PART TWO

## CHAPTER I

DEATH AND THE DEVIL

The relation between modern medicine and primitive witchcraft became so important to me during my years of health campaigning in the South Pacific that I think I should say something here to indicate the islander’s daily reliance on sorcery’s touch with the powers of darkness. During all my work among the remoter tribes I was not received and respected as a university M.D., but as a novel sort of witch doctor who had come among them with a stronger magic than the old. Otherwise I could have made no headway at all. My assistants and I were professional sorcerers, backed by Government; we were that, or we were nothing.

It was some time before I got a glimmer of this native point of view, then I began to take advantage of it. I had to. I had to let them believe that I was a mystic with a ritual that would take away the diseases with which sorcery had cursed them. When I gave tuberculin injections to the wild men of Malaita they believed that I was doing something to remove a wicked spell. In thousands and thousands of cases which I have treated, either for cure or diagnosis, they have gone away with the same simple faith. Good magic has been working against bad. At first I worried about fooling all the people all the time. Then I followed the only expedient that is practical in jungle medicine.

When we regard the native tribe as a unit we must not push the witch doctor aside as a buffoon and a faker. Let’s give the devil-man his due and mark the fallacy of the smug European who sits among dark races with the idea of “giving them good laws” and “teaching them morality.” This white man forgets that from the dawn of time the medicine man has held a position that is both useful and important to the tribe. Communities with no prison system must be controlled by a hand which, to them, reaches into the Invisible. In the old days sorcery was the prerogative of the chief, and sorcery was a hereditary and honored profession. And even today the wizard, either a chief or a commoner, is there to fend the people from epidemics, to cure their ills, to curse the enemy and to shield his flock from the invasion of evil spells--“and to sustain all those subtle influences that go to form the social cement that marks the difference between a community and a horde of men,” as Pitt-Rivers expressed it.

The sorcerer occupies, in his way, the same position as the Christian priests who bless the armies and the harvests and metes out spiritual justice to the sheep and the goats. When he tells the natives of ancient Christian miracles, why should they value his words beyond those of their own miracle workers?

* * * * *

I have remarked on the crude killings of the _puri-puri_ men, and their more subtle methods of removing unwanted tribesmen by what seemed to be the power of suggestion; the Pacific native is almost universally a believer in ghosts and devils. Am I going too far when I say that man’s first religion was a form of spiritualism? Life departs, but the soul lingers, and the simple believer listens to hear the testimony of the grave.

I had been working in Melanesia for years before I began to appreciate how much they are governed by the powers of darkness, by the casting of spells to kill or cure. In the days when cannibalism and war were unchecked, tribal and personal grudges were settled in a more horrid way. In these milder times it is enchantment upon which the clansman depends for vengeance.

I wrote to Dr. Walter Bradford Cannon of Harvard’s Physiology Department, in reply to a query of his:--

“Your letter brings up a very interesting question which is much in dispute. Dr. A. Montague, Chief Medical Officer of Fiji and a resident in the group for thirty years, did not believe in ‘voodoo death,’ that is, death caused by fear. Personally, I believe he was wrong, as I know of several instances.

“Dr. Phillip S. Clarke, of North Queensland, formerly practised just north of Cairns where he had a kanaka come to his hospital and announce that he was going to die; that he had had a spell put on him, and there was nothing that could be done about it. Dr. Clarke had been acquainted with this man for some time. He gave him a most thorough examination including examination of stool and urine, and found everything normal. The man kept on eating and smoking, but lay in bed and gradually seemed to grow weaker. Clarke was friendly with a better-educated kanaka, a foreman, whom he brought to the hospital ward; this man leaned over the patient, then turned to Clarke and said, “Yes, Doctor, close up [soon] he die.” The bewitched man died at eleven next morning, lying in bed with a cigarette in his mouth. Clarke did a postmortem on him and found nothing that could in any way account for the death.

“I stayed ten days at a Seventh Day Adventist mission station, Mona Mona, a few miles above Cairns. On the outskirts was a group of non-converts, among them Nebo, a famous witch doctor. The missionary’s right hand man was Rob, a convert. I had been there before and knew Rob. Now the missionary told me that Rob was ill in bed and wanted me to see him. I found that he had no temperature, no pain, no symptoms or signs; but he was evidently quite ill. He had told the missionary that Nebo had ‘pointed a bone’ at him, therefore he was going to die ‘close up.’ We got Nebo in, put the fear of God in him and--more important--told him that his supply of food would be shut off if anything happened to Rob; so Nebo leaned down and assured Rob that it was all a mistake, a joke, and that he had never pointed a bone at him. The relief was almost instantaneous; that afternoon Rob was back at work.

“The witch doctor can ‘point a bone’ from a great distance and the bone is supposed to pierce his victim’s body. However, it is necessary for the victim to know that he has been worked upon. Volumes have been written upon this subject, and I can recall endless illustrations of this magic, many of which have come under my personal observation.

“Among native medical students in the senior year I devote one period to the subject of magic, partly because of personal interest in the reactions I get, partly for the emphasis I try to lay on the foolishness of sorcery. There are records of Native Practitioners themselves having died of _draunikau_, and the medical class is always composed about half of Fijians and the rest Polynesians with an occasional Micronesian. The Polynesians of the present generation do not know this magic; but to the Fijians, even to the educated ones, _draunikau_ is a dreadful word. When it is mentioned the student’s face becomes a mask; I catch the look of worry and fear.

“The practice is still in evidence back in the hills and remote places where in Christian Fiji, with 93 per cent literacy, there are still famous witch doctors. _The only Fijian I have ever known to be unafraid of draunikau[4] is a man named Malakai, who has been working for me now for thirteen years._ He has actually defied one of the most powerful witch doctors in Fiji to do him any harm. Incidentally, the native theory is that magic cannot affect the white man.”

_Ndrau-ni-kau_ is the Fijian word meaning “magic-of-leaves.” You might call it the foundation of the old-time religion. No Melanesian believes that he can grow ill or die from natural causes like dysentery or influenza--look for the enemy who has hired a sorcerer to lay you low. Even the diagnosis of the District Medical Officer will not change the native mind. The curse is on him, therefore the cursed will die unless some more potent witch doctor is called in to magic away the spell. The Melanesian’s ghost-religion is dreadful. When a man dies and is planted underground his soul loses its kindly nature; your sweet and gentle mother or father or grandfather turns into a _tevoro_, a fiend plotting mischief to his own. And the _tevoro_ becomes a principal actor in the long ritual which brings a plague on your house.

The professional making of a _draunikau_ is as complicated a process as that used by the demonologists of medieval Europe. As in the cruder magic of the _puri-puri_ men, the practitioner obtains a bit of clothing or hair or feces from his victim’s person. These things, mixed with leaves, are shut up in a bamboo joint--or more modernly, in a bottle. The mage who follows this craft is merely employed by the hater to work evil on the hated.

Although the approved methods might be roughly classified as the Seven Ways of Cursing, one general practice is for the performer to take his bottle of _draunikau_ to some chosen graveyard where the _tevoro_ lies underground. The curse called _tava vatu_ is said to be the most difficult to beat. Among the graves grows a special plant called _uthi_ whose leaves the magician roasts on hot stones, and calls out that this is the _draunikau_ by which So-and-so must die; out of the smoking leaves the voice of the victim cries aloud. Then the _draunikau_ is buried and the victim will die in about four days, unless the curse is prayed off by a rival expert, who sprinkles his own special brew on the hot stones and repeats, “This is the _sorosorovi_ by which the man shall live.” The _sorosorovi_, wrapped in leaves, is taken to the sick man’s house and displayed so prominently that the _tevoro_ will mistake it for the _draunikau_ and float into it. So now he’s caught, and the benevolent witch doctor throws the package into water. The devil is foiled, and becomes so angry that he will enter the body of the witch doctor who first summoned him, and this man will die in four days.

_Kena balavu_ is a slower torment; every time you heat the _draunikau_ the object of hatred becomes ill; when it cools he becomes better. The patient’s sickness is determined by the mixture put in the bottle. If it is a hair from his head, then he will have head-sickness, if parings from his toenails, then foot-sickness, and so on. A rival doctor may lift the spell by finding the bamboo where the hell’s broth is buried; he will heat the bamboo and rinse it in salt water, then dose and massage the sufferer with magic leaves. The sorcerer who comes to cure is called the “antagonist.” Before the antagonist digs up the _draunikau_ he must pour kava for four nights over the spot where it is buried. But if the patient dies, then the witch doctor who cursed him must save his own life by stealing to the victim’s body and jabbing it with some sharp instrument, or, after the man is buried, he must pierce the grave with a spear. Otherwise the magician will die in four nights. And if friends wrap a breadfruit in mummy-apple leaves and put it under the corpse’s arm, the evil wizard will die of heart disease.

_Kena leka_ is another hot-stone _draunikau_, very swift because the death ritual has been said by moonlight. The _tevoro_ floats from the grave to some large tree by a lake or river. _Sova yanggona_ is among the most popular of the curses. On the grave of one of the victim’s ancestors a libation of kava is poured, with supplications for death. _Tei nia_, the coconut curse, is said to have no antagonism. The operator waters sacred ground with kava, then plants a coconut. When it sprouts he transplants it--and his man is dead.

_Ndrimi_ is a Solomon Island importation. Dip your finger in the magic-of-leaves and touch the hated one. The more potent _ndrimi_ doctors can bring sickness by pointing a finger. This power gives Solomon Islanders a prestige in Fiji. If a black boy from Bougainville wants a pretty local girl he merely says _ndrimi_--and gets her.

The classic forms have often inter-pollenized, and Christianity and water-front trading have added comedy. There are a number of specialists who mix whisky and the Bible with their efforts to kill or cure. Hard liquor is forbidden the natives, so a full bottle adds charm to necromancy. One of our native medical practitioners witnessed the work of an up-to-date witch doctor, called in to antagonize a _draunikau_. He prescribed a tablespoonful of whisky and a verse from the New Testament, then began taking his own medicine, in liquid form. As our N.M.P. reported it, “He seemed quite drunk.”

This modern technique, plus the dreadful _sova yanggona_, had to do with a recent _cause célèbre_, which I am leading up to. Here the magicians used the lantern-and-mirror technique. They went by night to an ancestral cemetery where one man held a lantern, another a mirror and the third poured kava with the death-prayer. Pleased with his drink, the _tevoro_ awoke.... Look in the mirror and see his cruel face! See, he is shaking the grave-dust from his body! Now ask him to follow you!

* * * * *

What I have heard has come to me after much curious prying. I had been down there nearly twenty years before I could dig any of it out. It is not general knowledge among the whites. The missionaries should have known, but too many of them never turn to see what’s going on behind their backs. Superior natives, especially Fijians, have furnished the most valuable data. Benuve Vakatawa, N.M.P., whose work had been among his people, became quite an authority. Once I asked him how the native reconciled the two religions, the old gods and the new God. Did they not call upon Jehovah and Jesus to protect them from the evil old Fijian divinities? He shook his head. I asked, “What is the true religion in Fiji, Christianity or Magic?” He said unhesitatingly, “Magic.” Christianity was just a cloak, held up before European eyes to hide the worship of devils and satanic miracles. The people did not want Europeans to interfere with ancient demonology, he said, but Christianity had its place--it was “society,” as the European knows it in his dances, theaters and ouija-board parties. It had an amusement value.

* * * * *

I have told how native medical students reacted to my lectures on magic. Vakatawa, however, thought that the old-time religion was losing ground; that the N.M.P.’s as well as the native pastors were drifting away from it. The pastors, for instance, had learned to keep a little iodine and a few simple home remedies around the house and were going to the N.M.P. for medical treatment. But many of these native Christian teachers still saw the witch doctor first, and only got around to the scientifically trained practitioners when the old way didn’t seem to work. However, the Native Medical Practitioner with his better education and better methods is getting about, and modern medicine is slowly commencing to take its place in Fijian lives.

What Pitt-Rivers said in defense of the witch doctors is certainly true of the influence they still exert. The old tribal habit of killing strangers because they had “salt water in their eyes” probably dates back to sorcerers who noticed that epidemics followed visitors. Let’s say this for the primitive medicine man. He had his own kit of remedies, many of them effective--probably herbs, massage and hydrotherapeutic treatments. He knew about fractures and their care; even today you rarely find there a deformity following a fracture, yet in native life there are many cracked and broken bones.

The witch doctor still bolsters the old moral code. Vakatawa has seen a witch woman tell a sick girl that the gods had cursed her for loose living. The girl was weak with dysentery and confessed that she had cohabited with more than twenty youngsters. The witch said, “Tell everything or you will die.” But the poor child died with the last sin unconfessed. Here was a recorded failure in magic in a district where Vakatawa had his hands full; the inhabitants were going to the witch doctor and the medical doctor at the same time. If the patient recovered the magician was praised; if he died the physician was blamed.

* * * * *

Who is the god of gods to whom the Fijian secretly prays for harm to his enemies? Maybe he is Dengei, most powerful of their evil pantheon--yet who is to say, when there are so many? Several of them appear as great sharks, making mischief, bearing ill tidings. There are the two siren goddesses, Yalewamatagi, who lure handsome young men to sin with them, then leave them dead in the bush. Daucina, an oversexed man-god, is the dread of young girls who wander by night. Death often follows his brutal ravishing.

During the gold rush on Viti Levu in 1932 many natives were afraid to go into the mines. Wasn’t it known to all magicians that Tui Mateinagata, the Snake-bodied One who hides in gold, was lurking in a cave at Tavua, and that his seven heads of gold and silver would destroy all trespassers? And the witch doctors whispered that the veins would soon play out, for Tui Mateinagata knows how to hide his treasure. There’s the old crab-goddess, too, whose bite is poison; but it is to Dengei, lord of origins and of evil, that the magicians fondly turn. He too is a great serpent, and frequents the caves of Nakauvandra in the north. His magic made and populated Fiji. The god admired two eggs in the nest of the kitu bird, and decided to hatch them himself; the issue was a boy and a girl, whom he separated for five years by the trunk of a giant tree. One day they peeped around the tree and said, “Great Dengei has hatched us that we may people the land.” Dengei, complimented, produced growing things for food, flowers for adornment, fire for cooking. The first humans would have been immortal, but they disobeyed their god and were punished with sickness and death.

Another story of origins is not so flattering to the Fijian who, according to the tale, was born before all others. But he acted wickedly and his skin darkened, so he received little clothing. The people of Tonga,--Polynesians, by the way,--were not so naughty with Dengei, who rationed out clothes to them which kept their skins much lighter. The white man was the great beneficiary. He was born last, behaved like a perfect gentleman, and Dengei rewarded him with so much to wear that his complexion became the beau ideal.

The Polynesians of Tonga say that the gods held a meeting and decided to create humanity. They baked three figures of clay. The first to come out didn’t seem to have baked long enough; he was disagreeably white and looked half-raw. The second was a Tongan, a beautiful olive-brown, and the gods admired him so much that they forgot the third figure until a voice from the oven cried, “I am burning!” Sure enough, the poor fellow was roasted nearly black; so they sent him west and he became a Fijian.

* * * * *

The absent treatment of sorcerers has no effect on the white man, so natives say; but old Thakombau, inwardly infuriated by a snub, might or might not have been the instrument that changed England’s royal succession.

In the early ’80’s, _H.M.S. Bacchante_ brought two royal midshipmen to Fiji. They were the Duke of Clarence, heir to the throne, and his younger brother Prince George, who later became King George V. Ex-King Thakombau was the nearest thing to a monarch that Fiji could produce, and now he was a Christian. He entertained the visitors at a great kava ceremony where the long line of _meke_ singers sat cross-legged and clapped hands to the chanted welcome, “_Mbula, mbula mai!_” Dancers had impersonated the animals, birds and fishes, comedians had impersonated dogs quarreling over a bone, long lines of men had coiled across the green in the contortions of the snake-god Dengei, or undulated in the beautiful surf dance. There was the presentation of the _tambua_. To the Fijian this sacred whale’s tooth is the prize of prizes; it is gold, it is magic. If a tribesman offers a _tambua_ to you, you may refuse the gift; if you take it you must grant any boon the giver asks--even the murder of your best friend, the yielding up of your favorite wife. There’s a long tale of crime and punishment connected with the giving of the _tambua_.

This was royal ceremony. Maybe in the back of Thakombau’s sly head there was a picture of another _meke_ over which he had presided often in his days of power. The Dance of the Cannibals.... Massed warriors were roaring out the notes to the boom of heavy drums.... Human meat was about to be cooked.... High voices in a savage tenor would cry out, “_Puaka balavu!_”... The bodies were ready for the oven.... Then, “_Sa rawa tu!_”--“It is prepared.”

The English royal visitors had settled under the flower-pavilion and the makers of _yanggona_ were at work. They were making kava by the old method--chew the root and spit the juice into a great bowl. The drink was ready. The honorable cupbearer knelt and received a portion in a polished coconut shell, rose and bore the cup to the more important guest. Offering it, he knelt before Britain’s heir apparent. But Clarence, who had seen native saliva go into the bowl, was not amused, so the story goes. He pushed the cup aside and made a wry face. Grim silence followed. The cupbearer rose and knelt before young George, whose tact was equal to the occasion. He took the shell and tossed his portion off with gusto; then reached down and spun the cup across the mat--the highest compliment. Loud clapping of hands with cries of “_Mbula vinaka!_”

The time came for King Thakombau to make his speech. With florid generosity he dwelt upon the greatness of England and the benefits Victoria had conferred upon his people. Then abruptly he turned to the Duke of Clarence and said, “You have been afraid to drink the _yanggona_ of Fiji. A true man knows no fear. Because you are not brave you will never become King of Veretania.” Then pointing to George, “You are a brave young man, you are not afraid of our customs. You will be the King, and a great one.”

The Duke of Clarence died without succeeding to the throne. George became King of England. Yet they say that the native _draunikau_ has no effect on a white man, and that puts a big hole in the story. From time immemorial, on the other hand, the chief has had the right to bewitch. Thakombau, on or off the throne, was a king; and there is some reason to believe that he used his ancient right.

* * * * *

A recent case of witchcraft struck in high places and involved two of Thakombau’s grandsons, Ratu Pope (pronounced _Pope-ee_) and Ratu Sukuna.

Ratu Sukuna graduated from Oxford with a degree in law. Caucasian in feature, handsome by any standard, Sukuna offered himself to the Empire in 1914; because his Empire refused the service of natives, he enlisted in the Foreign Legion, gained his sergeancy and a decoration, and came home with a well-earned wound-stripe. He was one of the few properly educated Fijians. True, Ratu Devi, his brother, later studied medicine in New Zealand. Devi’s annoyance was his great personal charm with women in the wards, who wouldn’t let him alone. In Fiji he is now an unusually successful District Medical Officer.

Ratu Sukuna holds important government positions in Fiji, where he is in the anomalous position of one who tries to carry two races on his shoulders. In England and France he adapted himself to foreign languages and customs. In his heart, under the borrowed gloss of alien culture, he is still sufficiently Melanesian to avoid the ancestral graveyard after dusk; the educated half of him scoffs at the idea of ghosts, yet he admits freely that when he passes the family plot in the dark of the moon he feels an unpleasant something clawing at his shoulders.

His cousin, Ratu Pope, was a famous character in Fiji, and was always intimate with Sukuna, whom he admired prodigiously. By nature a sportsman, in youth he was a great cricketer. He was schooled at the Methodist College in Sydney, but had the accent of the English country gentleman. His athletic figure was impressive in the short, white _sulu_, above sturdy bare legs and feet; from the hips up he dressed in the British tradition, sports coat for the morning, dinner jacket or tails for ceremonial occasions--much as the well-born Highlander wears his kilt with all the conventional fixings.

He had the charm and wit which we associate with exiled kings. When the Duke of Windsor visited Fiji as Prince of Wales he was delighted with Pope. Pope was, by courtesy, banished for many years to Mbau, the enchanting island his wise ancestors had chosen for their capital; soft winds cool it, blow away mosquitoes; above the royal _bure_ looms a great rock, the little Gibraltar where Grandfather Thakombau was supposed to have been hemmed in before he gave his domain to England. Governor Sir Eyre Hutson decided to exile Pope because he had rather innocently defaulted. As chief of his province he had been Assistant District Commissioner, hence a tax collector. It was his free-hearted Melanesian generosity that put him on a bad spot: When you have money, spend it on your people and your friends. Generosity is godlike, stinginess is for the worms. Let me tell it in Pope’s own way:--

“I had no trouble at all collecting the silly taxes. Tax gathering is a royal prerogative. So the Government sent me up a little iron safe, to put the money in, you understand. Well, months went by and one day a chap from the Government came in a launch--rather a blighter, I thought. We had a spot of whisky and a cigar and he said, ‘Ratu, the tide’s turning and I must be pushing on. I’ve called, you know, to take back that tax money.’ I said, ‘I’m rather afraid, old boy, that I can’t lay my hands on it now.’ He seemed a bit miffed and said, ‘But didn’t we send you an iron safe to put it in?’ ‘Oh, yes,’ I said, ‘it’s over there in the corner. If you look at it you’ll see that the door’s wide open.’”

Royal prerogative had scattered the money in several ways--but always for the good of the people of Mbau. Ratu Pope had set up shower baths in all the village houses, and built a reservoir to supply fresh water. The reservoir remained dry while an offended Government interned Pope on his ancestral isle--until he paid the bill. “It’s only a few hundred pounds,” he complained, laughing at himself, “and as all I have is invested in rather poor coconuts, I’ll be Methuselah, I fancy, before I’m free again.” However, a relenting Government allowed him to come to Suva to see the cricket matches--he’d have died without that. Also they let him meet the tourist boats, the best possible advertisement for the Fiji Islands.

When the late Martin Egan and his traveling partner Wallace Irwin were his guests at Mbau, in 1927, they brought back stories that illustrated Pope’s quick come-back. One night they were sitting by lantern light under the breadfruit trees, smoking the long Coronas Pope adored. He said, “It’s a bit tiresome, being cooped up here. One longs for travel. I am very fond of the _National Geographic Magazine_.” He called for copies, turned to a back page. “I think I prefer your clever advertisements. Look at this, for instance”--showing the New York Life Insurance Company’s stock advertisement, the one with the modest skyscraper. “My word, it seems to go up twenty-five or thirty stories!” Martin Egan told him that Al Smith and his pals were building a skyscraper that would be about a hundred stories high. Pope objected, “But doesn’t one get blood pressure, going so high in a lift?” Egan said that everybody in New York had high blood pressure so what was the difference?

Ratu Pope looked at him gravely. “That fellow Frederick O’Brien who wrote the White Shadows twaddle visited me last year. When he left I wondered if all Americans were such damned liars.”

He showed his guests Thakombau’s cannibal temple, the one he preserved for sentiment’s sake. The shaggy thing, on a base of high stone terraces, is immensely out of scale with the low village houses. Pope took an honest pride in the deeds of his grandfather, much as Grant’s descendants might in the surrender at Appomattox. He pointed out a hole in the ground, right in front of the temple, and said, “The stone of sacrifice used to stand here. It was built rather like a very wide gravestone, with a depression in the top for the--er--victim’s head. I gave it to our local church to use as a baptismal font. Would you like to hear the ceremony of a cannibal execution? Grandfather sat on the second tier and the people formed a semicircle below. Around the stone the priests drew lots as to whether the poor fellow was to be buried or--er--eaten. The latter usually won, I’m afraid. It was purely economic, you see. Well, four powerful executioners came along carrying the victim lashed to a plank. They held him in the correct position, and when Grandfather gave the word they would bash the fellow’s head smartly against the stone. They were so very skillful that I doubt if the poor chap even felt it.”

That was Ratu Pope, playboy king who spoke up-to-date King’s English, liked American magazines, excelled at cricket, brought European ideas to a cannibal capital, and then....

Late in 1936 he was taken to the hospital in Suva, far gone with diabetes and cirrhosis of the liver. He should have had faith in the British doctors; he knew them all, and respected their work. As he weakened he called for his wife, Andi Torika, and whispered, “I have been bewitched. They have put a _draunikau_ on me.” His wife nodded. But who was working the black magic? Pope whispered, “My cousin Sukuna.”

The accusation, by way of native grapevine telegraph, soon reached the ears of Ratu Sukuna, who was horrified. Why in the world would he want to put a _draunikau_ on good old Pope? What silly nonsense! They had been pals ever since they were knee-high. Sukuna went straight to Ratu Pope’s bedside. A gifted speaker with a feeling for the niceties of language, he sat beside the dying man and strove with him, gently. At last Pope nodded and asked forgiveness. No, Sukuna could not have brought about the evil spell. But somebody had paid a witch doctor for this _draunikau_. Yes, agreed Sukuna, and went sadly away from the man who had been cursed--by somebody.

A short time afterward Sukuna was in his schooner, sailing from Viti Levu to Lakeba. Suddenly he called out, “Turn back!” For in the water, skimming along his course, he had seen the family totem shark. That could mean only one thing--death of a near relative. When he returned to Suva, his cousin Ratu Pope was dead.

There followed a battle of magic and countermagic, ghost against ghost, throughout Thakombau’s old empire. The persons concerned in it were too noble to be ignored. All this, mind you, happened only about three years ago. It began with Ratu Pope’s dying whisper into the ear of his faithful wife, Andi Torika. She belonged to the same _matangali_ as Ratu Wailala, powerful sub-chief in Taveuni. To Wailala the widow sent a present of ten _tambuas_, a dangerous gift, for under the eyes of the gods the recipient must grant a favor. Ratu Lala, Lord of Taveuni, was on Andi’s bad books; he stood in royal succession; if he lived his son might sit on Pope’s shadow-throne.

This was politics, in a conflict between two branches of an old ruling family. Seventy-five years ago it would have meant war. Today it was _draunikau_. Ratu Wailala took Andi’s _tambuas_, which had come with a request to put a _draunikau_ on Ratu Lala, accused of Pope’s death by magic. Wailala was also jealous of Lala’s title, and went about the curse in classic style. He presented a _tambua_ to another chief, with the request that a _draunikau_ be arranged for Lala. This chief took the _tambua_ to Mosese, a very able witch doctor.

That was in mid-April, 1938. In the dark of night Mosese and Kalepi, his assistant, with a local chief, stole over to the grave of Ratu Lala’s grandfather and carried with them the proper leaves and kava root for the _Sova Yanggona_ (the Pouring Kava) ritual. They crouched at the foot of the mound where the dead man’s legs would be pointing. Mosese, seated between his two associates, lifted the bowl to his lap, then six times raised it to his head. Kava was made according to ceremony. Now it was ready. The performers clapped three times; Kalepi filled a drinking bowl and presented it to the dead chief with the request that Ratu Lala’s life be taken away. Six times the libation was poured on the head of the grave to fill the mouth of a thirsty _tevoro_.

The tattler was a woman who had started out before the break of day to fish for prawns. She lost her way, shuddered by the cemetery, then paused in a paralysis of fear. There were voices by the grave of Nagolea, there was the scent of _uthi_, the graveyard flower. She peered, she saw three crouching figures making _draunikau_. For days she was too frightened to tell.

Then, on April 15, 1938, Ratu Lala went to Suva and grew dizzy as he walked. He knew why, and sent for the powerful sorcerer Ngio from Ngau, whom he employed to combat the evil magic. Ngio told him that his sickness started from Taveuni, and there the _draunikau_ would be found. That night Ratu Lala had a dreadful dream. A chief who had been dead twelve years came in and poked him with his walking stick, saying, “Who is this man sleeping in my house?” Lala returned to his home in Taveuni, and when another sick spell came on he heard gossip about the three men who had made _draunikau_. He sent for the sorcerers, ignored their pleas of innocence and had them beaten with ropes. They went to the hospital, still denying their share in black magic. Wailala also feigned innocence, but a constable included him with the others.

Ratu Lala’s witch doctor, the gifted sorcerer from Ngau, assembled his colleagues, hoping that their combined magic would offset the dreadful _Sova Yanggona_. One night Lala dreamed that he saw the gods in a meeting; a short man knelt at Lala’s doorway, holding up a _tambua_ with the request for death. A voice wailed, “Ratu Wailala’s _tambua_ cannot be returned with mercy on Lala’s life!”

It was on September 17, to be exact, when I was with Dr. Strode, inspecting the hospital at Suva. We found Ratu Lala in bed with an abscess of the neck, and his morale completely shattered. He had told the world that he expected to die of a _draunikau_.

On Wednesday, September 21, Dr. Strode and I went to a luncheon at Government House. And what did we see? Sitting calmly beside Mr. Monckton, Secretary of Native Affairs, was Ratu Lala. Only four days had passed since he had about given up the ghost, and now he was in high spirits, telling the Governor fine stories and eating with gusto. His explanation was straightforward. Oh, that witch doctor, Ngio from Ngau, had an antagonism that was too strong for black magic to withstand. He had worked from the Bible, and that was big medicine; he would open the Good Book at random and interpret past, present and future; but invariably he would return to the Gospel according to Saint Matthew, and from that he could foil any ghost or devil that ever flew over Fiji.

Ngio the gospel-wizard came to Suva later and boasted of his holy magic to all and sundry.

* * * * *

Exhibitions of fire walking, given by a priestly cult from the island of Mbengga, are too well known now to permit much discussion. Before these shows became popular features for tourist ships and visiting royalty I saw them dozens of times on their native ground. There have been any number of scientific treatises written to account for the phenomenon of bare Fijian feet which remain unscorched after contact with burning stones. As a physician I have studied the condition of the fire walkers before and after the ordeal, and I have always gone away with the feeling that I have seen a miracle. The old Mbengga myth which says that Ra Duna the Eel taught the hero Koma how to do the trick seems about as good an explanation as any I have heard.

Among the dark islanders magic things are usually grim, although there is a faded myth about the _neli_ people, a race of elves with long golden hair. They dance by moonlight, and if one of the golden hairs touches a peeping mortal he forgets how to find his way home. They say that native boys and girls who stayed out late usually blamed it on the _neli_. But belief in the little folk is passing.

The giving of curses is a serious everyday affair. In groups less advanced than Fiji the witch doctor commits simple murder. I have mentioned the Poisoner’s College at Mou. And there is the celebrated case of Captain Bell, Government tax collector, who went out in the Solomons on his unpopular errand and was speared by savages, sent to carry out a practical _draunikau_.

Inspector Bill Tully was down in the primitive New Hebrides. One morning his breakfast had been laid on a veranda; below many natives were gathered for a lecture. Tully sat down to breakfast when a witch doctor, in full paint, stepped up and flourished a bamboo wand, telling the world he held the magic that would kill. “Go ahead,” challenged Tully, so the magician tapped his wand on a plate. A little powder sifted out. Scornfully the young inspector blew it away and ordered his boy to bring bacon and eggs.

