CHAPTER I
The British Ornithologists’ Union—Members of the Expedition—Voyage to Java—Choice of Rivers—Prosperity of Java—Half-castes—Obsequious Javanese—The Rijst-tafel—Customs of the Dutch—Buitenzorg Garden—Garoet.
In the autumn of 1858 a small party of naturalists, most of them members of the University of Cambridge and their friends and all of them interested in the study of ornithology, met in the rooms of the late Professor Alfred Newton at Magdalene College, Cambridge, and agreed to found a society with the principal object of producing a quarterly Journal of general ornithology. The Journal was called “The Ibis,” and the Society adopted the name of British Ornithologists’ Union, the number of members being originally limited to twenty.
In the autumn of 1908 the Society, which by that time counted four hundred and seventy members, adopted the suggestion, made by Mr. W. R. Ogilvie-Grant, of celebrating its jubilee by sending an expedition to explore, chiefly from an ornithological point of view, the unknown range of Snow Mountains in Dutch New Guinea. A Committee, whose Chairman was Mr. F. D. Godman, F.R.S., President and one of the surviving original members of the Society, was appointed to organise the expedition, and subscriptions were obtained from members and their friends. The remote destination of the expedition aroused a good deal of public interest. The Royal Geographical Society expressed a desire to share in the enterprise, and it soon became evident that it would be a mistake to limit the object of the expedition to the pursuit of birds only. Mr. Walter Goodfellow, a naturalist who had several times travelled in New Guinea as well as in other parts of the world, was appointed leader of the expedition. Mr. W. Stalker and Mr. G. C. Shortridge, both of whom had had wide experience of collecting in the East, were appointed naturalists. Capt. C. G. Rawling, C.I.E., 13th Somersetshire Light Infantry, who had travelled widely in Tibet and mapped a large area of unknown territory in that region, was appointed surveyor, with Mr. E. S. Marshall, M.R.C.S., L.R.C.P., who had just returned from the “Furthest South” with Sir E. H. Shackleton, as assistant surveyor and surgeon; and the present writer, who had been medical officer, botanist, and entomologist on the Ruwenzori Expedition of 1906-7, undertook the same duties as before.
Prolonged correspondence between the Foreign Office and the Dutch Government resulted, thanks largely to the personal interest of Sir Edward Grey and Lord Acton, British Chargé d’Affaires at the Hague, in permission being granted to the expedition to land in Dutch New Guinea on or after January 1, 1910. The date of landing was postponed by the Government until January in order that there might be no interference with the expedition of Mr. H. A. Lorentz, who it was hoped would be the first to reach the snow in New Guinea by way of the Noord River, a project which he successfully accomplished in the month of November, 1909.
VOYAGE TO JAVA
On October 29th four of us sailed from Marseilles in the P. & O. S.S. Marmora. Mr. Stalker and Mr. Shortridge, who had already proceeded to the East, joined us later at Batavia and Amboina respectively. At Singapore we found the ten Gurkhas, ex-military police, who had been engaged for the expedition by the recruiting officer at Darjiling; though some of these men were useless for the work they had to do, the others did invaluable service as will be seen later. We left Singapore on November 26th, and as we passed through the narrow Riou Straits we saw the remains of the French mail steamer La Seyne, which had been wrecked there with appalling loss of life a few days earlier. It was believed that scores of persons were devoured by sharks within a few minutes of the accident happening. Two days’ steaming in the Dutch packet brought us to Batavia in Java, the city of the Government of the Netherlands East Indies.
We had hoped that our ten Gurkhas would be sufficient escort for the expedition and that we could do without the escort of native soldiers offered to us by the Dutch Government, but the local authorities decided that the escort was necessary and they appointed to command it Lieutenant H. A. Cramer of the Infantry, a probationer on the Staff of the Dutch East Indian Army. The Government also undertook to transport the whole expedition, men, stores, and equipment, from Java to New Guinea. The undertaking was a most generous one as the voyage from Batavia by mail steamer to Dobo in the Aru Islands would have been most costly, and from there we should have been obliged to charter a special steamer to convey the expedition to the shores of New Guinea.
When we left England we had the intention of approaching the Snow Mountains by way of the Utakwa River, which was the only river shown by the maps obtainable at that time approaching the mountains. After a consultation with the Military and Geographical Departments at Batavia it was decided that, owing to the bad accounts which had been received of the Utakwa River and the comparatively favourable reports of the Mimika River, the latter should be chosen as the point of our entry into the country. This decision, though we little suspected it at the time, effectually put an end to our chance of reaching the Snow Mountains.
During the month of December, while stores were being accumulated, and the steamer was being prepared for our use, we had leisure to visit, and in the case of some of us to revisit, some of the most interesting places in Java. A large German ship filled with fourteen hundred American tourists arrived at Batavia whilst we were there, and the passengers “did” Java, apparently to their satisfaction, in forty-eight hours. But a tourist with more time could find occupation for as many days and still leave much to be seen. Germans and Americans outnumber English visitors by nearly fifty to one, and it is to be deplored that Englishmen do not go there in larger numbers, for they would see in Java, not to mention the beauty of its scenery, perhaps the most successful tropical dependency in the world, a vast monument to the genius of Sir Stamford Raffles, who laid the foundation of its prosperity less than one hundred years ago.
NEAR THE MOUTH OF THE MIMIKA RIVER.
PROSPERITY OF JAVA
Some idea of the progress which has been made may be learnt from the fact that, whereas at the beginning of the last century the population numbered about four millions, there are to-day nearly ten times that number. Wherever you go you see excellent roads, clean, and well-ordered villages and a swarming peasant population, quiet and industrious and apparently contented with their lot.
There are between thirty and forty volcanoes in the island, many of them active, and the soil is extraordinarily rich and productive, three crops in the rice districts being harvested in rather less than two years. So fertile is the land that in many places the steepest slopes of the hills have been brought under cultivation by an ingenious system of terracing and irrigation in such a way that the higher valleys present the appearance of great amphitheatres rising tier above tier of brilliantly green young rice plants or of drooping yellow heads of ripening grain. The tea plantations and the fields of sugar-cane in Central Java not less than the rice-growing districts impress one with the unceasing industry of the people and the inexhaustible wealth of the island.
One of the features of life in the Dutch East Indies, which first strikes the attention of an English visitor, is the difference in the relation between Europeans and natives from those which usually obtain in British possessions as shown by the enormous number of half-castes. Whilst we were still at Batavia the feast of the Eve of St. Nicholas, which takes the place of our Christmas, occurred. In the evening the entire “white” population indulged in a sort of carnival; the main streets and restaurants were crowded, bands played and carriages laden with parents and their children drove slowly through the throng. The spectacle, a sort of “trooping of the colours,” was a most interesting one to the onlooker, for one saw often in the same family children showing every degree of colour from the fairest Dutch hair and complexion to the darkest Javanese. It is easy to understand how this strong mixture of races has come about, when one learns that Dutchmen who come out to the East Indies, whether as civilian or military officials or as business men, almost invariably stay for ten years without returning to Europe. They become in that time more firmly attached to the country than is the case in colonies where people go home at shorter intervals, and it is not uncommon to meet Dutchmen who have not returned to Holland for thirty or forty years. It is not the custom to send children back to Europe when they reach the school age; there are excellent government schools in all the larger towns, and it often happens that men and women grow up and marry who have never been to Europe in their lives. Thus it can be seen how a large half-caste population is likely to be formed. The half-castes do not, as in British India, form a separate caste, but are regarded as Europeans, and there are many instances of men having more or less of native blood in their veins reaching the highest civilian and military rank.
