A Yankee doctor in paradise

by S. M. Lambert

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We sailed toward Vanikoro, and saw Tinakula flaming across the sea, a volcano that seemed to be in constant eruption. Black smoke obscured it, then winds would clear it so that we could look to its sharp summit; at night it was a pillar of fire. Vanikoro, which lay beyond, had a total population of ninety-five. It was a noteworthy illustration of the decay of native races. When the early voyager La Pérouse was wrecked there, the island teemed with people.

We saw the Duffs, where the dark people looked Melanesian and spoke Polynesian; Macgregor told me that they chewed their words so that he couldn’t understand them. They scorned our tobacco because it was a grade too good; it seemed that the Burns-Phillip store had sold Crocker some of the better sort of rope-tobacco made by East Indians in Fiji. The minute the natives smelled it they turned in disgust. They wanted the rank trade tobacco made in America, and you couldn’t fool them with a substitute. A disappointment to our anthropologists, when they tried to collect museum specimens on the Duffs, and got nothing....

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We swung around to the little land I learned to love on my visit there twelve years before. Sikiana with its three charming atolls, three links in a chain. I remembered its unspoiled, laughing Polynesians, its modest, pretty girls who had draped us with wreaths of flowers. I remembered its jolly, handsome men, who had been inoffensively drunk with toddy the day we got there. I remembered the bearded patriarch we had called Old Number One; I had thought of him as one who ruled only by example in a pagan democracy which had no laws, no worries, no debts, no crimes, no serious diseases. I was full of forebodings as our ship neared a palm-fringed lagoon. What had happened to little Sikiana since last I saw it?

Two canoes came out across the reef, and I recognized an old friend, Lautaua, who had done me many favors on my last visit. We were glad to see each other, and his pidgin was garrulous, describing his trips over many waters during that dozen years. Most of the Sikiana men who had been our sailors on the Lever Brothers’ cruise had died or strayed away.

And did I know what had happened? Well, the Melanesian Mission had come to their little Polynesia. Over the ten miles of soft lagoon Lautaua told the story. How they had sent in preachers and teachers to improve them. As Missioner-in-Chief a very black boy had come from Guadalcanar. His name was Daniel Sande. At first the people would not join the Church, and many were still holding out; but the Polynesian will yield to persuasion, if only for a show of politeness. Lautaua had offended Black Daniel by moving to another island; then he got so homesick that he came back, a shorn lamb, and found four black Melanesian teachers ruling the roost for Lautaua’s proud, light-skinned neighbors and relatives. I asked Lautaua his confidential view on the new religion. He bowed his handsome head. “Master, some fellow he talk man die he come back; me tink man he die he go along ground finish. He no come back. Me no go along school [catechism]. Me no go along water behind [baptism]. Me tink Story [Birth of Christ and miracles] he altogether gammon. Mission he spoil him altogether people.”

Sikiana, where once they had danced by the light of the moon, had a look of dull propriety. Good heavens, there was a church! A conch shell sounded—and the Sikiana girls were filing in, dressed in white pinafores. Beside them marched sad-looking Sikiana men. It was edifying, it was shocking. Salvation had entered Paradise. Government had entered, too, for here was the official shack where we were to bunk and try to eat the awful messes a native cook had thrown together. Malakai took one sniff at the mound of indigestibles, then he did what Malakai would. He shouldered out the cook and took over the saucepans. For the rest of our stay there we ate wholesomely and well.

There was an undercurrent of discontent in Sikiana because a hurried Government Secretary had swooped down on them when Old Number One died and had asked in haste, “Who’s chief now?” An enterprising impostor named Tuana had presented himself and made a glib selling talk which got him appointed in twenty minutes, more or less. The Honorable Secretary went back to his boat, too full of business to wait and find out that he had broken Sikiana’s traditional line of chiefly succession. Such a miscarriage of justice is not characteristically British; but there are always puffy officials, meaning well and doing badly.

I learned about Black Daniel, who seemed to be a hard-bitten slaver in the name of the Lord. This was his day’s routine: Sound the conch at 6 A.M. for church; sound it a little later for the children’s school; sound it again at ten for the bigger boys and girls; school for grown-ups at 4 P.M., where the study was catechism; church again at 6 P.M., with much singing and a long, strong sermon. This was the week-day program. Sunday, of course, furnished a constant grist for the mill that never ceased turning. When religious duties didn’t interfere the inhabitants could work; but they weren’t working very hard. Sikiana was getting lazy.