partially realized and may be worked out fully in the end. I hope so, for the sake of a million patients.... I know that no man was ever more generously helped than I was, with the friendship of Montague on the Government side and with Sir Maynard Hedstrom backing me in the Legislative Council. Hedstrom, by the way, always stood ready to act as interpreter for my Yankee lingo and Yankee methods when I had to argue before cautious governors.

The practicability of a modernized native medical school came home to me. I had had a white man’s peep into the Melanesian mind; anthropologists rank him as the mental equal of the Caucasian; the Polynesian stands a grade higher intellectually, with the Japanese; while the Chinese heads the list. Environment, geography and tradition have held so many races back that it is impossible to compare them with our own ingenious and self-destructive civilization.

* * * * *

I had gone over all this when Malakai, N.M.P., was sent to me, and my mind was made up.

Malakai had been made Native Practitioner by the hit-or-miss of the old school. More than half self-educated, his inquisitive mind would never let a subject go until he had mastered it. He was a cannibal’s grandson, I have no doubt; so many of the best ones were. His favorite dish was scientific books, which he devoured.

He came to me, a slim young man of twenty with the fine bronze skin of the Melano-Polynesian mixture. Something of a dude, he wore a silk _lavalava_ down to his good Fijian knees. His English was imperfect then. In 1924 when I went out on my series of group surveys, I showed him around as a model for the proposed Native Medical Practitioner. He became the best microscopist among the thirty-odd I have trained; his accurate eyes became mine in a work for which poor sight unfitted me. Moreover, he was father, mother, son and valet to me. It was unseemly to set him to small drudgery. Malakai settled that question; when we were in the field he invariably laid out my clean clothes, and did laundry work among savages who were too ignorant for such things. At night he gave me my quinine, and he was always the first up in the morning. The old-time missionary who spoke of the Fijian as “inclined to indolence” should have met Malakai. Once when we were out in the jungle my model N.M.P. fired the native cook and took over the job. Could he cook? Of course!

I’m showing you Malakai, but not as a great exception among Fijians. There are thousands of him on his home islands, only awaiting their chance; they’re the handiest people I’ve ever seen, adaptable, clever, willing, loyal, dependable in emergency. Never once has a trusted Fijian let me down, or failed to put up with hardship and smile in adversity. Treat them with the consideration they deserve, trust them as they should be trusted.... Well, I’ve seen many of their fine young men come on, and I’m watching many on their way up....

On my return visit to Sikiana I was troubled by the number of enlarged spleens I found among the people. Malakai was the first to suggest a wide infection of malaria, but I pooh-poohed. Where were the anopheline mosquitoes? Malakai disappeared and came back smiling. “Doctor, I’ve let them bite me. They stand on their heads to feed, and they have spotted wings.” He showed me several captured anopheles and saved me from being ridiculous in my report.

I shall never forget his appearance when he came back from a later mission to the New Hebrides. He had served for a year and a half as the only purely Condominium medical officer. Suddenly there came a cable: “HAVE QUITTED CONDOMINIUM, MALAKAI.” It was a matter of color. A newly-appointed official had been born on an island where nobody was exactly lily-white; so he was extremely race-sensitive, and insisted on putting the boy from Fiji in his place. We welcomed Malakai back to Suva because we had let him go at a sacrifice in order to demonstrate the efficiency of native doctors.

The picture of his getting off the boat was something to remember. He had discarded the proud _lavalava_ for a pair of trousers. He merely said he liked them, and nobody could pry the real reason out of him. About a year later he showed up with a new silk _lavalava_, and was ready to tell about the trousers. Down in the New Hebrides he had experimented once too often with mosquitoes; an attack of malaria had made his legs so thin that he was ashamed of them. The Fijian dandy’s pride is in his swelling calves and slim ankles.

In 1926 when I was going from the New Hebrides to Sydney on the _Makambo_, Captain Tom Brown moved Malakai from second class to the captain’s table, a gesture of respect. On my return to the Cook Islands in 1932, the natives asked only two questions: Where was Malakai and what had I done with my big camera? I had been the fifth wheel in the wagon. For three years Malakai ran our yaws unit in Fiji. A European doctor couldn’t have done the work as well with four times the money. Malakai’s unit was a model.

A European Medical Officer on the Ellice group went alcoholic, so I sent Malakai down for six months. After we had to call him home the local District Officer almost challenged me to a duel; he was going half-crazy, he said, because deputations from surrounding islands were pouring in, clamoring for Malakai’s services.

My young doctor’s addiction to silk neckties, silk shirts, silk _lavalavas_, fine coats, wrist watches, mandolins and guitars, once ran him afoul of a Fijian custom called _kere kere_. The clans are communistic, and if you happen to be a clansman anything you have is theirs by divine right. That’s why he returned from his home town looking like a cat that had been dipped into the sea. His family had trimmed him down to a ragged shirt and a cotton _lavalava_. The highest-born Fijian may get this rummage sale welcome if he ventures into the land of his birth. It quells ambition.

That, of course, belonged to the private life of Malakai. So did his marriage to a handsome wife, who used to accompany him on his trips. When he started sailing alone I was afraid of trouble; Malakai, temperamentally, would have made an ideal guardian for a very old Turk with a very large harem--no outside assistant would have been necessary. Then there was the matter of his savings. Like all Pacific Islanders he had no idea of a money economy. Why save for a rainy day? The sun will come out; it always does.

Love came to Malakai’s life and money flew out of the window. I had badgered him into putting £119 in a savings account; but Malakai got hold of the book. He was having wife-trouble. The first Mrs. Malakai was barren, and the Fijian who hasn’t fathered a child is jeered at as something less than a proper man; sterility is grounds for divorce. Malakai had gone courting a native nurse, and the romance had dug deep into his £119. He blew his whole remaining balance on a party to proclaim an approaching heir--on the sinister side. His fiancée was far from sterile--but how to give an honest name to the unborn Malakai, Junior?

