CHAPTER XI
“SO YOU’VE COME TO FIJI!”
I have such a collection of hurricanes that in self-searching moments I call myself “The Storm King’s Target.” The wind that blew us around an island, that time we were trying to make Rabaul, is an example. Another was one hot day in Fiji, years later, when our half-caste skipper demonstrated his share of brains: He saw the storm coming and poked our cockleshell into a sheltering cove. For three days we “holed up” with District Officer Bob and his wife Elaine, and watched a Fiji village take wings; the big palm-thatched meeting-house looked like a flying haystack. On the way home I searched for landmarks. Two rivers on Viti Levu had plunged together; an East Indian village had been swept away, everybody drowned. A Fijian town had vanished under a sliding mountain.
Once in North Queensland I saw a galvanized iron roof wrap itself around a telephone pole as you wrap paper around a pencil. I’ve been lucky; never has a ship gone down under me—quite. Several ships, though, have been wrecked before I had time to get aboard.
Two refuges for the soul in a hurricane are the Power of Prayer and the Power of Swear. Take your choice. Once the big wind roared over a mission station, and the missioner, who didn’t care to go himself, sent loyal converts down to bring in his launch, and they saved the boat from the gale’s fury. Neighbors made scandal of the wanton risk, but the missionary smiled, “Oh, no. It was no risk. I saw the Spirit hovering over them when they went down to the water.”
Another hurricane met our ship coming toward Fiji from Sydney, and I fell back on the Power of Swear. With every comber that plowed through the dining saloon of the old 1,100-ton Suva I dug up long-forgotten oaths. My wife and child got through; Eloisa comes of a pithy stock, otherwise she could never have followed me in my curious career. This trip was a soul-shaker. The Fijians have a meke song in which they address the powers of the hurricane, “blown from the black mouths of the Ladies of the West.” For three horrible days the Ladies of the West gave it to us, straight. The captain tied our propeller-shaft in a bowknot, heading straight into the volley, trying to drag us out of an invisible grip.
I had my hands full, seeing that my eight-year-old Harriette wasn’t drowned in our stateroom. An Australian lady furnished a touch “of romance.” A hard one would shiver our timbers, she would cling to me, her children would cling to her. “Oh, Doctor, I’m so glad”—she would shriek above the tempest—“that you’re here on the ship. I feel so much safer.” I imagined myself swimming with Eloisa and Harriette in one hand and the Australian lady (with family) in the other.
When we limped into Suva harbor the sea had turned to glass. Hurricanes have an annoying way of doing things like that.
There on our starboard hand lay the jumbled little waterfront; and on our portside a craggy peak they call The Devil’s Thumb; perpetual landslides had marked its face with a perfect Y, as though Yale sophomores had been working overnight.
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Suva, capital of Fiji, has advanced a great deal in the last eighteen years. Nowadays occasional passenger liners dock there and allow tourists to straighten out their sea legs. The men can buy their favorite brand at Piccadilly tobacconists or London bars. The debutantes can play tennis, while their mothers visit little jewel shops and squander a few shillings on a small handful of silver-gilt pearls that are lovely and have no respectable commercial rating, or take in the museum and shudder at the collection of savage iron-wood clubs which ex-cannibals traded for hymnals,—or buy a four-shilling guidebook at the Carnegie Library,—or inspect the Government Building, that cost about $1,500,000 and looks a size too large for Pittsburgh; that structure was built after the gold rush of ’32 when the colony went madder than Californians and started things on a grand scale—for a while. Suva today is like any small colonial capital. Whiskered Sikh policemen in staring red tunics guide the traffic; along the orderly streets walk orderly Fijians, short white sulus and bare legs under English coats, their immense, smoothly cut headdresses of kinky hair giving them the appearance of English guardsmen in regimental bearskin busbies. Dignified, broad-shouldered, small-waisted, they seem to be heading for some savage war-dance. Actually they are going to church, or to the native motion picture palace.
