Cruise Of Leper

Ship

Dr. Ellison’s Round Trip

From Our Own Correspondent.

Rarotonga, June 20.

HAVING just completed a tour of the Group for the purpose of collecting and transporting lepers to the Govern ment station in Fiji, Dr. Ellison returned by the last mail-steamer to resume his duties as Resident Medical Officer.

Even the Olympian calm with which the doctor describes his experiences does not prevent parts of this voyage from sounding like the more macabre imagin ings of some novelist with a penchant for horrors.

Starting with a crew who were unaware of the task before them, and the over coming of whose objections called for no small display of tact, Dr. Ellison went on to tell of inspection after inspection at each island, of a slowly mounting human cargo, of insanity aboard, and of his own unarmed entry into one of the “cages” to quieten the would-be homicide.

Dr. Ellison has made a special study of leprosy, and it is largely due to his unremitting surveillance that the disease is decreasing in this Group. Ignorance and carelessness on the part of native communities present one of the major difficulties, contact rather than heredity being responsible for its appearance and continuation in certain families.

In the remote atolls, carelessness has often been carried to dangerous extremes, as was the case not so very long ago in Rakahanga, where some seven or eight young bucks, segregated on a small motu, made a nightly practice of crossing to the settlement and there visiting their erstwhile lady-friends. These excursions only ended with the destruction of a large canoe which they had secretly built and kept concealed among the undergrowth of the motu.

Thirty-five lepers were collected in all, including five from Samoa and one from

Niue. The worst cases were placed in the ship’s hold, the remainder being ac commodated on deck in specially con structed “cages.”

Commenting on the general condition of the northern islanders. Dr. Ellison, whose last visit was in 1927, said that he had been struck by their present lack of prosperity, due to the heavy fall of copra and pearl-shell prices, upon which these islands are wholly dependent for their income. On the other hand, he was of the opinion that despite the depression these people were actually better off without many of the luxuries to which they were formerly accustomed, their health to-day being distinctly better than in 1927 and on the whole superior to that of the Raro tongans, whose greater contact with the outside world rendered them more prone to diseases and epidemics.

Also, Dr. Ellison added, they were by far the happiest and most contented looking folk in the Cook Group. In these Isolated but self-supporting islands, “de pression” really means little more than a shortage of tobacco or one less pair of pants for Sunday.

Handing over his duties to Dr. Ellison, Lieut.-Colonel Dawson left for Welling ton on the last boat. Col. Dawson, who proved as generous as he was popular during his short stay, returned the hos pitality which he had received from local residents by a number of very jolly little theatre parties to his new friends.

A photograph of Dr. Ellison and some of his assistants is published on page 41.

Dr. W. C. Klein, who has been studying economic and developmental conditions in New Guinea and Papua for the Dutch New Guinea Committee, returned to Port Moresby from the Mandated Territory in mid-June by 'plane from Wau. On June 25, Dr. Klein and his secretary, Mr. S. van Oosten, sailed from Pt. Moresby on the Laurabada for the Eastern and South- Eastern Divisions of Papua, as guests of His Excellency Sir Hubert Murray. The party returned to the capital on July 3, and it was Dr. Klein’s intention to sail for the Dutch East Indies by the Van Rees on July 19.