Bill finished his breakfast in full view of a very watchful audience. So far so good. But he had scarcely bolted the last scrap when he felt a griping in his stomach; cold sweat broke out, and he knew that he had turned pale green. He must have been a sickening sight, for the gawping natives screamed and scampered to the woods. It took Bill some minutes to recover equilibrium. Then he remembered. He had taken a rather large dose of calomel, and the darned stuff had begun to operate shortly after the wizard tapped his plate.

Polynesian magic is not so black, perhaps, as that you’ll find all over Melanesia; but it is always there, hiding behind Christianity or even higher education. In the Cook Islands a father cursed his pretty daughter. He had elephantiasis, and she had jeered him for his “big-leg.” “Very well,” he said, “and may your especially beautiful legs, which have caused too much trouble already, swell up and become big as mine.” Accordingly her legs swelled, and she was disfigured. True, she had been sleeping in her father’s house for years, and the filarial mosquito is no respecter of persons.

The Maoris of New Zealand are superior Polynesians. When I was making a survey there Dr. Ellison, himself half Maori, told me of a case that had come under his direct observation. The Polynesians, he reminded me, are practically all spiritualists, and the average Maori has forgotten more about spiritualism than the European medium will ever know. Among the Tohunga cult there is power to bring death by a secret wish; in the Melanesian _draunikau_ the victim is not affected until he knows that the curse is on him. But the Tohungas never telegraph their punches.

Dr. Ellison told me that a Mr. Haberley, half-Maori and an acquaintance of mine, was interested in the Wellington Museum and in search of fine Maori carvings. The quest took him to the region where Rua the Prophet held forth. Haberley found many neglected and rotting relics, but Rua defied him to lay hands on them. However, the collector took them to the museum. It wasn’t long before a serious illness overtook Haberley, who fell back on the customs of his mother’s people. He was of the Taranaki Maoris, so it was all in good form when he called in another Tohunga necromancer from Taranaki. Out of Mr. Haberley’s suavely educated lips came the command, “Save me if you can, and if you can’t, finish off Rua.” Very promptly the Tohunga put the bee on Rua the Prophet, who died during my survey of New Zealand. Haberley also died.

## CHAPTER II

GILBERT AND SULLIVAN, 1924

My share in the application of carbon tetrachloride had been a decided step forward for me, and I had spent two very busy years in Fiji, campaigning both for cure and prevention. But what most engaged my heart and mind was the plan for an improved medical school for natives. Through thick and thin I preached my crusade and hung to the idea like a terrier. In this plan I saw the only salvation for the island peoples.

In February, 1924, when I set out for a brief survey of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, the idea was still foremost in my thoughts. That was the first time I took Malakai along, just to show them.

The G and E Group, as it is conveniently called, is satirized by young cadets over the Fiji Club bar as “Gilbert and Sullivan.” It has a certain comic appeal. Dr. Walter E. Traprock, America’s glamour boy among nature fakers, chose these dots on the sea for his _Cruise of the Kawa_, where the national bird of the Filbert Islands was supposed to lay square eggs and cackle “Ouch!” Robert Louis Stevenson was far more serious, describing scenes of blood and beauty along the threading atolls.

Samoans, who once stigmatized as ghosts and slaves all folk who lived beyond them, called their islands “The World’s Navel.” In this they were somewhat off their bearings, for their Samoa is a bit too far southeast to center the earth. The Gilbert and Ellice group is strung in faint tattoo marks along the very middle of Earth’s belly. In all it covers 1,000 miles of sea, with islands so sparsely scattered that the easternmost is some 600 miles from the westernmost. A white man’s government has combined these two archipelagoes, but as a matter of geography they lie about 100 miles apart. The Gilbertese are a Micronesian stock, the Ellice folk are typically Polynesian and have a physique, a language and a social organization entirely different from the Gilbertese.

The Gilberts, which have been the meeting place of the races, have become the meeting place of the anthropologists. Originally, these men agree, the inhabitants were a black, smallish, flat-nosed mouse-eared people, called “the Spider Folk” because their divinities appeared in the form of spiders--also of turtles. The Spider Folk were supposed to be dreadful magicians, therefore they were avoided. Then came the invaders, great of stature, red of skin (that is, light brown), who fought them like devils, but still feared the Spider Magic. Songs survive, telling of the conquerors’ prowess as sailors; in them they are extolled as Children of the Sea, Fierce Fish of the West.

* * * * *

The mystery of Polynesian or other Pacific migrations is a puzzle that may never be solved. The Gilberts formed a bottle neck through which many waves of migration must have come from the ancestral home, Hawaiki--from which are derived the modern names Hawaii and Savaii. Some pressure, some social convulsion on the continent must have driven them off of the southeast tip of Asia and sent them out in migratory waves--no turning back, a fierce starving horde in a quest for land and a home in the Pacific. Another stream undoubtedly crossed the Behring Sea and traveled southward along the coast; Mexican legends told of their coming from the north. Probably they passed as far as to South America. Our red Indian race must be the mixture resulting from these invasions. They must have reached the continent across the Pacific, or some must have returned from the west coast of the Americas, to have brought the sweet potato to the Pacific. In this time we can appreciate the thrill of horror that went over the peaceful Pacific islands, waking to see strange fleets of enormous canoes pouring forth their hordes of death-driven warriors.

In the sterile Gilberts the invaders found little that they wanted--except women. They lingered for a generation or so, then conquered the Ellices, captured Rotumah, fought their way into Savaii and Upolu in Samoa.

Tradition and genealogy tell the story plainly. About twenty-four to twenty-eight generations ago a return invasion rolled back from Samoa, moving northward. It overwhelmed the Ellices, but was repulsed by the Gilbertese; except that small Nui in the Ellices still retains much of the Gilbertese language and customs.

In total area the Gilberts won’t measure much more than 170 square miles. They hardly seem worth fighting over, these bare coral rocks with an occasional drift of soil where coco palms can just hang on. The people must subsist largely on fish and coconut products; in addition, they have the stringy, unsatisfactory fruit of the pandanus and _babai_. The latter is a bastard taro, eaten in other groups only when famine drives the people to it. Yet it takes a mighty struggle for the Gilbertese to raise even these poor things. Over 28,000 population, crowded together on a little land, are never more than a jump away from starvation. Rainfall is sparse, and on the islands nearest the Equator droughts may last for two or three years; at times even the coconut palms have died, and the people have been reduced to sucking the few drops of moisture from fish-eyes. Even after large churches have been built, with a competent watershed from the roofs, many have died of thirst, because they were afraid to drink the water from holy places.

Yet what did I find in the Gilberts? Very healthy specimens, strapping copper-colored fellows with hair from straight to curly; big-shouldered, but not particularly tall. They had the look of men who grow what they eat, and work for it. Their average health was in contrast to that of the naturally handsome, pale-skinned Polynesians in the Ellices to the southeast. To these food came more easily from a richer soil. And must I say it again? There were fewer missions in the Gilberts, whereas the Ellice Islanders were all nominally Christian--as witness once more the greasy Mother Hubbards, layer on layer, pressing oil and germs into their beautiful bodies. Dirt and laziness seemed to have followed the Cross into charming lagoons which once inspired Stevenson’s prose poems.

* * * * *

We were traveling on the High Commission yacht _Pioneer_, where Printer Johann Sebastian Bach’s son Bill shared the cabin de luxe with me; we had a bathroom of our own, but when the portholes leaked in one direction the toilet leaked in another. I envied Malakai, who bunked on deck. It was one of the morning’s ceremonies for Malakai to come down and see to it that young Bach got his bath. Bill was of the age when all boys are anti-soap, and it was worth getting up to see a cannibal’s scientific grandson enforcing hygiene on a great composer’s descendant; Bill’s treble, “Ow, ow!” against Malakai’s grim bass, “You aren’t finished till you wash the other ear!”

That got us to Rotumah, an island which for some mystic reason is considered a part of Fiji, but lies nearer the Ellice group. Because public health is concerned with sociology, politics, geography, history and anthropology as well as worms and germs, let me use Rotumah as an example of what lavish Nature can do to a people.

The Rotumans were among the world’s laziest, their island among the world’s richest. Crops grew while you slept; therefore the natives slept or went to a party. This was coconut wealth, prodigal and wasted. Up in the volcanic mountains it took a little work to get at the palms, so they were never gotten at. Nuts ripened, dropped, rotted or fed the island’s expensive pigs. Ask an owner about his wealth in coconuts and he’d guess he had plenty.

They were a delightfully mixed race. Their ancestors had been generous to ships that stopped there to “refresh” their crews. In the unwritten history of Oceania the Tongafiti conquerors used Rotumah as one of the steppingstones that let them spread the Polynesian race over the South Pacific. As I found Rotumah, there was little evidence of that fierce and noble background.

To get things done they hired Fijian labor at eight or ten shillings a day. If a Rotuman ran into debt he merely sent his hirelings out to gather a few more nuts--or that was what they were doing when I got there. Some 900 acres of land produced 2,000 tons of copra annually. Mild efficiency could have boosted the output to 6,000 tons. But why be efficient?

Did you want to buy a pig? Well, he would cost you about fourteen pounds. What a price for a pig! Yes, sir, but remember that he’s been fed on very expensive copra, and has already eaten twice his value. But why not fatten him on something else? That would be a lot of trouble, sir, and our pigs are used to copra. There’s plenty of copra. And maybe, sir, we couldn’t afford to sell you a pig anyhow. We’re giving another feast tomorrow, and what’s a feast without a pig?

In the Rotuman’s Melano-Poly-Malay-European veins there was a dash of Negro, and right royal. In the blackbirding days an Afro-American, probably a slave himself, was cast ashore and proceeded to make himself king. He seemed a kindly monarch, and didn’t have the tragic finish of the other Emperor Jones. He taught the people how to work,--they say,--but he’s been a long time dead.

When I got there they were all Christians; maybe that was because it was so easy to find a church. The Catholic church had a £600 belfry and a splendid mosaic altar. Things like that were prosperity’s blow-off, and when the Rotumans didn’t know what else to do with their surplus they built another fine concrete monument. There were monuments everywhere, mortuary, honorary, sumptuary. It was like our wealth-parade in the Coolidge Administration. Rotuman pig-feasts were costly milestones in every life. It cost £100 worth of celebration for a baby to be born, £200 for a man to die, £800 for him to be properly married.

And on the doctor’s side of this generous picture I found Rotumah heavily laden with hookworm, yaws, tuberculosis and leprosy. Over 90 per cent of the inhabitants were covered with scabies. A sticky, hot, fly-and-mosquito-ridden island, with hardly a breeze to break the dead monotony of climate.... A stone wall, built along the shore road, kept in the pigs and kept out whatever breeze might blow. That didn’t matter much in Rotumah, where the people seemed too lazy to draw a deep breath.

Most of the elderly men, by the way, had elephantiasis.

* * * * *

Because elephantiasis was something I had to meet as I went along, it may be apropos to explain what I have mentioned before: that it is not a disease, but the manifestation of a disease. The disease is filariasis, caused by the filarial worm, a long, threadlike creature that lives in the lymphatic glands. The eggs pass into the lymphatic and blood streams and hatch into microfilariae. The low power of a microscope will show them in a drop of blood, but their sex cannot be distinguished. They take on sexual form in the body of the mosquito which has drawn up infected blood, and the mosquito injects them into the veins of the next victim.

Now definitely male and female, they make their way into the lymph glands, grow and breed by millions. The female lays her fertile eggs, which complete the cycle by becoming microfilariae. Because there is much destruction of microfilariae in the mosquito’s body, and because there is much wastage of the parasites in the reinfection of a human, the disease is rather slow to develop. Mosquitoes may bite millions of times before enough male and female worms accumulate to cause symptoms. It usually takes years of residence in a mosquito-infected native community before these ideal conditions meet.

With the proper number of parasites comes filarial fever, which is accompanied by inflammation and abscesses in the lymphatic and subcutaneous tissues. The inflammation subsides, but some of the swelling remains in dependent members of the body, arms, legs, breasts, vulva and scrotum. These swellings may be caused by dead filaria worms, which block the glands whose function it is to drain a dependent area; thus the dead worms might impede the return flow of lymph and cause an overgrowth of skin and subcutaneous tissue, slowly piling up to a huge size. The skin grows rough like an elephant’s hide, and the monstrous limbs add to the elephantine look.

Filarial fever seems to have little effect on longevity, but causes a lassitude which results in a great labor loss. And when it becomes elephantoid it impedes any form of activity.

An interesting phenomenon is connected with these minute organisms. The activity of the microfilariae which the mosquito puts into the blood stream is similar, in one way, to the habits of the mosquito that has carried them. That is to say, if the mosquito is a night-biter, the microfilariae are active during the night only. During the day they seem to rest quiescent, deep in the recesses of the body. But if they have been introduced by a day-biting mosquito their behavior is just the reverse--they are day-active. In the Pacific the disease is transmitted by the _Culex fatigans_ and by members of the _Aedes_ family. The Pacific branch of the _Aedes_ clan is a daytime feeder while the _Culex fatigans_ is a night worker. So afflicted island people suffer from an infection that does twenty-four-hour duty.

In the Ellice group so many elderly husbands were disabled by elephantiasis of the scrotum that they often asked for surgical operations in order to restore domestic harmony; for it was “the fashion” for old men to marry young wives. At Funafuti Dr. Mac Finney told me that one swollen applicant, who had come quite a distance, gave his age as ninety. (They date their ages from the coming of the missionary.) The patient looked a trifle passé, but Mac Finney did a clean job, and hoped he would recover.

On a return voyage Mac Finney saw the old boy coming back on the boat to Funafuti. The ancient confessed that he was on his way to jail. Why? Well, when he got off the boat for home, he felt so vigorous that he had attacked the first woman he saw.

The twin groups, Gilberts and Ellices, were a special problem in the spread of this disease. The dark-skinned Gilbertese, living a hundred miles northwest of the light-skinned Ellice Islanders, seem to have been free of filariasis until modern civilization arrived, although the Ellices had been infected for a long time. The writer found this disease moving slowly northward in the Gilbert group. Primitive savagery and that thin strip of water had long kept the Gilberts in a state of quarantine. Then barriers were down, and filariasis reached the Gilberts. The British administration made several attempts to re-establish quarantine, but conditions made it difficult, and they probably knew that it was a bit too late; the mischief had already been done. Only recently has the machinery of infection been understood. In several groups British medical authorities have made valiant efforts to check the blight. Their problem has been made more difficult by the fact that the principal carrier is the “wild mosquito,” a creature that lives and breeds in the bush. The domestic mosquito is easier to run down.

* * * * *

In those ten weeks of inspection we covered 6,500 miles, crossed the Equator six times and touched the globe’s four hemispheres. In both groups the islands are so low-lying that a few miles away they are invisible; first you see a plumage of palms, then the border of white sand; then the glory of lagoons, some of them looking no bigger than your hand, others stretching a quarter of a mile, brushing their faint pastel colors against the feathering reef that divides them from the Pacific’s royal blue. I love lagoons.

Other white men have loved them too. At Funafuti, for example, one of the boys who helped us ashore had a tinge of red in his hair and said his name was O’Brien. The headman of the town and the native magistrate were also O’Briens. O’Briens flocked from every corner until I hoped to hear a trace of the brogue. But the original O’Brien, who must have been a broth of a boy, had long since passed away and left good deeds behind him. In the wicked blackbirding days he had promptly deserted his ship and taken up with an island girl. He saved the people with the advice that they had better stick by him, as his vessel had come to take them into slavery. Blessings on his red head. To keep his Irish memory green, fifty-four O’Briens flourished in Funafuti, out of 250 inhabitants.

Except for Funafuti all the Ellice Islands had closed lagoons, and to come ashore one must run the surf in native canoes, which usually meant a ducking, and always a wet bottom. I have never seen so many churches to the square mile, for the Ellices are highly Christianized, as witness the layer upon layer of dragging Mother Hubbards that cover the women. On small Vaitupu I counted three expensive concrete churches, and found that the London Missionary Society’s Samoan teacher hadn’t liked the acoustics of the first two, so he had had a third built to suit his voice. In one year, the Ellice Islands had sent $6,000 to _foreign_ missions! And $60,000 had been devoted to the piety of 3,000 inhabitants. Churches were objects of superstitious awe. It would be sacrilege, they said, to drink rain water from church roofs, and something awful would happen if they did; their livers might swell up and burst, for instance.

Up in the Gilberts, on the other hand, they were only a few years removed from the absolute savagery of an era when one island waged fierce war against another. As it was, about half of them were nominally Christianized. The Sunday parade to church was a sight worth while. The native ladies wore short fiber skirts and nothing else, except dinky little English hats perked on top of their bushy heads. For hadn’t St. Paul said distinctly that no bareheaded woman should enter the House of God?

At Tabatauea on the Gilberts I made a postmortem examination of a dead king. Since the king had been dead a thousand years, I was not surprised that the results were spectacular.

I was led to a palm-thatched shrine where the bones of Korave, heroic ancestor of the island’s chiefs, were held in veneration; legend tells of his gigantic size and heroic strength when he led the people of Beru to the invasion. Before I could be admitted District Commissioner Anderson had to get the consent of Korave’s entire family connection. We came in a canoe, waded through mud, and as very wet spectators got at last to the assembly hall, the _muniapa_.

The whole village had turned out. The Gilbertese converse in shouts, and the palaver around us sounded like a football game until Mr. Anderson silenced them to explain how important this occasion was. I sat there, looking as majestic as a large fat man can after a dousing in sea water and a sweaty walk. Then the big question. The exalted visitor wished to see great Korave’s bones. Immediately the people of Tabatauea went into noisy conference. Abruptly the huddle parted. A headman came forward and said yes, we could see the bones.

Hung to the ridgepole was a large basket decorated with white shells. Two men carefully washed their hands and lowered the great chief’s remains. After one glance at the bones, which they had spread on a mat, I had a keen desire to examine them for myself. But could I? There was a terrible hubbub, every branch of the Korave family yelling at each other. Then the headman said “all right” with variations.

There was a remarkably fine skull, indicating that somebody had had a generous brain pan with plenty of room above the eyebrows. At first I found two thigh bones and two tibias, just as any hero should have. When I got around to the two fibulas, the small leg-bones, I found them smaller than their mates, and was tactless enough to ask if their ancestor didn’t walk with a limp. Indignant denials. I was more impressed still when I picked up another fibula and tibia--golly, the man must have been three-legged! Also three radii and extra pelvic bones turned up. It looked as if the late king had three of everything to the common man’s two. There was a collection of small ribs that might have fitted a great many people, but if they had been assembled on Korave’s skeleton they would have presented a new problem in anatomy.

I disturbed Tabatauea’s faith as gently as I could by asking if they were _sure_ these bones all came from the same man. They were very positively certain. Hadn’t the relics been carefully passed down through the generations? And this simple faith may cast light on some of the holy relics worshiped in our Christian churches.

Anderson’s flowery introduction had won much respect for my opinion, it appeared, for they asked what I could tell them about their mighty ancestor. Already they had allowed me to sit, just for a moment, on the enchanted stone where Korave used to sit; it was supposed to have a magic quality of coolness. Sure enough, it was quite cool. So I must tell them of their ancestor. The safe bet was to fall back on generalities. I told them that he was a very big man indeed, much bigger than one of his very large descendants whom I saw in the audience. Quite truthfully I praised the size of great Korave’s head; no commonplace man could have worn a skull like that. But my praise of the bones _in toto_ made the hit of the day. Not only was Korave remarkable in other things, I said, but he had more bones than any man I had ever seen. After Anderson translated this he told me that they were very grateful for the information, which would be treasured among their legends of the hero.

* * * * *

On Kuria it was my professional duty to confer with one of Robert Louis Stevenson’s least appreciated characters, District Commissioner Murdock, who had emerged from the days of piracy. Stevenson had

## actively disliked Murdock; somewhere in his tales of Apamama and

King Timbinoka, the novelist had referred to Murdock as “a rat-faced Scotchman with a secretive disposition,” and “Timbinoka’s cook.” The feud stemmed on Murdock’s refusal to tell of a thousand and one nights he had been concerned in. He had plentiful reason to keep his mouth shut, for at the time the other Scot was snooping for adventure stories Murdock was a sort of business manager to the savage king who conquered Kuria and terrorized all surrounding islands. Murdock had also acted as contact man between the terrible Timbinoka and the terrible Bully Hayes, pirate and blackbirder extraordinary.

All the pirate I saw in Murdock was his flaring white mustache; the mouth below it stayed pretty tight, and he only grunted, until I won him over with a fancy new spinner for his fishing. Then he opened up and talked about himself.

As a consumptive lad of nineteen he had come there on a sailing ship and won Timbinoka’s heart by cooking him a good meal of vittles, and was hired on the spot. From frying fish he had graduated into diplomacy, mostly with Bully Hayes and his slaving deals with Timbinoka. Hayes, who probably hailed from San Francisco, would clean out whole islands and carry away the inhabitants to die in the fields and mines of Australia, Fiji, South America. As a side line, he would swoop down on the pearl fisheries, gathering the pearls and the girls. Out at sea he would repaint his ship with a new set of colors, to fool pursuing naval vessels. He often baited his trap with pretty girls; the ladies of Aitutaki were especially tempting, so he would take on a load of them and keep them in full view as he loitered by various islands. Then the native men, poor fools, would swim out to be captured and chained.

On one occasion, at least, Murdock went as the King’s agent to an island where Bully Hayes had carried a shipload of Timbinoka’s warriors to punish some of His Majesty’s disobedient subjects. When Bully took captives he had the privilege of buying them from Timbinoka. The monarch prospered on this industry, and was a tyrant of the old school. Once he sent Murdock with 300 slaves for coffee plantations in Mexico and Guatemala.

The King’s harem was extensive, and uninvited males were promptly slain. A splendid rifle shot, Timbinoka kept in practice by pinking disobedient wives, usually on the run. He owned every blade of grass, chased competitors out of his trading stores, forbade missionaries. He could be hospitable, but when he said, “Get out!” his guest said good-by. He bought liquor, boats and gadgets wholesale. His grand passion was sewing machines; he had a royal collection in various stages of decay; and a trader with music boxes to sell received a royal welcome. European clothes charmed him, and he couldn’t wait for the latest styles to come by boat. So he sent two natives to Auckland to learn tailoring. Alas for Timbinoka’s vanity! He got so very fat so very soon that the broadest coats and trousers split on him. He spent his declining years in an ornamental Mother Hubbard. Murdock showed me a photograph of him wearing one; so fat he couldn’t walk, he was being carried by eight men.

Once he sent Murdock to investigate a wreck on Apamama. The crew was found in a sorry plight; natives had given them food and shelter--but they had run out of liquor. So Murdock got a large demijohn and filled it with rum from one of the King’s hogsheads. He reported this to Timbinoka, who asked, “Where you catch im dis feller rum?” Murdock identified the hogshead and his King said, “Hum hum, hum. One time one feller man belong Sydney he like im one feller head belong kanaka. So he pickle him along dis feller rum.”

In short, Timbinoka had severed some enemy heads which a trader bought, pickled and sent to a scientist in Australia. After this transaction the enterprising trader sold the rum back to Timbinoka. The monarch found out about it, so he didn’t use the liquor. But the shipwrecked sailors got their share of it and His Majesty was vastly amused when he told them what they had been drinking and saw them get sick. He commissioned Murdock to buy their ship for five pounds. Timbinoka assembled the whole kingdom with everything that would float. By main strength and awkwardness they raised the ship, which was repaired and became the Royal Navy. With a regal gesture Timbinoka sent the crew back to Australia, at his expense.

Before his death the King got his useful cook a job as District Officer, a post he served well the rest of his life. Once, he told me, he found an extremely leprous village, so he burned it down and moved the inhabitants to new quarters. From these particular people, he said, he never heard of leprosy again. It sounds a bit fishy, for to this day no experimenter has found out how the leprosy germ is imparted.

* * * * *

One of Timbinoka’s royal descendants was at Kuria when we were there. A big man, he had once been handsome, but he was going to fat and his baldness rivaled mine. His morals were everybody’s business, even among the Gilbertese, who are remarkably sophisticated for so primitive a folk. Maybe their vices had drifted in from Tahiti, or from an especially low crop of beachcombers. Possibly the discouragement of the harem system had demoralized them. At any rate, the Royal Descendant was no match for a nice girl.

He served as background for a story that came to me as island tales do. Years later I found a Frenchman, Mr. X, looking for a job, and wondered why a man of his education and intelligence should be out of work. He seemed so pitifully anxious that I pulled wires and got him a job managing a trading station. He didn’t keep it very long. And this is why:--

He had been a priest, serving faithfully on these islands. Marie was an extremely attractive half-caste girl in his school. With his Bishop’s consent he encouraged her wish to become a nun; she preferred this choice to marrying the Royal Descendant, her family’s selection. If Father X was in love with her, it was a passion he religiously denied, although he went on with her education while she was a novice. The European nuns in the convent made her life especially hard; they disliked the idea of a half-caste in the intimacy of full sisterhood. She worked for years as a drudge, scrubbing floors. Meanwhile her family were constantly nagging her to leave the convent and marry the aristocrat.

One night she went to Father X, who had been her only earthly friend. Her tears and his efforts to console her were too much for both of them. The Devil he had downed so long came forth. A few weeks later Father X went to his Bishop, a wise and worldly churchman. “Don’t take it so seriously,” said the Bishop, “those things will happen. Let me transfer you to Australia until it blows over.” “No,” insisted Father X, “she’s going to have my baby, and my child must be legitimate.” The Bishop shrugged it off; he shrugged off Father X’s priestly frock, too.

Father X, now a layman, went out into the world. The first thing he did was to marry Marie, and when the baby was born he did his level best to raise and educate the child. That might have been easy in a land where clever white men are scarce, but Mr. X came up against a stone wall. He was an unfrocked priest, he had married a half-caste under queer conditions. He wandered from pillar to post, getting small jobs, losing them, feeding his family as best he could.

Then things brightened for him. With his wife and child he wandered to Australia. A clever agriculturist, he invented a cure for some prevalent tree blight, and cashed in. He was now laying aside enough money to support his family; then he would go back to France to reenter his order.

* * * * *

An ambassador without portfolio, a doctor without a license, I went over the leper situation on the Gilberts and Ellices. The twin groups had their small share of the disease, but when I spoke to certain authorities and asked for co-operation in the model colony we were planning for Mokogai, the response was not too encouraging. Years later a sort of compromise affair was started on Tarawa on the Gilberts, but it proved such a dismal failure that we finally got our way and had the patients transferred to Mokogai.

On this first G and E survey I had gone on preaching my crusade for modernized native practitioners. Government schools in the two groups were effective, although European training can be overdone; the scope of the native mind is circumscribed by the shadow of the coconut tree. Gilbertese intelligence was high. When I looked over such schools as the one at Bairiki and saw bright faces knit in an earnest desire to learn, and when I observed their steady progress, I knew that here were potential N.M.P.’s. They were the sort who could learn medicine, and could return to their home islands to practise and to teach. Malakai was with me everywhere, an object lesson to them.

At Funafuti one of our old school N.M.P.’s, a giant from Tonga named Josaia, came aboard ship. I had known him as a pharmacist’s assistant in Auckland before he took up medicine, and we were renewing our friendship when Josaia paused and scowled at a well muscled native who had shuffled around me. Josaia said, “You have just insulted the Doctor. You have walked across his shadow.” Whereupon Josaia picked the man up, tossed him over his head and through an open door. Josaia was something of a storm king, and he was temporarily out of a job. He was an excellent surgeon. If he operated too often for tubercular glands in the neck, it was because of his lack of proper training. In those days many practitioners confused yaws with tuberculosis and acted accordingly. Josaia had been on the G and E group for a half-dozen years, working his head off for six pounds a month.

* * * * *

In the highly missionized Ellices there was much religious confusion, although I cannot vouch for the current story about the London Missionary Society lady. She kept her girls carefully guarded on a small island with a lagoon. When several showed signs of approaching maternity she asked who was to blame. “The Holy Ghost,” they replied. Immaculate conception was all right, they thought, and didn’t mention boys who crossed the lagoon in the dark of night.

On the less missionized Gilberts, religious affairs once took a more violent turn. An island had been having the usual squabble between Catholics and the London Missionary Society--the latter prevailed, controlled by native teachers. A native preacher fanned up a religious mania which swept the people. Self-appointed “Apostles and Angels of God” took over the works, led by a local “Virgin Mary.” The Angels rounded up all the Romanists they could find and killed several. They had locked up the native Catholic magistrate, were marching on him with a cross, and would have used it had it not been for the courage of one villager who went by canoe for the District Officer and white missionaries. The rescue, a few Europeans facing a mass of howling savages, required tactful argument. Subsequent investigation, which resulted in the island’s paying a fine, revealed scandal among the Angels. John the Baptist had been intimate with the Virgin Mary.

Where the religious problem puzzled the righteous, the medical questions confounded the doctor. Ocean Island, one of the world’s great phosphate bonanzas, was headquarters for the Gilbert and Ellice groups. A British syndicate mined the product. Arthur Grimble, Cambridge M.A., was acting District Commissioner and an ethnologist who had made useful discoveries.

From the doctor’s point of view too many Chinese had been imported to Ocean Island, although the Government’s very good hospital was doing more than its share. The trouble was that Gilbertese and Ellice Islanders worked beside the orientals; they caught the imported diseases and carried them home. All through the twin groups I saw evidence of infections which the strangers were bringing to a lovely people. Pathologically, the march of disease was beginning to show. Yaws, which seemed to have been brought by civilization, was making heavy inroads. Tuberculosis was working its way into handsome youths, who lacked the European’s immunity. Filariasis was a vexing puzzle, because it seemed impossible to control the mosquitoes that carried it. Intestinal parasites were fortunately few; the people lived near the beaches, and tidewater is Nature’s handy sewage system.

* * * * *

In my notebook I jotted down “interesting items”:--

Gilbertese stick-throwers.... One man with wreaths of flowers over head and shoulders, the other with pointed, fire-hardened stick about a yard long. Stick-thrower stood away from wreath-bearer only five yards, poised the stick, and _after it had left his hand_ named the wreath that would be cut off. He never missed. If a man is accidentally killed by this, there is no legal penalty....

Concrete-topped graves to keep the _tevoro_ from getting out. Graves decorated with dear possessions of deceased, derby hats, bottles, bicycles, spectacles, pipes. Saw one piano....

Wreckage that had floated to Tarawa from San Francisco ... common occurrence because of ocean currents....