Well, I talked to Magistrate Burrowes, who obligingly called two divorce hearings--and dismissed them both because neither Malakai nor his friends, for inscrutable Fijian reasons, would testify to the fact. At a third hearing Burrowes was in a sour temper. Bari and Rafaeli, Malakai’s friends, remained mum, but Malakai loosened up a little. Annoyed, the magistrate penalized him three pounds a month out of his N.M.P. salary of nine pounds--probably the first alimony ever paid by a Fijian. On the first of every month the retired Mrs. Malakai showed up to collect. She bled her ex-husband white as a Swede; then came to me for six months’ payment in advance to take her on a holiday trip. I argued that three months’ cash in hand is worth a lifetime of installments in the bush. She fancied the idea, and finally for fifteen pounds spot-on-the-counter surrendered Malakai for life. Now she could buy presents, buy clothes, go home, save her face. And, quite naturally, pick out a husband. Honor was satisfied. Another instance of native money psychology.

In 1936 Malakai went to the Gilbert and Ellice Islands as Senior Medical Practitioner. When he left there, it required two Europeans to fill his post. He came back to Fiji in 1939, a few days before I retired.

* * * * *

In his ability and in his foibles Malakai was all Fijian. He settled my determination on higher education for such men. Dr. Montague was in the mood for it. If we could have taken that bull by the horns in 1922-1923 our enthusiasm might have swept in the political consent and money backing of at least eight great island groups. All we needed was the partnership of the Rockefeller Foundation. That, I guessed, was merely a matter of asking.

My guess was wrong. I wrote a detailed letter to Dr. Victor Heiser and outlined our plan. Just a little school with forty undergraduates, to start with. It could be an adjunct to the new hospital in Suva, but need not be an expensive set of buildings. Dr. Montague’s plans were modest in price and extremely practical. Governor Sir Eyre Hutson was enthusiastic. Administrators on distant island groups were begging for it. Now was the time.

Ardently I wrote:

The Foundation gives cheerfully to help medical schools for Chinese, Spanish, English and what you please, to people who are better able to help themselves than these poor blacks out here who are as eager for a chance of this sort as ever a white man was. The Board could give this school and fund half of a teacher’s salary; the other half might be made up by the different groups ... the money would produce results at a far higher rate than in England or Canada....

The reply came from 61 Broadway. Dr. Heiser with his usual sagacity had found the plan reasonable and practical. But the Foundation is so vast that it must be zoned into many divisions, such as a Division of Medical Sciences, a Division of Social Sciences, a Division of the Humanities, and so on. And the Division of Medical Sciences was dead against us; it was out for ambitious projects, and thought mine very third-rate indeed. Rockefeller millions were going into the great establishment in Peking. No use throwing good money after bad, on little squirt schools in the Pacific. After years of my dinging away at the subject, Heiser himself grew cold and asked me to forget it. Peking and many others were the big health investments....

Well, where is Peking today, after the Japanese have finished? And Fiji? I’m saving that information for dessert.

It is one of the ironies of our times, and a quaint one, that the Rockefeller Foundation mailed the Japanese a large check for their Public Health School on the same day the Mikado’s army bombed to powder a beautiful library which the Foundation had given to Chungking.

## CHAPTER XII

A DOCTOR EX OFFICIO

I was a dog without a collar, medically speaking. Official Fiji had heard about the avaricious Yankee, planting himself on foreign soil to amass a dishonest fortune. In 1922 a law was passed, for my personal benefit, to the effect that no American could practise medicine in Fiji without a “special permit.” The special permit was far less potent than a chauffeur’s license, and my official status, if any, was somewhat lower than that of the N.M.P. (Native Medical Practitioner). Until 1937 I was not legally qualified to treat anything but hookworm. In the meantime I had treated and been responsible for the care of hundreds of thousands of cases of hookworm, yaws, malaria, tuberculosis, ringworm and so on. Come to think of it, I hadn’t been a lawfully qualified physician in Papua and New Guinea. When Dr. McGusty came to power in Suva, he huffed and he puffed and he said, “All nonsense!”--and proceeded to get me a respectable license. In 1937 the Empire discovered that I was in Fiji, and I joined the British Medical Association.

Not that it mattered. Montague and I were together, never slipping a cog. He wasn’t the sort who fishes for praise, and he never failed to give me credit, if credit were due.

Fiji was a case of racial decline, with a trend upward. Briefly, the population fell from its 200,000 in the hearty cannibal days of 1870 to 105,000 in the Christian year 1891. The census of 1905 showed an appalling drop to 87,000; epidemics of endemic dysentery and whooping cough had decimated them every year; then measles swooped down on these non-immunes. A pause in the death rate, and in 1911 a slight increase in population which was to continue until 1917 when there were 91,000 living Fijians. They might have risen in eight years to the 1891 level but for the withering blast of influenza in 1918-1919. Once again they recovered from a low of around 82,000 until the New Year of 1937 showed a population of 98,291.

Discounting the World War’s gift of flu, which baffled all medicine, Fiji shows how the gradual fall in the death rate can almost be measured in terms of medical effort. I wish we could be smug and say that the trick is turned, both in Fiji and Western Polynesia. But there’s the other puzzling factor: the East Indian.

Today in Suva the tourist admires the picturesqueness of these Asiatics, brightening the streets with turbans and silken _saris_. In the early ’80’s they were first brought in as laborers, and succeeding shiploads increased them to 50,000. With natural progeny they grew to some 85,000, by the 1936 census. Fiji colonials began by believing that such immigrants were needed for industrial development; but in 1916 the indenturing of Indians ceased. Since then more of them have left than have entered. Those who leave are usually old; the re-entering ones are usually young adults.

