V

In February 1926 I decided to leave Samoa. I went to Salailua to wait for a motor-boat to convey me to Apia. While at Salailua I learned that there had recently been an outbreak of dysentery in the village resulting in several deaths: the epidemic still continued. This was known to the white missionary of Gagaemalae, the adjacent village. He was a new-comer to Samoa: a member of the Australasian Methodist Mission.

On reaching Apia I reported the epidemic to the Chief Medical Officer, who naturally was somewhat sceptical, since he had had no word to this effect from the Gagaemalae missionary, to whose station a dispensary and Government-trained nurse were attached. However, he said he would send over a doctor, which he did. I found that the steamer by which I had intended to go to Europe had arrived earlier than antici-page breakpated

Putting on the Thatch

page 215, and was gone. During this visit to Apia the place seemed dead. It was stated that practically all social life had ceased, and that conditions generally were unbearable.¹ I returned to Salailua.

The only action in relation to the epidemic that the Gagaemalae missionary took during its course, was to isolate his mission station, which stood upon a hillock at one end of the village, for a period of six or seven weeks. During that time he kept clear of the church and the Gagaemalae and Salailua villages. He objected, moreover, at the very start of the epidemic, to the Samoan nurse visiting her dysentery patients, for fear of conveying back infection, and forbade her to use the shower-bath. The nurse in consequence took up her residence down in the Salailua Village at the trading-station of my late employer, Mr. Jensen, where she was when the doctor from Apia arrived. Notwithstanding these precautions, dysentery reached the mission station. The son of the missionary—but for medical attention—in all probability would have died.

In the meantime an outbreak of dysentery had been discovered on the north coast of Upolu, and the disease was traced eventually to have been brought to Savaii from there. The man who had conveyed it, according to the Visiting Medical Officer, was an elderly native pastor of the London Mission. He had come over, via Salailua, to the Salega district, to marry a young girl belonging to a village near Faiaai. Everywhere he stopped en route was an outbreak of dysentery, from which disease he was found to have been suffering. The local traders told of a scene at the wedding, when the unwilling bride snatched her hand from the elderly and devastating groom, who had during the course of the ceremony to leave the church.