And all this led up to my brandy-and-eggs conversation with Raymond Fosdick. In fact, it also led up to one of my most interesting adventures.
For when morning broke, after my Arabian night with Crocker, Eloisa reminded me again that he was in need of fresh eggs and that we had plenty in the hen-house. “I’ve gathered three dozen,” she said, “and you might put them on the Zaca when you go down to the office.”
I took the eggs over to the Zaca, which was busily preening herself for a long haul. I left them with my compliments and best wishes. The Zaca sailed at noon.
A few days later a messenger came over from the Fiji Club with something wrapped in the Times and Herald. Unwrapping, I found four bottles of 1835 brandy. There was no address on the package, and I thought there was some mistake. I asked Amos, secretary of the Club, and he said: “Well, if you don’t want the stuff, I do. But Mr. Crocker seemed to say that it was for you.”
I wrote my thanks to Templeton Crocker, and this opened up a lively correspondence. He was about the way I had been when I first heard about Rennell Island. He couldn’t drop the subject, and as months went by his keenness seemed to grow. Early in 1933, he wrote that he had made some changes in the Zaca so that it would be more handy for collecting scientific specimens. He finished by asking me to go along and show him the strange country I had told him about. Of course I wanted to see Rennell Island again, but I secured an invitation from the High Commission first, then wrote Mr. Crocker, “I’ll go willingly, if you’ll spot me around where I can inspect our work in the Solomons and make a tuberculin survey.” I also suggested that he bring an anthropologist along. He found the man and added a plant collector and an entomologist to the Zaca party.
******
That was the way Eloisa’s eggs came to roost, if I may scramble a metaphor. In a roundabout way they gave me a chance to revisit a spot which interested me more, perhaps, than anything I had seen in the Pacific.
CHAPTER III
THROUGH THE SOLOMONS TO RENNELL
Let me begin with a scrap from my diary of May 4, 1933. We had been on the water three days, moving toward Vanikoro.