135 
for Fiji. The gigantic freighter dwarfed our small ship, and it has forced 
us to be out in the harbour, in touch with our ship only once every two hours 
by small ancient harbor ferry boat. 
However, this ferry boat did manage to carry ashore all our artifacts. 
That the canoe (15 feet long) and the huge Ureparapara wooden dishes and 
our other collected items will require 180 cubic feet of crating or the 
equivalent of 4.5 metric tons came as a surprise. To have it all off our 
hands is a great relief, and we shall now only be worried about the costs and 
interminable delays usually associated with such shipping. We shall see. 
If the canoe ever gets to me in the U.S. along with all these artifacts 
intact I shall be most pleased, and we shall have made a very sizeable 
collection from the southern Solomon Islands and the Banks and Torres. In 
fact, the combined collection rivals anything in the Solomon Islands Museum 
here in Honiara. 
The same teacher at St. Mary's school who took me around the last time 
I visited here with Yavine, a light red-skinned man from Northern Malaita, 
met us there again. I did not recognize him at first. He told me that John 
Tope had finished his work at the school and would probably go into the 
police force school in Honiara. This means that he may have flunked out 
or not made it into secondary school. I thought of him as an excellent 
student, and did not get a chance to inquire of how it was that he was now 
out, when it is not the end of a school year. I had heard from , 
the Anuta boy at Luesalava on Santa Cruz, that John Tope had just 
passed by with the Bishop en route back to visit Anuta. We shall see. I 
shall try to reach him by mail! I recall John as a 15 or 17 year old, yet 
everyone on Anuta places him at over 20! I wonder. 
Jean Guiart has sent me a first draft of his paper, the first report 
from our expedition, of his work on marriage in the Banks Islands. It is 
called "The Marriage System of Merelava and Merig". I have also outlined 
for all our party a memo on the "Scientific Value of Ethnographic Collections 
made on the Alpha Helix Expedition", in which I have requested everyone to 
turn in a full catalogue of their entire loot, with photographs of every 
item. From it Don Rubinstein (with me and Peter Fetchko or Ivan Mbagintao, 
or whomever else helps sufficiently) could get out a paper or a small 
catalogue on the material culture of these islands, for the combined 
collection is extensive and comprehensive. Supplemented by the photograpic 
record of housing and other unpurchasable items, it would be a rather 
complete coverage and an interesting side product of our work. 