Spiritualistic séance ... two old men and a hag sit in a one-room native house ... smoking short pipes, they go into a trance ... you ask them to make prophecies, simple ones like what’s tomorrow’s weather or when will the boat get in ... there’s a short silence, then you hear the queerest, eeriest whistling along the ridgepole ... pipes never leave their mouths. You run out to see if there is somebody on the roof ... bright moonlight, no accessory visible ... their prophecies are all wrong. They say it will rain tomorrow, but it’s clear, and the boat they name for Tuesday is a week late.... Probably ventriloquism....

All over the Pacific you hear brave stories of divers who cut the throats of man-eating sharks. When I ask about it they usually say “They do it in the Gilberts.” Made a standing offer of £5 for anybody who could do the trick. No takers. In Santa Ana, Solomons, I once saw boys thump sharks on the nose and take fish away from them. Here, when a canoe upsets, the natives climb into the wet sail, to avoid sharks....

But wonderful canoeing. Government is reviving the old custom of giant building. Saw one 109 feet long, sheer as a knife blade and with an outrigger float big as a young canoe. Could carry 150 natives; same people that once steered vast distances by the stars and with charts made of twigs and string. Gilbertese boys now prefer bicycles, but they’re making canoes on a grand scale....

District Officer of Tabatauea has one with accommodations like a yacht. I went out in a 30-footer, very fast. When they tack they disengage the mast in the stern and step it into a socket in the bow. Outrigger lifted clean out of the water, three men on it to keep it steady.... I got on to add my heavy weight. As we neared the ship, showing off, the outrigger’s framework stood almost upright, like a fence. We scooted around again and one of the native “captains” ran around on the uplifted outrigger. Seeing is believing. The swiftest of these canoes can make 18 knots. At the regatta in Sydney Harbor they rule them out--too fast, they always win....

I also made notes on the white inhabitants, and with a touch of sadness. Many of them had been so long away from the outer world and were so hungry for the sight of new faces that they joined the _Pioneer_ at the slightest excuse until the boat looked like a picnic excursion. The resident physician was with us. A young cadet named Jones kept sending messengers, saying that he must be seen at once, as he’d had a serious accident. In mercy’s name we went to his island, 200 miles off our course--and found that he had nothing worse than a splinter in his leg and a slightly wrenched back. What he really wanted was an invitation for himself and his wife to join the joy ride, and I certainly sympathized with them. But the ship was already crowded to the gunwales.

The island group’s treasurer made the trip to check each island’s finances. He was a pleasant man, with a decided character of his own. Somehow I wasn’t surprised when he mildly informed me that he was a grandson of the frightful Bully Hayes. I had my phonograph along and delighted him by turning on the latest ditties from New York. Yes, he had a Victrola, he said, but the tunes it played were so mildewed that even his children were tired of them. When he got off the boat I gave him a record of “Mr. Gallagher and Mr. Shean,” and he was ever so grateful.... About the time our ship was turning back toward Fiji I heard of his death. For some morbid tropical reason he had taken his own life.

His story had a ghostly finish. When I reached my office in Suva I found a letter from him, dated a few weeks back, thanking me for the record. It had given the children so much fun.

* * * * *

I was forced to conclude that white colonists of the Gilbert group needed a doctor more than the natives did. Monotony of life there must eventually depress the health of every European. The food was a trial to the civilized stomach; nothing but coconuts, fish and that stringy, tasteless root, the _babai_; and for variety whatever tinned goods the trader happened to have. If the Devil gave me a bad choice, I should rather live on the Ellices than the Gilberts--and rather on Rotumah than on the Ellices. Those are the three spots on the Pacific that I’m least fond of.

## CHAPTER III

A LITTLE KINGDOM AND A GREAT QUEEN

The Chief Medical Officer of the Tongan Islands was away on leave. Dr. Minty, his competent assistant and the only other medical officer on Tongatabu, called me in to assist in an emergency operation on Her Majesty, Salote Tubou, monarch of the last surviving native kingdom on the South Pacific. This was at Nukualofa, the capital.

Dr. Minty had no anesthetist, and asked me to help him out; it was a job I didn’t relish, for the responsibility would be pretty heavy, and surgical operations in the hot tropics are always something of a gamble. The Queen lay on a bed in one of the royal chambers. Her beautiful eyes turned toward me, her friendly lips said that she was glad that I had come. Her consort, Prince Tungi, bent his huge Tongan frame over her, consoling her and buoying her courage. It was my first personal medical service to reigning royalty, an adventure among giants, for the Queen of Tonga was two-and-a-half inches over six feet and weighed over 300 pounds. She came of a family of giants; her father had been even larger, and her great-grandfather George Tubou the First had been over six feet five inches and built in proportion. She wasn’t fat, either. The breadth of her shoulders showed tremendous physical strength. She was a woman of heroic size, a proper mother of Polynesian kings.

Everything was ready. I said, “Your Majesty, breathe regularly, and deeply. If you find the anesthetic is coming too fast, raise your hand and I’ll give you a breath of air; but not too often.” I started the stuff going and she raised her hand. I gave her air and started again. Again she raised her hand and kept on raising it until I said as deferentially as I could, “Remember, Your Majesty, there is no royal way of taking an anesthetic.” After that she was still as a mouse, an ideal patient. Her marvelous chest expansion, breathing in the vapor, was like the opening and shutting of a great accordion; her chest seemed to lift a foot.

Getting her in her bed was no job for a weakling. Prince Tungi was for carrying her in his arms; he was quite capable of it, but I wanted to keep an eye on her breathing and said, “Don’t be a hog, Tungi, move down and give me a share.” My arms hardly reached under her shoulders and I was relieved when the move was completed safely. She was one of the handsomest, biggest women I have ever seen.

Minty’s rapid, efficient job should have been nobody’s business; but an operation on royalty is always of great national moment, and the kingdom was agog. Especially in the European section; for Tonga was prosperous enough to employ a great many foreigners to fill government posts. Next morning Bob Denny, the picturesque Scottish postmaster, gave me the first inquisition. “Doctor, didn’t the Queen have an operation? What was it for?” I said, “I only gave her the anesthetic.” He couldn’t understand my obtuseness and shouted, “BUT WHAT WAS THE MATTER WITH HER?” I said, “That’s the Queen’s and Dr. Minty’s business.” I knew that if he asked Minty he would be rounded up with a short turn.

In the South Pacific, where everybody’s business is your own, Aesculapian secrecy was never quite understood. When Postmaster Denny found that I wouldn’t talk about the royal operation he generously forgave me by offering me some pamphlets addressed to a lady who was away. “They might be interesting,” he said, “but you’d better get them back in a week. She’s due about then, and she’s cranky about her mail.”

For my share in the much-discussed operation I was rewarded in royal Tongan fashion. The house we lived in was loaded down with gifts of appreciation: rolls of fine tapa, huge chunks of roast pork and quantities of selected Tongan fruit.

These gifts had become familiar to me; in May of the previous year I had accepted an invitation to make a hookworm survey of the Kingdom of Tonga. I spent three months there the first year of the survey. My family and Malakai accompanied me. We showed the Foundation film “Unhooking the Hookworm” with great effectiveness in the local movie theater to large crowds which assembled, docile to the Queen’s command. In the remoter areas we fell back on the hookworm charts. The response in specimens was splendid. This was what the Tongans liked--they were already interested in health, and here was something new for nothing. Our examinations yielded little noteworthy in the way of hookworm disease. The infection rate was low and the number of worms per head was low. I judged this was because the Tongans still obeyed the old Polynesian tabus about the disposal of excrement; we also found that most houses in community groups had latrines of a sort, though these were inadequate. But their water supplies were awful. There are almost no running streams and the drinking water was largely obtained from shallow wells, which were subject to great contamination because pigs, fowls, horses and humans shared them.

The pig question came up right away. The Chief Medical Officer wanted me to say that pigs carry hookworm to human beings, and that theory ran afoul of my conviction to the contrary. The C.M.O. and I ceased to be friends after I refused to agree with him. He was a Scot. Scots have about the best medical minds. When they find that a theory is right nothing can budge them. You seldom run across one who will devote all his native stubbornness to a shaky hypothesis.

Well, I’m a bit stubborn myself, and on the question of pigs I had my reasons. One of the weaknesses in native diet is the shortage of meat, fresh or otherwise. Europeans coming into native life immediately want to put pigs in corrals. I knew an Irish doctor who didn’t rest satisfied until he had enforced such a regulation. He hailed from a land where, according to legend, “they keep the pig in the parlor”; but to the native such intimacy isn’t good form. My observation has been that when pigs are enclosed in the corral, the meat supply soon runs out. Why? Because one man objects to feeding the other man’s pig; keep them in a common enclosure and they are gradually killed off, with no replacements. When pigs are allowed to run loose in the villages they pick up their own food, or most of it. This is the native way. Much as I have looked into the subject, I know no Pacific island disease that is carried by pigs. Had I agreed with statements to the contrary, to satisfy the esthetics of a few foreigners, I could not have been honest with my own convictions.

Tongans are notably robust and resistant to disease, as we shall see, and I attribute it in no small measure to a generous supply of pork, added to their other foods.

Tongan good feeding and abundant hospitality almost made a wreck of a visiting Fijian football team. I saw the first match of that series, much to my sorrow, for I am Fijian to the bone. When the boys came to Tonga they were regarded as much the superior team, and when I talked with Native Practitioner Savanada, one of the players, all was confidence. But on the field of glory Fiji was dull and heavy as lead. Then the saddened Savanada told me why. On the thirty-six-hour steamer trip to Tonga the Fijians had had little to eat. The minute they stepped ashore they were confronted with a feast. Poor, starved Fijians! There were more roast pigs than they had ever seen at one time, heaped up with trimmings of yams and succulent breadfruit, and chickens and fish to fill in the crevices.

When they went on the field they were a little like Mark Twain’s Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, artfully weighted down. The crafty Tongans, by the way, played on empty stomachs. All over the South Pacific, a sharp trick like this is known as “Tongafiti.”

Tonga won the second game, too, with me yelling my head off for the glory of Fiji. This time Savanada explained it away with a dignity worthy of his chiefly rank: “Queen Salote was present, and it wouldn’t have been courteous for us, as her guests, to win.” But Fiji won the last game hands down, and every time the Tongan team came to Fiji the kingdom’s athletic pride was lowered a hitch.

* * * * *

Speaking of “Tongafiti,” as far as I can find out the word is a compound of _Tonga_ and _Viti_ (Fiji), and it is probable that the Pacific’s ancient conquerors took Fijian warriors along with them in the days when they were the Huns and Vandals of their time.

Sikiana had been cleaned out by “Tongafiti” people; there was evidence that they had fought their way via the fringing Polynesian islands to the west, conquering as they went; at the tip of the Solomons the people of little Rennell Island had beaten these warriors by luring them up on the sharp coral, which mangled their bare feet. One end of Rotumah is still settled by a chief who is descended from Tongan invaders, so is one end of Mangaia on the Cooks. For two or three centuries the Tongans made slaves of the Samoans; at last Malietoa drove them off, and they promised never to return except in peace. Then Tonga forgot the arts of war, but in the seventeenth century it became fashionable for their chiefs to go over to Fiji and join forces with one or the other of their warring provinces. These trips were a sort of Grand Tour, a part of their education. They were always welcome because they were unafraid of charging a fortified position, something that the Fijian always dreaded. Chief Ma’afu, descending on Fiji, would have unseated Thakombau had the British not intervened.

Contact with Melanesia has given the Tongan a slightly browner coloring than the golden skin of the pure Polynesian; those portions of dark Fiji where Tongan warriors and mission teachers were most frequent can still be picked by lighter skins and other Tongan stigmata. Tongans have a stoutness, a fiber, that excels that of all other Polynesians. In many ways they are the superior natives of the Pacific.

Captain Cook discovered them in 1770, although seventeenth-century navigators had sighted them. Because of their kindly reception Cook called them “the Friendly Islands”; he didn’t know that he would have been butchered and his boats seized if the chiefs had not disagreed among themselves. A few years later the _Port au Prince_ was less lucky. A young boy appropriately named Mariner was the only one saved; Finau Ulukalala, the leading chief, happened to take a fancy to him. Mariner lived there for four years, and after his escape a Dr. Martin took down his enthralling story, which reads like a dime novel.

The missionary followed the white trader, and Tonga was a cockpit for religious factions. The last chapter of that bitter feud was written as late as 1924. It was Methodist against Catholic at first; finally Methodist against Methodist--actually Wesleyan against Wesleyan. Taufahau, a giant chief of the Kanakupolu family and destined to be king, first saw the writing on the wall and joined the Wesleyans; by that time the Tongans had lost their old religion, the worship of Polynesian deities. Taufahau may have yielded to a greater magic than he knew. He may have become a true Christian, although this seems difficult to believe. Certainly he seized the opportunity to weld the group into a political unit. A great warrior, a great strategist, a great man, he was enthroned in 1826 and lived until 1894. Under his kingship all Tonga became Christian, mostly Wesleyan.

In his later years, around the seventies and eighties, scandals arose in the Church. Much money was exacted in religious offerings, and after the missioners had feathered their own nests, the balance was sent out of the country. Tonga, mind you, was just emerging from the Stone Age--yet she was supporting foreign missions! Finally Taufahau, now King George the First, decided to head his own state Church, the Free Church of Tonga. There were cruel persecutions of Wesleyans who wouldn’t recant; many were killed, thousands driven out of Tonga. George the First had a renegade Wesleyan missionary named Baker as his guide, and the guide became Prime Minister. Although Prime Minister Baker served the kingdom with some permanently wholesome laws, his rule degenerated in the course of years. As much appears to have been wasted through him as through the former rule of the missions, and things came to such a pass that the British High Commission had to intervene and institute a protectorate over Tonga. The Free Church pursued its erratic way through the reign of George the Second of Tonga, who died in 1918, and into the reign of Queen Salote. In 1924 she joined the Wesleyan Church, and the Free Church ceased to be Tonga’s official faith. The Free Church left a bad financial record, and had little regard for honest business practices. For many years Tongan religion had been largely a matter of politics. Whenever a monarch switched his religion there had been a corresponding switch in the opposition to the Crown.

The Tubous are the sole survivors of numerous native dynasties which the first white men found in the Pacific. The Tongan kingdom has outlived the greedy gobblings of Western powers, and the people have kept their identity through every political crisis.

The Tubous have a past longer than that of any other ruling dynasty today. Their kings first came from Eastern Samoa, probably from Ta’u, which seems to have been the cradle of great Polynesian kings. The Tui Tonga was the spiritual and temporal head of the state, and Aho’-itu was the first of the Tui Tonga. A later Tui Tonga wearied of the double burden and turned temporal affairs over to his brother Tui Haatakalaua, and Haatakalaua finally passed his power over to another brother, Tui Kanakupolu. When King George the First took the throne, he abolished the title of Tui Tonga. Joeli, last claimant to that ancient title, died after my first visit to the kingdom.

This seems a pretty sketchy way to pass over a thousand years of history. When I first saw Tonga its two great historical strains were joined in marriage. The Haatakalaua and the Kanakupolu families united in Tungi and Salote. The royal wedding was in 1918. With three sons the dynastic succession seemed safe.

In 1924 the reigning couple were more highly educated than most of their subjects. Salote had studied in Auckland and Tungi had gone to an excellent school in Sydney. Ata, one of the great nobles, had also been to Sydney for his education. Otherwise only a few half-caste children had enjoyed foreign advantages. Generally speaking, the people knew only a few words of English.

The Tongans were great nationalists with a mortal dread of being taken over by one of the Powers. They were even afraid of England, although they seemed quite safe in that direction. The British protectorate over the kingdom was (and is) a very light one. Great Britain was selecting Chief Justices and Auditors for them, and quite naturally the Tongans paid the salaries. The British Consul and Agent acted as adviser to the Queen, and it was his duty to approve any financial expenditures. With these restrictions, Tonga is today a free constitutional monarchy, with a parliament and the Queen’s privy council.

The point of friction has always been the British Consul’s right to veto expenditures. If he was well trained in the British civil service the plan worked out well. But the job occupies not more than an hour of the Consul’s day, and too many of them have used the leisure to indulge in petty statesmanship and tyrannies far beyond their official authority.

The financial veto is a powerful weapon, but the check in expenditure has been Tonga’s salvation. It is hard for Western civilization to understand the Polynesian’s utter lack of money sense--or the Melanesian’s, for that matter. From early childhood the European has learned the art of getting and spending. Not so the Pacific Islander. Although in many ways they may excel us intellectually, it is next to impossible to make them understand that coined metal isn’t something you pick off trees and throw around for the moment’s enjoyment. It’s all great fun, while the party lasts. Only by hard knocks will the native learn money economy. Oftentimes his education comes in jail, where he can study at leisure the disadvantages of Western methods over his old-time communal system.

Wild extravagances of Church and State forced Great Britain to set up a protectorate to prevent Tonga from falling into other hands. The British Consul, with keys to the treasury, had to span the great void which is the Tongan money sense. Today I know of no other nation so financially sound as Tonga--no debt, internal or external, and a surplus of £150,000, about twenty-five dollars per head. For the United States this would be a capital of well over three billions, with no debts at all. Not so bad for Tonga, a land that saw iron for the first time about 250 years ago. And the kingdom’s wealth is well distributed, too. Every Tongan male at the age of eighteen receives from his government eight-and-a-half acres of fertile land and a town lot to build his home on.

The white man goes through these islands and sees many things that may be comic from his biased viewpoint. But shouldn’t we turn the laugh on ourselves in the light of New Deals and Planned Economies? While Western civilization is eating its accumulated fat and beginning to gnaw its own vitals, I wonder if some Tongan Brain Trust might not lead us out of our wilderness of bureaucratic taxes, and teach us what the Abundant Life really means.

In 1924 Queen Salote was in her young twenties, but her mind was matured by experience in government, and she was quick to see the help our Foundation could give her little realm of 25,000 souls. We were working like devils to give Tonga an adequate water supply, and I wore my diplomacy threadbare trying to convince the Scottish C.M.O. of the obvious need. Although I am a chronic admirer of the Scots--and haven’t I seen them survive and carry on in posts that would have demolished a less sturdy breed?--this Medical Officer remained a prickly thistle that drove me to distraction. I’m a peaceable man, as the Irish say. Certainly I’ve managed somehow to get along with a great variety of human types.

But not with this one. The few faint hairs that remained on my head bristled at the sight of him. He bothered those hairs worse than the Tongan flies that swarmed around breakfast at Bill Smith’s boarding house; there I learned to cover my bald spot with a knotted handkerchief. No handkerchief could shield me from the Scot’s irritating perversity. I had to confer with him, of course, or I couldn’t have worked at all. He was a very competent surgeon,

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

South Pacific. As a health officer he had done some splendid work, especially with yaws. But I had got off on the wrong foot when I disagreed with him about pig hookworm. His great fault--if it be a fault--was his firm conviction that he was a final authority on everything.

One of his assistants, a brilliant young fellow who suffered as long as he could endure it, then accepted a high post in Australia, gave me all the help he dared, and that was useful. But the Scot had an anti-Lambert complex. We were trying to install model latrines all over the Tongan Islands, and we had to choose a type that met with his approval. Nothing I offered was satisfactory, and it was impossible to find out what he wanted. If I hadn’t finally resorted to a “Tongafiti” trick I feel sure that nothing would have been accomplished. At last, in complete despair, I went to him with one of the plans he had rejected and said suavely, “Well, Doctor, I’ve finally come around to your original idea, and I’ll go with you on this plan.” Without a murmur he accepted it. I had discovered a system.

Probably Tonga was fortunate in having so good a man at the helm. For the kingdom had been hospitable to some quacks, both clerical and medical.

A prominent trader was saying good-by to friends at the boat and remarking, “Glad you’re going while you have so good an impression of the women,” when a well-dressed stranger with a lady on his arm strolled up and said, “No man is good enough for a good woman.” This knightly champion’s name doesn’t matter, except that it went on the Tongan medical register with the string of initials “M.D., Phy. D.O., M.S.R.U.I., S.A. and Harvard University D.O.” The S.A. might have meant something, but his fantastic list of degrees remained as much a mystery as why the Tongan Government appointed him to a high medical post. Later on he admitted to me that he learned all his medicine as a hospital wardsman.

He was the only physician available when Queen Salote gave birth to the Crown Prince. His elegant bedside manner combined with his official prestige had elevated him beyond criticism. The accouchement took place, according to tradition, in the royal suite; following old custom, the great nobles waited in an antechamber to hear the birth proclaimed. Now and then the much-titled physician would pop in to take a look at his patient, then pop out to smoke a cigarette and shoot his cuffs. Finally a capable half-caste nurse, who had been constantly in attendance, poked her head out and announced that the baby was coming. The titled one hurried to the bedside a minute late; the child was already born. He stepped over to the nurse and whispered confidentially, “And what shall I do next?” It was his first obstetrical case.

Well, the nurse must have taken care of it, for when I was in Tonga the Crown Prince was a charming little boy. The obstetrical curiosity was not dismissed; he served the kingdom for quite a while. When Fatafehi, father of the late king, finally succumbed to his family’s hereditary disease (old age) our hero was on something of a spot. He was told of one royal funeral where the body lay so long awaiting the family’s arrival that the pallbearers had had an unpleasant task in bearing away the casket. It was decided to embalm the remains of Fatafehi--which stumped the poor fellow again. Finally he compromised by filling the lead coffin with formaldehyde solution. On the way to the grave the pallbearers wondered why it was too heavy to manage. They had to bore holes in the side and let out the solution before they could lower the coffin into the grave.

At last the good doctor was faced by a flu epidemic. He couldn’t handle it, so he went to Fiji for “medical supplies,” and never came back. I didn’t know much about him when he came around to me in Suva and impressed me with his charming manner. I wanted a competent doctor to take my place while I was home on leave, and his fine talk almost decided me to take him on. “All I want,” he said, “is a chance to treat the natives. Just for my board and keep. I love the natives.” When I asked the Tongan Consul about him the answer didn’t quite satisfy me, so I changed my mind.

He went the way of all flash: a very minor sanitary inspector in Fiji; then a job as little doctor on a little ship; then a move back to Tonga to settle down to beachcombing with a native wife. He could at least lay some claim to having brought a royal heir into the world. Even though he hadn’t known what to do next.

If the Saga of Tropical Medicine has a comic section, some of the Tongan M.D.’s legitimately graduated from the pick of the universities deserve a place in it. One very able physician was a practical-joke addict. In his office was a skeleton, jointed and movable, with which he scared natives by jerking the strings. At night he would rub phosphorus on his bony playmate and take him driving in his buggy; the ghastly hell-light threw the town in a panic. When old Bridges was Collector of Customs the fun-loving doctor brought in a “drug order” which included a great many household furnishings. To dodge duty, he gave the furniture large Latin names: like _Carpetorum brusselorum_ and _Hattus rackus_. This got by the native inspector, to whom Latin was all Greek, but Collector Bridges stopped the racket.

They told me of another doctor who was anxious to become C.M.O. Over in Haapai he quarreled with Chief Israeli, who was a great swell in Tonga and closely related to the King. Some minor skin disease took Israeli to this doctor, who found his revenge in saying, “Man, you’ve got leprosy!” He kept poor Israeli interned for six months outside the village and started a dicker with the Tongan Government. He craved promotion to Chief Medical Officer, he said, and if they handed him that, Israeli would be pronounced cured. The doctor got what he wanted, and proclaimed that his treatment had saved the patient from a leper’s tragic end.

* * * * *

When I began hookworm treatments the royal family were the first to take the medicine, as a good example to Tonga. For me that was a delicate assignment. The household numbered forty in all, for Tongan hospitality kept the palace bulging with relatives and near-relatives. Keeping up the establishment must have been quite a drain, although Salote had a competent income and Prince Tungi was well-salaried as Premier; both had landed estates. But they were rich relations to two large families, and feudal tradition imposed on their generosity.

Feudal tradition encountered modern medicine when it came to dosing the Queen. The tetrachloride had to be mixed in a special mug; for custom demanded that no common mortal should eat or drink from any dish or cup that royalty had used. However, the Queen and Consort took their medicine gracefully, and allowed themselves to be photographed taking it. An anxious populace waited outside the palace, and there was a murmur of relief when it was announced that our medicine had taken its normal course.

As a special favor I was given “back-door privileges” at the palace, and it was an honor I valued highly. Here on quiet mornings I would find Salote sitting in loose, easy clothes, a relief from the British-made silks and satins of her state appearances. Our talks got me very close to her quick mind and her eager desire to learn what was best for her people. Taufaahau, the heir apparent, and his two brothers would be playing around the place. Sometimes I would see them riding the giant turtle which has never left the palace grounds since Captain Cook brought him from the Galapagos in 1773, a gift for the King of Tonga. I always had chocolate bars or some other sweet for the children to nibble when they decided to sit on my knee. That was sixteen years ago. The turtle is still alive and the Crown Prince has graduated with honors from Sydney University. He is going to Oxford to study law and anthropology. Salote and Tungi have a right to be proud of this tall, splendid young man. Lord, how time has slipped along....

Many and many times I talked my plans over with Salote, and especially my fixed idea that there must be a modernized Central Medical School in Fiji. She was a constructive listener. She looked upon the people as her children, and was grieved by the tricks that had been played upon them by alien races. Once I asked her if politics and religion weren’t the same thing in Tonga, and she said: “Doctor, I think you’re about right.”

A true Christian, she had an intense admiration for Queen Victoria. Once a year, robed for the occasion, she would open Parliament, and be seated in the red chair of state, with her adored Tungi at her side. She insisted on ceremonial black for the parliamentarians assembled, and before the great day there was a tremendous scrambling for European clothes. Once a small boy scampered into a trader’s store and demanded a pair of silk stockings. He was a Queen’s page and had to put on full regalia.

Ancient suits were hired or borrowed for the occasion; dress suits, dinner jackets, antique cutaways and obsolete Prince Alberts, anything so long as it was black. Once I contributed my winter-weight dress clothes to an appealing noble and watched him join the long, sweaty line of lawgivers that filed in to the boiling ceremony. And the minute it was over ministers of state sneaked away crosslots, suffocating coats over their arms, tight shoes in their hands. They were stealing home to their comfortable and sensible _lavalavas_.

Major-General Sir George Richardson, Governor of Western Samoa, told me of his presentation at court when the Queen was very new to the throne. Richardson, a crusty Britisher who had gone through the mill at the Court of St. James’s, may have exaggerated the incident. In the presence of young Salote, he said, he had approached the throne, made the proper bow and backed the prescribed distance. Out of the silence the Queen clapped her hands: “Johnnie, bring the gentleman a whisky-soda!” She hadn’t yet learned all the European formalities, but hospitality told her what a Britisher seldom refuses.

Salote, with the pride of an ancient dynasty behind her and the problems of a modern world facing her realm, was the connecting link between the old and the new.

Strangers, dropping off at Nukualofa, have looked over the ancient stone relics there, have wondered at their monumental size and have heard, perhaps, smatterings of their legend. They have seen the great Haamonga (Burden on the Shoulders), a trilithon with side pieces fifteen feet high; one piece is twelve feet wide by four feet eight inches thick, the other is nine feet seven inches wide by three feet eight inches thick. These are above-the-ground measurements, as they are set very deep. They stand ten feet apart and are grooved at the top to support a crosspiece that is fifteen feet long, five feet wide and twenty-one inches thick. These stupid, literal measurements describe a colossus, and nobody knows where the stones came from. Tradition says that they were brought from Wallis Island in ancient Tongan canoes.

The great squared arch is the gateway to the old sacred _marai_ (family ceremonial ground) where the Tui Tonga worshipped until the rise of temporal power moved them to another _marai_, a few miles away. On the old _marai_ where the Burden on the Shoulders stands there is another relic important to the lost religious history of Polynesia. This is called the Leaning Stone, and is a slablike pillar nine feet high, five wide, two thick.

The Tongans, you must remember, were fast losing their old religion when the white man came. They knew that the trilithon and the leaning pillar were of sacred memory, but what they signified was not clear. It was not until I visited the Cook Islands, where I saw similar relics and heard the young chiefs recite their poetic myths, that I realized what Tonga’s stone relics signified in the old paganism.

Almost everywhere in Polynesia the symbols were the same. The arch represented Hina, goddess of fertility, and the leaning pillar was Tangaloa her husband, god of life’s origin. After I found similar pillars and arches on the Cook Islands I concluded that Tonga’s ancient worship must have been phallicism. I submitted my theory to Prince Tungi and he consulted with keepers of the old tradition; they all agreed that this was probably the explanation. Tungi told me that there were caves on Tongatabu which were called Hina because of their archlike shape, and that on Vavau there was a very realistic cleft stone, also called Hina.

When I describe the Cook Islands I shall elaborate a little more on the Hina (or Ina) and Tangaloa myth, for the Cook Islander still remembers.

Tonga’s third wonder is the Royal Tombs, the Langi. There are five Langi, generally pyramidal in shape, and covered with from three to five layers of stone. They measure about two hundred feet on a side; their outer stones, some of them twenty feet long, are nicely squared and fitted. Each was built for a Tui Tonga.

During one of our back-porch conferences Queen Salote told me that she had recently allowed one of her relatives to be buried there, because he was of the Tui Tonga line. The Queen was also of the same ancient family, so she was the only witness, except the Haatufunga, honorable buriers of the royal dead. The chamber into which the body was to be lowered was deep down in the center of the Langi. It was covered with an immense slab that had lain there four hundred years, and was raised with great difficulty. They found a vault, about twelve feet long by four wide and three deep, walled with artfully fitted stonework.

I beg Her Majesty’s pardon if I misquote her, but this is what I remember her saying: “I saw the body go down into the dark vault. When it was first opened we found the skeletons of three men. One lay face down, and must have belonged to a very powerful man. The other two were more slender, and their bones showed that they died in a sitting position.”

The seated skeletons were probably those of the Haatafunga, whose duty it was to prepare the bodies and wrap them in fine mats. In the old days they were permitted to remove the costly cerements and take them away as perquisites of office--if they could work fast enough. They were given just the time it took to poise the slab over the tomb, and lower it. The pair squatted on either side of the noble skeleton had been a minute too slow, and had been sealed in.

Later Tonga grew more humane, and the funeral workers were not permitted to touch the mats; they were given safe exit before the lid fell. Certain valuable things, equivalent to the funerary spoils, were set aside as their reward. The Queen told me that Joeli, lineal descendant of the Tui Tonga, had opened a tomb a short time before and found a beautifully carved ivory pillow. She had wanted to present it to the scientific world, but Joeli had re-interred it.

