A Yankee doctor in paradise

by S. M. Lambert

Those who knew him well said of Vakatawa, “He has the mind of a first-class white man.” That remark was a bit patronizing, but it expressed the general confidence in him. He had gone very deeply into the study of magic, and to his reports I owe a great deal of what I learned about draunikau and the ritual of the seven curses.[7]

Did Vakatawa end his life as the result of some magic wish? That was out of the question. Time and again, he had outfaced the witch doctors with practical lessons in modern medicine, and he was too well-loved among the villages for anybody to put a curse on him. I have looked into Vakatawa’s case as best I could from where I sit and where he lies, and I think I know the reason why he locked himself in his room and put a razor blade across his wrists. Always a sensitive man, he had a sensitive man’s high temper, which his racial courtesy seldom allowed to get the better of him. But that hot temper got him into some sort of brawl, and after it was over he felt that he had disgraced himself and had not lived up to his responsibilities as a Practitioner. He was inordinately proud of his profession, and when his brooding mind told him that he had let the School down, he decided that there was no use living any longer.

I give Vakatawa an honored place among those who died in the line of duty.

******

Our little School has grown, and is growing. My constant hope is that its roots have gone so deep into the soil of Fiji that no political whim or Anglo-Saxon prejudice shall ever blast it in some clumsy attempt at transplanting. Already we have sent out well over a hundred competent medical men; not many, perhaps, in the millions of ocean miles which their work must cover. But their efficiency shows in the general improvement in health wherever they have operated.

To the outsider it may seem a bit incredible that the descendants of cannibals—and the majority of them are just that—should be devoting their young talents to saving life, where their ancestors were bent on destroying it. But to me the protean change is a very logical thing. The cannibals were anatomists, and their gruesome habits made them familiar with the set-up of the human body. Just as Roman surgeons studied the victims dragged from the arena, so the wiser of the anthropophagi observed and learned. Neither ways were pretty roads to knowledge, but strange things have happened in the Martyrdom of Man.

As I lectured the students in the postmortem theater I often paused in interest at the skill of this one and that, plying the knife. No one of them had ever seen cannibalism in practice; but ancestral voices, turned friendly and benevolent, seemed to be telling them what to do.

I have a photograph which I took down in Santa Ana, Solomon Islands. It is of a brown woman, practically nude, with shark’s teeth around her neck and a long clam-hinge sticking through her nose. I think I’ve told you how I took this picture of Mrs. Kuper, the trader’s wife. She was holding up one small, naked boy, and another stood at her side. I have another picture; it is of a good-looking boy, very collegiate in a tweed suit and striped necktie. He would be hard to recognize as the naked child in the first picture.

Geoffrey Kuper’s father was sufficiently well-to-do to send him for study in New Zealand. He graduated from our Central Medical, class of ’38, and Sydney gave him a prize “for the most distinguished scholar of the year.” Before he took up his duties as N.M.P. in the Solomons, he dropped in on his old school-friends in Auckland. A reporter got hold of him and Geoffrey told of the first scholastic prize he ever received, an honorary belt which his mother’s tribe gave him as an introduction to manhood. It was a hard initiation. For six months he had stayed in the ceremonial house, among the ancestral canoes and family skulls. Priests came to his pagan retreat to instruct him in tribal duties, which included house-building and the preparing of a yam and dalo garden.

Then he was put in a fishing canoe where the priests angled until they caught a great bonito. It was the boy’s task to wrestle with the fish and hold it until it ceased to flap. Boy and fish were taken to the pagan altar where priests squeezed the bonito’s gills and let drops of blood fall into the initiate’s mouth. At the end of the long ceremony Geoffrey was taken to a high tower and allowed to throw food down to the admiring populace. “That part was fun,” he said.