Suva in 1922 had one dirt road that ran to Nausori, fifteen miles away. The taxi fare was about $7.50. Your director, to save Rockefeller funds, usually went there on the little Andi Roronga, which took from 9 A.M. to 1 P.M. with a stop along the mangrove-tangled Rewa. She started back at two. When you went by taxi you had to cross the river on a funny pontoon with a submerged cable.
I was no longer under the loose-handed control of Australia. Now it was the British High Commission that owned Fiji’s 250-odd islands, had a grip on the Solomons, a tiny toehold on the independent Kingdom of Tonga, controlled the Gilbert and Ellice Group and ran some curiously distant isles, like Rotumah and Pitcairn and Christmas Island. The Governor of Fiji was (and is) the temporal head of the High Commission. However, the real government comes from London. Colonials as a rule don’t understand Englishmen. Americans, after what happened about 1776, can sympathize. The Yankee slides comfortably into the ways of the Canadian, the Australian, the New Zealander or South African. The born Englishman with his hauteur and peculiarity is another fish to fry. He has ruled his far-flung dominions uncannily well, but his colonials tender him more respect than love.
Yet down there I have worked with Englishmen for whom I felt the deepest loyalty and friendship. Chris Kendrick is one of them. Barley is another, and there are many more. Pretty soon I am going to tell you of another, who was my associate for eight years in Fiji.
Colonials in Suva used to grumble, “Back in London they don’t know we’re alive.” But the politicians knew. Fiji became a dumping place for younger sons and Ministry favorites. Young chaps, green as grass and fresh as paint, were called “cadets,” and there was always a new cadet to fill the desk left vacant by retirement or promotion. Against the cadet system the experienced colonial, who knew the land and the people, hadn’t the ghost of a show.
Where the English are respected and not liked, the Americans are liked but not respected. Colonials regard us as too evangelical, too insistent on modern shower baths in every room and on having everybody’s trousers creased in the same way. They speak of us as rotten colonizers; and these arguments are in the face of our record in Cuba, for instance, where we cleaned up yellow fever and gave the island real sanitation.... I remember what an educated Cuban once said to me, “Of course we don’t like you, Doctor. You found us dirty and contented; now we are clean and unhappy.”
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Naturally the British Empire must exact tribute from her dominions or she could not survive. All over Britain’s Pacific empire “Buy English” was behind the sale of all the machinery, all the material used in public improvements. Yet it was astonishing how popular American products remained, in spite of the high preferential tariff against them. American cars, burdened with a 45 per cent duty, were eagerly sought in New Zealand, Australia, Fiji. Loyal colonials had their tongues hanging out in their desire to buy British automobiles, yet pig-headed English manufacturers were sending low-powered, poorly sprung cars, built for smooth, hill-less roads. Our own Henry Ford would have adapted his article to geographical requirements. Not so the British maker with his cry, “Buy English!”
Sunkist oranges were everywhere, an example of American trade-genius under difficulties. New Zealand, with her own tropical possessions and access to Australia’s and Jamaica’s supplies, displayed Sunkist oranges in every remote village. It’s still an unfathomable mystery to me, how these California go-getters can drag oranges eight or nine thousand miles, and profit under adverse conditions. Maybe it is because their fruit is obtainable all year round, or because its uniform size makes it attractive.
As my work went on in Fiji I had to put up a fight for one important drug, the arsenical derivative neosalvarsan, often conveniently called “salvarsan,” although it is Ehrlich’s improvement on his own salvarsan discovery. It is indispensable in the treatment of yaws. On one of my brief trips to the United States I argued the high cost of neosalvarsan with wholesale drug manufacturers who came to a meeting of the American Medical Association. Could the price be cut down if we ordered it in large quantities? I promised that if they would give us a good price we could use $7500 worth a year. When our purchasing agent struck a bargain I don’t think the wholesalers regretted it. We used the order soon after the first shipment, and cabled for more. When we ceased to buy in driblet lots, the cost of neosalvarsan was cut four times, and each price was lower than that set by the Crown Agent in London—he being the gentleman whom the Mother Country appoints to collect a large part of the tax on colonies and dominions. Through the deal our purchasing agent made with American wholesalers natives of the South Pacific were saved more than the Foundation’s expenditure on building programs, health campaigns and my salary.