* * * * *

The Tongan people, always having lived under communism qualified by an aristocracy, still offered an example of socialized medicine in daily practice. Sickness was treated free. If it was often not treated at all, that fact was partly due to the wide scatteration of little islands, and partly to the incapacity of an understaffed medical department. Voyaging around the small, forgotten islands I groaned over dirt and flies and the ignorance of simple hygiene which spread yaws, dysentery and typhoid. General weakening from these diseases had made the people easy prey to the influenza epidemic of 1918, which swept away eight per cent of the population. What they needed most was proper soil sanitation, proper water supplies, _and education in these necessities_. So many deaths were unattended by a physician that it was difficult to estimate the mortality figures covering typhoid, for instance.

The question of infant mortality--deaths of children under five--was to grow less crucial year by year. I have learned that by stimulating one branch of public health the physician is apt to stimulate many others. Our hookworm campaigns in Fiji, for example, worked toward the reduction of infant mortality; from 200 per 1,000 it fell below 100, and in one banner year was as low as 89.

The Tongans were a pithy breed with a will to live and an eagerness to learn--if you got around their ancient prejudices and the new peculiarities imparted by various mission sects. Proselytizing Mormons and Seventh Day Adventists had confused the issue. The Adventists had been popular when natives found that this faith gave them two workless days a week. They were less ardent believers, however, when their preachers forbade smoking and the eating of pig. The Mormons were anti-tobacco, too. Visitors at the mission stations of either sect had to keep cigarettes and tobacco locked away from light-fingered converts.

I sometimes wondered if civilization had done these people any good at all, except to shake off the abuses of the nobles. The ancient communism with nobody rich, nobody poor in a self-contained island group that fought away intruders--would that be the simple answer today? Over a hundred years ago Mariner thought so, when he asked good Dr. Martin to write into his book: “Captain Cook brought the intermittent fever, the crooked backs and the scrofula.” (Probably tuberculosis.)

And Vancouver brought the bloody flux, which in a few months killed a great number of them.... To any man of humanity, nothing can be more distressing than to cast his eye on the island of Otaheite, a spot blessed by nature with everything that can make life pleasing ... but now become a scene of general mortality, and a prey to disease, which to all human appearance, will in a few years render it a desolate wilderness.

But when you run a thumb over Mariner’s _Tonga Islands_ you are forced to believe that the old cures were sometimes super-Spartan, although the savage doctors recognized tetanus long before the discovery of bacteria. Says Mariner:--

In all cases of considerable wounds produced by pointed instruments the patient is not allowed to wash himself until he is tolerably well recovered, nor to shave, cut his hair, nor his nails; for all these things are supposed to produce _gita_ (tetanus).

Mariner reported that convalescents “happening to wash themselves too soon, spasms supervened, and death was the consequence.” Observers told him that “wounds in the extremities ... are liable to produce tetanus.... They never allow females to be near men thus wounded, lest the mere stimulus of venereal desire should induce this dangerous complaint....” One man was “eight months without being washed, shaved or having his hair or nails cut....”

Now for the old treatment of tetanus, an art they learned from Fiji, where warlike habits made _gita_ very common.

... consists in the operation of _tocolo’si_, or passing a reed first wetted with saliva into the urethra, so as to occasion a considerable irritation and loss of blood; and if the general spasm is violent, they make a seton of this passage, by passing down a double thread, looped over the end of the reed, and when it is felt in the perineum they cut down upon it, seize hold of the thread ... the thread is occasionally drawn backwards and forwards, which excites great pain, and an abundant discharge of blood....

Several times Mariner saw this cruel operation; the jaws, he said, were violently closed for a few seconds, but lockjaw never developed. The recoveries, he thought, were about forty per cent. They also let blood in this way for ridiculous reasons, like wounds in the abdomen; but they had a theory (rather in line with some of our advanced scientists) that passing a reed into the urethra had a rejuvenating effect on the debilitated. The King of Tonga, in Mariner’s time, had this operation performed “and two or three days later he felt himself quite light, and full of spirits.”

The operation called _boca_ was castration in cases of enlarged testicles (probably elephantiasis). Tourniquets were skillfully made of native cloth and the instruments were razor-edges of split bamboo. Dr. Martin wrote:--

A profuse hemorrhage is mostly the consequence of this operation; it was performed seven times within the sphere of Mr. Mariner’s knowledge ... to three of which he was witness. Not one of the seven died....

Sounds gory enough, doesn’t it? But those native sorcerers, working with tapa and banana-leaf bandages, cutting with split bamboo, displayed an art and a knowledge of surgery which had been cultivated through generations of experience. This wasn’t just voodoo. It was applied surgery, practised by men who needed only the touch of modern science to equip them for the great work.

* * * * *

In contradiction to what I have said about native deficiency in money sense, I found the Tongan developing into a keen trader in a small way. The _Tongafiti_ game wasn’t lacking in his deals, and many European traders were going bankrupt because the native was too sharp for them. The old Tongan was a babe unborn when it came to expenditures, and there are stories of primitive natives playing pitch-game with shipwrecked trade dollars. Not so today.

Salote and Tungi were studying finance methodically, patiently, to learn modern economics. Up and down the beaches their subjects were sometimes sharpening their wits in a very practical way.

Trader Algy Slocombe told me of the only times he ever got around a native in a deal. Living next door, a Tongan family let a couple of their trees hang over his fence and interfere with his tennis. He approached the native wife, who talked to her husband, and there was a long Tongan dicker. The husband admitted that he was grateful for the water he got from the Slocombe well; so that was something to bargain with. Algy said to the native’s wife, “If you’ll cut down those trees I’ll let you have all the coconuts that drop into your yard from the palms on my side.” The Tongans say, “_Fa moli moli_,” when they mean “Many thanks,” and there was a far-off look in the woman’s eyes when she said it. For years she had been gathering those same nuts, and no questions asked. But a trade was a trade.

A native from Vavau came to Algy’s office proposing to deposit some tobacco against a loan of one pound. He said he was mayor of his town, had a good plantation, dealt with Lever Brothers. Algy wanted a day before closing this big transaction; just for curiosity he wired Vavau and found that this man had never had credit there. The customer returned--without the tobacco, of course--and said he must have the money at once, as the boat was leaving for Vavau. Algy merely smiled, “_Fa moli moli_,” and his applicant departed without the slightest sign of ill-feeling. His five-dollar build-up had been as elaborate as that of the New York confidence man. But that was all right. He’d find a touch somewhere before the boat left.

Neither in Fiji nor Tonga did the natives have family names; though some of the better-educated were beginning to affect the European way. I ran across a Tongan named Joni Motocawiah. If you say it fast it sounds like “Johnnie Motor Car Wire”--just what it means. The day Joni was born his mother saw her first automobile, and a roll of barbed wire was washed up on their beach. There was also a baby named Atalosa, which sounded sweet. Before the baby came her mother had sniffed something they told her was attar of roses; “Atalosa” was the way she said it.

Remodeling the English language wasn’t confined to Tongans. Eloisa and I were quartered for a while at Bill Smith’s boarding house, where food was delicious and flies abundant. Bill Smith was the reigning Mr. Malaprop. Once when he cornered me in a learned medical discussion he referred to “A man’s tentacles and pinnace.” He knew more about the cookbook than the dictionary, and told me how to bake ham under a layer of mud so that it “brought out the intersticine juices.”

A Tongan’s own language served him well if he didn’t happen to like you. Needy aristocrats, beginning to learn the value of money and liquor, had perfected a little trick of giving a high title to visiting Europeans and making them “members of the family.” If the European was romantic snob enough for the game, he freely lent money and whisky to the noble donor of titles. When money and whisky played out the titles vanished also, and the once-honored one was unceremoniously removed from the family. This old army game was a bit of _Tongafiti_ that was practised in Samoa as well as Tonga. The generous Polynesian was beginning to learn that you don’t give something for nothing in this wicked world. Chief Ulukalala, a pretender to the throne, had titles to give that sounded extremely noble. He gave one to an official, and another to a resident doctor’s wife. Between the two honored ones there was contention as to which should rank the other at native ceremonies. Her title was _To’e Umu_, literally “Scraps from the Oven.” His was _Kuli Haapai_, which in English is “Dog of Haapai.”

The relics of early missionary blue laws made it very easy to go to jail. It was forbidden to do any sort of work on Sunday, even on your own premises. When I was there Dr. Ruhen, a medical officer, was arrested for breaking the Sabbath by picking a bunch of bananas in his own yard. Despite his protest that he was only gathering food, he was duly fined. Sunday games were prohibited. Algy Slocombe’s tennis court got him into trouble with the puritans. We had some splendid Sunday games there, and Algy felt secure because his court was screened by a hedge. Some holy peeper caught him finally, and all his players were haled before a native magistrate and fined. Fortunately that happened after I went home.

All crimes lead to jail, or are supposed to. Going to jail in Tonga seemed to be quite a merry social affair. Back in the days of old George Tubou one of the royal relatives was a prisoner. Every afternoon the King’s carriage would wheel up, take the culprit for a drive and for tea in the Palace, then return him at six o’clock, the closing hour.

A friend told me that when he first saw the Vavau jail there was a sign over the door “All prisoners not in by six o’clock will be locked out for the night.” When I was there the jailers complained bitterly because there were no prisoners, and they had to do all the work. Tongan prisoners were great gadabouts. In one village there had been several burglaries of provision stores, and the police were baffled for days. At last they located the loot, hidden under the jail where the inmates could delve in, when they pleased, for a midnight snack. It seemed rather remarkable that such good boarding houses were losing boarders.

* * * * *

That was Tonga as I saw it, going in and out for many years. Like all Pacific groups, it was a land of marked contrasts. At sunset an old witch woman would stand on the cliffs “calling the sharks.” She would throw scraps into the water, then raise a high, queer chant and the beasts would poke their noses through the surf. And in the palace at Nukualofa an educated, civilized woman sat with her consort, planning to meet the conditions which a new world had imposed on her kingdom. Because their rule was good, and the British Protectorate a wise one, Tonga continued to improve greatly, both in health and in understanding.

I never let Salote and Tungi forget that the native medical talent was right there in the kingdom, waiting to be developed. Every time I visited her islands I told the Queen how the pick of her young men could go to Fiji for a first-class medical education, if we had the money to back such an enterprise. There was always that big If. Salote’s common sense and patriotism told her that I was right. Her generous wish was not limited to her own realm; she saw how the native races of Oceania could not be helped until they learned to help themselves. But when I talked this problem over with her I realized that little Tonga was not rich enough to effect a program that would cover the whole wide Pacific.

* * * * *

One day in 1926 I was very discouraged when I came to Queen Salote with my troubles. I told her of a letter I had just received from Heiser; he had decided that I must abandon the School idea altogether. It was no fault of his, he had done what he could. But the case was hopeless.

Queen Salote listened carefully to what I had to say. In her thoughtful hesitation I saw that she was agreeing with Heiser. I had put up a four-year fight for an impractical ideal.

Then suddenly she raised her kind eyes and asked, “Doctor, is it such a tremendous amount that we can’t bear our share?”

It wasn’t a spendthrift Tongan speaking. It was the voice of a woman who had considered the question carefully, and had come to see the road to a sick kingdom’s recovery. She knew that there was a competent treasury balance. She had been with us from the first. Her influence had helped reduce Tongan infant mortality until it had become the lowest in the Pacific; she had encouraged mothers to come to doctors or government dispensers for supplies of baby food; this had given medical officers a chance to check up on the condition of young children. Salote had encouraged war on tuberculosis, and had seen that every house in her realm should have sanitary arrangements, even if they were still crude. The medical men she backed with moral support were cleaning up yaws with arsenicals. No one more than Salote knew the health situation in Tonga.

And couldn’t Tonga bear its share in our School, so that the Pacific would at least have competent native medical service? Before she had spoken, my School had been taking its last gasp. Now it was alive again.

I went to Samoa and quoted her offer to the old Governor, Major-General Sir George Richardson. “Well,” he grunted, “if Tonga is willing to do that we’ll come in too.”

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

* * * * *

When I left Tonga for the last time the Crown Prince Taufaahau was on the ship with us. He had come home to the celebration of his twenty-first birthday and had been given the high title of Tubou Toa. He was a splendid boy, one I would have been proud to have claimed as my son. Two young anthropology professors from the University of Chicago were with us and were charmed with his conversation, always on an intellectual footing with theirs. Gigantic as his ancestors, he kept fit by exercising with fifty-six-pound dumbbells. He laughed, remembering the chocolate bars I used to feed him. I was telling him about a chief of a lost Pacific island who had asked me to come back and be his guest for life; the Crown Prince fell into a long study, the way his mother did when she was deciding something for herself. Then he said, “Doctor, I invite you to make your home with me in Tonga. But of course,” he said, “that will be after I have assumed my place in Tongan society.”

I know of no happier place for my old age.

## CHAPTER IV

THE LAND OF THE TALKING MEN

I only stretch the long-bow lightly when I say that Western Samoa’s political troubles began with a small medical problem and ended with a great one. Certainly the finish of the Mau Rebellion was a picture of hatred’s reaction upon public health.

The _malanga_ of 1924 was in full swing, and I was one of the party. From days of old the _malanga_ has been a royal progress, an annual window-dressing on the march, as it was in England when a grateful populace turned out to greet Henry VIII with polished hauberks and freshly dry-cleaned plumes. In Samoa’s year of plenty, 1924, the _malanga_ was still an impressive show. His Britannic Majesty’s proconsul, Governor of New Zealand’s ten-year-old Mandate, had full-costumed a military display and was accepting the feasts or listening to the bands and musical orators all around Savaii.

Since Samoa’s dawn of time the _Tulafale_ (the orator or “talking man”) had commanded leadership. No funeral, wedding or political controversy in the _Fono_ (meeting place) has been official without a competition of orators, first on one side, then on the other, showering palaver or threats neatly wrapped in compliments. In the years of the Mandate the Talking Men were still importantly featured, and that wolf-gray, bullet-headed old British soldier, Major-General Sir George S. Richardson, had made many stops along his two weeks’ march, to examine the well-being of a people he governed all too kindly.

Under this _malanga’s_ careless pageantry I witnessed a small pregnant incident. It dropped another of the seeds which, in a few years, sprouted into the wicked flower of an insurrection already germinating. In my report to the Foundation I described this official tour as “unique in my experience and remarkable for its results in obtaining the confidence of the native and his co-operation in measures for his own benefit. In the party there was the Governor, the Commissioner for Native Affairs, the Resident Commissioner of Savaii, the Chief Medical Officer, the Collector of Customs and Taxes, the Governor’s A.D.C., Dr. Buxton and myself.” Fau’mui’na, high chief, led thirty Boy Scouts called “_Fetu o Samoa_,” the Star of Samoa; there were native police, carriers and attendants. The Fetu went in front, beating a drum, behind them was the flagbearer, next the Governor with his retinue, then the endless queue of followers. It was a parade to touch the imagination of a people susceptible to pomp and ceremony.

In the village reception house there would be the usual kava ceremony, the food presentation, the long hour devoted to exchange of courtesies. Then the _Tulafale_, the professional orators, would unlimber their eloquence for the benefit of the Governor: “We in our ignorance and humility turn to you for the light of your wisdom, as the flower turns to the sun. We are the children, you are the father upon whom we depend for guidance. We know that you love us, and we return your love....” When you hear this doled out day after day you begin to believe the Orator. The simple Samoan child of nature--and watch out or he’ll have the shirt off your back. Witness how his shrewd diplomacy all but had the United States, Germany and Britain tearing at each other’s throats in 1900. When Germany got her cut in the colony the Samoan’s connivance worried her to a point where she only tried to control them with punitive raids....

But in the Governor’s _malanga_ of 1924 the Orators were laying it on thick. They would look into every gift-basket, call out the donor’s name with praise if the taro were big and the fish well-cooked. If the contribution looked stingy they would be very frank about it, amidst popular mirth.

Public health was never relaxed in this bright journey of inspection. The Boy-Scoutish Fetu, wearing nothing but the _lavalava_ and a cap with the emblem Star, would give the people exhibition games, object lessons in simple sports that would keep the villagers away from picture shows and dissipations in Apia. The Administration was sensible in showing the all but naked bodies of the young Fetu, to illustrate the health advantages of light clothing in the tropics. The Administration was always rational and kind.

At one of the settlements the orations and ceremonies had been unusually long. As in every place we stopped, the doctors had lined up the population for quick inspection of ulcers, skin lesions, eye conditions, enlarged spleens, or any other sign of disease. Our time was more than up, we had to be pushing on. What happened then was certainly no fault of Dr. Ritchie, a Medical Officer whose patient and enlightened work in restoring a failing race had earned him a crown in Heaven, twice over. It was a fault of tact, reacting on that interesting intangible, the Samoan temperament.

We had been there long enough for the natives to report any sickness in the region. Now we were hurrying to board the launch. What happened then was characteristic of Samoan dilly-dally. Several natives came running up with the cry: “There’s a woman who has been having a baby for five days! It’s half in, half out!” (They were describing, I suppose, a “hand presentation.”) All Savaii had known that we were there, but it had just occurred to them to call a doctor. Dr. Ritchie, on the march, had no instruments with him, and experience told him that the woman was as good as dead. To examine her would mean an out-of-the-way trip, and Governor Richardson was impatient for the pompous _malanga_ to move on. So it moved.

Even then I felt the seriousness of that diplomatic blunder. Here was a chance for the Administration, out for show, to make a beautiful gesture. Of course there was no hope for the woman, but it would have made an immense impression of kindness if the party had turned their launch around and wasted a day with the dying mother. It would have had the dramatic effect they wanted.

But the mistake was made among a people who were nursing many grievances, most of them imaginary. When the calamitous Mau Rebellion broke in 1927 that incident was remembered. Years later, after the messy thing had subsided, one of the Mau leaders, Fau’mui’na--since promoted to a good government post--told me that official neglect of the woman did much toward fomenting revolt. That and the shooting of Tamasese, exiled as a nuisance and a royal pretender....

* * * * *

No war-captured country ever had a better government than these islands enjoyed after New Zealand’s soldiery took over in 1914 a group which the League of Nations later changed from German Samoa to the mandate of Western Samoa. It was in refreshing contrast to Australia’s early rule in New Guinea. Even before the uniformed Anzacs had left Samoa there was a clear-headed scientific attempt to look into social and health conditions. New Zealand, with her high cultural standards, had long studied the splendid race of Maoris, whom she had governed well. At home a million-and-a-half New Zealanders lived alongside 70,000 Maoris whose population had increased and whose rights had been maintained under a benevolent rule. Yes, Western Samoa was fortunate in her new government which had never shown a selfish financial motive behind any of its acts. But the Mau Rebellion came, and its “cruel oppressions” have been so sensationalized by newspaper propagandists that the average reader asks: How did the administrators come to grow hoofs and horns overnight? Well, they didn’t.

In 1923 Dr. T. Russell Ritchie came in as Chief Medical Officer and his four years there were as remarkable for scientific achievement as anything accomplished by Gorgas in cleaning up Cuba and Panama. In civil administration you’ll find mistakes everywhere this side of Heaven. But even the mistakes were motivated by a fiery zeal to show the world New Zealand’s disinterestedness. Education and public health were the features in a program so thorough that it should not be forgotten.

It was a demonstration of preventive medicine unexcelled in the tropics. By 1926 a death rate of over thirty per thousand was reduced to twenty in four Samoan districts. Yaws was practically eliminated, infant welfare work had brought down the average mortality under five years to the lowest in the Pacific--before Tonga worked out that problem. Soil sanitation had become the rule instead of the exception; in 1921 New Zealand had sent a commission to Australia to study the Foundation’s hookworm campaigns there; Ritchie had adapted it to Western Samoa with marvelous results. He was bringing in pure piped water; on islands like Savaii, which is very rainy but so lava-porous that it has no streams, he had overridden Polynesia’s superstition and used church roofs as watersheds for storage tanks. New Zealand’s successful medical work was becoming a model for other island groups. There could not have been a better one. Germany’s last census in 1911 showed a population of 33,476. In 1917, after three years in possession, New Zealanders counted 37,196. In 1918 pandemic influenza, a scourge that baffled world medicine, mowed the natives down. But the Mandate’s care brought them back so steadily that in 1933--despite the hellish work of the Mau Rebellion--our yaws campaign workers counted 48,300. This last estimate, I think, was about 1,500 short of the actual number. Confused conditions, following years of revolt, made the count extremely difficult. In 1936 the census showed 55,000.

From 1921 to 1931, half of those years consumed by the Mau’s hateful destruction, New Zealand had given to Samoa between £12,500 and £14,000 annually for medical purposes alone. None of this was in the form of a loan; it was free as a birthday present. Add to this New Zealand’s gifts of public works,--like the native piped water supplies, for instance,--and you have a total of some £250,000 devoted to Western Samoa with no expectation of any return but the moral satisfaction of seeing a race revived.

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

* * * * *

Samoa has been plowed over so often by romance-hawkers, big and little, that it would hardly be worth my time or yours to try to revisualize the moonlight and song, the deep-grooved valleys, the lacy waterfalls infested by golden girls with tumbled raven hair. On my frequent professional visits I saw their unromantic side, yet always admired a people who refused to be coaxed or slave-driven into the sort of work which, to them, seemed unnecessary. Don’t dismiss the Samoan as a happy good-for-nothing. On sterile Savaii I have seen them carrying farm produce on their backs, mile after mile; it was the old way, and they were working their own land. If Samoan racial pride seems to you to be no more than backwoods vanity, remember the Polynesian brain, one of humanity’s best. And remember that in both Samoas, Western and American, there are as many people, perhaps, as you’ll find in one of New York’s longer streets. The old days are done for; the days of brave canoe-voyaging over uncharted blue waters. Among their ancestors were baffled Alexanders, weeping for more worlds to conquer. The worlds they found were so small, so scattered....

They have settled down to a small-town complex. For hours on end they sit around the kava circle, talking, talking. We are outnumbered, they say, but we are still Samoans. The New Faith is well enough. We must still observe our ancient ceremonies, our rules of courtesy, our carefully graded social distinctions, and every complication of our political structure. Listen to that old chief over there. He can recite his ancestry for thirty or more generations back. He is an aristocrat, and his memory is long, they say. All our memories are long.

This is not all poppycock. The Samoan is a born gentleman. Although books have been a stranger to him since the dawn of history, he is reading now. He is a nationalist and his reasoning mind has told him that his nationalism will have international support. Inwardly he believes that he is smarter than a European, and he wants a Samoa that is governed by Samoans. He looks across toward the Kingdom of Tonga and asks, “If they govern themselves, why can’t we? Tongans don’t work for Europeans. They hire them.”

All such ideas are splendid, if impractical and slightly ridiculous. They had much to do with the disastrous Mau.

The good Samoan mind is still factional. When the Dutch explorers first saw Apia they found a people who lacked the solidarity that welded Tonga. Each of Samoa’s three main islands had its own complicated aristocracy and tribal intrigue. It was Japan without a Mikado. You would have thought that the descendants of voyaging warriors would have developed the leadership that pulls a country together. Perhaps the Samoans were too innately civilized to crave a Hitler and a generation of massacres. It was the European’s job to drag them out of the Stone Age into the Bomb Age--all in a century and a half. By 1900 they could use rifles well, as witness the small butchery of Marines that led to the partition of the two Samoas between Germany and the United States.

Cloying praise has shared in spoiling the native Samoan. Robert Louis Stevenson was the worst sinner. It was too easy to sentimentalize their sweet and gentle women, their courteous patriarchal chiefs, the waterfalls that sang like fountains day and night. Before Hollywood went South Sea and flattered them with the camera, Stevenson had told us in charming, balanced sentences how he had lived among Greeks in Eden’s Vale. Samoan conceit became elephantoid under this pretty coddling, and the abundant orators around the kava ring told them again that they occupied the Navel of the World. It was never raucous boasting. As I have said, the Samoans are a race of gentlefolk.

* * * * *

The medical problem in Western Samoa was more than a matter of lining them up, treating them, sending them home. In American Samoa, our Navy tried the efficiency method, but it didn’t work very well with a people who live on ceremony as much as Japan did under the Shogunate. A sick Samoan, if he has rank, pays for his operation a thousandfold before he is home and recovered.

The Samoan social system could ramify its way across a hundred library shelves. To be brief, its core is the _Matai_, or master. This title goes to the head of the _Ainga_, or family, and is handed down like an heirloom. The title _Tufunga_ is high, and carries with it the greatest dignity, and the honors that go with it have always been recognized.

To the practical modern doctor the old ceremonial is what can’t be cured and must be endured. Take the ceremonial journey they call the _malanga_--if a Samoan goes visiting relatives and takes the whole village along, it becomes a _malanga_, and the visitors are apt to eat the host’s provisions down to the last taro, while he bites his nails in secret and publicly implores his guests to stay longer. But this generosity has a true Christmas spirit--you give something and expect something back. Pretty soon the host will be on a _malanga_ of his own--then it will be his turn to do the feasting, and yours to pay for it.

Treating a sick Samoan is an ordeal for the doctor and it is not always so easy on the patient. N.M.P. Ielu Kuresa, an honored graduate of our School, wrote an article for our medical journal, the _Native Medical Practitioner_, in which he described the rigmarole which surrounds a simple surgical operation. This is his account, in brief:--

“To be operated on by a doctor does not mean the doctor’s bill only. Custom and etiquette must be complied with. In the first place, the scene will be at the patient’s own home.... Having come to the conclusion that he must be operated on, he will first inform his immediate family of his intentions. At this stage a daughter or son, perhaps residing some distance away, will have to be sent for in order to participate in a family meeting to decide whether the sick person’s wishes should be carried out, or whether a further try of other native medicine or treatment be applied.” Every Matai, under these circumstances, must make peace with his kinsmen; otherwise “it means carrying with you bad luck and perhaps better chances of dying. Samoans are very particular about their selection of physicians and will travel miles to get to a good surgeon, leaving another doctor who might be close to their village.”

All the related Matais are informed of the coming event. Then the Orators are brought into play. They assemble at the sick man’s house, and there is a contest of eloquence, wishing the patient “all good luck and God’s never-failing help....” So the Orators must get their pork and the sympathizers must feast--“... food in such a quantity as befits the title of the sick person ... a whole roasted pig, or even two, bread or biscuits and of course taro by the score ... the first installment on operating expenses.” Any other stricken member of the _Ainga_, a wife or child, gets the same ceremony, scaled down to the social importance of the sufferer.

“The first expense, then, can be from £1 to £5, to be conservative.” If the Matai happens to be hard up he must borrow pigs from his in-laws. “At times, just to conform with Samoan customs, if no pigs are forthcoming from the son-in-law or the daughter-in-law, or the sister, the _Ainga_ must resort to parting with a share of the family lands, or some other form of property.”

This blow-off ends the first scene. A boat is probably necessary to carry the patient to the hospital. The crew offers its services free--But wait. The expedition is called _ole si’ingama’i_, “party-carrying-the-sick.” The boating expedition swells to a heavy-laden fleet. And don’t forget the _Tulafale_, the all-pervading Orators, bringing their wives and children and in-laws.

Etiquette demands that there shall be a stop or two on the way. Etiquette also demands that leading families provide a splendid barbecue. Samoan hospitality, carefully gauged by the family code, holds the patient long enough to get well--or else. The visitors know that it is their ancient right to demand food, and that their hosts will be their guests someday and there’ll be another big picnic. The visitors make gifts, too; usually fine mats and tapa cloths. These gifts are a part of the prevalent gentleman’s code.

The patient gets to the hospital--alive, let’s say. “Parties-carrying-the-sick” are not allowed in wards, so they are settled in a base-camp in a near-by village, as guests of the _Ainga_ there. The visitors contribute more pigs, and mats which cost from one pound up, according to historic value. These expenses, Ielu writes, “will no doubt appear absurd to the European mind.... It may all be in the course of life, according to the Samoan way of living, yet a pig is a pig and a fine mat is a fine mat.”

Then comes the operation. The native pastor and an Orator have been at the patient’s bedside. The parson and the _Tulafale_ have said their prayer, made their speeches. Back in the camp there is wholesale cooking. The occasion demands ... “something to mark the occurrence. The presentation will be done publicly and the food announced aloud wherever it is being presented. The announcing is usually done when the patient has been brought back to the ward after the operation.”

The sick man, if he got well, was in for such an entertainment bill as never faced Lucullus. If he died the funeral would be on the same lavish scale and his family would have to pay for it.

Ielu tells of operating on I’inga, an aristocrat. Ielu was a brilliant surgeon, and the patient’s elephantoid scrotum was such a simple matter that he let him walk a short distance to the hospital. That should have cut the cost. He didn’t need boats or a base camp or a lusty entourage. However, this proud I’inga was compelled by custom to make a large food presentation every day of his illness; daily 100 loaves of bread with sugar and butter and two whole roast pigs went down to his account. His title of Matai was a high one, therefore he had to pay in fine mats for the daily _sua_ (pig) presentations. The party cost him five pounds in bread, and pigs were worth about seven pounds apiece. The whole job set him back forty-four pounds, thirteen shillings.

Surgical and hospital fees came to four pounds.

* * * * *

One night in 1924 I was dining at Vailima with Governor Richardson, who lived in the romantic house which Robert Louis Stevenson used to occupy. Above it loomed the steep hill which is topped by Stevenson’s tomb. So many tourist-ladies have climbed the mud-slippery trail to visit this shrine that I blush to mention it.

Governor Sir George had risen to high office by force of sheer ability. War had advanced him from the rank of drill sergeant to general command. A born Englishman, he had immediately won New Zealand’s respect for his Mandate administration. You had to admire him. He had the middle-class Englishman’s anti-Yankee prejudices; a brush with our United States Navy control in American Samoa hadn’t helped. Don’t think that he was any martinet when it came to native administration. Devotedly, honestly he wished to be the father of his flock. But he seemed rather too self-satisfied. Touchy Samoa politely resented his attitude, “See what we are doing for you. Come to us if there’s anything you want done.” I longed to tell him that he was doing too much for the Samoan, feeding him with modernism faster than he could digest it. But you didn’t tell things to Governor Richardson. He told you.

At that meeting, as at many others, we had discussed the need of a modern native medical school in Fiji, and as usual Richardson had been favorable to the plan. The expenses of governing a country that had 3,000 chiefs to 40,000 population was the only thing that held him back until Queen Salote’s generous offer in 1926, when he pledged Samoa to share in a scheme in which he had always heartily believed. During that long evening’s talk in 1924 I didn’t mention the woman on Savaii who died in childbirth. But if a competent Native Medical Practitioner had been on the spot that day the story of Richardson’s administration might have had a happier ending. I think he had a right to feel proud of the medical situation, for the Mandate was already training native nurses in the model hospitals, was using one of our old-school Native Medical Practitioners, and had socialized medicine to a point where every Samoan paid a head-tax of about five dollars a year for all treatments.

