******
An ambassador without portfolio, a doctor without a license, I went over the leper situation on the Gilberts and Ellices. The twin groups had their small share of the disease, but when I spoke to certain authorities and asked for co-operation in the model colony we were planning for Mokogai, the response was not too encouraging. Years later a sort of compromise affair was started on Tarawa on the Gilberts, but it proved such a dismal failure that we finally got our way and had the patients transferred to Mokogai.
On this first G and E survey I had gone on preaching my crusade for modernized native practitioners. Government schools in the two groups were effective, although European training can be overdone; the scope of the native mind is circumscribed by the shadow of the coconut tree. Gilbertese intelligence was high. When I looked over such schools as the one at Bairiki and saw bright faces knit in an earnest desire to learn, and when I observed their steady progress, I knew that here were potential N.M.P.’s. They were the sort who could learn medicine, and could return to their home islands to practise and to teach. Malakai was with me everywhere, an object lesson to them.
At Funafuti one of our old school N.M.P.’s, a giant from Tonga named Josaia, came aboard ship. I had known him as a pharmacist’s assistant in Auckland before he took up medicine, and we were renewing our friendship when Josaia paused and scowled at a well muscled native who had shuffled around me. Josaia said, “You have just insulted the Doctor. You have walked across his shadow.” Whereupon Josaia picked the man up, tossed him over his head and through an open door. Josaia was something of a storm king, and he was temporarily out of a job. He was an excellent surgeon. If he operated too often for tubercular glands in the neck, it was because of his lack of proper training. In those days many practitioners confused yaws with tuberculosis and acted accordingly. Josaia had been on the G and E group for a half-dozen years, working his head off for six pounds a month.
******
In the highly missionized Ellices there was much religious confusion, although I cannot vouch for the current story about the London Missionary Society lady. She kept her girls carefully guarded on a small island with a lagoon. When several showed signs of approaching maternity she asked who was to blame. “The Holy Ghost,” they replied. Immaculate conception was all right, they thought, and didn’t mention boys who crossed the lagoon in the dark of night.
On the less missionized Gilberts, religious affairs once took a more violent turn. An island had been having the usual squabble between Catholics and the London Missionary Society—the latter prevailed, controlled by native teachers. A native preacher fanned up a religious mania which swept the people. Self-appointed “Apostles and Angels of God” took over the works, led by a local “Virgin Mary.” The Angels rounded up all the Romanists they could find and killed several. They had locked up the native Catholic magistrate, were marching on him with a cross, and would have used it had it not been for the courage of one villager who went by canoe for the District Officer and white missionaries. The rescue, a few Europeans facing a mass of howling savages, required tactful argument. Subsequent investigation, which resulted in the island’s paying a fine, revealed scandal among the Angels. John the Baptist had been intimate with the Virgin Mary.
Where the religious problem puzzled the righteous, the medical questions confounded the doctor. Ocean Island, one of the world’s great phosphate bonanzas, was headquarters for the Gilbert and Ellice groups. A British syndicate mined the product. Arthur Grimble, Cambridge M.A., was acting District Commissioner and an ethnologist who had made useful discoveries.
From the doctor’s point of view too many Chinese had been imported to Ocean Island, although the Government’s very good hospital was doing more than its share. The trouble was that Gilbertese and Ellice Islanders worked beside the orientals; they caught the imported diseases and carried them home. All through the twin groups I saw evidence of infections which the strangers were bringing to a lovely people. Pathologically, the march of disease was beginning to show. Yaws, which seemed to have been brought by civilization, was making heavy inroads. Tuberculosis was working its way into handsome youths, who lacked the European’s immunity. Filariasis was a vexing puzzle, because it seemed impossible to control the mosquitoes that carried it. Intestinal parasites were fortunately few; the people lived near the beaches, and tidewater is Nature’s handy sewage system.
******