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It was at Pomare’s request that I visited the Cook Islands toward the end of 1925 and into the early months of 1926. He asked me especially, as a director for the Foundation, to look into the hookworm situation there, but also to include in my survey the general aspect of native diseases. He had not then been long enough in office to organize the public health work as thoroughly as he desired, and there was the usual shortage of competent doctors. Sir Maui had a special affection for the Cook Islanders, as he was closely related to them. He often suggested my looking into the pre-Christian religion on the Cooks and the relics it left behind.
Medically speaking, the Cooks were a great relief after the New Hebrides. Although conditions were far from perfect, I found no serious problems. Public health was above the Pacific average, but there were some indicated dangers, and I was obliged to raise the red flag. Population had begun to fall in the eighties, but had been slowly coming back since 1900, when New Zealand took over. Up to then the group had been utterly neglected, save by the usual despoilers. Twenty-five years is too short a time to work a radical change in any people. The Maoris on these tiny, graceful clumps of land now numbered over 10,000. The group lies some twenty degrees below the Equator, cheek-by-jowl with Tahiti—too close, perhaps, for health.
Rarotonga, so often described by romantic novelists, has suffered some injustice from flights of imagination. It is the main island in the little Cooks and is a collection of small towns, one of which harbors Government Headquarters. To the native mind it had the lure of Paris for the Peorian. Cinemas, public entertainment and private vice drew with the loadstone’s charm, and the combination was probably dangerous for the pleasure-loving Maori. Gonorrhea, imported from generous Tahiti, was on the increase. That was true of Rarotonga, but not of the less populated and more primitive islands. The Polynesian is a great gossip, and when an infected townsman came home from his big spree the whole village knew it, and shunned him accordingly.
Dr. Ellison was working like a beaver with an understaffed department, yet what could he do but just shuffle along and make the best of it? I had Malakai along, my Exhibit Number One. At once he became a popular idol, a social and scientific success. When Ellison saw his work and realized what a native physician could accomplish, and I told him that our Central Medical School, once it got going, could turn out hundreds like Malakai, Ellison was all for the School; he’d do anything to put it through.
My hopes were running high then. Dr. Montague had just written a letter, announcing that all the High Commission groups, five of them, and all the groups controlled by New Zealand were ready to sign on the dotted line. And there was Sir Maui Pomare, clear-thinking and powerful in his faith that the native mind was receptive to the highest education.
My hope was to be blasted by an act of Pomare himself. He had suffered a slap in the face, something no well-born Maori will endure. I shall go into that later.
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In Rarotonga it was pleasing to see the young people, the boys in white trousers, the girls in simple frocks, throwing their souls into the dances of 1925. European clothes and European ways seemed to be their destiny, and the Government had encouraged innocent dances, away from the temptations of bush-beer and petting parties on the beach. This music and youthful pleasure was in sharp contrast with the plight of the unhappy New Hebridean, robbed of his tribal ceremony and given nothing to take its place.
In less conventional surroundings girls were still dancing the hura, more graceful than the Hawaiian hula, but they were contorting for the leer of visiting sailors. Gonorrhea, already gaining in 1925-1926, was not entirely blameable on that old scapegoat, Tahiti. The Hollywood movie had become the popular notion of European behavior. Imitate clothes, imitate morals. The local girl had acquired a craving for silk stockings and high heels, things that must be paid for with Pakeha money, however she got it.