Do you remember the alarm of ten years ago—how our most modern instrument of speed, the airplane, had carried the deadly Anopheles gambiae from Natal in Africa across to Brazil? Brazil was too busy with a revolution to fool with mosquitoes until three or four years later when death-without-bullets felled the population in wet areas. Fortunately the infection reached a comparatively dry belt, so that the mosquitoes were slowed up. Then Brazil joined with the Rockefeller Foundation in a gigantic campaign. In 1939 a million dollars was spent down there, and this year they expect to double that sum in an attempt to check the scourge before it spreads, heaven knows how far....
Dr. Marshall Barber, the great authority on malaria, says: “There is no doubt that this invasion of gambiae threatens the Americas with a catastrophe in comparison with which ordinary pestilence, conflagration or even war are but small and temporary calamities.” I have had no experience with the gambiae in my corner of the tropics: but I am using him as a bogie to make a point. How tropical are “tropical diseases”? Germs and worms love to visit around. The northern-born influenza has swept away thousands in the South Pacific; neglected, its germ may bide its time for a plunge back into the North. Amoebic dysentery is a “tropical disease”—yes, and a few years ago it appeared in Chicago. The distinctly tropical filariasis (often manifested in elephantiasis) has been identified in several cases in an incomplete survey of the Carolinas. Dr. Boyd, investigating in Florida, asserted that our temperate-climate mosquito can carry a tropical strain of malaria. I saw how inguinal (venereal) granuloma spread from island to island in the Pacific; recently I was not surprised to hear of cases in the United States. Leprosy, which curses the Polynesian, was brought to him by the oriental; the Polynesian may pass it around—there is plenty of it in New York today. The white man gave tuberculosis to the black Solomon Islander, who awaits an opportunity to return the generous gift.
A few millions of Rockefeller dollars, a few hundreds of Rockefeller scientists, have gone forth into the seed-beds of disease, to work and study, and cure, if possible. I say this for the benefit of smug stay-at-homes who ask us, “Why do you waste your time and money on these niggers, who live in another world from ours?” Yes, but do they? Our little planet is moving faster every day. If sanitarians go on bungling their way through bogs and forests and mountains, maybe it is to save you from a peck of trouble some fine morning, Mr. Homebody. Or at least we can wave the danger flag.
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In the Kaiser’s day, I was told, the German planters sent to Ninigo to replenish their harems. Certainly the people were terribly thinned out. I found an island where they were reduced to thirteen, one girl and twelve men; and all eaten with venereal granuloma. The Hermit Islands had lost their hermit; a friendly planter had taken off the last inhabitant, a healthy young fellow who became a personal servant, too gentle to meet the invasion.
The Admiralty Group is north of the mainland, under the Equator. Manus, a fairly large island, is the center of a wealth of little dots. Some villages here were built over water in the Venetian style of Gaile. Paradoxically, the women were chaste, domestically speaking, yet in Manus I found the only public prostitution I ever saw in the South Pacific. It was an ancient custom here. Discouraged by the Germans, it had come back under the military administration. The incoming civil administration crushed it for a while; but when I was there the custom was flourishing again.
Manus had a certain Gaile-like charm, especially noticeable in the houses. Your canoe entered in the front through a covered opening, so low and narrow that once in you had to crawl on hands and knees. The object of this was simple and practical; if you were an enemy you could be conveniently clubbed as you poked your head into the living room. The houses set aside for young girls were quaint, too. With almost Spanish sternness the maidens were watched over by local duennas, and were carefully caged to the age of puberty. After sunset they were permitted to take the air, still under guard. At first I thought that this was the Manus method of preserving chastity; then I found that it was a mere matter of complexion. Indoor living bleached the skin, and in Manus a pale young bride was quoted at rather a high figure.
A weakness for canoes increased my fondness for this pretty Admiralty Group. I snatched every minute to drop my trouble in the serenity of bright lagoons; great Manus outriggers were wide enough to hold comfortable deckhouses below their coco sails.
Contrast this lagoon-bound holiday with my return trip on the cutter Siar, a capable craft with a capable captain; Skipper Bell was the best of the Australian type, raw-boned, handsome, brave. We had reached the New Hanover Group when a hurricane came down on us with a sudden ferocity that seemed to bring sea and sky together. That we stayed afloat those three mad days is one of God’s mercies. Our engine was drowned out, we lost all sense of direction, all sense of everything except what was needed to hang on and pray—or swear. When a calm came, almost as violently sudden as the storm, we found that we had drifted over reefs and banks and heaven knows what—we had been blown clean around the large island of New Hanover and were lying in an inlet between it and New Ireland, which we had passed three days before. There wasn’t a dry thing on the boat; our cookstove had been doused with the first wave that swept over us.
I have been caught in more tropical storms than I can remember, but this was the worst. With quaking Jerope and such of my gear as I had recovered I went ashore and flagged a schooner bound for Rabaul. Bell and his staunch little ship deserved a better fate than that which later overtook them. The battered Siar was towed to Sydney, where she fell a-prey to a favorite island trick: the calkers stopped the leaks with concrete, to save the expense of honest calking. On the return voyage she struck another storm and went down like a flatiron—with poor Bell at the wheel. He was a fine, clean young man who adored his pretty new bride. Well, he was one of the many.