Three white men waited for me on flat Yule Island beach. I recognized two of my inspectors, the Orr brothers, Jack and Ron. Their food supply had been spoiled by surprise tumbles from canoes. They greeted me with unrestrained shouts of joy; they would eat again! The third greeter was Mr. Connelly, the jolly, hard-boiled District Officer. When I mentioned the giant mountains across the stream he said casually:—
“They’re a bit of a climb. When you’ve finished with Yule Island I’ll show you up, part of the way. Business and pleasure. I’ll have to push beyond Mafulu—after a batch of murderers, you know. Come over to the house and we’ll have a spot of tea or something.”
I was no sooner in Mr. Connelly’s house than I heard a strain of sweet, familiar music. An American accent! It was young Mrs. Connelly saying, “Pleased to meet you.” She was a native of New Jersey. How she came here to be the wife of a man who scaled crags to round up murderers was just another in the grab-bag we call marriage. My own wife, after all, was born in Mexico, educated in California—and was now waiting for me in a Port Moresby bungalow.
Connelly knew the ropes, as needs must be when one man combines the duties of sheriff, judge advocate, postmaster, tax collector and justice of the peace in a country where the people are hard to count as wild pigs. After an evening of bridge he told me, casually, that he’d fix me up with the forty-seven carriers I needed. How? Just leave it to him. “I’m Government, you know”—with a dry smile.
During our week’s survey of Yule Island the Orr brothers and I were lodged in the patrol officer’s house, walls and floors of split bamboo, ceiling of nipa palm thatch. The shower bath was two Standard Oil cans (“petrol tins” over there) hung one below the other. Can Number 1 is filled with fresh water, and when you pull a string a plug comes out and empties it into Can Number 2, which has been drilled full of nail-holes to give a fountain effect. The first time you use this Rube Goldberg invention you soap yourself carefully under the spray—and the water gives out. The next time you try soaping yourself in your own sweat, which can’t be done. The third try you just say “Oh, hell,” and pull the string.
******
The Mission of the Sacred Heart has a business name which I have remembered accurately: Company of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Ltd. Its holdings ran all the way from Yule Island to a point some 130 miles distant across the channel, up into the wild mountain-heart of Papua, and its practical label was a key to its practical Christianity. The Sacred Heart was, and still is, about the best mission establishment in the Pacific, and should serve as a model for the numerous jarring sects and creeds—Church of England, Calvinist, Wesleyan, Seventh Day Adventist, London Missionary Society and even Mormon—that confused the native mind with conflicting roads to salvation.
I grew to admire these curiously devoted Fathers, thirty-one in all, who usually put aside their priestly robes for the frontiersman’s rough khaki. Fierce beards relieved them entirely of the soft ecclesiastical look. In little convents, strewn along the broken trails up to Mafulu and beyond, there were twenty-six nuns living the same rigorous life.
There was almost every European nationality in this French order: French, German, Swiss, Dutch, one Italian, one Spaniard. They were understaffed, hideously overworked; in faces around the luncheon table I could see the look of men who were not going to last much longer. They were short-lived because they followed their incessant work without considering illness or the demands of a difficult climate. They all died in Papua. With them I visited two cases of typhoid which they said had been brought in from Port Moresby, despite their efforts to quarantine against the germ. I operated on one Father for a bad case of hydrocele, and on others for injuries and infections common to their hard life.
They had solved the food problem troubling the rest of Papua, which was stuffed with American and Australian canned goods. Here they had their own truck gardens, bountifully yielding, so that they could feed their 120 pupils wholesomely and at minimum cost. There were nearly a hundred half-castes in this school. The Sacred Heart method of dealing with mixed blood was practical.