A Yankee doctor in paradise

by S. M. Lambert

CHAPTER III

THROUGH THE SOLOMONS TO RENNELL

Let me begin with a scrap from my diary of May 4, 1933. We had been on the water three days, moving toward Vanikoro.

... We are a little crowded, but not too much. Zaca is beautiful; 118 feet long, 23 feet beam, 125 tons, 22 tons lead on keel, draws just under 15 feet of water. I have had my share of fortune in vessels on survey trips and plenty of hard times ... now I blink, looking around me, and wonder if I’m awake. I should like to keep the daily menus, they are so varied and excellent. First night we had grilled steak, perfect; next night Long Island duckling, and I gorged—Christmas dinner every night. Always fresh vegetables, just like home (U. S., not Fiji). All Frosted Foods....

Roomy cabin, electric fan over bunk, reading light over bed. Two bunks, one of which I use for scientific gear, a chiffonier and two drawers, under the bunk, which Malakai and I share, as well as a roomy clothes closet with hangers etc. I share Mr. Crocker’s elaborate bathroom with Maury. We eat on deck at two bridge tables under an awning, as the mainsail is not raised.

... Was somewhat worried, coming on this trip, for fear we might have to conform to millionaire standards of dress. This would have been cruelty to me and would have hindered, as it always does, the success of the work. On some small boats I have been on trips with Resident Commissioners who felt that they must uphold good old British prestige by putting on black coats and choker collars every night; I remember one who ran out of boiled shirts and had to eat in his stateroom to conceal his shame. But Crocker out-Herods Herod. Lavalavas are the order of the day, and in the evening a singlet if it is too cool. Day and evening, Crocker wears a lavalava or a very short pair of shorts—nothing else but a bandanna handkerchief around his neck....

We did not lack scientific equipment or scientific brains. Mr. Crocker and his secretary Maurice (Maury) Willowes collected specimens of anthropological and marine-life interest. Norton Stuart was a botanist, and Toschio Aseida a Japanese photographer of submarine and surface phenomena. Gordon Macgregor was an anthropologist from the Bishop Museum, and our ship’s surgeon, Dr. John B. Hynes, did blood groupings on the various islands we visited. This may sound like a hero list out of the “Iliad,” and I may add Homerically, “with me always were Gordon White and my long-tried henchman, Malakai Veisamasama.” Malakai found the stateroom so comfortable that it rather surprised him. Between island visits he sprawled on his bunk, always reading. It was usually The Martyrdom of Man, which I gave him once for a birthday present. He carried it with him as you’d carry a Bible.

The Zaca’s white crew had been mostly enlisted in California. The stewards were soft-footed and dextrous. When we sat under the awning of long, starlit evenings I had the impression of being on a crack ocean liner. We had everything but an orchestra, but there was a phonograph wired throughout the Zaca, and a very powerful Morse station of R.C.A.... No, this wasn’t real. I wasn’t the Lambert who had slapped mosquitoes in a Papuan whaleboat and been stranded on a New Hebrides island, waiting for anything with steam-power or gas-power or paddle-power to take him off.

******

I wanted to see the Solomon Islands again, for my inspection in 1921 had been a hurry-up affair, at the whim of Lever Brothers’ busy island inspector. My visit to Tulagi in 1930 had been mostly directed toward Rennell Island. In 1921 ill luck had kept me from seeing Malaita, the most savage spot in the savage Solomons. On the Crocker trip Gordon White and I were equipped to make tuberculin tests, for little was known of its prevalence in the group. Above all things, I was anxious to compare my new notes with my old ones. What had happened to the health of the islands I had seen twelve years ago? And what had happened to Rennell Island in three years?

In the Zaca’s comfortable lounge my only worry was that I might get too fat to waddle ashore, what with Mexican beer and a snack at 11 A.M., cocktails and a snack before dinner, highballs and a snack in the evening. Being by nature a sensualist, I had to pray to my Puritan forefathers to save me from myself until our ship touched the White Sands.

Visiting Tucopia, a dot on the southeast tip of the Solomons, I met a problem almost unique in the Pacific—overpopulation. This island, too small to warrant a stop-over, was another Rennell in miniature, with the same lake in the center. And the people who came paddling out in canoes were strikingly like Rennellese, perhaps more like the tribes of Bellona—more Melanesian than either. They had the same style of tapa breechclout, the same palm-fan sticking in the back, the same way of knotting their hair. The Fijians have another island, Thikombia (Tucopia in Fijian), which lies just north of Vanua Levu. It is undoubtedly one of the old steppingstones to this second Tucopia and Rennell. The Tucopians whom we found here spoke a language with so much Fijian in it that Malakai could speak a few words with them; he said that they looked like the light-skinned tribe on Thikombia, who were supposed to have come from Futuna.

