The French had a way of shooting the natives off land on which a “legal” claim had been filed. The dazed aborigines, of course, hadn’t the vaguest idea what it was all about. But the canny Frenchmen knew. They always raided native plantations where the trees were bearing and gathered the nuts until their own newly planted acres began to yield.
Black men on Malekula, Santo, and Malo were doing as little as possible to help the unwelcome white man, though their murderers ran to the missions to be handily converted and missionaries often sheltered refugees from the rough work of “recruiting” for contract labor. French planters were tricking men into service, holding them indefinitely in the chains of drink and debt. Only about 13,000 of the possible 50,000 inhabitants were under any semblance of government control. There were eight government agents to enforce what order they could with a handful of sketchy native police. In a perfect climate, blessing a soil that flowed with milk and honey, there were but four British plantations. The French had crowded the others out.
The public health physician must study a population from all angles, and New Hebridean angles were odd. It would require volumes of anthropological data, with charts, to outline the cobweb of family structure on these islands.[5] In one rough sentence: The northern and more Polynesian half of this double archipelago was matrilinear (inheriting through the mother) while the negroid folk of the south were patrilinear (inheriting from the father’s side). Among the bearded natives of Malekula the wives were squaws, while their lords slept with rifles and bottles of toddy. Women were forbidden the men’s sacred enclosure. A true man cooked for himself and never let female hands defile his food.
Women had their value, however. On one island off Malekula I watched native boats every morning, being shoved off; the women were rowing across to work the “gardens” (truck farms) on the opposite shore. Their husbands sat at bow and stern, bristling with rifles; they took no chances on their drudges being picked off by rival Nambas, sniping from the bush.
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In a roundabout way I have Mr. Smith-Rewse, the British Resident Commissioner, to thank for Pastor Parker’s hospitality and for the pains that earnest Adventist took to show me the cannibalistic pig-killing. With the Commissioner’s party I had set out from Vila on an inspection tour of Malekula and Santo, for health conditions on these notoriously savage islands demanded my attention.
Except for two excellent physicians in the Presbyterian hospitals, overworked and always embarrassed by a shortage of medicine, I found white men in the New Hebrides grossly ignorant of the causes, cures and prevention of tropical diseases. In Papua plantations were places where sick men came to be cured; in the New Hebrides plantations were seed-beds for infections that the workers carried back to the villages. Natives had become so enfeebled that the French were importing Tonkinese. These yellow strangers were contributing a new disease-picture to a land that had not yet set up an immunity to the scourges brought in by Europeans 100 years ago.
As to hookworm, the Necator americanus, I found the prospects pretty doleful. I was told that if I asked for specimens on Malekula the Big Nambas would either take a pot shot at me or run howling to the jungle. Even the missionized ones feared that I was collecting fragments of excreta for purposes of witch-doctoring. One of them, whom I tried to convince to the contrary, shook his bushy head stubbornly. “No, master. Dis would spoil me fellow altogether.” However, through the help of a few responsible white residents, I made enough worm counts to suspect that the general infection in the New Hebrides would run to something over 94 per cent. That meant that on our future curative campaign we would have to treat the whole population.
On the way to Malekula the government yacht Euphrosyne touched at little Atchin. The mission bell was ringing lustily, but when services were over only four sad natives came out of church. Pastor Parker took us to his house and fed us on the fat of the land—strictly vegetable fat. After dinner we smoked pipes and cigarettes around the table, and neither the Pastor nor his wife said a word. The Commissioner’s sins were to be respected. Anyhow, we’d be off for Malekula in a day or so.
But on the hour when the Euphrosyne was about to depart Smith-Rewse said to our host, “Parson Parker, I expect you to see that Dr. Lambert doesn’t go into the Big Nambas country.” A bush war was going on over there, and the Commissioner’s word was law.