CHAPTER VI
IN RETROSPECT
As the Pacific’s halfway house, Suva has become more and more of a stopping-off place for the great and the near-great. Royalty, inquiring novelists and scientific bigwigs have come in the regular way, by sea. The first visitor from the sky was Kingsford-Smith, and because he must have trees cut down from the parade ground to make a safe landing, Suva was in a dither. The residents loved those trees so fondly that they didn’t start to fell them until after they learned that the aviator’s plane was well on its way from Hawaii. Then down they came, and when the giant bird roared in it was probably the high moment in Fijian history.
English princes and royal dukes weren’t exactly a commonplace. Their comings and goings threw the colony into a patriotic frenzy. Before the then Prince of Wales decided on “the woman I love” Suva all but gave him a coronation. The Duke of Gloucester’s visit in 1935 caused a social upheaval among the natives, who were preparing a colossal dance in his honor. Many of the boys, in imitation of European styles, had been cutting off their great bundles of hair. The master of ceremonies gave it out that no dancer would be eligible unless he wore the high, round hairdress of classic Fiji. One of the high chiefs of Mbau, whose hereditary privilege it was to act as cupbearer in the kava ceremony, defied the rule and came to the dance in his college cut. He was incontinently rejected. The Duke had two Scotland Yard men with him, but that didn’t interfere with his efforts to be democratic. He was especially fond of the bacon-and-egg parties common in young Suva society after the ball; these were at about dawn, when the Duke’s watch-dog equerry was sound asleep. After many stiff-collar affairs in the larger colonies Gloucester found his release, I think, in Suva’s simple, kindly hospitality.
His voyage was bothered, however, by people who were less considerate of royal democracy. As H.M.S. Australia was leaving Samoa, the little yacht Seth Parker, owned by an enterprising radio star, sent out an S O S. When the Australia came about for rescue work the yacht announced: “Open your wireless set and you can hear a broadcast all over the U. S., saying that the Duke of Gloucester has come to the rescue of the Seth Parker.” Another coy one followed: “Won’t the Duke come up on the bridge so that we can take his picture?” Gloucester’s sulphuric words must have raised a storm, for an hour or so after the royal cruiser went her way a hurricane blew up, and the battered Seth Parker sent out another S O S, a real one this time. Dutifully the Australia turned back again, and stood by for two days until a vessel from Pago Pago came and picked up the offensive little yacht.
Before the present King and Queen of England even dreamed of wearing crowns they paid us a visit as Duke and Duchess of York. We met them on two occasions, an official ball at Government House and a more informal affair in the Grand Pacific’s ballroom. The Duke of York said that his father had visited Fiji and had drunk the kava which they “spit in the bowl.” So that party with old Thakombau was family history. The Duchess was what we Americans call a “nice girl,” and her poise never seemed to get in the way of her good humor. I liked the way she handled a young cadet, whom the occasion and the champagne had somewhat exhilarated. It was contrary to custom, but he wanted to win a bet when he asked her for a dance. She said, “Sorry, my card’s full.” Well, so was the young cadet; he took another drink and asked her again. Again she was sorry. Next afternoon he woke with a headache and moaned, “Lord, what did I do?” His pals were all too ready to tell him, and with flights of imagination. He prepared himself to be cashiered, but nothing happened. It would be romantic to say that the Duchess intervened in his behalf. I doubt if she remembered his name.
When the School was well started and I could spend more of my time in Suva’s civilized environment I occupied a crossroads position where I met many, going and coming. Earl and Lady Beatty were guests at Sir Harry Luke’s dinner party, and I was much flattered when I found that the Earl knew quite a lot about the School. This contact was more impressive, perhaps, but less engaging than the one I made when the yacht Caroline came in and her owner asked me to come aboard with some medical advice. The owner was Douglas Fairbanks, and the tall, blond lady with arched eyebrows was his future wife, Lady Ashley. I remember him as a charming, unassuming host with the finest yacht I have ever visited—the Zaca not excepted. It was air-conditioned, so that the temperature in a dozen luxurious staterooms could be lowered to taste. Fairbanks said that he slept under blankets every night in the tropics. Suva, always broad-minded about the holy bond, made quite a fuss over them, and Ratu Sukuna gave them a native dance. “Doug” wanted me to go with him on a voyage to Singapore, but I had other irons in the fire.
