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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.