CHAPTER X
KING SOLOMON’S GOLD
New Guinea was my jumping off place for the Solomon Islands, and “jumping off” well describes my first trip around that great island chain. I had only a few weeks to work in, and to draw conclusions which were to lead up to years of campaigning along 700 miles of that wild archipelago. If you will recall George Fulton, the man in evening dress whom I met in a smelly trader’s store, you will remember his half-promise to send me down to lost Rennell Island on the Lever Brothers’ yacht. Well, he had kept his promise—with reservations—and I was at last on the Levers’ Koonakarra, heading southeast. I had planned to go on the Government’s Bellama, but she was wrecked in a hurricane. To be transferred to George Fulton’s boat seemed like a stroke of luck. Now I could see Rennell Island....
It was nine years before I saw Rennell, for the very good reason that George Fulton didn’t want me to see it. He had changed his mind since I talked with him. Rennell might turn out to be a phosphate island, one of those volcanic freaks which quantities of bird guano and submersion in sea water have loaded with valuable crystalline fertilizer. Fulton didn’t want Rockefeller people snooping around his potential bonanza. A few years later he found that Rennell’s wealth was just another myth of King Solomon’s gold.
Alvaro Mendaña, who found these islands in 1568, returned to Spain and told King Philip that he had discovered the place where King Solomon got his gold. Philip rewarded the naughty liar by sending him on a second expedition; but when he returned to the isles of specious wealth he found that they had disappeared. Just another case of bad Renaissance navigation, but Mendaña died hunting for the vanished Solomons. They were lost for 200 years. Monsieur de Bougainville found them again in 1768.
As far as Rennell Island was concerned, for a long while I felt that I had been cheated of my gold. It was not idle curiosity which drew me toward that mysterious spot. If the people had been, as George Fulton said, “practically untouched for ages,” I might find there a clue to the origin of the Polynesian race. Many of the ancient invasions have been traced through the evidence of the hookworm. The public health physician, you see, must be a bit of an anthropologist, a bit of a politician and a bit of a historian....
But I had to wait until 1930 to see Rennell Island.
The Koonakarra of 1921 was so busy trading, recruiting and supervising plantations that I had to pick up what information I could get between stops. I had an opportunity to draw one large conclusion: that natives from the big islands to the north, near the infesting trade routes, were much the more heavily diseased. Disease diminished steadily as we moved down toward the less frequented parts. My superficial look at a population which, for lack of an accurate census, was estimated at 100,000, verified my theory: Epidemics are the fruits of island hospitality.
In those days little could be done to improve conditions. That group of a half-dozen enormous islands, and the many little outlying ones, was served by one lone Medical Officer, and some missionary doctors who strove with a bravery against conditions that should have broken their valiant spirits.
Among the unsung heroes—but no missionary—was my friend J. C. Barley, Oxford M.A., who had voluntarily given his life to a God-forsaken post at Kirakira. In his jungle house he was like something out of Kipling, dressing for the evening, having his spot of gin and bitters before dinner, his sound cigar afterward. He might have gone anywhere in the colonial service, for as a young Oxonian he had outranked hundreds in competitive examinations. But he was too clean a sportsman to play politics. His passion for ethnology and his affectionate responsibility for the natives kept him where he was. He had become the people’s advocate, and knew more about the Solomons than any official report could ever tell. His trips for inspection and research were his only relief from solitude.
I only speak of Barley because he was so useful to my future work and because of pleasant memories of his charming mind; in fact I should not write at all of this brief survey, except that I wish to point out a few spots where in later years I returned and marked the changes wrought by contact with the outer world.
Bill Tully and I worked mostly at night, lecturing by lantern light. The ship would be off in the early morning. At Star Harbour on San Cristoval, the largest island on the unfrequented southeast, the naked people carried candlenut torches as they wound down the mountain trail. It was like something out of “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream,” that twisting stream of light. Few traders and no missionaries had come to them, and they showed a low rate of infection. A friendly, backward Negroid people, they were endangered by their own hospitality. Charley One Arm, the policeman, our fierce black guide, couldn’t understand us when we refused the temporary gift of two island daughters. I went away dreading what might happen when more trading ships came in.
Santa Ana lay so near that one of their canoes, bastard ebony with mother-of-pearl insets, could take you there in an hour or two. Yet the Santa Ana folk were light-skinned and their features almost Caucasian. They wore bones in their noses and shark’s teeth around their necks. There was more trading, hence more hookworm. I gave treatments to Trader Kuper’s two little half-caste sons. It was a good investment, and later I shall tell you why.