During forty-five years the Indian birth rate far surpassed the Fijian. The steadier Fijian rate shows a rise. In the early ’90’s there was an excess of 7,000 native males over females, but the margin steadily narrowed until 1936 when the excess was reduced to 2,087. This indicates a healthy tendency. But wait. The Colony’s annual medical and health reports, 1921-1936, show that the Indian woman outbreeds the Fijian woman by 25 per cent; soon the Indian population must overtake the native Fijian. There is a greater loss by death among Fijians than among Indians. The Fijians lose more people from tuberculosis than the Indians do _from all causes_; the Fijians lose more children under five than the Indians do _from all causes_; the Fijians lose more from causes other than tuberculosis and death under five than the Indians do _from all causes_.

Add this up. Fijian mortality is three times that of the Indian, and the fertility of the Indian woman is 25 per cent higher than that of the Fijian woman.

The Indians in Fiji are survivals of thousands of ancestral generations of exposure to disease. Fiji with her better food, wages, housing and free medical attention was an unmixed blessing to these newcomers. Far from the teeming Punjab they dropped the shackles of caste, and brought with them a devouring hunger for land and freedom. The larger the family the larger the workable holdings; and there is no stigma on illegitimacy.

In 1922 the East Indians were spreading. Today they are spreading even faster until Fiji is threatened with becoming an annex to India. The Asiatic population is running about neck-and-neck with the native. Something should be done about it, of course, but what? Is it survival of the fittest? Not entirely. It is partly the artificial stimulation given to the oriental through medical science and a vastly improved environment. Some evils have come with the banishment of their old caste system. There is no longer the invisible barrier between Hindu, Brahman, Chamar, Pariah--and Moslem. The Indian found a new freedom in the tropic isles, and the immigrants were mostly very low-caste. Their ideals were vague, their women scarce, the recruiting system led to degeneracy, the marriage tie weakened, little girls were offered for barter. Cult priests from India would froth up fanaticism and loud-mouthed little Gandhis kept the pot boiling. India’s Nationalist Movement made a pretty mess of attempted social equality. The Indians had been allotted three seats on the Legislative Council on an equality with elected Fijian chiefs. The Asiatic members put up a howl for a common franchise, and when this was defeated in council, they promptly resigned. Then came the school question. It was fantastically impossible for the Government to build the hundred schools which the Indians demanded, while they declined to contribute their share to Government-fostered mission and private schools. So about a sixth of their children went without education.

I am taking no sides. I only report that the Indians are becoming conquerors by infiltration of an archipelago where the native deserves his own land and customs. In Fiji the Asiatic is developing a kindly fraternalism which Mother India never quite crushed out of him. Very often when one of them has been stranded in India, after a holiday, his friends in Fiji--Hindu, Pariah and Moslem--will chip in on a purse to fetch him back. At one time in our Suva household we had three Indian servants of three discordant faiths: a Hindu cook, a Moslem gardener, a Christian chambermaid. Back in the old home-town they might have cut each other’s throats every morning before breakfast. But here it was the song of songs, close harmony. I wish Eloisa had them now....

No, I am not against the experiment to bring back the East Indian. Only I wish they hadn’t tried it on Fiji, whose native people I have learned to love deeply.

Now how about the Fijian?

When you number his islands at 250 you include large Viti Levu, which bulks about 4,000 square miles, and its slenderer, somewhat smaller sister Vanua Levu to the northeast; then there is a scattering of fair-sized fellows scaling down to mere pin-points on the map. If some super-Hitler should decide to combine them there would be enough to fill New Jersey, almost. They are heavenly things, the tiny islands, with rounded bases of iron-brown rock and palms dipping toward the sea; so many fern baskets set around surprising blue inlets--blue and silver in the morning. Then you coast around toward larger footholds, elegant cliffs with threads of waterfall and great white shells on the shore, like bleaching skulls. In summer, which is December, the thermometer seldom rises above ninety-two degrees, and July Fourth is in the very ecstasy of spring. I have no real estate to sell in Fiji. So I speak only out of a homesick heart when I say that it is the best winter climate in the world, and the best climate, any time, for me.

Early discoverers called it “Feejee,” although the official name is Fiji--and that, too, is wrong. The correct name for it is Viti. Captain Cook made the mistake when he touched at the Tongan Islands, near neighbors, and heard the Polynesians say “Viti” in their own way. This group was honestly named “the Cannibal Islands.” The transit of fierce tribes from man-eating to prayer-meeting is miraculous. In 1927 when Martin Egan, as a traveler, saw a long file of sedate natives going to church, he remarked, “From Cannibalism to Calvinism!” And this describes it, although the predominant Church happens to be Wesleyan. It is almost impossible to believe that these quiet, law-abiding people have emerged so soon and gone so far.

The Fijians not only were cannibals, but were inordinately cruel. When a chief’s dwelling was being built captives were made to stand in the postholes “to hold up the house,” and were buried alive. A chief’s canoe was launched over living bodies, human rollers. When there was a shortage of enemy meat, hunters would stalk women and children of their own tribe; women and children were regarded as delicacies fit for visiting chiefs. When there were plenty of captives the resident chief would order out his livestock in the morning, to choose his meat. If one of them sneezed, which was considered an evidence of cowardice, the chief would cry “_Mbula!_” which meant, disdainfully, “I give you life.” No proper man ever ate coward-meat. Then the sneezer would reply, “_Moli_,” which meant, in effect, “Your words are like the sweet juice of the orange to me.” The word “_Mbula_” is often heard today, a pleasant greeting: “How’s your health?” “_Mbula vinaka_” is like a casual “My health is good.”

