A Yankee doctor in paradise

by S. M. Lambert

CHAPTER VII

WHERE NEW GUINEA WAS NEW

Rounding the northern edge of the great island you come upon the Territory of New Guinea, which was German New Guinea until 1914, when Australia took it over. To simplify the confusion in a few words: the eastern half of the island is Australian-governed, divided into Papua and the Territory. The western half (roughly half) is Dutch New Guinea. That was how the land lay in 1921. Perhaps the horrors of the Second World War will change its geography again.

In May, 1921, when I boarded the Melusia, bound for Rabaul, the capital, our decks and cabins were thronged with seventy officials of the civil government, coming in to relieve a military government of evil repute. The newcomers were centered by the Administrator, Brigadier-General Evan Alexander Wisdom, C.B., C.M.G., D.S.O., V.D., whom his King later adorned with an added set of initials and a knighthood. Despite this alphabet train, General Wisdom had a character that went well with his name. He was an Australian Scot, veteran of Gallipoli and the French campaign. I felt that he was a man who could listen to reason and exercise his own. He needed all he had, for he was setting out to face a tangle which would have confused King Solomon.

The physicians he had brought with him for public health work were competently educated men, but inexperienced in tropical diseases. Colonel Honman, the new Chief Medical Officer, was another Aussie-Scot I didn’t forget in a day. A hard-crusted, soft-hearted old regular, all he knew about tropical medicine was what he had learned as personal physician to Prime Minister Billy Hughes. He wasn’t afraid of liquor or anything else. For seven months I was to be very close to Honman, and to love him for his contradictory qualities.

Aboard ship I had no sooner met him than he suggested that I give them a talk on malaria. I felt that here on the Melusia it might be of service to the incoming officials. That night they gathered on the main deck and I told them of my experiences with the disease. How the Anopheles punctulatus, whose female is more deadly than the male, travels in the Pacific with mankind in his restless journeying from village to village, from island to island. How I had run my fingers under the lower ribs of thousands of natives and felt the sagging spleen which tells the tale. I went into a subject which the medical men present knew as well as I did—through book knowledge: blackwater fever. This quickly fatal disease gets its name from the dark coloration of bloody urine, caused by the oxidization of hemoglobin, and the bladder condition is called hemoglobinuria.

I had found very few cases of genuine blackwater fever, I told them. Even when it occurs the patient is often dead before diagnosis. The condition, when it comes, is frequently caused by a blind misuse of quinine. Malarial people sometimes neglect the remedy for a couple of months, then swallow a handful. And here I tried to drive home my favorite point. I even had the temerity to quote a German; the world-renowned Dr. Robert Koch had come to New Guinea in 1910 and proved, for the first time in medical history, that epidemic malaria can be reduced by quinine alone. Here I took my chance to say that in fever-bitten countries quinine in regular moderate doses is an absolute necessity. Liquor is no substitute. If you abuse your constitution with a daily dozen bottles of beer or a habitual quart of whisky, don’t cry “blackwater fever.” A white man in the tropics can remain as healthy as in the temperate zones, provided he exercises and takes care of himself.

Wasn’t it Kate Douglas Wiggin who said, “It is hard to be agreeable and instructive at the same time”? However, most of the medical men seemed to like the talk. I heard one District Officer for the Admiralty saying, “This quinine business is all bloody nonsense.” Perhaps I had gone afoul of his prejudice. You can’t talk quinine without arousing some bitter criticisms.

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In contrast to Papua’s bleak capital I found Rabaul a picture of tropical delight: regular streets were bordered with poinciana, royal palms, coconut palms; betel-nut palms raised graceful, slender stems and flaunted their feathery tops just above clusters of fruit that were like hothouse grapes; Indian laurels loomed graciously over thriving fig trees. The Germans had drained all this land, relieved it of mosquitoes, planted the groves; they had set Government House on a fine eminence overlooking a stretch of water that might have been a Scottish lake.

