12 
Nandi, Fiji to Port Vila, Efate (Air Pacific 503) September 13, 1972 
The last lap before boarding the Alpha Helix ! Gordon Wallace tells me 
that he had received sera from the Ontong Java collection by the Harvard 
group which, under Damon, has just finished its expedition to Malaita, 
Ulauwa and Onton Java. I have my misgivings as to just how efficient 
a team we shall be and how much we shall get done. We are under-organized, 
rather than over-organized, and I am counting on the next week to set our 
plans. An eighty passenger BACl-11 jet now replaces the eight passenger 
four-motor Heron, on which I used to make this flight. 
"Knowledge comes but wisdom lingers," from our Public School No. 5 
assembly hall walls comes to mind. In my fiftieth year to heaven, may I 
begin to find wisdom. The Greco-Roman Pantheon provides me with all the 
dieties to whom I need pray. I have never come to grips with Judaic- 
Christian-Moslem morality and cosmology. It places too much emphasis on 
the word, has too little comparative outlook on love, sex and family, and 
links Grace too closely with meekness, abrogation and humility, rather 
than on awe and wonder. 
Joe Gibbs is my most serious loss on this trip... I need him and should 
not have settled so quickly for indirect notice that he could not go. He 
did not want to go, I feel, because of our program’s need of him at NINDS, the 
situation in his family and his medical problems. All this is probably 
exaggerated and he would surely have been a great asset on the expedition. 
I must find for him a suitably rewarding substitute quickly. Could he 
join us at Santa Cruz or on Ponape? 
I am now trying to plan an attack which will make our expedition the 
most successful on record for "new" observations in the Pacific area since La 
Perouse’s and Captain Cook's Voyages. 
Port Vila, Efate 
I am logged in on the Alpha Helix , occupying the luxurious stateroom 
recently vacated by Albert Damon, the Chief Scientist's cabin, next to the 
Captain's. Our captain is Alan W. Phinney. 
Patrice de Carfort is lodging me at his home once again, and Roger 
Greenhough has given me much time, help and advice and has tended to the 
receipt of all our supplies and had them loaded on the Alpha Helix already. 
Both Patrice and Roger have been of enormous help to me in their own very 
different ways. Arighi is still here, a surgeon at the French Hospital, 
but with his wife and children off in Toulon awaiting his arrival in early 
November. He will leave at the end of October and then end his eight years 
here; he does not hesitate to let me know that he does not want to leave and 
hopes to return and have Patrice's job. It is difficult to judge the 
relationship between the two French "colonial" physicians, but it seems to 
be hardly very amicable. A new, very young physician has just arrived from 
Paris, Dr. Rivlere-Cazaux; he is to be stationed at the new French Hospital 
on Malekula at . There are two hospitals on this large island. In the 
south, at , the French have another physician. Dr. . On Efate the 
new hospital is still under construction and should be finished in mid-1973, 
with 150 beds. It can be expanded easily to over 300 beds later. Patrice ‘ 