I am not so sure that their cannibalism was not caused originally by a protein shortage. There were no four-footed animals, with the possible exception of the rat. The Fijian fainted at sight of the first horse, as the Aztec did before Cortes’ ponies. Old tales tell of a maniacal blood-lust: How the father of King Thakombau cut out a disobedient brother’s tongue, roasted and ate it. How Thakombau (Evil of Mbau) performed the same feat on the severed arm of a living captive.... Widowhood was handled with frightful practicality: during a husband’s funeral the widow would lay her head in the lap of a seated woman, who would put one hand over the widow’s mouth, the other at the back of her neck; and a relative, sometimes a son, would string a vine around her neck and finish the job.

If some man of the tribe would come forward and claim her, the widow was spared. The very word for widow, _dawai_, is still an abusive term. Little girls who were betrothed to little boys had the vine-noose always waiting. If the boy happened to die it was etiquette to strangle the girl and toss her in his grave. Sometimes she was given a chance to return to her parents and try another marriage. Frequently the parents were so devil-ridden that they sent her back to the executioner. Yet the Fijians were, and are, a child-loving people. I cannot believe that the custom-bound parents who led their daughter back to death were not torn with genuine grief; the nice name for daughter is “rafter of the house.” The widow who was nursing a child or was pregnant was sent home to her father’s house and lived out her natural life.

The ceremonial over a dead chief would go on for a long time, at intervals. In a hundred days came the final feast. Some of the warriors would show up with a finger or two missing. They had cut them off as an expression of grief.

The first and last King of the Cannibal Islands was named Thakombau, and since most history books spell him “Cakobau” I must dwell on a trick of Fijian spelling that has driven native schoolboys to despair. Johann Sebastian Bach, descendant of the great composer and for years Fiji’s public printer, told me how this mad spelling came about so that the island of Mbengga, for instance, is printed “Beqa.” In the early days the man who did the missionaries’ printing ran short of type. In Fijian every _g_ and _d_ has an _n_ sound in front of it, so to save _n’s_, none were used, the _n_ sound being understood in front of each _g_ and _d_. Every Fijian _b_ has an _m_ sound in front of it so that letter was understood there and dropped. The plentiful _th_ sound ran the printer out of that character, so he substituted _c_ for _th_ as there is no other use for _c_ in Fijian. The common _ngg_ was replaced by a handy _q_. A full account of this typographical theory would require pages, but I hope I have outlined the principle, which shows some remarkable results.

This King called Thakombau (and spelled Cakobau) offers an example of the native money sense, that perfect vacuum. His warriors had been merrily destroying American trading establishments, and missions, occasionally pausing to eat the inhabitants. In 1858 President Buchanan sent the _Vandalia_ to press a claim for a $45,000 indemnity. The warships looked mighty strong, and Thakombau wasn’t getting on very well with his revolutions; the one way out seemed to be to sell his mess of empire for the debt. He offered the bargain to the United States and to England, but found no takers.

In 1874 home politics changed the British mind. According to current myth Thakombau was beleaguered on Mbau’s Gibraltar-rock when a British man o’ war lay handily offshore. A well-armed landing party scattered the besiegers, brought the King back to his tapa-lined house, and saw him make a cross on a paper which mentioned the payment of debt and the delivery of the Fijis, body, soul and breeches. The story is close enough to the truth. A little later Britain accepted the Fijis. King Thakombau finished with a pretty gesture when he handed over his war club as a present to Queen Victoria. Probably she never used it, but her heart was gratified when she learned that the deposed monarch had exchanged cannibalism for Christianity. He burned most of the heathen temples in his fading realm, but saved his own on Mbau--for sentiment’s sake.

The chastened Thakombau took to travel, and did his bit toward importing foreign disease. In 1876 he came back from Australia with a dose of measles, which he spread far and wide.

## CHAPTER XIII

HOW THE ANSWER CAME

In Fiji we started out directly for cure and prevention, an active campaign. Chris Kendrick was still with me, my gem of the first water; Malakai was a newly discovered diamond.

On my first tour I saw filthy sanitary arrangements, or none at all. By education we tried to induce the natives and oriental transplant to use ordinary cesspit latrines; our efforts met with more success after the discovery of a new internal remedy had rewarded us with public approval and made the Fijians health-conscious. From then on the pathway was cleared for all our efforts. Dr. Heiser, when he visited us in 1928, introduced the bored-hole latrine, which was the Foundation’s enthusiasm at that time. It was a twenty-five-foot hole dug with an eighteen-inch auger, which was a practical benefit to the East Indian in Fiji; but, for the native, the deep pit, covered with a polished concrete slab--which we were by then making and distributing by thousands--was by far the better sanitation.

Dr. Heiser came out again in 1934. In his _An American Doctor’s Odyssey_ he was kind enough to report those two visits at some length. On his latter trip we made the surveys together and looked over results of our bored-hole work. I have a pleasant memory of our expeditions; how he belied his sixty-third birthday when his long legs walked me lame in Fiji, Tonga and Samoa. We argued like a pair of plumbers on a holiday; subject, Bored Latrine versus Cesspit. I contended that the deep auger-hole was all right for the delicately built Indian, but, even then, in rocky or sandy soil it was no good at all. And for Fijians it wouldn’t work. Why? In a land where the natives use palm leaves, breadfruit leaves, stones, coconut husks and hanks of wild grass for toilet purposes, a narrow tube in the ground gets stopped up in less time than it takes to bore it. Then the chap takes to the bush, as of old. It has nothing to do with science, it’s just practical mechanics, plus tradition. Our debate had this effect at least; we later modified the bored-hole latrine with a much larger hole, but retained the concrete slab, which was admired by barefoot natives for its reliable cleanliness.