This sudden attack on the high price of drugs caused a mild sensation in London, which had governed the purchase of arsenicals up to that time. The Crown Agent responsible for disbursements compared our economical prices with those the colony had been paying. The reaction was true to form. Representatives of the Home Government wanted to know, unofficially, if we were in cahoots with some big Yankee chemical firm. At first an attempt was made to discredit my drug; then the price of salvarsan came tobogganing all through the British Empire.
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My reception in official Suva, though polite, was never emotional. There had been a short Rockefeller campaign there in 1917-1918, which had left the Administration markedly unenthusiastic. The Governor, Sir Cecil Hunter Rodwell, was a fine fellow, and I owe much to him and to Sir Maynard Hedstrom, a wealthy merchant who could see much further ahead of his nose than most I met; Hedstrom was with me in all my endeavors.
The Suva Hospital was not stately—a creaky old shack tinkered up somehow. The new War Memorial was finished a few months later when the Medical Department took it over; in spite of its newness it was a makeshift, and so small that it was overcrowded until the building program of 1934. The native nurses, for example, were jammed into an ancient wooden structure, where they had to carry their own firewood and do their own cooking in most primitive style; and these were the girls we must depend upon to raise Fijian standards of living.
There were between twenty-two and twenty-four medical officers whose average brains and conscientiousness were of a high order. I called them “the Old Guard” and was sorry that so many of them were retired soon afterwards; younger ones who replaced many of them had neither the social, educational nor ethical ideals of their predecessors. And it seemed to me that cadets who came out for the civil administration were also a step-down in quality.
There were forty Native Medical Practitioners—natives given a three-year course in simple medicine and surgery. They had no classroom, no charts, only one small book of simple medicine and hygiene, and that was written in Fijian. Teaching paraphernalia was practically nil. These boys attended out-patients, acted as male nurses, attended the doctors on their rounds. Their lectures were given at the hospital by the Chief Medical Officer and the Resident Medical Officer. When these officers spoke Fijian and were interested, the results were good; when they were not interested the formal education was very sketchy.
I studied this system, developed for over thirty years, and wondered if it wasn’t an answer to my prayer for something constructive. Some of these boys, though taught so little surgical practice, developed great ability; it was almost as though their cannibal ancestry had given them a particular flair for human anatomy. One Native Medical Practitioner (N.M.P.) was Sowani, who was lent to the Gilbert Island Colony and made a famous reputation as a surgeon; I shall tell of him in the proper place.
There was a system of native obstetrical nursing as well as a training school for European nurses. The native nurses had lectures from a Fijian with the same educational background as their own. One lecture a week for six months each of two years, then the girls were sent with N.M.P.’s to assist Fijian mothers in confinement. Bed-pan carrying for European probationers, mopping, and doorknob cleaning made up their only other training. They spoke no English.
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The Chief Medical Officer sat pining at his desk when I made my first call. He was about to retire, and that splendid Englishman, Dr. Aubrey Montague, with twenty years of local experience, was about to take his place.
The soon-retiring C.M.O. rose from his work, offered me his hand and said mournfully, “So you’ve come to Fiji!”
Yes, we’d come to Fiji. The Chief Medical Officer retained the hairline balance of politeness. The Foundation was a nice philanthropic institution, and it was sweet of us to be interested and all that; but there was no enthusiasm for chenopodium. I heartily agreed with him. We compared notes—without profit. You can’t invent a cure-all overnight. There was nothing to take the place of what we had, and nothing to do but go on.