THE RIJST-TAFEL
One or two curious relics of former times, which the visitor to Java notices, are worth recording because they show the survival of a spirit that has almost completely disappeared from our own dominions. When a European walks, or as is more usual, drives along the country roads, the natives whom he meets remove their hats from their heads and their loads from their shoulders and crouch humbly by the roadside. Again, on the railways the ticket examiner approaches with a suppliant air and begs to see your ticket, while he holds out his right hand for it grasping his right wrist with his left hand. In former times when a man held out his right hand to give or take something from you his left hand was free to stab you with his kris. Nowadays only a very few privileged natives in Java are allowed to carry the kris.
Another very noticeable feature of life in the Dutch East Indies, which immediately attracts the attention of a stranger, is the astonishing number of excessively corpulent Europeans. If you travel in the morning in the steam tramcar which runs from the residential part of Batavia to the business quarter of the town, you will see as many noticeably stout men as you will see in the City of London in a year, or, as I was credibly informed, as you will see in the city of Amsterdam in a month. It is fairly certain that this unhealthy state of body of a large number of Europeans may be attributed to the institution of the Rijst-tafel, the midday meal of a large majority of the Dutchmen in the East.
This custom is so remarkable that it is worth while to give a description of it. The foundation of the meal, as its name implies, is rice. You sit at table with a soup plate in front of you, a smaller flat plate beside it and a spoon, a knife and a fork. The first servant brings a large bowl of rice from which you help yourself liberally. The second brings a kind of vegetable stew which you pour over the heap of rice. Then follows a remarkable procession; I have myself seen at an hotel in Batavia fourteen different boys bringing as many different dishes, and I have seen stalwart Teutons taking samples from every dish. These boys bring fish of various sorts and of various cookeries, bones of chickens cooked in different ways and eggs of various ages, and last of all comes a boy bearing a large tray covered with many different kinds of chutneys and sauces from which the connoisseur chooses three or four. The more solid and bony portions find a space on the small flat plate, the others are piled in the soup plate upon the rice. As an experience once or twice the Rijst-tafel is interesting; but as a daily custom it is an abomination. Even when, as in private houses, the number of dishes is perhaps not more than three or four, the main foundation of the meal is a solid pile of rice, which is not at all a satisfactory diet for Europeans. The Rijst-tafel is not a traditional native custom but a modern innovation, and there is a tendency among the more active members of the community to replace it by a more rational meal.
CUSTOMS OF THE DUTCH
The houses of the Europeans are of the bungalow type with high-pitched roofs of red tiles and surrounded by wide verandahs, which are actually the living rooms of the house. The Dutch are good gardeners and are particularly fond of trees, which they plant close about their houses and so ensure a pleasant shade, though they harbour rather more mosquitoes and other insects than is pleasant. In strange contrast with the scrupulous cleanliness of the houses and the tidiness of the streets, you will see in Batavia a state of things which it is hard to reconcile with the usual commonsense of the Dutch. Through the middle of the town runs a canalised river of red muddy water, partly sewer and partly bathing place and so on of the natives, and in it are washed all the clothes of the population, both native and European. Your clothes return to you white enough, but you put them on with certain qualms when you remember whence they came. The town has an excellent supply of pure water, and it is astonishing that the authorities do not put an end to this most insanitary practice.
Dutch people in the East Indies have modified their habits, especially in the matter of clothing, to suit the requirements of the climate, and while they have to some extent sacrificed elegance to comfort, their costume is at all events more rational than that of many Englishmen in the East, who cling too affectionately to the fashions of Europe and often wear too much clothing. The men, who do the greater part of the day’s work between seven in the morning and one o’clock, wear a plain white suit of cotton or linen. The afternoon is spent in taking a siesta and at about five o’clock they go to their clubs or other amusements in the same sort of attire as in the morning. The ladies, except in the larger towns where European dress is the custom, appear in public during the greater part of the day in a curiously simple costume. The upper part of the body is clothed in a short white cotton jacket, below which the coloured native sarong extends midway down the leg. Low slippers are worn on bare feet, the hair hangs undressed down the back and the costume is usually completed by an umbrella. It must be admitted that the effect is not ornamental, but the costume is doubtless cool and comfortable, and it prevents any risk there might be of injury to the health from wearing an excessive amount of clothing. They appear more conventionally dressed about five o’clock, when the social business of the day begins. The ladies pay calls while the men meet at the club and play cards until an uncomfortably late dinner at about nine o’clock.
BOTANIC GARDEN
About an hour’s journey by railway from Batavia is the hill station of Buitenzorg. Although it is hardly more than eight hundred feet above the sea the climate is noticeably cooler (the mean annual temperature is 75°), and one feels immediately more vigorous than down in the low country. The palace of the Governor General, formerly the house of Sir Stamford Raffles, stands at the edge of the Botanic Garden, which alone, even if you saw nothing else, would justify a visit to Java. Plants from all the Tropics grow there in the best possible conditions, and you see them to advantage as you never can in their natural forest surroundings, where the trunks of the trees are obscured by a tangle of undergrowth. Every part of the garden is worth exploring, but one of the most curious and interesting sections is the collection of Screw-pines (Pandanus) and Cycads, which have a weirdly antediluvian appearance. Another very beautiful sight is the ponds of Water-lilies from different parts of the world. The native gardener in charge of them informed me that the different species have different and definite hours for the opening and closing of their flowers. I tested his statement in two instances and found the flowers almost exactly punctual. There was no cloud in the sky nor appearance of any change in the weather, and the reason for this behaviour is not easy to explain. At Sindanglaya in the mountains a few miles distant is an offshoot from the Buitenzorg garden, where plants of a more temperate climate flourish, and experiments are made on plants of economic value to the country.
A few hours’ journey east from Buitenzorg is Garoet (2,300 feet above the sea), which lies in a beautiful fertile valley surrounded by forest-covered mountains. The climate is an almost ideal one, the nights are cool and the days are not too hot. A very remarkable feature of the country about Garoet is the great flocks, or rather droves, of ducks which you meet being driven along the roads from the villages to their pastures in the rice fields. These ducks differ from the ordinary domestic duck in their extraordinary erect attitude, from which they have been well called Penguin ducks. Whether their upright posture is due to their walking or not I do not know, but they are excellent walkers and are sometimes driven long distances to their feeding grounds. When a duck is tired and lags behind, the boy who herds them picks it up by the neck, and you may sometimes see him walking along with a bunch of two or three ducks in either hand.
Others of our party visited Djokjakarta and the Buddhist Temples of Boro-Boder in Central Java and the mountain resort of Tosari in the volcanic region of Eastern Java. Tosari is more than five thousand feet above the sea, and is of great value to the Dutch as a sanatorium for soldiers and civilians from all parts of the Archipelago. The rainfall is comparatively scanty and the climate is like that of Southern Europe at its best.
A CONVICT COOLY OF THE DUTCH ESCORT.
A MALAY COOLY FROM BUTON.
[CHAPTER II]
Expedition leaves Java—The “Nias”—Escort—Macassar—Raja of Goa—Amboina—Corals and Fishes—Ambonese Christians—Dutch Clubs—Dobo.