A native missionary informed us that “people were growing like weeds.” District Officer Garvey had been there shortly before and wondered what to do with a race that was increasing faster than their food grew. For this fertility the missions were responsible, indirectly; when they came they said that every man should have a wife. Formerly only one son in the family was allowed to marry, the restriction being aimed at keeping the population within the bounds of subsistence. After their Christian teachers changed the rules Tukopia’s birth crop became embarrassing.... Well, that was something I couldn’t settle for them, except to suggest more recruiting for work on faraway plantations. That wouldn’t have been so practical, either, for the Tucopian had the same savage home-love as his Rennellese cousin. I went away chuckling. Here was a native race whom missionizing had increased. The men who came to our ship had a well-fed look. They seemed to be on the upgrade, though overcrowding might endanger their future.

******

We sailed toward Vanikoro, and saw Tinakula flaming across the sea, a volcano that seemed to be in constant eruption. Black smoke obscured it, then winds would clear it so that we could look to its sharp summit; at night it was a pillar of fire. Vanikoro, which lay beyond, had a total population of ninety-five. It was a noteworthy illustration of the decay of native races. When the early voyager La Pérouse was wrecked there, the island teemed with people.

We saw the Duffs, where the dark people looked Melanesian and spoke Polynesian; Macgregor told me that they chewed their words so that he couldn’t understand them. They scorned our tobacco because it was a grade too good; it seemed that the Burns-Phillip store had sold Crocker some of the better sort of rope-tobacco made by East Indians in Fiji. The minute the natives smelled it they turned in disgust. They wanted the rank trade tobacco made in America, and you couldn’t fool them with a substitute. A disappointment to our anthropologists, when they tried to collect museum specimens on the Duffs, and got nothing....

******

We swung around to the little land I learned to love on my visit there twelve years before. Sikiana with its three charming atolls, three links in a chain. I remembered its unspoiled, laughing Polynesians, its modest, pretty girls who had draped us with wreaths of flowers. I remembered its jolly, handsome men, who had been inoffensively drunk with toddy the day we got there. I remembered the bearded patriarch we had called Old Number One; I had thought of him as one who ruled only by example in a pagan democracy which had no laws, no worries, no debts, no crimes, no serious diseases. I was full of forebodings as our ship neared a palm-fringed lagoon. What had happened to little Sikiana since last I saw it?

Two canoes came out across the reef, and I recognized an old friend, Lautaua, who had done me many favors on my last visit. We were glad to see each other, and his pidgin was garrulous, describing his trips over many waters during that dozen years. Most of the Sikiana men who had been our sailors on the Lever Brothers’ cruise had died or strayed away.

And did I know what had happened? Well, the Melanesian Mission had come to their little Polynesia. Over the ten miles of soft lagoon Lautaua told the story. How they had sent in preachers and teachers to improve them. As Missioner-in-Chief a very black boy had come from Guadalcanar. His name was Daniel Sande. At first the people would not join the Church, and many were still holding out; but the Polynesian will yield to persuasion, if only for a show of politeness. Lautaua had offended Black Daniel by moving to another island; then he got so homesick that he came back, a shorn lamb, and found four black Melanesian teachers ruling the roost for Lautaua’s proud, light-skinned neighbors and relatives. I asked Lautaua his confidential view on the new religion. He bowed his handsome head. “Master, some fellow he talk man die he come back; me tink man he die he go along ground finish. He no come back. Me no go along school [catechism]. Me no go along water behind [baptism]. Me tink Story [Birth of Christ and miracles] he altogether gammon. Mission he spoil him altogether people.”

Sikiana, where once they had danced by the light of the moon, had a look of dull propriety. Good heavens, there was a church! A conch shell sounded—and the Sikiana girls were filing in, dressed in white pinafores. Beside them marched sad-looking Sikiana men. It was edifying, it was shocking. Salvation had entered Paradise. Government had entered, too, for here was the official shack where we were to bunk and try to eat the awful messes a native cook had thrown together. Malakai took one sniff at the mound of indigestibles, then he did what Malakai would. He shouldered out the cook and took over the saucepans. For the rest of our stay there we ate wholesomely and well.

There was an undercurrent of discontent in Sikiana because a hurried Government Secretary had swooped down on them when Old Number One died and had asked in haste, “Who’s chief now?” An enterprising impostor named Tuana had presented himself and made a glib selling talk which got him appointed in twenty minutes, more or less. The Honorable Secretary went back to his boat, too full of business to wait and find out that he had broken Sikiana’s traditional line of chiefly succession. Such a miscarriage of justice is not characteristically British; but there are always puffy officials, meaning well and doing badly.

I learned about Black Daniel, who seemed to be a hard-bitten slaver in the name of the Lord. This was his day’s routine: Sound the conch at 6 A.M. for church; sound it a little later for the children’s school; sound it again at ten for the bigger boys and girls; school for grown-ups at 4 P.M., where the study was catechism; church again at 6 P.M., with much singing and a long, strong sermon. This was the week-day program. Sunday, of course, furnished a constant grist for the mill that never ceased turning. When religious duties didn’t interfere the inhabitants could work; but they weren’t working very hard. Sikiana was getting lazy.

