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At last, graduate N.M.P.’s were sent to Rennell Island; they went one at a time for a six months’ service, fully equipped, but alone. An outstanding one was Eroni, a full-blood Fijian who gained a nickname: “the only white man on Mungava.” Patient and responsible as only a Fijian can be, he went barefoot over every coral snag and bog on the island. Conscientiously he treated everything they had. Once he saw the natives catch a shark according to custom; they wrestled with it in the water, bound it with ropes and hauled it in. One man had his hand bitten off, and Eroni saved him with a tourniquet. He was surprised to find that the Rennellese themselves had always known how to apply a tourniquet. Eroni was ever ready for emergency calls as well as methodical mass treatments.
But one medical man, work as he might, could not enforce that ounce of prevention which, on Rennell, would have been worth many pounds of cure.
Before the High Commission in Suva I tried to drive home the necessity of government protection for these defenseless people. The waters should be patrolled and mischievous ships kept away. Medical authority should be carefully admitted, and a properly hand-picked anthropologist. At the very mention of the latter profession I met opposition. A number of vicious playboys who masked as “scientific investigators” had put anthropology in bad odor. It used to be that everybody’s hat was off to every wandering bluffer who claimed to hold a key to the mystery of man’s origin. Too many of these fellows had overstayed their time—usually on islands where women were the prettiest. One “anthropologist” had just been ordered off the Pacific; he had been charged with violating two little girls. So the High Commission, although they quite understood my attitude, rather thought that I should take the matter up in London. The snag was somewhere in the Colonial Office, they said.
Here are a few lines from a letter I wrote His Excellency, the High Commissioner; just an item in the literature that passed back and forth in my long plea for the Rennell Islanders:—
Spiritually they have a gentle religion in which there is no skepticism and no cruelty. Socially it would be hard to convince me that these savages are not more highly advanced than we are. There is almost a complete absence of crime. Morally they have a code which suits them, and to which they adhere exactly. They themselves say that they do not want government, missions or doctors....
The High Commissioner’s reply, in part:—
The Bishop of Melanesia has suggested that he should be allowed to select young men from Rennell, train them as preachers, and send them back. What is your view of this proposal?
My answer in brief:—
... Unfortunately, when anyone’s ideas on any subject differ from those of a missionary, he is immediately put down as anti-missionary, if not anti-Christian. The only question on which all of the Mission Societies will unite is opposition to any attempt to limit in the least degree, for any purpose whatsoever, the extension of mission work. On all other questions they are drawn up in armed camps against each other. I am not anti-mission in any particular, and any reasonable man must be pro-mission, if he is acquainted with the history of mission efforts in the Pacific, where they have been the great humanizers and educators of the native races. However....