Early in 1938 (I think it was) I was off on field work when somebody tapped on the screen porch of our house and Eloisa went out to see who it was. A beefy gentleman looked through the wire and wanted to know if Dr. Lambert was home. No, said Eloisa, but wouldn’t he come in? “My name’s Morgan,” he said, and stayed for tea. It didn’t require a signed photograph for Eloisa to recognize him as J. P. Morgan. In fact I had rather expected him one of these days, as Heiser had written me, saying that when Mr. Morgan showed up I might outline a trip for him through the islands. He stayed for a couple of hours, talking about Fiji and the School and our work in the Pacific.
Later I couldn’t resist the temptation of writing him a letter, which began something like this:—
Dear Mr. Morgan:—
For years my brother Fred and I have had a standing family joke. When either of us started on a trip we would say to the other, “If J. P. Morgan calls up before I’m back, tell him I won’t sell under fifty.” I’m afraid you’ve turned the tables on us....
Such meetings, even if they were only by proxy, made bright passages in the doctor’s notebook.
One of life’s greatest moments for me was Richard Crooks’s concert in Suva, given for the benefit of our School’s athletic fund. I cherish this program among my fondest possessions, for on the cover it says: “Recital: Richard Crooks.... Impresario: Dr. S. M. Lambert.” I wasn’t chosen for my musical genius; somebody argued that as it was for the School, and as I had wangled Mr. Crooks into the generous gift of his voice, I ought to furnish the American ballyhoo for an American singer. For a day I knew how Gatti-Casazza must have felt all the time.
Suva had a right to be music-hungry, for Crooks was only the second opera star who had stayed there long enough to sing, and instrumental performers had fought shy of us. Our single connection with the musical great was our former Government printer, Johann Sebastian Bach, inheritor of an illustrious name. When Paderewski came to Suva he didn’t play his piano; in fact he just got off the boat and got on again. In Suva royal visitors have ceased to be a novelty. But Richard Crooks was of the Metropolitan Opera!
When the job of taking care of him fell to me I rather dreaded it, fearing that I had to deal with some sort of seraph. However, he turned out to be much more human than many grocers I have known. Lunching with us, he said he never ate much before concerts; but when Eloisa’s special crab casserole came on he helped himself twice and sighed, “That’s the best crab I ever ate.” Watching him eat, I was afraid that his voice would suddenly go back on him. When I brought him to my home from his hotel my Buick had had a puncture—and singers are highly sensitized. It didn’t seem to faze him. Then we were off for the concert hall—and the Buick had another puncture. I think about that time he was telling me that the Firestone Tire people were paying him $3,000 a broadcast. Apropos of punctures, perhaps.
The seraph sang; Handel, Haydn, Stradella, Moszkowski—I remember the composers, for I still keep that program. While Suva sat spellbound he topped the performance with Lehar’s “Yours Is My Heart Alone,” and the impresario was too emotionally touched to count the profits, which turned out to be something over £100. Many have been generous to our School, but his generosity came in the form of beauty, which made it doubly precious. He sang for me again in 1939, on his way to Sydney. When he repeated “Yours Is My Heart Alone” I was glad that my eyes were hidden behind tinted spectacles. That was my swan song in Fiji; I was going away in a few weeks.
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A misunderstanding prevented my visiting Tahiti, which would have fascinated me as a study of what not to do with a native people. The French are notoriously poor health administrators, and Tahiti has long been a model example of disease breeding among a dwindling population. I know nothing about it at first hand, but from what I have been told there is little hope for the remaining Polynesians there.
Perhaps this sounds pessimistic. The public health worker has often been called the Cinderella of the medical profession; he must get used to adversity, and his story too often ends before Prince Charming comes along. I have no complaint to make on that score. The work has never been drudgery, and the long waits for results have been rewarded according to my personal merits—and demerits. In medicine there is no such thing as the Perfect Result. We leave that to the Pelmanites.
I am no Cinderella, but I am worried because my readers may think of me as a sort of medical Cassandra, moaning doom for the Pacific peoples. If that is your impression, I feel that I must say a word to change your minds before I leave you.
Too many cocksure lecturers and writers have made a free-handed flourish from Borneo to Tahiti and proclaimed, “The people are dying off.” And they have referred to the main killers—alcohol; imported disease; food and clothing; the wreckage of their ancient habits with no wholesome and attractive substitutes to take their place.
All too true of the past, and mildly true of the present. I have told you how I watched the New Hebrides decline under a vicious form of colonial government, and how Rennell Island was blighted for lack of protection; and how the natives of the world’s second largest island, New Guinea, must inevitably fall off in numbers and weaken in physique unless their case is handled with more honesty and intelligence than the home Government has seen fit to give it.