Rabaul was an extremely shaky Garden of Eden, geologically and politically. Jolly earthquakes came and went with seismic whimsicality, and were so frequent that every hotel, house and office had its heavy furniture lashed to the walls. Otherwise, one might have waked up any morning and found a large German wardrobe in one’s lap. Right inside Rabaul’s port, Vulcan Island was a particularly bad actor. The Reverend George Brown, the fighting missionary, records its beginning back in 1878 when it blew the twenty-mile channel full of pumice; thousands of boiled fish were washed ashore, and great sea turtles with their tortoise-shell cooked to a pulp. The next big show was in 1937, when Vulcan covered the town with ashy vomit; after that there was talk of moving the capital, but the colonial becomes a fatalist. He has to be.

One morning in 1921 I saw some lumber that had been piled on Vulcan go scattering into the sea like a box of matches, and I saw the huge sheet-iron D.H. & P.G. store curl like a withered leaf. After that Eloisa and I agreed that at the next tremor we’d pick up little Harriette and make for the hills.... And let’s not forget two very wicked “Shaker ladies,” two tall peaks about three miles from town on the mainland, and officially named Mother and Daughter. On the night of Vulcan’s birth there was a volcanic growl at the mouth of the Bay, and in the morning Vulcan loomed from the sea, shoved 600 feet from the water and venomous as a newborn cobra. Vulcan is now popularly known as “The Bastard,” and so he will be called until he takes a notion to sink again.

******

Where Papua with her probable 500,000 natives had five official medical men, New Guinea Territory, equally populous, had eight or ten government doctors to serve it. The hospital at Rabaul I found especially well equipped, thanks to a retired German medical staff. The Australians had adopted a German expedient. Well-trained orderlies, under the supervision of medical officers, were sent out to run the lesser hospitals. These orderlies were called “lik-lik doctors” or “small doctors”—lik-lik means “little.” They had a high sense of duty and were remarkably competent. When I was there the natives were being trained simply in bandaging, treating sores and administering physic; then they were given a uniform cap and lavalava and sent back to their villages to apply their useful knowledge. They had the title of “Tultul” and their salary was a pound or so a year.

The Medical Tultul was a modest beginning in an important system that was destined to go on. I had studied the mind of the higher type Melanesian and had begun to see that he was far from a fool. I had watched the work of my head boys in the field—men like Ahuia, for instance. What except race prejudice stood in the way of their being educated in medicine and equipped to practise among their own people, whose language and customs no white physician would ever understand?

Even in those days I heard reports of the more progressive Fiji Islands where for a long time they had been giving a sketchy medical training to Melanesians. Most of the South Pacific received the idea with a cynical smile. In Papua I had broached the plan of sending out picked natives, under the direction of laymen, to administer yaws and hookworm treatments over a country so vast that the few white doctors were ridiculously inadequate to cover it. This plan was later adopted. In the Territory of New Guinea I had still better luck; crusty old Colonel Honman had sufficient faith in me to permit the experiment at once. The black boys I chose and instructed in the administration of oil of chenopodium proved remarkably useful, considering the inadequacy of their training.

Conditions we had to meet were similar to those in Papua, only the people were far nearer to the Stone Age than were most of the Papuan natives. Cannibalism was still practised within forty miles of Rabaul. We had to move cautiously out in the bush, but we never carried firearms—with the exception of Chris Kendrick, who faced one or two situations where a pistol proved a very useful tool.

New Guinea Territory, in fact, was at that time harder to deal with than it was before the abrupt political change of 1914. The coastal native, more sophisticated than his brother of the jungle, was dumbly wondering what had become of the Germans, who had ruled them well, all things considered. Natives had been servants of the padroons, and had learned to like them. And what was this new set of white men with a new set of laws which they seemed unable to enforce?