On December 21st we left Batavia, and on Christmas Day, 1909, we sailed from Soerabaja in the Government steamer Nias, Capt. Hondius van Herwerden. The Nias, a ship of about six hundred tons, formerly a gun-boat in the Netherlands Indies Marine, is now stripped of her two small guns and is used by the Government as a special service vessel. Her last commission before embarking us has been to transport Mr. Lorentz on his expedition to the Noord River in New Guinea three months earlier. Now she was full to the brim of stores and gear of all sorts and her decks were crowded with men. There were five of us and ten Gurkhas. The Dutch escort consisted of Lieutenant H. A. Cramer in command, two Dutch sergeants and one Dutch medical orderly, forty native Javanese soldiers and sixty convicts, most of them Javanese. The convicts were nearly all of them men with more or less long sentences of imprisonment and some of them were murderers in chains, which were knocked off them to their great relief the day after we left Soerabaja. One of the best of the convicts, a native of Bali, was a murderer (see illustration, page 12), who did admirable service to the expedition, and was subsequently promoted to be mandoer.[1]
At Macassar we stopped a few hours only to add to our already excessive deck cargo, and to hear a little of the gossip of Celebes. I was interested to learn that the power of the Raja of Goa, whom I had visited a few years before, had come to an end. That monarch was an interesting survivor of the old native princes of the island. His kingdom extended to within three miles of Macassar, and he was apparently not answerable to any law or authority but his own. The place became a refuge for criminals fleeing from justice, and it was a disagreeable thorn in the side of the Dutch authorities, who were at last compelled to send a small expedition to annex the country. The Raja himself, it was said, came to a very unpleasant end in a ditch.
There had also been a small war on the east side of the island, which resulted in the pacification of the large and prosperous district of Boni. Now the Island of Celebes, which only a few years ago was dominated by savage tribes and where it was unsafe for an European to travel, has been almost completely brought within the Dutch administration, and it seems likely that its enormous mineral and agricultural wealth will soon make it one of the most prosperous islands of the Archipelago.
AMBOINA
On December 30th we anchored in the harbour of Amboina, where we were joined by the last member of the expedition, Mr. W. Stalker, who had been for some months collecting birds in Ceram, and recently had been engaged in Amboina in recruiting coolies for the expedition. It had been expected that he would go to engage coolies in the Ké Islands, a group of islands about three hundred miles to the south-east of Amboina, where the natives are more sturdy and less sophisticated than the people of Amboina; but circumstances had prevented him from going there, and we had to put up with the very inferior Ambonese, a fact which at the outset seriously handicapped the expedition. We stayed for two days at Amboina, or, as the Dutch always call it, Ambon, buying necessary stores and making arrangements with the Dutch authorities, who agreed to send a steamer every two months, if the weather were favourable, to bring men and further supplies to us in New Guinea.
Amboina is an exceedingly pretty place, and a very favourite station of the Dutch on account of its climate, which is remarkably equable, and its freedom from strong winds or excessive rain. There is a volcano at the north end of the island which has slumbered since 1824, and the place is very subject to earthquakes. A very serious one occurred as recently as 1902, which destroyed hundreds of lives and houses, whose walls may still be seen lying flat in the gardens, but as in other volcanic places the inhabitants have conveniently short memories, and the place has been re-built ready for another visitation.
Like most of the other Dutch settlements in the East, Amboina has been laid out on a rectangular plan, but the uniformity of the arrangement is saved from being monotonous by the tree-planting habits of the Dutch. The roads and open spaces are shaded by Kanari trees, which also produce a most delicious nut, and the gardens are hedged with flowering Hibiscus and Oleander and gaudy-leafed Crotons. Roses, as well as many other temperate plants, in addition to “hothouse” plants, flourish in the gardens, and the verandahs of the houses themselves are often decorated with orchids from Ceram and the Tenimber Islands. Birds are not common in the town itself except in captivity, and you see, especially in the gardens of the natives’ houses, parrots and lories, and pigeons from the Moluccas and New Guinea, and you may even hear the call of the Greater bird of paradise. Attracted by the many flowering plants are swarms of butterflies, some of them of great beauty. One of the most gorgeous of these is the large blue Papilio ulysses, which floats from flower to flower like a piece of living blue sky.
THE AMBONESE
The harbour of Amboina is a wide deep channel, which nearly divides the island into two, and in it are the wonderful sea-gardens, which aroused the enthusiasm of Mr. Wallace.[2] They are not perhaps so wonderful as the sea-gardens at Banda and elsewhere, but to those who have never seen such things before the many coloured sea-weeds and corals and shells and shoals of fantastic fishes seen through crystal water are a source of unfailing interest. The sea is crowded with fish of every size and form and colour. Nearly eight hundred species have been described from Ambonese waters, and it is worth while to visit the market in the early morning, when the night’s haul is brought in, and before the very evanescent colours of the fish have faded. Nearly every man in the place is a fisherman during some part of the day or night, and nobody need starve who has the energy to throw a baited hook into the sea. Most of the fish are caught either in nets very similar to our seine-net or in more elaborate traps which are mostly constructed by Chinamen.
The market is also worth visiting to see the variety of fruit and spices that grow in the island. Amboina has a peculiar form of banana, the Pisang Ambon, with white flesh, dark green skin, and a very peculiar flavour. Besides this there are many other kinds of bananas, mangoes, mangostines, guavas, sour-manilla, soursop, pineapples, kanari nut, nutmeg, cloves, and a small but very delicious fruit, the garnderia.
The native inhabitants of Amboina are a curious mixture of the aboriginal native with Portuguese, Dutch, and Malay blood. There is a strong predominance of the Portuguese type, which shows itself in the faces of many of the people, who still use words of Portuguese origin, and preserve many Portuguese names. A large number of them are Christians, and they rejoice in such names as Josef, Esau, Jacob, Petrus and Domingos.
New Year’s Eve was celebrated by a confusion of fireworks and gun-firing, which lasted from sunset until the small hours of 1910, and by an afternoon service in the Church attended by many hundreds of people. The women, who are usually in Amboina dressed entirely in black, wore for the occasion long white coats, black sarongs and white stockings. The men went more variously clad in straw hats, dinner jackets, low waistcoats, white or coloured starched shirts, coloured ties, black trousers, and brown boots. We were interested to find that the great bulk of the stuff from which clothes are made in Amboina is imported from England, and we were assured by a merchant who was interested in the trade that a man can dress himself in so-called European fashion as cheaply in Amboina as he can in this country.
An agreeable feature of life at Amboina, as at other places in the Netherlands Indies, is the hospitality of the Dutch people. A stranger of at all respectable social position is expected to introduce himself to the club, and the residents in the place feel genuinely hurt if he fails to do so. The Societat, or “Soce,” as it is everywhere called, is more of a café than a club according to English ideas, and it exists for conviviality and gossiping rather than for newspaper reading and card playing. It is not even a restaurant in the sense that many English clubs are; the members meet there in the evening but they invariably dine, as they lunch, at home. On the verandah in front of the club is a round table, at which sit after dark large men in white clothes smoking cigars and drinking various drinks. The foreigner approaches with what courage he may and introduces himself by name to the party severally. They make a place for him in the circle and thereafter, with a courtesy which a group of Englishmen would find difficulty in imitating, they continue the conversation in the language of the foreigner. An Englishman is at first a little staggered by the number of pait (i.e. bitter, the name for gin and bitters) and other drinks that his hosts consume, and which he is expected to consume also, but, as I remember noticing in the case of their neighbours the Belgians in the Congo, it appears to do them little if any harm.
THE ARAFURA SEA
In the larger places there is a concert at the club once or twice a week—at Bandoeng in Java I heard a remarkably good string quartette—and in almost every place there is a ladies’ night at the club once a week, when the children come to dance to the music of a piano or gramophone, as the case may be. It is a pretty sight and one to make one ponder on the possible harmony of nations—“Harmonie” is commonly a name for the clubs in the Netherlands Indies—to see small Dutch children dancing with little half-castes and, as I have more than once seen, with little Celestials and Japanese.
