The South Pacific Islands where Dr. S.M. Lambert
worked for the health of the natives

A YANKEE DOCTOR
IN PARADISE

THE AUTHOR

A YANKEE DOCTOR
IN PARADISE

BY S. M. LAMBERT, M.D.

BOSTON

LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY

1941

COPYRIGHT 1941, BY S. M. LAMBERT

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THE RIGHT
TO REPRODUCE THIS BOOK OR PORTIONS
THEREOF IN ANY FORM

FIRST EDITION

Published May 1941

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

DEDICATION

To my father, William Walter Lambert, who made
sacrifices for my education, who never harassed me
with advice; I did the things he would have liked
to do.

AND TO

Eloisa Tays Lambert, my wife, who has packed and
unpacked in a hundred homes, nursed me when I
was sick, made me go on when I wanted to quit;
there wouldn’t be any story without Eloisa.

FOREWORD

In 1927 there were two plump New York-Californians vacationing in Fiji: Martin Egan and Wallace Irwin. It thrilled me to meet the creator of my boyhood’s admiration, “Hashimura Togo,” and I was pleased if unprepared when he wanted me to put my adventures—then half completed—into a book. I remember our three days’ trip to Mbengga to see the fire-walkers; all the way I was enthralled with his experiences as a writer on the other side of the world; he could talk two hundred words to the minute, a record that surpasses mine. Our meeting resulted in a desultory correspondence that covered several years. When I came home with a trunkful of my own data I naturally turned to him for help; and I want to thank him for the patient editorial advice through which I have been able to assemble a quantity of rather mixed material, and to put it into some form.

I have so many to thank besides those mentioned in the text—few have been other than helpful. Probably I am the most grateful to the British in the South Pacific colonies, officials and laymen. If a Britisher had come to an American colony and assumed the critical role to which my job compelled me, he would have been tarred and feathered and ridden out of bounds. Their long tolerance reminds me of the Arizona saloon motto: “Don’t Shoot the Pianist. He’s Doing His Damndest.”

We were made to feel welcome in the various communities as we moved along. My daughter, Sara Celia, was born in Suva, Fiji; I owned a house there, and on momentous occasions had my vote solicited by Henry Marks, Alport Barker and Pat Costello. I belonged to the Fiji Club. Uncle Bill Paley and I settled mine and the world’s affairs in a few minutes every morning. What more has the future to offer?

Space did not permit me to emphasize the admiration I have for New Zealand’s high conduct in native affairs. I had the best advice and cooperation, from the Permanent Head of the Prime Minister’s Department and the Director General of Health down through the Civil Service.

If I had the privilege of making out my Personal Honor Role I should certainly put Fiji’s Colonial Sugar Refining Company close to the head of it. Without their W. P. Dixon and F. C. T. Lord I could not have progressed far in my Fijian endeavors; for in 1922 the island communications were next to nothing, and almost every hookworm district was over the cane lands they controlled, and opened up for me. We lived in their quarters, used their track-cars and railroad, had the assistance of the managers and underofficials of this whacking big Australian concern, operating in both Fiji and North Queensland.

And I want to thank my Field Inspectors, young fellows who knew how to do about anything—except complain; men like Chris Kendrick, Kenny Fooks and Bill Tully,—whose Irish mother said, “Doctor, you’ll take care of Willie, won’t you?”—and the wild American lad, Byron Beach.

And Malakai, the Fijian practitioner with an inflexible medical conscience. In jungle, swamp or canoe, nobody would wish for a stronger heart or a better brain.

I was just an item in the Rockefeller Foundation’s globe-circling humanitarianism. Dr. Victor Heiser gave me my first job in the South Pacific; Dr. Sawyer, now Director for the International Health Division, turned the tide for me when my favorite plan seemed about to fail. With Dr. Heiser I have tramped over Fiji and Samoa, agreeing or disagreeing on various questions of tropical health. Once or twice he turned to me and asked, “Lambert, why don’t you write a book?”

Well, this is the book.

S. M. L.

Walnut Creek, California

CONTENTS

PART ONE

PART ONE

CHAPTER I

SHORT NOTICE FOR A LONG CHORE

“Lambert, I’ve got a good one for you this time. I’m sending you to Papua.”

Dr. Victor G. Heiser, the Rockefeller Foundation’s famous Director of the East, made this announcement as if Papua were across the street.

“That’s fine, Doctor,” I said, “perfectly fine.”

Papua? Where was Papua? Vainly I fished for scraps of geography and pulled up impressions of palmy islands where black warriors asked guests how they liked their missionary, rare or well done.

Dr. Heiser sat behind a modest desk in one of the smallest rooms at 61 Broadway, delivering a sort of curtain speech to an act that had taken longer than a Chinese play, an act which had played through the war summer of 1918. I had finally found a successor and resigned my superintendency of the United Fruit Company’s hospital in Costa Rica; I was in New York to offer my services. But Uncle Sam wasn’t looking for medical officers with weak eyes.

Now Dr. Heiser’s kindly voice was praising and instructing one of the family, for at last I had joined up with the Foundation. There he was, kneeing his desk, telling me nothing about Papua, saying that my Costa Rican and Mexican experience had particularly fitted me for work with the International Health Board, not mentioning that war had taken away many of their physicians. He dwelt on the preparatory three months’ hookworm training I had already taken, under the Foundation’s auspices, among the hillbillies of Mississippi ... kept me moving, didn’t it, canvassing from door to door?... Lambert, you can work a lot faster down in the South Pacific, where you’ll lecture and treat in batches of from fifty to five hundred.... You’ll have to cover a lot of ground down there.... Take along plenty of khaki, and no evening clothes.... Get your family ready and start day after tomorrow.

“And on your way to Papua, Lambert, you’d better report to Waite, who’s in charge of our work in Australia. There’s quite a hookworm campaign going on in North Queensland. Good place to brush up on what you’ll need in Papua. You’ll find the Australians good fellows, like our Westerners, rough and generous and tolerant—they haven’t had to jam together in big cities and get small-minded.”

During our argumentative stage, I had told Dr. Heiser about a mining syndicate’s offer to take me down to Peru. I didn’t bring that up again, or mention General Gorgas’ half-promise to forgive my blinky eyes and commission me in the venereal section of the Medical Corps.

When I left that morning I was under the spell of the Heiser charm; a charm that has sent armies of scientific men, great and small, to follow jungle trails all over this planet, and work until they drop. In later years I walked with him along some of those trails, and my admiration for him increased every step of the way. There is a godlike something about Heiser that will never let him fall from the pedestal he deserves. Grant him clay toes if you wish, he is still a colossus who has bestridden the field of public health for twenty years—and been the target of much professional jealousy. In 1937 when I was at a League Conference in Java I heard an envious Yankee voice say, “Yes, I’ve read his American Doctor’s Odyssey, and I wonder why he didn’t call it Alone in the Orient.” Which gave me the luxury of a reply: “Did you watch him inaugurate public health work in the Philippines? Alone in the Orient describes it rather well.”

******

I found an atlas and looked up Papua. Rather dully I was informed that Papua lay on the southeastern edge of New Guinea, the second largest island in the world—the Australian Continent’s hottest neighbor, no doubt, since its northern shoulder jogged the equator. The extremely savage names of its numerous tribes, the aimless fertility of its soil, its wealth of gold, copper and pearls, struck only dull fire on my imagination. I was going to a place called Papua, not to flirt with rubber-bellied brunettes in grass skirts, but to search sensibly for yaws, malaria, dysentery, tuberculosis and intestinal parasites. And to rout out the hookworm as tamely as I had poked him up in polluted Mississippi.

That was 1918, when a trip to Paris and back was something to talk about. The armistice hadn’t yet sent back a million doughboys with a smattering of obscene French. The world cruise hadn’t risen as a major industry. Today any debutante who has sauntered around the globe can tell you more about Fiji fire-walking and Arabian sword-swallowers than anybody but a professional explorer knew then.

******

No, the hereditary Lambert is not a geographer. We are a homebody family, and I often wonder how the colonial Lamberts ever found courage to cross over from England to seventeenth-century New Jersey. They certainly stayed put when they got here; nothing but hunger and Indian raids could budge them. My father, who was a tanner and often used his best leather trying to teach me civility, was looked upon as something of a sea rover because he once drove mules along the Delaware and Hudson Canal towpath. Relatives in Ellenville, New York, where I was born, paled when they learned that Father was moving us to Little Falls.

Our pious Methodists always regarded Father as a freethinker; and wasn’t it like him to want Sylvester to be a doctor? Mr. Babcock, head of our Free Academy in West Winfield, was even more radical. A boy ought to have a college education before he started studying medicine. I had worked with the tannery gang long enough, and had learned too many of the rich, brown oaths they spat out with their chewing tobacco. Hamilton College was the place to smooth me out for medical school. Hamilton College! My mother’s hands went up at the spectral idea of a place so remote that Sylvester would have to go overnight, by train.

I entered with the class of 1903, and the thought of all my father sacrificed to send me there made me a rather earnest student—that, and his threat of more tannery, if I didn’t make good. I am thankful that Hamilton and the Syracuse Medical, which I later attended, were both small, for in small classes the instructor knows the needs and failings of every student. I was a hard worker, but not a grind. I found time for football, which toughened the tannery boy for harder years to come. Trips with the team to rival colleges were early adventures in foreign travel. Colgate, swollen with toothpaste money, was easy fruit for us then. Williams rubbed our noses in the mud to the tune of 4-0—and I wept, limping off the field.

Sometimes in my late middle age I awake from sleep swearing. I have been dreaming of a game with the Carlisle Indians. That big Injun, Red Water, is on the line opposite me, tall as a church, never losing his grin. The ball is snapped and his long arm reaches tenderly over me, gets the seat of my britches....

In 1904 I was prepared for Johns Hopkins, but Mother wanted to know what I’d be doing with myself, ’way over in Maryland. Syracuse was in New York State, anyhow, and that was far enough for anybody.

Syracuse had a faculty disproportionately large and able for so small an enrollment. The ideal of scholarship was Spartan; if a student’s nose roved from the grindstone it was pushed back again. The quizzes were little inquisitions, the recitations no place for a sleepwalker. To study under Elsner, Jacobson and Levy was to appreciate Jewish respect for scholarship. Dr. Steenson, of the Department of Pathology, had a time-keeper’s complex and you missed his eight-thirty bell at your own risk. We called him “Johnnie Cockeye,” for his devotion to the gonococcus germ. I stared through the microscope for interminable hours, seeing but little on the slides. My eyes were already going, but I could read easily. Before I came to class I knew, theoretically, what I was supposed to see under the glass—and that’s how I coped with Steenson’s sudden quizzes.

******

The very distinguished Dr. Frank William Marlow, graduate of the Royal College of Surgeons, is dead now, but he crowned his career with a book called The Relative Position of Rest of the Eyes. A course under him put my eyesight, quite literally, on the blink. And this is how it came about.