The military administration, which came in with the first World War and lasted for seven years, was a great political blunder, as the best minds of Australia knew from the first; but what could be done about it until Billy Hughes’s home Government decided on something less fantastic? The whole business had the nasty look of any sudden political overturn.

Long before 1885, when the Kaiser’s Government officially occupied German New Guinea, his thrifty subjects had been working the plantations. This was no pumped-up Sudetenland, for the Germans were honestly in control. They were good planters who studied the soil under tropical conditions on this favored side of the big island. Their colonial treasury showed a surplus; they had increased their acres and become rich padroons; they lived luxuriously. Their Governor’s Palace at Rabaul (which the new military administration seized) was a fine example of tropical architecture. Out of a fever-ridden swamp they had made a Rabaul that was malaria-free.

In our time Germany has committed so many crimes against civilization that a crime against Germany may be worth putting on record. Its criminality reacted on all concerned, and especially on hordes of young war veterans whom the Australian Government “rewarded” with free grants of land.

I was settled in Rabaul and enjoying the generous privileges which Colonel Honman gave me in the fine German-made hospital when I learned some details of that military occupation, which a hard working civil administration was by now trying to live down. Everybody was talking about a scandal which compared with our own postbellum days in the South. Field-tried old soldiers were referring with scorn to the “Coconut Anzacs” whom Australia, for lack of better men, had sent to take possession in 1914. The Coconut Anzacs seemed to have been mostly men who hadn’t gone to the real war, for one reason or another—raw amateurs without the slightest sense of discipline. Military power inspired many to wanton acts of cruelty and the stupidest sort of blunders.

My daring young man Byron Beach was eyewitness to one outrage. He presented himself as a medical officer to a punitive expedition, and was taken along. A company of Coconut Anzacs had been sent out to chasten a native village, accused of cannibalism. Led by a hard-drinking officer, himself frightened of the poor, scared cannibals, the troops surrounded a certain inland village to teach the black beggars a lesson. Maybe they were pretty drunk when they proceeded to shoot up everything they saw. Men were shot as they ran, women and children were gunned out of trees. Beach saw the leader of the party put a pistol to the head of a girl who lay flat on the ground.

And next day the commanding officer found that he had made a little mistake. He had attacked the wrong village.

Another expedition went to see about a German anthropologist who lived alone in the bush. He had been there for years and had a way of locking his books and papers in the little house and going away on tours of research. When war was declared he was so far away from his home base that he didn’t hear the news. In his absence the frenzied patriots broke down his door, found great stacks of carefully written papers and made a bonfire of them. They didn’t understand German, and the writing looked like spy stuff. On his return the scientist found his lifework reduced to ashes. They say he went crazy.

Maybe the new civil government was too bitter, looking over the mischief the military administration had wrought. There had been a great deal of aimless sabotage. For instance, they had demolished the apparatus in the great radio station. The excuse was that it might be sending messages to Berlin. It hadn’t occurred to the conquerors that they might save these costly things for their own use.

Now what to do with the German planters? Prime Minister Hughes’s Territorial Government was taking care of that. When I established myself at Rabaul in 1921 the farce was in full swing, and through no fault of Governor Wisdom’s, who had to make the best of a policy already framed. The policy was starkly this: Encourage the thrifty Germans to improve their land with the promise that they might retain it. In 1921 something called an Expropriation Board arrived, called in the anxious Germans, and gave them vouchers enabling them to sell their property back to the Territory, at their own valuation. But when the Germans turned in these vouchers the Territory’s Treasury Department paid for them in orders on the German Government—to be applied on Australia’s reparations claim!

Bankrupt Germans were selling their household goods for anything they could get. During my stay in New Guinea it was a commonplace to see vessels departing for Australia, laden with pictures, rugs, silverware. Returning ships were bringing back the same old load: hard liquor and fresh contingents of war veterans to stray into the plantations, sicken and go home.