It was a boon to me and to Fiji when Dr. Aubrey Montague took over the desk of the Chief Medical Officer. He was the best of the Anglo-Saxon breed, one of the most helpful influences that ever touched my life. Clear-headed, clear-eyed, he was spiritually incapable of lying even to himself. I never knew him to do an underhand thing or go back on his word—quite a record for an official in the tropics. He was one of the three ablest men I have known in the Pacific and he didn’t take third place. A naturally shy man walls himself in. I put a high value on the intimacy we formed when the wall was broken and I could look in on his well-controlled intellect.
His clean life and ideals were free from intolerance; he judged men leniently. I have often seen them fail him, and be forgiven tomorrow after he had weighed them in his kindly practical mind. His administration opened an era of large expansion, especially along lines of preventive medicine. A routine politician would have thrown money around. Montague was economical, almost parsimonious. It was a wondrous thing in those days to see government funds protected by a gentleman’s deep responsibility to King and Country.
Governors continually came to him with questions outside his department; advice from his clear mind was never less than valuable. So it was a great shock to me when Montague, after thirty years of service to the Empire, was allowed to retire and to die without the honors he richly deserved. He had done his job unobtrusively and lacked the self-seeking qualities that bid for titles. The only monument he left behind him was an unfillable gap.
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Through those first few months we agreed on three ambitious plans. Montague wanted an improved native medical school for his Fijians, a real one instead of a makeshift. His wish was mine, and uppermost in my thoughts; but I wanted this educational project to reach out over all the South Pacific. It was a big idea which might have seemed audacious, but we discussed its possibilities from every angle. He saw clearly the advantage of sending competently educated islanders back to their homes to work among their own people.
We went into the subject of asylum for lepers at Mokogai,[2] a near-by island where the old establishment had been moldering for years. I pointed out that all the poor, small Pacific groups might combine their resources co-operatively and make Mokogai the center, a modernized and enlarged plant where patients could be cared for at minimum cost and with maximum results. Here would be teamwork, the thing most needed over those wide blue waters.
And we agreed on another design for teamwork. High Commission control should be centralized more, particularly in health matters. Quick communications, radio especially, were bringing the islands together. We saw a far vision of a unified medical service; one that would make sense out of the bedlam that existed from New Guinea to the Society Islands. Montague and I were for this plan, and before our preliminary talks were over we had decided that he, Montague, was to secure the backing of the Fiji Government and that I was to bring in the financial and moral support of governments controlling the many Pacific groups around us.
These were long, long thoughts. But before his retirement Montague saw two of his dreams, and mine, come true. The third was partially realized and may be worked out fully in the end. I hope so, for the sake of a million patients.... I know that no man was ever more generously helped than I was, with the friendship of Montague on the Government side and with Sir Maynard Hedstrom backing me in the Legislative Council. Hedstrom, by the way, always stood ready to act as interpreter for my Yankee lingo and Yankee methods when I had to argue before cautious governors.
The practicability of a modernized native medical school came home to me. I had had a white man’s peep into the Melanesian mind; anthropologists rank him as the mental equal of the Caucasian; the Polynesian stands a grade higher intellectually, with the Japanese; while the Chinese heads the list. Environment, geography and tradition have held so many races back that it is impossible to compare them with our own ingenious and self-destructive civilization.
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I had gone over all this when Malakai, N.M.P., was sent to me, and my mind was made up.
Malakai had been made Native Practitioner by the hit-or-miss of the old school. More than half self-educated, his inquisitive mind would never let a subject go until he had mastered it. He was a cannibal’s grandson, I have no doubt; so many of the best ones were. His favorite dish was scientific books, which he devoured.