We left Amboina on New Year’s Day in a deluge of rain, and all that day we were in sight of the forest-covered heights of Ceram to the North. On January 2nd we passed Banda at dawn, and at sunset we got a view of the most South-west point of New Guinea, Cape Van de Bosch. On the morning of January 3rd we dropped anchor in the harbour of Dobo in the Aru Islands. For several miles before we arrived there we had noticed a marked difference in the appearance of the sea. Since we left Batavia we had been sailing over a deep sea of great oceanic depths, sometimes of two or three thousand fathoms, which was always clear and blue or black as deep seas are. Approaching the Aru Islands we came into the shoal waters of the Arafura Sea, which is yellowish and opaque and never exceeds one hundred fathoms in depth. We were, in fact, sailing over that scarcely submerged land, which joins the Aru Islands and New Guinea with the Continent of Australia.
Dobo has doubtless changed a good deal in appearance since Mr. Wallace visited it in 1857, the majority of the houses are now built of corrugated iron in place of the palm leaves of fifty years ago; but it cannot have increased greatly in size, for it is built on a small spit of coral sand beyond which are mangrove swamps where building is impossible. The reason of its existence has also changed since the time when it was the great market of all the neighbouring islands, for now it exists solely as the centre of a pearl-fishing industry controlled by an Australian Company, the Celebes Trading Company. Messrs. Clarke & Ross Smith, the heads of this business, rendered us assistance in very many ways, and the sincerest thanks of the expedition are due to them. The primary object of pearl-fishing is of course the collection of pearl-shell which is used for knife handles, buttons, and a hundred other things. Shell of a good quality is worth more than £200 a ton. The pearls, which are occasionally found, are merely accidentals and profitable extras of the trade. Some idea of the extent of this business may be learnt from the fact that more than one hundred boats employing about five thousand men are occupied in the various fleets.
We left Dobo, the last place of civilisation that many of us were to see for a year and more, on January 3rd; and here, as we are almost within sight as it were of our destination, it may be opportune to state briefly the geographical position of New Guinea, and to give a short account of its exploration.
DOBO. ARU ISLANDS.
[CHAPTER III]
New Guinea—Its Position and Extent—Territorial Divisions—Mountain Ranges—Numerous Rivers—The Papuans—The Discovery of New Guinea—Early Voyagers—Spanish and Dutch—Jan Carstensz—First Discovery of the Snow Mountains—William Dampier in the “Roebuck”—Captain Cook in the “Endeavour”—Naturalists and later Explorers.
The island of New Guinea or Papua lies to the East of all the great islands of the Malay Archipelago and forms a barrier between them and the Pacific Ocean. To the South of it lies the Continent of Australia separated from it by the Arafura Sea and Torres Strait, which at its narrowest point is less than a hundred miles wide. To the East is the great group of the Solomon Islands, while on the North there are no important masses of land between New Guinea and Japan. The island lies wholly to the South of the Equator, its most Northern point, the Cape of Good Hope in the Arfak Peninsula, being 19´ S. latitude.
The extreme length of the island from E. to W. is 1490 miles, and its greatest breadth from N. to S. is rather more than 400 miles. New Guinea is the largest of the islands of the globe, having an area of 308,000 square miles (Borneo has about 290,000 square miles), and it is divided amongst three countries roughly as follows: Holland 150,000, Great Britain 90,000, and Germany 70,000 square miles. The large territory of the Dutch was acquired by them with the kingdom of the Sultan of Ternate, who was accustomed to claim Western New Guinea as a part of his dominions: it is bounded on the East by the 141st parallel of East longitude and partly by the Fly River and thus it comprises nearly a half of the island.
The Eastern half of the island is divided into a Northern, German, and a Southern, British, part. The German territory is called Kaiser Wilhelm Land, and the islands adjacent to it, which have received German substitutes for their old names of New Britain, New Ireland, etc., are known as the Bismarck Archipelago. British New Guinea, which is now administered by the Federal Government of Australia, has been officially renamed the Territory of Papua, and with it are included the numerous islands at its Eastern extremity, the D’Entrecasteaux and Louisiade Archipelagoes.
Only in the British territory has a serious attempt been made at settling and administering the country; the headquarters of the Government are at Port Moresby, and the country is divided into six magisterial districts.
The German possessions are governed from Herbertshöhe in Neu Pommern (New Britain), which is the centre of a small amount of island trade, but the settlements on the New Guinea mainland are few and far between, and it cannot be pretended that the country is German except in name.
The Dutch territory has been even less brought under control than the German. For more than half a century there has been a mission station at Dorei in the N.W. but until 1899 when the Dutch assumed the direct control of the country, which was till that time nominally governed by the Sultan of Tidor (Ternate), there was no sign of Dutch rule in New Guinea. Now there are Government stations with small bodies of native soldiers at Manokware, an island in Dorei Bay, and at Fak-fak on the shore of MacCluer Gulf; more recently a third post has been established at Merauke on the South coast near the boundary of British New Guinea, with the object of subjugating the fierce Tugere tribe of that region.
MOUNTAIN RANGES
The most important physical feature of New Guinea is the great system of mountain ranges, which run from West to East and form the back-bone of the island. The Arfak Peninsula in the N.W. is made entirely by mountains which reach an altitude of more than 9000 feet. In the great central mass of the island the mountains begin near the S.W. coast with the Charles Louis Mountains, which vary in height from 4000 to 9000 feet. Following these to the East they are found to be continuous with the Snowy Mountains (now called the Nassau Range, the objective of this expedition) which culminate in the glacier-covered tops of Mount Idenberg (15,379 feet), and Mount Carstensz (15,964 feet), and to the East of these is the snow-capped Mount Wilhelmina (15,420 feet), and Mount Juliana (about 14,764 feet).
Leaving Dutch New Guinea and proceeding further to the East we come to the Victor Emmanuel and the Sir Arthur Gordon Ranges, which lie near the boundary of German and British New Guinea. Still further East is the Bismarck Range, often snow covered, and extending through the long Eastern prolongation of the island are the great range of the Owen Stanley Mountains, which reach their highest point in Mount Victoria (13,150 feet), and the Stirling Range.
As might be expected in so mountainous a country there is a large number of rivers and some of them are of great size. On the North coast the Kaiserin Augusta River rises in Dutch territory and takes an almost Easterly course through German New Guinea to the sea, while the Amberno (or Mamberamo) rises probably from the slopes of the Snowy Mountains and flows Northwards to Point d’Urville. On the South coast, in British New Guinea besides the Purari, Kikor and Turama Rivers, the most important is the Fly River, which has been explored by boat for a distance of more than five hundred miles. In Southern Dutch New Guinea there are almost countless rivers: chief among them are the Digoel, which has been explored for more than four hundred miles; the Island River, by which a Dutch expedition has recently reached the central watershed of New Guinea; the Noord River by which Mr. H. Lorentz approached Mount Wilhelmina; the Utakwa and the Utanata.
THE NATIVES OF NEW GUINEA
The natives of New Guinea are Papuans and the island is indeed the centre of that race, which is found more or less mixed with other races from the island of Flores as far as Fiji. Though the Papuans in New Guinea itself have been in many places altered by immigrant races, for instance by Malays in the extreme West, and by Polynesian and Melanesian influences in the South and East, there yet remain large regions, particularly in the Western half of the country, including the district visited by this expedition, where the true Papuan stock holds its own.
The name Papua, it should be said, comes from the Malay wood papuwah, meaning “woolly” or “fuzzy,” and was first applied to the natives on account of their mops of hair; later the name was applied to the island itself.
