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Suva, capital of Fiji, has advanced a great deal in the last eighteen years. Nowadays occasional passenger liners dock there and allow tourists to straighten out their sea legs. The men can buy their favorite brand at Piccadilly tobacconists or London bars. The debutantes can play tennis, while their mothers visit little jewel shops and squander a few shillings on a small handful of silver-gilt pearls that are lovely and have no respectable commercial rating, or take in the museum and shudder at the collection of savage iron-wood clubs which ex-cannibals traded for hymnals,—or buy a four-shilling guidebook at the Carnegie Library,—or inspect the Government Building, that cost about $1,500,000 and looks a size too large for Pittsburgh; that structure was built after the gold rush of ’32 when the colony went madder than Californians and started things on a grand scale—for a while. Suva today is like any small colonial capital. Whiskered Sikh policemen in staring red tunics guide the traffic; along the orderly streets walk orderly Fijians, short white sulus and bare legs under English coats, their immense, smoothly cut headdresses of kinky hair giving them the appearance of English guardsmen in regimental bearskin busbies. Dignified, broad-shouldered, small-waisted, they seem to be heading for some savage war-dance. Actually they are going to church, or to the native motion picture palace.
Suva in 1922 had one dirt road that ran to Nausori, fifteen miles away. The taxi fare was about $7.50. Your director, to save Rockefeller funds, usually went there on the little Andi Roronga, which took from 9 A.M. to 1 P.M. with a stop along the mangrove-tangled Rewa. She started back at two. When you went by taxi you had to cross the river on a funny pontoon with a submerged cable.
I was no longer under the loose-handed control of Australia. Now it was the British High Commission that owned Fiji’s 250-odd islands, had a grip on the Solomons, a tiny toehold on the independent Kingdom of Tonga, controlled the Gilbert and Ellice Group and ran some curiously distant isles, like Rotumah and Pitcairn and Christmas Island. The Governor of Fiji was (and is) the temporal head of the High Commission. However, the real government comes from London. Colonials as a rule don’t understand Englishmen. Americans, after what happened about 1776, can sympathize. The Yankee slides comfortably into the ways of the Canadian, the Australian, the New Zealander or South African. The born Englishman with his hauteur and peculiarity is another fish to fry. He has ruled his far-flung dominions uncannily well, but his colonials tender him more respect than love.
Yet down there I have worked with Englishmen for whom I felt the deepest loyalty and friendship. Chris Kendrick is one of them. Barley is another, and there are many more. Pretty soon I am going to tell you of another, who was my associate for eight years in Fiji.
Colonials in Suva used to grumble, “Back in London they don’t know we’re alive.” But the politicians knew. Fiji became a dumping place for younger sons and Ministry favorites. Young chaps, green as grass and fresh as paint, were called “cadets,” and there was always a new cadet to fill the desk left vacant by retirement or promotion. Against the cadet system the experienced colonial, who knew the land and the people, hadn’t the ghost of a show.
Where the English are respected and not liked, the Americans are liked but not respected. Colonials regard us as too evangelical, too insistent on modern shower baths in every room and on having everybody’s trousers creased in the same way. They speak of us as rotten colonizers; and these arguments are in the face of our record in Cuba, for instance, where we cleaned up yellow fever and gave the island real sanitation.... I remember what an educated Cuban once said to me, “Of course we don’t like you, Doctor. You found us dirty and contented; now we are clean and unhappy.”
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Naturally the British Empire must exact tribute from her dominions or she could not survive. All over Britain’s Pacific empire “Buy English” was behind the sale of all the machinery, all the material used in public improvements. Yet it was astonishing how popular American products remained, in spite of the high preferential tariff against them. American cars, burdened with a 45 per cent duty, were eagerly sought in New Zealand, Australia, Fiji. Loyal colonials had their tongues hanging out in their desire to buy British automobiles, yet pig-headed English manufacturers were sending low-powered, poorly sprung cars, built for smooth, hill-less roads. Our own Henry Ford would have adapted his article to geographical requirements. Not so the British maker with his cry, “Buy English!”
Sunkist oranges were everywhere, an example of American trade-genius under difficulties. New Zealand, with her own tropical possessions and access to Australia’s and Jamaica’s supplies, displayed Sunkist oranges in every remote village. It’s still an unfathomable mystery to me, how these California go-getters can drag oranges eight or nine thousand miles, and profit under adverse conditions. Maybe it is because their fruit is obtainable all year round, or because its uniform size makes it attractive.