Toward the end of my third year my brother became seriously ill, and I had to take him to Arizona. There I discovered, to my bald astonishment, that this Lambert had a wandering foot. In Tucson I obeyed a mad impulse and joined the crazy medical unit of a construction gang, working down the West Coast of Mexico. I had time to grow romantic when I came to the fine old hacienda of Mr. Eugene Tays, an American mining engineer. The dark eyes of his pretty daughter, Eloisa, melted my every ambition to go home and plug again at a stiff medical course. She was half Spanish, one of the influential Vegas around San Blas; but she had enough Scotch common sense to tell me to go home and graduate. When I had a practice of my own, she said, I could come back and marry her. She had to wait five years, but she kept her promise.

So I went back to Syracuse, weeks behind in my work and facing the final examination in ophthalmology. There were only three days and nights to make up lost time. I had nothing but a photographic memory to help me out. With a shrewdness born of despair I cracked the book at Marlow’s pet subjects. When I finally blinked my way into the classroom I had committed to memory a half-dozen picked pages. I was in luck; iritis, conjunctivitis, glaucoma and myopia were all there to be dealt with. I wrote the answers almost word for word from the pages my mind had photographed. Doctor Marlow was so impressed that he showed my paper around the faculty; it was fairly well decided that I had been cribbing. I might just as well have been, for after a long, tired sleep I found that I had forgotten half the stuff I had crammed. And my eyes were never the same after that ordeal.

No use going so early into the technicalities of my half-ruined sight. Microscopy became all-important to me over twenty-five years of service. I have been very fortunate in the assistants I found or trained to operate the lens for me. With glasses, my middle vision and far vision remained fairly good. And this was fortunate, too, for in my wanderings I have been required to look on many beautiful and horrible things.

Photographic memory-plates are apt to fade rapidly. Several years later, I was admitted to the Costa Rica Medical Faculty, after another feat of intensive cramming. Costa Rican professional standards are high, and not too friendly to Yankee doctors. Though I passed the very severe examination, I am not sure it was my learning that won my degree; my initiation included many cocktails with a great many influential medical officers. Those things help in Central America.

******

That was in the calmer period, following four years in Mexico, where I practised medicine between raids by Carranzistas, Villistas, Yaquis. Twice I established myself with my wife and baby on the West Coast, near Eloisa’s home. Twice, because the United States Navy ordered us to escape with our lives, we left the country as refugees.

Those years were heavy with adventure. There was the time when smallpox broke over the helpless people like a cloud of poison gas; I worked alone among hundreds of peons who were anti-vaccinationists to a man and died in their own stench, hidden under dirty clothes. Time and time again I performed emergency amputations on kitchen tables, my Chinese cook giving the anesthetic. I diagnosed malaria on myself, and found my mistake when I came down with a bug of an atypical typhoid group. I lost forty pounds from dysentery and Donna Angela nourished my convalescence with iguana stew. I brought an hysteria-stricken girl back from a state like death by scaring her with a sharp knife. One day I gasped with horror, seeing a native midwife promoting childbirth by tying a woman to high rafters and jerking her legs. One afternoon I barricaded my wife and baby behind sacked beans, and performed a tonsilectomy while the Yaquis broke into a liquor warehouse. Still, there were sweet, mild months under a benevolent Aztec sun; then there came a night when I smelled burning houses and heard the wild-horse squeal of women being raped by Indians.

******

One adventure I might record, if briefly. The dreaded Yaquis had joined forces with General Obregón. Colonel Antunez, like a good fellow, was bossing the Indians. They had been letting us alone at Mochis, but danger was always brooding in a place that never knew which side it was on. One day, to my discomfiture, this Colonel Antunez came limping in. He complained of pain in his groin, and a large swelling indicated an operation. He urged me to be quick; he had to be at the front, he was the only man whom Obregón trusted with the wild Yaquis.

When I got in with the knife I found a tumor that extended into the big blood vessels. Removing it was a serious major operation. As soon as he was out from under the anesthetic the war horse snorted again. He must be up and back at the front. I told him that his condition necessitated three weeks of complete rest; he got so excited that his temperature shot up and I had to stop arguing. As he recovered, his officers and their Yaquis were always around.

One morning I found his bed empty. They had smuggled him away in a jolting truck, through a cold rain. He died at Navajoa, of peritonitis or phlebitis, one of the inevitable results.

Next day I was called to the office of His Honor, the Sindico of Mochis, and was surprised by a captain’s tap on my shoulder. I was under arrest. It was a long trip toward the death-house. They jailed me first at Mochis, where I managed to have three words with Meade Lewis, a little red-headed friend of mine who was American consul. I told him what I guessed: I was booked to be shot because one of Obregón’s most valued officers had died after my operation.

My tumbrel to Topolobampo was a track car, bristling with rifles; half the population and their dogs tagged along for a look at the gringo who was going to be tried—which was a synonym for being executed. I had been allowed one glance at Eloisa and our baby. The cell in which I spent ten days was a Yaqui butcher shop when it wasn’t occupied by the condemned. Into a fragrance of spoiled meat my jailor came at last to inform me that the trial and shooting were set for Saturday morning. And here it was Friday.

On Saturday morning I had prepared my sinful Methodist-born soul for a stern hereafter, when the officer in command swung wide the door, saluted deferentially and proclaimed, “Doctor, you are free!”

Not until I had rejoined my family did I learn what this, or anything else, was about. I had become an international affair, they said. Consul Meade Lewis had fairly pulled the cables loose between Topolobampo and Washington. William Jennings Bryan had sent a cruiser down from San Diego. The captain of that cruiser burned the wires to Mexico City with a Richard Harding Davis sort of message: “Release Lambert at once or I’m coming to get him.”

It made a ripping newspaper story. Away up in Newark my brother Fred had been visiting some Mexican friends who told him how wonderfully I was doing in Mochis. After the party Fred passed a subway newsstand and saw the black headline, “JAIL DOOR SWINGS WIDE FOR LAMBERT.” He was proud of the family when he read how William Jennings Bryan had taken steps.

******

I have jotted down these few facts about myself so that my readers may try to decide how well experience had equipped me to be an international health physician. I hope they’re not as unsure as I was that day in September, 1918, when I put my family aboard the train for our first long pull toward Papua.

CHAPTER II

BY THE RAM’S HORN ROUTE

It was early May, 1920, before I saw the sterile hills and corrugated iron roofs of Papua’s capital, Port Moresby. As they traveled in those days it would have taken the ordinary voyager six weeks from San Francisco. I was no ordinary voyager, it turned out. The little stopover in North Queensland, which Dr. Heiser had suggested for me, held me there a year and a half in one of the most strenuous hookworm campaigns in the history of the parasite. The minute I saw Dr. Waite, who was our chief worker there, I was shocked by the picture of what the tropics can do to a man engaged in the benevolent business of public health. Malaria had yellowed his skin, and a horrid fungus called “sprue” had ravaged him so that he was going home to die. He didn’t die; but I did very nearly, of the same foul blight that lays bare a man’s intestinal tract from mouth to anus.

Fieldworkers for the Foundation don’t go about bragging of the bugs they pick up along the way. In twenty-one years I think I caught everything the tropics have to offer, with the exception of yaws, venereal and leprosy. I’m not sure about leprosy. It’s so slow to develop you can’t be sure you haven’t got it until you’ve died of something else.

******

We were leaving North Queensland at last, in the seagoing washtub Morinda, Papua bound. In the Australian hot country I had been the Buffalo Bill and the Jim Farley of a whirlwind campaign. I had acted as director there until October, 1919, when Dr. W. A. Sawyer came out to take charge of Australasia. Then there were six months of it, helping him organize.

The North Queensland campaign had offered the combined excitement of a Blitzkrieg and a Methodist revival. I had shouted my sprue-sore mouth raw. I had ballyhooed a Yankee’s message to Australasia—privies and more privies! Our greatest popular hygienist, Mr. Chic Sale, could never have been prouder of his Temple of Necessity than I of my fly-proof, worm-tight w.c. when it was accepted as a model by the committees of North Queensland. I was preaching a crusade, and I was heeded. At Shire Council meetings, soil-pollution questions flamed like torches; labor unions called strikes on and off, excited by thousands of feet of lumber to be hauled and nailed together into latrines; commercial travelers took up the cause and were asking their customers, “Have you got one of those things the Yankees are peddling up and down the coast?”

******

Now it was May, 1920, and that was over. The little Morinda was off Cairns; we would be moving, maybe, when the tide rose. I laughed wickedly, remembering what the shattered Dr. Waite said when he left North Queensland to my tender care. “Lambert, if you stick, you’ll probably go out feet-first.” Well, my feet were still under the deck chair where I loafed and totaled up eighteen months of hard campaigning.

We had supervised the building of 4,000 model latrines and repaired 4,000 more up to the standard. We had treated thousands and thousands of hookworm cases; from Proserpine to Cooktown we had examined 98 per cent of the population for intestinal parasites. We hadn’t found infection heavy, but I gloated over the change wrought in many people by the humble expedient of a decent privy behind every house. Brightness was coming back to eyes and skin. Healthy children were playing.

Yes, the Australians are like our Westerners. When there is work to be done they go at it wholeheartedly. Subsequent improvement in North Queensland’s health shows what these people can do.

******

The story of the hookworm disease and its cure is a twice-told tale, or a thousand times told in the medical libraries. But because the subject is pertinent to my years of work, let me say a little about a scourge which was so widespread in 1918 that it had but one rival—malaria. Just as Dr. Heiser said, one third of our planet’s inhabitants had hookworm.

It is one of the oldest diseases recorded in history. The Ebers papyrus, dating back to 1500 B.C., speaks of “worms in the abdomen” and makes the hieroglyphic guess that the trouble was caused by “much handling of sand.” It is more likely that the infection came from the sacred scarab, a creature so unclean that it is commonly called the “dung beetle.” Moses said to his wanderers in the wilderness, “And thou shalt have a paddle upon thy weapon; and it shall be, when thou wilt ease thyself abroad, thou shalt dig therewith, and shalt turn back and cover that which cometh from thee.” Without that wise precaution against the infesting parasite, the Children of Israel might never have seen their Promised Land.

The Greeks probably had a name for it; ages later an Italian doctor called it Ankylostoma, which is fairly good Greek for “hookmouth.” Caesar’s legions carried it from Africa into Italy. In 1838 Dr. Dubini of Milan found 105 infected post mortems, and a year later it was discovered that Italian laborers had conveyed hookworm into the Alps. Australia got her dose of it when she imported Orientals and Islanders to work her plantations.

Hookworm and his wife came to America with Africa’s compliments to slavery. No worm travels far on its own belly; it is the human belly, to mix a metaphor, that gives wings to the pest. During the Spanish American War Colonel Bailey K. Ashford of our Medical Corps studied “coffee picker’s anemia” in Puerto Rico; he segregated the hookworm in these cases and wired the news to Dr. Charles W. Stiles of the United States Health Service. Stiles became our pioneer investigator in the South, something of a martyr to science. He called this variety of worm Necator americanus (American murderer), although he might more properly have named it Necator africanus. The Negro’s habitation of our soil could be proved by the infection he has left behind, even though the race should disappear. Scientific investigators like Darling have studied hookworm—content to trace great racial migrations.

Investigation and treatment of the hookworm disease is no job for a florist. Much of the work has to do with microscopic examination of human excreta. But the physician is a realist, and every function of the body has, for him, the equal rights of a true democracy.