* * * * *

But in 1922, as a newcomer in Fiji and with only such authority as I could get by talking myself into it, this broken jigsaw puzzle looked to me like something no mere human hands could put together. I was a health officer on a rather large scale with nothing so much as a dog license to show for it. It was pretty discouraging, at first. I was like a fireman with a leaky hose, trying to stop a blaze at one end of a building while an incendiary poured gasoline on the other. The government health authorities had a right to mourn over the Foundation’s recent attempt to kill the all-pervading parasite. Everywhere I went I saw how little the good work had accomplished. Chris Kendrick would come back from treatments in outlying districts and smile ruefully. “They’re quite a mess out there.” Like all of us, he was losing faith in chenopodium; and Chris Kendrick’s faith would stand a good deal of punishment.

Nevertheless, I was working vigorously to educate the natives in the nature of various parasites and the virtue of treatment. And I was pumping up British enthusiasm with every publicity device I could lay my hands on. As I tooted the Horn of Health they began to look upon me as Barnum’s little brother with a rich strain of Rockefeller in me somewhere.

One of my less dignified efforts along the line of health-advertising was a window display I devised for Pop Swann’s drugstore, prominent on Suva’s main street. Pop was a stanch friend of medical progress. So it didn’t take long to convince him that an attractive display of intestinal parasites would help both his business and mine. Most of his customers were Fijians and East Indians, so nothing could be more logical. “Anything in the world to push things along, my boy,” said enthusiastic Pop. Between us we set up a charming arrangement in the two windows on either side of his street door, where all who passed could wonder and admire: worms of every variety in the big gallon bottles they call “Winchesters.” Tapeworms of infinite length slithered around in alcohol; families of _Necator americanus_ swam cozily beside a jugful of oriental Ankylostoma; there was a large bottle devoted to the fat roundworms, nearly a foot long, and to the screw-headed whipworms, and to other, less notorious wrigglers. Pop Swann rubbed his hands as we stood outside gloating over our work in the two windows that fledged his main door. “Doc,” chuckled Pop, “that ought to draw customers, if anything will!”

Then a very busy week, uphill and down dale, organizing the campaign and pushing it along. One day, going by Pop Swann’s, my way was blockaded by a semicircle of Indians and Fijians, standing at a respectful distance from the great exhibition. Out of the door burst Pop, hair on end. “Doc,” he shouted, “for the love of God take those things out of my windows. The natives are so scared they won’t pass in between those worms. You’re ruining my trade!”

So I dewormed the window and time marched on. But it wasn’t marching well for me, or in the right direction.

* * * * *

One late afternoon in February, 1922, I keeled back in my office chair and appreciated the soreness a middle-aged prize fighter must feel after he has taken the count in round one. With a sanitary squad of nine native and Indian assistants and the invaluable Chris Kendrick I had again made a round and seen the dank hopelessness of two races weakened by their own customs and by the unfriendly acts of nature. It was just as Paley had shown: rainfall flooded their shallow wells and mixed with the foulness of their latrines so that both wells and latrines had the same bacterial flora. In some districts hookworm infection ran as high as 98 per cent. This condition was not limited to primitive natives by any means; the Hindu and Moslem of ancient culture were quite as ignorant of sanitation, and more worm-laden than their dark brown brothers.

This filthy stable must be cleaned, but the baffling thing was to find the cure. Our International Health Board was sharing expenses with the Government for a three-year campaign. The question of throwing good money after bad had come up again. Officially, I should have been pro-chenopodium. Actually that drug was the first word in my Hymn of Hate. And the discouraging thing was this: despite the crucial need of hygienic improvements, an effective cure must take first place as an educational demonstration. If you destroy all the hookworms inside the human body, no more of their eggs will fall to the ground to hatch the larvae that make the worms that suck the blood.... The whole Jack-built song of consequences with a tropical setting. Sounds very simple, doesn’t it? So does astronomy.

I sat at my desk, facing facts and not liking a single one of them. Evening was coming on and I should have been home for dinner. I was too sick of myself and my work to move a muscle. Three more years of this, and where would it get us? Nowhere.

Maybe it was my guardian angel who stole up and laid a still hand over mine. Without knowing what I did or why I did it, I moved my hand across the desk and woke, blinking. I had picked up the Journal of the _American Medical Association_, a November 1921 issue, and an invisible finger seemed to point the page for me. And there was the title: “The Use of Carbon Tetrachloride in the Removal of Hookworm ... by Maurice C. Hall.” Hall was the man who approved my experiment down in Rabaul when I gave those injections to six cannibal prisoners. I respected him, as most of the profession did. As Senior Zoologist of the United States Bureau of Animal Industry, his researches had gone far in his own field. He didn’t talk unless he knew what he was talking about.

Here was Hall’s report in the modest gray of scientific language, revealing years of most careful observation. His tests had led him to a novel drug--carbon tetrachloride. Queer, humble thing to have fished out of the pharmacopoeia! Hitherto it had been useful only in dry-cleaning fluids and fire extinguishers. He had observed that patients under chloroform anesthesia frequently emit a number of intestinal parasites. Chloroform, then, would be a successful vermifuge were it not for its poisonous qualities. Hall made hundreds of tests down the list of Hydrocarbons until he came to chloroform’s close relation. Chloroform’s chemical initials are CHCl₃. Tetrachloride’s laboratory name is CCl₄.

Tetrachloride touched the spot Hall had been looking for. He tried it first on dogs, then on swine, horses, monkeys. He carefully gauged the dosage to 3 cc. for every 10 pounds of animal weight; later he found that O.3 cc. to every kilogram of body-weight expelled the worms in surprising quantities. After treatment he had performed postmortems on many animals and had examined internal organs which showed no pathological changes that could be traced to CCl₄. In animal experimentation it had been an unqualified success.

In animals, yes. But what of man?