Liquor and malaria, malaria and liquor—a vicious circle to worry the public health physician. These brave soldiers, who never wanted to hear the word “war” again, were taking Billy Hughes’s advice: “Just go to New Guinea and pick out a fine plantation.” They didn’t know how to eat, drink or live in the tropics. There were many stories, funny and sad. One returned soldier was blithely dumped on the beach and sent to the wilds with nothing more substantial than a case of tinned beef, a case of mixed pickles and six cases of beer. Babes in the wood, what did they know about malaria? Men who should have known said to them, “Shaky in the morning? Then scoff off a tot of whisky or a bottle of beer, and you’ll feel fit as a fiddle.” Green as grass, the poor fellows thought that coconuts grew underground like potatoes or on vines like grapes. They starved, they drank, they let the natives take advantage of their ignorance. They swallowed the popular “fever cure” and finally tottered back to the returning ship—if they could.

I looked over the annual import of alcoholic beverages—beer 102,204 gallons, spirits 7,534 gallons, wines 1,500 gallons, stout 1,056 gallons. This was to serve a European population totaling 1,265. The natives didn’t drink, and you must discount the women, children and missionaries.

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I was hardly established in Rabaul when Colonel Honman began urging me to take full charge of the hospital. That was a flattering offer, which I at first declined. Between my medical units and myself, we had to make some sense out of the half million neglected natives we had come there to study. But I shall never forget the grand old Colonel’s morning calls at my house. A soldier to the bone, he never complained, but I could see that he was suffering from “New Guinea fever”—in short, he needed a pick-me-up. It was a habit of my neighbors to borrow a bottle of whisky in the morning, return it at noon, and borrow it again at night. But Colonel Honman always drank his tonic on the spot. Without a word I would administer the usual dose, a drinking glass filled one third with gin and the other two thirds with French and Italian vermouth. Straight as a ramrod he’d toss it off, smack satisfied lips over his double row of false teeth, and bellow, “We breed men in Australia!”

He had a leather stomach, a golden heart and a head that nothing seemed to affect. Already we were sympathizing with Governor Wisdom’s job, for he was breaking up a racket which was as crude as any invented by Brooklyn union leaders. It was the bird of paradise racket—which may sound fantastic, but it was there, and had been ever since the military administration did its worst for New Guinea. In German days it had been customary for newcomers to shoot and sell enough birds to earn the price of a plantation. But the new Territorial Government passed a law to protect the birds. Like all prohibitions this invited bootleggers who, like all bootleggers, were followed by highjackers. It was so easy to make a rich kill and pass it across the Dutch border, where there were no game-protection laws!—and very convenient for a Chinese trader to wait on the Dutch side and pay cash for the bag. Or you could smuggle the feathered pelts into the hands of a ship’s steward. Stewards were getting rich; one of them was able to run thoroughbreds on the track.

District Officers were up to their necks in poaching. One of them came back from the Dutch border with £10,000 in his pocket. He started for Sydney, fell ill on the boat and had to be taken off at Cairns. A sympathetic friend offered to take the easy money to the invalid’s family. The “friend” was a highjacker, of course, and had arranged a clever get-away. The poacher died in the hospital.

District Officers had been up to many things never dreamed of in the philosophy of Tammany Hall. One of them revived “blackbirding,” the old-time slavery. He got a little island offshore, made raids on natives, stored his prisoners there and proceeded to sell them in job lots. When this human meat ran short through brisk sales the official used his police authority and arrested a lot more. Several succeeding District Officers went in for this thriving trade. The military administration tried to break it up. There were some records, for the Keop (District Officer) always made the deals look very legal. But when the Military Governor demanded these records, a handy filing clerk confessed that they had been mislaid.

These abuses were on the wane when Wisdom stepped in, but, even so, he had inherited a pretty kettle of fish. Colonel Honman’s principal worry was a lack of doctors who knew anything about tropical medicine. If I didn’t take over the hospital, he said, he’d have to draft my services. Well, he did finally.