When I had audience with Black Daniel I found him a big, smiling fellow with a boil on his nose. Several Sikiana girls were fanning away the flies; these light-skinned damsels had the look of trained nurses who didn’t much care for their assignment. Daniel had something of a Father Divine technique, a way of bursting into ecstatic patter, then coming down to practical affairs. Quite an able man, I thought. He had a record of births and deaths by age and sex, which he had kept since he came there three years ago. Also he had kept a census, very useful to me when I started to work.

Arcady had vanished under the heel of religio-totalitarianism. I wondered if the dark-browed missioners were “taking advantage” of the pretty girls around them. But I found that this was not so. The girls were looking out for that. They were too Polynesian not to shrink in disdain from black-skinned lovers. Not that their hearts were as pure as the Bishop of Melanesia might have wished. They cast yearning eyes toward our good-looking sailors; those were white men, and quite a different matter. I heard one sailor speak softly to a pretty girl named Ana, who looked nervously toward the mission. “Master,” she said, “me fright too much come along you. Big Master Stop along Top he look along night too.”

Our sailor learned, however, that these affairs could be arranged through special dispensation from Black Daniel. If he liked you, and the girl was a heathen, the church would bless the temporary mating. Daniel liked the sailor, so that was a granted privilege. However, the romance fell unripened. When the couple decided that their love was sanctified they were discouraged by a crowd which followed them constantly. It was all very funny, and tragic. I wondered how long these people would remain purely Polynesian. Their Melanesian teachers had the Supernatural on their side, and the time would come, I thought, when the breed would become very mixed.

Poor Old Number One, how his bearded ghost must have worried! A year before our visit a fanatical trader named Buchanan had run amuck and burned down all the heathen temples. Not only that, but a crew of Japanese pearl fishers had insisted on coming ashore. When the people told them that they were not welcome, they turned a machine gun on a village and forced a landing. Machine-gunning islands seemed to be a Japanese habit. They stayed long enough to fish all the shell out of the lagoon and quartered themselves in Lautaua’s house. When they left they became generous, gave Lautaua 1,500 cigarettes, a toothbrush and an old pair of swimming goggles. He was clever enough to imitate the glasses with wood and scraps of windowpanes.

Pukena, the cook whom Malakai had discharged forthwith, but who remained as humble helper, told about Tuana, the misappointed chief. Tuana was a grafter, and like many grafters, lazy. The Administration had entrusted him with medicine for the people. When the sick applied for help, Tuana would reply that his stock had all run out. In short, he was keeping the good stuff for himself and his henchmen. Lautaua, being obviously the superior man on Sikiana, should have been entrusted with these things.

We were there four days, all of us very busy except Crocker, who had a badly infected foot.

I had been carrying on wholesale injections of tuberculin, and had found that the prevalence of tuberculosis was alarmingly high. On my first visit I had had only time to make sketchy tests, but certainly the disease had gained great headway. Gordon White and I went over the whole population. Lautaua, the religious rebel, blamed the missionaries for the disease. Yet the population had made a satisfactory increase in the past twenty years; and that was hard to understand. There was plenty of malaria, and we were finding acute, unguarded pulmonary tuberculosis. Possibly the change in custom, brought in by the missions, possibly added infections which may have resulted from contact with them, or with the Japanese, might have resulted in the many acute chests we saw. Or possibly it was due to the small amount of additional clothing which had come in with the new way of living.

There had been almost no traders, and few foreign vessels came that way. But the very isolation of these atolls, plus Black Daniel’s scientific inadequacy, added to the weight of native ills. Among the plentiful mosquitoes we found the malaria carriers. One afternoon Malakai held out his bare arm and showed me a probing little insect. “She stands on her head when she feeds,” he said, “and she has spotted wings.” Anopheles punctulatus, sure little poisoner, conveying disease from the sick to the well. It was impossible to get anything like an adequate supply of quinine from Tulagi.

Lautaua in his own way described the symptoms and testified that malaria was an old inhabitant. Did the sickness begin with a chill? “Oh, master, plenty too much.” Realistically he acted out a malaria chill. Had it been here long? “Yes, master, fader belong me, fader belong him, all same.” Did the children have it too? “Small fellow, my wort! Him shake too much all same dis.” More synthetic chills. “Behind (after) him he hot too much; now water he come out all same rain.”

Their light contact with trading ships and their habit of using the tidewater for toilet purposes had saved them from hookworm. There were only two cases of yaws, secondary and in children. The people called it matona instead of tona, the usual Polynesian name. They said that tona was an old-timer, but had died down. I saw no evidences of it among the adults.