Graciosa Bay was so wild that Mr. Mathews, Lever Brothers’ representative who had lived there fifteen years with an armed guard, warned us not to come ashore. With knives and fishhooks we lured a few of the untamed to come aboard the launch and be examined. In fifteen years the population had dropped from 3,000 to 500. Somehow, in spite of their savagery, they had allowed vicious malaria and tuberculosis to get in.
Near-by Reef Island showed a different, lighter breed. Somewhat missionized, largely pagan, it had a murderous reputation. It was in its harbor, Mohawk Bay, that an incident occurred which I remembered for twelve years. After a lantern-light lecture I was resting in the whaleboat. In the dim moonlight a naked man came floundering toward me. I reached for a hatchet, and a mild voice told me that it was only Sam, the Christian teacher. I had made a mistake, Sam told me, and gone to a heathen village. His was the Christian village I should have given my magic tins to. And wouldn’t I come? It was too late for that, so I let him stand waist-high in the water while I taught him the outline of my pidgin English lecture. I gave him tins and told him to bring them back to me in the morning. He brought them to me at dawn, and I admired his Christian fortitude. Poor devil—like the others, he thought our tins were magic boxes that would cure the people. I waited twelve years to hear the sequel to that story....
At Mohawk Bay I found that a young native was selling the services of his fiancée to our sailors. Brides were expensive there, and he had formed a syndicate to buy her, then rent her out until she had earned the price. It was “the fashion.” Not as a moralist, but as a doctor I asked the question: Who would educate people like these, upon fast-opening trade routes? Who would teach them self-protection? The missionaries? Perhaps. But the doctor must follow, or there would be nobody left to educate.
“Recruiting,” that legalized form of contract labor, might act as an educator. The High Commission Government was already requiring that plantation hands should be well-cared-for medically and sufficiently fed.
In a lonely bay I saw recruiters at work. One man with a rifle lay flat in the bow of a cutter, covering every movement of another man who approached the shore in a whaleboat. The whaleboat backed water all the way, and the man sent to parley stood up, carefully facing the naked savages who waited on the beach. All during the long powwow the hidden rifle was carefully aimed. These labor conferences were no job for a coward. So many lone recruiters had been killed on duty that the Government had made it a law that they must hunt in pairs.
Considering the vast work which we must soon undertake in the Solomon Islands, I was encouraged when I found that the intelligent native looked upon indentured labor service as a blessing, just as it had been in Papua. An island boy said to me, “I wish the Hawk would come soon.” The Hawk was a recruiting ship. I asked him why he wanted it to come soon, and he said, “There are so many sore-legs in the village.” This boy knew what was good for his people, and I hoped that there would be many more like him.
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I never think of Sikiana without a little sadness. Three small atolls all but link. The Sikiana Group was the last land to be discovered in 1791 and since then very few vessels had touched there. The inhabitants were pure Polynesian people; and because our crew was composed of Sikiana men our landing was a joyous homecoming. Every man-jack in the village was lightly lit on homemade toddy; the Ellice Islanders, their blood-cousins, had taught them how to cut the central spathe of the coconut, catch the drip, and trust in fermentation. Unfermented, it makes a fine baby food. In toddy form, it is intoxicating.
There was some heathen religious festival going on, hence the bibulous hilarity. The women, who never drank, couldn’t speak pidgin. Much gesturing, and the aid of our Sikiana sailors, who were sharing the toddy, sent swimmers and canoemen to the neighboring atolls to spread the news. And the people danced. Not lewdly, but with the natural grace of unspoiled bodies. They were completely pagan. No missionary had ever settled here. Traders hadn’t debauched them; the soil was too poor to produce anything worth trading for.
The girls were lovely with their long, fine, glossy hair; they hadn’t learned to bob it as they were doing on the missionized islands. They wore modest lavalavas from waist to ankles, and a kerchief which they knotted around the neck and drew under one arm. Some of the men wore their hair long, too, in ancient Polynesian fashion. I made friends with a splendid young fellow named Lautaua, who talked fair pidgin and told me how “in the time of his grandfather” (that might mean a thousand years ago; they had a habit of reckoning time by grandfathers) the Tongafiti had come to Sikiana and killed everybody except the women, and how succeeding migrations from Ongtong Java and the Ellices had drifted there in lost canoes.
