CHAPTER I
OLD BRANDY AND NEW EGGS
First let’s try to peg the story down to the spring of 1931, when I put a bottle of rare old brandy under my arm and went up a very New Yorkish elevator to see Mr. Raymond Fosdick. The brandy, worth its weight in gold, if you could price it at all, had been given to me in exchange for three dozen fresh eggs.
Mr. Fosdick, as legal advisor to the Rockefellers, was also an important trustee of the Foundation, therefore my business with him was legitimate. So was the brandy, although America was then in the throes of Amendment Eighteen.
As I waited outside his office I almost asked his amiable secretary if I hadn’t better smuggle the bottle under her desk and say nothing about it. I was conscious that Mr. Fosdick’s brother was the Reverend Harry Emerson Fosdick, pastor of Mr. Rockefeller’s great temple of sobriety on Riverside Drive, and the Rockefeller family were honestly in favor of prohibition. And how about the big Rockefeller executive in his office over there? Representative of a great temperance family, brother of a great preacher.... No, I had better hide that bottle somewhere....
Then his secretary said “Dr. Lambert,” meaning me, so I picked up the bottle and went into his office. I had been told that I would meet one of the most charming men on earth, and I wasn’t disappointed. But our conversation hadn’t gone very far before I noticed his eyes straying toward the wrapped bottle I was holding in my lap; he was wondering, I suppose, if South Sea doctors always carried their own liquor. Maybe I was getting off on the wrong foot, but something had to be done. I pulled off the wrapper and handed him the brandy. I began, “I don’t know how you stand on prohibition. This happens to be rare old stuff—but if you have any prejudices—”
“Prejudices!” He stared at the faded label. “It’s 1835! Yes, I have prejudices—in its favor.” Relieved, I said, “Well, it’s for the black sheep of the Fosdick family.”
Still nursing the bottle, he laughed, “My brother Harry is so strict I have to balance the ship. Now let me uncover a family skeleton. My great-grandfather was a distiller before he became a preacher. His distillery failed because he endorsed bad notes for friends, so he turned to the Baptist pulpit for consolation. In those days they had high pulpits with a steep stairway in the back. My ancestor used to keep a bottle under those stairs, and before sermons he would brace himself with a couple of good spots; then he would mount the ladder and give his congregation and the distillers hellfire for two solid hours.... No, Doctor, I don’t mind your telling all about the family. I’ve often said to Brother Harry that it would be a good thing for him if he imitated the old gentleman. But Harry seldom listens to my wiser suggestions.”
The brandy perched on the desk like a silent diplomat, opening the way to confidences. Mr. Fosdick had studied at Colgate when I was at Hamilton, and when I told him that I was on the team that knocked the living perfume out of Colgate our entente was established. He asked about progress over my six million square miles of sea. Maybe he had read my reports, but there were so many reports blowing in from all points that I sought briefly to refresh his memory. With education and tetrachloride, I said, the hookworm disease was getting under control and populations were on the upgrade, where the High Commission and the Foundation had a free hand. Wherever we worked with the New Zealand health authorities we got fine results. We expected the Cook Island natives would show an increase of 20 per cent in the decade between 1926 and 1936. The Mau Rebellion had set back New Zealand’s work in Western Samoa, but they were making good headway again, the Foundation doing its share. The awful Condominium was still making a mess of the New Hebrides; and the Australians—well, they weren’t playing ball.
The Central Medical School had graduated two classes, but without the thorough curriculum which the new students would have. Soon we would be able to throw more well-educated N.M.P.’s into the work.... I am not sure that Mr. Fosdick remembered our little School at all. Fiji is a long way from lower Broadway. When he had commended our modest project, a few years before, he had thought of it as romantic; yet when he fixed his signature to the plan, buried among the vaster projects, it was one of the most fruitful acts of all his useful life. Many Rockefeller millions, for instance, had gone into the great school in Peking, and into field work in China. Five or six years later the Sino-Japanese war blasted away those handsome contributions. The little school at Suva was destined to grow steadily and bear an annual crop of trained native talent.
I told him that our work was now directed toward mass treatments for both cure and prevention. The big, shaggy Solomon Islands were black spots in the Pacific which we were doing our best to penetrate with modern medicine, and with what few responsible white men we could find. They were injecting thousands with neoarsphenamine, for yaws, dosing thousands with tetrachloride and tetrachlorethylene for hookworm. I had made a short survey of the Solomons in 1921 and later on, through Montague, had started things going that way. I had visited there again in 1930 and this trip had taken me at last to the lost Rennell Island.... I tried to tell him about Rennell Island, small as a mustard seed in a pond, yet unique in all the world because it was inhabited by a people who were 20,000 years behind our modern times....