In lighter vein let me tell you about Black Daniel’s other boil, for he had developed a lusty carbuncle on his hip. I opened it with the cleverest instrument at hand, a razor blade; and with no anesthetic, of course. Daniel had no ambition to be a Christian martyr. It took four of his disciples to hold him down while I drained out the pus, and he called on his Saviour in the voice of a wounded lion.

His Sikiana flock was a contrast in stoicism. Their beautiful teeth were going—ill-balanced diet, probably—and in one afternoon Malakai and I extracted thirty teeth. We had only straight forceps, and it was a pretty mangling job; but we didn’t hear a moan during the whole ordeal.

Like all primitives, the people of Sikiana confused the diagnosis with the cure; remember how the Cook Islanders had thought I could make them well by putting a stethoscope on their chests? Tuberculin injections are merely given for negative or positive reactions. But to them the needle was a sovereign remedy, and they always went away smiling. Only the very young children objected when the point was jabbed under their skin. As to the others their faith was rather heartrending. It was the same all over the Solomons.

After the boil operation Black Daniel so far relented as to let his congregation dance for us, with the beautiful old-fashioned abandon—but with plenty of clothes on. It was the first time in three years that they had been allowed to revert to this pretty, jolly paganism. Before our otter boat pulled us back to the Zaca, Daniel and his three dusky assistants occupied four chairs and consented to be photographed. Gathered around them a group of Sikiana girls in white pinafores and white capes looked for all the world like tropical Girl Scouts. Templeton Crocker, suffering from a lame foot and feeling satirical, watched the photographic group, a drift of snow with a bucket of coal in the middle. “The Four Black Crows,” he said, thinking of a popular vaudeville team. But the holy dictator and his followers were speeding us on our way with “God be with you till we meet again.”

God be with Sikiana, I thought glumly. For twelve years that little place had been one of the pets of my memory. I decided that it would need a hustling Native Medical Practitioner, if anything was to be accomplished.

******

We interrupted our work and turned back to Tulagi. Dr. Hynes had reported that Toschio, our Japanese photographer, was so ill that he needed hospital attention. Crocker’s sore foot had caused a friendly disagreement between Hynes and me. Before he reached Suva, the Zaca’s owner had scratched his foot on some submerged coral. He had pluckily said nothing about it until the infection had begun heating up. As a young graduate of New York’s Presbyterian Hospital, Dr. Hynes might have been a bit more interested in major operations than in minor bruises. But I had seen many coral scratches and knew that they could, if neglected, prove as stubbornly hard to cure as a gastric ulcer.

At Tulagi—in the humble little capital, very neat and British—we ran into a mess of colonial politics. My very good friend J. C. Barley, who had won the general approval of the High Commission and had aided the natives in so many kindly ways that they thought of him as “Government,” had been sidetracked again. Captain Ashley had come back as Resident Commissioner, and that had left Barley, the obvious choice, out in his small post on Auki; Barley, who knew more about the customs, language and social traditions of the people than any white man who had ever lived on the Solomons; Barley, whose affection for the natives was fatherly, and who had devoted his splendid life to them.

At last I got around to see Captain Ashley, who had been so kind about helping me on my first Rennell trip and had sent out a relief boat to find me. What I wanted to talk about more than anything else was Solomon Island candidates for our Central Medical School. We had two native practitioners working on the group. Dr. Hetherington, the C.M.O., had only one white physician whom he could put in the field. There were a few medical missionaries, some of them very good—especially those of the Melanesian Mission, which had a leper asylum of sorts on Malaita.

How about getting some more Solomon Island students into our school at Suva? Well, the Protectorate was about broke—stony truth—and even our small tuition would be burdensome. Norman Wheatley of New Georgia had sent his two sons, Trader Kuper of Santa Ana was educating his older boy, Geoffrey, in a New Zealand school. Geoffrey seemed especially bright, and ought to make a fine N.M.P.

I reminded Captain Ashley of how I had first looked those boys over, back in 1921. Norman Wheatley, retired blackbirder, had settled sedately on Roviana Lagoon, where he had married a native woman. His early adventures should have made him rich, but a ruling vice had reduced his surplus to near the vanishing point. His vice was collecting prize-winning small craft in Sydney. All around the lagoon were his ancient yachts, racing schooners and launches, rotting away for lack of use and attention. Wheatley’s sons were pretty small then, but he had listened to me when I said that he ought to make doctors out of them.

Trader Kuper was then living on Santa Ana with his native wife, a fine woman who had posed for my camera in her tribal costume. Her two boys, the older not more than four, were running wild on the beach, absolutely naked. The mother was bare from the top of her head to the waistband of her lavalava; around her neck were shark’s teeth, and a long pencil of polished shell ran through the septum of her nose. Tenderly she picked the children up and told me that they were nice boys, but not strong. I had found that they had hookworm, and I delayed my departure to dose them with chenopodium. When I left I had given Mrs. Kuper instructions as to further treatment. I saw Mr. Kuper a few years later and he told me that they had grown to be fine husky kids, and he was grateful because we had saved their lives. I had reminded him, as I had Norman Wheatley, that his sons ought to go to Suva and study medicine.