All this is on the dark side of the canvas. Let’s look at the brighter picture. I quote myself, from an article in the Pacific Island Monthly:—“The problem of depopulation of natives in the Pacific need no longer exist. The formula for turning declining into increasing populations has been devised and put into operation by British Administrations in Central Polynesia, in Polynesian New Zealand, in British Micronesia (the Gilberts), and in Melanesian Fiji. American Samoans are increasing under the operation of the same general formula.”
The formula: Native doctors and nurses to care for current illnesses and educate their people in the prevention of disease, especially in soil sanitation and pure water supplies; attention to infant and child welfare; reliable census-taking to check results—all under the supervision of competent European physicians and nurses. Add to this a careful study of native customs on the part of civil administrations, so that they may learn respect for the more wholesome of the folk ways that have given life’s zest to the people.
Where this formula has been applied native populations have increased, and are continuing to increase. It has only failed where it has been pigeonholed by incompetents.
The work down there is unfinished, and may remain so until the horn of Judgment awakes some of the living dead. I have been only a very minor spoke in the Rockefeller Foundation’s great wheel of health, which moves with the Earth’s axis. I should like to see the task completed over that 6,000,000 square miles of island-sprinkled sea where I made the doctor’s rounds; but I know that Methuselah couldn’t live long enough to supervise that task. I only know that wherever we worked with progressive governments the vital statistics began to swing upward, however slowly and whatever the temporary setbacks. I have spoken little of the Maoris of New Zealand, for my only work there was concerned in making surveys. But as an example of the above formula, well carried out, let me say that the Maoris of New Zealand have almost doubled their numbers in twenty years. The Cook Islands have done fully as well. And there’s Western Samoa, which has outlived the filthy horrors of the Mau Rebellion, and has come back. The Fijians, too, have risen from the epidemic of 1918, which threatened their extinction. In the black islands of the Solomons nobody knows whether the birth rate is keeping pace with the mortality. We have treated these people on a grand scale and results are being shown in the generally improved condition of plantation labor; tuberculosis is still the reigning terror, and that’s a difficult enemy to cope with. In the Gilbert Islands the brown Micronesians are most certainly reviving; our N.M.P.’s have been working there for years.
Nineteen years ago, when I voyaged hurriedly through the Solomons on the way to my destiny in Fiji, I was already experienced enough to draw my fixed conclusion: Depopulation follows the visitor. The immortal Captain Cook guessed this over a hundred and fifty years ago. A century ago keen observers like George Turner marked the locust swarm of imported diseases, eating their way along the islands. But later, investigators broached a comfortable theory that the natives had begun to die off before the white man came. Nonsense. White men, in the malign form of looters and slavers, Spanish, Dutch and Portuguese, were there two hundred and fifty years before Cook came.
When I first saw the Solomon Islands they served as a type example. In the northwest islands near New Guinea, where shipping, trading, recruiting and missionizing were plentiful, the disease rate was high. As we traveled to the southeast into areas less accessible to visitors the so-called “native diseases” steadily diminished. Twelve years later showed me the change: The Southeast was sick from tuberculosis, dysentery, pneumonia and venereal, which strangers had carried there and spread among non-immune natives. I have mentioned the incidence of these seemingly unaccountable plagues, burning like fire in dry grass. The old-time voyagers, who did their share to spread infection, have noted the evil effects. These things are still going on in the remote corners of the Pacific.
The recruiting of contract labor was once a curse, but more enlightened government has turned it into something of a blessing; wise labor laws have made it so that a worker usually leaves the plantation with his health better than when he came. The New Hebrides, where French planters serve drink, drugs and firearms to their native helpers, is an exception.
There is a school of thought which points to the “decay of custom” as depopulation’s main cause. The native has ceased to take interest in a warrior’s physical well-being. The missions have discouraged those picturesque ancient ceremonials which were the background of tribal life. The Rivers Theory argues that boredom creates a psychic depression which actually decreases reproductive power; that it also encourages abortion and infanticide amidst the cry, “Why grow slaves for another race?” Undoubtedly this theory works out in some regions I have seen, where Christianity has been an ineffective substitute for the war club and the tribal dance. The warrior grows flabby. His wife, a squaw, slaves on.
But the main cause of depopulation in the Pacific, let me repeat, is the introduction of diseases to which the natives have no immunity. Even in the heart of Papua, where the Fathers of the Sacred Heart performed practical miracles among ferocious mountain cannibals a hundred miles from the coastline, working a non-malarious soil that produced bountiful nourishment, I heard the death-knell. I can’t forget how I heard Father Fastre’s bemused voice speaking under the moon: “Doctor, when I first came here I could stand at my doorway and see ten thousand people.” Where had they gone? The nearest village was four hours away, and from where he gazed the good priest saw only moonlit ghosts.