The answer came like a clap of thunder out of Hall’s quietest paragraph. _He had tried the stuff on himself._ Audaciously he had taken a 3 cc. dose, gone to bed and wakened in the morning with no pathological symptoms. The dangerous drops he had swigged the night before had had none of the nauseous effects of chenopodium. His animal experiments had shown him that it worked as fast, as safely and more thoroughly. And here was another point in its favor: tetrachloride tried on animals seemed to have no ill effects on pregnancy. Chenopodium had always been a dangerous thing to give a woman with child. It was, at times, among the unsafe abortifacients--often effective if used up to the poison point.

The message of tetrachloride came to me like an answer to prayer. But would the dog-cure turn out to be a man-killer? Probably not. _Hall had tried it on himself._

* * * * *

With a hop, skip and jump I went to the laboratory used by the Medical Officer of Health. Naturally old Carment, who presided over the collection, wouldn’t have the drug. Why should he? Yes, but there it was! A big, brown bottle with the label CCl₄. It had never been opened, of course, and how it got there nobody knows. Strange, useless things drift onto laboratory shelves.

When I went up to Dr. Montague’s office I had the brown bottle under one arm and the _Medical Journal_ under the other. “Read that and look at this,” I said. He read the article painstakingly, then turned the bottle in his hand. “Lambert, try anything,” he sighed. That was about the way we all felt those days.

We had been trained in the empirical school. Try anything, if evidence is in its favor. Even the jungle medicine man, for all his black magic, has herbs and simples which the respectable practitioner might include in his remedies. A thousand years before Harvey demonstrated the blood’s circulation Asiatic wizards were giving chaulmoogra oil for leprosy--true, they gave it wrong, but they gave it. The Incas of Peru taught us the value of quinine for malaria; they chewed the bark. Before the Crusades, corner barbers were giving mercury to syphilitic noblemen. Up to fifty years ago the medical profession depended pretty much on the household remedies your grandmother used to choke down you; as long as they worked they saved many a fine prescription in abbreviated Latin.

The old empiricals had moved along that line. But men of the new thought, like Pasteur, like Ehrlich, had set out deliberately to fit a drug to a condition. And that was how Hall had worked.

So we were trying to cure hookworm disease with a cleaning fluid. A veterinary had recommended it. True, he was about the greatest vet in the world. I have to laugh now, remembering how we, as green young undergraduates at Syracuse Medical, used to snoot veterinaries and dentists as “hoss doctors” and “tooth yankers.” We didn’t take the trouble to remember that modern anesthesia originated in a dentist’s brain. And since we lacked the gift of prophecy, how were we to know what a horse doctor would someday do with something out of a fire extinguisher?

My mind was made up, but my heart wasn’t doing any too well when I went to the native ward and picked out four hookwormy East Indians. I wasn’t sure how these follows would behave, for Mr. Gandhi’s Civil Disobedience had become their evening prayer. However, they felt pretty sick and were ready, like Montague, to say, “Try anything.” I started them off with a stiff dose of salts.

At seven next morning my faltering hand administered to each of them 3 cc. out of the brown bottle. The minute they swallowed it I felt like a Borgia. It was too late to do anything about it, unless I gave them a quick emetic. If tetrachloride went back on me I’d be responsible for the death of a man, maybe four. Doctors have to become hardened to death, otherwise they couldn’t remain in practice. But experimental killing is a different thing. If any of these Hindus died I’d have the weight on my soul. Not only that, I’d lose my job.... Already I saw my resignation from the International Health Board being requested by cable.

I steadied myself with an argument: If the Fiji campaign failed along the old line that wouldn’t be any feather in my cap either. Well, I was deciding something on a very long chance.... My stomach went back on me, foolishly reflecting the pain of my victims. Solid food didn’t appeal, so I breakfasted on a pint of coffee, embittered with a new torment. Why hadn’t I taken tetrachloride myself, before I tried it on those Indians?[3]

_Dr. Hall had taken a dose of it._

I had dosed my four Indians at seven, and time was wearing on. Tetrachloride, which is a purgative, should have acted quicker. The men were dumb and drowsy. Would this be coma? I felt their lean wrists, listened to their lean chests; pulse and respiration normal. How soon would they take a turn for the worse?

_Dr. Hall had taken a dose of it._

Yes, but Hall had been in the prime of health, able to throw off toxic poisoning. These poor fellows were like dry leaves. The very thing that made treatment necessary had weakened them to the exhaustion point.... Then I thought: Even if I had drugged myself with the stuff it wouldn’t have proved much; what I was trying to find out was its actual effect on hookworm....

* * * * *

I had wandered back to my office, hoping that solitude and a cigarette might tell me what to do next.... The door burst open and Chris Kendrick tumbled in on me. His look was grave as he said, “That tetrachloride--”

“Are they dead?” I asked stiffly.

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

That was how the news came to me. I had been watching them for hours while local medical officers passed their beds and made long faces which said to my fevered imagination, “See what Lambert’s done now!” Then the minute I turned my back CCl₄ had begun to work. For three days while my Indians were, as Chris exaggerated it, “fairly spouting worms,” the result was a constant wonder. Cordiality glowed in an atmosphere which had been none too warm. Doctors gathered around our hookworm count like baseball fans around the box score. The native orderlies were as excited as the rest. First day, second day, third.... I had gambled with four lives, and won. I call that Tetrachloride Experiment Number 2, since Hall swallowed the first dose; and Experiment Number 2 was a surprising success. Between them my patients had expelled 244 worms after a single dose. The following week we gave them a test treatment with chenopodium--and only got four Necators. The man I mark down as Case 1 expelled none at all. The other three needed no follow-up treatment. In three days Case 1 had shed ninety-five hookworms, and all were discharged as cured. One dose of CCl₄, mind you, had proven 99 per cent perfect.