Well, so young Geoffrey Kuper was studying in New Zealand. Certainly he would be an ideal candidate for the Medical School, Ashley said.

Again I heard the old story of benevolent Dr. Fox of the Melanesian Mission. Earnestly wishing to help the natives and to understand them, Fox specialized in ethnology. In order to put himself in closer touch with native family ways, he offered to change lives with Joni, one of his dark parishioners. Joni agreed to change his name to Dr. Fox; Dr. Fox to become Joni. The real Dr. Fox handed the real Joni his bankbook and so on, while the metamorphosed clergyman moved into the native house and took over all the family with all the duties, except the intimate matrimonial ones. He didn’t learn much, because the natives remained secretive. The French farce situation became intolerable when the simon-pure Fox discovered that his counterfeit had been strutting all over the island using Dr. Fox’s name and prestige so successfully that there were many newborn infants being called “Dr. Fox.” So lavalava was immediately exchanged for clerical garb, and all bets were off. That was a classic yarn around Tulagi, but still good for a wicked smile.

******

We coasted down the shore of Malaita, a great hulk of mountainous woods 110 miles long, beautiful and forbidding. When I had covered the Solomons in 1921 a convenient hurricane had beaten us away from the shore. This island held a horrid fascination. Twelve years ago no white man had dared the interior jungles, and there was still little knowledge of its wild hill tribes. The splendid black Malaitamen were good workers, when you could get them. Recruiters, there to pick up field hands for the plantations, always worked in pairs; wise laws of the Protectorate compelled them to do so, for bloody experience had proved the necessity of armed caution.

The luxurious Zaca skirted the savagery of Malaita, which the Spaniards called “Mala” for short; and it was “Bad” to them, as ghastly stories reveal. Over there lay Sinarango where Tax Collector Bell with Cadet Lilies and fourteen native police had been butchered in 1927. There were some missionaries, planters and traders scattered along the coastline. The spread of disease was diminishing the Malaitamen, and my object in visiting them would be to learn, if possible, the role played by tuberculosis. Also I was keen to look over the Melanesian Mission’s leper establishment, for I had been told that about one per cent of Malaita’s population was afflicted.

Around Malaita are many artificial islands, time-old and mysterious as the people who inhabit them. A long native canoe, with no outrigger, landed us on one of them, about three acres built of huge coral-chunks that had been planted on the reef and filled in with soil and rubble. Dr. Macgregor pointed out children with bright yellow hair; no, it hadn’t been sunburned to that color, or bleached with lime to destroy lice. This was natural hair. When we examined a grown girl’s hair down at the roots, where the sun could never reach it, the color was almost as yellow as straw. There were gray eyes, too, flashing out of dark brown faces. Gray eyes are often found among Polynesians who have had no intimate contact with Europeans. But these were no Polynesians. They were almost as dark as the other Solomon Islanders.

White and Malakai and I had all day ashore at Tai Harbor, lining up hundreds for tuberculin tests. I was aboard ship again when I learned that my much-admired friend J. C. Barley was at Tai on inspection. When I told Crocker about Barley my host suggested that I go ashore and ask him to dinner on the Zaca. That was a pleasant assignment, for I must have a talk with the man who knew his natives inside and out.

He came around the side of a leaf-house, cool, clean and physically fit. Shaking hands, I knew that he was glad to see me again, as I was to see him. Yes, the Solomons were in a bit of a jam and all that, he said, and a jolly good thing, Lambert, that you’re looking over our tuberculosis. He spoke with gratitude, as though I had been treating him personally. That was Barley all over, responsible for every man, woman and child under his care. He had been District Commissioner for Malaita—splendid job. There were over 50,000 natives on Malaita, and we must have treated nearly 40,000 of them for prevalent diseases. Not that they wouldn’t stand a lot more of it. Naturally those wild fellows up in the hills weren’t so tubercular as the coast dwellers, he said, but they’d bear looking over. The news had spread to them that the white doctors jabbed them with a needle. They were all crazy for the treatment.

Barley was going to be married; nice Australian girl—he hoped she wouldn’t be lonely out here. (As if anybody could be lonely with him.) He had just gotten back from Rennell Island, he said, and had brought Buia with him. Buia! Sure enough, there was Buia, somewhat disguised in a pair of shorts, but the same muscular hunky figure. We didn’t rub noses this time, but shook hands, European style. Buia was becoming a man of the world.

