Then one morning on Bushman’s Bay my favorite N.M.P. turned up with a large number of anopheles in his specimen case. Buxton wanted to know where he got them. Oh, explained Malakai, he had just cut a hole in his mosquito net and used himself for bait. Having had their fill of blood they had gone to rest inside the net, so in the morning Malakai had gathered them in. With a pretty gesture he handed the scientist eighty-seven specimens to carry back to London. I wonder if this gave our visitor a little more respect for the N.M.P.
This neat rebuke was all too subtle for a land where murder was the popular way of showing annoyance. If I wished to get rid of anybody in particular I would just lure him to the New Hebrides, push him off a boat and forget it. Should anybody get around to questioning me—which they probably wouldn’t—I would blame the disappearance to “blackwater fever,” always a handy explanation for missing persons. Or if I were a native I would shoot first, then run to a mission and get converted. To bask in righteousness was always fairly safe for the escaped trigger-man. (At one mission service the Nambas lurked in the woods, well supplied with ammunition for a couple of sanctified runaways, while the congregation inside was singing with much fervor: “Anywhere with Jesus I may safely go.”)
Another, if less popular, refuge for the guilty was to “recruit” into contract labor. Women offered themselves to recruiters, too, but for a different reason; they were usually in flight from “old men” husbands or embarrassing family troubles. I saw one big black girl approach a house and ask the planter’s wife to take her on indefinitely. She was a runaway, quaintly wild, naked except for a G-string pad and a small mat on her head; she used the mat for a pillow. Down her back, suspended from her forehead, she carried a calico bag and there were a few coppers in a leaf-purse at her throat. The bag contained all her earthly possessions encased in sections of bamboo (bahbu). She showed us her treasures: a piece of taro and a hatchet. She was all ready to set up housekeeping.
At the British Residency in Vila there was an excellent servant I called “Bush-Fellow Santo,” just to watch him grin. A few years before a chief had ordered him to shoot a rival chief, so obedient Santo had poked a rifle through the bush, a foot from the doomed one’s head. Poor Santo pulled the trigger, and the thing missed fire. The annoyed chief picked up the fallen gun and Santo made for the shore under a rain of bullets. Luckily the Government’s yacht lay in the stream. He was pulled aboard, swearing eternal devotion to the white man. And he kept his word.
The general practitioner, who attends one patient at a time, must know something of the sick man’s habits, environment and psychic condition. The health physician in primitive countries has these problems multiplied by thousands. He must regard mass behavior—and examine the files for the rate of tribal advance or decay. He must know something of the history of his multiple patient to form a workable theory concerning the dangers or benefits of foreign contact. He must strive to be a diplomat and make whatever contact he can with the Government in power.... Then he must work with the best tools and knowledge that are at hand.
In the mad Condominium, where there was no reliable census, we had to pit fact-finding against an estimated population of around 55,000. The real figure, as we estimated it, was under 45,000, and steadily sinking. Evidences of depopulation showed in the long-deserted villages and in the discontinuance of many tribal ceremonies because there were so few old men left who knew enough of the mysteries to perform the rites. Long since these grand masters had been swept away by epidemics. Old planters would point out spots where they had seen tribes almost blotted out in the course of thirty years.
Yaws was second to hookworm and malaria. On pleasant Tanna, to the extreme south of the group, it was a painful sight to see the poor fellows hobbling to the fields, as though walking on hot coals. They were suffering from “crab yaws,” which causes the feet to split oddly. Others, further gone with the disease, were given sitting down jobs, cutting copra near their quarters. Little attention—except in the hospital here—was paid to the condition and its cure, but what information I gave was welcomed. In more settled sections of the island a few injections with arsenicals were being given with the usual striking results. On parts of Tanna I found the natives themselves so eager for a cure that they were paying for the cost of salvarsan, and so earnestly asking for it that the supply was constantly giving out. When our outfit returned on later visits to give mass treatments the people were so grateful for the improvement in their health that they took up a collection and tried to present Tully with thirty pounds.
Everywhere we were busied by a variety of cases. We discovered an odd dozen of lepers and decided that the disease was spreading through the unprotected shores; there was no attempt to segregate the patients, although two at the Presbyterians’ Tanna hospital were being successfully treated with chaulmoogra injections. Queer cases swam into our ken. Here was a sick warrior who had tried to dry up his yaws by smoking them over a fire. Here were patients being treated for tuberculosis when they were suffering from tertiary yaws, or treated for malaria when they were sick with filariasis. Here were missionaries complaining of prevalent syphilis—and it was yaws again. Here we became emergency dentists and examined pyorrhea, one result of anemia. Here were Christian teachers who wondered why so many children died, especially girls in a land where more women were needed. We tried to lecture them on the rudiments of infant feeding; the Presbyterians were doing their best to supply milk. On Tanna I found that good Dr. Nicholson had been breeding goats and teaching the babies to suckle the nannies, direct from producer to consumer. It was a sensible idea, since there was no effective way of storing milk out of reach of filth-carrying flies. The nannies had come to regard the youngsters as their own kids. Once, experimentally, I picked up a small baby and growled at it. There was a worried “Baah!” and the mothering she-goat came at me, tail up and horns down. No foreigner was allowed to fool with her children.
Where there was a scarcity of drugs there was always a plenitude of witch doctors. These wizards lacked the dignity of the ancient tribal seers, who undoubtedly exerted a certain protective influence over the flock. Now they had degenerated to annoying rain-makers, windmakers, sun-makers, generally called “poisoners.” If rain, wind or sun failed to appear on schedule, the Nambas had a jolly habit of shooting these specialists and calling in new ones.
I went with the Commissioner to round up a couple of wizards at Malua Bay, Malekula. They had been making mischief, setting family against family; then shooting had begun. Mr. Smith-Rewse, personally conducting the arrest, said that he would have let it blow over if the Adventists hadn’t kicked up such a row. We went up to a plateau where the missioners were starting a village, and there was Pastor Parker, offering his services. Natives hung around in a wide circle, but they had left their rifles in the bush. They were not allowed to carry guns to public meetings.