He came to me, a slim young man of twenty with the fine bronze skin of the Melano-Polynesian mixture. Something of a dude, he wore a silk lavalava down to his good Fijian knees. His English was imperfect then. In 1924 when I went out on my series of group surveys, I showed him around as a model for the proposed Native Medical Practitioner. He became the best microscopist among the thirty-odd I have trained; his accurate eyes became mine in a work for which poor sight unfitted me. Moreover, he was father, mother, son and valet to me. It was unseemly to set him to small drudgery. Malakai settled that question; when we were in the field he invariably laid out my clean clothes, and did laundry work among savages who were too ignorant for such things. At night he gave me my quinine, and he was always the first up in the morning. The old-time missionary who spoke of the Fijian as “inclined to indolence” should have met Malakai. Once when we were out in the jungle my model N.M.P. fired the native cook and took over the job. Could he cook? Of course!
I’m showing you Malakai, but not as a great exception among Fijians. There are thousands of him on his home islands, only awaiting their chance; they’re the handiest people I’ve ever seen, adaptable, clever, willing, loyal, dependable in emergency. Never once has a trusted Fijian let me down, or failed to put up with hardship and smile in adversity. Treat them with the consideration they deserve, trust them as they should be trusted.... Well, I’ve seen many of their fine young men come on, and I’m watching many on their way up....
On my return visit to Sikiana I was troubled by the number of enlarged spleens I found among the people. Malakai was the first to suggest a wide infection of malaria, but I pooh-poohed. Where were the anopheline mosquitoes? Malakai disappeared and came back smiling. “Doctor, I’ve let them bite me. They stand on their heads to feed, and they have spotted wings.” He showed me several captured anopheles and saved me from being ridiculous in my report.
I shall never forget his appearance when he came back from a later mission to the New Hebrides. He had served for a year and a half as the only purely Condominium medical officer. Suddenly there came a cable: “Have quitted Condominium, Malakai.” It was a matter of color. A newly-appointed official had been born on an island where nobody was exactly lily-white; so he was extremely race-sensitive, and insisted on putting the boy from Fiji in his place. We welcomed Malakai back to Suva because we had let him go at a sacrifice in order to demonstrate the efficiency of native doctors.
The picture of his getting off the boat was something to remember. He had discarded the proud lavalava for a pair of trousers. He merely said he liked them, and nobody could pry the real reason out of him. About a year later he showed up with a new silk lavalava, and was ready to tell about the trousers. Down in the New Hebrides he had experimented once too often with mosquitoes; an attack of malaria had made his legs so thin that he was ashamed of them. The Fijian dandy’s pride is in his swelling calves and slim ankles.
In 1926 when I was going from the New Hebrides to Sydney on the Makambo, Captain Tom Brown moved Malakai from second class to the captain’s table, a gesture of respect. On my return to the Cook Islands in 1932, the natives asked only two questions: Where was Malakai and what had I done with my big camera? I had been the fifth wheel in the wagon. For three years Malakai ran our yaws unit in Fiji. A European doctor couldn’t have done the work as well with four times the money. Malakai’s unit was a model.
A European Medical Officer on the Ellice group went alcoholic, so I sent Malakai down for six months. After we had to call him home the local District Officer almost challenged me to a duel; he was going half-crazy, he said, because deputations from surrounding islands were pouring in, clamoring for Malakai’s services.
My young doctor’s addiction to silk neckties, silk shirts, silk lavalavas, fine coats, wrist watches, mandolins and guitars, once ran him afoul of a Fijian custom called kere kere. The clans are communistic, and if you happen to be a clansman anything you have is theirs by divine right. That’s why he returned from his home town looking like a cat that had been dipped into the sea. His family had trimmed him down to a ragged shirt and a cotton lavalava. The highest-born Fijian may get this rummage sale welcome if he ventures into the land of his birth. It quells ambition.
That, of course, belonged to the private life of Malakai. So did his marriage to a handsome wife, who used to accompany him on his trips. When he started sailing alone I was afraid of trouble; Malakai, temperamentally, would have made an ideal guardian for a very old Turk with a very large harem—no outside assistant would have been necessary. Then there was the matter of his savings. Like all Pacific Islanders he had no idea of a money economy. Why save for a rainy day? The sun will come out; it always does.
