Sylvester Maxwell Lambert

“ 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. ”

“ I was forced to conclude that white colonists of the Gilbert group needed a doctor more than the natives did. Monotony of life there must eventually depress the health of every European. The food was a trial to the civilized stomach; nothing but coconuts, fish and that stringy, tasteless root, the babai; and for variety whatever tinned goods the trader happened to have. If the Devil gave me a bad choice, I should rather live on the Ellices than the Gilberts—and rather on Rotumah than on the Ellices. Those are the three spots on the Pacific that I’m least fond of. ”

“ Taupangi, Lord of the Lake, sat in state on a pile of native mats, and was properly dressed for the religious ceremonies. Around his waist he wore a wide tapa and a fancifully woven mat. His hair was in a knot at the back of his head and he was smeared all over with sacred yellow turmeric. He was still young, and about the biggest man I saw on Rennell Island, with shoulders like an ox’s yoke and a wonderfully proportioned body. All of the Big Masters that I saw were handsome men, none of them running to fat as Polynesians do in middle age. ”

“ When the Duke of Windsor visited Fiji as Prince of Wales he was delighted with Pope. Pope was, by courtesy, banished for many years to Mbau, the enchanting island his wise ancestors had chosen for their capital; soft winds cool it, blow away mosquitoes; above the royal bure looms a great rock, the little Gibraltar where Grandfather Thakombau was supposed to have been hemmed in before he gave his domain to England. Governor Sir Eyre Hutson decided to exile Pope because he had rather innocently defaulted. ”

“ The Big Pig Ceremony goes on for weeks of splendidly rhythmed dancing, warriors chanting the saga of the tribe, grandees parading in elaborate masks while many curl-tuskers die for glory.
Sometimes a white man with an eye to business has gained chieftainship through feats of pig culture. One I knew attained high nobility by offering his collection of freaks. He took his rank seriously and went about in complete undress, save for a nambas and a pair of curled tusks around his neck. ”

“ In the village reception house there would be the usual kava ceremony, the food presentation, the long hour devoted to exchange of courtesies. Then the Tulafale, the professional orators, would unlimber their eloquence for the benefit of the Governor: “We in our ignorance and humility turn to you for the light of your wisdom, as the flower turns to the sun. We are the children, you are the father upon whom we depend for guidance. We know that you love us, and we return your love....” ”

“ 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. ”

“ Every time I visited her islands I told the Queen how the pick of her young men could go to Fiji for a first-class medical education, if we had the money to back such an enterprise. There was always that big If. Salote’s common sense and patriotism told her that I was right. Her generous wish was not limited to her own realm; she saw how the native races of Oceania could not be helped until they learned to help themselves. But when I talked this problem over with her I realized that little Tonga was not rich enough to effect a program that would cover the whole wide Pacific. ”

“ In a lonely bay I saw recruiters at work. One man with a rifle lay flat in the bow of a cutter, covering every movement of another man who approached the shore in a whaleboat. The whaleboat backed water all the way, and the man sent to parley stood up, carefully facing the naked savages who waited on the beach. All during the long powwow the hidden rifle was carefully aimed. These labor conferences were no job for a coward. So many lone recruiters had been killed on duty that the Government had made it a law that they must hunt in pairs. ”

“ 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. ”

“ From birth to death in Rennell’s primitive society there was no such thing as a door to close or a curtain to draw when you wished to be alone and mind your own business. Instinctively the untaught savage longed for a sanctuary, away from prying eyes. I had to have lived on communistic Rennell Island to understand and value civilization’s greatest boon—privacy.
When we got back to the comparative civilization of Tulagi we found that Resident Commissioner Ashley had worried because we were overdue and had started out on an expedition to find us. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The annual pay of £300, added to Montague’s salary of £1,100, would have been an inducement sufficient to attract an excellent man. But to ask anything like a first-class physician to devote all his time and energy to the Unified Service for £1,000 a year was simply out of the question.
When Montague retired, I raised the question again, and struck an obstacle no larger than a gallstone, and quite as tormenting. It was the little bureaucratic mind of Fiji’s Colonial Secretary, who sat around all day worrying for fear that somebody in the Government would be making a halfpenny more than he did. ”

