On a return voyage Mac Finney saw the old boy coming back on the boat to Funafuti. The ancient confessed that he was on his way to jail. Why? Well, when he got off the boat for home, he felt so vigorous that he had attacked the first woman he saw.

The twin groups, Gilberts and Ellices, were a special problem in the spread of this disease. The dark-skinned Gilbertese, living a hundred miles northwest of the light-skinned Ellice Islanders, seem to have been free of filariasis until modern civilization arrived, although the Ellices had been infected for a long time. The writer found this disease moving slowly northward in the Gilbert group. Primitive savagery and that thin strip of water had long kept the Gilberts in a state of quarantine. Then barriers were down, and filariasis reached the Gilberts. The British administration made several attempts to re-establish quarantine, but conditions made it difficult, and they probably knew that it was a bit too late; the mischief had already been done. Only recently has the machinery of infection been understood. In several groups British medical authorities have made valiant efforts to check the blight. Their problem has been made more difficult by the fact that the principal carrier is the “wild mosquito,” a creature that lives and breeds in the bush. The domestic mosquito is easier to run down.

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In those ten weeks of inspection we covered 6,500 miles, crossed the Equator six times and touched the globe’s four hemispheres. In both groups the islands are so low-lying that a few miles away they are invisible; first you see a plumage of palms, then the border of white sand; then the glory of lagoons, some of them looking no bigger than your hand, others stretching a quarter of a mile, brushing their faint pastel colors against the feathering reef that divides them from the Pacific’s royal blue. I love lagoons.

Other white men have loved them too. At Funafuti, for example, one of the boys who helped us ashore had a tinge of red in his hair and said his name was O’Brien. The headman of the town and the native magistrate were also O’Briens. O’Briens flocked from every corner until I hoped to hear a trace of the brogue. But the original O’Brien, who must have been a broth of a boy, had long since passed away and left good deeds behind him. In the wicked blackbirding days he had promptly deserted his ship and taken up with an island girl. He saved the people with the advice that they had better stick by him, as his vessel had come to take them into slavery. Blessings on his red head. To keep his Irish memory green, fifty-four O’Briens flourished in Funafuti, out of 250 inhabitants.

Except for Funafuti all the Ellice Islands had closed lagoons, and to come ashore one must run the surf in native canoes, which usually meant a ducking, and always a wet bottom. I have never seen so many churches to the square mile, for the Ellices are highly Christianized, as witness the layer upon layer of dragging Mother Hubbards that cover the women. On small Vaitupu I counted three expensive concrete churches, and found that the London Missionary Society’s Samoan teacher hadn’t liked the acoustics of the first two, so he had had a third built to suit his voice. In one year, the Ellice Islands had sent $6,000 to foreign missions! And $60,000 had been devoted to the piety of 3,000 inhabitants. Churches were objects of superstitious awe. It would be sacrilege, they said, to drink rain water from church roofs, and something awful would happen if they did; their livers might swell up and burst, for instance.

Up in the Gilberts, on the other hand, they were only a few years removed from the absolute savagery of an era when one island waged fierce war against another. As it was, about half of them were nominally Christianized. The Sunday parade to church was a sight worth while. The native ladies wore short fiber skirts and nothing else, except dinky little English hats perked on top of their bushy heads. For hadn’t St. Paul said distinctly that no bareheaded woman should enter the House of God?

At Tabatauea on the Gilberts I made a postmortem examination of a dead king. Since the king had been dead a thousand years, I was not surprised that the results were spectacular.

I was led to a palm-thatched shrine where the bones of Korave, heroic ancestor of the island’s chiefs, were held in veneration; legend tells of his gigantic size and heroic strength when he led the people of Beru to the invasion. Before I could be admitted District Commissioner Anderson had to get the consent of Korave’s entire family connection. We came in a canoe, waded through mud, and as very wet spectators got at last to the assembly hall, the muniapa.

The whole village had turned out. The Gilbertese converse in shouts, and the palaver around us sounded like a football game until Mr. Anderson silenced them to explain how important this occasion was. I sat there, looking as majestic as a large fat man can after a dousing in sea water and a sweaty walk. Then the big question. The exalted visitor wished to see great Korave’s bones. Immediately the people of Tabatauea went into noisy conference. Abruptly the huddle parted. A headman came forward and said yes, we could see the bones.