* * * * *

Years of administering that model colony bred a certain smugness in the good Governor Richardson; and smugness is always dangerous in handling native affairs. Early in 1927 he went to the New Hebrides on a Royal Commission with Governor Sir Eyre Hutson of Fiji. Richardson was on the crest of the wave, feeling his oats in every pore. When the party got back to Fiji I wanted to return his Samoan hospitality, but Richardson’s mind harbored a single thought: go up to Government House again and tell Sir Eyre how to run Fiji. Hutson was one of the smoothest products of the colonial school, and he had learned enough about the treatment of native races to have made Fiji a model for all students of island administration. However, Richardson got to Government House and told Hutson; and Hutson smiled rosily, suavely agreeing that he ought to study Samoa and get some tips on how to run Fiji.

When Richardson finished telling Hutson and returned to Apia, the Mau Rebellion broke right in his face.

* * * * *

As a doctor I cannot diagnose Samoa’s illness without looking further into the causes that led up to it. The status of the half-caste in Polynesia was at the root of the disturbance. While in dark-skinned Melanesia a touch of white is often a stigma, it is a matter of pride to the peach-tan Maoris, Cook Islanders and Samoans. The European may turn his shoulder on the half-caste, but the Polynesian forgets his insular pride in an eager mating with Europeans; every child with a trace of Northern blood is looked upon as something which approaches the racial ideal. The Samoan highly respects the child of a mixed union--provided the native mother has not been deserted by her husband or mate. There is the case of one distinguished British scientist who experimented with going native, chose a Samoan woman, wore a _lavalava_ around his belly and a hibiscus flower over his ear. Called back to London to account for himself, he left the girl where he found her--and the baby. It was no disgrace that she had to do washing; needy aristocrats often do that. Nor was she ashamed that she couldn’t show a marriage license. She hung her head because Johnson (I’ll call him) had deserted her, and before the baby was born. Johnson wandered to Chicago, where he died; but his beach-widow carefully guards her beautiful son for fear that some of his father’s relatives may come along and claim him.

I heard two half-caste boys quarreling. One howled, “Jonisoni!” and the other yelled, “Anisoni!” They were not accusing one another of bastardy, but raising the accusation that their mothers had been deserted by Johnson and Anderson.

When Germany ruled Samoa every man whose father was registered as a European could himself register as a European. Some so classified were less than one thirty-second white, and many of them could not speak a word of English. When New Zealand took over she had to accept the Made-in-Germany rule. The mental and moral worth of these mixed bloods depended, of course, on the quality of their parents. The product varies; but the more I travel the more I see the brilliant results when two superior beings of opposing races are bred together. After a while I’m going to tell about a few New Zealanders who are legally classed as Maoris.

The fuse that led up to the Mau explosion carried one very dangerous combustible--half-caste jealousy of European social prestige. The jealousy was mutual, I think, for the European wife grew watchful of the lovely half-caste girl with her soft, long-lashed eyes and velvet skin. This girl was getting an education and her parents were grumbling because she could not step into the social sphere which her mind, her manners and her beauty demanded, in all fairness.

Insurgency centered in O. F. Nelson, a half-caste who possessed genius both for business and for political leadership. The chain of Nelson trading stores had bulked him about $1,500,000, an unthinkable fortune to be gathered out of Samoa. Like Nelson, the discontented half-castes had educated their daughters in colleges and upper schools, yet had gained no status for them in European society. The full-blooded Samoan looked up to Nelson, one derived from their own race and so powerful that the Government had to come to him for favors. When he rode out in his handsome car he displayed a coat of arms as large and gaudy as the Governor’s own, and his A.D.C. was in uniform. The native majority was under his control.

_Mau_ means “Stand Fast,” and the stand was against real and fancied wrongs. Trouble brewed when Western Samoan traders howled because American Samoa was outbuying them in the copra market. The quarrel became a crazy patchwork, with Richardson trying to patch the patches. Half-castes were clamoring to be counted as Europeans, even though the change would have endangered their rights. Then Prohibition, that indomitable mischief-maker, raised its old silk hat. Because the Customs House, through an error, got more than its share of liquor on one consignment, the League of Nations, which controlled the Mandate’s thirst, ordained that Western Samoa’s Europeans should have liquor for medical purposes only. Up to then strong drink had been wisely forbidden the natives. Under Prohibition, indignant Europeans taught Samoans to make a vile intoxicant called “bush beer,” and to help themselves to a share of it. All this added native drunkenness to the pattern of revolt.

The Orators were putting their heads together. At every _Fono_ the Talking Men intoned “Samoa for the Samoans” and suavely asked the aristocrats, “How can nobles and chiefs serve under this common fellow Richardson?” The mess, which largely interests me from a medical point of view, harked back again to the Governor’s _Malanga_, which I described at the opening of this chapter; it included two officials who were later accused of corrupting Samoan youths. A schoolteacher who showed us around Savaii was also involved. Two suicides resulted from the scandal, which set the Talking Men off again, asking why the Europeans sent such people to teach them morals.

On top of these grievances, and dozens of smaller ones, came the Mau. At first it was passive resistance, then in 1928 there was bloodshed. Tamasese, a justly exiled pretender to Samoa’s shadow-throne, came back to Apia with a howling demonstration. Richardson, tired and sick, had resigned in favor of Colonel Allen, a New Zealander with a cool blue eye and guts to spare. When the mob battered in Officer Abram’s head with a stone Allen’s police fired on them, as they were ordered to do in case of violence.

That was all the blood spilled; but it might have been better for the Samoans if the rebellion had been stifled by force of arms. It went on for years, passively. Nelson was banished to New Zealand, where he managed his revolt by wire. After the quarrel was settled, over the festering carcass of Samoa, there came Nelson’s Napoleonic return. But there was no Waterloo; only a popular clamor to give him the place of leader in the native parliament as well as to admit him to the European Legislative Council. The new Administration refused him this bi-racial privilege with the remark, “You can’t wear trousers and a _lavalava_ at the same time.”

* * * * *

As you study small life under the lens and watch the microcosm work out its cycle, so you can look at Western Samoa and see the after-effects of war over this wrongheaded world. The doctor rushes in afterwards and tries to patch up the innocent and the guilty. Samoa, when the Mau subsided, knew a terrible aftermath. The Samoans hadn’t got back Samoa; all they had received was a resurgence of the native diseases which a careful Mandate had struggled so valiantly and successfully to cleanse. Devoted men had worked for many years to accomplish what five years of rebellion had undone.

It was five years after the Mau began before co-operation between the Government and the Rockefeller Foundation could begin salvage operations. When I returned to Samoa to have the Foundation’s share in cleaning up the Mau pigsty, I shook my head at the sorry change. The beautiful Samoan children--and nothing can be more beautiful--were pitiful little things, their skins a scab, their faces eaten with yaws. The tea-rose skin had faded to gray; intestinal parasites were sucking again at their blood and lymph. The Mau had turned against its own people instead of its enemy. Argument had triumphed over reason, the Polynesian had junked his high intelligence and become an Intellectual.

Samoa for the Samoans! Ignore every order of the white intruder with all their nosy medical men, dinging away at keeping clean, keeping the water pure, reporting sickness. Ignore their impudent instructions about repairing fly-proof latrines. Ignore vital statistics. Tear them up. Ignore everything but Samoa for Samoans.

The latrines rotted or were torn down by the indignant. Water supplies festered. Clean in his habits from days of old, the Samoan jettisoned the ancient tabu and gave over mischievously to soil pollution. Fields and villages stank with a foulness which defied the Administration while it killed the Samoans. It was hard to approach some of the settlements, they were so odorous of decay. Samoa had certainly cut off her nose to spite her face.

It was impossible to collect vital statistics during that spell of madness. The death toll was a matter of eye measurement. We plunged in with rolled-up sleeves to give all possible help. Tragic as it was, the devastation proved to be less than that of the influenza epidemic in 1918. Yaws was the principal problem, almost universal with the young. A giant campaign was organized, our combined workers gave 89,000 injections, including treatments and re-treatments. For experience has taught medicine that this disease is stubborn and may reappear in deep-seated conditions after the superficial symptoms have vanished. However, in our wide mass treatments our main effort was to cure the open sores which spread infection.

In 1933, when New Zealand took its yaws census of Samoa, the figures showed the population on the upgrade again. The forward march will go on, I think, unless some Liberator decides to turn these islands over to Germany or Russia or Italy. Then again there will be hell in warm water.

* * * * *

American Samoa, Uncle Sam’s split in the three-cornered deal of 1900, I did not survey until my Pacific adventures were nearing a close, although after 1926 I visited it briefly every year. The reason for my delay is simple; I had to wait for Uncle Sam’s invitation. Working so long on the other side of the line and rather feeling the American lack of interest in an American enterprise, I’m afraid that I was rather prejudiced against the administration of our lovely little possession, centered in Pago Pago.

In many ways I was happily disappointed when I came at last to make a short survey--all in spite of the fact that I was annoyed by the unfairness of our home folks in their comparison of the two Samoas. So many sweet lady-tourists from Boston and Keokuk have sailed into Pago Pago’s bright waters, which lie smooth as a lake inside the leafy oval of a dead volcano. There’s the old Flag again and our gallant sailors in white. Why, this is the naughty land of Miss Sadie Thompson! Why, we’ve all seen that lovely, wicked play called “Rain”--but the scenery doesn’t do Pago Pago anything like justice.... It’s all so peaceful and orderly, isn’t it? Quite different from Western Samoa over there, where they’ve certainly made a hash of it. See the handsome Commandant, who seems to boss Pago Pago with a velvet glove. Let’s call him “Uncle Samoa”!

This is a sort of autopropaganda, born of national pride. Overnight trippers cannot see--how can they?--that Uncle Sam has guinea-pigged a race, or that part of a race which is identical to the people on the western islands. The tourists haven’t had time to find out that the New Zealand Administration, working against great odds with a population about four times as large as that which America controls, is a shining example of government for the people who must be governed. And in spite of the Mau Rebellion, New Zealand is building up a better racial spirit. The people in their Samoa are better educated, better prepared to meet civilized conditions. They speak better English and are far, far better mannered.

Uncle Samoa, in fact, is an honest quarterdeck hero. His real interest in his share of the islands is to maintain a naval base; and that, in all common sense, is extremely necessary. He salutes the Regulations and does the best he can. It is certainly no fault of his if some antediluvian chapter in the book limits his service to eighteen months and orders him to sea duty or paper work or rolling hoops. Orders is orders, and tomorrow he’ll be saluting the next man that comes along to hang his cap on the official hat-rack. It’s the same all down the line. The Governor is just getting the swing of his job, then he’s off; the Chief Medical Officer is just beginning to organize his theories of native diseases--then good-by. In the schools there’s a continual change of teachers, hence a general sloppiness of instruction. The impermanence affects the enlisted man, often not unpleasantly. He chooses a temporary mate, raises a few children, and when the time comes to sail back to the States he hands his family over to some newly arrived buddy. Pago Pago is full of wistful college widows, scanning the sea with dreamy Samoan eyes and wondering what the next ship will bring.

A great many of our “administered” natives, I found, were enlisted in the Marines with the same pay as American boys. The results were often unfortunate. Certainly it was another move toward taking away the Samoan’s national character.

This is all on the black side of the slate,--to mix a metaphor,--the white side showed a great deal to American credit. In 1918 our Navy successfully quarantined influenza when it was almost decimating Western Samoa. But I must remind you that only one ship arrived in our Samoa during that year, whereas the New Zealanders’ group had the job of overhauling vessels from all the Seven Seas. However, our work was thorough and promptly quelled the scourge.

It was remarkable to me how well the Navy’s medicos carried on, in spite of handicaps. The newcomer would pick up his predecessor’s unfinished business, work it out in his own way, and hand the job over to the next one. Of the twelve thousand inhabitants whom he was there to supervise he would find twelve thousand spoiled by coddling on the one hand, unexplained discipline on the other. We had been pursuing the American way, serving them large doses of democracy overnight, forgetting that democracy to the aristocratic Samoan is like raw whisky to a newborn babe. From the chiefs down to the humblest kanakas a “Hello, buddy” attitude was all too general. Nobody could tell the natives anything. False prosperity had come with the Navy’s colossal expenditures, and among a people to whom a handful of pennies had once meant fortune this easy money was demoralizing. The native official and the native houseworker clamored for higher pay and shorter hours. The “gimme” habit was an ubiquitous nuisance.

Four Chief Medical Officers, coming and going, had developed some good teamwork. The first of the four had very sensibly framed a policy he could hand on to the next one, and the results were good. The indifference of the people was always a stumbling block. It was up to the Navy to install a decent latrine system, and no native would lend a helping hand. They expected everything to be done for them--and it was.

I admired the field and hospital work of the chief pharmacists’ mates and the petty officers under them. Most of them were university graduates, technicians in dentistry, entomology, pathology, bacteriology, X-ray and all the other necessaries. Watching their performance, you had to bulge your chest and say, “That’s a Navy job. No American parents could ask a better training for their sons.”

One superior of these medical gobs had had rather a crude way of distributing benefits. If natives didn’t show up for treatment they were hauled out and given the get-well-damn-you orders. In case an inhabitant refused to be hauled out, lusty police came and hauled him properly. Education by force stopped a general yaws infection, which was good. But it dampened Samoan confidence in America’s kindly rule, which was bad.

There was an organized body of trained Samoan nurses; the regulation pay was fifteen dollars a month, increased by a monthly dollar for each year’s service. Good pay, but the tendency was to get married and go home. This wasn’t at all bad, since it brought new blood into the work, and those who retired formed an alumnae body and became health missionaries in their villages. Their training was excellent and included the all-important items, baby feeding and dietetics.

An acute conjunctivitis generally called “Samoan eye” was prevalent in both groups. One school of thought still maintains that it is a form of trachoma. When you say “_Fa’a Samoa_” down there you are saying “Samoan fashion,” and that style of treating the eyes isn’t so good. When natives go blind, as so many do, it is usually due to their inherited witch-doctoring. They use a _Fa’a Samoa_ treatment, which consists in scrubbing the eyes with coco fiber soaked in salt water. After a good course of this the entire eyeball is destroyed. It was encouraging to see how the chief pharmacists’ mates, who ranked as District Officers, were going at the problem. Every newborn baby got its drop of argyrol, and school children had their daily treatment. Adults were harder to handle; they were apt to wander away and try _Fa’a Samoa_, then come back stone-blind.

_Fa’a Samoa_ for deafness was another medical annoyance. It consisted in tucking small shells into the afflicted ear and, in most cases, destroying the drum. Commander Paul Crosby, then Senior Medical Officer, deserves high praise for his supervision of eye and ear cases, and for the improvement all around in native health.

* * * * *

The Mau was shorter in American Samoa than on the other side, but it came to the Naval Administration before it reached New Zealand’s mandate. Part of our Mau was a sad story, and promptly hushed-up for the good of the Service. Trouble started among half-castes and traders. Then it was known that some of the Naval staff were in the conspiracy. Zealots even confined Governor Terhune in his house. I knew Terhune back in the days when I practised in Mexico, and remembered him as an upright officer and a square-shooter. But a Board of Inquiry came sailing down to Pago and would have called Terhune to account for something or other, if he had been alive. Over his dead body he was absolved of all blame. The guilty officer was punished; and I hope that tardy justice cleansed the memory of poor Terhune, who had decided to die like an officer and a gentleman.

But it was a curious finish for the ruler of what one colonial news lady headlined “A Kindly Despotism,” commenting on the Governor who happened to be in office, “With astonishing disregard of American constitutional principles he combines in his person executive, legislative and judicial authority.” The lady otherwise flattered our Naval Administration, and made allowances for the difficulties it had overcome. I make allowances too. It’s a bitter thing to be responsible for the work of colonial empire.

Along Miss Sadie Thompson’s haunted beach I was reassured by a fringe of modern privies, built firmly. Tourists might have been offended by this, but to me it was far more beautiful than if the beach had been left to pure romance and soil pollution, which have combined to destroy so many tribes.

I was glad to scribble in my notes:--

Medical conditions excellent--have never seen schools so clean as at Ofu and Olosenga under Chief Pharmacist’s Mate Campbell. _Ta’u_ under Harris far better than the average, but not so good as Campbell’s work. Little or no ringworm and no conjunctivitis among 300 school children. Campbell and Harris had reached independent conclusion that eye manifestations in Samoa can be controlled by argyrol, therefore no trachoma. Teachers instill drops daily in children’s eyes. Scars on lids and cataracts are due to native treatment....

And to go on:

Mrs. Harris told about The Sanctified in L.M.S. mission here. If you’re Sanctified it means you’ve led a pure life, so you’re socially exalted and allowed to wear a hat to church. You’re not in the Club unless you keep up your dues, $1.50 every six months. Before communion The Sanctified meet and confess, to find out if they’re still fit members. The ones who admit that their morals have slipped during the month are fined twenty-five cents, which entitles them to be re-sanctified and take communion. Mrs. Harris tells of her servant who had been wrestling with her soul. Question: Should she blow $1.50 to get herself sanctified, or save her money and have fun? Finally she decided to have fun.

These two Samoas, because the population was so small, were like handy laboratories for the study of racial breeding, its decline and its rise. They offered such opportunities for new knowledge on the subject of one all-important disease--filariasis and resultant elephantiasis--that I suggested to the International Health Board a special study there, as the debility caused by filarial fever was cutting into labor efficiency all over the Pacific. Commander Phelps, an extraordinarily able physician, found that in Samoa the daytime microfilariae did not differ from the night variety. Dr. Buxton of the London School of Tropical Medicine thought the _Aedes variagatus_ the principal offender. No satisfactory cure has been found, but Commander Phelps experimented with intramuscular injections of chenopodium, and with good results. These were much the same as the ones I gave the six cannibals down in New Guinea, with a decided effect on whipworms.

The roundworm question was an important one in Samoa, and always had been. An early observer, nearly a hundred years ago, remarked that the natives were infested with “_lumbrici_.” In my time the Governor himself vomited one up, much to the sailor’s delight. Strangely enough, hookworm was scarce; moisture, heat and soil pollution invited the pest, which did not seem to respond. In spite of Pago Pago’s handsome fringe of waterside latrines, the building of them was a problem among the islands. If they were made of wood, fierce winds blew them down. Concrete was fairly expensive. Lieutenant Commander P. J. Halloran came across with the best idea yet for tropical arrangements, and although the humorists called them “Halloran’s Privies,” many were set up and proved entirely satisfactory. A unit cost $400 and would accommodate ten, five on a side. Molded in quantity--for they were practically all concrete--they would cost about $250 per unit, built over a concrete trough with an automatic flushing system. I lack space to go into detail, but to tropical administrators of public health this plan ought to be a boon.

The Navy was going at the job in its own way, and in many regards was extremely thorough. In the hospitals it even made blood tests to determine Samoa’s racial origin. Hawaiians, as blood-examination has found, are in Group A, the world’s largest racial stock, the Caucasian or Caucasoid. But some of the Pacific blacks are also heavy in “A.” The aborigines are usually in Group O, as witness the American Indian. But blood donors in the hospital at Pago Pago revealed such a predominance of Group O that, from that angle at least, it would prove that the Polynesians are of a mixed stock.

Mixed in blood or mixed in ideals, I still have faith in the Polynesian’s ability to survive against a civilization that has been thrust upon him. To our credit, the native population of American Samoa has about doubled since we took command. In 1900 it was 5,679, and in less than forty years it had risen to 11,638. America’s experiment is restoring health to our Polynesians. In doing so, I hope we have not lost them their way of living, which was a very good way indeed.

Although quite unfortified, American Samoa, centering in Pago Pago, is a powerful link in that chain of steel we are drawing across the Pacific. And what if an aggressor should happen to want it? Well, it’s one of the great fueling stations, and oil is the food of war nowadays.

## CHAPTER V

PIG ARISTOCRACY

The Adventist pastor who had only two converts led me into a dark, gnarled jungle. With every step I was forced to remember that this was not Samoa with its kindly government and courteous natives. We were on one of the blackest spots in the New Hebrides, and right across the stream was wild Malekula where the Big Nambas had added liquor and firearms to the ancient art of man-eating. “This way, please,” whispered the Pastor, as if it were a prayer meeting. Ahead of us broke a light from many torches, moving ceremoniously around a great square.

Now and then a rifle cracked. Musicians were whistling on reeded Pan’s pipes; _oom, oom_ sounded the enormous wooden drums. Over the spectacle towered graven images, demoniacal human shapes and forms of swooping birds. It was a barbaric choral scene, everything centered on the star performers. Then I turned my eyes--and saw it. A painted man stood on a high stone pulpit, gesturing and counting. Below him another painted man wielded a mallet. Victims were being hauled up, screaming, only to be silenced by a crack on the skull. There was a chanted hymn of praise. The donor, who had contributed the sacrifice, held an honored place apart. Crack went the mallet again. Another body was dragged away....

They were killing pigs.

* * * * *

This is a glimpse of the New Hebrides as I saw them in 1925. On other groups we had already launched curative campaigns as wide as our numbers would permit. My plans for an advanced School to train Native Practitioners had not come to anything definite, and there I stood alone on one of Oceania’s plague spots. Well, not alone, for I had Malakai with me.

I had come full of curiosity, hoping to check up some of the causes of racial decay in the New Hebrides, that unfortunate double chain of islands where the population had been dwindling for well over a hundred years. Jogging shoulders with suave Samoa on the one hand and tamed Fiji on the other, these thirty wild islands remained the lawless stepchildren of a bad government called the Condominium (aptly nicknamed “Pandemonium”), a sort of Siamese-twin arrangement made between England and France in 1907. There was a Frenchman in one Government House, a Britisher in the other. The only occasions I ever saw the Condominium get together were on the King’s Birthday and July Fourteenth.

The heroic pig-killing was a rather open session of one of the native secret societies, which have controlled the New Hebrides from time immemorial. In my study of depopulation I was glad to have seen it. Because it was a cause of racial decline? Quite to the contrary. For uncounted generations it had been the social pulse of tribal life. European meddling was weakening the fabric of these mystic orders and giving the native no substitute. Let me remind you again that races die out for three established reasons: imported disease, the decay of custom, and a lack of will to live. Imported disease is easily the most important of the killers, but the three together produce results dismal to behold.

It was on the tiny island of Atchin, off wild Malekula, that I saw the pig ceremony. My survey was half over, and I had already seen enough demoralization to understand what happens when the ruling white man is too indifferent or poorly equipped to take up his burden. In Vila, the little capital where M. D’Arbousier, a cultured mulatto gentleman, governed for the French, and Mr. Smith-Rewse, a kindly Britisher, did his lonely best to hold up his end, I had seen a comic-opera demonstration of authority. The French half of the twin, it seems, was selling the natives their worst enemies, liquor and firearms. It wasn’t lawful, but what of the law? The native liked to drink and shoot, so why not accommodate him? The British pretended to frown on this. How much their frowns meant is herein illustrated:--

We were playing tennis behind the neat British Residency when a police official was suddenly called from the game. He sauntered away and found the trouble, a noisy altercation over a police patrol which, for unexplained reasons, he had set in front of a trading store. Trader Le Meskime was in a dither; the show of arms was scaring away natives who had come to buy toddy. A large number of them, mixed with Tonkinese, were huddled outside, not daring to approach. _Incroyable!_ What an outrage to keep an honest Frenchman from his honest profits! So the accommodating British police official moved his guard and the dark customers filed in to spend a week’s wages on a Saturday-night jag, as usual.

The sale of booze and bullets to a Stone Age people made the French very popular, you may be sure. French ships with supplies of opium for the Tonkinese, and some for the natives, were popular, too. Ask a discouraged official if there were no laws in the New Hebrides and he’d groan, “Plenty of them.” Perhaps he would show you a “Joint Resolution,” passed in May, 1922, for the Island of Tanna and beginning, “The Joint Order of January 2nd is repealed.” It was a nice piece of paper, which seemed to cover everything in the way of land claims. The only trouble was that the French and British settlers between them had put in more claims for property than there was land in the New Hebrides. In the old days any pioneer who came along would trade a bauble with a native chief for “all the land from here to there and as far back as I can see.” The native, who probably had no claim on the land, would cheerfully make his mark on a piece of paper, call in a friend as witness--and another rainbow sale would be more or less on record.

The Joint Court was supposed to settle the quarrels that rose over shaky claims. But since the Court postponed its meetings from year to year, the witness who opposed a claim was usually dead before they met. The judicial body could not function unless all members were present, and some were always on leave. Soreheads proclaimed that the Court preferred it that way--the fewer witnesses the less trouble.

The French had a way of shooting the natives off land on which a “legal” claim had been filed. The dazed aborigines, of course, hadn’t the vaguest idea what it was all about. But the canny Frenchmen knew. They always raided native plantations where the trees were bearing and gathered the nuts until their own newly planted acres began to yield.

Black men on Malekula, Santo, and Malo were doing as little as possible to help the unwelcome white man, though their murderers ran to the missions to be handily converted and missionaries often sheltered refugees from the rough work of “recruiting” for contract labor. French planters were tricking men into service, holding them indefinitely in the chains of drink and debt. Only about 13,000 of the possible 50,000 inhabitants were under any semblance of government control. There were eight government agents to enforce what order they could with a handful of sketchy native police. In a perfect climate, blessing a soil that flowed with milk and honey, there were but four British plantations. The French had crowded the others out.

The public health physician must study a population from all angles, and New Hebridean angles were odd. It would require volumes of anthropological data, with charts, to outline the cobweb of family structure on these islands.[5] In one rough sentence: The northern and more Polynesian half of this double archipelago was matrilinear (inheriting through the mother) while the negroid folk of the south were patrilinear (inheriting from the father’s side). Among the bearded natives of Malekula the wives were squaws, while their lords slept with rifles and bottles of toddy. Women were forbidden the men’s sacred enclosure. A true man cooked for himself and never let female hands defile his food.

Women had their value, however. On one island off Malekula I watched native boats every morning, being shoved off; the women were rowing across to work the “gardens” (truck farms) on the opposite shore. Their husbands sat at bow and stern, bristling with rifles; they took no chances on their drudges being picked off by rival Nambas, sniping from the bush.

* * * * *

In a roundabout way I have Mr. Smith-Rewse, the British Resident Commissioner, to thank for Pastor Parker’s hospitality and for the pains that earnest Adventist took to show me the cannibalistic pig-killing. With the Commissioner’s party I had set out from Vila on an inspection tour of Malekula and Santo, for health conditions on these notoriously savage islands demanded my attention.

Except for two excellent physicians in the Presbyterian hospitals, overworked and always embarrassed by a shortage of medicine, I found white men in the New Hebrides grossly ignorant of the causes, cures and prevention of tropical diseases. In Papua plantations were places where sick men came to be cured; in the New Hebrides plantations were seed-beds for infections that the workers carried back to the villages. Natives had become so enfeebled that the French were importing Tonkinese. These yellow strangers were contributing a new disease-picture to a land that had not yet set up an immunity to the scourges brought in by Europeans 100 years ago.

As to hookworm, the _Necator americanus_, I found the prospects pretty doleful. I was told that if I asked for specimens on Malekula the Big Nambas would either take a pot shot at me or run howling to the jungle. Even the missionized ones feared that I was collecting fragments of excreta for purposes of witch-doctoring. One of them, whom I tried to convince to the contrary, shook his bushy head stubbornly. “No, master. Dis would spoil me fellow altogether.” However, through the help of a few responsible white residents, I made enough worm counts to suspect that the general infection in the New Hebrides would run to something over 94 per cent. That meant that on our future curative campaign we would have to treat the whole population.

On the way to Malekula the government yacht _Euphrosyne_ touched at little Atchin. The mission bell was ringing lustily, but when services were over only four sad natives came out of church. Pastor Parker took us to his house and fed us on the fat of the land--strictly vegetable fat. After dinner we smoked pipes and cigarettes around the table, and neither the Pastor nor his wife said a word. The Commissioner’s sins were to be respected. Anyhow, we’d be off for Malekula in a day or so.

But on the hour when the _Euphrosyne_ was about to depart Smith-Rewse said to our host, “Parson Parker, I expect you to see that Dr. Lambert doesn’t go into the Big Nambas country.” A bush war was going on over there, and the Commissioner’s word was law.

The Big Nambas and the Little Nambas, let me explain, are two savage cults among the innumerable divisions and subdivisions in the New Hebrides. They go naked, except for a wrapping of dried banana leaves around their genitals. This wrapping, called the _nambas_, is large with the Big Nambas and small with the Little Nambas. Both cults were rather untamed in those days. Mr. Smith-Rewse told me about his last trip to Malekula, and the murderer he brought back. The man couldn’t understand why he was arrested, although he had just buried his infant daughter alive. All the way back to Vila he pleaded, “Master, me no like go jail. More better you make me belong police.” That happened in peacetime, the Commissioner said. In wartime Malekula needed a major general more than it needed a doctor.

Later on I saw plenty of Malekula.

So I was left alone with Pastor Parker. I went out on the veranda, lit my pipe and heard his gentle voice saying, “Doctor, I’m afraid you’ll have to stop smoking in the house or on the veranda. I must enforce the rules of our faith.” A chronic smoker, I struck a compromise. I’d move to the lawn and let the Pastor talk to me from the veranda, if he didn’t mind shouting. This was quite satisfactory, except when it rained. I had much idle time on my hands. Atchin was too small to afford many conclusions, except that the people were pretty heavily infected.

Mostly in shouts, Pastor Parker unloaded his peck of troubles. How his predecessor had moved to another station and all his converts had backslid when he stopped paying them a salary. He had worked on the patronage system, and his expensive conversions had drained the mission exchequer. Pastor Parker had never had enough money to make a wide appeal. In several years of purely spiritual effort he had only made two converts, a pair of primitives who were living in sin with heathen wives. The wives always accompanied them to church.

Trouble had been waiting for Pastor Parker when he took charge. The week they moved in, the place was raided by Big Nambas, who had plenty of guns and did plenty of shooting. The barricaded Parkers might have furnished long pig for the pig lovers but for a rescuing party of Presbyterians. To Parker’s Adventist mind Presbyterians were limbs of Satan, but they saved him just the same, and advised him to move out. The Pastor informed them that he had come there to preach the True Gospel, and by Jehovah, he’d stay.

He was brave according to his lights. Once, in a desperate appeal for converts, he went alone among the Big Nambas and invited them to shoot him. It was a sort of sanctified attempt at suicide with all the charm of martyrdom. The savages laughed and sent him home. Either they admired his courage or they thought he was “touched.”

