A Yankee doctor in paradise

by S. M. Lambert

I was afraid that would be the last I’d ever see of him.

******

Our breakdown at Dobu gave us a view of the geyser field at Seymour Bay which matches the Yellowstone. The greatest spouter is Seo-seo-kuna, which roars like a hundred menageries. Beside one of the boiling pools I saw a group of natives kneeling reverently. Ah, this would be something worth seeing; the primitive heart bowed down to some powerful goddess of fire and water.... When I came closer I soon found what they were doing. They were cooking yams.

Probably they did say a little heathen prayer—if the missionary was not looking. Unofficial paganism is the custom everywhere in the Christianized Pacific. In choosing my native assistants I usually rejected the mission-trained boys, who were too often slackers, liars and hypocrites. “Him Mission” meant “He’s a Christian,” and was a scornful term.

I do not underrate the work of missionaries, the best of them; I have known so many who tackled their problems cheerfully on the pittance doled out by Foreign Boards. They had volunteered for a life so bitterly hard and so meagerly paid that it might easily have brought out something more petty than the helpful generosity which the best of them showed me. But the days of the great missioners like Chalmers and Brown, who fought and died in the midst of ferocious savagery, have passed away.

The man of God down there, when he went in for selfish profit, usually made his investments in his wife’s name and took advantage of special concessions allotted by the Government for legitimate mission work; or he used the funds from good Christian collection plates at home. Professional traders had a right to complain of unfair competition in the labor market, for the business-missions often secured labor for nothing under a forced system of “donating” work. Among the missions which “came clean” were the Catholics, who were accustomed to look to Europe for their support; but when 1914’s war came on that support was cut off. They faced the music manfully, and did their bit toward paying their own way. The fruits of this labor were turned back to the native, in the form of an intelligent attempt to better his condition. But too often the missionaries were wrapped in a dream of heavenly perfection, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, smelling nothing. It was refreshing to meet an honest-minded one, who could be fair enough to rationalize his ideals....

Our cutter Bomada had staged her terminal breakdown in one of the Trobriands’ divine lagoons which seemed to take its color from the pearls that lay below. The Bomada, I felt, had killed every noble impulse in my heart. Especially that rainy day when we tried to hoist sail and saw the rotten thing—which hadn’t been looked at for two years—fall to pieces in the first breeze. And now I was taking afternoon tea in the pleasant garden of a pleasant missionary. The prettily formed native girls who served us wore single garments, brief fiber skirts. The only shamed person present was the missionary’s wife, who kept chirping, “Isn’t it disgusting, Doctor!” Her husband, who had entered the ministry from Oxford, had educated these people in cleanliness and right living. He had taught them many things that natives must know in order to meet the perils of European civilization. On purely scientific grounds he had opposed the missionary custom (encouraged by the traders) of dolling the women up in disease-breeding clothes.

I asked this sensible messenger of Christ, “How many converts, in our sense of the word, have you made here?” He rubbed his tired forehead and replied, “Doctor, not one in twenty years.” I honored him for that, and was willing to wager that he had won his way many times over a “civilizer.” He was human, and he knew humanity.

He was in refreshing contrast to at least one luxuriously living Christian who had entertained me in Samarai. He “instructed” the natives in collecting nuts, cutting copra and building boats. His fine house and teeming acres revealed how well he had profited by his instructions. If he had made any attempt to civilize the people, the effect was not apparent. Except in the case of the lone missionary who honestly despaired of making converts, there seemed to be no attempt to teach the natives English.

But there must have been another exception once, for on a small Trobriand island a native boy addressed me primly: “Undoubtedly, sir, you will find more clement weather for the remainder of your voyage.” Startled, I asked, “Where did you learn to talk like that?” The boy said, “My missionary taught me. Unfortunately he expired in an insane asylum. He had been irrational for quite a long time.”