And how was Rennell? Well, said Barley, what had happened there might have sounded funny, only it was rather terrible. Too many visiting ships, of course, with Tahua’s charming girls to lure them into the White Sands. But there was something much worse. The Seventh Day Adventist outfit had gotten at them, rather. Pastor Borgas landed on the White Sands and informed the Big Masters that they had come to “teach” them. “You know,” said Barley, “how crazy the Rennellese are to learn English. They thought teaching meant just that. When the Adventists taught them to say ‘Me want skula’—meaning ‘We want a school’—they didn’t know that school was the Adventist word for batches of New Testament and vegetarian diet. Old Testament for a people living in an age that’s older than Isaac and Rebecca; vegetarian diet for a race that’s starving for meaty proteins! Well, before Mr. Borgas went home he gave strips of white cloth for Tahua and Taupangi to wear; white arm bands with ‘M.V.’ marked on them in big black letters.”

“What’s ‘M.V.’?” I asked.

“Mission Volunteer,” said Barley with a wry smile.

I let out a whoop. Imagine those archaic and bearded kings strutting around with Mission Volunteer on their arms!

But Barley couldn’t see the comic side. Neither could I after he told me the rest. “When Taupangi and Tahua found out what those cranks had been up to, they flew into a rage and vowed that no missionary should ever again come within bow-shot of their island. I say, this thing is breeding trouble. Next thing you know they’ll be killing off another parcel of Christian teachers. Then there’ll be hell to pay. I don’t want to see a punitive expedition go into Rennell Island and hang a lot of them.”

Barley seemed to be reading my thoughts when he said: “If I had my way I’d put a reliable N.M.P. or two on that island, with plenty of medicine. And I’d keep everybody else out, except scientists, maybe. You won’t find the people in as good condition as they were when you saw them last. Sea-changes are very sudden in the Pacific.”

So Barley went back with me to the Zaca. It was one of Crocker’s company dinners—grilled steak which had come frosted from Montana, and 1922 Perrier-Jouët. Barley was answering a shower of questions. The Malaita warriors, he said, were Proper Men, and took no nonsense from anybody. They didn’t know how to lie. When you asked them how many they had killed they either told you that it was none of your business, or candidly counted over the murders to their credit....

Under softly shaded table lamps our stewards were delicately pouring vintage wine. Right over there, blacker than the darkness, lay Malaita....

******

With Gordon White and Malakai I went to the leper colony at Quaibaita. I knew that leprosy, of comparatively recent importation, ran about one per cent on Malaita. Whenever colonists mentioned the Melanesian Mission doctors, they usually said, “Wonderful work!” I was not disappointed when I saw the mission colony, order in the midst of green chaos: a hospital and church built of concrete, and the leper institution set a little too near for safety. The Empire Leper Association subsidized them for drugs, the Protectorate furnished some medical supplies and a tiny dole for food. I was astonished at first when I found that two of their orderlies were arrested cases of leprosy; then I realized the stringent economy under which these devoted men and women must work in order to keep their mission enterprise on its feet. Educated and gently reared, they slaved out their lives in genuine Christian cheerfulness. Some of them, I fancied, had not had a square meal for years.

I had lunch with them. If they had been French priests they would have gathered a delicious meal somewhere out of the jungle, for that’s French genius. Here the missioners chatted gaily over the poor things that came on the table. I knew it was the very best they had, for we were their guests.

The doctors and the nursing sisters told me that it was hard to suit Malaitamen, when they got a notion in their heads—which was most of the time. The mission here was treating 73 lepers, but they had had as high as 147. Many of them were out-patients; that is to say they preferred to live in their own village, about a mile away. They dropped in for treatment about when they felt like it; or else just wandered away. The Melanesian Mission was trying to get a law passed that would compel lepers to stay put. Natives loved everything that was treated with the “needle,” but they couldn’t be cured with two or three injections, as they could for yaws. The leprosy treatment took a great deal of time, and after a couple of injections the Malaitaman would say to his brothers, “What the hell? This fellow’s magic isn’t working.”

All this was uphill for the brave medical missionaries. My only suggestion was that the leper establishment was too near the “clean” hospital, where they were treating a little of everything else. And it looked tricky to me, having a leper acting as head warder. The obvious thing to say was: Round them up and send them to Mokogai. But that would have been out of the question for a government whose finances were already strained. Without going into figures, it would have cost the Protectorate a large share of its revenue, if they had gone to the expense of shipping away an estimated 950 lepers. Add to that the physical impossibility of taking the sick away from regions so wild that the Government itself did not dare to penetrate; regions where fierce savages were warring, tribe against tribe, and the white man an hereditary enemy. It was just another tragedy of European rule over a native race.

Around the Quaibaita Mission Station I wish to put a bright red mark of approval. Striving against heavy odds, it has done the Lord’s work in a practical way, and every year it has shown improvement. Its workers, keeping body and soul together on forty pounds a year, reveal the missionary at his classic best: a civilizer, a healer and a defender of the helpless.