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My right and left hands, Bill Tully and Chris Kendrick, were still with me. Without those two I could never have got through Melanesia. As laboratory assistant Bill used his fine eyes at the microscope, to supplement my dull ones. I had Kenny Fooks too, always good for a barefoot excursion into the swamps, gifted with a constitution that kept him plump through months of hardship. And there was young Byron Beach, an erratic fund of energy. I had picked up two new inspectors, very competent men, whom I had sent out with the other field units. I took out a unit of my own. Between us, we swept north and east over the big hook formed by New Britain and New Ireland; we traveled west under the Equator to Manus and the Admiralty Group; west again to the string of flyspecks, Marou and Ninigo, Matty and Ana.

Chris Kendrick, through fat and lean—usually lean—remained his quiet, reliable self. After his long absences in the bogs and streams and jungles, he’d show up smiling and slap down his neatly written reports, pregnant with a Britisher’s genius for understatement. “Had to climb face of cliff. Waited between jumps till surf stopped pouring over it, then jumped again. Tricky business.” “Horse broke leg in volcanic rock. Had to shoot him. Too bad, fine animal.” “Had to use a lawyer-vine stick on black assistant. First time I ever struck a native. The lik-lik doctor here brought me a boy he said had beri-beri. It proved to be a champion hookworm case. In 5 days counted 1,237 worms. Dosed him again in a week. Chenopodium very slow. Got only 25 first dose. Second yielded 1,122. Score going up. Left assistant in charge of patient, instructions to watch stools. When I got back I was annoyed to find that the idiot had thrown the whole mess away. Jungle housekeeping. I might have recovered 4,000 worms.” This item gave me a bitter laugh. Things like that have happened to us so often, with ill-trained assistants.

When Chris was with me in New Britain I saw him severely bitten—by a parrot, pet of the Samoan wife of a German planter. Chris was busy making friends when the bird nipped him square across the nose. I treated it, and Chris’s diary tersely records: “You never know what to expect down here.”

He jotted down one item which a garrulous explorer might have turned into a chapter, and a thrilling one:—

Alone with native crew, big, sulky devils. Couldn’t understand trouble. Maybe short on food. They turned on me, with spears and paddles. Covered them with my service pistol, but was a bit nervy for fear 2 or 3 would get me from behind. Finally the D.O. showed up with police. It was rather tricky.

One day en route Kenny Fooks lost his temper and told a coastwise skipper what he thought of him. The skipper retaliated by dumping Kenny off on a sort of desert island. Nothing to do for weeks but count the sparse hookworms and write a weather report. Most of that diary read: “June 14, weather fine.” “June 21, weather still fine.” “July 1, weather cloudy.” “July 9, raining like hell and glad of it.” My other inspectors were more active, and I had to scold Byron Beach occasionally for his daredevil tendencies. But he was learning fast and his young vitality made him a splendid worker. My new acquisitions were W. J. McErlane and R. V. Sunners. Fooks and Beach were later sent to the mainland, and McErlane covered the field in Bougainville, an island far to the east and formerly part of the Solomons. These men were not heard from for half a year.

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I had been studying pidgin English for nearly a year, but had not reached the point where I could use it in my lectures, as I knew I must. Until I had mastered the idiom I had to depend on a faithful interpreter. Therefore I chose a very cross-eyed native named Jerope; I got him because nobody else in Rabaul seemed to want him. Jerope was so cross-eyed that when he poured my coffee I had to follow the spout with my cup, otherwise he would have poured it in my lap. He was a bush fellow with none of Ahuia’s sophistication, and was obsessed by every witch and devil that flies over the Pacific. Before I could take him into the field he got himself arrested for stealing a red lantern off a sewer-digging in Rabaul. When the judge asked him what he wanted with a red lantern he blandly explained. He thought the white men had put them on the streets so that natives could use them to scare off devils. For everybody knows that devils won’t attack a man with a lantern.