Love came to Malakai’s life and money flew out of the window. I had badgered him into putting £119 in a savings account; but Malakai got hold of the book. He was having wife-trouble. The first Mrs. Malakai was barren, and the Fijian who hasn’t fathered a child is jeered at as something less than a proper man; sterility is grounds for divorce. Malakai had gone courting a native nurse, and the romance had dug deep into his £119. He blew his whole remaining balance on a party to proclaim an approaching heir—on the sinister side. His fiancée was far from sterile—but how to give an honest name to the unborn Malakai, Junior?
Well, I talked to Magistrate Burrowes, who obligingly called two divorce hearings—and dismissed them both because neither Malakai nor his friends, for inscrutable Fijian reasons, would testify to the fact. At a third hearing Burrowes was in a sour temper. Bari and Rafaeli, Malakai’s friends, remained mum, but Malakai loosened up a little. Annoyed, the magistrate penalized him three pounds a month out of his N.M.P. salary of nine pounds—probably the first alimony ever paid by a Fijian. On the first of every month the retired Mrs. Malakai showed up to collect. She bled her ex-husband white as a Swede; then came to me for six months’ payment in advance to take her on a holiday trip. I argued that three months’ cash in hand is worth a lifetime of installments in the bush. She fancied the idea, and finally for fifteen pounds spot-on-the-counter surrendered Malakai for life. Now she could buy presents, buy clothes, go home, save her face. And, quite naturally, pick out a husband. Honor was satisfied. Another instance of native money psychology.
In 1936 Malakai went to the Gilbert and Ellice Islands as Senior Medical Practitioner. When he left there, it required two Europeans to fill his post. He came back to Fiji in 1939, a few days before I retired.
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In his ability and in his foibles Malakai was all Fijian. He settled my determination on higher education for such men. Dr. Montague was in the mood for it. If we could have taken that bull by the horns in 1922-1923 our enthusiasm might have swept in the political consent and money backing of at least eight great island groups. All we needed was the partnership of the Rockefeller Foundation. That, I guessed, was merely a matter of asking.
My guess was wrong. I wrote a detailed letter to Dr. Victor Heiser and outlined our plan. Just a little school with forty undergraduates, to start with. It could be an adjunct to the new hospital in Suva, but need not be an expensive set of buildings. Dr. Montague’s plans were modest in price and extremely practical. Governor Sir Eyre Hutson was enthusiastic. Administrators on distant island groups were begging for it. Now was the time.
Ardently I wrote:
The Foundation gives cheerfully to help medical schools for Chinese, Spanish, English and what you please, to people who are better able to help themselves than these poor blacks out here who are as eager for a chance of this sort as ever a white man was. The Board could give this school and fund half of a teacher’s salary; the other half might be made up by the different groups ... the money would produce results at a far higher rate than in England or Canada....
The reply came from 61 Broadway. Dr. Heiser with his usual sagacity had found the plan reasonable and practical. But the Foundation is so vast that it must be zoned into many divisions, such as a Division of Medical Sciences, a Division of Social Sciences, a Division of the Humanities, and so on. And the Division of Medical Sciences was dead against us; it was out for ambitious projects, and thought mine very third-rate indeed. Rockefeller millions were going into the great establishment in Peking. No use throwing good money after bad, on little squirt schools in the Pacific. After years of my dinging away at the subject, Heiser himself grew cold and asked me to forget it. Peking and many others were the big health investments....
Well, where is Peking today, after the Japanese have finished? And Fiji? I’m saving that information for dessert.
It is one of the ironies of our times, and a quaint one, that the Rockefeller Foundation mailed the Japanese a large check for their Public Health School on the same day the Mikado’s army bombed to powder a beautiful library which the Foundation had given to Chungking.