Even among those Papuans who are pure-blooded—in so far as one may use that expression in describing any human race—there are very considerable varieties of appearance, but it is still possible to describe a type to which all of them conform in the more important particulars. The typical Papuan is rather tall and is usually well-built. The legs of the low country people are somewhat meagre, as is usually the case among people who spend much of their time in canoes, whilst those of the hill tribes are well developed. The hands and feet are large. The colour of the skin varies from a dark chocolate colour to a rusty black, but it seems to be never of the shining ebony blackness of the African negro. The lips are thick but not full, the teeth are strong but not noticeably good, and the jaws are strong but they can hardly be called prognathous. The forehead is receding, the brows are strong and prominent, and the shape of the face is somewhat oval. The hair is black and “frizzly” rather than “woolly,” it is crisp and hard to the touch, and in some tribes it is grown to a considerable length and dressed in a variety of ornamental fashions. Short hard hair is also found frequently on the chest and on the limbs, but on the face it is scanty and frequently altogether absent.
The most characteristic feature is the nose, which is long and fleshy and somewhat “Semitic” in outline, but flattened and depressed at the tip. But these characteristics of the nose would not alone suffice to distinguish the Papuans from others were it not for the fact that the alae nasi are attached at a remarkably high level on the face, and so an unusually large extent of the septum of the nose is exposed. It is owing to this curious formation of the nose that the Papuan is enabled to perform his almost universal practice of piercing the septum nasi and wearing there some ornament of bone or shell.
Apart from physical characteristics many observers have found mental qualities in which the Papuans differ from, and are superior to, neighbouring races; but these things are so difficult to define, and they vary so much according to local circumstances, that it is not wise to use them as conclusive evidence. It may, however, be said without fear of contradiction that no person, who has had experience of Malays and of Papuans, could believe for a moment that they are anything but two very distinct races of men. The origin of the Papuans is not definitely known, and the existence in different parts of the island of small people, who are possibly of Negrito stock, suggests that the Papuans were not the original inhabitants of New Guinea.
EARLY SPANISH NAVIGATORS
The history of the earliest discovery of New Guinea is not precisely known, but it is safe to disregard the legends of navigators having found the island before the Portuguese reached the Moluccas and founded a trading centre at Ternate in 1512. The earliest authentic record is of the Portuguese Don Jorge de Meneses, who was driven out of his way on a voyage from Goa to Ternate in 1526, and took refuge in the island of Waigiu. Two years later a Spaniard Alvaro de Saavedra taking spices from the Moluccas to Mexico appears to have reached the Schouten Islands in Geelvink Bay. From there he sailed North and discovered the Carolines and the Mariana Islands, but unfavourable winds drove him back to the Moluccas. In 1529 he set out again, and sailed along a long expanse of coast, which was doubtless the North coast of New Guinea.
In 1546 Ynigo Ortiz de Retes sailed from Ternate to Mexico in his ship San Juan. He touched at several places on the North coast where he hoisted the Spanish flag, and called the island Nueva Guinea, because the natives appeared to him to resemble the negroes of the Guinea coast of Africa. The name, spelt Nova Guinea, appears printed for the first time on Mercator’s map of 1569.
The last important Spanish Expedition was that of Luis Vaz de Torres, who sailed with two ships from Peru, and in 1606 reached the south-east corner of New Guinea. He sailed along the South coast from one to the other end of the island, of which he took possession in the name of the King of Spain. Torres’ voyage through the strait which now bears his name was the first to show that New Guinea was an island, but the account of the voyage was not published and the fact of his discovery remained unknown until after 1800.
The seventeenth century was chiefly notable for the explorations of the Dutch, whose East India Company proclaimed a monopoly of trade in the Spice Islands to the exclusion of people of other nationalities. In 1605, Willem Jansz sailed from Banda to New Guinea in the Duyfken. The Ké and Aru Islands were visited and the Cape York Peninsula of Australia was reached, but the importance of that discovery was not realised. On the mainland of New Guinea nine men of the ship’s company were killed and eaten, and the expedition returned to Banda.
Jacques Le Maire and Willem Schouten made an important voyage in 1616 in the Eendracht. Sailing from Europe by way of Cape Horn they crossed the Pacific and discovered New Ireland, where they had trouble with the natives, who (it is interesting to note) gave them pigs in exchange for glass beads. The Admiralty and Vulcan Islands were seen and then, after reaching the coast of New Guinea, they discovered the mouth of the Kaiserin Augusta River and the Schouten Islands.
THE VOYAGE OF JAN CARSTENSZ
The next important voyage, and in this chronicle the most important of all, was that of Jan Carstensz (or Carstenszoon) who sailed from Amboina in 1623 with the ships Pera and Arnhem. After visiting Ké and Aru they reached the S.W. coast of New Guinea, where they met with trouble. “This same day (February 11) the skipper of the yacht Arnhem, Dirck Meliszoon, without knowledge of myself or the sub-cargo or steersman of the said yacht, unadvisedly went ashore to the open beach in the pinnace, taking with him fifteen persons, both officers and common sailors, and no more than four muskets, for the purpose of fishing with a seine-net. There was great disorder in landing, the men running off in different directions, until at last a number of black savages came running forth from the wood, who first seized and tore to pieces an assistant named Jan Willemsz Van den Briel who happened to be unarmed, after which they slew with arrows, callaways, and with the oars which they had snatched from the pinnace, no less than nine of our men, who were unable to defend themselves, at the same time wounding the remaining seven (among them the skipper, who was the first to take to his heels); these last seven men at last returned on board in very sorry plight with the pinnace and one oar, the skipper loudly lamenting his great want of prudence, and entreating pardon for the fault he had committed.”
The incautious skipper died of his wounds on the following day and so he did not take a part in the most momentous discovery of the voyage. “In the morning of the 16th (February) we took the sun’s altitude at sunrise, which we found to be 5° 6´; the preceding evening ditto 20° 30´; the difference being divided by two comes to 7° 42´; increasing North-easterly variation; the wind N. by E.; we were at about one and a half mile’s distance from the low-lying land in 5 or 6 fathom, clayey bottom; at a distance of about 10 miles by estimation into the interior we saw a very high mountain range in many places white with snow, which we thought a very singular sight, being so near the line equinoctial. Towards the evening we held our course E. by S., along half-submerged land in 5, 4, 3, and 2 fathom, at which last point we dropped anchor; we lay there for about five hours, during which time we found the water to have risen 4 or 5 feet; in the first watch, the wind being N.E., we ran into deeper water and came to anchor in 10 fathom, where we remained for the night.”
That is the brief account of the first discovery of the Snow Mountains of New Guinea by Jan Carstensz, whose name is now perpetuated in the highest summit of the range. Very few ships have sailed along that coast in three hundred years, and there are very many days in the year when not a sign of the mountains can be seen from the shore, so it is not very astonishing to find ships’ captains sailing on those seas who still disbelieve the story of the snow. On the same voyage Carstensz crossed the straits and sailed a considerable way down the Cape York Peninsula believing that the land was still New Guinea.
In 1636 Thomas Pool explored a large tract of the S.W. coast; Pool himself was killed by natives, but the expedition discovered three large rivers, the Kupera Pukwa, Inabuka (? Neweripa), and the Utakwa. Tasman sailed along the North coast of New Guinea in 1642 after his discovery of Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania); and in 1644 he was sent to find out whether there was a passage between New Guinea and the large “South Land” (Australia). Apparently he cruised along the coast about as far as Merauke, and also touched Australia, but the strait was not discovered.
Throughout the seventeenth century the Dutch East India Company maintained their monopoly of the cloves and nutmegs of the Moluccas, and great consternation was caused when the English tried to obtain these spices direct by sending ships to the Papuan islands. The Moluccas were protected by forts and their harbours safe, therefore in order to prevent the English from obtaining the spices outside the sphere of direct Dutch influence, all trees producing spices were destroyed.
