A Yankee doctor in paradise

by S. M. Lambert

CHAPTER VI

NEW ZEALAND’S LITTLE SISTER

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

******

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

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

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

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

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

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

******

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pomare wrote:—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

******

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

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

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

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

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

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

******

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

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

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

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

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

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

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