“ The mystery of Polynesian or other Pacific migrations is a puzzle that may never be solved. The Gilberts formed a bottle neck through which many waves of migration must have come from the ancestral home, Hawaiki—from which are derived the modern names Hawaii and Savaii. Some pressure, some social convulsion on the continent must have driven them off of the southeast tip of Asia and sent them out in migratory waves—no turning back, a fierce starving horde in a quest for land and a home in the Pacific. ”

“ The financial veto is a powerful weapon, but the check in expenditure has been Tonga’s salvation. It is hard for Western civilization to understand the Polynesian’s utter lack of money sense—or the Melanesian’s, for that matter. From early childhood the European has learned the art of getting and spending. Not so the Pacific Islander. Although in many ways they may excel us intellectually, it is next to impossible to make them understand that coined metal isn’t something you pick off trees and throw around for the moment’s enjoyment. It’s all great fun, while the party lasts. ”

“ Finally we were working into the forests of Malekula which Mr. Smith-Rewse thought too dangerous for a white doctor to tackle. Shaggy black men, each wearing a chronic scowl and a beard that would rival a Scottish terrier’s, lurked and peered or trooped down on us with their handy muskets. To make even an approximately accurate hookworm-survey was like trying to pry buttons from a live rattlesnake. When it came to yaws I found the men more obliging, for here as elsewhere they admired the needle, which New Hebridean pidgin called “stick medicine.” ”

“ As you study small life under the lens and watch the microcosm work out its cycle, so you can look at Western Samoa and see the after-effects of war over this wrongheaded world. The doctor rushes in afterwards and tries to patch up the innocent and the guilty. Samoa, when the Mau subsided, knew a terrible aftermath. The Samoans hadn’t got back Samoa; all they had received was a resurgence of the native diseases which a careful Mandate had struggled so valiantly and successfully to cleanse. Devoted men had worked for many years to accomplish what five years of rebellion had undone. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Dancers had impersonated the animals, birds and fishes, comedians had impersonated dogs quarreling over a bone, long lines of men had coiled across the green in the contortions of the snake-god Dengei, or undulated in the beautiful surf dance. There was the presentation of the tambua. To the Fijian this sacred whale’s tooth is the prize of prizes; it is gold, it is magic. If a tribesman offers a tambua to you, you may refuse the gift ”

“ When I gave tuberculin injections to the wild men of Malaita they believed that I was doing something to remove a wicked spell. In thousands and thousands of cases which I have treated, either for cure or diagnosis, they have gone away with the same simple faith. Good magic has been working against bad. At first I worried about fooling all the people all the time. Then I followed the only expedient that is practical in jungle medicine.
When we regard the native tribe as a unit we must not push the witch doctor aside as a buffoon and a faker. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Aboard ship I had no sooner met him than he suggested that I give [Pg 75] them a talk on malaria. I felt that here on the Melusia it might be of service to the incoming officials. That night they gathered on the main deck and I told them of my experiences with the disease. How the Anopheles punctulatus, whose female is more deadly than the male, travels in the Pacific with mankind in his restless journeying from village to village, from island to island. How I had run my fingers under the lower ribs of thousands of natives and felt the sagging spleen which tells the tale. ”

“ The European seized the Pacific, and that’s an old story. In spite of the horrible example of bombing and burning which European civilization is showing today to the uncivilized, the settled holdings of various national governments over a quarter of the globe’s surface, the Pacific, must remain in statu quo. Unless it does, you will hear something you will not like, Mr. Homebody. The status quo over that vast empire is all-important, and it cannot be maintained unless the white man takes up his burden and carries it through. ”