Mr. Ballin

Tahiti is an island east of Australia.

Lewis was just about to step into his office when he heard the hospital doors open, and he looked over to see a few policemen walking in, carrying this unconscious man on a stretcher.

Just from the looks of the way this guy was dressed,

Dr. Allard could tell he was a sailor.

So a lot of Dr. Allard's patients were sailors because Papeete was a port town.

So if people got sick or injured at sea and then docked in Papeete, they would come to the hospital right there.

So Dr. Allard walked over to the police and asked them what was going on with the sailor.

And the officers explained that this man's friends had found him unresponsive that morning, apparently after a very long night of drinking.

Dr. Allard nodded and then motioned for the police to follow him and bring this guy with him, and he led them over to an exam room, where he had them lay out the sailor on a table so that Dr. Allard could look him over.

The sailor appeared to be pretty young.

He was in his 20s, maybe, and he appeared very healthy and strong.

But when the doctor checked for a pulse, there was none.

And so after checking a couple more times to make sure it wasn't just a very weak pulse, the doctor ultimately concluded that, you know, this sailor was not just unresponsive, the sailor was dead.

And if Dr. Allard had to guess, he very likely died from alcohol poisoning, given his friend said, you know, the night before, this guy had had a really heavy night of drinking, and here he was, so alcohol poisoning.

So this hospital had a policy for how to handle the death of foreign sailors in Tahiti.

Basically, the doctor who pronounced the sailor dead would then arrange for them to be buried in a public cemetery.

And in fact, the hospital kept these cheap wooden coffins in the hospital morgue for this exact purpose.

And so Dr. Allard followed protocol and asked the police to go inform the sailor's friends of his death, and then the doctor went to the hospital's morgue to arrange for a coffin.

A few hours later, Dr. Allard was back in his office when he heard a knock at his door.

He told whoever it was to come in, but when the door swung open, the doctor was surprised at who he saw there.