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My American medicine frequently competed with native witchcraft, which though it was never an open challenge, was something I felt all around me. Here and there I would catch whispers of this and that laborer who had sickened and died in the field; some puri-puri doctor had “pointed a bone” at him. Belief in magic, black and white, had penetrated into some odd places.
There’s an elegant little chain of islands off New Britain which old-timers called “Queen Emma’s Kingdom.” Emma was a self-made queen, the half-caste Polynesian daughter of an American consul. She bought a domain for a few guineas and made a prince consort out of the German nobleman she married. Her descendants were educated in European schools, married Europeans of good family, and came home to enjoy their share in the inherited kingdom. I talked with one of these descendants, a lady who knew Wagnerian opera and Ibsen plays. When it came to medicine her faith was all bound up in the old family witch doctor. Earnestly she told me about some herbs which worked the medically impossible. She was offended at my incredulous smile when I transposed from what Lincoln said of General Grant: “I’d like to know the bottle he gets it from.”
No wonder, then, that cross-eyed Jerope was anxious to carry a lantern after dark.
One evening we paused for rest on the tangled brow of a high mountain in New Britain. Incidentally, that had been a most interesting day; I had found rather puzzling evidence of modern sanitation. The tribe here was fierce, savage, cannibalistic—and surprisingly free of intestinal parasites. At some risk I searched behind the village houses and found latrines as scientifically constructed as if endorsed by the International Health Board! The pits were dug twenty-five to thirty feet into the soil, and over them was a support of timber. The deposit fell so far underground that hookworm larvae had no opportunity to invade the surface. The common housefly, bearer of dysentery and typhoid, dared not penetrate that dark well. Rude screens separated the men’s latrine from the women’s. My compliments to the wise old witch doctor who invented that.
Byron Beach had been to this mountain before me, with a punitive expedition, armed to chasten man-eating. They had climbed 7,000 feet and had forced themselves among tribes that had never before looked on a white face. Beach reported that every village he entered had been equipped with these deep cesspits. They were not mere archaic ornaments, either; the people were using them.
I tried to find out who had taught them, but all I got was “It is the fashion.” I had to remember what the immortal Captain Cook said of the New Zealand Maoris when he first saw them—that this primitive people were obeying sanitary laws when the housewives of Paris and Madrid were emptying chamber pots into the streets. It set me thinking. Was not the islander, before the whites came to unsettle his traditions, reasonably self-preserving in his daily habits? My visits to lost Rennell Island, some years later, confirmed the theory.
But that evening, lolling on the mountain brow, I talked with Jerope about dream magic and heard the beginning of a story which, when it was finished, touched me deeply. I looked up and saw that his crossed eyes were not funny any more.
I had asked him if evil spirits could “walk along dreams” and curse you while you were awake. Oh, yes, master, they could do that. But devil-devils can do your dreams great favors, he said. He gazed crookedly at the sunset and told me, quietly as you tell of a proposed subway trip, how tonight in his dream he would visit his mother in the little local heaven. He explained the witch charm which would bring this about. From a great magician, who had been to the Evil One’s home on the wild Sepik River, Jerope had bought the skin of a great bat, the enchanted flying fox that could carry you into the land of the dead. “Tonight,” he said, “I shall burn the bat’s hairs and paint the ashes on my eyes. Then I shall go.”
Next morning I asked him if he had gone to his mother. Yes, he had gone; and he told me how, earnestly:—