Jerope languished awhile in jail and improved his education. Because the boy was brighter than the average the Keop who ruled the jail put him in charge of the bulla-ma-cows (cattle herd) and Jerope was faithful to his trust. The day I called and accused him of milking the cows, his eyes crossed in great sadness when he replied, “No, master, him no woman cow, him man cow.”

Jerope was not a mission boy; he despised their kind for a lot of sissies. Once when we were inspecting Ninigo away up in the northeast we had with us a well-known English anthropologist, nephew of a great one. Like the Catholic missionaries he had a soft voice and a full beard. He was far too dainty. The Australians called him “Birdie” because he wore a feather in his Alpine hat. Birdie shrank from cold baths, so every morning he minced back and forth across the deck, carrying a little bowl of hot water for his tub. Once when the bowl-bearing Birdie minced by, Jerope turned and spat into the sea. “Him mission!” he growled.

From a medical point of view the Ninigo group was interesting. I made a count of palpable spleens and found an index of 54 per cent; considerable malaria for so remote a spot. In fact this was about the same proportion that I found among the assorted natives brought to the hospital in Rabaul. Hookworm, on the other hand, was only 8.4 per cent as against 74.2 for the whole Territory. Why? Because the group was made up of narrow atolls, where the beaches were the latrines and the tide carried the infecting material away. Malaria and elephantiasis are both mosquito diseases (if you can call elephantiasis a disease—it is merely a symptom of filarial infection). On one of the islands here I saw a woman’s breasts so enlarged that when she sat they touched the ground.

Ninigo might serve as a type example of a region with no protection against the insect carriers that are today scattering plague among all the sons of Adam. Rapid transit, open ports, borders wide open.... It’s the same old story, to us of the Health Service.

Do you remember the alarm of ten years ago—how our most modern instrument of speed, the airplane, had carried the deadly Anopheles gambiae from Natal in Africa across to Brazil? Brazil was too busy with a revolution to fool with mosquitoes until three or four years later when death-without-bullets felled the population in wet areas. Fortunately the infection reached a comparatively dry belt, so that the mosquitoes were slowed up. Then Brazil joined with the Rockefeller Foundation in a gigantic campaign. In 1939 a million dollars was spent down there, and this year they expect to double that sum in an attempt to check the scourge before it spreads, heaven knows how far....

Dr. Marshall Barber, the great authority on malaria, says: “There is no doubt that this invasion of gambiae threatens the Americas with a catastrophe in comparison with which ordinary pestilence, conflagration or even war are but small and temporary calamities.” I have had no experience with the gambiae in my corner of the tropics: but I am using him as a bogie to make a point. How tropical are “tropical diseases”? Germs and worms love to visit around. The northern-born influenza has swept away thousands in the South Pacific; neglected, its germ may bide its time for a plunge back into the North. Amoebic dysentery is a “tropical disease”—yes, and a few years ago it appeared in Chicago. The distinctly tropical filariasis (often manifested in elephantiasis) has been identified in several cases in an incomplete survey of the Carolinas. Dr. Boyd, investigating in Florida, asserted that our temperate-climate mosquito can carry a tropical strain of malaria. I saw how inguinal (venereal) granuloma spread from island to island in the Pacific; recently I was not surprised to hear of cases in the United States. Leprosy, which curses the Polynesian, was brought to him by the oriental; the Polynesian may pass it around—there is plenty of it in New York today. The white man gave tuberculosis to the black Solomon Islander, who awaits an opportunity to return the generous gift.

A few millions of Rockefeller dollars, a few hundreds of Rockefeller scientists, have gone forth into the seed-beds of disease, to work and study, and cure, if possible. I say this for the benefit of smug stay-at-homes who ask us, “Why do you waste your time and money on these niggers, who live in another world from ours?” Yes, but do they? Our little planet is moving faster every day. If sanitarians go on bungling their way through bogs and forests and mountains, maybe it is to save you from a peck of trouble some fine morning, Mr. Homebody. Or at least we can wave the danger flag.

