A Yankee doctor in paradise

by S. M. Lambert

When I found Crocker resting his foot on deck he asked me what sort of mob scene we had been pulling over there. I told him that it was the kind of melodrama most explorers were looking for, but I didn’t care for it. I was sweating freely, very cold sweat for so warm a day. It reminded me, I said, of what Winston Churchill once told a certain Commissioner from a certain Pacific island group, who came back to London to explain a lot of things. Churchill was Colonial Secretary then and the Commissioner was an old friend. “Winston,” said the Commissioner, “they accuse me of keeping women.” “But Charles, my dear boy,” said Winston, “why shouldn’t you?”

I was in trouble with Malaita, but why I shouldn’t be was an open question.

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Too often on that voyage I was forced to say “I told you so,” comparing what I saw with what I had seen twelve years before. Stevenson’s “Drink and the devil had done for the rest” might have been transposed into “Disease and the traders.” Casual islands, where casual ships dropped in and the people had no moral barriers against strangers, were obviously on the downgrade. In 1921, when we had made an overnight survey around Star Harbour, my medical mind had worried over the carefree sex-generosity of the women there. It was none of my business that, according to native custom, young men hired their fiancées out long enough to earn a marriage dowry. That was the fashion, and there seemed to be no ill results—so long as they confined their promiscuity to their own tribesmen. Their freedom with visiting sailors, black, white or yellow, caused me to foresee what I found there in 1933. That horrid visitor, venereal granuloma, had come to play and stayed to kill. A Chinaman, they said, had brought it there. Life was shortening, the birth rate was almost nil. The abundant missionaries were doing what they could to curb immorality. What they could do wasn’t much. Star Harbour was too good a trading station to keep away from.

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When the Zaca lay at anchor in the colored waters of Mohawk Bay I came upon the end of a short story which had taken twelve years to tell. It was here, you remember, that back in 1921 I had given a midnight hookworm lecture, in what I thought was a mission village; after the lecture I was resting in a whaleboat near the beach when a naked man, darker than the darkness, had waded out to me and told me that he was Sam, a mission teacher; and his lively pidgin had informed me of my mistake—that I had gone to a heathen village; his was the Christian community, where I should have lectured in the name of the Lord. So I had given him a number of tins, told him what to say in his lecture, and asked him to bring me the specimens in the morning, and he had obeyed. Poor devil, like so many others, he had thought his people would be cured merely by filling the tins. He was foolish, but a true Christian.

Well, as Templeton Crocker’s luxury yacht now idled in this bay a missionary came aboard with a number of natives. One of them kept crouching close to my chair, and I recognized him. He was Sam the Christian. “So you’re still the mission teacher here,” I said. “No, master,”—softly,—“you talk along me that night in whaleboat, but me no mission.” I liked the old rascal, and spent a day with him, looking over his village and getting at the truth of his story, which was just this: When he had waded out to my boat with the Christian yarn, he had been a pagan, living among pagans; he had come to me with his pious line of talk because, he explained, the heathens never got any plums from the whites; plums all went to the missionized ones. His people had hookworm, and he didn’t care what he said so long as he got the cure.

Sam was goodfellow too much, so I gave him some more lessons in hookworm treatment and some drugs to help out. He was still a heathen, he told me, although the native teacher had marked him for an extremely hot Eternity....

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So much for scenes revisited, and all not happy ones. We had weighed anchor and were churning out to sea, heading now once more toward Rennell Island. I had seen the mischief done in gentle Sikiana and in other unprotected places. What had happened to Rennell? Buia, coming home with us, said some disturbing things.