He told me that he believed there was a great deal of cannibalism on Atchin. Offered a meatless Adventist diet as an alternative to man-eating, I could well understand their attitude. Flatulent with three windy meals a day, I gazed morbidly at my host. I asked him if the pig-killing ceremony he had shown me was not a symbol of cannibalism. He thought so, vaguely. Later talks with ethnologists assured me that my guess was right. In the Pre-Pig Era, when man-eating was the rule instead of the exception, human beings were led up to the sacrificial stone, and with every stroke of the mallet were counted off to the credit of the fortunate donor. The pig is a comparative newcomer in the Pacific, but the ritualistic ceremonies are old as Time. It is remarkable how the pig took center-stage in New Hebridean life. He became the unit of wealth, of social position, of tribal power. When I was there, although his cult was vanishing with other folk ways, he was still being bred in strange shapes for sacrifice. Wives were still valued as swineherds, chiefs exalted for the number and odd variety of their hogs. Murders were committed more often over pigs than over women.

It was something out of _Gulliver’s Travels_. Up to the time when misapplied Government and applied Christianity had weakened the pulse of the tribe, the secret society ruled these islands with a power that was super-Masonic. There were numerous lodges, each designated by some emblem-leaf and special tabus. A boy coming of age passed the harsh initiation, which included circumcision or, more often, incision. Among the incisionists the medicine men were still operating on the young initiate by standing him in water up to his waist, thrusting a blunt stick under the prepuce to stretch the skin and using a feather-edge of split bamboo to cut the foreskin longitudinally from end to end. The wound was packed with herbs, which might have been astringent and antiseptic. The boys, treated _en masse_, were locked away for long days of fasting. I never heard of one who died.

The ceremony I first saw was to celebrate the return of a boy from the sacred island of Aoba, where he had gone through the cruel final tests which would admit him into the lowest rank of the secret order. He might work for years, maybe a lifetime, to accumulate enough pigs to raise him a degree in native Masonry. Now he was distinguished by a woven strip of fiber, worn something like an apron. Initiated boys danced in front of him. Yams were stacked like cordwood around the space where torches flared. Musicians pounded ten-foot wooden drums, shaped like fat cigars. The tops of the drums were painted with identical faces; the face of Tamaz, the Unseen God of All.

The ambitious native bought his way into high position in the order, and to chieftainship, through his contribution of pig monstrosities, especially raised for sacrifice. It was near Bushman’s Bay, Malekula, that I first saw one of these freaks, a boar with artificially curled tusks. These tusks had grown toward the upper jaw, then turned in a circle backward as far as the lower jaw, where they were growing upward again to form a spiral. He was fourteen years old; if he lived to be twenty-one, he would be prized beyond money valuation--the pig with the three-curled tusks. The curl is produced by knocking out what correspond to our eye-teeth. With these gone, the teeth below have full play, and begin to twist backward at the end of the climb. Sometimes the curving ivory grows into the lip and tissues of the jaw, sometimes into the jaw itself. The animal must suffer constant pain. By the time he is ready for the altar he is fairly tough food, yet the man who can offer such a sacrifice to the noble dead is well on the way to mastership of his lodge.

The donor of several boars with curled tusks is immediately exalted. Such things are important to the great Tamaz; for when a high-grade native dies his soul goes to a high-grade heaven. The commoner, known as “man rubbish,” must do with a pretty cheap Hereafter. Spiritual merit is achieved at the great ritual, but there is a minor ceremony known as “killing small,” which is more practical. Here the donor merely taps his pigs on the back, to show that they will be sacrificed when the time comes. The idea is to hold a surplus of pork, which might otherwise all be eaten at one grand party.

The Big Pig Ceremony goes on for weeks of splendidly rhythmed dancing, warriors chanting the saga of the tribe, grandees parading in elaborate masks while many curl-tuskers die for glory.

Sometimes a white man with an eye to business has gained chieftainship through feats of pig culture. One I knew attained high nobility by offering his collection of freaks. He took his rank seriously and went about in complete undress, save for a _nambas_ and a pair of curled tusks around his neck. A friend who had known him in his other life asked him aboard his yacht, and was so shocked by the white chiefs fashionable nudity that he wouldn’t let him stay to dinner unless he put on a bath towel.

All through the New Hebrides there is a carefully guarded strain of sows which produce a certain number of pseudo-hermaphrodites with every litter; they produce them consistently and have a special name among breeders. I didn’t believe this until I saw several alleged bisexuals being tenderly cared for. Undoubtedly they had both male and female characteristics, but in every case one sex or the other predominated. They could not breed, of course; but I was informed that they were amorous. There was a general opinion that only the matrilinear people bred these _ragwe_ for high sacrifice and that the patrilinear groups shunned them as devil-devils.

The communistic New Hebridean builds a stockade around his vegetable patch in order to keep out the roving pigs. With no knowledge of crop rotation he moves his garden every year. Neighbors pile in to help him break ground, and he reciprocates. He cleans his patch when the _neurav_ blossoms and harvests his yams when the cicada sings. And here’s where the pig comes in, literally. Tribal law permits the yam-grower to shoot the low-bred trespassing hog. But if the interloper happens to be a tusked boar, hands off. Shoot him and you’re fined in pigs of equivalent value; or else the owner goes gunning for you. Hence many very ugly pig wars.

The pig-poor commoner can’t afford polygamy; women are scarce. Multiple marriage is a luxury for the rich, and for surprising reasons. I asked a wealthy chief on Aoba how many wives he had. Oh, about six, he guessed, but one of them might have died “of a pain in the heart.” He had about a hundred pigs to take care of and they were increasing so fast he’d need at least two more wives.

Pigs were increasing, humans thinning out. That was true of almost all the islands I visited. In most districts the birth of boys far exceeded the birth of girls--a danger signal that marks the decline of population.

* * * * *

Finally we were working into the forests of Malekula which Mr. Smith-Rewse thought too dangerous for a white doctor to tackle. Shaggy black men, each wearing a chronic scowl and a beard that would rival a Scottish terrier’s, lurked and peered or trooped down on us with their handy muskets. To make even an approximately accurate hookworm-survey was like trying to pry buttons from a live rattlesnake. When it came to yaws I found the men more obliging, for here as elsewhere they admired the needle, which New Hebridean pidgin called “stick medicine.” It was a trifle disconcerting, however, to “needle” a man who squatted with a loaded rifle across his knees, ready to repel a surprise attack from Little Nambas or to rebuke a Foundation doctor whose technique proved unsatisfactory.

A few years earlier the Nambas, Big or Little, had fallen upon white planters, butchered and eaten them. Then an Anglo-French naval force landed on a punitive expedition. They made about fifteen miles inland, burned some houses--and never saw a native. Another night came on, and the Commander knew that people were hiding in the bush; there was desultory firing and a few casualties. The landing party retreated in the early morning, the bush-fellows picking them off as they ran helter-skelter for their ship and safety. Their retreat was scattered, with wounded men and abandoned firearms. The forest cackled its jeering laughter, “Why don’t you come and get us?” The hidden savages had tied guns to the trees so that muzzles covered the trail. They had fastened long strings to the triggers and sheltered themselves behind rocks where they could pull at a safe distance--an old Malekula trick. There was plenty of meat for the ovens that night; and when the bad news straggled back to Vila the bi-national Government decided that there should be no more reprisals. Natives must be approached with tact. That was about the only policy the Condominium ever decided on, and we followed it, you may believe, in our subsequent task of cleaning the uncleanable. Working on my findings of 1925, I sent Inspector Tully down there, and later some of our best N.M.P.’s. What they accomplished in the face of native perversity was quite remarkable, and they had good government backing. Tully reported that one mission body rather resented his coming into their areas, because they had been charging a fairly stiff price for yaws injections, and we were giving them free. The missionary attitude was understandable, for we were buying the drug much cheaper than they could; and after we furnished them our source of supply and gave them the advantage of exchange, the difficulty was ironed out. When the missionaries charged for treatments the natives were more than willing to pay. The “needle” was always immensely popular with them.

Before I left Suva for the 1925 survey Dr. Maurice C. Hall had requested me to try his latest discovery, tetrachlorethylene, on hookworm patients. I was the first to use it. Malakai and I selected a number of patients at the Residency at Vila, treated them, counted the worms, then re-treated them to see the percentage of efficiency. Results were splendid, and physical reactions to the drug were few.

Later on a shipping strike in Sydney stranded us at Bushman’s Bay, Malekula, and there I was able to make a field test to determine how well tetrachlorethylene would work if given by laymen. On the fine Matevan Plantation I examined 102 laborers and found 97 infected with the Necator. We were working all over the island, so we had to move into the interior, but before I left Matevan I gave Fleming, the planter, a supply of the new drug with instructions as to dosage. Malakai and I got back in two weeks; again I rounded up my 97 patients, and was delighted to find that only 16 of them were even lightly infected with the worm. When I considered that the work had not been done by medical men, the results were very gratifying.

On this Matevan plantation I found that filariasis was so general that one force of 69 field hands had lost a total of 34 days in the past month. No wonder the French were importing Indo-Chinese. But a bad compromise.... The natives seemed to enjoy it when we took blood smears and let them peer through the lens at swimming microfilariae. “Snakes in the blood!” they shouted admiringly. Back in the bush villages, when we were making hookworm tests, the old snake-in-belly argument always worked. What worked still better was the growing opinion that our medicine was some sort of booze. Results were often disconcerting. With thirty Big Nambas milling around, flourishing guns and shouting praise to Tamaz, it was up to your director to sit very tight and remember what the Government had said: Use tact.

Hookworm lectures in the villages, when we could drum up an audience, never lacked the element of surprise. One day we expected a fair number of natives but nobody showed up. Then a shy pagan sauntered in and explained that they couldn’t come today “because an old man had to hang himself.” We set out with police and missionaries, but the party was over when we arrived. The old man had had all his pigs slaughtered and given the neighbors a splendid feast. In the flush of revelry he had gone into the house, put a noose around his neck and thrown the end out of a window. His friends had obligingly pulled the string, then gone on with the free feed, vowing that he was a nice, generous fellow, but too old to be much good.

In the back country the old and feeble were often buried alive. A Catholic priest told me how he had started his congregation. He dug up an antiquated couple who had just been dug in, revived them, baptized them and gained two splendid converts.

On Santo I saw one man who had been arrested for planting his father in a deep hole. This patricide was just as puzzled as the Malekula fellow who had buried his newborn child.

* * * * *

As a divertissement in pandemonium we had on our hands Dr. P. T. Buxton of the London School of Tropical Medicine. A distinguished scholar, Buxton was often a thorn in the side because of his definitely pro-Buxton opinions. I first met him in Samoa where he was patronizing New Zealand’s great medical work, then London sent him with us to the New Hebrides. Before our boat touched land he endeared himself to his fellow passengers by remarking, “Aren’t colonials quare people!” At a tea party in Vila his hostess asked, “Which of the Colonies do you come from, Doctor?” Buxton’s eyebrows went up. “I only come from England!”

Malakai, who had been busy as a bird dog, was guardedly polite to this very learned entomologist, and I wondered what black revenge was simmering in the Melanesian heart. Malakai owed Buxton a grudge; up in Samoa the Londoner had twitted him about having hookworm. To disprove the accusation Malakai had examined his specimen by our regulation field method, and had found his case negative. “Suppose you try my Clayton Lane technique,” challenged Buxton--this method was splendid for hospital examinations, but too complicated for fieldwork. Malakai was game. He tried Buxton’s method on himself--and got one solitary, smallish hookworm. So Dr. Buxton had told the world how he had the laugh on a poor N.M.P.

Malakai bided his time. The malaria situation was not acute, because May to November is the “dry season” in the New Hebrides--meaning that it doesn’t rain very hard and mosquitoes are comparatively few. We were on Malekula, and Dr. Buxton had returned from a month’s tour, combing the islands for anopheles. In all his search he had only found two damaged-looking specimens. Where were the mosquitoes? Malakai looked over the sad little exhibit and never turned a hair.

Then one morning on Bushman’s Bay my favorite N.M.P. turned up with a large number of anopheles in his specimen case. Buxton wanted to know where he got them. Oh, explained Malakai, he had just cut a hole in his mosquito net and used himself for bait. Having had their fill of blood they had gone to rest inside the net, so in the morning Malakai had gathered them in. With a pretty gesture he handed the scientist eighty-seven specimens to carry back to London. I wonder if this gave our visitor a little more respect for the N.M.P.

This neat rebuke was all too subtle for a land where murder was the popular way of showing annoyance. If I wished to get rid of anybody in

## particular I would just lure him to the New Hebrides, push him off a

boat and forget it. Should anybody get around to questioning me--which they probably wouldn’t--I would blame the disappearance to “blackwater fever,” always a handy explanation for missing persons. Or if I were a native I would shoot first, then run to a mission and get converted. To bask in righteousness was always fairly safe for the escaped trigger-man. (At one mission service the Nambas lurked in the woods, well supplied with ammunition for a couple of sanctified runaways, while the congregation inside was singing with much fervor: “Anywhere with Jesus I may safely go.”)

Another, if less popular, refuge for the guilty was to “recruit” into contract labor. Women offered themselves to recruiters, too, but for a different reason; they were usually in flight from “old men” husbands or embarrassing family troubles. I saw one big black girl approach a house and ask the planter’s wife to take her on indefinitely. She was a runaway, quaintly wild, naked except for a G-string pad and a small mat on her head; she used the mat for a pillow. Down her back, suspended from her forehead, she carried a calico bag and there were a few coppers in a leaf-purse at her throat. The bag contained all her earthly possessions encased in sections of bamboo (_bahbu_). She showed us her treasures: a piece of taro and a hatchet. She was all ready to set up housekeeping.

At the British Residency in Vila there was an excellent servant I called “Bush-Fellow Santo,” just to watch him grin. A few years before a chief had ordered him to shoot a rival chief, so obedient Santo had poked a rifle through the bush, a foot from the doomed one’s head. Poor Santo pulled the trigger, and the thing missed fire. The annoyed chief picked up the fallen gun and Santo made for the shore under a rain of bullets. Luckily the Government’s yacht lay in the stream. He was pulled aboard, swearing eternal devotion to the white man. And he kept his word.

The general practitioner, who attends one patient at a time, must know something of the sick man’s habits, environment and psychic condition. The health physician in primitive countries has these problems multiplied by thousands. He must regard mass behavior--and examine the files for the rate of tribal advance or decay. He must know something of the history of his multiple patient to form a workable theory concerning the dangers or benefits of foreign contact. He must strive to be a diplomat and make whatever contact he can with the Government in power.... Then he must work with the best tools and knowledge that are at hand.

In the mad Condominium, where there was no reliable census, we had to pit fact-finding against an estimated population of around 55,000. The real figure, as we estimated it, was under 45,000, and steadily sinking. Evidences of depopulation showed in the long-deserted villages and in the discontinuance of many tribal ceremonies because there were so few old men left who knew enough of the mysteries to perform the rites. Long since these grand masters had been swept away by epidemics. Old planters would point out spots where they had seen tribes almost blotted out in the course of thirty years.

Yaws was second to hookworm and malaria. On pleasant Tanna, to the extreme south of the group, it was a painful sight to see the poor fellows hobbling to the fields, as though walking on hot coals. They were suffering from “crab yaws,” which causes the feet to split oddly. Others, further gone with the disease, were given sitting down jobs, cutting copra near their quarters. Little attention--except in the hospital here--was paid to the condition and its cure, but what information I gave was welcomed. In more settled sections of the island a few injections with arsenicals were being given with the usual striking results. On parts of Tanna I found the natives themselves so eager for a cure that they were paying for the cost of salvarsan, and so earnestly asking for it that the supply was constantly giving out. When our outfit returned on later visits to give mass treatments the people were so grateful for the improvement in their health that they took up a collection and tried to present Tully with thirty pounds.

Everywhere we were busied by a variety of cases. We discovered an odd dozen of lepers and decided that the disease was spreading through the unprotected shores; there was no attempt to segregate the patients, although two at the Presbyterians’ Tanna hospital were being successfully treated with chaulmoogra injections. Queer cases swam into our ken. Here was a sick warrior who had tried to dry up his yaws by smoking them over a fire. Here were patients being treated for tuberculosis when they were suffering from tertiary yaws, or treated for malaria when they were sick with filariasis. Here were missionaries complaining of prevalent syphilis--and it was yaws again. Here we became emergency dentists and examined pyorrhea, one result of anemia. Here were Christian teachers who wondered why so many children died, especially girls in a land where more women were needed. We tried to lecture them on the rudiments of infant feeding; the Presbyterians were doing their best to supply milk. On Tanna I found that good Dr. Nicholson had been breeding goats and teaching the babies to suckle the nannies, direct from producer to consumer. It was a sensible idea, since there was no effective way of storing milk out of reach of filth-carrying flies. The nannies had come to regard the youngsters as their own kids. Once, experimentally, I picked up a small baby and growled at it. There was a worried “_Baah!_” and the mothering she-goat came at me, tail up and horns down. No foreigner was allowed to fool with _her_ children.

Where there was a scarcity of drugs there was always a plenitude of witch doctors. These wizards lacked the dignity of the ancient tribal seers, who undoubtedly exerted a certain protective influence over the flock. Now they had degenerated to annoying rain-makers, windmakers, sun-makers, generally called “poisoners.” If rain, wind or sun failed to appear on schedule, the Nambas had a jolly habit of shooting these specialists and calling in new ones.

I went with the Commissioner to round up a couple of wizards at Malua Bay, Malekula. They had been making mischief, setting family against family; then shooting had begun. Mr. Smith-Rewse, personally conducting the arrest, said that he would have let it blow over if the Adventists hadn’t kicked up such a row. We went up to a plateau where the missioners were starting a village, and there was Pastor Parker, offering his services. Natives hung around in a wide circle, but they had left their rifles in the bush. They were not allowed to carry guns to public meetings.

If they had wished they could have picked us off like tender fowls for Sunday dinner, for nobody knew how many were hiding behind cover. We were entirely unarmed, except for four policemen in dungaree uniforms--opposed to a whole island of untamed savages who openly boasted of cannibalism. It was surprising to see their frightened faces as they came up and shook hands with the missionaries; they were too shy to talk to government officials. Then with the suddenness of all savage things a thin, tall old man appeared. His beard and his eyes were somehow alike, wildly roving. He was the first of the accused wizards. I had expected an arrogant figure, threatening us with all the powers of sea and air. He slunk up, a picture of abject fright. The other, who followed soon after, dragged back at every step like a schoolboy about to be spanked.

They had fallen into a trap. The Resident Commissioner had given it out that he had come to discuss some abuses on the part of the “recruiters” who haul in contract labor. The natives huddled around, hanging on Smith-Rewse’s words--then abruptly he turned his questions on the two witch doctors, who seemed to have lost the power of invisibility. Four policemen seized them, and as they were dragged to the boat the air was filled with pleas for mercy. I was only sorry for them.

For three days, going toward the Vila jail, the older one was just a plaintive, seasick old man. He gave me a nicely curled pig’s tusk, a pledge of friendship, and admitted with the artlessness of a child that he had planned to kill off the converts in the new Adventist mission. He grew more and more downcast, and as we neared Vila he asked in quavering pidgin, “How soon will you eat us?” I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. The poor old devil thought that our expedition was a cannibal raid.

The Vila authorities sentenced him to a jail term long enough to untwist his imagination. When I saw him in the jail yard he was very docile. He even allowed me to treat him for hookworm. That was something of a triumph for modern medicine.

The witch-doctor affair didn’t end with the arrest. Nine days later an Adventist convert named Harry, working in his garden, was shot from ambush. He had been spokesman for Mr. Smith-Rewse during the capture of the magicians; also friends of the sorcerers accused him of having informed on them. After the shooting he lay for a long time on the beach; riflemen in the bush dared the rescuing Adventists to come ashore. Then one missionary recognized an acquaintance and arranged a truce. I don’t know whether Harry lived. He had gone to the village of the magicians to assure the women that the wizards were only under arrest and would come back. The villagers had decided that he was there to seduce their wives--or that was the story they told.

I offer these scenes as samples of a country where a Foundation doctor was trying to make medical sense. Later on, when I made my return visits, we met every possible condition, good and bad--mostly bad--and often went alone among the most backward savages. None of us was murdered, but there was still a chance of a white man’s blood being shed, if some fanatic should arise with a crusade against the oppressor. It had happened before.

For instance, there was the prophet Ronivira. Once in the early yam season he awoke to find that his navel was blown out. The uninitiated would have put it down to too much yam, but Ronivira arose and proclaimed that ghosts in his belly had given him power to raise the dead; price one pound to revivify a male relative, ten shillings for a female, five bob for a child. He didn’t do any revivifying, but made a huge impression. His platform was the Bible, his program anti-white. He built warehouses to receive goods from a sympathetic United States--for the New Hebridean believes that all Americans are black men.

Finally the Resident Commissioner took him aboard the government yacht. In the midst of cross-questioning a storm broke with a clap of thunder; and thunder was so unusual in those parts that the Commissioner, so I was told, lost his nerve and let Ronivira go. After a time doubting Thomases began asking the prophet why he didn’t raise any dead. When his wife died he stood over the corpse and made all the passes in his repertory, but Mrs. Ronivira didn’t respond. To bolster his falling stocks he said that white magicians were working against him. Therefore all white men and their sympathizers must die. A high mast was erected on the beach for the hanging of all native skeptics; and when a white rag fluttered from the yard-arm it meant a European must die before sundown.

They murdered one white, at least, ate part of the body and threw the rest to the dogs. Finally the Resident Commissioner arrested Ronivira in earnest; but the yacht taking him to Vila met a storm that all but wrecked it. Although his trial was prolonged by witnesses afraid to testify, the authorities finally hanged the Great Resurrector. Otherwise the Condominium’s frail hold on the native might have collapsed.

* * * * *

Any white man’s stories of cannibal revels should be checked with care. The primitive is a shy bird, and he knows that cannibalism has been blacklisted. Therefore he works cautiously. Old-timers in the New Hebrides say casually, “Oh, yes, it is going on.” But I have never found one who has actually seen it.

When Bill Tully was running our yaws campaign in a remote part of Malekula, guards appeared around his house one day and forbade his going out. Through the chinks he could see a glow of fire, hear drumming and fierce cries. Bill knew, as if he had seen it, that they were cooking long pig. The patients who came to him next day were especially quiet and subdued.

One afternoon, on Atchin, Malakai came back from an inspection across the island and said that work had been delayed by a ceremony. The messenger of a chief on Malekula had come with a gift for a chief on Atchin. It had come carefully rolled in pandanus leaves. Maybe the chief was less secretive than he would have been before a European, for he allowed Malakai to look on while he opened the package. It contained a human hand.

What Malakai saw was part of an old courtesy-custom. When a chief makes a kill he sends some part of the body, like a hand or foot, to a chief bound to him by kin or friendship. Within a certain period the recipient is supposed to return the gift in kind. There is a delicate code: If the meat of a common native is sent to A, then in due time A sends to B flesh of a similar social status. If the cut is from a chief, then chief-meat is expected in return. In old days when white men were easy game the exchange was often in white-man’s flesh. But nowadays bagging Europeans is a dangerous sport, so the meat of a “clothed man” takes the place of this delicacy. A “clothed man” means any native who has been educated to European dress.

This pernicious round-robin, I was told, had got on the nerves of some chiefs, who had learned to prefer peace and pig. But when the pandanus-wrapped package came they knew what was expected of them.

Man-eating is far from an everyday amusement in the New Hebrides, but in 1923 even white men were not entirely safe. Ewan Corlette, a planter on Bushman’s Bay, Malekula, sent his native wife to the neighboring island of Santo to visit at the home of his friend, Klapcott, who had a trading store, and a native family. Later the place was found a shambles, a welter of blood. Klapcott had always kept a rifle handy, but evidence proved that, when he turned to take down some goods, one of his native customers had brained him with a hatchet. Evidence also showed how the women and children had run, trying to escape, before the savages finished them.

Traders didn’t like to tell cannibal yarns because it “gave the place a black eye.” They were something like the San Franciscans who saved face by calling their earthquake a fire. The face-savers along the beach were inclined to scoff at tales of white men having taken photographs of man-eating revels, although some such pictures, I am told, have been shown to the public.

The Negroid folk, if they ever talk about man-eating, will tell you that it has a religious significance. The merrier, slightly Polynesian people to the north and east are more candid. One of their chiefs, who had probably finished a quart of bad French wine, said simply, “Me like im long pig too much.” He just liked what he liked. His people had a record for cruelty. In the bad old days their trained garroters went on long hunts, stole upon sleeping islands and strangled the sleepers, quietly, with a looped vine. They were reputed to have kept their prizes in pens to fatten them. Island peoples with a higher mental capacity than their neighbors have often been the bloodiest cannibals and tormentors. Witness Fiji, witness the New Zealand Maoris. Cruelty seems to be the brat of young imagination. The ape-man bashes his enemy with a club; he can think of nothing cleverer. His more gifted neighbor becomes a virtuoso in the art of giving pain. Yet superior peoples like the Samoans and Cook Islanders have not been notorious man-eaters; whereas the flat-headed Goaribaris are still at it. In spite of this paradox, I have found some of my most enlightened native friends among grandsons of cannibals.

Meanwhile anthropologists debate the subject: Do men eat men to satisfy an animal hunger, or has cannibalism a religious significance? Scholars who associate the Christian Church’s sacramental bread and wine with the ancient custom of devouring a sacrificial hero will appreciate the remark of one big black convert. It was Communion Sunday, and when the wine cup was passed to him he drained it and shouted lustily, “Fill um up anudder time, Master. Me like im dis fellow Jesus too much!”

* * * * *

Perhaps at times I have given the missionary less than his due. I stand rebuked by a letter I picked out of a recent _Pacific Island Monthly_. It quoted an eminent authority who wrote in the middle of the eighteenth century and reminded his readers that the missions had appreciably reduced “the power of an idolatrous priesthood--a system of profligacy unparalleled ... infanticide ... bloody wars where the conquerors spared neither women nor children.... In a voyager to forget these things is base ingratitude; for should he chance to be at the point of shipwreck on some unknown coast, he will most devoutly pray that the lesson of the missionary may have reached thus far.”

The letter-writer reminds us that the author of these words was no missionary, nor was he rated a good Christian. Many called him an atheist or freethinker. He was Charles Darwin.

I have criticized some missionaries as I have criticized some of my own profession. But I have stumbled so often, late at night, into little lonely mission houses, to be welcomed by their poor best; I have depended so much on the missionary’s co-operation in my medical work, and so frequently seen his eagerness to learn the nature and the cure of diseases that were afflicting the tribes, that I do not wish to seem unfair.

I am speaking of the best. And I shall not take back a word I have said in disparagement of the others. Even among the best there was frequent jealousy and backbiting. Opposing missionaries were too often “sheep stealing.” Once on Ambrym I heard Smith-Rewse ask a missionary why he hadn’t been to Vila lately. “I can’t get away,” he said. “Every time I leave, those Seventh Day Adventists steal one of my villages.”

Missionaries are excellent men, average men, poor men and evil men--about like the rest of us. I do not agree with their claims of making such large numbers of _true_ converts; but their claims as educators, humanizers and civilizers are often justly founded. Not so long ago in the Pacific the whole burden of education was left to them. And as humanitarians I praise the Presbyterians in the New Hebrides--without their intervention over the past hundred years the last native there would have died. And I have seen the quiet work of the Melanesian Mission in the Solomons where the workers are High Church, yet drudge and slave with evangelical zeal. The Melanesian Mission, I think, is doing better medical work than any of the other sectarians down there. And, not excepting the devoted Fathers of the Sacred Heart in Papua, I would call the Presbyterians of the New Hebrides the best religious civilizers.

In the Melanesian Mission were educated men and women giving their lives and all for the Cause, which paid them £40 a year. They were often short on equipment, but their hospitals were better than could be expected. Brave people, mostly celibates. I can almost forgive Bishop Baddeley for helping to wreck a great humanitarian plan by writing, in effect, “I will accept no boundaries to the Kingdom of Christ.” Baddeley had served as a colonel in the First World War, and he guarded his boundaries with a soldier’s sense of duty.

* * * * *

Let me offer the Reverend Frederick J. Paton as the best example of a Presbyterian missionary. A frail-looking man of fifty-eight, crippled by a missing leg and a twisted arm, he took me in his creaky little motorboat over to Onua on Malekula. Before he had unlatched his gate I caught a scent of roses and verbena. The rich soil of the New Hebrides had grown a garden that might have smiled in Kent or Massachusetts. But his fragrant little garden contrasted with the awful untidiness inside his house. Items in the litter were too numerous to mention, except to say that he dined off one end of a long table in his big living room, and the rest of the table was given over to books, binoculars, scraps of food, discarded watches, a typewriter, some clothes--in fact about everything that Mr. Paton had put there and forgotten. He usually did his own cooking, but in our honor he brought in a couple of native teachers who stirred up a frightful mess in a very dirty kitchen. He had a bathtub, which Malakai insisted on giving a triple scrub with disinfectants before he would let me get in. I don’t know where Mr. Paton bathed, but he was always neat and clean, if shabby.

When I talked with him I realized why he was the most useful missionary in the New Hebrides. His father before him was the famous missionary-bishop, and his son Frederick’s life was devoted to distributing the John D. Paton Fund. Mr. Paton was too busy with good works to bother about his surroundings. His doors were always open to stray natives, who wandered in day and night; they just curled up on the floor and slept. While provisions held out Paton never let them go away hungry. This Australian Scot had inherited some money; however, his pocket never held two pennies to rub together.

I think it was his ambition to die poor; but when money was needed for his work he could be shrewd. He would pack and go to Sydney, where a Mission Board was never quite able to resist his plea.

Medical experience had taught me that a pure spirit often dwells in a broken body. When he was a baby a careless nurse had spoiled one of his arms; he had lost a leg when a motorboat fouled a hidden rock, during an emergency call. His success in handling natives was envied, even by his co-religionists. His converts were nearer Christians than most I saw.... I don’t know why I speak of him in the past, for as I write he is very much alive, seventy-three and going strong. We have been corresponding for years, and I bless him for the way he took up my cause for the Central Medical School. His daily work had shown him the need of it.

I can’t forget the way Mr. Paton had the laugh on me one night when I was lecturing the natives in a church at the quaint village of Pangkumu. With unique co-operation he had assigned the contribution box to receive hookworm specimens. The people were pretty badly infected, so I strained my pidgin English to express the horrible fecundity of the female Necator. See the hundreds of snake-eggs she could lay in twenty-four hours.... “Look out!” Paton whispered. Right in front of me a woman with scared eyes was holding a baby. In her fright she let it drop. I had to stop the lecture to look over the casualty, and when I found that no bones were broken Paton laughed softly, “It doesn’t pay to be too sensational.”