******

We had been injecting around Tai Harbor, and our technique was so popular that it drew wild men from the hills many miles away. Our needles wore out and our fingers grew stiff from puncturing the skin of hundreds who applied, clamoring for “neela” (needle). A tuberculin test, to prove anything, required two applications and two inspections, five days in all. The difficulty was to get the people back for the second injection and the last inspection, and I was fascinated by Gordon White’s orations in lively pidgin. “This big fellow doctor along Fiji, him he come dis time for giving nother kind neela. Now dis nother kind neela, him for stop dis sick along coughie where some fellow he spit blut....” And in the elaborate roundabouts he was telling them that they’d had their two injections, but must be back at the “house takis” (tax house) for the third inspection on Tuesday. The heavy rate of tuberculosis, shown in fierce reactions, made it quite obvious that Malaita needed a tuberculosis sanitarium. That, considering the Protectorate’s finances, would have been no more available than a general roundup of lepers.

Our investigations, I hope, threw some light on the prevalence of tuberculosis. Those we examined on Tai Lagoon ran over 77 per cent infection. Those we were able to get from the bush village showed 60 per cent. The very unpopular officials who had gone out to collect the head tax reported that taxpayers on Malaita had fallen from 14,000 to 10,000 in a decade. Since the Solomon Islands plantations relied on Malaita for nearly three quarters of their plantation labor, this falling off was disastrous. Run the gamut of diseases, from tuberculosis to ringworm, and you have the medical problem that faced the land-poor Protectorate. The only salvation—I must repeat myself—would be to send the largest possible number of native students to study medicine in Suva. That time was coming, I felt sure, for my School was beginning to draw a deep breath.

While we worked ashore Templeton Crocker remained a true sportsman, enjoying himself as best a temporary cripple could. For weeks he sat on deck, his sore foot propped up on a chair, and had the vicarious pleasure of hearing what the doctors and anthropologists and other -ologists had been doing on their expeditions. For an active and adventurous man it must have been torment. The foot was improving, very slowly as a neglected infection must in a damp, hot climate. Now and then, when British residents invited us for tea or cocktails, Crocker would get himself into the sedan chair Dr. Hetherington had given him, and be carried ashore. Sitting aloft with four black men lifting the poles, Crocker looked for all the world like a Roman proconsul on his way to a banquet or a temple, or wherever proconsuls went.

For hours he would sit on deck, listening to Buia’s descriptions of Rennell Island and his reasons for not liking Adventist missionaries. “Fish he tabu; meat he tabu; walk about he tabu; tobacco he tabu; altogether along dis fellow he tabu.” Crocker, a confirmed hater of tabus, was sympathetic, and liked to hear Buia declare that Mr. Borgas, who had tacked “M.V.” on the arms of Tahua and Taupangi, might have fooled those old men, but he hadn’t fooled Buia for a second. He well remembered what Mr. Hamlin and Dr. Lambert had said about them: “That mission he altogether no good along Mungava.”

******

Templeton Crocker had gone to the greatest pains and expense to organize this expedition. All along the way he had been annoyed by a quaint turn in customs regulations, which suddenly whimmed to charge duties on a little of everything. Never before had the Zaca been bothered that way by a British Colony. We were out serving the High Commission by invitation and deserved the freedom of the port. However, you never can tell which way island politics are going to turn.

Those of us working ashore had our basket of troubles also, and trouble on Malaita means that you’d better run for your life.

As I have said, tuberculin tests take five days. We inject one day, then skip a day, and on the third inject the cases found negative with a stronger solution; then we skip another day and on the fifth get our final negative cases—those thought not to have an infection and never to have had one. A positive reaction, showing that a person has, or has had, tuberculosis, is revealed by a small and slightly raised pink circle around the site of injection. The confused natives thought that the pink circle was the desirable thing, and they would strut proudly away to show their friends. It was very difficult to make the final negatives understand that they had had the full works—for where was the pink spot they were after?

Well, we had been at it four days, and the course was almost over. Then who should show up but several native teachers with a note from the Seventh Day Adventist white missionary, asking us to inject his people. We knew that we wouldn’t have time to finish the five-day job, but a single injection to the new lot might prove something. Also one always wants to sustain a white man’s authority before the natives, and it wouldn’t do to refuse this request. Remember, the Malaitamen thought that our tests were a cure, for God knows what—tuberculosis or leprosy or yaws, it was all about the same, so long as they got the magic “neela.” No, one jab wouldn’t do them any harm; it might buck them up spiritually. So on that sophistry, we decided to inject the Adventist’s choice.

To complicate matters, we had been obliged to refuse injections to the multitude of natives who had come after the first day, and they were pretty sullen about it. Who could blame them, considering their long trudge over mountaintops, probably without food? They gathered around us with black scowls, inwardly wondering why if five days did a lot of good, four or three wouldn’t do some good, anyhow. Then the word got around that we were making an exception in favor of the Adventist crowd—and things started to boil.

Newcomers had been flocking in daily, and in front of our “house takis” there was a jam almost as far as one could see: black, ugly faces, determined to have their share of injections, if we started another lot. We had already tested about 1,500, and eight native policemen had guarded us every minute of the time. They changed guard every hour, with impressive swinging of rifles, always with fixed bayonets. I was soon to realize good old Barley’s common sense in sending them along under John White’s direction, for John knew his job.

