A Yankee doctor in paradise

by S. M. Lambert

Our Zaca moved across the short stretch of sea. In sight of Bellona’s forbidding cliffs I sent a short radio message to Eloisa; a demonstration of science in the midst of savagery.

A man came out in a canoe and gave his name as Samoana, which was pure Samoan for Guardian of the Sea. He guided us to a beach which had changed so in three years that I hardly knew it. Great storms had washed it clean of sand; now it was a forest of sharp coral points. When I sat down on the softest lump I could find, I was immediately surrounded by a half-hundred fierce faces; threatening fists were full of bows, arrows and spears. A man who came out of a cave seemed to own the beach, and I asked him if we might pitch our tent there. No, he said archly, if we set up a tent (“big calico”) we might take a notion to stay. A poor start, but with the help of Buia I managed to persuade him that we were moving on in four days. When I asked for the chiefs to come to me—a policy I adopted on Bellona—Samoana went away, then came back to report that Ponge, the Big Master, sat with three lesser Masters, presiding at a great festival. He couldn’t possibly come, as he was very tabu; his face was blackened, which was the deepest of all tabus.

Buia brought in the three lesser Masters, who surprised me with their willingness to have the people inspected. And of course it would be all right to have the big calico on the shore—if we didn’t stay too long. When I told them that I had left much of my equipment in a big calico on the White Sands, with the assurance that nothing would be stolen, the three Masters promised me that my goods would be respected. And they kept their word. Even on Rennell I had found that the people were learning the difference between meum and teum. Sleeping on that beach would be about as comfortable as a Hindu fakir’s bed of nails, and Bellona’s geological freaks made water available only by catching it in coconut shells or the funny wooden bowls they used for that purpose. The Bellonese, who were the gentlest people in the world in spite of their savage look, seemed to subsist almost without water. A little coconut juice satisfied bodies that had adjusted themselves to conditions.

I loaded the three Masters on the small boat and we presented them with candy and tinned meat. Crocker turned on the phonograph, with startling effect. They all began to shake and shiver; Buia’s cousin Takeika rose nervously and tried to take the machine down to his canoe. We had to tell him that it was very tabu for anybody but Crocker, who was Captain to them—the highest title they could understand. We didn’t turn the record on again. They were very curious about the two little fishes which Buia had tattooed on my left ankle. They didn’t know that my ankle was still sore where a needle (made from a sliver of human bone) had gone in, or that my leg was sensitive from a couple of buried boils, which I had carried with me from Suva and hadn’t given a chance to cure. They smacked their lips and rolled their eyes, marveling at the tattooed fishes, symbols of Rennell.

They seemed to think that the Rennell people put on airs. Macgregor found that Bellona gave a soft sound to ng, as in “sing,” where Rennell hardened it to ngg, as in “finger.” Probably considered an affectation, like the English broad a....

Malakai and I, setting up a tent on the beach, found that the petting habit on Bellona was slightly worse than that of Rennell. People surrounded us like sticky flies. Two or three would run their hands down my shirt collar, to see if my worshipful belly was real or just padding; two or three more would be lifting up my trousers to marvel at my white ankles, and the tattooed fishes. That massage, with inquisitive and dirty hands, went on for four days. It went hardest with Crocker, who had more respect for his personal dignity than some of us. He was getting used to being called Captain—on Rennell he had tried to insist that his name was Owner, but that hadn’t made sense to the native. Captain meant Boss, and you couldn’t go any higher than that.

At last we went to Big Master Ponge, since he was too sacred to move from his seat of dignity. Every time my sore leg came down I suppressed a moan, and wondered why I had ever left Suva in such condition. Whenever the choking scrub along the way opened up a little I had pleasant views of the neat, thatched houses. They looked very pretty at a distance, but when I went into some of them I found only dirt floors, with hardly a mat to squat on—and all the time dirty natives were patting my hands, pawing my shoes, stockings, every inch of me.

Big Master Ponge had invited us to a dance, and that was the reason for those weary three miles. As we had done in Rennell, we crawled on our stomachs under the low eaves and faced the Presence on all fours. And there was the great Ponge, seated on his dais and looking for all the world, as Maury said, like a Chinese mandarin. But a mandarin doing a black-face act, for his cheeks, nose and forehead were thick with tabu soot. He shook hands all round and listened carefully when I told him why we had come, and how Crocker had invited him to visit the Zaca. Macgregor talked, and presented him with a cane-knife—and I hoped he’d use it to clear a path through that awful scrub. In behalf of his Master Tahua, Buia gave him an American ax. By way of ecclesiastical blessing Ponge pronounced us “good fellow too much.” I didn’t wait for the dance, but limped back over the terrible trail. I had business awaiting me on the beach.

I looked over the people that filed through my tent and was surprised to see how much clearer skinned and robust they were than the inhabitants of the White Sands. They appeared cleaner, but they smelled a little worse than the Rennellese. I saw some hideous cases of yaws, and remembered what Buia had said: The Bellona folk did not quarantine it. In fact the Rennellese quarantine was the only one I ever saw among primitive people.

Bellona called it caho, and when I asked in the presence of the crowd where caho came from, they answered to a man that Dr. Deck’s missionaries had brought it. Dr. Deck had botched his expeditions sufficiently, without this. Even though Deck’s excursions might have brought some of it, it was just a case of yaws meet yaws, I thought. If the people of Bellona were Polynesian, this was the only Polynesian spot on the Pacific where the disease was not called tona or some name much like it. Their ignorance of the word suggested that they had been pushed out of some Western Polynesian group before they had had a chance to come in contact with the Tongans; for yaws is a curse that does not die out of itself, and if they had come to Bellona after meeting Tongans, they would have carried the Tongan name tona.