I only mention their drinking because it was something of a freak in that corner of the Pacific. The Sikiana folk only made toddy on festival occasions, and never took it beyond the point of exhilaration. Later on, taking the advice of Mr. Barley, who was always their generous friend, they stopped making and drinking toddy. In Sikiana they were gay enough without false stimulation—a friendly, virtuous, lovable people; perhaps their custom of keeping women away from liquor helped maintain their racial self-respect. By and large, I have found the tribes on comparatively sterile islands superior in health and character to their neighbors who had little to do but lie in the shade and catch bananas. It’s the same the wide world over; those of Adam’s sons who work for a living are better fitted to cope with the cruelties of life.
Young children held our hands and drew our arms around them. The moon swung high over the lagoon and our returned sailors, quite sober now, daintily walked with their girls, up and down the beach. As we sat on the sand, waiting for the lecture audience to come on, young girls put garlands around our necks, chains which would bind our memories to Sikiana; these were ropes of hair, a strand from the head of every girl.
I had given lectures under odd conditions, but never before like this. White moonlight, pretty, laughing faces, simple people who took it all as the greatest joke in the world, but were so kind-hearted that they followed our instructions faithfully, as one might indulge a feeble-minded person of whom one is fond. Everybody smiled, even the dignified patriarch whom we called Old Number One; he was an unsalaried official representative of the Government. Between Old Number One and Lautaua, everything was arranged for us. Next day when we departed all was in order.
A simple people, allowed to grow up in their own way. Were they the uncivilized ones, or were we? They were not entirely free from tuberculosis; but they seemed to have set up an immunity. Here was a Government without the need of officialdom; no discord, no poverty, no distress, no taxes, no clothing to speak of; and no vices more obnoxious than a little toddy-drinking on national holidays.
I left happy Sikiana with a certain fear for its future. I saw it again in 1933....
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I returned by way of Sydney to pick up my family. In a week or so I would be pointing toward Suva, which was the cultural center of the South Pacific—if you disregard the scientifically advanced universities in Australia and New Zealand. Suva was to be headquarters for the rest of my professional career.
Thus far I had worked toward proving my favorite point: Depopulation follows the visitor. I believed what I still believe—that the item which looms over everything else in the question of failing native races is the introduction of diseases to which they have no immunity. I had seen its effects so often, right under my eyes.
Moving toward Sydney, I took stock of my South Sea experience, which had covered less than four years. I was beginning to see that one bad old theory was losing ground—the belief that the native, especially the Melanesian, is an economic unit to be exploited till he dies. Governments once blind and cruel were beginning to see light. The British High Commission, controlling five island groups, was struggling toward better things. So was progressive New Zealand with her mandates and possessions over wide stretches of Polynesia.
I considered the stumbling blocks in the way of curing sick Oceania. The Rockefeller Foundation, a vast scientific machine tuned up to deal out mercy in a practical, businesslike way, must have a co-operation which the Pacific administrations of that day were not offering. There must be teamwork, or nothing could be accomplished. Medical authority must come from a central brain. As things stood, the health physicians were political appointees, either lazy and incompetent time-servers or good men baffled by overwork and the whims of local government. When one good health officer retired a successor would come in to undo whatever he had begun. It was medical chaos, and I felt that the Foundation’s liberal share in cleaning up the Pacific must be backed up by some unified control. Else the work would be as futile as sweeping fog off a back porch. Suva, capital of Fiji, was headquarters for the British High Commission, and the Governor of Fiji was its head. Suva would be the ideal center for such medical authority.
I considered the problem of leprosy. All along the way I had encountered this imported disease, but there was no census to tell whether or not it was increasing. The cure and prevention of leprosy is methodical treatment with the one known remedy, and segregation of the infected. In all the South Pacific except Fiji there was nothing like a modern leper colony. The island governments should combine to support one.
The shortage of doctors had been very discouraging. Few competent white men cared to endure tropical hardships for starvation pay. From sheer boredom and despair many of them became quacks and drunkards—even if they hadn’t started out that way. The answer to that was educated native medical men.... I have talked about that a great deal, because that idea never left me. And now I was going to Fiji, where there had already been a crude attempt to teach medicine to Fijians.
As our ship neared Suva, a larger worry was in the back of my mind. Through years of study, from North Queensland to Papua, from Papua to New Guinea, from New Guinea to the Solomon Islands, I had found that oil of chenopodium was not working well enough or fast enough to relieve the million patients who reached out for a cure. In Rabaul’s hospital I had given injections of it, hoping to make the drug more effective through a new channel. The experiment had removed whipworms, but almost no hookworms.
I had to look these facts in the face. Chenopodium, on which we had relied as a cure for one of the world’s most prevalent blights, was not coming up to our expectations. There seemed no answer to that, until help came from an unexpected quarter.