* * * * *

Mine was the embarrassment of riches. I had worked for the Foundation too long to believe that they would approve of wholesale treatments with so new and untried a drug. If I went on with tetrachloride, as I felt I must do, the only way was to go ahead and say nothing about it.

Dr. Montague’s enthusiasm was as great as mine, but I moved cautiously at first. The next set of East Indians I tried it on was less satisfactory than the original four. It wasn’t the fault of tetrachloride, but of Gandhi; his sick disciples were so independent that they threw their specimens out of the window before we could make an accurate worm-count. We recovered enough, however, to keep Kendrick and his force of Fijian helpers pretty busy going over the thin washings spread out on tightly stretched gauze.

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

... Almost total lack of symptoms in the group that received the purge after the drug. Not one of them was incapacitated for his regular duties ... with no after-purge there were some who had minor symptoms. Many were sleepy for several hours....

... Young Indian working in our office given 3 cc. at 7:45 A.M. ... by 10:15 gave 85 hookworms. Total for three days 101. Test treatment showed he was cured. This illustrates the rapid expulsion of worms by this drug, which we have observed generally.

The time came when I felt that the whole thing was too important to keep to myself, so I wrote a careful letter to the Foundation. The answer from 61 Broadway with its code-name “Rockfound” was cabled back so fast that it burned a streak across the Pacific: “FORBID USE. WE DO NOT EXPERIMENT WITH HUMAN LIFE.”

I took the limp message to Dr. Montague and said, “Well, the jig’s up. I’m forbidden to play with fire extinguishers.”

Montague thought a long time. Tetrachloride was God’s gift to Fiji, he said, and he didn’t intend to give it up. He was recommending it for all the institutions under his authority.

Then I found an out. I asked, “Do you authorize me, as your subordinate, to continue its use? Would you O.K. a letter to that effect?” He said he would, and he did. After that I heard no more objections from the Foundation, whose administrators were only too glad, of course, to have the drug tried out on a large scale, as long as the Government of Fiji took the responsibility.

* * * * *

Up to the time when I grew bolder and dosed a whole large Indian school, the new treatment had been tried very quietly. Then it got too public to be kept away from the press. It was at the Dilkusha Mission that we gave this first “mass treatment”--the only practical way of administering a cure to the many. Before that it had been a matter of tedious house-to-house canvas. At Dilkusha we lined up 400 children, and I was about as jittery as I had been when I tackled the four adults at the War Memorial. But I went away smiling, a little cocky about myself. One dose of tetrachloride had removed 99 per cent of the infestation. Meanwhile in Suva Jail Dr. Kalamkar, East Indian physician, had run up a score of 94.5.

All this was news, and Suva had an editor with a keenly developed news-sense. His name was Victor Abel, and among other bold enterprises he ran a paper called the _Pacific Age_. A daring young chap of a good Anglo-Jewish family, he had raised mules in South Africa, made a failure of it, then come to Fiji to raise hogs, and made a failure of that too. His influential father-in-law was Sir Henry Marks, who worried a great deal about the _Pacific Age_.

Sir Henry had set his cap for a place on the Executive Council, and you never could tell what the incorrigible Victor would say next to stir up the Government. The town was always agog, waiting for some new outbreak in his personal correspondence column. It was a completely open forum, that column; under all sorts of fancy _noms de plume_ citizens let each other have it, straight in the nose. Then, just to keep the pot boiling, they would change their _noms de plume_ overnight and start thundering on the left. When Victor decided to write anything up he trimmed it artistically. For example, there was his famous account of the government yacht left in Suva harbor with her seacocks open. She gently sank, while the officers and crew were ashore seeing a football game.

In the midst of our growing campaign Victor came to me and said he was pretty sure he had hookworm. He had; and tetrachloride did its work very nicely. “Listen, Doctor,” he said, “what about this magic stuff? Where did it come from? What’s the story? Are you going to bury big news like that in Suva? Tell me about it, let me put it on the wire and I’ll have the whole world sitting up.”

By that time Fiji was certainly sitting up. Natives were clamoring for treatment. Not until the gold rush of ’32 was anything more generally talked about. I wanted Victor to have the story; I said to Victor, “You can run the story provided you keep me out of it--and don’t mention the Foundation, either. Just say that Maurice C. Hall’s treatment is being given. If that’s understood, here are the facts.”

Victor kept his word in an appropriately sensational style, proclaiming that Maurice C. Hall was curing hookworm with a thing called tetrachloride. The news thrilled the medical world, scientific men were mulling over the possibilities of a new and novel drug. How would it come out in Fiji? That was the question.

When the tidings came to Washington, friendly biologists crowded Dr. Maurice C. Hall’s office to congratulate him, and his reply was characteristic. “You say I’ve been curing hookworm in Fiji? Hell, I’ve never been near the place.”

* * * * *

In a month I had treated more cases than my predecessor had in fourteen months, and with no increased expense. Tetrachloride worked with such accuracy that there was no need of repeated doses, as with chenopodium. By the end of 1922 the Rockefeller Foundation, which had untangled the Hall-Lambert collaboration and duly forgiven my disobedience, reported 52,000 treatments by tetrachloride.

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

The history of public health cannot be written by the sure-cure patent-medicine man. We had our bumps, at first, but they were amazingly few. In every district where the Willis salt flotation method showed a hookworm frequency of over 60 per cent we rounded the people up and gave the treatment _en masse_. In regions like the dirty Rewa and Navua districts infection was particularly heavy. In one place we dosed 1,243, and came back in a month to find 1,111 villagers showing negative--about the average sample of our work as it increased to large proportions.

