A Yankee doctor in paradise

by S. M. Lambert

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When the report came that we would reach our destination next day I began looking into the physical condition of all aboard. If the Rennellese were as primitive as I had heard, any introduced germ would catch like wild fire, and we might spread a scourge. Harry, our Solomon Island cook, had developed a nasty eye condition; he was a spectacle in the galley, with that dirty rag over his eye. White and I treated him and he began to improve. Still I was worried, wondering how his infection would react on the people we were about to visit.

I looked them all over. There were no common colds, and that was satisfactory. How about that quick-moving venereal contagion, gonorrhea? To the embarrassment of some, and the merriment of many, I lined them all up, from black crew to white captain, and gave them what the Army calls “short-arm inspection.” They were all negative. Satisfactory again. Also there were no visible signs of skin infection. We seemed to be, all told, a very healthy lot.

Then I got my thrill when Hamlin called me on deck, pointed over the bow and said, “There she is!” It lay isolated in the sea. I saw a straight line of cliff, sheer as a prison wall, lifted some 400 feet and running as far as the eye could travel. Scraggly foliage showed faintly at the top. What except an airplane could get anybody up there?

Hamlin, all out of patience, told me that there was only one dent in the cliff, a narrow passage called Kungava Bay, the “White Sands.” If the Scotch skipper hadn’t been so stubborn we could have sailed straight into it. As it was that day was gone and most of the next before we made our final tack and found the opening in the cliffs which marked Rennell’s only landing place, a pin-point approach to an island that was fifty miles long and some fifteen wide. Those guardian cliffs were relics of a strange volcanic action which pushed the Pacific’s largest atoll into high prominence. The island was so tightly ringed with a collar of coral-stone that Sinbad himself could not have found the entrance without a chart. Fortunately Hamlin had one which his navigator on the former trip had made for him.

We shot through the reef and found anchorage inside a beautiful, sheltered bay; it was especially serene because the cliffs protected it on two sides; below their impressive height the beach curved like a white necklace. Things began to move. Two rudely built outrigger canoes came paddling up to us, and I got my first glimpse of these strange people. There were two men, a woman and a couple of small boys. They were not like anything I had ever seen before, and I remembered what Fulton had said: “About twenty thousand years behind modern history.” At the risk of being trite, let me say that the men, very tall and handsomely muscled, had the figures of Greek gods. Around the loins they were swaddled in folds of clumsy tapa (kongoa), made grotesque by a palm-leaf fan stuck in the back. The fans, I learned later, were for protecting the hair when it rained, or for brushing away flies when it shone. Their heads were impressive, dark as to hair and brows, and with strong, well-modeled features. Their hair, almost straight, was coiled in a bun at the back. Their dark, expressive eyes were somewhat slanting, but not Mongoloid fashion, more like the American Indians’. Although they wore small tortoise-shell ornaments stuck through the septum, their noses were slenderly arched. There was nothing negroid about their gracefully cut mouths. What were they like? Somehow you couldn’t call them either Polynesian or Caucasian. Yet there was something indefinitely Caucasian in their features.

The woman was shorter, nude save for a long strip of tapa, bound so tightly around her hips that it seemed to hold her legs together. Those legs were her imperfection, for they were short, stocky and knock-kneed. I wondered if this peculiarity, which I saw later in the majority of the women here, had something to do with the tight binding of the thighs. Or was it an occupational distortion, caused by carrying heavy loads? In the Kuni dwarfs of Papua I have remarked on another sort of occupational distortion—they were pigeon-breasted and duck-footed from climbing hills all their lives. This Rennellese wife, like the man, was well tattooed except for her face and back The designs seemed to be all in the same pattern.

They had hardly gotten aboard before they were all over the ship, prying into everything, handling everything, including ourselves. Delicate, dirty fingers felt of our shirts, felt of the buttons on our shorts, patted us all over to see if these strange beings were real. One of the small boys patted my stomach, not satirically, but in admiring surprise that it could be so big. One of the men went into the galley where he tunked the tin pans and chuckled strange words in a dialect which was not quite Polynesian.

Hamlin and I went down the ladder to look at their canoes, strange hulks gnawed from thick logs—gnawed is the word, for they had been hollowed out in the most primitive possible way.

Hamlin said, “Yes, they char the wood and hack it with shells. But these canoes are better made than the ones I saw before. I gave them some hatchets, and they’re working with them. They’re crazy to get iron and steel. They’ll do anything for it, give you anything they’ve got, and that isn’t much—mostly women.”