In the South Pacific, where everybody’s business is your own, Aesculapian secrecy was never quite understood. When Postmaster Denny found that I wouldn’t talk about the royal operation he generously forgave me by offering me some pamphlets addressed to a lady who was away. “They might be interesting,” he said, “but you’d better get them back in a week. She’s due about then, and she’s cranky about her mail.”
For my share in the much-discussed operation I was rewarded in royal Tongan fashion. The house we lived in was loaded down with gifts of appreciation: rolls of fine tapa, huge chunks of roast pork and quantities of selected Tongan fruit.
These gifts had become familiar to me; in May of the previous year I had accepted an invitation to make a hookworm survey of the Kingdom of Tonga. I spent three months there the first year of the survey. My family and Malakai accompanied me. We showed the Foundation film “Unhooking the Hookworm” with great effectiveness in the local movie theater to large crowds which assembled, docile to the Queen’s command. In the remoter areas we fell back on the hookworm charts. The response in specimens was splendid. This was what the Tongans liked—they were already interested in health, and here was something new for nothing. Our examinations yielded little noteworthy in the way of hookworm disease. The infection rate was low and the number of worms per head was low. I judged this was because the Tongans still obeyed the old Polynesian tabus about the disposal of excrement; we also found that most houses in community groups had latrines of a sort, though these were inadequate. But their water supplies were awful. There are almost no running streams and the drinking water was largely obtained from shallow wells, which were subject to great contamination because pigs, fowls, horses and humans shared them.
The pig question came up right away. The Chief Medical Officer wanted me to say that pigs carry hookworm to human beings, and that theory ran afoul of my conviction to the contrary. The C.M.O. and I ceased to be friends after I refused to agree with him. He was a Scot. Scots have about the best medical minds. When they find that a theory is right nothing can budge them. You seldom run across one who will devote all his native stubbornness to a shaky hypothesis.
Well, I’m a bit stubborn myself, and on the question of pigs I had my reasons. One of the weaknesses in native diet is the shortage of meat, fresh or otherwise. Europeans coming into native life immediately want to put pigs in corrals. I knew an Irish doctor who didn’t rest satisfied until he had enforced such a regulation. He hailed from a land where, according to legend, “they keep the pig in the parlor”; but to the native such intimacy isn’t good form. My observation has been that when pigs are enclosed in the corral, the meat supply soon runs out. Why? Because one man objects to feeding the other man’s pig; keep them in a common enclosure and they are gradually killed off, with no replacements. When pigs are allowed to run loose in the villages they pick up their own food, or most of it. This is the native way. Much as I have looked into the subject, I know no Pacific island disease that is carried by pigs. Had I agreed with statements to the contrary, to satisfy the esthetics of a few foreigners, I could not have been honest with my own convictions.
Tongans are notably robust and resistant to disease, as we shall see, and I attribute it in no small measure to a generous supply of pork, added to their other foods.
Tongan good feeding and abundant hospitality almost made a wreck of a visiting Fijian football team. I saw the first match of that series, much to my sorrow, for I am Fijian to the bone. When the boys came to Tonga they were regarded as much the superior team, and when I talked with Native Practitioner Savanada, one of the players, all was confidence. But on the field of glory Fiji was dull and heavy as lead. Then the saddened Savanada told me why. On the thirty-six-hour steamer trip to Tonga the Fijians had had little to eat. The minute they stepped ashore they were confronted with a feast. Poor, starved Fijians! There were more roast pigs than they had ever seen at one time, heaped up with trimmings of yams and succulent breadfruit, and chickens and fish to fill in the crevices.
When they went on the field they were a little like Mark Twain’s Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, artfully weighted down. The crafty Tongans, by the way, played on empty stomachs. All over the South Pacific, a sharp trick like this is known as “Tongafiti.”
Tonga won the second game, too, with me yelling my head off for the glory of Fiji. This time Savanada explained it away with a dignity worthy of his chiefly rank: “Queen Salote was present, and it wouldn’t have been courteous for us, as her guests, to win.” But Fiji won the last game hands down, and every time the Tongan team came to Fiji the kingdom’s athletic pride was lowered a hitch.
******