CHAPTER V
BREAKING UP THE FALLOW GROUND
‘A light for revelation to the Gentiles.’—St. Luke ii. 32.
From the first I had to give a good deal of medical advice to my people, and my work in that direction increased so rapidly that, finally, I had to confine medical work to one day a week, unless the case was very urgent. It is important that the majority of missionaries should know something about medicine—if only enough to impress them with its mysteries and their ignorance of its action, so as to keep them from prescribing unless they are pretty sure of their diagnosis. Medical skill is often of great service in the work and to the workers themselves. Besides, no native will believe that a European knows nothing of medicine. There is, however, a danger of a man being tempted (and many yield to the temptation) to give more time than he can afford to that part of his work, to the detriment of other and even more important duties.
Dentistry was very popular, for the Malagasy suffer much from toothache. One of their proverbs says: ‘A worm in the tooth, there is no cure except extraction.’ The Malagasy may almost be said to know nothing of nerves in our sense of the term; but I have seen a Malagasy young woman writhing on the ground under the agony of toothache, from which she only found relief on my extracting the tooth. One morning I drew three teeth, one after the other, for one woman, who never once winced, but, with her mouth half full of blood, simply said, ‘Thank you, sir!’ and walked away as if nothing had happened.
Operating upon others was easy enough; it was when one had to draw one’s own tooth—as I had to do one Sabbath morning—that the difficulty came in. I had had a night of excruciating toothache, and in the morning was half beside myself with the pain. I was due that morning to preach at one of the outlying churches. I knew the people would be waiting for me, but while in such agony I did not feel fit to go. In my desperation I determined to have the offending tooth out. I wanted my wife to draw it, but she said she could not. ‘Fix the forceps on it, then,’ I said, ‘and I will draw it myself.’ She did as requested. I waited a little, then I wrenched the tooth out, flung the forceps from me, danced through the hut for a few minutes in agony, then all was over, and I mounted my palanquin, and went off to my preaching. Fortunately it was an upper tooth, otherwise I could not have succeeded.
Just after we had settled at Fìhàonana, a boy was brought to me with his hand seemingly crushed to a pulp. At the entrance of the villages in the country a circular block of granite used to be rolled in between four upright pillars of the same material during the night to block the entrance. Sitting swinging upon one of these, he had got his hand crushed between the circular block and one of the pillars. When first I saw it I thought the whole hand was bruised to a jelly; but after soaking it for some time in tepid water I found that it was not nearly so bad as I had feared. The first joint of the middle finger, however, had been so crushed that I deemed it best to amputate it. I laid the lad down on a mat at my own door, with a crowd of natives standing round, administered chloroform, took my knife and performed the operation. The hand was dressed and done up before consciousness quite returned. After all was over his friends asked the lad whether he had felt the vazàha (white man) cutting him. ‘No,’ he answered. ‘Did he cut me?’ he asked. ‘Yes,’ they said, ‘he cut off the point of your finger.’ ‘I never felt him,’ he replied. His confession caused the deepest wonder. ‘What magicians these white men are!’ the people said; ‘they just put a rag with a few drops of eau-de-Cologne’ (eau-de-Cologne was the only liquid with an odour with which the Malagasy were acquainted) ‘to a boy’s nostrils, and off he goes to sleep, and they can cut him without his knowing anything about it.’
Of course an exaggerated account of this simple operation was spread abroad, and gave rise to an exaggerated estimate of my own powers and that of my medicine, which stood me in good stead for many years; although I only discovered this during the rising in 1897.
In those early days, and even until 1896, we had domestic slavery in Madagascar. It was, no doubt, the mildest form of slavery, and in most cases the slaves were regarded as almost members of the family and treated as such. Still slavery it was; and that is the sum of all villanies. When masters treated their slaves badly they ran away. In those days also the soldiers of the native army were soldiers for life, and received no pay. They had to maintain their wives and families as best they could; that was their business and not the government’s. In consequence, many of the soldiers deserted, and one can attach small blame to the poor fellows who flung away their rifles and fled to the forests and joined the runaway slaves. Together they formed marauding bands, and dwelt for the most part in the forests of the far north. They made periodic raids on Imèrina, Vònizòngo, and the other provinces, and were a terror to many parts of the country.
A set of these freebooters pounced down one morning upon a large village near Fìhàonana, bound every man, woman, and child in it, and carried off all that they could lay their hands on—cattle, sheep, pigs, and poultry. The day following a man passing the village thought that it was very quiet, and entered to discover the reason. He found the inhabitants all lying bound in their huts. These robber bands often carried away women and children, especially those belonging to the Hovas, and sold them to the Sàkalàva tribe, or body of tribes, who inhabit some six hundred miles of the west side of the island.
One of my pastors came to tell me what had happened at that village, and to warn me of the approach of the band. I thanked him, but added that I was not at all afraid of their molesting us: but I did not know then, nor for many years after, to what we owed our exemption from their depredations. The report of my operation, and of the effects of the chloroform, had reached even them. They had been told that, if they went near that vazàha’s house, even during the night, it would be the worse for them; for he kept most powerful medicine—had but to open his window, and fling it out, and all would fall down asleep, and by-and-by wake up to find themselves all bound and ready to be sent as prisoners to the capital!