But here we were on a tough spot. I had promised to inject the Adventist’s natives. Looking around at the angry black men, crowding in on us, I changed my mind. Not only did we have to save our own skins, but if the mob set on us the Adventist converts would be the first to go. I had thought that the native police were a joke, until I saw them spring into line. I yelled to an interpreter, “Tell the Adventists that we haven’t got time!”

He told them. Arms flourished and waved and there was a deafening racket from a thousand husky throats. “Neela! Neela! Me want im neela!” The noise was so great that John White had to shout in my ear, “Better give it to them. Just jab them any way, never mind if it doesn’t mean anything. If you don’t treat them all, and the mission natives especially, they’ll certainly kill the lot of us.” I stood my ground with nothing more defensive than a hypodermic syringe. Maybe it was long medical discipline that made me shake my head; I wasn’t going to waste a batch of expensive tuberculin on any wholesale fake. “What have we got an armed guard for?” I asked.

Much to my surprise the native police began doing their duty. With bayonets leveled they formed a rough cordon between us and the mass of howling hill-fellows. Then we stood not upon the manner of our beating, but beat it at once, an undignified scramble into the otter boat and a frantic paddling back to the ship. A bedlam of threatening yells followed us out to sea.

When I found Crocker resting his foot on deck he asked me what sort of mob scene we had been pulling over there. I told him that it was the kind of melodrama most explorers were looking for, but I didn’t care for it. I was sweating freely, very cold sweat for so warm a day. It reminded me, I said, of what Winston Churchill once told a certain Commissioner from a certain Pacific island group, who came back to London to explain a lot of things. Churchill was Colonial Secretary then and the Commissioner was an old friend. “Winston,” said the Commissioner, “they accuse me of keeping women.” “But Charles, my dear boy,” said Winston, “why shouldn’t you?”

I was in trouble with Malaita, but why I shouldn’t be was an open question.

******

Too often on that voyage I was forced to say “I told you so,” comparing what I saw with what I had seen twelve years before. Stevenson’s “Drink and the devil had done for the rest” might have been transposed into “Disease and the traders.” Casual islands, where casual ships dropped in and the people had no moral barriers against strangers, were obviously on the downgrade. In 1921, when we had made an overnight survey around Star Harbour, my medical mind had worried over the carefree sex-generosity of the women there. It was none of my business that, according to native custom, young men hired their fiancées out long enough to earn a marriage dowry. That was the fashion, and there seemed to be no ill results—so long as they confined their promiscuity to their own tribesmen. Their freedom with visiting sailors, black, white or yellow, caused me to foresee what I found there in 1933. That horrid visitor, venereal granuloma, had come to play and stayed to kill. A Chinaman, they said, had brought it there. Life was shortening, the birth rate was almost nil. The abundant missionaries were doing what they could to curb immorality. What they could do wasn’t much. Star Harbour was too good a trading station to keep away from.

******

When the Zaca lay at anchor in the colored waters of Mohawk Bay I came upon the end of a short story which had taken twelve years to tell. It was here, you remember, that back in 1921 I had given a midnight hookworm lecture, in what I thought was a mission village; after the lecture I was resting in a whaleboat near the beach when a naked man, darker than the darkness, had waded out to me and told me that he was Sam, a mission teacher; and his lively pidgin had informed me of my mistake—that I had gone to a heathen village; his was the Christian community, where I should have lectured in the name of the Lord. So I had given him a number of tins, told him what to say in his lecture, and asked him to bring me the specimens in the morning, and he had obeyed. Poor devil, like so many others, he had thought his people would be cured merely by filling the tins. He was foolish, but a true Christian.

Well, as Templeton Crocker’s luxury yacht now idled in this bay a missionary came aboard with a number of natives. One of them kept crouching close to my chair, and I recognized him. He was Sam the Christian. “So you’re still the mission teacher here,” I said. “No, master,”—softly,—“you talk along me that night in whaleboat, but me no mission.” I liked the old rascal, and spent a day with him, looking over his village and getting at the truth of his story, which was just this: When he had waded out to my boat with the Christian yarn, he had been a pagan, living among pagans; he had come to me with his pious line of talk because, he explained, the heathens never got any plums from the whites; plums all went to the missionized ones. His people had hookworm, and he didn’t care what he said so long as he got the cure.

Sam was goodfellow too much, so I gave him some more lessons in hookworm treatment and some drugs to help out. He was still a heathen, he told me, although the native teacher had marked him for an extremely hot Eternity....

******

So much for scenes revisited, and all not happy ones. We had weighed anchor and were churning out to sea, heading now once more toward Rennell Island. I had seen the mischief done in gentle Sikiana and in other unprotected places. What had happened to Rennell? Buia, coming home with us, said some disturbing things.