Cannibalism and head-hunting were rough blessings, because they quarantined tribe against tribe. Cannibalism is a shocking habit, as Herman Melville, if I remember correctly, pointed out, adding, “I ask whether the mere eating of human flesh so far exceeds in barbarity that custom [hanging, drawing and quartering, perhaps] which only a few years since was practiced in enlightened England?” I am not pro-cannibal, but medically speaking I can see how well it worked to keep the other fellow in his place.
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And what of it? asks Mr. Homebody as he walks toward the old parking lot off Main Street. How in the world will it affect me or the boys around American Legion Hall if those sun-kissed yahoos on the Isle of Gumbo do happen to curl up and die? Head-hunters are all right in side-shows, but they don’t affect business on Main Street.
Main Street is the very point, Mr. Homebody. I once told you how far-off contagions might someday travel to your front door and disturb your parochial calm. But here’s another side of it—something which might upset your business, because you’re a partner in world business, whether you know it or not.
The European seized the Pacific, and that’s an old story. In spite of the horrible example of bombing and burning which European civilization is showing today to the uncivilized, the settled holdings of various national governments over a quarter of the globe’s surface, the Pacific, must remain in statu quo. Unless it does, you will hear something you will not like, Mr. Homebody. The status quo over that vast empire is all-important, and it cannot be maintained unless the white man takes up his burden and carries it through.
Why? Because tropical products have become world business. The lands down there, including immense Australia, vast New Guinea and big New Zealand, make up a territory comparable in size to our Western Hemisphere. The failure of mines, plantations and fisheries on one side of our quarrelsome Earth cannot fail to react banefully on the other side. Copra, hemp, cotton, sugar, gold, spices, fruits, pearls, innumerable varieties of oils and drugs which have been discovered, or will be, are only items among the tropical products which have entered the international market. They are burdening ships in enormous quantities, and the tonnage will grow greater, unless....
If native labor fails, Oceania’s production will fail. Healthy, contented native labor is indispensable to the producer. The importation of Asiatics will not answer the question. Regard the Fiji Government’s experiment with East Indians, who are today outbreeding the Fijian, and have brought him no benefits. Observe Japan’s taking-over of the Marshall Islands, and the subsequent infiltration of yellow men all over the Pacific. These strangers came because the native was too sick to work the land. The oriental’s peaceful penetration is already doing mischief down there; he brought with him a set of political and social ideas which inevitably hook up with his homeland prejudices, and extend into every intrigue of Weltpolitik. He has nothing in common with the simple islander whom he is pushing aside.
What will come of it all? Supply and demand are cruel partners. The planter must work his plantation, the shipper fill his ships; and if there is not enough healthy native labor to do the work, then send away to Shanghai or Bombay for what you can get. These fellows may not last long, either, but they will stay long enough to disturb the economic balance. South Sea industry will grow anemic, an easy prey to whatever Axis happens to be grinding blood out of the human race.
That, Mr. Homebody, will mean another war; and even if you are a year or two too old for military service, your Main Street will rumble with the jar of an economic balance overthrown. Before that breaks right in front of your office building, maybe you will agree with the Rockefeller Foundation’s theory of economics. Keep the native alive, restore his health, give him enough European knowledge to fend him against the evils of Europe, then he will go happily ahead cultivating the soil for the world and himself.
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Perhaps in these pages I have dwelt too much on the savagery of certain backward tribes. Have I said enough about the self-sufficing social pattern which these so-called barbarians had built around themselves before the pale invader came to fuddle them? Have I said enough of the ideal family life and wise social laws that prevailed over old Polynesia? It needed no British or American schoolmaster to teach them the kindness and neighborly generosity that are the aim of higher civilization. They had these things, which are at the heart of social happiness.
Definitely, I am not a Cassandra. The islander, I feel, will survive to achieve great things in a brave new world. Already he has contributed to science and statecraft, and in some cases has dominated in a business world which yesterday was a closed book to him. He will make his way in the arts, literature, music, painting. He had been misled and fooled for generations, but his intellect is overcoming an inferiority complex which the pale overlord once foisted on him. Island governments have become humane and understanding, more missionaries are letting fanaticism yield to common sense. Utopia is always a long way off, but I’ll risk a prophecy. Guide the native with sympathetic intelligence, and the time will come when he will cease to be our pupil. He will become our teacher. Not in the science of war, God deliver us, but in the more difficult art of living together in harmony and peace.
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So the Lamberts have bought a house in California. Eloisa tells me that she will soon have the best rose garden in Walnut Creek. We are a bit too far inland to see the Pacific; but I can feel it, over in the west. Fiji doesn’t seem so far away.
THE END