The Diahot valley mosquitoes
Mosquitoes like salted waters of New Caledonia mangroves. Fortunately there is no malaria in this country. This biting environment has also changed. Mosquitoes density in the Diahot valley is no longer what it was forty years ago ore more. This is good news for people of this area who used to live among biting mosquito clouds.
In Ouegoa, mosquito density records were generally held. Yet on the West Coast, in Teremba swamps for instance, they were also in impressing clouds. However for people from up North, nothing equivalent to the Diahot swamps was existing and particularly in Forêt d'Ougne, the worst among the worst. The writer reporting this tale has witnessed mosquitoes densities of these times. In the fifties, for professional reasons he had a camp in Pilou mine area, near the Diahot swamps and not far from Forêt d'Ougne. Mosquitoes attack was a permanent one, lasting day after night. They bit full time in dense clouds. They bit through the thick cotton material of seats, through socks and shirts. They were so thick on one's back that, when walking behind somebody, you could hardly see the color of his shirt. This was a total war. Even most elementary hygienic acts were problematic as offering to mosquitoes the most hidden parts of one's body. The only refuge was the mosquito net but, even with net protection, they were mosquitoes to find a way through and get inside to meet those which had come in riding on your back. Their buzz was a permanent and steady one. Waking up was with it and the sight of mosquitoes; those inside, swollen with blood and those outside, thousands of them, hungrily waiting for you hanging on the mosquito net.
Hardened through permanent contact with mosquitoes, the few people inhabiting the swamps area and the ones living in Ouegoa were totally stoical. Their most violent reaction was to gently push aside mosquitoes gathering in too large number on their nose. When attacks were at their worst, they would go the point of sweeping their backs with a small tree branch. In extreme cases they would consent to say that "today they are a few ones", unusually using the French female pronoun as these trained observers of nature knew that only female mosquitoes bite.
The following tale is perhaps hard to believe for those who have not known the thirsty mosquito herds of these times. However Edouard Normandon, a famous and attaching character of Ouegoa, knew how to tell it with all the details of an obviously true story.
The exact location is not clear, it was probably in one of the copper and lead mines of the Diahot valley, near the swamps, perhaps near "Pilou" or "Mérétrice" mine. One day a man who was working there could not stand it any further. Too many bites, too many mosquitoes in his ears, he lost his nerve. Who was he? The teller had the delicate attention not to name him. A man from the bush of New-Caledonia is unlikely, certainly not a man from this Diahot valley where nobody would shamefully give in to mosquitoes. Perhaps a city man from Noumea where skins are thinner or, more likely, a Frenchman from Metropolitan France, with an even thinner skin.
Not standing it anymore, the man dived in a steel 44 gallon drum nearby. It had a lid which he closed onto himself. Inside this metal cylinder, lit by his small kerosene lamp which he had thought to take with him, he had squashed the last mosquitoes which had entered with him. He was then hoping for a moment of peace, albeit a hot one. But it was very brief indeed. He suddenly felt bites again, bites on his back which only could have come through the steel sheet of the drum! This brought him near madness. He sprung from the drum, took a hammer, jumped inside again putting the lid back on. In the humid heat of his confined environment, he then undertook to rivet all the mosquitoe proboscis, stinging in increasing number through the drum steel sheet.
It was his vengeance : to fasten the mosquitoes for ever to the metal sheet. He riveted and riveted during hours, thousand and thousand of mosquitoes and they were getting ever more numerous with time.
What happened at the end?
The drum with the man inside took off, up in the air!