Last May [I said] I was in Tulagi, capital of the Solomon Islands, looking over our health campaign. I don’t have to tell you how long I had waited for a chance to see Rennell Island; and mine wasn’t all an explorer’s curiosity. When George Fulton told me, back in 1920, that the Rennellese were “practically untouched” I had wondered if these seemingly archaic people were infected with one of the known varieties of hookworm. Or if they were infected at all, would it be a variety hitherto undiscovered? If so, I might be able to furnish valuable data on the origin of a race that had been so long lost to the world.
From inquiry and general reading I knew that Rennell Island, and its tiny companion Bellona, had been visited in the past; but those visits were few and far between, even in the Pacific sense of the term. Some sailors might have penetrated to the interior. Two brave bishops, Selwyn and Patterson, touched there in 1856, and fifty years later C. M. Woodford and A. G. Stephens had made geological surveys around the shore. Dr. Northcote Deck, of the South Sea Evangelists, visited several times with a companion missioner, between 1908 and 1911; Deck made a gory mess of proselytizing. Resident Commissioner Kane, on his official inspection of 1925, might have been the first white man that ever went into the interior. A few years before that, the powerful Lever Brothers had “recruited” some labor from offshore; but the natives were so unresistant to disease that the recruiters had decided to take back the ones who survived. In 1928 Stanley and Hogbin made a geological survey for the High Commission, and reported that they had found absolutely nothing of commercial importance.
The next year the Whitney South Sea Expedition went there collecting birds for New York’s Natural History Museum. The young men from this expedition, on its second trip, were the ones who brought me into the story. Rennell lay only 150 miles to the southeast of Tulagi; it was hard to realize that it was so near, or that in 1930 one could turn back the book of mankind’s history for thousands of years and read the living page; that the voyager of today might thrill as Captain Cook thrilled when he first saw a Pacific island.
Well, I talked about Rennell to Captain Ashley, Resident Commissioner at Tulagi, and he offered to take me there on his next cruise. He’d have to drop me on the beach and pick me up when his yacht swung around that way again. But Rennell Island wasn’t very safe for strangers, he said. A few years ago when Dr. Deck of the South Sea Evangelists had sent three native missionaries there the Rennellese had killed them off; eaten them, probably, for nobody ever found the bodies. No, the safest way to see Rennell would be behind an armed guard.
Time was precious and there was no telling when Captain Ashley’s boat would take a notion to come. Then I saw a stout but battered little auxiliary schooner lying offshore. It looked like a turn of Providence, for she was the same France that had taken the Whitney Expedition to Rennell three years before. A crowd of young men came ashore, looking more like hoboes than naturalists. Their leader was Hannibal Hamlin, grandson of Lincoln’s Vice President, and an old Yale football player. I pricked up my ears when Hamlin said that they were heading the France for Rennell Island again, if they could make it. My ears stood higher still when he said that he was the second white man, perhaps, to have gone inland as far as the Lake.
I wasted no time, you can well believe, in asking them what dicker I could make to go along. Hamlin showed true American generosity. They were indebted to Captain Ashley for a lot of things, and if I was his friend they’d do anything to oblige me; only trouble was the Whitney Expedition backers hadn’t come across with their check. They were out of provisions. All right, said I, provisions and trade were on me. Let’s take them on and get started. At the Burns-Phillip Store Hamlin took on some very odd supplies, including a great number of adzes, hatchets and trade knives with wooden handles and blades six inches long. When I asked him if we were going to use them on the savages he said, “No, but that’s what they’ll want.” I could understand the jumble of cheap mirrors and scissors. When he called for calico and beads he always asked for red. Why red? “That’s the color they’ll want,” he said, and started dickering for three pasteboard trade boxes with flimsy locks.
Our only stop was at Gaudalcanar where Gordon White was heading one of my Solomon Islands treatment units. He was an especially valuable addition to the party, as he had been to Rennell Island on the Stanley Expedition, two years before. On this trip he was to act as my microscopist.
We were a careless, happy company, getting dirtier every hour. We had with us a youngish German named Walter—I can’t remember the rest of it—who was a shell collector and looked the part. Our skipper was an ancient Scot, sour with religion. Gordon White had brought on three Solomon Island attendants, and he lent me a very black one named Ga’a, four feet high, aged fourteen, and proud as Punch to be serving a white gentleman. Service consisted mostly in opening tinned food and throwing the empty tins overboard—or letting them roll. The main cabin was so small that you couldn’t stretch without banging your elbows; here we ate amidst fumes from the engine. We only used the engine in dead calm, when it could make four miles an hour. We had a small lavatory and a shower, neither of which worked. I was more than grateful to my companions when they allotted me—out of respect to my superior girth—the largest berth on the ship. It was right off the cabin, and there was no privacy. But privacy was a stranger to the France.
There was a place for nothing, and nothing in its place. Walter the German strewed shells, Hamlin and Coultas stuffed birds and scattered feathers so that some of them always managed to get into the stew. Our native deck-hands slept in places where you couldn’t help stumbling over them. Gordon White, when he wasn’t trying to find where he had stowed his microscopic outfit, turned on the phonograph and shouted.
We were on our way to Rennell Island—maybe. And just another touch to our oddity: We had a stumpy black Hercules who helped the cook by spilling soup, waited on table by dropping dishes, cleaned the cabin by pushing the dirt across into another corner. He was an ebony figure of the Masculine. And his name was Bella.