Here is the life cycle of this dreadful little bloodsucker: Its eggs cannot hatch in the intestine, where the hungry mother clings and lays them by thousands. They must pass out with the bowel movement and lie exposed to moist, warm, shady air; under these conditions, they hatch in from twenty-four to thirty-six hours, and begin their progress as tiny larvae in search of human flesh. They infest the soil for several feet around the filth in which they have incubated. Enterprising ones crawl up weeds and will even bore their way into ankles under thin stockings.

Once inside the skin the embryo finds the blood stream and makes its long pilgrimage—through the heart, through the lungs, up the throat; then down into its destined home, the upper intestine, where it fastens its teeth and grows by what it feeds on, human blood. On one drop of blood a day it grows almost to the size of a pin and develops jaws as steely strong as wire-cutters. Multiply these blood-drops by a hundred, by a thousand, and watch the pale anemia that lays the sufferer open to the first epidemic that comes along.

In infected districts the health physician’s job was routine diagnosis and routine treatment. When we had to treat and survey whole villages and tribes within a limited time we gathered as many as we could into an audience and lectured them in whatever language they happened to speak. After the lecture we would hand them out small tin containers, each marked with a person’s name. We told them carefully how to put a small portion of each individual’s next bowel movement into the tin with his name. We urged that all tins be returned next morning. These specimens we usually examined by the “Willis salt flotation” method. This routine was invented by a brilliant young Dr. Willis, an Australian whom I broke in during the campaign in 1919. In the Willis test a specimen of excreta the size of a small filbert is mixed in a tin container with saturated salt solution. The solution comes level with the top of the container, and a glass slide is laid over it. The eggs concentrate by floating to the surface and are lifted with the salt solution when the glass is raised. Under the microscope the floating eggs can be seen. When the Willis test proved positive the patients were set aside for treatment—if we had the time and the drugs to finish the job. Those were the days of “the awful oil of chenopodium,” as it was often called. It was regarded as a specific; it was relatively ineffective, and dangerous to use with large groups. I shall go into that later.

Much of the work planned for Papua was the making of “surveys,” which means a medical census of vast areas as remote from our usual earthly experience as so many lunar landscapes. Perhaps I am running a little ahead of my story and putting too much stress on ankylostomiasis, the hookworm disease. Our later work carried us into investigations of every tropical malady, from ringworm to leprosy.

At last Papua and novel adventures lay ahead of me, if we ever got there. The Morinda was poking her distracted snub nose into blue water, doing her darnedest. It was Sunday morning and our skipper was an old-fashioned practical joker. Captain Teddy Hillman, brief of bone and round of belly, solemnly invited me to his cabin to hear his phonograph play “Shall We Gather at the River?” Sadly he asked me how I liked it, and when I said, “Fine, you old so-and-so,” it was somehow the perfect reply, for he spatted my knee and crowed, “Then we’ll make you a member of the Gin Club!” Gin Club initiates ordered drinks by pushing buttons that had needles concealed in them. The drinks came in the sort of glasses you order at trick-stores; lift one and it squirts gin over your shirt-front. All very adolescent, but anything went on slow-going junks like the Morinda.

The job ahead was much on my mind. We had been given seven months to cover a Territory which, to a large part, had defied explorers, where the census had been little more than guesswork, where estimates placed a thousand natives for every two Europeans. The inspectors I brought with me were four of the six men I had planned to put in charge of separate surveys or use for laboratory work. They were Australian boys, except Chris Kendrick, a tropics-seasoned Englishman and one of the ablest helpers I have ever sent into the field; with a sort of planned recklessness he used his head so well that he might have gone through hell and brought back the Devil’s hookworms. With few exceptions all my inspectors had that sporting spirit—“Tomorrow, by the living God, we’ll try the game again.” The youngest of the ones who came with me on the Morinda was Bill Tully, only eighteen; the oldest was thirty. A terrific shortage in tropical physicians had made helpers like these an absolute necessity. They had been trained to diagnose and treat a limited number of native diseases and to lead our dark safaris wherever the work called them, from gloomy swamp to savage mountaintop. A man’s job, and they were men.

******

We stood on a Port Moresby dock and blinked at a collection of hot tin roofs, the white man’s gift to the tropics. Sweltering, steaming. The town was on the dry fringe of an island famous for moisture; the merciless sun seemed to dry up everything but sweat. A crew of Papuans came to our relief, thunderously pushing along small flat cars to carry our freight and baggage. They were big blacks with oiled skins and nothing on but lavalavas. Their bushes of hair were two or three feet in diameter; jolly smiles relieved the savage look. These were the first Papuans I had seen, and already I was learning a word of their language. Glancing respectfully toward me they repeated it, “Bogabada, Bogabada!” This, I thought, was some native honorific. I took the salute gracefully. “Just what does Bogabada mean?” I asked the Irish customs inspector. “Big belly,” he said.

Some of my 235 pounds I dropped in the strenuous months that were to follow. However, I knew that Bogabada would still stick by me.

My Papuans rolled the luggage up a corrugated iron street to the corrugated iron hotel. Ryan’s Hotel became my headquarters. The bedroom walls ran about seven feet high; above them to the ceiling was a great open space which let in breezes, bats and mosquitoes. If elephants could fly they would have made it, too. These ventilation holes breathed the very breath of scandal, for you could hear every whisper, and wonder who were paired off now. Like most tropical hotels it was the home of dissatisfied customers; they drank excessively, they said, to drown the taste of Ryan’s food.

******

Almost at once I assumed the role of lobbyist for human health. Financial details had been arranged. Papua, Australia and the Foundation were to share expenses equally. When I saw Governor Murray I found him polite but vague, with a smile that let me know that our work had been thrust upon him, and that every hookworm we might find would be an added insult to his administration, something that would lead to trouble with the overlords in Melbourne.

He quoted discouraging figures, and said that census-taking in Papua couldn’t be much more than an estimate. When you put the population figure at 300,000 you always had to say “more or less.” There were so many places that white men seldom or never saw. How could you be accurate about a Territory that covered 87,786 square miles on the mainland alone, and 90,540 when you counted in the outlying islands? You had to tackle mountains that were practically unclimbable, streams that were unnavigable and tribes that even explorers couldn’t dig out. He stroked a graying mustache over a withering mouth.... Yes, his own medical service was quite adequate, he thought. (Fading eyes strayed a little, peering to see which way Parliament was going to jump.) Yes, Lambert, this Rockefeller idea might do some good here.... When could we dine?

I have had time to reverse my first opinion of Governor Murray, who lived to be over eighty and died with a fine administrative record. He didn’t happen to like us, that was all. So I had to go to the very competent Chief Medical Officer, who understood the situation exactly and gave us the most generous help. The planters backed us all the way.

******

I decided to begin with short surveys of plantations lying around Port Moresby. Heiser and Waite had told me I needn’t fool with the villages; all the parasites were on the plantations. I hadn’t been out a week before I realized they had reached this conclusion only because they hadn’t gone beyond Papua’s freakish little dry belt, where the Ankylostoma cannot thrive. I found the villages in the moist area alive with hookworm.

After our short tour was finished, we were to push into the wild interior. We had decided to give mass treatments where we could; otherwise we must leave medicine and instructions with planters and missionaries along the way. It was talk, talk, talk these first few days, and I was like a wild horse, rarin’ to go. I got plenty of going before my seven months were up.

******

There was a touch of madness in this little hot-spot of semi-civilization where Queenslanders had come to build up another Australia. The superintendent of the hospital, Dr. Mathews—(“Dr. Mathews, one t in the name, please”) halted operations to quote a Biblical passage proving, to him, that the world would end in 1925. He had worked it out mathematically; exactly 144,000 souls would be spared from fire by a race-conscious Creator. These would be mostly Papuans, who would rise and inherit the earth from England. He hated England. His prophecy of destruction, he told me, had come to him when a boy of fifteen, in the midst of a football scrimmage.

Port Moresby, during the war scare of 1914, earnestly believed that German New Guinea might at any minute cross the border to burn and loot. At the Papuan Club they could laugh it off after the third whisky-soda. They told about native sentries posted around town, instructed to shoot at sight. One gray dawn a sentry spied an excessively smelly scavenger’s wagon rolling up, and took it for the enemy. The password was “Vailala.” The guard leveled his rifle nervously and said, “You no talkim Vailala me shoot.” The baffled Motu driver replied, “Me no sabe Vailala. This no shoot-cart. This shit-cart,”—and rolled away into the mist.

The Motu is a tamed and pleasant savage who only murders when it is conscientiously necessary. In the Port he is quite a city fellow, wearing his great bush of hair with style, but not aggressively. His kind brown eyes hold no reproach for the white folks who set him to minor household drudgeries. He is inclined to be timid; but in Papua you mustn’t put too much faith in kind brown eyes. Even the butcherous Koiaris and the cannibal Goaribaris can look at you with winning gentleness when you visit their villages.

******

Viewed from all angles,—geographical, political, medical,—our situation was not easy.

Here were three thousand miles of coast, with mountains massed so near that roads by the sea were impossible; the nineteen-mile road that ran from Port Moresby to Sapphire Creek was the only one that wasn’t a goat path or a postman’s trail. The Governor’s yacht was out of my reach, and we hired or borrowed the canoes that took us up rivers; therefore, for transportation we were largely at the mercy of recruiters and planters.

We were only there on sufferance, for the Australian Government which ran the Territory chose to snub local authority. The depression of 1920 had set the planters yammering for subsidies to help a Territory which, for the tropics, is strangely unfertile. Governor Murray was at his wits’ end to carry on his pinch-penny policy with the aid of ships’ engineers and stewards whom he had made into roughly able magistrates and district officers.

The whole medical service was pared down to an excellent Chief Medical Officer with nothing to work with, a Judgment Day prophet in charge of the local hospital, and one physician for each of three far-flung districts. These five, with a couple of nurses and two European dispensers, were supposed to service the 90,000-odd square miles. The officer at Samarai was efficiently modern; the other three were elderly hacks. This was typical of the general medical situation over the South Pacific.

Sometimes I wonder how we ever got our units organized. At last we imported two extra inspectors from Australia and scattered like scalded dogs from a steaming kettle. In my weeks of preparation, I found that I had the Papuan Club behind me. That meant support from the ablest colonials in the South Pacific: Loudon, Bertie, Sefton, Jewel, Tom Nesbitt and a dozen more. I couldn’t have moved a finger without the help of these men and their friends. These were the forward-looking ones who wanted native labor restored to health, to revitalize races for whom, at that time, there seemed no future but extinction.

At the Papuan Club I couldn’t open my mouth for any fly-blown anecdote without there being wild laughter and shouts of “More! More!” A new man would come in. “Harrigan, have you heard the Doc’s latest? Doc, tell it again.” I was rather puffed up until I found out what they were laughing at: it was my funny Yankee accent.

CHAPTER III

WHERE THE DEAD MEN TALK

Only a day by motor lorry from the galvanized iron of Port Moresby, and untamed Papua was pressing around us—a brute that could throw sudden tremendous cliffs into tangled drylands that were flat as your hand, a country where the souls of men seemed forever broken between gross materialism and fantastic belief in ghosts and magic. Perhaps the black man’s mystic spirit imparted to his white conqueror a shuddering faith in the walking dead.