DAMPIER AND COOK
The most important of the English voyages was that of Capt. William Dampier in the Roebuck. He sailed by Brazil and the Cape of Good Hope to Western Australia and thence to Timor. On January 1, 1700, he sighted the mountains of New Guinea; he landed on several islands near the coast, captured Crowned pigeons and many kinds of fishes, which he described in his book. Rounding the N.W. corner of the island he sailed along the North coast and discovered that New Britain was separated from New Guinea by a strait to which he gave his own name.
After the voyages of Philip Carteret, who proved that New Ireland is an island, and of de Bougainville in 1766 the most important is that of Captain James Cook in the Endeavour. He sailed from Plymouth in August 1768, rounded Cape Horn, reached and charted New Zealand, reached the East coast of New Holland (Australia) in April 1770, and sailed along the coast to Cape York, which he named. Looking Westward he decided that there was a channel leading from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean, and after sailing through it he came to the coast of New Guinea to the N.W. of Prince Frederick Henry Island, where he was attacked by natives and thence he sailed to Batavia. Thus Captain Cook by sailing through his Endeavour Strait, now called Torres Strait after the original navigator, repeated the discovery of Torres after an interval of more than a century and a half, and the general position and outline of New Guinea became known to the world.
After the voyage of Cook many important additions were made to the charts of New Guinea and its neighbouring islands, notably by the voyages of La Perouse (1788), John MacCluer (1790-1793), D’Entrecasteaux (1792-1793), Duperrey (1823-1824), D. H. Kolff (1826), and Dumont d’Urville (1827-1828).
But during all this time New Guinea was practically no man’s land, and except at Dorei and about the MacCluer Gulf explorations were limited to views from the deck of a ship. Flags were hoisted now and then and the land taken possession of in the name of various sovereigns and companies, amongst others by the East India Company in 1793, but no effective occupation was ever made. The Dutch regained their title to the Western half of the island, but it was not until 1884 that a British Protectorate was proclaimed over the S.E. portion of the island, and over the remainder by Germany in the same year.
RECENT EXPLORATION
Although numerous naturalists, notably Dr. A. R. Wallace, Von Rosenberg, and Bernstein, and missionaries had spent considerable periods of time in the country, no very serious attempt was made to penetrate into the interior until 1876, when the Italian naturalist, d’Albertis, explored the Fly River for more than five hundred miles. Since that time a very large number of expeditions have been undertaken to various parts of the island, and it will only be possible to mention a few of them here. In 1885 Captain Everill ascended the Strickland tributary of the Fly River. In the same year Dr. H. O. Forbes explored the Owen Stanley range, and in 1889 Sir William Macgregor reached the highest point of that range.
In Dutch New Guinea very little exploration was done until the beginning of the present century. Professor Wichmann made scientific investigations in the neighbourhood of Humboldt Bay in 1903. Captains Posthumus Meyes and De Rochemont in 1904 discovered East Bay and the Noord River, which was explored by Mr. H. A. Lorentz in 1907.
During the period from 1909 to 1911, whilst our party was in New Guinea, there were six other expeditions in different parts of the Dutch territory. On the N. coast a Dutch-German boundary commission was penetrating inland from Humboldt Bay, and a large party under Capt. Fransse Herderschee was exploring the Amberno River. On the West and South coasts an expedition was exploring inland from Fak-fak, another was surveying the Digoel and Island rivers, and a third made an attempt to reach the Snow Mountains by way of the Utakwa River. But the most successful of all the expeditions was that of Mr. Lorentz, who sailed up the Noord River and in November 1909 reached the snow on Mount Wilhelmina, two hundred and eighty-six years after the mountains were first seen by Jan Carstensz.
[CHAPTER IV]
Sail from the Aru Islands—Sight New Guinea—Distant Mountains—Signal Fires—Natives in Canoes—A British Flag—Natives on Board—Their Behaviour—Arrival at Mimika River—Reception at Wakatimi—Dancing and Weeping—Landing Stores—View of the Country—Snow Mountains—Shark-Fishing—Making the Camp—Death of W. Stalker.
ARRIVAL IN NEW GUINEA
When we left the northernmost end of the Aru Islands behind us the wind rose and torrents of rain descended, and the Arafura Sea, which is almost everywhere more or less shoal water, treated us to the first foul weather we had experienced since leaving England. At dawn on the 4th January we found ourselves in sight of land, and about five miles south of the New Guinea coast. A big bluff mountain (Mount Lakahia) a southern spur of the Charles Louis range determined our position, and the head of the Nias was immediately turned to the East. As we steamed along the coast the light grew stronger, and we saw in the far North-east pale clouds, which presently resolved themselves into ghostly-looking mountains one hundred miles away. Soon the rising sunlight touched them and we could clearly see white patches above the darker masses of rock and then we knew that these were the Snow Mountains of New Guinea, which we had come so far to see. Beyond an impression of their remoteness and their extraordinary steepness we did not learn much of the formation of the mountains from that great distance and they were quickly hidden from our view, as we afterwards found happened daily, by the dense white mists that rose from the intervening land.
Following the coast rather more closely we soon found that our approach was causing some excitement on shore. White columns of the smoke of signal fires curled up from the low points of the land and canoes manned by black figures paddled furiously in our wake, while others, warned doubtless by the signals, put off from the land ahead of us and endeavoured to intercept us in our course.
In some of the larger canoes there were as many as twenty men, and very fine indeed they looked standing up in the long narrow craft which they urged swiftly forward with powerful rhythmic strokes of their long-shafted paddles. At the beginning of each stroke the blade of the paddle is at right angles to the boat. As it is pulled backward the propelling surface of the paddle is a little rotated outward, a useful precaution, for the stroke ends with a sudden jerk as the paddle is lifted from the water and the consequent shower of spray is directed away from the canoe.
1. 2. 3. Carved Wooden Clubs. 4-10. Stone Clubs.
The shore was low and featureless, and it was impossible to identify the mouths of the rivers from the very inaccurate chart. It was not safe for the Nias to approach the land closely on account of the shoal water, so Capt. Van Herwerden dropped anchor when he had been steaming Eastwards for about eight hours, and sent the steam launch towards an inlet, where we could see huts, to gather information. A bar of sand prevented the launch from entering the inlet, so they hailed a canoe which ventured within speaking distance, and by repeating several times “Mimika,” the only word of their language that we knew at that time, learnt that we had overshot our destination by a few miles. That canoe, it should be noted, was remarkable on account of two of its crew. One of them held aloft an ancient Union Jack; the other was conspicuously different from the scores of men in the canoes about us, who were all frankly in a bare undress, by wearing an old white cotton jacket fastened by a brass button which was ornamented with the head of Queen Victoria. How the flag and the coat and the button came to that outlandish place will never be known, but it is certain that they must have passed through very many hands before they came there, for certainly no Englishman had ever been there before.
When the launch returned to the ship a crowd of natives, fifty or sixty at the least, came clambering on board leaving only one or two men in each canoe to paddle after the steamer as we slowly returned towards the Mimika. Two men were recognised by Capt. Van Herwerden as having belonged to a party of natives from this coast, who had been taken some years earlier to Merauke, the Dutch settlement near the southernmost point of New Guinea. At Merauke they had got into mischief and had been put in prison from which nine of them escaped, and these two men, probably the only survivors of the party, had contrived to find their way along four hundred miles of coast, peopled by hostile tribes, back to their own country.
