I am no Cinderella, but I am worried because my readers may think of me as a sort of medical Cassandra, moaning doom for the Pacific peoples. If that is your impression, I feel that I must say a word to change your minds before I leave you.
Too many cocksure lecturers and writers have made a free-handed flourish from Borneo to Tahiti and proclaimed, “The people are dying off.” And they have referred to the main killers—alcohol; imported disease; food and clothing; the wreckage of their ancient habits with no wholesome and attractive substitutes to take their place.
All too true of the past, and mildly true of the present. I have told you how I watched the New Hebrides decline under a vicious form of colonial government, and how Rennell Island was blighted for lack of protection; and how the natives of the world’s second largest island, New Guinea, must inevitably fall off in numbers and weaken in physique unless their case is handled with more honesty and intelligence than the home Government has seen fit to give it.
All this is on the dark side of the canvas. Let’s look at the brighter picture. I quote myself, from an article in the Pacific Island Monthly:—“The problem of depopulation of natives in the Pacific need no longer exist. The formula for turning declining into increasing populations has been devised and put into operation by British Administrations in Central Polynesia, in Polynesian New Zealand, in British Micronesia (the Gilberts), and in Melanesian Fiji. American Samoans are increasing under the operation of the same general formula.”
The formula: Native doctors and nurses to care for current illnesses and educate their people in the prevention of disease, especially in soil sanitation and pure water supplies; attention to infant and child welfare; reliable census-taking to check results—all under the supervision of competent European physicians and nurses. Add to this a careful study of native customs on the part of civil administrations, so that they may learn respect for the more wholesome of the folk ways that have given life’s zest to the people.
Where this formula has been applied native populations have increased, and are continuing to increase. It has only failed where it has been pigeonholed by incompetents.
The work down there is unfinished, and may remain so until the horn of Judgment awakes some of the living dead. I have been only a very minor spoke in the Rockefeller Foundation’s great wheel of health, which moves with the Earth’s axis. I should like to see the task completed over that 6,000,000 square miles of island-sprinkled sea where I made the doctor’s rounds; but I know that Methuselah couldn’t live long enough to supervise that task. I only know that wherever we worked with progressive governments the vital statistics began to swing upward, however slowly and whatever the temporary setbacks. I have spoken little of the Maoris of New Zealand, for my only work there was concerned in making surveys. But as an example of the above formula, well carried out, let me say that the Maoris of New Zealand have almost doubled their numbers in twenty years. The Cook Islands have done fully as well. And there’s Western Samoa, which has outlived the filthy horrors of the Mau Rebellion, and has come back. The Fijians, too, have risen from the epidemic of 1918, which threatened their extinction. In the black islands of the Solomons nobody knows whether the birth rate is keeping pace with the mortality. We have treated these people on a grand scale and results are being shown in the generally improved condition of plantation labor; tuberculosis is still the reigning terror, and that’s a difficult enemy to cope with. In the Gilbert Islands the brown Micronesians are most certainly reviving; our N.M.P.’s have been working there for years.
Nineteen years ago, when I voyaged hurriedly through the Solomons on the way to my destiny in Fiji, I was already experienced enough to draw my fixed conclusion: Depopulation follows the visitor. The immortal Captain Cook guessed this over a hundred and fifty years ago. A century ago keen observers like George Turner marked the locust swarm of imported diseases, eating their way along the islands. But later, investigators broached a comfortable theory that the natives had begun to die off before the white man came. Nonsense. White men, in the malign form of looters and slavers, Spanish, Dutch and Portuguese, were there two hundred and fifty years before Cook came.
When I first saw the Solomon Islands they served as a type example. In the northwest islands near New Guinea, where shipping, trading, recruiting and missionizing were plentiful, the disease rate was high. As we traveled to the southeast into areas less accessible to visitors the so-called “native diseases” steadily diminished. Twelve years later showed me the change: The Southeast was sick from tuberculosis, dysentery, pneumonia and venereal, which strangers had carried there and spread among non-immune natives. I have mentioned the incidence of these seemingly unaccountable plagues, burning like fire in dry grass. The old-time voyagers, who did their share to spread infection, have noted the evil effects. These things are still going on in the remote corners of the Pacific.
The recruiting of contract labor was once a curse, but more enlightened government has turned it into something of a blessing; wise labor laws have made it so that a worker usually leaves the plantation with his health better than when he came. The New Hebrides, where French planters serve drink, drugs and firearms to their native helpers, is an exception.