Papua isn’t rich in the things that man needs. Either it is parched with drought or reeking with wetness that produces giant weedy growths with no nourishment in them. A hemp plantation, big as a Texas ranch, was one of a certain development company’s failures; almost every enterprise in Papua seemed to be on the downgrade. Over yonder, a closed and battered factory revealed the company’s vain attempt to manufacture a trade tobacco that would be foul enough to suit the native taste.

Everywhere in the Pacific trade tobacco is native coin and currency. A few sticks of it will buy a man’s labor for the week, a woman’s virtue for the night. Government regulations have set a standard ration: two sticks a week. But the natives will accept only the stinking twist that traders import from Virginia. The development company had a bright idea: they would make a trade tobacco of their own and corner the business. They spent £50,000 trying to reproduce that exquisite dung flavor. The black boys put it in their pipes, but couldn’t be fooled. “Me want tabac!” they yelled. So the company imported an expert from Virginia. That didn’t work either. Maybe the local tobacco was a grade too good. The factory shut down and more shillings dropped out of the pockets of hopeful stockholders.

******

On one trip to these regions I went with Inspector Chris Kendrick, a planter named Sefton, and Archie McAlpin, who was chief inspector for the big development. There was also my “boy,” Ahuia.

In Port Moresby I had designed a uniform for my native interpreters. It was a jumper and skirt in gaudy blue edged with bright yellow braid, and on the breast was a large yellow H. The H, of course, stood for Hookworm; but it made boys throw out their chests and strut as if it meant Harvard at least.

Down there they call every male native a “boy”; Ahuia was my chief boy. Splendid in his new uniform, he had the look of a Malay pirate coming over the side with a big knife in his teeth. He wore more hair than I had ever seen on anything, living or dead. On special occasions he loved to decorate it with lilies. To the natives he was an oppressor, to me a tender guardian. He could wash clothes, hookworm specimens, camp dishes. He could cook and sew. He could put the fear of devils into the gang of carriers who bore our equipment. He spoke Motu fluently when he interpreted. Motu is the lingua franca along the dry belt. In remoter villages they didn’t understand Motu. But in every settlement under government control Ahuia would engage the services of the village constable, usually a murderer who had graduated with honors from Port Moresby jail. Jail was the native’s university, where he could learn more in three years than the home folks could teach him in a lifetime. The authorities always had a job waiting for a good jailbird. Ahuia, who was a great traveler, knew that any constable with a Port Moresby jail degree could speak Motu. A handy boy was Ahuia, and, like most natives, as afraid of ghosts and magic as a rabbit of a hound-dog.

******

At the big hemp plantation, field hands thronged around our lorry to help us with our load—queer fellows with sloping foreheads crowned with tight Negro wool. Long beaked noses gave them an ironic look; they had the appealing eyes of beaten hunting dogs, and were not healthy men. Some of them showed the dreadful ulcers of that false syphilis we call “yaws.” Others were too pallid for brown men—hookworm infection and malaria.

“What name dis fellow?” I asked Ahuia.

“Him Goaribari.” Ahuia spat contemptuously.

Goaribaris! I had heard bloodcurdling stories of these savages. It must have been a long haul for them—seven hundred miles or so from the Delta country which they terrorized. Here they labored along with downcast eyes, or looked up almost fawningly.

The plantation manager arrived and invited me to his comfortable, balconied house. These planters have the generous hearts of all good Australians. “And it’s a God’s blessing that you Yankees are jogging the Government up a bit. Half a million natives, maybe, and not half of ’em fit to lift a bloody hand.” When I asked about the Goaribaris who had so sedately helped us with our gear, the manager said: “Cannibals? Well, just a bit. When they’re home they’ll eat anything, from maggots to raw eels.”

I inquired into hygienic conditions. He said, “When the recruiters bring these boys in they’re lousy with the diseases they’ve caught in their blighted villages. The ones you saw are newcomers. Six months on a good plantation and they’ll pick up.”

He looked at me studiously. “The plantation’s a bit seedy now, but we have two sanitary features we’re proud of.”

Back of the cabins he led me into one of those latrines designed by Dr. Strong, the Papuan Chief Medical Officer, who strove so well for the people and never got a breath of credit. It was built with a rough wooden rail and the pit was some twenty-five feet deep. Darkness below was unattractive to the dysentery-carrying fly, the sides too steep and high for the hookworm larvae to climb.

That was admirable, I said. And what was the second sanitary improvement in which he took so much pride?

Beyond the hemp fields untidy black women loafed in the shade, revealing their baggy breasts; they were spitting bloody streams of betel-juice or smoking short clay pipes. “We have fourteen now,” the planter said. “We’ve sent some away—gonorrhea, you know. Bring a few more in this week. Yes, they have the ration of trade tobacco, rice and tinned food. They’re all married, so it’s just a matter of seeing the husband.”

Admirable. But what had that to do with sanitation?

The manager held me with clean gray eyes, and said: “Do you know what happens to men without women? These natives are only animals. You’ve seen how animals behave, when they can’t get what they want naturally? Indenturing men, taking them in herds away from the wives and the whores, teaches them a lot of tomfoolery. Europeans don’t think that the primitive man goes homosexual. Humbug! The missionaries think the savages will live like Christ, and they’ve made it illegal to have prostitutes on plantations. Well, these ladies here are just good hard-working wives. Ask any of the big planters—and they’re he-men if ever there were any—ask ’em about the native boys that weave their hips and ogle at the work-gangs going by. We call ’em ‘queens,’ and they’re a nuisance we’ve jolly well got to get rid of.”

The planter’s idea was brutal, like Papua. But his object was kindly, and, in its way, scientific. Since then I have seen much of the turning of simple people to the ways of perversion. The hard-hitting Queenslander, manly as a frontiersman can be, was doing his best to square the vicious circle.

******

That night I saw my first ghost. We had sat up rather late with the manager, who mumbled in a corner with Archie McAlpin. Once I heard him ask, “Is it still around?” Heads were together, voices lowered. Finally Archie McAlpin, who had finished his share of whisky, and mine, rambled upstairs. I rambled up too, for I was tired. That evening there had been a long lecture before an audience of sedate cannibals, earnestly attentive to what I told Ahuia to say in Motu to a Goaribari interpreter.

The Papuan servant never wakes you harshly, because when you sleep your soul has left your body to wander among dreams. Wake the body suddenly, and where is the soul? Still loitering with a dream. Therefore you die. When Ahuia wished to rouse me he would move a chair or give a polite cough. His cough woke me and I saw him, shadowy in a patch of moonlight. His jittery voice was imploring the taubada to “Look along veranda.... Devil-devil belong him outside.”

A voice was yammering somewhere. I looked out and saw a white figure that appeared to float as it gestured. I hadn’t many hairs to stand up, but they all stood. Yammering, yammering, the voice of the pale apparition beat out a long speech in Motu, then in English. “No, don’t come here again!”

The specter turned. It was Archie McAlpin. The voice hadn’t been that of a drunken man; under the white moon his look was sober. He shook his head, the debate was over. He didn’t see me, he appeared not to see anything as he went back to bed.

“Ahuia, what was he seeing?” I whispered, because the natives know so much of devils. Dark eyes were expressionless in the white night. “Maybe he see nothing, Taubada,” he whispered.

In three days I finished dosing two hundred Goaribaris. I had found that newcomers bore the heaviest load of worms, reversing a prevalent medical theory that plantations were infected and villages clean. Labor was bringing disease from the towns to the farms.

The plantation that was sanitated by prostitutes and model latrines, worked by tame cannibals and haunted by invisible things, disappeared in a dust cloud as our lorry rumbled away toward the unbelievable cliffs of Hombrom Bluff. When I spoke of ghosts to Archie McAlpin he turned his steel-gray eyes the other way.

We slept at the little inn at Sapphire Creek, where the specters wailed again, if only in the imagination of the English landlady whom I treated for a slight attack of alcoholism. Poor woman, she had raised two husbands and fourteen children, and had been a rough Florence Nightingale to the sick miners in the last flu epidemic. She stared up from her pillow and said, “No, Doctor, I’m not seeing things—only what’s all around us, all the time. Strange things happen in Papua.” She closed her eyes to shut them away.

******

Hombrom Bluff hangs over the seared scrub of flatlands below. All Papua is like that, a vast bear-rug, shaggy and tumbled in a hundred folds; man is the louse that must crawl up and down, down and up, to cross these endless entanglements. Craning my neck to look up Hombrom’s forehead I saw the change in vegetation from strangling tropic vines at the base to temperate evergreens that shagged its top. Blinking at three thousand feet of it, I said to Archie McAlpin, “How do we get around to the Sogari District?”

Archie said, “We don’t get around. We go over.”

They brought us horses and I mounted clumsily, being thirty pounds too heavy for the little shaggy animal. Then it was up, four breakneck miles of cliffside trail that was seldom more than a yard wide. It would have been a hard scramble for a man, but my Papuan horse must have been bred of a goat. On the one side we were elbowed by monstrous vines; on the other side loosened pebbles flew into empty air. At one high twist the forests were sliding down to Port Moresby harbor, where the reefs were fine spun lace, tattered over the expanse of lapis lazuli sea. Another turn and one of the world’s great waterfalls, Rona, joined diamond necklace to diamond necklace as it met the wild Laloki River, slicing through savage green.

Now at the top we dismounted on a narrow ridge. “What’s that lake over there?” I asked Archie McAlpin. The lake was a Venus’ mirror, framed in the lips of a dead volcano. Archie’s eyes were still as the lake; he stood silent at the marge of a cliff. Then I heard it again, heard the queer babble in Motu. I turned and saw that it was Archie, speaking to the sky. I whispered to Sefton, “Is he a bit off his head?” Sefton answered gravely: “No. But that lake over there is where dead men go. Archie’s saying the invocation. It keeps ghosts from following us. You can’t get a native to go within a mile of that lake. They know what’s good for them.”

Perhaps the lake had put its curse on me too; maybe it didn’t like to be photographed. When I was remounting my horse the saddle slipped and left me dangling in midair. Two hundred and thirty-odd pounds of me hung by a creaking stirrup. Quick-thinking Chris Kendrick caught me in time and shoved me back into the saddle. What I liked best about Chris was his way with an emergency.

Far away across a vertigo of green depths Mt. Victoria, a tall landmark in New Guinea, was in a misty shroud. On this silent trail the sudden flutter of a bird’s wing sounded like a shot.

“The mountain’s like a ghost,” I said to Archie McAlpin.

The trail had widened, we could ride closer together. “Along here I like it best in daylight,” he said. I asked him if he was afraid of Koiaris—for they were the killers with long spears. No, he wasn’t afraid of Koiaris. Their country was farther on.

Sefton stared into the pale mountain light. “There’s a trail that leads down from Jawavere where the Koiaris wait for anything that comes along. You don’t linger on the Jawavere trail.

