A Yankee doctor in paradise

by S. M. Lambert

The Big Nambas and the Little Nambas, let me explain, are two savage cults among the innumerable divisions and subdivisions in the New Hebrides. They go naked, except for a wrapping of dried banana leaves around their genitals. This wrapping, called the nambas, is large with the Big Nambas and small with the Little Nambas. Both cults were rather untamed in those days. Mr. Smith-Rewse told me about his last trip to Malekula, and the murderer he brought back. The man couldn’t understand why he was arrested, although he had just buried his infant daughter alive. All the way back to Vila he pleaded, “Master, me no like go jail. More better you make me belong police.” That happened in peacetime, the Commissioner said. In wartime Malekula needed a major general more than it needed a doctor.

Later on I saw plenty of Malekula.

So I was left alone with Pastor Parker. I went out on the veranda, lit my pipe and heard his gentle voice saying, “Doctor, I’m afraid you’ll have to stop smoking in the house or on the veranda. I must enforce the rules of our faith.” A chronic smoker, I struck a compromise. I’d move to the lawn and let the Pastor talk to me from the veranda, if he didn’t mind shouting. This was quite satisfactory, except when it rained. I had much idle time on my hands. Atchin was too small to afford many conclusions, except that the people were pretty heavily infected.

Mostly in shouts, Pastor Parker unloaded his peck of troubles. How his predecessor had moved to another station and all his converts had backslid when he stopped paying them a salary. He had worked on the patronage system, and his expensive conversions had drained the mission exchequer. Pastor Parker had never had enough money to make a wide appeal. In several years of purely spiritual effort he had only made two converts, a pair of primitives who were living in sin with heathen wives. The wives always accompanied them to church.

Trouble had been waiting for Pastor Parker when he took charge. The week they moved in, the place was raided by Big Nambas, who had plenty of guns and did plenty of shooting. The barricaded Parkers might have furnished long pig for the pig lovers but for a rescuing party of Presbyterians. To Parker’s Adventist mind Presbyterians were limbs of Satan, but they saved him just the same, and advised him to move out. The Pastor informed them that he had come there to preach the True Gospel, and by Jehovah, he’d stay.

He was brave according to his lights. Once, in a desperate appeal for converts, he went alone among the Big Nambas and invited them to shoot him. It was a sort of sanctified attempt at suicide with all the charm of martyrdom. The savages laughed and sent him home. Either they admired his courage or they thought he was “touched.”

He told me that he believed there was a great deal of cannibalism on Atchin. Offered a meatless Adventist diet as an alternative to man-eating, I could well understand their attitude. Flatulent with three windy meals a day, I gazed morbidly at my host. I asked him if the pig-killing ceremony he had shown me was not a symbol of cannibalism. He thought so, vaguely. Later talks with ethnologists assured me that my guess was right. In the Pre-Pig Era, when man-eating was the rule instead of the exception, human beings were led up to the sacrificial stone, and with every stroke of the mallet were counted off to the credit of the fortunate donor. The pig is a comparative newcomer in the Pacific, but the ritualistic ceremonies are old as Time. It is remarkable how the pig took center-stage in New Hebridean life. He became the unit of wealth, of social position, of tribal power. When I was there, although his cult was vanishing with other folk ways, he was still being bred in strange shapes for sacrifice. Wives were still valued as swineherds, chiefs exalted for the number and odd variety of their hogs. Murders were committed more often over pigs than over women.

It was something out of Gulliver’s Travels. Up to the time when misapplied Government and applied Christianity had weakened the pulse of the tribe, the secret society ruled these islands with a power that was super-Masonic. There were numerous lodges, each designated by some emblem-leaf and special tabus. A boy coming of age passed the harsh initiation, which included circumcision or, more often, incision. Among the incisionists the medicine men were still operating on the young initiate by standing him in water up to his waist, thrusting a blunt stick under the prepuce to stretch the skin and using a feather-edge of split bamboo to cut the foreskin longitudinally from end to end. The wound was packed with herbs, which might have been astringent and antiseptic. The boys, treated en masse, were locked away for long days of fasting. I never heard of one who died.

The ceremony I first saw was to celebrate the return of a boy from the sacred island of Aoba, where he had gone through the cruel final tests which would admit him into the lowest rank of the secret order. He might work for years, maybe a lifetime, to accumulate enough pigs to raise him a degree in native Masonry. Now he was distinguished by a woven strip of fiber, worn something like an apron. Initiated boys danced in front of him. Yams were stacked like cordwood around the space where torches flared. Musicians pounded ten-foot wooden drums, shaped like fat cigars. The tops of the drums were painted with identical faces; the face of Tamaz, the Unseen God of All.

The ambitious native bought his way into high position in the order, and to chieftainship, through his contribution of pig monstrosities, especially raised for sacrifice. It was near Bushman’s Bay, Malekula, that I first saw one of these freaks, a boar with artificially curled tusks. These tusks had grown toward the upper jaw, then turned in a circle backward as far as the lower jaw, where they were growing upward again to form a spiral. He was fourteen years old; if he lived to be twenty-one, he would be prized beyond money valuation—the pig with the three-curled tusks. The curl is produced by knocking out what correspond to our eye-teeth. With these gone, the teeth below have full play, and begin to twist backward at the end of the climb. Sometimes the curving ivory grows into the lip and tissues of the jaw, sometimes into the jaw itself. The animal must suffer constant pain. By the time he is ready for the altar he is fairly tough food, yet the man who can offer such a sacrifice to the noble dead is well on the way to mastership of his lodge.