When Chris was with me in New Britain I saw him severely bitten—by a parrot, pet of the Samoan wife of a German planter. Chris was busy making friends when the bird nipped him square across the nose. I treated it, and Chris’s diary tersely records: “You never know what to expect down here.”
He jotted down one item which a garrulous explorer might have turned into a chapter, and a thrilling one:—
Alone with native crew, big, sulky devils. Couldn’t understand trouble. Maybe short on food. They turned on me, with spears and paddles. Covered them with my service pistol, but was a bit nervy for fear 2 or 3 would get me from behind. Finally the D.O. showed up with police. It was rather tricky.
One day en route Kenny Fooks lost his temper and told a coastwise skipper what he thought of him. The skipper retaliated by dumping Kenny off on a sort of desert island. Nothing to do for weeks but count the sparse hookworms and write a weather report. Most of that diary read: “June 14, weather fine.” “June 21, weather still fine.” “July 1, weather cloudy.” “July 9, raining like hell and glad of it.” My other inspectors were more active, and I had to scold Byron Beach occasionally for his daredevil tendencies. But he was learning fast and his young vitality made him a splendid worker. My new acquisitions were W. J. McErlane and R. V. Sunners. Fooks and Beach were later sent to the mainland, and McErlane covered the field in Bougainville, an island far to the east and formerly part of the Solomons. These men were not heard from for half a year.
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I had been studying pidgin English for nearly a year, but had not reached the point where I could use it in my lectures, as I knew I must. Until I had mastered the idiom I had to depend on a faithful interpreter. Therefore I chose a very cross-eyed native named Jerope; I got him because nobody else in Rabaul seemed to want him. Jerope was so cross-eyed that when he poured my coffee I had to follow the spout with my cup, otherwise he would have poured it in my lap. He was a bush fellow with none of Ahuia’s sophistication, and was obsessed by every witch and devil that flies over the Pacific. Before I could take him into the field he got himself arrested for stealing a red lantern off a sewer-digging in Rabaul. When the judge asked him what he wanted with a red lantern he blandly explained. He thought the white men had put them on the streets so that natives could use them to scare off devils. For everybody knows that devils won’t attack a man with a lantern.
Jerope languished awhile in jail and improved his education. Because the boy was brighter than the average the Keop who ruled the jail put him in charge of the bulla-ma-cows (cattle herd) and Jerope was faithful to his trust. The day I called and accused him of milking the cows, his eyes crossed in great sadness when he replied, “No, master, him no woman cow, him man cow.”
Jerope was not a mission boy; he despised their kind for a lot of sissies. Once when we were inspecting Ninigo away up in the northeast we had with us a well-known English anthropologist, nephew of a great one. Like the Catholic missionaries he had a soft voice and a full beard. He was far too dainty. The Australians called him “Birdie” because he wore a feather in his Alpine hat. Birdie shrank from cold baths, so every morning he minced back and forth across the deck, carrying a little bowl of hot water for his tub. Once when the bowl-bearing Birdie minced by, Jerope turned and spat into the sea. “Him mission!” he growled.
From a medical point of view the Ninigo group was interesting. I made a count of palpable spleens and found an index of 54 per cent; considerable malaria for so remote a spot. In fact this was about the same proportion that I found among the assorted natives brought to the hospital in Rabaul. Hookworm, on the other hand, was only 8.4 per cent as against 74.2 for the whole Territory. Why? Because the group was made up of narrow atolls, where the beaches were the latrines and the tide carried the infecting material away. Malaria and elephantiasis are both mosquito diseases (if you can call elephantiasis a disease—it is merely a symptom of filarial infection). On one of the islands here I saw a woman’s breasts so enlarged that when she sat they touched the ground.
Ninigo might serve as a type example of a region with no protection against the insect carriers that are today scattering plague among all the sons of Adam. Rapid transit, open ports, borders wide open.... It’s the same old story, to us of the Health Service.