Sometimes I wonder how we ever got our units organized. At last we imported two extra inspectors from Australia and scattered like scalded dogs from a steaming kettle. In my weeks of preparation, I found that I had the Papuan Club behind me. That meant support from the ablest colonials in the South Pacific: Loudon, Bertie, Sefton, Jewel, Tom Nesbitt and a dozen more. I couldn’t have moved a finger without the help of these men and their friends. These were the forward-looking ones who wanted native labor restored to health, to revitalize races for whom, at that time, there seemed no future but extinction.
At the Papuan Club I couldn’t open my mouth for any fly-blown anecdote without there being wild laughter and shouts of “More! More!” A new man would come in. “Harrigan, have you heard the Doc’s latest? Doc, tell it again.” I was rather puffed up until I found out what they were laughing at: it was my funny Yankee accent.
CHAPTER III
WHERE THE DEAD MEN TALK
Only a day by motor lorry from the galvanized iron of Port Moresby, and untamed Papua was pressing around us—a brute that could throw sudden tremendous cliffs into tangled drylands that were flat as your hand, a country where the souls of men seemed forever broken between gross materialism and fantastic belief in ghosts and magic. Perhaps the black man’s mystic spirit imparted to his white conqueror a shuddering faith in the walking dead.
Papua isn’t rich in the things that man needs. Either it is parched with drought or reeking with wetness that produces giant weedy growths with no nourishment in them. A hemp plantation, big as a Texas ranch, was one of a certain development company’s failures; almost every enterprise in Papua seemed to be on the downgrade. Over yonder, a closed and battered factory revealed the company’s vain attempt to manufacture a trade tobacco that would be foul enough to suit the native taste.
Everywhere in the Pacific trade tobacco is native coin and currency. A few sticks of it will buy a man’s labor for the week, a woman’s virtue for the night. Government regulations have set a standard ration: two sticks a week. But the natives will accept only the stinking twist that traders import from Virginia. The development company had a bright idea: they would make a trade tobacco of their own and corner the business. They spent £50,000 trying to reproduce that exquisite dung flavor. The black boys put it in their pipes, but couldn’t be fooled. “Me want tabac!” they yelled. So the company imported an expert from Virginia. That didn’t work either. Maybe the local tobacco was a grade too good. The factory shut down and more shillings dropped out of the pockets of hopeful stockholders.
******
On one trip to these regions I went with Inspector Chris Kendrick, a planter named Sefton, and Archie McAlpin, who was chief inspector for the big development. There was also my “boy,” Ahuia.
In Port Moresby I had designed a uniform for my native interpreters. It was a jumper and skirt in gaudy blue edged with bright yellow braid, and on the breast was a large yellow H. The H, of course, stood for Hookworm; but it made boys throw out their chests and strut as if it meant Harvard at least.