The behaviour of our new fellow passengers was very remarkable and different from what one expected, though it was obvious enough at the first glance that these were people totally different from the Malayan races both in appearance and demeanour; yet there was none of that exuberance of spirits, child-like curiosity and exhibition of merriment and delight in their novel surroundings described by Wallace[3] and Guillemard[4] and which I had myself seen on the coast of German New Guinea. A few of them shook hands, or rather held hands, with us and talked loudly and volubly, while the rest stared dumbly at us and then wandered aimlessly about the ship seeking a chance to steal any loose piece of metal. They showed no fear nor did they betray any excitement nor any very keen curiosity about the marvellous things that they were seeing for the first time. They were quite unmoved by the spectacle of the windlass lifting up the anchor, and a casual glance down the skylight of the engine room was enough for most of them. They appeared to take everything for granted without question, and a stolid stare was their only recognition of the wonderful works of the white man’s civilisation. In one respect it is true they were not quite so apathetic and that was in their appetite for tobacco, which they begged from everyone on board, brown and white alike. When they had obtained a supply, they sat in groups about the deck and smoked as unconcernedly as though a passage in a steamship were an affair of every-day occurrence in their lives.
MOUTH OF THE MIMIKA
By the time that we eventually anchored off the mouth of the Mimika River it was beginning to grow dark, and Capt. Van Herwerden ordered the natives on board to leave the ship, not having noticed that the canoes had already departed towards the shore. No doubt this was a preconcerted scheme of the natives who wanted to stay on board, but by dint of much shouting two canoes were persuaded to return and take away some of our passengers. It was then quite dark and there was a white mist over the sea, and the spectacle of the procession of black figures passing down the gangway into an apparent abyss, for the canoes were invisible in the gloom, was singularly weird. There was not room for all in the canoes, so about a score of fortunate ones had to stop on board, where they slept in picturesque attitudes about the deck. Five young men chose a place where the iron cover of the steering chain made a pillow a few inches high; they lay on their sides all facing the same way, their arms folded across their chests and their bent knees fitting into the bend of the knees of the man in front, and so close together that the five of them occupied a space hardly more than five feet square.
Soon after daylight on the following day the steam launch left the ship with a party to proceed up the Mimika and find a suitable place for a base-camp. The river has a fine wide mouth about a mile across guarded by a sand bar, through which runs a narrow channel navigable at all stages of the tide except during rough weather. For some distance the river is a noble stream two or three hundred yards wide winding in fine sweeps between low mangrove-covered banks. About three miles from the sea the river divides into an East and West branch. The East branch, the Mimika proper, brings down not more than one-quarter of the volume of water of the West branch, of which it may be said to be a tributary. It is remarkable that the party who visited the Mimika in 1902 apparently overlooked the fact that the West branch is actually the main river. Above the junction of the two branches the water of the Mimika is of a brown chocolate colour which proclaims it, though we did not know it at the time, to be a mere jungle stream rising from comparatively low ground. The water of the West branch on the contrary is pale in colour and at times of flood almost milky-white, being charged with lime-stone from the high mountains where it rises.
A WELCOME OF TEARS
Proceeding for two or three miles up the Mimika, which had become above the junction a comparatively insignificant stream forty or fifty yards across and very tortuous, the exploring party in the steam launch arrived at the village of Wakatimi situated on the right bank of the river. The village was crowded with natives, numbering perhaps one thousand people, who gave the visitors a most remarkable reception. As soon as the boat appeared in sight the natives crowded down to the bank and shouted shrilly, men, women and children. When they came nearer the people threw themselves into the shallow water and many of them plastered themselves with mud, while the women performed their curious dance, if dance it can be called. It is not a concerted performance, but rather a pas seul executed by each woman independently of the others, and it is a peculiarly ungraceful exhibition. The body is bent forward from the hips, the hands rest on the knees or on the hips, and then with a shuffling movement of the feet the woman swings herself from side to side or up and down, always presenting her back and the narrow strip of barkcloth, which usually hangs down like a tail behind, to the astonished gaze of the spectator. She sings all the while a monotonous whining chant and occasionally looks back over her shoulder, as if to see that the onlooker is properly appreciative of her charms. Many of the people both men and women on this and other occasions of great excitement were so overcome with emotion that they actually shed tears of rapture.[5] For many days after this boats were constantly coming up the river from the ship, and they were always welcomed in a similar manner by the natives.
The river was explored for a few miles further up, but the only suitable place for a camp was found to be on the left bank of the river immediately opposite to Wakatimi. Lieut. Cramer and a party of his soldiers established themselves there the same afternoon and the work of clearing the ground and landing the stores was immediately begun. The Nias was anchored about two miles outside the river and the launch went very slowly when it had two or three heavily laden boats to tow against the strong current of the river, so the business of landing the expedition was a very slow one, and as there was at first but very little space for pitching tents on the camping ground some of us remained for a few days on board. During those days that were spent on the ship outside the Mimika we had opportunities in the early morning of getting a general idea of the broad features of the country.
At the top of the white sandy beach was in most places a narrow belt of Casuarina trees, which are accustomed to grow on sandy or stony soil. They resemble pines and their pale stems have a fresh green foliage, which is a pleasing contrast to the dense monotonous green of the majority of the trees in the country. Behind the Casuarina belt dense jungle, for the first few miles consisting entirely of Mangroves and beyond that of various trees, extends with hardly any rise of altitude to the foot of the mountains thirty miles away. This last observation was one of supreme importance and it affected the whole prospect and conduct of the expedition. Those of us who had been to New Guinea before had been accustomed to seeing a steep shore rising very quickly to the hills. This is the usual formation along practically the whole of the North coast of the island, also along a considerable extent of the South-east coast and again on the West coast in the neighbourhood of MacCluer Gulf. It was known of course that the South coast on both sides of the mouth of the Fly River and about Prince Frederick Henry Island was low swampy country, but it was assumed that, considering the fact that the highest peaks of the Snow Mountains were known to be not more than seventy miles from the sea, the foothills would certainly extend to within a short distance of the coast.
VIEW OF THE MOUNTAINS
Before we had reached the country we had had the idea that in a few days’ march we should find ourselves in the hills at perhaps three or four thousand feet above the sea, but the view of the country which we saw from the Nias effectually put an end to any hopes of that kind. It is probable that more searching enquiries made at Batavia would have revealed the existence of this wide belt of low land, but it seldom occurs to you to question the truth of such an assumption. However that may be, a serious mistake was made and we paid for it dearly enough. The mountains appeared to rise very steeply from the low ground, and seen from a distance they appeared to be composed of parallel ridges lying one behind the other, each one successively higher than the one in front of it. It was only in certain lights, and more particularly when the clouds began to form on them, that you could distinguish deep and narrow valleys running into the mountains. The nearer ranges rose steeply enough, but were not too steep to be covered with dense forest easily discernible from a distance. The furthermost ridge on the other hand rose in huge precipices of bare rock, which showed reddish yellow in the morning sunlight with here and there downward stripes of black colour, presumably water, and in other places streaks of pure white rock. This precipice, of which more will be said later, grew smaller towards the West until it ended at the deep valley, which divides the Snow Mountains from the range of the Charles Louis Mountains.
In the opposite direction towards the East the range rises gradually, until at a point about North-east from the Mimika three snow-capped tops are seen. I use the word “top” advisedly, for these three points are not peaks but are elevations on an otherwise fairly even mountain outline. The vertical extent of the snow is not very great, a few hundred feet at the most, the South face of the mountain being so steep that snow cannot lie on it save on the horizontal terraces of the strata, which could plainly be distinguished. Continuing the ridge East from the three snow tops (Mount Idenburg) is a long plain of almost level snow about three miles long. From the East end of the snow plain a ridge of shattered rock, looking like Dolomite towers from that great distance, forms a connection with Mount Carstensz, the highest point of the range.
