A Yankee doctor in paradise

by S. M. Lambert

CHAPTER V

PIG ARISTOCRACY

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

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

They were killing pigs.

******

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

******

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

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

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

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

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

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

Later on I saw plenty of Malekula.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

******

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This neat rebuke was all too subtle for a land where murder was the popular way of showing annoyance. If I wished to get rid of anybody in particular I would just lure him to the New Hebrides, push him off a boat and forget it. Should anybody get around to questioning me—which they probably wouldn’t—I would blame the disappearance to “blackwater fever,” always a handy explanation for missing persons. Or if I were a native I would shoot first, then run to a mission and get converted. To bask in righteousness was always fairly safe for the escaped trigger-man. (At one mission service the Nambas lurked in the woods, well supplied with ammunition for a couple of sanctified runaways, while the congregation inside was singing with much fervor: “Anywhere with Jesus I may safely go.”)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

******

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

******

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

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

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

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

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

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

******

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

******

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

******

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

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

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

******

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

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