“I have a station on the trail,” he said, “and always look for anybody passing to have a drink with me. It’s a bit lonesome. About four one afternoon, a native runs in and says he saw a taubada (white man) who had been riding along there, taking his time, just staring ahead. His horse didn’t make any noise, the bush didn’t flutter. I thought that was a lot of native humbug, and was annoyed that the man didn’t drop in for a drink. I asked around among the other plantations. Yes, they’d all seen the rider, and at about four o’clock the same afternoon—in places miles apart. Finally we searched the bush and found the bones of a man and a horse, around some smoky stones. The Koiaris had done him in, weeks before we saw him riding.”

Archie said thoughtfully, “Yes, and there was the woman dressed in white. I couldn’t sleep one night, and there she was in the garden, bending over picking flowers. I spoke to her, but she didn’t look up. She was the Englishwoman who married that chap from Cairns. She made a little English garden, but it never suited her. Always wanted to go home; you know how the English are. Her man thought Papua was good enough for her, until she died. Then he shot himself.”

“Do you ever see his ghost?” I asked.

“No. He’s too deep in hell, I fancy, to get out.”

They believed earnestly in the horseman who rode over the bluff. They believed that lights appeared in the deserted house from which another woman had run away with her baby.

We were riding along silently when our horses stopped, snorted and sat on their tails. At first I thought it was a fallen vine, then I saw it wiggle. I slid off and threw a handy stone at eight black feet of snake; which was a diplomatic blunder, for the thing made straight at me. Sefton broke its back with a whip. “Venomous?” I asked. I hate snakes. “Rather,” Sefton said, and poked the poison sacks.

We rode on. Ghosts were real, snakes only a nuisance in a country where anything could happen. Except mules. According to the planters there was just one mule in Papua; and his long ears waved over a fence at the Seventh Day Adventist Mission. Natives marveled and fed him votive yams; because he was a member of God’s house, locally presided over by a missionary they called “Smiling Charley.”

The first time his celebrated animal strayed away, Charley organized his black men to search for it. They hunted until they were tired out. Smiling Charley went on over the brow of the next hill, and there was the mule. Charley thought this was an opportunity to demonstrate the power of prayer, so he went back and said, “Boys, let’s pray for guidance.” They prayed, and in a few minutes overtook the mule. A week or two later it strayed again, much to the chagrin of the boys who had to do all the carrying when it wasn’t there. Smiling Charley tried to organize another search, but the boys were unwilling. He questioned them and they said, “More better you pray first time, Taubada.” So Charley had to pray, but it didn’t work so well, for it was a week before the mule came home.

Dusk was falling when we left Smiling Charley’s Seventh Day joyfulness. After shadows began blackening the hills, Archie McAlpin said, “We’re in the Koiari country now, and we’d better push along. On the slope there, you can see the graveyard.” Stones were like skulls among the scrub. “Those are planters that the jungle got the best of.” Everybody who’s been a week in Papua knows how the jungle defeats all but the strongest—malaria, accidents, bites and infections, all take their toll of the pioneering white.

A mountain chill blew from the pale stones. A tall horseman came toward us, and I tried to forget the mounted ghost. But Archie McAlpin sang out, “Hello, Sam!” The horseman stopped. Archie said, “Seems to me, Sam, that you’re not giving this graveyard a very wide berth.” “Me? Archie, I never see ghosts.”

“Then I suppose, Sam, you wouldn’t mind sleeping among the graves?”

“I may be crazy,” Sam said, “but I’m not a bloody fool. If I see any ghosts there’ll be one more horseman riding over the Bluff. He won’t be back, either.”

He galloped on. No, people don’t loiter on the Jawavere trail. I was still thinking of the lonely Englishwoman who couldn’t go home; her poor shadow was earth-bound to Papua.

How about the ghosts of indentured natives, confused spirits that can never find their way back to the villages they loved because they were born there? Here’s a scrap from my diary, written from a survey which I made a little later:—

On Saturday P.M. gave lecture to natives. Back of the boys’ houses found evidences of gross soil pollution ... natives must be educated to some idea of sanitation.... Seem well fed and contented, save for a lot from the Dutch border, some of whom have died for no apparent cause, other than homesickness....

CHAPTER IV

THEY WALK ALONG DREAMS

On those first short trips our main effort was to count and report the diseased. I often had a deep sense of personal guilt when I left the villages just as I had found them, crying out for the healing I had no time to give. All I could do was lecture them, hand out the tins and gather them up for tests in the next place I stopped. Sometimes the containers were returned in fifteen minutes—such is the celerity of the savage gut. Faces would be wreathed in smiles. They had filled the magic boxes, just as I had ordered, had they not? To them that was all that was needed for the cure; fill the magic boxes, hand them over to the white medicine man who would say an incantation—and lo! sickness would vanish from the tribe.

This was a sort of Heathen Science point of view which would have been funny, had it not been so tragic. I got used to it, and left the people with a smile as cheery as their own. After all, the drug would be coming soon, and I had told the missionary or planter how to administer it.

When we had sufficient oil of chenopodium we did not waste an overnight stop in making diagnoses; in this district wherever there were villages the infection was obviously so heavy that we could call it 100 per cent. Therefore we lined them up and dosed every man, woman and child. With great gusto they swallowed down the nasty oil, in a spoonful of sugar, and smacked their lips. They laughed over the bitter purge that followed. More than once they lingered to steal the leavings of Epsom salts solution, on the principle that the more you take the sooner you get well. Only the children held back. I won’t forget the naked four-year-old who knew enough missionary English to yell, “Oh, Jesus, no!” when his elders dragged him forward.

Many of these first trips took us no farther from Port Moresby’s tinny orderliness than it would be from New York’s city hall to Trenton. Yet with every mile we found some curious or savage twist to the human animal’s makeup. There was always the white man, standing one against five hundred natives, in an urge to develop a resisting wilderness. Keep the tribes alive for another day’s work, that was the problem. My early expeditions were all zigzags. There was a plunge into the sawmill country along the Laloki River to inspect a mining company’s Kiwais, big jolly fellows like Virginia Negroes; I stayed there long enough to advise the operators on the use of their lumber for pit latrines. I won’t forget the cleanest native village I ever saw. The Company had surrounded it with a stockade fence and commanded the people to sweep the streets and throw their rubbish away. I had only one fault to find: the dark villagers polluted the trash-heaps they piled on the other side. These people should have been crawling with hookworms. Actually, the infection was extremely light. Another medical paradox....

I sometimes came upon pathological freaks. There was the paralytic at Kabadi plantation, who seemed to have lost muscular control of one side at a time; when he turned he grimaced horribly with the conscious effort. His walk was like pushing forward two sticks of wood. I wondered why they kept such a monster, then they told me. Oh, he was very useful. The Koiaris were so afraid of him they didn’t dare raid the place.

In the black belt of the South Pacific dreams are very real things. When you sleep your soul goes walking into living adventures. If you love a girl in sleep, then she is no longer a maiden when you meet her in the morning. A nightmare murder is no mere fancy; you have killed your enemy dead as dead. When you happen to meet him tomorrow sauntering down the glen, that is nothing. What you are seeing is merely a fancy. Your dream has killed the man you hate. And take care how you treat that frightful paralytic who leers at you in the hemp-fields. He may “walk along your dreams.”

Too many things I saw walked along my dreams. There was that pageant at Boera....

Boera was a dismal beach and supported a London Missionary Society station, presided over by two Samoans. Samoa was a far cry from that lost spit of sand. Alien to the soil, these imported teachers grow to be like many white missionaries, muddling along with Christ’s work. Their impulses are as fine as their results are vague in a dingy routine of bell-ringing, prayer-saying, Sunday school reading and more bell-ringing. This pair, Mosea and Emma, were meekly discouraged, but with the beautiful manners of the Polynesian aristocrat. Mosea was already heavy-legged with elephantiasis. His cousin Samueli dropped in to report with Christian cheerfulness that conditions were “very bad.”... Queer how they travel. Years later this same Samueli came to me on an Ellice Island beach far away from Papua, and made me a present of a fresh-killed chicken. When I asked him how conditions were, he said, “Very bad.”

At Boera I got my first real look at a yaws-stricken community. This hideous thing was apparent on the bodies and faces of at least a third of the people, men and women with noses reduced to yawning holes in the middle of a flat scar. Fingers and toes curled like withering twigs. Swarms of flies carried the filth-born germ. I looked into baby faces and saw how the process of healing had drawn their lips together into a featureless surface with an opening so small that you could hardly get a lead-pencil through.

Yes, these Papuan specters walk along your dreams. The tropics are dreamlands, released from the balance of Northern things. Life down there moves between poetic loveliness and monstrous disgust. I have since seen many other villages like Boera; and I should have become callous, seeing so much of it. I could get used to the maimed adults, but the children always wrung my heart.

It is quite understandable that the early voyagers should have confused yaws with syphilis. That such confusion still persists is reasonable. For all we know of yaws, it may be syphilis modified by Stone Age conditions. We call it framboesia tropica (tropical raspberry). When you speak of yaws you must always speak of syphilis—the two are so alike, with wide differences.

Captain Cook, who first visited the Pacific in 1773, wisely wrote: “Another disease of more mischievous consequences, which is also very frequent, and appears on every part of the body, in large broad ulcers, discharging a thin, clear pus ... it being certainly known and even acknowledged by themselves that the natives are subject to this disease before they were visited by the English, it cannot be the result of venereal contagion, notwithstanding the similarity of the symptoms....”

Here at least is illness you can’t blame on the whites.

The enlightened traders and missionaries who followed Cook sketchily jotted down “syphilis.” All my work in Papua and my following years of careful research over the whole Pacific failed to find one case of syphilis, although I have run across one or two rather doubtful diagnoses. I have never found the tell-tale chancre scar, which is the sure mark. The manifestations of the two diseases run so parallel that carelessness or ignorance have put a libel on the native races.[1]

Yaws is not a venereal disease, nor is it hereditary. It is usually acquired in early childhood. Native mothers expose their babies to it in hopes of “getting it out of their systems,” much as some Yankee mothers do when measles come around.

Now here’s the confusing resemblance. The yaws germ Treponema pertenue is so closely related to the syphilis germ Treponema pallidum that the two are hard to tell apart. Both diseases progress in three of four stages. The “mother yaw” first appears on any part of the body, and its secondary manifestation is a great number of “daughter yaws” which are widely distributed over the skin and progress into the third stage, which is remarkably syphilitic in appearance. Arterial changes and nerve lesions (as in syphilis) sometimes cause the general paralysis of the insane.

Missionaries have an easy way of accounting for yaws: it’s a curse inherited from cannibal ancestors. Certainly it is ugly enough to have come to the world through that black door.

And here’s another parallel. The treatment for yaws is exactly the same as the treatment for syphilis—arsenical injections. Framboesia was quite beyond the reach of medicine until Professor Ehrlich produced his salvarsan. There is nothing more dramatic in medicine than the almost visible growth of healthy tissue over a yaws sore after an arsenical injection.

The Pacific is the one place in the world where yaws is in no way complicated by syphilis. I am told that in Tahiti the two diseases thrive, but the same person never has both. On the Islands there seems to be a cross-immunity, so that the two germs cannot prosper in the same host. Certainly the native has been abundantly exposed to syphilis; East Indian labor, when it came to Fiji, brought with it 75 per cent infection. The Chinese and the white sailors fetched their share and did their amatory best to spread it, but nothing happened. Something had made the native immune, and that something is quite apparent.