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In the Kaiser’s day, I was told, the German planters sent to Ninigo to replenish their harems. Certainly the people were terribly thinned out. I found an island where they were reduced to thirteen, one girl and twelve men; and all eaten with venereal granuloma. The Hermit Islands had lost their hermit; a friendly planter had taken off the last inhabitant, a healthy young fellow who became a personal servant, too gentle to meet the invasion.

The Admiralty Group is north of the mainland, under the Equator. Manus, a fairly large island, is the center of a wealth of little dots. Some villages here were built over water in the Venetian style of Gaile. Paradoxically, the women were chaste, domestically speaking, yet in Manus I found the only public prostitution I ever saw in the South Pacific. It was an ancient custom here. Discouraged by the Germans, it had come back under the military administration. The incoming civil administration crushed it for a while; but when I was there the custom was flourishing again.

Manus had a certain Gaile-like charm, especially noticeable in the houses. Your canoe entered in the front through a covered opening, so low and narrow that once in you had to crawl on hands and knees. The object of this was simple and practical; if you were an enemy you could be conveniently clubbed as you poked your head into the living room. The houses set aside for young girls were quaint, too. With almost Spanish sternness the maidens were watched over by local duennas, and were carefully caged to the age of puberty. After sunset they were permitted to take the air, still under guard. At first I thought that this was the Manus method of preserving chastity; then I found that it was a mere matter of complexion. Indoor living bleached the skin, and in Manus a pale young bride was quoted at rather a high figure.

A weakness for canoes increased my fondness for this pretty Admiralty Group. I snatched every minute to drop my trouble in the serenity of bright lagoons; great Manus outriggers were wide enough to hold comfortable deckhouses below their coco sails.

Contrast this lagoon-bound holiday with my return trip on the cutter Siar, a capable craft with a capable captain; Skipper Bell was the best of the Australian type, raw-boned, handsome, brave. We had reached the New Hanover Group when a hurricane came down on us with a sudden ferocity that seemed to bring sea and sky together. That we stayed afloat those three mad days is one of God’s mercies. Our engine was drowned out, we lost all sense of direction, all sense of everything except what was needed to hang on and pray—or swear. When a calm came, almost as violently sudden as the storm, we found that we had drifted over reefs and banks and heaven knows what—we had been blown clean around the large island of New Hanover and were lying in an inlet between it and New Ireland, which we had passed three days before. There wasn’t a dry thing on the boat; our cookstove had been doused with the first wave that swept over us.

I have been caught in more tropical storms than I can remember, but this was the worst. With quaking Jerope and such of my gear as I had recovered I went ashore and flagged a schooner bound for Rabaul. Bell and his staunch little ship deserved a better fate than that which later overtook them. The battered Siar was towed to Sydney, where she fell a-prey to a favorite island trick: the calkers stopped the leaks with concrete, to save the expense of honest calking. On the return voyage she struck another storm and went down like a flatiron—with poor Bell at the wheel. He was a fine, clean young man who adored his pretty new bride. Well, he was one of the many.

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My American medicine frequently competed with native witchcraft, which though it was never an open challenge, was something I felt all around me. Here and there I would catch whispers of this and that laborer who had sickened and died in the field; some puri-puri doctor had “pointed a bone” at him. Belief in magic, black and white, had penetrated into some odd places.

There’s an elegant little chain of islands off New Britain which old-timers called “Queen Emma’s Kingdom.” Emma was a self-made queen, the half-caste Polynesian daughter of an American consul. She bought a domain for a few guineas and made a prince consort out of the German nobleman she married. Her descendants were educated in European schools, married Europeans of good family, and came home to enjoy their share in the inherited kingdom. I talked with one of these descendants, a lady who knew Wagnerian opera and Ibsen plays. When it came to medicine her faith was all bound up in the old family witch doctor. Earnestly she told me about some herbs which worked the medically impossible. She was offended at my incredulous smile when I transposed from what Lincoln said of General Grant: “I’d like to know the bottle he gets it from.”

