In total area the Gilberts won’t measure much more than 170 square miles. They hardly seem worth fighting over, these bare coral rocks with an occasional drift of soil where coco palms can just hang on. The people must subsist largely on fish and coconut products; in addition, they have the stringy, unsatisfactory fruit of the pandanus and babai. The latter is a bastard taro, eaten in other groups only when famine drives the people to it. Yet it takes a mighty struggle for the Gilbertese to raise even these poor things. Over 28,000 population, crowded together on a little land, are never more than a jump away from starvation. Rainfall is sparse, and on the islands nearest the Equator droughts may last for two or three years; at times even the coconut palms have died, and the people have been reduced to sucking the few drops of moisture from fish-eyes. Even after large churches have been built, with a competent watershed from the roofs, many have died of thirst, because they were afraid to drink the water from holy places.
Yet what did I find in the Gilberts? Very healthy specimens, strapping copper-colored fellows with hair from straight to curly; big-shouldered, but not particularly tall. They had the look of men who grow what they eat, and work for it. Their average health was in contrast to that of the naturally handsome, pale-skinned Polynesians in the Ellices to the southeast. To these food came more easily from a richer soil. And must I say it again? There were fewer missions in the Gilberts, whereas the Ellice Islanders were all nominally Christian—as witness once more the greasy Mother Hubbards, layer on layer, pressing oil and germs into their beautiful bodies. Dirt and laziness seemed to have followed the Cross into charming lagoons which once inspired Stevenson’s prose poems.
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We were traveling on the High Commission yacht Pioneer, where Printer Johann Sebastian Bach’s son Bill shared the cabin de luxe with me; we had a bathroom of our own, but when the portholes leaked in one direction the toilet leaked in another. I envied Malakai, who bunked on deck. It was one of the morning’s ceremonies for Malakai to come down and see to it that young Bach got his bath. Bill was of the age when all boys are anti-soap, and it was worth getting up to see a cannibal’s scientific grandson enforcing hygiene on a great composer’s descendant; Bill’s treble, “Ow, ow!” against Malakai’s grim bass, “You aren’t finished till you wash the other ear!”
That got us to Rotumah, an island which for some mystic reason is considered a part of Fiji, but lies nearer the Ellice group. Because public health is concerned with sociology, politics, geography, history and anthropology as well as worms and germs, let me use Rotumah as an example of what lavish Nature can do to a people.
The Rotumans were among the world’s laziest, their island among the world’s richest. Crops grew while you slept; therefore the natives slept or went to a party. This was coconut wealth, prodigal and wasted. Up in the volcanic mountains it took a little work to get at the palms, so they were never gotten at. Nuts ripened, dropped, rotted or fed the island’s expensive pigs. Ask an owner about his wealth in coconuts and he’d guess he had plenty.
They were a delightfully mixed race. Their ancestors had been generous to ships that stopped there to “refresh” their crews. In the unwritten history of Oceania the Tongafiti conquerors used Rotumah as one of the steppingstones that let them spread the Polynesian race over the South Pacific. As I found Rotumah, there was little evidence of that fierce and noble background.
To get things done they hired Fijian labor at eight or ten shillings a day. If a Rotuman ran into debt he merely sent his hirelings out to gather a few more nuts—or that was what they were doing when I got there. Some 900 acres of land produced 2,000 tons of copra annually. Mild efficiency could have boosted the output to 6,000 tons. But why be efficient?
Did you want to buy a pig? Well, he would cost you about fourteen pounds. What a price for a pig! Yes, sir, but remember that he’s been fed on very expensive copra, and has already eaten twice his value. But why not fatten him on something else? That would be a lot of trouble, sir, and our pigs are used to copra. There’s plenty of copra. And maybe, sir, we couldn’t afford to sell you a pig anyhow. We’re giving another feast tomorrow, and what’s a feast without a pig?
In the Rotuman’s Melano-Poly-Malay-European veins there was a dash of Negro, and right royal. In the blackbirding days an Afro-American, probably a slave himself, was cast ashore and proceeded to make himself king. He seemed a kindly monarch, and didn’t have the tragic finish of the other Emperor Jones. He taught the people how to work,—they say,—but he’s been a long time dead.