Paton knew his natives, and he knew the Condominium well enough to have an incompetent district agent removed now and then. When my Native Medical Practitioners ran afoul of European prejudice Paton never failed to take their part. A French physician objected to our N.M.P. Peni visiting the villages when a whooping cough epidemic was raging--and whooping cough can be deadly down there. The Frenchman wanted the sick to come to his hospital, to sleep outside in leaky shacks until he was ready to treat them. Paton advised Peni to go straight to the villages and save the patients from the shock of being moved, and he acted on that advice. When Mesalume was there--the poor boy who died on duty--Paton often got out his motorboat at small hours in the morning and hurried him to emergency calls. The Government had no launch to send.

During my first visit to Onua I treated 300 hookworm cases, and nearly half of them were women; a remarkable record in a land where women were especially guarded by the feces tabu. Whenever I found a people susceptible to medical advice I always found a good mission in charge. Paton’s was 100 per cent.

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

* * * * *

I had finally the meager satisfaction of knowing that the population was taking a slow turn upward--but too slow to hold its own. The men still outnumbered the women; there were not enough of the latter to carry on the breed. In some regions where public health was beginning to pick up I found that the sex balance was working toward a normal equilibrium. That was a good sign, though all too faint. Its promise was dimmed by graver threats of racial annihilation. You can’t draw clean water from a stream that is polluted at the source. The New Hebrides, with no enforced quarantines, no concerted effort to look into the causes of epidemics, no program for restoring the best and healthiest of the native customs, no educational system, and apparently no sincere wish to divorce the savage from liquor and firearms, were well on the road to racial extinction. The slum-scum of the Orient would take over all the jobs of the sick islanders, and succumb to the same diseases. That’s a gloomy picture--but an illustration of what may befall any community, tropical or temperate, where public health and education are not enforced by a strong central authority.

When I was working among the plantations around Male I stayed with M. Peletier, who owned a wide domain, 800 acres of it rich with coffee, cacao, cotton and copra. M. Peletier was equally rich in children from wives and concubines. He had come there as a stranded French sailor, and in middle age his ambition was to retire and live in Los Angeles. The sanitary habits of his laborers were fairly well looked out for--which was refreshing, since I had just seen indescribable filth on near-by plantations.

Well, on Saturday night I retired early in one of M. Peletier’s clean rooms, and had just fallen asleep when the quiet was shattered by drunken native voices. Next morning the natives who had promised to come for a lecture failed to show up. They were sleeping it off.

In the afternoon I drove with the Peletiers to the home of M. Margot, who had the usual store in the back of his house. We were having a glass of wine on the front porch when a crowd of natives appeared and began to file around toward the store. They were none too steady and it was obvious that they had come for more liquor. The Margots gave me an embarrassed glance. _Comme c’était embêtant!_ With a Foundation doctor looking on, knowing that they were selling grog to the heathen! M. Margot rose to the emergency and staged a powerful scene. Blue with indignation, he faced the rioters and asked them what they meant by coming on Sunday, of all days, to buy kerosene and tobacco? Then, turning to me, he explained gently, “They’re just children. If they happen to want kerosene and tobacco they pay no attention to my rules. Such children!”

Meanwhile the children were howling some island French word that sounded like “Poison,” or maybe “Boisson,” but obviously referred to booze. Their college cheer, “Me want Boisson,” was pointed-up by one big voice in the bedlam: “Suppose you no pay me my five pounds wages along grog--me want Boisson!” And the Margots were loudly protesting that they had never heard of such a thing. Neighbors ought to be ashamed to give grog to those poor boys.

We left in the midst of the embarrassing scene; left Margot to unbolt a side door and begin serving the customers. I let out a vulgar American horse-laugh. How furious the Margots must have been at Peletier for taking me there on Sunday! Peletier drove moodily away and tried to continue the argument about natives wanting kerosene and tobacco. When I asked him if I looked like a jackass he changed his tune. You had to sell grog, he said, if you wanted to keep anybody on your plantation. Even the British did it on the sly.

M. Margot’s side-door trade was mild compared to what I saw on another island. Saturday night again. Nude figures were dancing around a fire. In the center of the group was a fat Frenchman, naked except for a grass skirt. He was leading them all, contorting and howling. The ground was strewn with empty bottles. I asked the man with me if this fellow had “gone native.” “Oh, no,” he said, “he is the owner of a big plantation. But he prefers to dance with the people. It keeps them contented.”

In going among the islands we would come occasionally upon scenes of well-being that raised our hopes for the future. Even now I stroke my waistcoat, remembering the large hospitality of F. J. Fleming’s plantation at Bushman’s Bay. Here was a New Zealander who had succeeded against all odds. His acres were lush with luxury. Blooded cattle grazed in his fields, his yards were filled with fancy ducks, turkeys, chickens and guineas. One native boy was devoted to a single job--supplying Matevan Plantation with fish. Dinner at Mr. Fleming’s table was something I often remembered on hard cross-island hikes. It was here that I made the tetrachlorethylene experiments, for in spite of the plantation’s prosperity there was much disease.

Mr. Fleming dwelt in the Land of Canaan and knew all the ropes. He kept his plantation clean with blooded Herefords which multiplied so rapidly that there was a surplus over the needs of his menage and his labor quarters. Once a week he had a young bullock slaughtered, and he knew how to keep the meat tender and wholesome. The only provisions he had to buy were tea, sugar, wine and flour. Matevan baked its bread in its own ovens, and was not bothered by labor shortage, because the good eating was famous among the natives. This project flourished on dangerous Malekula, a smiling picture of what the New Hebrides offered to the right man.

While Mr. Fleming fed on the fat of the land discouraged planters over the hill were starving on tinned beef.

* * * * *

This survey didn’t end with very cheerful conclusions. The New Hebrides group offered a picture of a race being murdered by European invasion. Fiji and Samoa had been invaded too, but their conquerors had set about making amends. Outside of sporadic attempts to discourage cannibalism, what had the pale-faced intruders done to improve this race whose labor they so bitterly needed?... I had worked my level best and given all the advice I had to give.

We were coming back to the New Hebrides someday, with all the medicine and all the knowledge at our command. I told that to Mr. Paton just before I left, and he was mightily pleased. I couldn’t prophesy any results, but now that I look back on our subsequent years of work down there I know that in many regions we turned the tide of health. Yet it has still not turned fast enough to restore a dying population. And if it dies, what then? Well, the Axis Powers can always pour in slaves to upset Oceania’s racial and economic balance again. I hate to think of that as a solution. But the Condominium Government as I saw it was inviting its own fall.

I didn’t dwell on doleful things when I said good-by to Mr. Paton and told him that we were coming back to cure and not to question. Before we shook hands he smiled and said, “Mr. Rockefeller has given us so much in the work you are doing for my people that I want to give him something in return.” He brought a package and when he opened it I saw a roll of tapa cloth, very old and unusual with a faded velvety texture. The markings were so faint and frail that he had to trace them out. He said, “This came from Efate over in the east where there’s quite a mixture of Polynesian. The missionaries who first touched there over a hundred years ago found the natives worshiping this cloth. Nobody knows where it came from, but there’s a myth that it was brought in a foreign canoe.” Mr. Paton rolled up the tapa and handed it to me, with a letter to John D. Rockefeller. “Just to thank him,” he said. “I don’t think there’s another tapa like it in the world.”

* * * * *

On my way for a month’s leave in the States I went by Sydney, Fiji and Tonga, carrying the old tapa back along the course it must have followed centuries ago. At Tonga I unwrapped it and showed it to Queen Salote. She looked it over carefully, and so did the wise old ones. They all said that it must have come from Futuna, one of the French Polynesian islands just north and west of Tonga; they told me that it was of a type made nowhere else. “It must be very old,” Salote said, “because it was not pounded with a stone, as they do it nowadays. It was scraped with a shell, and that gives it the velvet texture. And the stenciling is finer than the modern style.” She marked out the graceful feather design, almost indistinguishable. “They never made feather designs in Tonga. Tapa is still scraped in Samoa,” she said, “but this one is a double tapa, and they do not make that kind.” The old people pointed out the thin reddish color that still tinted the surface and said that it was _lengo_, which is turmeric, a sacred plant-juice worn only by chiefs. Futuna was on the old route where traders brought in turmeric for the body and garments of royal personages. “The feather design is royal too,” the old people said. “This tapa was worn by a king. So a king must have visited Efate.”

I went on my way, carrying something that amounted to a lost crown jewel, a proof that Tongafiti conquerors had once touched the New Hebrides. When I reached New York I sent that tapa with Mr. Paton’s letter to Mr. Rockefeller, who dropped me a note saying that he was putting the relic in a museum. I hope he did. I hope it wasn’t tucked in the family attic where a housekeeper would junk it someday among unidentified family scraps. If that should happen, the Rockefeller estate would lose a unique treasure.

## CHAPTER VI

NEW ZEALAND’S LITTLE SISTER

Before I take you into the Cook Islands, where our war on disease landed me late in 1925, I must deal briefly with Polynesia’s humane and thoughtful big sister, New Zealand. The kinship of her native Maoris with those she was called upon to govern in the Cooks is so close that one can scarcely refrain from naming the two in the same breath. I have made several visits to the Dominion, both to learn and to teach, and have written hundreds of pages of reports, never without admiration for the Government’s progress in rehabilitating a magnificent race which, but for a generous conqueror, might have perished from the earth.

I grant you that their program for education and health has been marked by errors of judgment, and that their pioneering was like most Pacific conquests, selfishly concerned with taking away a native people’s God-given right to its own land and its own way of life. Perhaps New Zealand’s temperate climate worked on the temperate mind of the Anglo-Saxon when he finally set himself to govern the greatest number of Polynesians in any of Oceania’s racial zones. This might have brought about the bright change. But I am more inclined to believe that it came largely through the native Maori’s natural genius for government.

Consider the lusty fighting Maori of two centuries ago. They numbered perhaps between 200,000 and 300,000 souls. In 1896, when Government conscience awoke, the Maoris had fallen to 40,000. Then came the resurgence, forced through channels of education and public health, so that today the Polynesians on the mainland have passed the 85,000 mark and are steadily increasing. In the year 1937 the Dominion spent well over £1,000,000 on education, building, sanitary improvements and pensions for the Maoris. Public schools were thrown open to their children. Industrial training fostered the Maori’s natural ingenuity with tools. Too much, perhaps, was being done for the native; it is only human for a spoon-fed people to do as little as possible to lift the spoon.

On the Pacific New Zealand is unique: her million-and-a-half Europeans outnumber her natives by tremendous odds. This may sound easy for the Dominion, but Government, every step of the way, has been forced to tackle a variety of problems: ancient and well-earned grudges against the _Pakeha_ (white man), a tendency to lean on a dole, carefree indifference to modern hygiene--a hundred and one cross-currents. I have seen the subsidized Maori farmer on the East Coast, dressed in British clothes, looking like any tanned European and proud of modern farm machinery. I have seen the model dwelling houses which the authorities set in the back yards of native schools to inspire the Maori housekeeper. I have seen British ladies striving to teach back native arts which the natives had forgotten. I have seen lazy boys playing pool during work hours and pertly asking, “Why work when the _Pakeha_ pays?” And all this time, in the primitive village which he ruled with a rod of fear, Rua the Prophet lay dying of a rival witch’s curse; when he died his followers sat for days, expecting him to rise again.

In 1926 New Zealand was governing her own Maoris, their cousins on the Cook Islands and beautiful Niue, and had control of Western Samoa. She was ruling 152,000 Polynesians. It would be better for the Polynesians, I think, if she were to govern them all.

The British New Zealander is not especially race-tolerant, nor has he always been an idealist. The surprising thing is that the Maori’s rise from death to life came about largely through the genius of certain Maoris, of one generation at least, who seized the opportunity and so brilliantly improved it that their zeal revived the flagging soul of a conquered people.

Let me name a few of that generation. Some had a light strain of British blood, but their minds and hearts were Maori. There was “Jimmie Taihoa,” later knighted as Sir James Carrol, a lawyer whose scarifying logic so outmaneuvered Parliament that the _Pakeha’s_ unjust land laws were enfeebled by _reductio ad absurdum_. Sir Apirana Ngata, probably the greatest of these Maoris, deliberately set himself to learn European ways that he might protect his race against the _Pakeha_. With a cabinet portfolio he served for years as Minister to the Maoris. When his fire blazed too hot the Prime Minister put him out. But only to invite him back, because as an outsider he was even more destructive. His land laws stand today, a bulwark between the Maoris and the land-grabbers. He is still living and fighting. Highly Europeanized, his great wish is to have his people return to their tribal ways.

Dr. E. P. Ellison, a Maori, was last Director of Maori Hygiene, and served in the Cook Islands with distinction as Chief Medical Officer. Dr. Peter Buck (Te Rangiheroa) began in the same post, developing later into one of the world’s great ethnologists. He was visiting professor at Yale for two years, and in Honolulu he became director of the famous Bishop Museum. I have heard that he is returning to New Haven.

These distinguished Maoris graduated from Te Aute College, and the new generation has not produced such leaders. Possibly it is the fault of a changed educational system for natives. Possibly it is because unusual men are born, not made.

Sir Maui Pomare died a few years ago. We were close friends from the day I met him with Lady Pomare, also a Maori aristocrat. He held down three ministerial positions at one time; but for his racial origin he would have been Prime Minister. Graduate of an American medical school, he began his career as Maori Medical Officer. Once young Dr. Pomare handled a three months’ typhoid epidemic without a soul to help him. As Director of Maori Hygiene he treated a whole race over scattered areas. His preachment of modern sanitation and racial self-respect were lasting things. Often Pomare’s theories ran counter to Ngata’s, for his great desire was to close the gap between two races.

Memories of an ancestral thoroughbred always pleased Sir Maui. About the time the Ministry of Health for New Zealand and the Ministry of the Cook Islands were conjoined under his authority, there was an anniversary service in one of Wellington’s oldest churches. Eloquently the preacher dwelt on the Christian beatification of a certain old-time savage, Pomare’s great-granduncle, who had given the ground the church was built on and money to endow it. The sermon so honeyed the good works of the converted barbarian that the news got around to Pomare, who asked the clergyman to come to his office and hear the real story.

Great-granduncle, a cannibal and head hunter, had led the first Maori War and held the British at bay so long that an embarrassed Crown Governor put a price of five hundred pounds on the rebel’s head. The Maori King called in a few chiefs, who might have been a bit pro-British, and made this counter-proposal: “I am honored by the offer of five hundred pounds on my head. Five hundred pounds is a lot of money, and if any of you want my head, suppose you come and get it.” The chiefs made no reply. “Well,” said the King, “I think I know the value of heads. Suppose I put my price on the Governor’s, an exchange of courtesies. My offer is sixpence.”

Sir Maui informed the clergyman that his ancestor had endowed the old church after he had laid aside his well-worn spear and become a Christian. The gift had to do with horse-racing. The British had built their race track in Wellington, and the craze had spread among the more prosperous chiefs. The retired King, old and feeble, had imported a thoroughbred and entered it for the great meeting of the year. The elderly Maori lay on his deathbed too ill to go near the track, so he posted relays of runners all the way from the course to his bedside. When a messenger proclaimed that the horse had won, the old man straightened up, shouted, “A victor to the last!” and fell dead. His success on the track enriched a church endowment, and a winning horse had crowned his string of victories over the white man.

With relish Sir Maui told me how the old gentleman did a stroke of business. He sold the present site of Wellington to the granduncle of Sir Francis Bell. The deed is recorded, and the price was something like this: two kegs niggerhead tobacco; three dozen red flannel nightcaps; a dozen pipes; a dozen umbrellas; two flintlock pistols; assorted muskets with powder; half a gross of jew’s harps.

When I asked Pomare if it didn’t make him sick to think of his ancestor selling the site of a great modern city for a mess of junk, he said, “It was only a fraction of the land Great-granduncle had. And he got what he wanted. Can’t you imagine the old man walking away, wearing his red nightcap, hoisting his umbrella, playing his jew’s harp and laughing over the way he stuck the white man in that deal? Everything’s relative in this world, and when it came to money-sense--well, he was a Polynesian.”

* * * * *

It was at Pomare’s request that I visited the Cook Islands toward the end of 1925 and into the early months of 1926. He asked me especially, as a director for the Foundation, to look into the hookworm situation there, but also to include in my survey the general aspect of native diseases. He had not then been long enough in office to organize the public health work as thoroughly as he desired, and there was the usual shortage of competent doctors. Sir Maui had a special affection for the Cook Islanders, as he was closely related to them. He often suggested my looking into the pre-Christian religion on the Cooks and the relics it left behind.

Medically speaking, the Cooks were a great relief after the New Hebrides. Although conditions were far from perfect, I found no serious problems. Public health was above the Pacific average, but there were some indicated dangers, and I was obliged to raise the red flag. Population had begun to fall in the eighties, but had been slowly coming back since 1900, when New Zealand took over. Up to then the group had been utterly neglected, save by the usual despoilers. Twenty-five years is too short a time to work a radical change in any people. The Maoris on these tiny, graceful clumps of land now numbered over 10,000. The group lies some twenty degrees below the Equator, cheek-by-jowl with Tahiti--too close, perhaps, for health.

Rarotonga, so often described by romantic novelists, has suffered some injustice from flights of imagination. It is the main island in the little Cooks and is a collection of small towns, one of which harbors Government Headquarters. To the native mind it had the lure of Paris for the Peorian. Cinemas, public entertainment and private vice drew with the loadstone’s charm, and the combination was probably dangerous for the pleasure-loving Maori. Gonorrhea, imported from generous Tahiti, was on the increase. That was true of Rarotonga, but not of the less populated and more primitive islands. The Polynesian is a great gossip, and when an infected townsman came home from his big spree the whole village knew it, and shunned him accordingly.

Dr. Ellison was working like a beaver with an understaffed department, yet what could he do but just shuffle along and make the best of it? I had Malakai along, my Exhibit Number One. At once he became a popular idol, a social and scientific success. When Ellison saw his work and realized what a native physician could accomplish, and I told him that our Central Medical School, once it got going, could turn out hundreds like Malakai, Ellison was all for the School; he’d do anything to put it through.

My hopes were running high then. Dr. Montague had just written a letter, announcing that all the High Commission groups, five of them, and all the groups controlled by New Zealand were ready to sign on the dotted line. And there was Sir Maui Pomare, clear-thinking and powerful in his faith that the native mind was receptive to the highest education.

My hope was to be blasted by an act of Pomare himself. He had suffered a slap in the face, something no well-born Maori will endure. I shall go into that later.

* * * * *

In Rarotonga it was pleasing to see the young people, the boys in white trousers, the girls in simple frocks, throwing their souls into the dances of 1925. European clothes and European ways seemed to be their destiny, and the Government had encouraged innocent dances, away from the temptations of bush-beer and petting parties on the beach. This music and youthful pleasure was in sharp contrast with the plight of the unhappy New Hebridean, robbed of his tribal ceremony and given nothing to take its place.

In less conventional surroundings girls were still dancing the hura, more graceful than the Hawaiian hula, but they were contorting for the leer of visiting sailors. Gonorrhea, already gaining in 1925-1926, was not entirely blameable on that old scapegoat, Tahiti. The Hollywood movie had become the popular notion of European behavior. Imitate clothes, imitate morals. The local girl had acquired a craving for silk stockings and high heels, things that must be paid for with _Pakeha_ money, however she got it.

Disease-bearing Tahitian boys were coming over with a bribe which few Rarotongan girls could resist--bottles of French perfume. For this the girls deserted their local sweethearts and husbands, flew to the scented strangers, and were sorry afterward. The bright lights of Rarotonga were luring so many from surrounding islands that overcrowding threatened a higher infection of tuberculosis. Polynesian hospitality invited the germ, for relatives came pouring to be packed like sardines in the coral houses. They ate so much that many hosts went undernourished between parties.

Speaking of forced sophistication, a little native nurse in one of the best hospitals approached me shyly and asked for an examination. I brought in assistants, had her put on the table and ignored her protests over the delicate job at hand. When I had finished I asked her why she had made such a fuss; she ought to be used to doctors. “Oh, but Doctor,” she said, “I thought you were going to examine my chest!” She had expected me to use a stethoscope. It was the same all over the Cooks. Put a stethoscope to a native’s chest and he thought it was magic to cure whatever ailed him. What ailed the little nurse happened to be pregnancy.

Here’s another example of the naïve sophisticate. I was with a local merchant, admiring the beautiful sunset, when a pretty native girl stopped her bicycle. She was trig and slim in a white duck dress, white shoes and a flaming red scarf around her neck. What she said sounded like something you learn by rote: “I-am-looking-for-the-doctor, to-come-to-my-mother, who-is-very-ill.” I asked my friend if her mother was ill and he said, “That’s something she learned at school and is trying on us.”

She smiled primly and my friend asked her where her lover was. She said, “Luff? That is no good. Some boys talk luff, I say ‘Go way, I am too strong. I no go down to the beach.’” Her name, she told us, was Ngapuku, and she was sixteen, fancy free. “I am a Girl Guide,” she announced. With every breath she went on talking about “luff,” which did not interest her because she was a proper Girl Guide. Where and how she guided the stranger came out in the next sentence. Last week when a New Zealand gunboat came in she met a sailor who talked “luff” and was indignantly repelled. However, since Jack ashore wished to be guided, she took him around to the other sort of girl and charged a fee of twenty-five shillings, five for girl friend and twenty for herself.

The Cook Islands had no half-caste question because there were no half-castes, socially speaking. All were members of the local community, and a light-skinned baby was a welcome arrival. There was no slightest stigma on illegitimacy. Married natives were eager to adopt such children. One British trader I knew had a native wife and four daughters; long before a newcomer was born a delegation came to the house and begged for the privilege of adopting the baby. The prospective mother finally promised it to a childless couple, if it should be a girl. But if it was a boy she would keep it. She had no boys.

I heard of one native who quarreled with his wife and left her. But when he learned that she had been living with a white man he returned and implored to be taken back. He wanted the privilege of fathering her expected child. The Maori here seemed to be moving toward another race, and I hoped that it would be for his betterment. Children with a European strain usually got ahead faster, not because they had more brilliance or character, but because their lighter skin seemed to cast an aura of superiority. Parents favored them, schoolteachers, however fair-minded, unconsciously moved them toward the head of the class. I am not sure that the full-blooded Cook Islanders were not the best type I saw in the Pacific. Although the women were inclined to sloth and fat, the men were thin and well-muscled, hard workers and innately industrious. All day long they labored in their gardens, or carried produce miles to load it on the steamers offshore. At home they did the cooking for their lazy wives, who, like most Polynesian wives, were spoiled by their husbands.

As an inquiring physician I noted the fine condition of the men; handicapped by imported disease, inadequately defended by a medical system not yet well organized, they seemed to be building up their bodies against many of the ills that attacked them. The principal occupational disease among them was hernia, result of lifting heavy loads.

On my second visit there, 1932, I wrote to the Secretary of the Cook Islands, urging him to take advantage of the larger number of Native Medical Practitioners we were then able to offer. I pointed out one paradox: sophisticated Rarotonga showed less confidence in European physicians than I usually found in the primitive outlying islands. Everywhere there was a faith in witch-doctor remedies, which was astonishing considering that these places had been in contact with Europe for over a hundred years. During my first visit I used Malakai more than once to scold and wheedle sick natives away from their ancient superstitions. He could talk to them as man to man, which was more than any European could ever do. I missed him on my second trip.

Some of the impressions I am giving deal with my later stay on these islands, but they are mainly true of the Cooks as I saw them in 1925-1926.

* * * * *

Captain Andy Thompson of the _Tagua_, which took us from atoll to atoll, was a Yankee from Minnesota. As confirmed fishermen, Andy and I were soulmates. In those waters you might land anything from a minnow to a hammerhead shark. What happened one afternoon might serve as a Polynesian parable, and Andy was the philosopher to interpret it. Andy’s line grew rather taut, and as he pulled it lazily in he said, “Just a little one!” The fish was halfway in when the line started out to sea. “Guess it’s a big one,” Andy decided, holding on. Then as suddenly the line slacked; there was some dead weight on it. Andy pulled it in, 300 pounds of kingfish, which might have weighed considerably more if half its tail end hadn’t been bitten off while it was being hauled into the boat. Put me down for a liar, but this is what I saw. The big fish had swallowed the hook so deeply that we had to slit its belly. In the postmortem we found a thirty-pound cod attached to the hook, which it had just gobbled when the kingfish grabbed it. Further scientific curiosity caused us to open the cod and find a two-pound mackerel. “Well,” drawled Andy, “that’s the Pacific all over again! England swallows New Zealand, New Zealand swallows the Cooks....” He was like a Roman augur, interpreting guts at the altar. I studied the kingfish and wondered what sea monster had eaten its tail. And would this be the fate of Pacific empire when its shrinking population had grown too feeble to serve European needs and hordes of orientals swarmed over the plantations to overthrow the economic balance until some monster military machine would swim up and kill a fish it was not quite able to swallow? 1940 was to threaten the world with that very thing.

This fishing interlude came when we were approaching low-lying Mauke, where I was entertained by hospitable traders, many of whom had native wives. The Cook Islands might well be named after the prevalent good cooking; the tenderly roasted sucking pig and Mitiaro eels, found nowhere else, are something to recall with watering mouth.

Our work in the New Hebrides was sometimes delayed by native hostility, but more often it was native hospitality that set us back, in the Cooks. Not all native, either. On the beach at Aitutaki was Whiskey Smith, reputed to be the Pacific’s most disagreeable trader. Sourly he defied us to have a drink of his home-brew bush beer, and in vain hopes of establishing cordial relations I tasted it. Whenever I think of it my head begins to ache. In subsequent meetings Smith refused to know me, then one day he barked, “Come in and meet the wife!” He produced a dingy grotesque of womanhood and said with a flourish, “Ah, a perfect type of native beauty!”

As soon as our ship was sighted whole islands would put on gala dress. They were going to have official visitors, a chance to entertain company! Everybody turned out, from the schoolmaster to the village idiot. Houses were decked with flowers, pretty girls wore fashionable dresses that traders had brought from Wellington. Out came the local string orchestra, playing American jazz and British hymn tunes.

Then the anticlimax. What a blight fell over the festival scene when it was known that the foreign doctor had come only to examine them for hookworm! That was a tedious test, likely to spoil any party, for it required forty-eight hours of dull dosing and unpleasant purging; when it was over we should have been about as popular as Mussolini after his castor-oily march on Rome. But the Maori has a reasoning mind. One of my patients, a chief with a wide white smile, said, “Now we’ll feel better, so we can go on with the dances in your honor.” They would line up the girls and regale us with remarkably loose-muscled huras. Then the orchestra would play prewar tunes from Broadway or Piccadilly. All over the Cooks, wherever I found boys and girls who co-operated in my treatments, I would give them lessons in the fox-trot, the latest wrinkle. I carried this fancy step with me, like a message from another world, and gave dancing lessons on every island I visited. If I wasn’t popular as a doctor, I was a toast as a dancing master. And there was always a feast. Stuffed with tender pork, chicken, turkey, fish, tomatoes, taro, native oranges, I politely ate my way through the islands. This was no place for a fat man.

In Rarotonga’s hard-working, understaffed hospital they were beginning to work out the New Zealand plan of visiting nurses. There were two European nurses, one who supervised the Rarotonga hospital, another who took care of babies and other things at Aitutaki. One schoolmaster’s wife was a Government Nurse.

On that first trip I was covering the ground and studying the needs, and on the later visit we campaigned for a latrine back of every house in the Cooks. It was all prearranged and set to go; and it did go in all the lower group. The Foundation was sharing in the overhead; otherwise a paternal government paid for the whole job, with the exception of the labor which the natives contributed. The buildings were made according to the best economical design, and the islanders rivaled one another in producing decorative effects. They were becoming esthetically health-conscious.

Speaking of esthetics, I must mention a social event among the Europeans, known as “the Privy Tea-party.” Its host was Mr. David Brown of the Cook Island Native Store. It was an official opening of the model latrine which had been endorsed by New Zealand and built on the Foundation’s plans. The building, garlanded with flowers, was set up on one end of the lawn while at convenient tables tea was served to Rarotonga’s élite. The ceremonial unlocking of the door was spectacular. Then the master of ceremonies delivered his speech from the throne. This was horseplay, but splendid propaganda; for the whole official personnel was there and heard a clear outline of the benefits which more little throne rooms would bring to the Cook Islands. There were some jokes at my expense, but I didn’t mind in the least. The core of the speaker’s argument was something that I had preached a thousand times: “When you build a house, build a sanitary latrine first, then a sanitary kitchen; then parlor and bedroom arrangements to suit yourself.”

* * * * *

On Mauke, above-mentioned for its hospitality, I lived with the Resident Commissioner, Mr. Dwyer, who not only showed me that young octopus served with sauce of salted ground coconut can be a dish for the sea gods, but made us the guests of the island. Mana, son of King Tamuero the Second, made a fine point of Polynesian courtesy when he moved in with his wife and took charge of the household, to see that we were comfortable. Like most good husbands, he was confidential only when his wife wasn’t listening; if she heard him explaining things to me she would warn him not to talk to strangers. However, he found a chance to tell me about the three kings of Mauke who built the London Missionary Society’s famous old church.

Remembering what Sir Maui Pomare had said about the old religion and the new, I was anxious to see that church. Mana took me there and showed me the big structure of coral and lime with two separate paths leading like low causeways up to the door. He pointed and said, “That path is for the men.” I looked again. Two fourteen-foot stone phallic pillars were planted on either side of it, and on top of each was a roughly hewn stone hat. The other path was for the women; across it was a heavy stone arch, Ina’s phallic sign. Strange wedding of paganism and Christianity.

Inside the church, the altar rail was set with hand-carved panels of hardwood; there were thirteen panels, and each was studded with a silver disk. Looking closer, I saw what they were--old Chilean trade dollars. Figures of the sun and moon were painted on the ceiling, symbols of the procreative divinities, Tangaloa and Ina. I have mentioned the priapic images, male and female, which I saw in Tonga. But here, in the sanctity of a puritanical church....

Mana, son of Tamuero, explained. The first missionaries who came to Mauke did much prosperous trading. Their store paid Chilean trade dollars for copra, then got them back when the natives bought axes and calico. The Maoris saw how the good men cherished the silver tokens. So when the natives built the edifice out of respect for the missionaries, they finished the chancel reverently--and into the panels they set the dollars, each one an image of what they considered the white man’s God.