The stamping out of yaws is largely a matter of intensive campaigning. But what will happen when the fight is won? Will syphilis slip in to take the place of the spirochete it could never meet—on equal terms? That is another doctor’s dilemma.

******

The morning after we heard the planters’ ghost stories I sent Kendrick to ride ahead for preliminary inspection of the rubber plantations. On a rough sea or a jungle trail, Chris was at home. I made short surveys along the trail, resting my raw posterior when I could. Then horseback again, clenching my teeth at every bump on the saddle-sores. Imagine a Coney Island roller coaster magnified a hundred times, and you have our slide and scramble, up and down, down and up, to attain an elevation of 3,000 feet. Down, down would go the coaster on a grade so steep that a fly, if he tried it, would fall over on his nose; and I marveled again at the adhesive footing of my horse. On the final upgrade I spared my buttocks and skinned my heels, for even the horse surrendered.

Now the rubber trees were all around, above and below me, their coarse, hard leaves like green glass that blinded the eyes in afternoon sun. Underneath was a grotto of soft light, upheld by pale trunks like pillars of snakeskin. Naked men worked in silent preoccupation, sharp knives making incisions in the bark; neatly they would rip down paper-thin slices, and the tree’s milk-white blood would trickle into cups. Watching, I was thinking: they are natural surgeons. Down the ages they have learned so much, dissecting human flesh with the razor-edges of split bamboo. Train men like these to use the knife to save instead of kill, and what couldn’t they accomplish for their people?...

The man nearest to me turned. His wooly hair, his sloping brow, his long, hooked nose told me that he was a Goaribari. I looked at his companions. All Goaribaris, with that undeniably Hebrew profile which gave them the name “the Lost Tribes of Israel.” But these were different from the scrawny cannibals I had seen on the hemp plantation. They were fatter, better-muscled, and their brown skins were beginning to show silk. They were not newcomers, and the planters had taken care of them. Back home, where they pursued the jolly business of going to war and dining on the enemy, they hadn’t eaten very regularly. On the farms the white man had fed them, and done his best to teach them sanitary ways; an uphill job among primitives who were naïve as cattle in their bodily functions. In subsequent surveys all over the Territory I could tell, almost at a sweep of the eye, the men who had been on plantations. They were the upstanding, healthy specimens.

Rubber plantations have a smell of their own, something like the aroma of fried overshoes. It drifts from the factory where the sap is being smoked and reduced to the wide, dirty-gray ribbons that go forward to market. Here my cannibals worked like hiving bees, swarming in and out of the door on the commonplace business of supplying crude material for the raincoat trade. I looked around and saw Chris Kendrick, smiling and self-assured, pushing his way through the throng.

“You missed something yesterday afternoon,” Kendrick said. “The Koiaris came down and staged a raid on the Goaribaris. A lot of workmen were loafing in a field, then a naked devil was in the midst of them, poking away with a long spear in either hand. There was just one of him, mind you, and there must have been twenty Goaribaris. They may be tough bastards in their home towns, but here they were taking it like frozen lambs—till somebody ran in with a shovel and a hoe handle. Next you knew the Koiari was making for the woods, naked and howling, shaking his long spears.

“But the Goaribaris caught him and—what do you think?—turned him over to the management! What the hell did he care? He’d got his man.” Like so many of the fiercer tribes, Koiaris kill because murder is a proof of manhood, and a warrior who has not bloodied his spear is laughed at, even by the women.

“I got a snapshot of the fellow he left behind,” Kendrick said, and showed me the print he had developed. A broken body lay in the scrub. The plantation manager came up just then and grinned, “We buried him deep. His brother Goaribaris might take a notion to eat him, you know. Of course, they’re pretty well fed, but.... Yo-hum, farming’s so full of little problems like that!”

******

Yes, farming in Papua, even at its best, offered many problems never dreamed of in the philosophy of a Secretary of Agriculture. The old hands were far from hookworm-free, although vastly improved in general health. New recruits were coming in with fresh loads of parasites to be hatched from the filth they scattered in spite of managerial watchfulness. Green laborers regarded the well-built privies as queer traps set by the white man for their undoing ... pretty, but look out!

That night I lectured by the light of hurricane lanterns swung from the beams of a great, empty warehouse. The audience sat cross-legged in a wide crescent, their oily faces gleaming up at us. The front row was solid Goaribari with natives of gentler tribes behind. These, being more nearly civilized, understood Motu, which was so much Greek to the Delta savages. Therefore it had been up to Ahuia to fetch the local constable, a very ugly man in a G-string and a policeman’s cap.

Such occasions were Ahuia’s hour to shine. Out on the trail he went stripped to the waist, but at lectures the gaudy yellow H on his bright blue jumper stretched with every expansion of his chest. And he hadn’t forgotten to put lilies in his hair. He had set the stage with our regulation International Health Board chart, loosely bound pages with simple illustrations of the hookworm’s course to the intestines; there were drawings, greatly enlarged, of the male and female parasite and the egg their mutual love produced. There were big photographs of a sick boy and a well boy—something like the patent-medicine man’s “Before and After Treatment.”

Ahuia quelled the Goaribaris with his pirate’s scowl, and in impressive silence brought out our prize number, a large bottle of adult hookworms, pickled in alcohol. This was a stage property which we carried for purposes of demonstration. Cannibal eyes popped as the collection was passed from hand to hand.

Ahuia was getting his lesson by heart, but I still felt it safer to prompt him. “Tell them first,” I said, “that they must look carefully at what is in the bottle.” He spoke Motu, straight into the mouth of the interpreter: “Tatau bona, memero, umui iboumuiai inai gaigai ba itaia....” The native constable was saying it after him, in the queer lingo of the Goaribaris: “Men and boys, all of you look at these little snakes.”

Education strained through three languages. The row of man-eaters sat very still; their long noses, pointed up, were like the muzzles of wistful hounds. Ahuia was telling them how the lady snake laid very bad eggs that fell out of the black boy and the black “mary”; how the eggs hatched tiny baby snakes that nipped the black boy’s foot and crawled back into his belly. Now see the picture of the sick boy and the well boy—they are both the same boy. The well boy took the medicine the taubada brings, and the snakes came out of his belly. Now he will keep well, because he is a wise boy. He goes to the clean privy the white man built him, so that the snake cannot come out and crawl into him again.

Patiently drumming simple words into woolly heads, we tried to make simple men understand cause, cure and prevention of a disease they might have brought from Africa, ages ago; a disease so wasting that the mills, rivers, the plantations were calling upon half-invalids to furnish brawn for Europe’s driving ambition.

Sometimes in my early lectures as I looked over the stooped dark figures I would have moments of weakening. I would wonder if it was worth while to save these curious beings, so out of touch with anything our Northern civilization knew.

As time went on, I came to realize how very much worth while it was.

******

The lecture was over and I started alone across an open swathe of dim moonlight that pointed toward the plantation house. I was anxious to get to headquarters where I could write up my notebook and tumble into bed. On both sides of me rubber trees made high black walls, like something built of coal. My conscious mind was concerned only with the day’s work and tomorrow’s; somewhere in the back of my dreams I may have sensed the danger of another such Koiari spear as had butchered a man yesterday.

I looked up and saw the outline of three men, emerging out of the shadows. Even to my defective eyes they made a grotesque group, all locked together in a shambling stride. There was nothing for me but trust in the white man’s prestige. I was unarmed. If I had shouted for help it would have been a sign of fear, and these fellows, I knew, worked in a hurry. When they came closer I saw that they carried no weapons.

Two of them, who had been holding to the third, began jabbering in Goaribari, making friendly sounds. Was this a trap? Fortunately Ahuia and the native constable came swinging up with hurricane lanterns—even in moonlight they carried lanterns to scare away ghosts. Ahuia pointed to the man in the middle. “That fellow broke his hand in a fight. There were not enough women to go around.”

All right, let’s have a look at it. We led the foiled lover to my quarters where I examined the wrist and found a bad Colles’s fracture. In dim lantern-light I did a careful job of bonesetting, even though the fellow had just scared the living lights out of me. If he had shown up in the dispensary at Rochester with the pick of the faculty looking on, he couldn’t have had more meticulous surgical attention. I even took time to give him Doctor Moore’s famous dressing, which is fussy, but perfect.

“All right, boy,” I said, “run along.” He stood there patiently, holding out his unwounded hand. What the devil was he waiting for? “Does he want to thank me?” I asked Ahuia.

“No, master.” Ahuia looked fiercely sad. “He is waiting for you to pay him. That fashion belong this fellow.”

“What fashion?” My short temper was getting shorter. “What should I pay him for?”

“For mending his sick hand, Taubada.”

I growled and Ahuia shoved him out into the night. When I was around Ahuia feared neither ghosts nor Goaribaris. The incident seemed to be closed, but I was aware that the cubicle next to Kendrick’s, where I slept, was quite doorless and exposed to pale moonlight.

Next morning I was aroused by softly arguing Motu voices. Ahuia and Quai, who was with Kendrick, had missed something from our bags. Quite likely. For there was a gentleman’s agreement among Motuan servants: Never steal from your master—oh, that was very tabu. But you could take a little something from your master’s host, or from some stranger taubada, sleeping near you, if he happened to leave his bags open. It was honorable to snitch a handkerchief or a pair of new shorts and drop the small loot into your bag. When two white men were bunking adjacently, their boys working with the bags would watch each other as cat watches mouse. It was all right for the good servant to get away with a few of the stranger’s cigarettes, for personal smoking.

There were other guests on the plantation, and I was wondering whose boy had gotten by Ahuia’s watchfulness when a sleepy glance through the sunlit window awoke me to a real annoyance. There sat the Goaribari with the bandaged hand, serenely chewing betel-nut. “For the love of God, Ahuia, what does he want now?”

Ahuia’s funny English informed me, “Taubada, he still wishes to be paid. He has slept all night on the porch.”

I jumped out of bed, dragging the mosquito netting with me. Like a fishwife in a bridal veil I exhausted all the arts of profanity. With an amiable smile on his betel-red mouth the cannibal listened—and held out his good hand. Then I checked myself in mid-oath and laughed as I have never laughed before. This was socialized medicine with a reverse English.

“Ahuia,” I shouted, “give this cheeky bastard two sticks of trade tobacco.”

Quite unemotionally the savage accepted his fee and departed.

I was still laughing when the planter came in, and he grinned. “It’s the fashion—that’s all a bush fellow will say. They’re pretty much confused about money values. To them a white man’s a sort of cross between Simon Legree and Santa Claus; when he comes around it’s either to send ’em to jail or pay ’em off.”

I grumbled: “Next thing they’ll expect me to pass around free tobacco before every hookworm lecture.”

“Certainly they will,” he said. Then he rang the changes the planters had rung all along the line. “Anything can happen in Papua.”