Primitive folk made a carnival of our coming; drums sounded and they all reached out for the wizard drops. They called it “toddy” and said it was fine because it made them drunk. Possibly it did, a little. After a child’s-size dose small boys would run around like wild dogs, tear up the flower beds in mission compounds, throw mud and have a perfectly bully time. Full-grown “marys” would caper and dance like Aunt Dinah at an old-fashioned revival; but when their big buck husbands smacked them they would come back to normal with surprising alacrity. Most of the demonstrations were merely put on; our patients usually went wild before the drug could have had time to take effect. However, tetrachloride has a mildly intoxicating reaction, especially if it is not administered with some technical care. But these demonstrations were mostly psychological--the native craving for a big joy party. The British have been more than wise in keeping alcohol away from these people.

After the first two years of wholesale treatments we had to report seven deaths. Postmortems under the observation of able physicians revealed the causes. These seven were all East Indians. One of them, it turned out, hadn’t taken tetrachloride at all; it had been chenopodium. One lad who died had a congenital malformation of the intestine, a deformity which would have prevented his living to maturity. Another was a woman who was addicted to the use of alcohol. The remainder were children heavily infected with _Ascaris lumbricoides_ (roundworm).

When the deaths came, after forty thousand treatments, I took it pretty hard. I had gambled for success with everything I had, my job, and my professional good name. I felt as though I hadn’t a friend in the world. Then who came unexpectedly to my support? Dr. Basil Wilson, whom I had always thought of as a queer sort of Englishman with an aversion to me, if any feeling at all. Stanchly Dr. Wilson did the friendly thing; he postmortemed the bodies and developed theories as to the cause of death so sound that they stand on record today. Among his medical colleagues he became my champion. Worry was aging me years in a day until Wilson’s support renewed my youth with courage. Funny Englishman; I could have kissed his long, homely face.

Since that first setback tetrachloride has not caused one death among the thousands of Melanesians, Polynesians, East Indians and Europeans whom we treated.

The fatalities were limited to victims of alcoholism and roundworm. That was interesting; more especially in Ascaris cases. Alcohol was contra-indicated; a few drinks before or after treatment brought complications. Lingering headaches which came to many of the nondrinkers were easy to relieve with an after-dose of salts. But what about the roundworm? Why did his presence in the intestine turn tetrachloride into an active poison? I don’t think that question has been settled yet. One theory says that CCl₄, while it does not kill the Ascaris, irritates him to a point where he secretes lethal toxic juices. According to Dr. Lamson and his collaborators, poisoning with tetrachloride occurs in dogs when there is a lowered blood calcium. This chemical poverty may have something to do with it; I make the conjecture, without being able to substantiate it, that there is a relation between a large number of ascarides and a lowered blood calcium.

* * * * *

In the course of the next ten years 286,486 Pacific Islanders were treated, under my personal observation, with carbon tetrachloride and the later drug, tetrachlorethylene.

For the gifted Dr. Hall had come across with an improvement on his discovery, and he asked me to give it its first tryout when I campaigned in the wild New Hebrides in 1925. I used it extensively down there, and optimism sounded in my conservatively worded report. Its work was faster, its toxic effect less than that of his original find. There is no 100 per cent in medicine, but Hall’s new polysyllabic drug was hitting an average that was uncanny.

What a wizard he was, this pre-eminent zoologist, who was Washington’s Number One horse doctor! Every pet dog wags his tail (or should) in gratitude for his two deworming remedies. The dog’s pal, the human, is Hall’s debtor--all but the fur dealers. The price of silver fox has taken a terrific slump. Do you know why? Dr. Hall sent his tetrachlorides to the fox farms where so many hookwormy bitches and pups used to die that pelts had become a luxury for the wives of steel barons. When Hall’s treatments came to Foxville the breed picked up rapidly and its fur went to the lower department stores; so now every stenographer can have her silver fox--and on her own salary, too. Ask your furrier.

Dr. Hall is dead now. I know it’s trite to say that such men don’t really die. He has put his own spark into millions of men, women and children who would be in their graves today were it not for what he freely gave. He was an untold benefit to the human race. Most of the human race, of course, have never heard of him.

Then let’s sum up the work of tetrachloride over seventeen years since the enterprising Victor Abel first put it on the wire. Dr. Heiser, authority on public health, used to call hookworm the world’s most prevalent disease; in all Earth’s population one out of three had it, he said. Then the figures on tetrachloride (and tetrachlorethylene) treatments went up and up; 654,896 in 1924; 3,000,000 in 1936. In 1937 I attended a League of Nations conference in Java. A group of us were discussing hookworm treatments. I was pretty cocky about the 500,000 done in the Pacific; so I asked Dr. Chellapa of Ceylon how many they were doing there. Last year had been a pretty bad one, he said--they had only given 1,400,000 treatments on account of the malaria epidemic. They usually got 2,000,000 he explained. I just said, “Very fine, indeed,” in a manner I hope wasn’t patronizing. I never mentioned our figures. However, in Ceylon they are using the same old Fiji formula and dosage.

One statement may be simpler than these figures. Every year the Rockefeller Foundation used to publish a bulletin of the number of hookworm treatments. In 1938 hookworm was not even mentioned in the Foundation’s report, except for data on some still undefined parasite recently found in Egypt. The report had no general heading for ankylostomiasis. The worm which had been the source and inspiration of their world campaigns had dropped out of their ken.

My application of Hall’s discovery immediately heightened my prestige all over the Pacific. I don’t claim credit. I happened to be the man who stood at the crossroads when a wonderful sort of salvation came my way. I would have been a fool if I hadn’t seized it and carried it on. And what a lucky afternoon that was, early in 1922, when I read a little article and found a brown bottle labeled CCl₄. It gave me the courage I needed to strengthen me for a message of my own, which I knew I must work out and make clear in the hard days that were to follow.