The pillars and the arch outside had their own story. The three kings were converted and the people followed _en masse_, as Polynesians will. The leader of the kings studied his Gospel devoutly. But in the back of his head he wondered what Tangaloa and Ina would think of these doings. Well, it was safe to drop an anchor to windward. So he set up the pillars for the men to touch when they went in to church, and the arch for the women. Thus they could worship the new God and still give no offense to the old divinities.

And how about the stone hats on top of the pillars? The business missionaries gave English straw hats to the three kings with the understanding that hats were something like crowns; only kings and Englishmen could wear them. King Tamuero, the most enterprising of the three, decided that he might offend Tangaloa by wearing a royal headdress when the god had none. Therefore he wove two coco-fiber hats in imitation of his own and set them on top of the twin pillars. So the god was again appeased. It took a generation or so for the missionaries to realize what the strange stones outside the church really stood for, then they were so shocked and grieved that they ordered them torn down. A common-sense New Zealand government was in control by that time and protected the Maori’s right to do as he pleased with a church he himself had built. Tangaloa’s two straw hats had worn out after a while, and admiring natives had replaced them with permanent stone ones. I hope they are still there.

It would require a Homer to recite the endless myths of Tangaloa and Ina. Like the Greek Apollo, Tangaloa could walk the earth as a man or ride the heavens as a god. He had two wives. One controlled the sun, and since Tangaloa was the sun, she darkened the land to wintry gray when she took him on pleasure trips. His more illustrious wife, Ina, had a father named Rangomatane, the Club.

This information, and a great deal more, came from Mana, who was at first extremely reticent. It wasn’t cricket for a Christian Maori to talk too much about things which, in his heart, he believed. When I journeyed to Atiu, second largest island in the group and magnificently walled with coral cliffs, Mana referred me to a man named Maka, who would know more. The aristocratic young Maka served as sergeant of police for the District Agent, and was heir to the chieftainship. He was outwardly so missionized that it was hard to make him talk--at first. But Maka was too much of a goodfellow Maori to offend me with secrecy, and he was renowned for knowledge of the old ways. One afternoon he led me down among the coral walls on the beach and showed me two curious niches cut in the formation. Deep inside these recesses were the Tangaloa and the Ina symbols, sculptured with anatomic realism. On this island, and others, I saw women bowing to upright stones, offering up prayers for fertility.

Maka told me more of the myth than I could translate and put down in that short visit. _Tanga-loa_ meant Man Everlasting. His first-born son was called The Beginning. Tangaloa gave fishing tackle to this god-boy and bade him cast his line into outer darkness. The lad gave a mighty tug, and when the Cook Islands came to the surface he cried, “Father, I have brought up the land!” In another aspect Tangaloa was called Maui (He Baited the Hook). The first name he gave the Cooks was Nukatea (Fruit of the Land), but he changed it to Tepapa (Firm Rock) for this reason: proud Tangaloa bade the land to come to him, but it defied him saying, “I am the firm rock.” Then the angered god seized hold of Ina’s father, The Club, and beat the land until it split open and his second son, god of southern winds, came forth. Tangaloa had seven sons with mighty names like The Shelter, The King of Peace and The King of Heaven.

The aristocrats of Mauke and Atiu claimed divine ancestry. Ina loved best her youngest son, Ariki, and for ages the islanders favored him. Maka knew that his heavenly ancestor was Rangomatane, the Club, and spoke of him as you would of a distinguished grandfather. The lordly sergeant of police took me up to the flat ground and showed me an interesting relic of the old cult, ruins of Tangaloa’s Worship House, two long stone walls some half-mile apart, one side shorter than the other. And here had been the sacred _marai_ called Arangirea, or Heaven, where the people gathered, calling out the names of the heavenly sons, and of Tangaloa, and of Ina. They sacrificed pigs, and cried, “Tangaloa, Everlasting, Everlasting!” When the great priapic sign was raised the women danced the hura, sacred to the god.

One point in his long story confused me, and I wanted to know who was the mother of all Tangaloa’s sons. He looked self-conscious, and I knew I was treading on delicate ground. I had touched the family skeleton, for Maka was descended from Rangomatane, the Club, therefore Ina was his ancestress. Once upon a time Tangaloa was so insistent in his husbandly demands that Ina descended from the moon on a banyan tree; look at the full moon and you will see the shadowed banyan. Ina fled in vain, for Tangaloa followed her, and seven sacred sons were the result. Maka told me earnestly that he only revealed the scandal in the interest of truth, and it was nothing to be proud of. By many signs, he said, you knew when Ina was near. White clouds were her tapa, and when they grew red it was her father’s signal, “Come to earth.” Thunder and lightning meant that she had obeyed and her divine feet had touched the ground. The rain was her tears, the emerging sun meant that she was drying her clothes.

Maka told me how Ina, like the Phœnix, renews her youth--but not by fire, by a dip into the sea. When I asked him who created Tangaloa he puzzled a moment, then said, “He was the son of the Unknown God. And nobody will ever know who created God.”

* * * * *

The prevalence of leprosy on the Cook Islands interested me impersonally, as a medical investigator; as a human being it interested me because of an unpleasant incident which threatened to wreck my plans for the Central Medical School.

Twenty years before my first visit there Dr. Maui Pomare made a leprosy survey and took some interesting notes. Penrhyn Island was a notorious type case; five per cent of the inhabitants were afflicted when I saw it in 1926. On Penrhyn the great Maori physician looked into the local history of the disease and found that a Penrhyn Islander who had lived with a leprous woman in Samoa brought it back with him in 1885. Forty-four cases stemmed from this man; over a course of twenty years thirty-one of them had died, for leprosy is a slow killer. One boy came down with itch, was declared “unclean” and shut away with a real leper for many miserable years. When the sick man died his companion buried him. Pomare found that this boy showed no trace of leprosy.

At that time lepers were isolated on the rim of Aitutaki as well as on Penrhyn, where through fear of the disease they received no medical or surgical care, and scarcely any food. Once a month a whaleboat would dump rations on the beach. The only contact the sufferers had with the outside world and their families was a few words shouted to the boys in the boat, lying safely offshore. An inlet on Penrhyn lagoon, connected with the main island at low tide, had become a trash-heap for lepers.

Pomare wrote:--

The poor unfortunates do not get enough to eat. There will be no need to ask for a volunteer keeper, as we have already an unrecognized Father Damien, in Meka and his young wife, who volunteered to live on the island in order to be near their adopted son. I really do not know what would have happened to these unfortunate British subjects if Meka had not volunteered. He does all the fishing and looks after the sufferers; for this he receives no recognition from the civilized world in either funds or praise. Perhaps when the great Master will call His own He will say unto him, “Good and faithful servant, enter into the rest of the Lord.... Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

World-wide experimentation has shown us very little of the etiology of this disease. The cause of infection remains almost as mysterious as the cause of cancer; but unlike cancer it is definitely contagious. For thousands of years it has been treated with chaulmoogra oil, taken by mouth, which showed better results than any other drug, but was so nauseous that an adequate dose was impossible. In 1900 Dr. Victor Heiser, working at Manila, gave it in injections intramuscularly, and made the first step forward in the long history of the disease. Today modified chaulmoogra oil is the chosen treatment.

Conventionally, we shrink away from leprosy. Biblical stories of the “unclean” and lurid passages from popular novels like _Ben Hur_ have played upon the imagination until we have given leprosy leadership among the bogies. Among primitives, where the treatment is not understood and the extremities gradually slough away, growing so anesthetic they do not respond to the touch of a red-hot instrument, the picture is unpleasant. But the disease is so leisurely that it takes years for it to arrive at its final horrifying aspect. To the experienced physician diagnosis in the early stages is a matter of routine, and the modern method is simple. Today, if I were forced to choose, I would rather have leprosy in an early stage than tuberculosis. But the world was slow in taking up preventive work. Isolation and treatment were everything until recently when the American Leper Association began to study the mode of leprosy’s transmission. They could only find a few old men who knew anything about the disease, so the Association had to train young investigators to look into the causes.

Its transmission is a knotty problem. We know that infection is general in leprous communities, but how does it infect? Medical martyrs have tried to infect themselves by wearing leper’s clothes and sleeping in leper’s beds, but these tests have brought no results. Natives have lived with leprous women for twenty years without contracting the disease, but Pomare found forty-two cases that had been conveyed to Penrhyn Island by a man who had lived with a leprous woman. There is a theory that it is acquired in early infancy and does not manifest itself until later life, under circumstances favorable for the disease. But what are favorable circumstances? Nobody seems to have found out.

It takes a keen expert eye to mark out leprosy in its early stages; the experienced sisters on Makogai can spot it at once; slight discolorations, slight skin anaesthesias. In the Pacific where civilized early treatment is given you see no such horrid sights as meet you at every turn in India and China. In 1926 we were rounding up Cook Island lepers and sending them to the Mokogai colony.

Leprosy is not indigenous to the Pacific, and there are evidences of its rather recent importation. It has been there long enough to have a folklore, and natives generally believe that a leper can will his sickness on an enemy. These natives know that the disease is transmissible, but if the patient is your friend you can live and eat with him. If he is your foe, do not touch anything he has touched. In Tahiti they tell of a goatherd who was caught in a sudden rain and borrowed a shirt from his pal, who happened to be a leper. When people asked him if he wasn’t afraid of catching it he said, “Why? He’s my best friend. Why should he want to pass it on to me?”

Aitutaki offered a plain picture of two diseases which have only recently scourged the Cooks--elephantiasis and leprosy. They seemed to have no native name for the disfiguring offshoot of filariasis; it was too new for them to have given it a name. Aitutaki’s burying places showed that they had been a larger race only a few generations back. The bones were longer and sturdier and the skulls showed clean white teeth. Among the living, I found all too many cases of dental decay. Their white-toothed forefathers had not tasted sugar, nor become dependent on the trader’s white flour. From what I could find out, the Aitutaki of 150 years ago had known no serious infections except yaws, which they called _tona_, as all Polynesians did.

About seventy-five years ago a man from Tahiti imported leprosy and nobody could make out what it was. Then the belief grew that the curse came to those who defiled the sanctity of those family ceremonial grounds, the _marai_. They tell of a European who burned a trash-pile on an ancient _marai_, and was cursed. Nobody felt sorry for him; they had warned him of what would happen. The _marai_ was so sacrosanct that none but members of the family were allowed to weed the plot, and _nobody_ could build a fire on it. One on Amuri was so vengeful that its black stones poisoned the nuts falling from surrounding trees. Those who ate these nuts would be afflicted with swollen lips. Ancestral ghosts are jealous guardians.

On Christmas Day, 1925, I gave a party for the natives who had helped me generously with my work. To foster competition and please myself with a pretty show, I offered a prize for the best hura dancer among the girls. One of the prettiest creatures that ever shook a grass skirt was a light-colored native named Ann Masters, winner from the start. After her lovely hura she put on European clothes, and looked as though she had just walked off Park Avenue. In my role as dancing master I taught her the fox-trot. We danced for two hours, I imagine.

Afterwards, one of the residents asked me if I knew about Palmerston Island. Palmerston? Well, yes; it had a bad reputation for leprosy. And my friend asked if I knew that an Englishman named Masters had brought the disease there, and that his descendants were known as “the leprous Masters”? Did I know that Ann was the daughter of a Masters who had moved to Rarotonga? I wasn’t much flustered, hearing about Ann. Why worry the doctor who had given reward-of-merit fox-trot parties all over the Cooks?

Two years later I went with Dr. Heiser to inspect the rapidly improving leper colony at Mokogai. The island was divided into a “clean” side and a “dirty” side. On the clean side lived the resident natives and the hospital staff, a respectful distance from where the lepers were kept. I had no sooner crossed the deadline to the “dirty” than I heard a sweet voice in the peculiar jargon of Palmerston calling out, “How do you do, Doctor?” It was Ann Masters, still trig and young to outward appearances. The doctors said she was too far gone to get well, but later I was happy to hear that she was on the road to recovery. I have a photograph of her, one I took at the Christmas party. Today, with my increased experience in spotting the symptoms, I can see many indications of the disease in that pretty face.

On that same visit to Mokogai I had another surprise. Two familiar figures strolled down the beach and waved their hands at me. I recognized the cook and housemaid who had served me so well when I lived on Aitutaki in 1932.

Certainly it is a slow, conservative germ, and I stand as a human example. A dozen years ago I must have been exposed to it a number of times, yet I show no leprous symptoms.

One woman I examined on Atiu haunts my dreams. Because she showed suspicious signs I made a hasty bare-handed examination--conditions were too crude for the physician to protect himself with rubber gloves. My fingers went under her arm to examine the ulnar nerve--and struck a big, mushy ulcer. I couldn’t find soap or even fresh water, so I walked for nearly an hour until I could wash my hands.

In 1938 Dr. Ellison conducted New Zealand’s last big roundup in the Cooks, combing the islands for lepers. On Penrhyn he was entertained by Phil Winton, a wealthy pearl trader. Winton fed Ellison royally, and at the end of his stay the Doctor went to thank the cook for her distinguished meals. He took one look at her and said, “You’d better pack up and come with me on the boat.” Winton had made the mistake of forgetting that leprosy could come in by the back door.

* * * * *

A few months after my return to Fiji I went on leave to the States, to be gone until the beginning of 1927. Meanwhile Sir Maui Pomare, always anxious about the leper situation in the Cooks, had chartered a ship and gone there to take patients off for Mokogai. Leaving Suva for home, I was on the crest of a wave. The Central Medical School was an assured fact--practically. Now I could boast to New York and Utica that four years of propagandizing and wire-pulling had achieved the unachievable. All the groups controlled by the High Commission and by New Zealand would send the money, send their quota of students. Soon we would be breaking ground for the long-deferred project.

It was a case of crowing before you are out of the woods.

When I returned to Suva Dr. Montague’s long face proclaimed bad news. What had happened in my absence was worse than I had expected. The Cook Islands had withdrawn from the Medical School scheme, and not through any fault of parliamentary politics. It was Sir Maui Pomare himself who had suddenly quit the game. But when I learned the truth I held no resentment against the great Maori.

It seemed that Pomare had gone in his rescue ship to a spot in the Cook Islands where they dumped lepers and left them to die in their own way. Under his administration the situation had bettered somewhat, but it was still a poor makeshift. Pomare’s one desire was to get the poor devils to the modern leper colony.

The boat you charter for the haulage of lepers isn’t exactly a luxury liner, and the trip to Mokogai was slow, dirty and dangerous. At last he got them there, some thirty patients, and was taking the greatest care to see that they were properly landed. When that job was over he came down the gangplank, not a very presentable Cabinet Minister; rough travel in a rough boat had soiled his clothes, exposure had darkened his complexion and he hadn’t shaved for a week. Down on the wharf he was stopped by a dandified young Medical Officer, obviously fresh from London, who held up an arresting hand and twittered commandingly, “Colored people this way, please!” I don’t know how many kinds of hell New Zealand’s Minister of Health gave the efficient youth, but plenty I imagine. Pomare inherited temper from a long line of Maori chiefs.

Pomare took the next boat to Suva, went straight to Montague, then to the Governor. To both he said that the High Commission hadn’t sense enough to keep these brats away from responsible positions. He had seen what he saw on Mokogai, and he was through. So long as he remained in office, he declared, no health project favored by the High Commission would ever get the shadow of a red cent out of his ministry. And that broad ultimatum withdrew the Cook Islands’ co-operation from the Central Medical School. Without the Cooks, we were just where we had been before, helpless to go on.

* * * * *

Children say, “He’ll get over being mad.” With a strong and stubborn character like Pomare’s, this softening of the temperament was not so sure. I tried to steady myself with the knowledge that at least six important Pacific groups were still behind our plan. I remembered Queen Salote’s generous question which had given me the first big encouragement: “Are we too small to do our share?” But time was precious now, and whatever we did must be done at once. Pomare controlled a section of Polynesia which we must include, or quit.

It was January, 1927, when Montague retailed the bad news, and I gave myself a few days to worry. Then I went over to his office and asked, “What about it?” He said, “Lambert, you know Pomare, and I don’t. You’ve worked with him, he likes you and he’ll probably respect whatever you have to say.” I had already thought over what Montague proposed next. “Why don’t you take the boat for New Zealand, see Pomare and try to talk him over? It won’t be easy, but I can’t see any other way.”

In about two weeks I was in Wellington, where I went straight to Pomare’s office in the Government Building. I hadn’t announced my coming, and when I reached his desk I saw his look of friendly surprise. (I made the mental note, “At least he’s smiling.”) Well, he said, he didn’t know I was in New Zealand; and what had brought me there at this time of year? I said “I have come down to get better acquainted with you. The last time I was here it was so cold that I went to Auckland to write my Cook Island Report. Now I just want to visit.” Impulse was urging me to bring up the subject which I knew was foremost in both our minds. But it would be fatal to seem too eager. Our conversation drifted into impersonal channels; Dominion politics, welfare work among the children, native health problems--a little of everything except what had brought me there.

I wasn’t going to play the first card. Then gracefully, as if there had never been the slightest difference between him and the High Commission, he asked me how the School was progressing. This was my opening. I eased into the subject, as though he had never heard of it before. He listened for an hour, interrupting occasionally to make his own comments. In every detail this great Maori showed the same grasp of essential points that he displayed on a later visit to Fiji when we gave him the honors of a chief and Eloisa cooked her best dinner; Montague was there, a superb physician himself, and was convinced at last that a Maori could excel. He was even more convinced when we took Pomare over to Mokogai and landed him, in state, at the same spot where a whippersnapper had once said, “Colored people this way.”

... After that hour with Pomare in his Wellington office the difference was surprisingly smoothed out. He was cordial, beaming. Why, of course the Cook Islands would be in on the Medical School. Of course well-trained Native Practitioners would be the only solution. Of course the Cooks were in.

When I left his office, dazed by this splendid turn of luck, I could not restrain a chuckle. Had Pomare ever intended to hold aloof? Hadn’t he withdrawn from the High Commission scheme merely as a demonstration, to show the _Pakeha_ that he could not insult a Maori without the danger of reprisals? He had shown them that he held the power, and that he could use it. Then with a magnanimous gesture he gave them what they asked for.

Out on a Wellington street I mopped my brow and tried to realize that we had crossed the last bridge. The hard pull of four years was over. I was going to have my School. Now ground-breaking would begin in earnest. Now we could send all over the Pacific, bring in eligible native boys and teach them what modern medicine really means.

## CHAPTER VII

HALF A LOAF AND A SLICE OFF

I should be sloppily sentimental and call the scene which is to follow “My Dream Come True.” The dream had backed in a little crookedly, knocking over a few ideals and dumping at my feet a short measure of fine gold. But who was I to complain? Something substantial had materialized out of six hard years of constant hammering for results. I think I was excited, for I could scarcely follow the earnest, dedicatory voice that rang through the new lecture hall, fragrant with fresh paint and plaster.

That was the morning of December 29, 1928. I sat on the platform with bigwigs of the Colony: Sir Maynard Hedstrom, U. S. Consul Roberts, the Secretary of Native Affairs, the Colonial Secretary and sundry others. His Excellency Sir Eyre Hutson, Governor General of the High Commission, was making a speech.

“It is fitting that there should be this meeting today to record the opening of the new Medical School in Suva, which has really been in being for some weeks, from November first, but officially as a Central Native Medical School in the Western Pacific will enter on its career, which we hope can be no other than a successful one, from January first, 1929 ... had its origin some years ago with Dr. Lambert, a member of the Medical Staff of the Rockefeller International Health Foundation ... whole-heartedly supported by Dr. Montague.... And the various Administrations in the Pacific, who have co-operated in the scheme, owe a deep debt of gratitude to Dr. Lambert for his strong faith, for his persistent advocacy of the proposal with the governing body of the Rockefeller Foundation ... without which we should not be in this building today....”

I looked over the upturned faces, brown and white. I counted the eight native boys of the graduating class, and thanked God that all the undergraduates wouldn’t have to sleep in the little firetrap of a dormitory, which would only accommodate twelve. The new dormitory could pack in twenty-eight, and there was room for forty in the dining room. The new main building, over which we were making such a fuss, would be fairly cramped quarters. It needed space for laboratories, pathological, bacteriological, biochemical. And the dissecting room wasn’t much bigger than my grandmother’s cupboard....

Just the same, my dream had come true, even with a string on it. The modest buildings we had achieved were modern-built and filled with students.

Now the Governor, his kindly, eupeptic face rather flushed with December heat, was addressing the student body:--

“... You are receiving opportunities with limitations, which are unavoidable, of becoming members of a very honorable profession, not only for your personal benefit but mainly for the good of those men, women and children to whom you will be called on to give medical and surgical aid and treatment to the best of your ability and knowledge....”

Then it was over, everybody had shaken hands, and I was being interviewed by the press. I told the reporters what I felt, that his Excellency had been too modest in disclaiming his own important share in bringing the School to life; how the project had been a partnership between Dr. Montague and myself, and how I might have given up early except for his quiet persistence; and how Queen Salote of Tonga and her Prince Consort had offered financial aid in my hour of deepest discouragement; how their loyalty to all the South Pacific had inspired other groups until at last they had touched the purse-strings of the Foundation....

Outside on the half-finished grounds I saw students filing into the classrooms. There was a score of dark-skinned Fijian boys with shocks of kinky black hair, sport shirts and _sulus_. They had the look I have always admired in their race, that of intellectual honesty and will to learn. The Polynesian boys were in _lavalavas_, and like the Melanesians they were bare-legged and unshod; some of them had the pale, even features and straight hair of Caucasians. There were a couple of boys from the Solomon Islands, wooly-haired and almost plum-black. The light-faced, worldly-looking ones were from the Cooks. There were a couple of well-dressed East Indians. The Condominium was sending us New Hebridean students, but they hadn’t come yet. The Fijians outnumbered the others, for there were twenty in all, and twelve of them were graduating from the old school, which had only accommodated sixteen students in all. Almost overnight the enrollment had increased to forty, and I was wondering how the boys from far-off groups would get on with the Fijians, when more of the outsiders came in. The fair-skinned boys from the Cooks and Samoa had one great advantage; they knew more English, whereas the Fijians were handicapped there and would have to learn hard lessons in a strange tongue. For the same reason all the Melanesian lads would have a tough time at first. New Zealand had been wise in giving her mother tongue to the Polynesians.... But I knew the Fijians, men like Malakai and Charley, who had mastered every hard subject that came their way.

More boys would be eligible for the school. We would have to refuse some for lack of space, and look very carefully into the mental qualifications of every applicant.... There would be a tendency on the home islands, I knew, to play favorites for political reasons. Some of the officials would promote candidates because they were “good batmen”--meaning that they had served them well personally.

All that must be straightened out, for we would never have room for slackers.... I wondered how soon we could promote a decent school for native nurses; that was a part of my plan for enlargement. Now they were living in a crazy shack where they did their own cooking, and in the hospital they scrubbed and emptied slops for dainty British nurses. Samoa was giving her native girls an adequate training. We could do no better than follow her lead.... I wondered if students would ever come from Papua and New Guinea, where N.M.P.’s were dreadfully needed. The Canberra Government was standing pat on White Man’s Australia, and the “blackfellow” was not supposed to have a head on his shoulders. Papuan and New Guinea natives, they said, were not adequately prepared for higher education. I knew better, for I had seen those boys, and worked with them.... According to Australia’s yardstick students from the New Hebrides and the Solomons were also inadequately prepared; but they were entering our first class. Australia forgot that her Territories had been missionized by Fijians, Tongans and Samoans.... Dr. Strong, the progressive C.M.O. at Port Moresby, had offered to pay the expenses of Papuan students, if Canberra would consent.... But why argue the point? Australia was jealous of little Fiji’s rise as a medical center, and had decided not to send a student or to permit an N.M.P. to work in her possessions.... I wondered if she would ever change her mind.

* * * * *

Up to the day I retired the Foundation was always a little nervous about what I was going to do next. They were usually asking, by inference, “Where is Lambert going to pop up now?” Dr. Heiser’s immediate reaction to whatever I put up to him was a simple, “No,” and I had to pound away at him until he gave up. As I have said before, he was very careful with Mr. Rockefeller’s silver dimes, and his honest stubbornness deserves great credit. Dr. Sawyer, who bossed me during my early days in the Pacific, was a strong advocate of the Central Medical School, for he knew the needs of the islands. Sawyer is now the Foundation’s Director of the International Health Division, and still a little nervous about me. He wants me settled on a Californian farm where I’ll be out of mischief. Sawyer is one of the most brilliant research scientists of our time. Considering his environmental background he is extremely broad-minded--he comes of a family of clergymen. I shall never forget the time I led him up to a North Queensland bar where the Australians were sneering “Wowser!” at every prohibitionist. Sawyer ordered ginger ale, drank it and made them like him. With the same puritanical gusto he backed me up in the Medical School. I shall always be grateful to him.

I had estimated that it could be financed by a contribution of £1,500 each from seven island groups. Fiji’s sudden decision that she could start a School of her own on a one-horse scale had given more point to my argument when I went back to the States and put it up to the Foundation. I had talked pretty steadily for half a year, informing the unsympathetic ones that Fiji’s stingy plan would set the School back about twenty years.

In 1927 I had come back to Suva with the Board’s promise in my pocket. They would fund half the expense of the larger plan. This was economical still, and hardly adequate for what we needed; but we had enough now to get things going. I had wrestled with the Foundation’s Department of Medical Sciences, to whom I had to appeal for the sort of funds required. To give out money to the very finest medical schools and raise their already high standards was the Department’s end and aim. To finance a little idea like ours gave them an almost physical nausea. I didn’t get anything out of them, except to make them admit that some lower grade of medical education might be useful, until their high-flown notions had time to turn out crack specialists to serve the teeming millions who lacked anything but witch doctors to care for them.

The Department of Medical Sciences remained adamant. I finally got the money from the International Health Board itself. This was the first time they had given financial support to the building of medical schools. Up to then it had always been in the hands of the Department of Medical Sciences.

The time would come when we would need more buildings and equipment, that was obvious. The time might also come when some jealous local politician would attempt to wreck the School, or drain it white. A little man can do big mischief, as we found later when a domestic colonial secretary worked his political best to destroy our planned Unified Health Commission, for the petty reason that Fiji’s Chief Medical Officer would head it with a few pounds larger salary than his own. He was of the old anti-American type, which has done so much to promote ill feeling both between England and her colonies and England and America. His kind, I hope, is passing. This little man was not quite able to interfere with co-operation in the Mokogai Leper Colony, which we started back in 1923 and saw built into one of the finest leprosaria in the world.

But the School was open, and we were down to the realism of immediate figures. We could admit forty, and the cost per student would be ninety pounds. There was a wooden dormitory, a main building seventy-six by thirty feet, and the Principal’s house. We were well staffed with the Chief Medical Officer, the pick of the government physicians and local practitioners. We also had the Government’s pharmacist, a dentist, the Government’s bacteriologist and chemist, and the Rockefeller Foundation’s modest representative. We had plenty of textbooks and scientific instruments. In fact we had about everything but room to turn around in.

* * * * *

I wasn’t dissatisfied that afternoon in 1928 when I made another inspection of the buildings. Our feet were on the ladder, we were going up. The other things would come, though there was plenty of fighting ahead.

I had to reflect on the slow and painful beginnings of the Native Practitioner system, some forty-two years before. In 1875 the Colony was frightened by the measles epidemic which burned the Fijians down, and with only the puniest attempt at medical aid. Thirteen years later the British residents were appalled by the danger of smallpox, brought in by the East Indian invasion. The Government well knew that the most important medical need was vaccination, but the expense of European vaccinators in this work seemed overwhelming. Health in those days was in the charge of Dr. Corney, Fiji’s second great Medical Officer. Sir William Macgregor, later Governor of Papua, was the first, and Dr. Montague was the third of the great ones. In Corney’s day the Colony, in desperate need, was sending out natives to administer vaccine to an endangered population.

Corney saw how dextrous these men could be with instruments and how quickly they won the confidence of half-wild villagers. Perhaps the Colony’s financial embarrassment was what touched off his imagination. At any event, in the late eighties, after the Government had voted small sums for vaccination purposes, Corney surprised them all by suggesting that the native boys be given some systematic medical education. In January, 1889, eight Fijians passed the examination and were given certificates.

These early students got only the bare bones of a living. They were huddled together in a _bure_ in the old Colonial Hospital grounds, and spent a good deal of their time working their gardens for enough vegetables to keep going. They had no lecture room, no models or diagrams; postmortem examinations were not easily obtained and almost the only apparatus for anatomical study was a set of bones. When medical officials had time to teach these boys they casually handed them some practical work in the Hospital. Most of the nursing duties fell on their shoulders, as the Matron was the only trained nurse in Fiji. There was some improvement in 1900, when a lecture room was built. Somewhat later improvements advanced as far as a wooden students’ quarters.

In 1898 the students went on strike, which resulted in the improvements of 1900. As a body they called upon the officials and announced that they wanted the whole-time services of a cook, otherwise they were going back home. The authorities concluded that they were probably human beings, so the point was carried. After several years the eight-student school had turned out approximately twenty Native Medical Practitioners. These men were working for something like seven pounds a year, all told, but they were given free gardens to cultivate for themselves. They earned two pounds ten as Provincial Vaccinators, and in 1905 their salaries jumped to between eighteen pounds and fifty pounds. Seven years later their usefulness was recognized by another increase in salary; this time they were divided into first, second and third class. A first-class N.M.P. was getting as much as one hundred pounds a year. When the new School was opened, they were making around one hundred and fifty pounds.

The products of this low-paid, rough-and-ready education won their spurs early. In the devastating influenza epidemic of 1918 three of the old students died at their posts as dispensers in the Colonial Hospital. Eight in all died, out of a total of forty-eight. In no case was there any complaint that an N.M.P. had failed in his duty so long as he was able to lift a hand.

In December, 1928, a new order was coming to pass, I hoped. The door was open, not too wide, but young men were passing through with a keen desire to get the best that modern methods could give. That door would have to swing wider. It mustn’t close again. Neither politics nor prejudice nor indifference must slam it shut in the faces of those who had come so earnestly to learn. I was canny enough to suspect that there would be the same percentage of failures you will find in any college anywhere--ten following years of experience taught me that the average was less. They had something more than the desire to get on in the world, which inspires so many European professional students. That December evening I talked with several of the incoming class, the boys who were not too shy to speak out. Why did they want to go into medicine? The answer I got from them was usually the same: “Because I want to do something for my own people.”

It was about then that I pulled in my belt and promised myself that so long as I was alive and in Fiji I wouldn’t let them down.