CHAPTER V

JUST THIS SIDE OF THE MOON

In July I decided to lead my own expedition as far into the interior as possible and get a proper picture of infestation in districts remote from the influence of white traders and planters. I had worked like a beaver along the coast, up rivers, into plantations, sea villages, hill villages. My inspectors were always away, leading surveys and campaigns that spread out fanwise across the country. Communications were crude. Canoes, whaleboats and jiggery launches plied their precarious way among the infinite shoals, or lost themselves under lush palisades where an all-wise Creator saw fit to turn on the shower at the slightest excuse.

I moved ahead of my inspectors, surveyed the districts, turned them over to my men and passed on to the next. Although the Government was inclined to look on me as a secret agent of John D. Rockefeller, they offered me a sort of mild indulgence. Our main handicap was supplies, as the Foundation’s Dr. Sawyer, then my over-director, could not believe that such great quantities of drugs were necessary to treat infected Papua. Where was all the stuff going? In Australia, where treatments had been comparatively few, expenditures had been small. Sawyer simply couldn’t grasp the immenseness of that sick population in the Territory. Yet to treat them en masse would have been the only answer. At that time mass treatments had been tried among laborers in Java; but a wholesale curative campaign was unheard of.

Our work had been so heavy that we had exhausted Central Office supplies. Even in the following year there weren’t enough to go around. We had to carry on with what we had.

******

On July 21 I was more than glad to be setting out for Yule Island, a splotch of land some sixty miles from Port Moresby. This island is separated by a thin gut of water from the prodigious jungle-covered mountains that stalk beyond Mafulu to the mysterious border some still call “German New Guinea.” Again we were jogging along on the little Morinda, with Captain Teddy Hillman and his Gin Club in command. With me I had the two boys, Ahuia and Quai. We took with us a quantity of “gear,” which was our term for the variety of things we must carry with us into the field.

A white man, bent on an excursion straight into the thick of Papua, requires several swag bags—one for his bed, mattress and mosquito netting; another for scientific equipment; a smaller bag to hold incidentals. The number of tucker boxes for food depends on the time one spends in the field. There will be no chance to replace anything after the start is made. These must be included: frying pan, teapot, billy-cans, a tin opener, a lantern with kerosene, an ax and an assortment of tinned food. Absorbing topics around a Papuan campfire are the relative merits of different brands of tinned meats, and cunning ways to disguise the taste of tin.

The tins for hookworm specimens, packed by hundreds, were little half-ounce cylinders about the diameter of a silver dollar. The gear made a load for many carriers, burdened too with their own food for the whole trip. And don’t forget the trade tobacco that must be doled out everywhere as strike insurance. We were prepared for almost anything; the going up to Mafulu would be hard.

Getting carriers for these long pulls was always a part of Papua’s labor problem. Ask a Motu boy to pack and follow you into the jungle and he’d begin to shuffle, roll his big eyes and move away. There was puri-puri, bad magic, in those hills out there. It was not “our fashion” to go among the Mondo or the Kuni people. They have enchantments, you die under a spell. The same fear lay across every district border; we had to change our carriers as we went along.

******

Yule Island, flat and green as a dish of parsley, lay separated by a thread of salt water from the distant panorama of tumbled mountains that climbed the wilds of Papua. It was an exotic and frightening beauty over there, peak after peak, their height exaggerated by closeness to shore. The tallest looked taller than Mt. Everest, and more unattainable.

Three white men waited for me on flat Yule Island beach. I recognized two of my inspectors, the Orr brothers, Jack and Ron. Their food supply had been spoiled by surprise tumbles from canoes. They greeted me with unrestrained shouts of joy; they would eat again! The third greeter was Mr. Connelly, the jolly, hard-boiled District Officer. When I mentioned the giant mountains across the stream he said casually:—

“They’re a bit of a climb. When you’ve finished with Yule Island I’ll show you up, part of the way. Business and pleasure. I’ll have to push beyond Mafulu—after a batch of murderers, you know. Come over to the house and we’ll have a spot of tea or something.”

I was no sooner in Mr. Connelly’s house than I heard a strain of sweet, familiar music. An American accent! It was young Mrs. Connelly saying, “Pleased to meet you.” She was a native of New Jersey. How she came here to be the wife of a man who scaled crags to round up murderers was just another in the grab-bag we call marriage. My own wife, after all, was born in Mexico, educated in California—and was now waiting for me in a Port Moresby bungalow.

Connelly knew the ropes, as needs must be when one man combines the duties of sheriff, judge advocate, postmaster, tax collector and justice of the peace in a country where the people are hard to count as wild pigs. After an evening of bridge he told me, casually, that he’d fix me up with the forty-seven carriers I needed. How? Just leave it to him. “I’m Government, you know”—with a dry smile.

During our week’s survey of Yule Island the Orr brothers and I were lodged in the patrol officer’s house, walls and floors of split bamboo, ceiling of nipa palm thatch. The shower bath was two Standard Oil cans (“petrol tins” over there) hung one below the other. Can Number 1 is filled with fresh water, and when you pull a string a plug comes out and empties it into Can Number 2, which has been drilled full of nail-holes to give a fountain effect. The first time you use this Rube Goldberg invention you soap yourself carefully under the spray—and the water gives out. The next time you try soaping yourself in your own sweat, which can’t be done. The third try you just say “Oh, hell,” and pull the string.

******

The Mission of the Sacred Heart has a business name which I have remembered accurately: Company of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Ltd. Its holdings ran all the way from Yule Island to a point some 130 miles distant across the channel, up into the wild mountain-heart of Papua, and its practical label was a key to its practical Christianity. The Sacred Heart was, and still is, about the best mission establishment in the Pacific, and should serve as a model for the numerous jarring sects and creeds—Church of England, Calvinist, Wesleyan, Seventh Day Adventist, London Missionary Society and even Mormon—that confused the native mind with conflicting roads to salvation.

I grew to admire these curiously devoted Fathers, thirty-one in all, who usually put aside their priestly robes for the frontiersman’s rough khaki. Fierce beards relieved them entirely of the soft ecclesiastical look. In little convents, strewn along the broken trails up to Mafulu and beyond, there were twenty-six nuns living the same rigorous life.

There was almost every European nationality in this French order: French, German, Swiss, Dutch, one Italian, one Spaniard. They were understaffed, hideously overworked; in faces around the luncheon table I could see the look of men who were not going to last much longer. They were short-lived because they followed their incessant work without considering illness or the demands of a difficult climate. They all died in Papua. With them I visited two cases of typhoid which they said had been brought in from Port Moresby, despite their efforts to quarantine against the germ. I operated on one Father for a bad case of hydrocele, and on others for injuries and infections common to their hard life.

They had solved the food problem troubling the rest of Papua, which was stuffed with American and Australian canned goods. Here they had their own truck gardens, bountifully yielding, so that they could feed their 120 pupils wholesomely and at minimum cost. There were nearly a hundred half-castes in this school. The Sacred Heart method of dealing with mixed blood was practical.

The half-caste too often comes into the world with no father willing to attend the baptism. Bishop Boismenu, a fighting priest, carried this question to the Government; his persistence was responsible for a law requiring the registration of every half-caste child’s white parent. And, my word, what a hullabaloo! Major Jones-Smith and Judge Brown-White had to do some tall explaining when sons or daughters suddenly materialized at the Mission of the Sacred Heart. One high Government official had a hard time facing his wife and his public; one rich American decided that he had loitered too long and had pressing engagements back in the States.

The half-caste problem is increasing in Papua. When the Melanesian was 100 per cent cannibal his women were chaste; the husband carried an ironwood club, and the tribe was never lax in enforcing blue laws. Poaching lovers were firmly lashed together with vines and laid across the liveliest ant-heap in the neighborhood. Or experienced tormentors would hobble the wandering bride permanently; they would just tie a hot stone under one of her knees. Nevada in the early days was almost as rough with domestic incontinence (if female). And look at Nevada today.

It was a strict mission rule that half-caste children should speak no language but English. Britishers they were; the law had acknowledged them. When they came of age the girls and boys were encouraged to marry each other, or to go into orders. They were to have a respectable place in society, and no handicaps.

I take off my old white helmet to the men and women of the Sacred Heart. There was Sister Magdalena, aged seventy-six. I found her sweet old face bent over a busily clicking typewriter. She had been stone blind for two years. “It was hard at first,” she said, “learning the touch system. But it’s like playing a musical instrument. I write poetry when I have time, and letters home. I’m useful too. One of the girls dictates to me, and I keep accounts for the mission.”

And there was Brother Heinrich, the jolly undertaker. Sallow and malarial, he had the smile of the artist who loves his work and has plenty of orders. Papuan fevers never bothered him so long as he had coffins to build. Bang, bang went his lusty hammer, doing a neat hardwood job. “Don’t forget a solid lid,” I said, coming up to him. Brother Heinrich chuckled and said, “I try not to forget anything. For instance, Doctor, you’ll need lots of brass nails on those shoes, if you’re going up to Mafulu. Won’t you send that pair to me before you go? I’m a cobbler too.”

Mother Ligouri, who presided over the neat little hospital, was another jolly one, round and rosy in spite of hell and high water. Her housekeeping was immaculate; she isolated typhoid cases, and was always in comic despair over sanitary arrangements, primitive latrines, flies and mosquitoes that infected her patients. Brother Heinrich was one of her favorite pests. “I have to shoo him away,” she said. “When anybody’s sick he gets the measurements somehow. I never knew him to fail to have a coffin ready, and a perfect fit. That man Heinrich!”

The day before we set out for the mountains I let Brother Heinrich have my shoes, and asked him if he had me on his list of measurements. “Oh, I can tell your size from your shoes,” he said with a glow of professional pride. That night he presented me with a remarkably fine job of hobnailing.

During the week I had talked to the half-castes, and it gave me pleasure to lecture in English. Already I was looking forward to my surveys in New Guinea Territory, where, I was told, the people understood pidgin English. I carelessly believed that pidgin would be easy to pick up. I little knew.

All I saw of that enterprise on Yule Island, and of its far-flung stations among the peaks and gorges of Mafulu, never failed to remind me of what Herman Melville, who didn’t like missionaries as a class, had said of the South Sea Catholics a hundred years ago. They were to him the great missioners. And they are the great missioners still, as long as they live in the purity of self-sacrifice.

******

Ahuia came to me with the air of a certified cruise conductor; he was wearing his full-dress jumper with the H, and had lilies in his hair. Would the Taubada care to see the natives dance tonight? I wanted to know if it would be any good. Ahuia puffed his chest and shrugged away the commonness of all bush natives. Oh, pretty fair, he admitted, but the girls around here didn’t do a lot of things they did in the East. We passed between aristocratic trunks of betel-nut palms. With each step the drum-pulse was louder, that jungle beat which can stir the same animal-soul that bares its sensuality before the repetitious chant of a camp-meeting revivalist. A slow cadence, tum teetee, tum teetee, tum teetee tum, speeding up to a rapid tum tee-tum tee-tum tee-tum. Light shone above oily shoulders, things moved and tossed like shaggy pillows that had been dyed with every color in the rainbow. Musicians were slapping hour-glass drums.

Then with a gasp I realized what those moving pillow-things were. Headdresses.... Headdresses made of bird of paradise plumes, hundreds of the lovely things flowing and flaming in every bushy ball of hair. Parrot feathers—blue, fire-green and crimson—accentuated the unearthly hues; and cassowary feathers, built up into high crowns like glittering sheaves of wheat....