No wonder, then, that cross-eyed Jerope was anxious to carry a lantern after dark.

One evening we paused for rest on the tangled brow of a high mountain in New Britain. Incidentally, that had been a most interesting day; I had found rather puzzling evidence of modern sanitation. The tribe here was fierce, savage, cannibalistic—and surprisingly free of intestinal parasites. At some risk I searched behind the village houses and found latrines as scientifically constructed as if endorsed by the International Health Board! The pits were dug twenty-five to thirty feet into the soil, and over them was a support of timber. The deposit fell so far underground that hookworm larvae had no opportunity to invade the surface. The common housefly, bearer of dysentery and typhoid, dared not penetrate that dark well. Rude screens separated the men’s latrine from the women’s. My compliments to the wise old witch doctor who invented that.

Byron Beach had been to this mountain before me, with a punitive expedition, armed to chasten man-eating. They had climbed 7,000 feet and had forced themselves among tribes that had never before looked on a white face. Beach reported that every village he entered had been equipped with these deep cesspits. They were not mere archaic ornaments, either; the people were using them.

I tried to find out who had taught them, but all I got was “It is the fashion.” I had to remember what the immortal Captain Cook said of the New Zealand Maoris when he first saw them—that this primitive people were obeying sanitary laws when the housewives of Paris and Madrid were emptying chamber pots into the streets. It set me thinking. Was not the islander, before the whites came to unsettle his traditions, reasonably self-preserving in his daily habits? My visits to lost Rennell Island, some years later, confirmed the theory.

But that evening, lolling on the mountain brow, I talked with Jerope about dream magic and heard the beginning of a story which, when it was finished, touched me deeply. I looked up and saw that his crossed eyes were not funny any more.

I had asked him if evil spirits could “walk along dreams” and curse you while you were awake. Oh, yes, master, they could do that. But devil-devils can do your dreams great favors, he said. He gazed crookedly at the sunset and told me, quietly as you tell of a proposed subway trip, how tonight in his dream he would visit his mother in the little local heaven. He explained the witch charm which would bring this about. From a great magician, who had been to the Evil One’s home on the wild Sepik River, Jerope had bought the skin of a great bat, the enchanted flying fox that could carry you into the land of the dead. “Tonight,” he said, “I shall burn the bat’s hairs and paint the ashes on my eyes. Then I shall go.”

Next morning I asked him if he had gone to his mother. Yes, he had gone; and he told me how, earnestly:—

“Master, me fastem head belong bat close under head belong me, then rub eye belong me along ashes and make fass (shut) eye belong me, and then me tink, and tink, and tink, then me like sleep....”

Jerope’s head had begun to whirl then—“Me all a same pidgeon.” The flying fox became a swift-winging god. “He catch me allesame pickaninny. Me hang on fass too much, then he go up and up and he go quick-feller too much. Him quick allesame nothing.

“Bym-by me come along place where Mamma belong me stop; this one place belong people who die finish.” Heaven was filled with Jerope’s dead kinsmen. “Master, this place he good feller too much. All man he got good feller garden, good feller house, plenty dog, plenty pig. Mamma belong me he come, he kiss me.” (Throughout he referred to Mamma as “he,” which is correct pidgin.) “Now me go inside along house belong him. Mamma he got good feller house too much, and yam he big one allesame tree. Suppose altogether people along Heaven he like kaikai fish, he tink, dass all, and good feller fish he must come along saucepan. Man dis place, Mamma dis place he no can work. Suppose Mamma like ’em something; he tink, dass all, and altogether something he tink, he must come.... Dis heaven belong Mamma him good feller too much!”

I made no attempt to deny anything, his whole tone was so convincing. He hadn’t been dreaming; he had been there and seen a worn old woman having the fine rewards that come by wishing.