In July I decided to lead my own expedition as far into the interior as possible and get a proper picture of infestation in districts remote from the influence of white traders and planters. I had worked like a beaver along the coast, up rivers, into plantations, sea villages, hill villages. My inspectors were always away, leading surveys and campaigns that spread out fanwise across the country. Communications were crude. Canoes, whaleboats and jiggery launches plied their precarious way among the infinite shoals, or lost themselves under lush palisades where an all-wise Creator saw fit to turn on the shower at the slightest excuse.
I moved ahead of my inspectors, surveyed the districts, turned them over to my men and passed on to the next. Although the Government was inclined to look on me as a secret agent of John D. Rockefeller, they offered me a sort of mild indulgence. Our main handicap was supplies, as the Foundation’s Dr. Sawyer, then my over-director, could not believe that such great quantities of drugs were necessary to treat infected Papua. Where was all the stuff going? In Australia, where treatments had been comparatively few, expenditures had been small. Sawyer simply couldn’t grasp the immenseness of that sick population in the Territory. Yet to treat them en masse would have been the only answer. At that time mass treatments had been tried among laborers in Java; but a wholesale curative campaign was unheard of.
Our work had been so heavy that we had exhausted Central Office supplies. Even in the following year there weren’t enough to go around. We had to carry on with what we had.
******
On July 21 I was more than glad to be setting out for Yule Island, a splotch of land some sixty miles from Port Moresby. This island is separated by a thin gut of water from the prodigious jungle-covered mountains that stalk beyond Mafulu to the mysterious border some still call “German New Guinea.” Again we were jogging along on the little Morinda, with Captain Teddy Hillman and his Gin Club in command. With me I had the two boys, Ahuia and Quai. We took with us a quantity of “gear,” which was our term for the variety of things we must carry with us into the field.
A white man, bent on an excursion straight into the thick of Papua, requires several swag bags—one for his bed, mattress and mosquito netting; another for scientific equipment; a smaller bag to hold incidentals. The number of tucker boxes for food depends on the time one spends in the field. There will be no chance to replace anything after the start is made. These must be included: frying pan, teapot, billy-cans, a tin opener, a lantern with kerosene, an ax and an assortment of tinned food. Absorbing topics around a Papuan campfire are the relative merits of different brands of tinned meats, and cunning ways to disguise the taste of tin.
The tins for hookworm specimens, packed by hundreds, were little half-ounce cylinders about the diameter of a silver dollar. The gear made a load for many carriers, burdened too with their own food for the whole trip. And don’t forget the trade tobacco that must be doled out everywhere as strike insurance. We were prepared for almost anything; the going up to Mafulu would be hard.
Getting carriers for these long pulls was always a part of Papua’s labor problem. Ask a Motu boy to pack and follow you into the jungle and he’d begin to shuffle, roll his big eyes and move away. There was puri-puri, bad magic, in those hills out there. It was not “our fashion” to go among the Mondo or the Kuni people. They have enchantments, you die under a spell. The same fear lay across every district border; we had to change our carriers as we went along.
******
Yule Island, flat and green as a dish of parsley, lay separated by a thread of salt water from the distant panorama of tumbled mountains that climbed the wilds of Papua. It was an exotic and frightening beauty over there, peak after peak, their height exaggerated by closeness to shore. The tallest looked taller than Mt. Everest, and more unattainable.