A Yankee doctor in paradise

by S. M. Lambert

Once he sent Murdock to investigate a wreck on Apamama. The crew was found in a sorry plight; natives had given them food and shelter—but they had run out of liquor. So Murdock got a large demijohn and filled it with rum from one of the King’s hogsheads. He reported this to Timbinoka, who asked, “Where you catch im dis feller rum?” Murdock identified the hogshead and his King said, “Hum hum, hum. One time one feller man belong Sydney he like im one feller head belong kanaka. So he pickle him along dis feller rum.”

In short, Timbinoka had severed some enemy heads which a trader bought, pickled and sent to a scientist in Australia. After this transaction the enterprising trader sold the rum back to Timbinoka. The monarch found out about it, so he didn’t use the liquor. But the shipwrecked sailors got their share of it and His Majesty was vastly amused when he told them what they had been drinking and saw them get sick. He commissioned Murdock to buy their ship for five pounds. Timbinoka assembled the whole kingdom with everything that would float. By main strength and awkwardness they raised the ship, which was repaired and became the Royal Navy. With a regal gesture Timbinoka sent the crew back to Australia, at his expense.

Before his death the King got his useful cook a job as District Officer, a post he served well the rest of his life. Once, he told me, he found an extremely leprous village, so he burned it down and moved the inhabitants to new quarters. From these particular people, he said, he never heard of leprosy again. It sounds a bit fishy, for to this day no experimenter has found out how the leprosy germ is imparted.

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One of Timbinoka’s royal descendants was at Kuria when we were there. A big man, he had once been handsome, but he was going to fat and his baldness rivaled mine. His morals were everybody’s business, even among the Gilbertese, who are remarkably sophisticated for so primitive a folk. Maybe their vices had drifted in from Tahiti, or from an especially low crop of beachcombers. Possibly the discouragement of the harem system had demoralized them. At any rate, the Royal Descendant was no match for a nice girl.

He served as background for a story that came to me as island tales do. Years later I found a Frenchman, Mr. X, looking for a job, and wondered why a man of his education and intelligence should be out of work. He seemed so pitifully anxious that I pulled wires and got him a job managing a trading station. He didn’t keep it very long. And this is why:—

He had been a priest, serving faithfully on these islands. Marie was an extremely attractive half-caste girl in his school. With his Bishop’s consent he encouraged her wish to become a nun; she preferred this choice to marrying the Royal Descendant, her family’s selection. If Father X was in love with her, it was a passion he religiously denied, although he went on with her education while she was a novice. The European nuns in the convent made her life especially hard; they disliked the idea of a half-caste in the intimacy of full sisterhood. She worked for years as a drudge, scrubbing floors. Meanwhile her family were constantly nagging her to leave the convent and marry the aristocrat.

One night she went to Father X, who had been her only earthly friend. Her tears and his efforts to console her were too much for both of them. The Devil he had downed so long came forth. A few weeks later Father X went to his Bishop, a wise and worldly churchman. “Don’t take it so seriously,” said the Bishop, “those things will happen. Let me transfer you to Australia until it blows over.” “No,” insisted Father X, “she’s going to have my baby, and my child must be legitimate.” The Bishop shrugged it off; he shrugged off Father X’s priestly frock, too.

Father X, now a layman, went out into the world. The first thing he did was to marry Marie, and when the baby was born he did his level best to raise and educate the child. That might have been easy in a land where clever white men are scarce, but Mr. X came up against a stone wall. He was an unfrocked priest, he had married a half-caste under queer conditions. He wandered from pillar to post, getting small jobs, losing them, feeding his family as best he could.

Then things brightened for him. With his wife and child he wandered to Australia. A clever agriculturist, he invented a cure for some prevalent tree blight, and cashed in. He was now laying aside enough money to support his family; then he would go back to France to reenter his order.