Men and women danced in two close lines, facing one another. Mouths were red with betel-nut, eyes were fixed, intoxicated. Golden skin flashed through stripes of gaudy paint adorning their hips; golden breasts bubbled through showers of bright shells. Yet this was no blatant exhibition. Each man faced his woman, and if he touched her it was according to the rote and rule of tradition; their passions are never on public show. Bright skins and delicate bodies revealed the Polynesian strain which gives the Motuan his urge to laugh and sin with every change of the moon. Melanesian women drudge at home and let their men wear all the feathers. But the Polynesian wife is nobody’s squaw.

Slim-waisted, straight, demi-nude, more handsome than grotesque in their paint, each man had his girl opposite him. Her arms and ankles were bangled with polychrome shells that tinkled with every suggestive movement. It was sensuality expressed in grace and rhythm. Under the least of grass skirts women’s buttocks wove with sly languor as couples moved in a curious shuffling gait—her hips quivering in retreat, his in attack: the sex struggle, the male forever in pursuit, the female always in flight, yet drawing him on by every allurement within her power.

A voice said, “It’s what Yankees call a Marathon dance. The people of Tsiria are competing with the people of Pinapuka. It’ll last until they drop—into each other’s arms, a lot of ’em.” I looked around to see Ron Orr, my inspector, who had been beating along the coast. “Watch that couple,” he said. A man and girl vanished under the shadowy palms. “They’ll be back after a while, maybe. During the Marathons here it’s the fashion for a man to take the one he picks. But only during this set period. If they forget and break the rule it’s just too bad. Sometimes a married man loses his head and takes his ‘mary’ away for a week end that lasts a month. Then there’s more trouble for the District Officer.”

“What sort of trouble?”

“Well, Connelly’s going up in the hills tomorrow after a bunch of murderers,” Ron said. “That’s the sort of trouble.”

There were no priests hovering about to give the pagan spectacle a disapproving eye. Protestant missionaries, Wesleyans or Church of England, might have broken up the performance, clothed the ladies in Mother Hubbards and sent them home to brood in sanctity—and secrete their vices. The people of Tsiria, possibly, were not among the Sacred Heart’s 8,000 converts; and if not, the Church of Rome, with its balanced system of discipline and tolerance, would bide its time before gathering them in. The people would still dance, maybe with a churchly curb on their orgiac moments—but they would still dance.

Night wore on, drums grew wilder. Everybody was chewing the betel-nut that natives can go drunk on. My good boy Ahuia was chewing, and his eyes were like live coals as he slavered red and gazed hungrily at the dancers. I smacked him on the arm and brought him to his senses. We were starting for the mountains tomorrow, and I didn’t want Ahuia to go native on me.

******

Next afternoon, as a floundering whaleboat took us across the narrow channel toward the looming mainland, I had a comfortable feeling that Brother Heinrich had secretly measured me for a coffin which he’d have to use on somebody else of my size and weight. I might as well say here and now that I have been the undertaker’s disappointment in twenty-one years of knocking about down there. I’m afraid that I offer pretty poor material for Hollywood.

Connelly and I, perched in our whaleboat, were off on a murder hunt; his quarry would be the human type of killer, mine the assassin-worm that yearly laid low more natives than cannibal wars could demolish in a generation. The looming mainland melted to a lace of Papuan bayous; we went on nosing up Ethel River, searching for Bioto Creek, a needle in a haystack of house-high tropical grass. Bloodthirsty mosquitoes welcomed us; we could find the miserable town of Bioto, if we could see it through that buzzing cloud.

Connelly had elaborated on a number of gruesome things which the Fathers had told me. Somewhere along this coast was the Pacific’s only native educational institution, a School of Poisoners, in the remarkably stinking village of Mou. Puri-puri men graduated with honors and knew about arsenic and strychnine to the last dying gasp. They were accomplished in “dead-man’s-poison,” which was a spearhead dipped into a rotting corpse; they made toxic applications by sticking spears through a floor to pierce the sleeper on his mat. If the natives built their houses on stilts to keep out evil spirits, the puri-puri men would crawl under and prong them from below; if they built on the ground, the first malevolent ghost that came along would walk in and do his dirtiest. They were between the devil and the deep blue spear.

Postgraduates of the Mou school had a specialty which required much study, and they prided themselves on it accordingly. It was the snake-in-bamboo trick, worked like this: First get on the confidential side of a certain venomous yellow-striped wriggler, and train him to lie inside a hollow bamboo wand; then look around for a client who wants somebody killed. When the time comes, drop your poison pet into an uncomfortably heated earthen jar; work him up to a frenzy; throw in scraps of clothes or bodily material from the chosen victim. The striking, tormented snake confuses these things with the cause of his pain; so he is ready, he has the scent. Pop him back in the bamboo and turn him loose in the accustomed path of the man who is about to die. The snake, like the elephant, never forgets, according to Connelly and Father Gerbout. By scent he can pick his man from a long file on the trail.

As we fought our way through the mosquitoes defending Bioto Creek the District Officer gestured toward the mountains. The Kuni people were up there—bloody little dwarfs, rather cook a man than fry an egg. The Government holds ’em down a bit, Connelly said, and the priests have tamed a few. But never trust a Kuni behind your back.

Bioto, when we found it, was a tumbledown huddle of huts. At first we couldn’t see a living thing but mosquitoes, then crocodiles, wallowing in the stream or basking on the mudbanks. All the way up the Ethel River we had counted them by half-dozens, too bold and too lazy to roll off the sandspits when we came within thirty feet. Bioto was almost a deserted village because of the mosquitoes. D’Albertis, an early Italian explorer, was the first white man to sleep here; after one night he told his father confessor that he wasn’t afraid to go to hell.

At last a few scrawny natives, naked except for a coating of mud, came ambling in. Their chief made a melancholy speech, but the message was cheery enough. We shouldn’t worry, we’d have our forty-seven carriers in the morning. He repeated this sententiously, as though announcing bad news. The energetic anopheles pecked their way through the netting when we crawled under for protection. Even Ahuia as he cooked our supper looked reduced and crestfallen. He vented his spite by throwing a billycan at a baby crocodile under our house.

Morning blossomed hot and bright; the chief was back with a motley collection of nudes. I saw Connelly marching up and down and telling the interpreter dirty words to say to the chief. “Call him a pig’s tit—no, better go easy on that—but ask him if he can’t count. I said forty-seven and he’s only brought twenty-three. Where’s the rest of ’em?” There was some mysterious form of native strike. Connelly ordered his police to beat the grass for the absentees. When we got up to Kubuna Mission Station, he said, he’d hold court and sentence those bloody runaways to work for me. And at Kubuna that was what he did. The thirteen or so he sentenced might or might not have been the deserters, but they were with me for the balance of that strange month.

We left the bulk of our gear with the corporal’s policeman and went on through reed-grass so tall that it arched over our heads. It was suffocating between those swishing walls, but we were well quit of Bioto. I don’t know whether Ahuia or I was gladder to get away. The priests of Yule had filled me with crocodile stories. The beasts were bolder at nightfall, they said, and they had a bad habit of putting their front paws over the sides of a canoe and grabbing the first native who fell into the water. Once a fifteen-footer, basking in the sun, had challenged Brother George, who was riding a bicycle. Brother George turned his wheel just in time, and for a long span felt the monster’s breath puffing behind. Saint George and the dragon in modern clothes, only this time the dragon had the saint on the run.

Two hours in sweltering grass, then because it was Papua we had to climb 800 feet of ridge and climb down again before we could reach the knoll which was Father Rossier’s mission, all scattered wooden houses around the chapel’s simple cross. Father Rossier, kind, bearded and khaki clad, showed us a little stream down the glen which they had dammed to make a swimming pool. Connelly, Ron Orr and I undressed, cackling that the last one in was a nigger. Then plop! Ron Orr dove into crystal water—and was out again in record time, swearing under his breath. Some bloody fool had left a log in there. Just look at the way it had skinned his wrist. Yes, the wrist was certainly skinned....

Slowly, languidly, a crocodile rose and appraised us with cold green eyes. We decided to go to dinner a little dirty.

Around the mission table with its bare boards and coarse crockery we were gratefully aware of being among Frenchmen; they could have broiled the crocodile out of their pool and given it the flavor of filet mignon. In the kitchen were two Sisters who worked Parisian marvels with taro and yams and a surprisingly good native asparagus. No canned goods here, everything fresh, and that included heart of palm salad pepped up with lime juice. There was some sort of idealized pork, two kinds of birds, a rich, sound claret, and black coffee far too good to come out of a French kitchen. The mission grew its own coffee, and the berries were ground hot from the oven every morning. Incidentally, chicory doesn’t thrive in Papua.

Sipping my share of Australian wine—and it can be good—I was thinking irreverently, “The Fathers manage to do themselves pretty well up here,” when I noticed that Father Rossier had watered his glass to a thin, pale ghost of what every Frenchman must have with his meals or starve. They drank sparingly because wine cost money. They ate well—it cost only labor to raise good crops. On their penny-saving system they smoked trade tobacco, and had learned to love its rank kick. They refused our cigarettes politely.

Father Rossier gathered in the people, and to a scanty audience I gave a lantern-light lecture which Ahuia interpreted to an interpreter. When I lectured the priests on their own infections and commented on the sparsity of the population Father Rossier told me that they were slowly increasing. “And that’s because we have discouraged cannibalism, infanticide and abortions.”

I had heard many stories of some magic weed which the native women used to promote race suicide. I suppose now I wore a cynical smile. “Oh, but it’s so,” he said solemnly. “I have seen it happen too often.” He showed me curled dry leaves powdered in his hand. “Fortunately European women don’t know about this.”

I asked him if he knew the relation between yaws and syphilis. These closely related diseases affect the procreative functions so that abortions are apt to occur. Now these dry leaves that the witch doctors supply might or might not have a mild action. Certainly they could not effect an abortion on a normally healthy woman, because modern medicine has never found a non-poisonous drug that can. I was making up my theory as I went along, but my later observations proved that it was sound.

Next morning, the carriers Connelly had sentenced to serve me took on their loads as Ahuia was going through the last motions of packing my bags. “Look, Taubada!” He held up my extra pair of shoes. One of the priests had spent the night hobnailing the soles.

******

You read of tropic beauty and smile at the flourishes with which a writer attempts to put ecstasy on cold white paper. There are no words in our dictionary too fantastic or farfetched to describe that man-killing climb to the valley of Popo Popo. Milton would have funked it in his blind visions of Paradise, and De Quincey would have given it up for lack of words and opium.

The region takes its name from some jungle-hidden bird that cries “Popo-popo-popo-popo,” a bell-like sound that gives a thrill of music. Paradise as we saw it on those days of puffing and scrambling was always joy to the mind and pain to the body. Thousands of feet up, thousands down, with hardly room for a tiny house on any of the razor-sharp ridges. Down in a Valley of Eden the “Popo-popo-popo-popo” sounded, ringing a welcome to the mission’s resthouse somewhere in the sky.