I told him of two of our excellent men, working in the more attainable Solomon Islands—if anything down there is “attainable.” Gordon White and Dr. Steenson were outstanding. White was an Australian small doctor made over from a pharmacist, and he was doing wonders with the hardest assignment in the world, “blackfellow treatment.” Dr. Steenson was a scientist of large caliber, although physically he was about vestpocket size. The Dean of the New Zealand Medical School knew what he was about when he recommended Steenson to me.
These men would send me their journals, written from the field when they worked up and down the double chain of six or seven big, wild islands. There were plantations and missions around the edges, but the interiors were usually inhabited by unregenerate killers. Malaita, for instance, was a little larger than Long Island, and twice as tough. When black Malaitamen worked on the plantations they had to be carefully watched; they had a nasty habit of turning on their straw-boss. No Malaitaman ranked as a true male until he had killed his man. There was the case in 1927 which newspapers played up as “The Malaita Murders.” Captain Bell, a tax collector, with his white assistant and fourteen native police, fell under massed spear-points, and when the guilty ones were tried for murder they made no attempt to deny anything. Hill-grown Malaitamen don’t know how to lie. Somebody had “sent” them to do murder—a witch doctor, most likely. Without a sign of fear they walked up to the hangman.
Dr. Steenson had drawn a very accurate map of Malaita, in four colors. The colors, he explained, had been made for him by mission boys, out of plant juices. He and White both carried phonographs, and when patients came in too slowly the white medicine men would turn on stale music-hall pieces. “Show Me the Way to Go Home” was a favorite. Mission boys learned it, formed male quartets and butchered the tune horribly, far into the night. Malaitamen loved the needle—sick or well, they demanded it. But on adjacent islands they would run and hide, scared to death of it. When audiences failed to show up the interpreter would say, “Big kaikai”—whether they were eating men or pigs was never revealed. Earthquakes were a commonplace, leaf houses tumbling, young parrots falling out of the trees, natives scrambling under a barrage of coconuts. Lollipops were always in demand; stalwart warriors would wait for a dole of candy before they would talk business. Sometimes a native, who had never been near a treatment, would curl up and die of a heart attack or gallstone colic or whatever ailed him. Invariably his fellow tribesmen would blame the death on “stick medicine,” hypodermics, and it would take a wealth of diplomacy to argue them down. This situation was never less than dangerous. Steenson carried his Bible with him, and on Sunday mornings, when the missions enforced leisure, he would open it at Genesis and pull out a file of papers entitled “Yaws Campaign Notes.” He wrote me: “There is one thing in this Bible with which I do not agree. I refer to a sentence in ‘The Equipment and Working of a Yaws Unit (Samoan Experience).’” Dr. Steenson was basically religious.
Quaint letters came from native mission teachers, White and Steenson sent them to me as comic bits: “My deer friend Dr. Steenson, I am David Ikala write this letter to you, about all your boys, on this night, you put Goaril to look after all your things, now behind you he went down to Raresu, he going on Mother’s house and he do a trouble there, he catch hold the girls.... And another time he brake the roof of there house....”
This letter was signed “With a great love.”
It was a horse of a darker color when surreptitious notes were slipped into Gordon White’s hand, saying, “Don’t go down to Wanderer Bay,” and telling how the natives there were waiting to club the white men. Gordon White wrote casually, “Wherever I go the local lads come along with their various relations, and there is no sign of trouble or discontent.”
White had the services of Charlie One Arm, the policeman, who with his single arm could knock out all comers. Charlie’s maxim was “Treat ’em rough.” Around mission stations he would shock the pious by shouting to women who wouldn’t take their medicine, “Listen, you sunnabitch fellow!” But when I read White’s reports of threatening letters I saw Montague; we had White, Steenson and Charlie One Arm moved to safer, tamer ground. We couldn’t afford to have another Malaita murder....
Gordon White rounded off his report by telling how a flock of naked cannibals, well armed with clubs and spears, swarmed down and surrounded his tent. Had they come to finish him off? No, it turned out, they were bearing gifts. Gordon wrote, “The Malaitaman generally wants as much as he can get for anything he has to dispose of, and giving things away he looks on as sheer madness. But here they were showering me with presents, and with no apparent strings on them—cowrie shells, kai-kai spoons, a bow and a few arrows, a basket of fruit, and a middle aged rooster—I should say about forty-five.” Just a little tribute to modern medicine, and no flowery speeches; solemnly the Malaitamen strode back to their jungle....
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I did not tell all this to Mr. Fosdick, a busy man on a busy day. But I had time to outline enough of it to hint at the problems we had to face among the howling pagans of the Solomon Islands, where the missionaries, good, bad and confused, were merely nibbling around the edges. Tuberculosis was prevalent in the Solomons, and we expected to tackle it on a grand scale when there were more N.M.P.’s.
Before we shook hands Raymond Fosdick asked: “But what about this wonderful 1835 brandy? Is it so easy down there to get hold of such rare stuff?”
“It is,” I said, “if you find the right man. I got four bottles of it in exchange for three dozen strictly fresh eggs.”
Then I told him how.