Seen from afar, Mount Carstensz appears to be of a different formation from the rest of the range. Mr. Dumas of the Dutch Expedition to the Utakwa River clearly identified masses of slate on the Southern face from a distance of twenty miles, and this would quite account for its different appearance. There are two principal tops, a Western black and irregular rock with scattered patches of snow, and an Eastern top more even in its outline and entirely covered with snow. Between the two a glacier of moderate size flows down the South face of the mountain. Still further East from Mount Carstensz could be seen yet other ridges, apparently a continuation of the Carstensz ridge. Occasionally these were covered with snow in the early morning, but no other points of permanent snow could be seen from the Mimika, and indeed there is no other until Mount Wilhelmina is reached more than one hundred miles to the East. But studying the mountains with field glasses was an occupation which could only be pursued for a short time, for the clouds formed early on the ridges and by nine o’clock at the latest all the higher mountains were hidden from view.
During the first two days that we lay off the Mimika we were visited by numbers of natives in canoes, who came some to trade and some merely to stare at the ship and the people on board. The articles that they brought for sale consisted chiefly of fish, coconuts and bananas of a very poor kind, though we afterwards came to regard these latter as a delicious luxury. They also brought a few young pigs, young cassowaries, and other birds and they received payment in beads, scraps of cloth, empty bottles and tins and pieces of metal. It is worth while to record, as showing the indolence of these people, that on the third day no natives came to visit us. Those who had before come to look at us had presumably satisfied their curiosity, while the others who had come to barter were content with the treasures they had won, although they might have added greatly to their wealth if they had had the energy to catch a few fish or pick a few more coconuts.
FISHING FOR SHARKS
Another occupation, which served to pass the time, was fishing for the sharks with which that shallow sea abounds. They are blunt-nosed animals with large dusky patches on the skin. It is very seldom that you see them at the surface of the water, and they appear to feed always at the bottom. The first that was caught was found to be full of fragments of large crabs. Nobody on board was found willing to eat the flesh, though it is probable that a few months afterwards they would have been less fastidious, so the fish was thrown overboard, and an hour or two later a second shark, a monster about twelve feet long, was hauled, on board, and on being opened it was found to be full of large undigested lumps of (presumably) the first.
On January 8th those of us who had remained on the Nias left the ship and proceeded to Wakatimi, where we found that Lieut. Cramer and his men had already done an immense amount of work in clearing the ground for the camp. It appeared that the place chosen had been cleared of forest at some time, for there were no large trees growing on it, but it was covered with a dense jungle of shrubs and small trees, a foot or so in thickness and a tangle of creepers. Already in four days a strip along the river bank about eighty yards long and thirty yards wide had been cleared of bush, and as time went on the clearing was gradually extended until there were twenty acres or more of open ground about the camp.
During the first two or three days the natives, who had assembled in large numbers at the village of Wakatimi, helped a good deal in clearing the ground and landing the stores. When the steam launch towing the laden boats arrived at the camp they fell upon the boats in hordes and quickly carried everything up the steep mud bank, but this amusement palled upon them very soon, and they stood about doing nothing and hampered the men at their work of unpacking. Accordingly a stout wooden fence was built about the landward side of the camp and over this they were content to gaze from morning till night. They stood packed together five or six deep, and the press of those at the back trying to catch a glimpse of what was going on was so great that two or three times the fence fell bodily inwards, and with it a struggling mass of black humanity; but it was not many days before their curiosity was satisfied, and though they did not afford us very much assistance it was fortunate that they were not inclined to molest or interfere with us in any way.
OUR FIRST LOSS
We had only been in our camp at Wakatimi for one day and it already seemed as if the place was beginning to show some sign of order, when a melancholy tragedy threw a gloom over the spirits of the whole expedition. On the afternoon of January 9th Mr. Wilfred Stalker, who had had plenty of experience of tropical and Australian jungles, went out from the camp taking his collecting gun to shoot some birds. The usual daily rain began at about four o’clock, but as we were all busy with various occupations in our tents his absence was not noticed until after six o’clock, when it was already pitch dark and the rain was falling in torrents. Beyond the camp was dense jungle intersected by creeks and pools of water, difficult enough to traverse by day but absolutely impassable in darkness, so there was nothing to be done that night but to hope anxiously that Stalker’s bushcraft had prompted him to make a shelter of some kind, if disaster had not already overtaken him. At dawn Lieut. Cramer sent out parties of soldiers in all directions, and soon all of us, Europeans, Gurkhas, and native soldiers were out searching and shouting and firing shots. With some difficulty we explained to the natives what had happened, and we offered them large rewards if they were successful in finding him, and many of them joined with us; but though the ground was carefully quartered and the search was continued all that day and a part of the next not a trace of him was found anywhere, and it was evidently hopeless that he could ever be found alive. On the second day, when the search had been abandoned, the natives were convinced of his fate, and two of the more important people came over from the village and wailed loudly outside his empty tent.
On January 12th all doubts as to his end were set at rest when a canoe manned by four Papuans, smeared with mud as their custom is in such circumstances, brought back his body from a creek about half a mile from the camp, where it had been found. Up to that moment there had been present in our minds the horrid suspicion that he might perhaps have fallen the victim to foul play. We thought that natives finding him wandering alone might have been tempted by his possessions and have murdered him, but it was evidently not so and we could only hope that by drowning death had come swiftly to him.
CAMP OF THE EXPEDITION AT WAKATIMI.
A HOUSE FOR CEREMONIES, MIMIKA.
WILFRED STALKER
We buried him under a tree about one hundred yards behind the camp, and in the absence of the leader of the expedition, who had gone away with Rawling and Cramer to reconnoitre the river above Wakatimi, I read the short burial service. Besides Marshall and Shortridge and myself there were a Dutch soldier, two convicts and about fifty Papuans, who stood quietly in a wide circle about the grave. I think the ninetieth psalm was never read to a more remarkable congregation. The grave was the first of the graves of many who left their bones in New Guinea.
Wilfred Stalker was in his thirty-first year when he died. Previously he had spent many years as a naturalist in Australia and several months in New Guinea. Early in 1909 he returned to the East where he spent a part of his time in engaging coolies for the New Guinea Expedition, and he had time to make an interesting journey in the Island of Ceram, where he made a remarkable zoological collection. He joined us at Amboina on January 1st so that we had not time to know him well, but his unflagging energy in the preparations at the base-camp, where he landed with the first party, showed that he was a man whom the expedition could ill afford to lose.
[CHAPTER V]
Arrival of our Ambonese—Coolie Considerations—Canoes of the Natives—Making Canoes—Preliminary Exploration of the Mimika—Variable Tides—Completing the Camp—A Plague of Flies—Also of Crickets—Making “Atap”—Trading with the Natives—Trade Goods.
AMBONESE COOLIES
After all the stores and equipment of the expedition had been landed at Wakatimi, an operation which took six days and some ten or more journeys of the steam launch towing many boats to accomplish, the Nias returned to Dobo, and brought back from there on the 14th January our Ambonese coolies, who had arrived there by mail steamer from Amboina. To those of us who had had experience of native carriers in other countries, the appearance of the ninety-six Ambonese came as something of a shock. When the boats crowded with them came within sight of the camp the natives cried out that our women were coming, and they might well be excused for their mistake. With their wide straw hats and coloured coats and shirts and gay sarongs they had not much the appearance of men, and we wondered what sort of people they would be to force a way through the trackless country. When they landed, our first impression of their unsuitableness was rather strengthened than otherwise. Every man (to give them a dignity which very few of them deserved) had a large wooden or tin box as well as a huge bundle of bedding and mats. Their average age appeared to be about sixteen years, and though they were said to be the best men obtainable in Amboina, the physique of most of them was wretched. It was evidently useless to keep so many feeble creatures, so it was decided to keep fifty of the more promising and send the rest back to Amboina by the Nias, which was waiting at the mouth of the Mimika until the following day. The whole gang was paraded and a more hopeless looking lot it would be hard to imagine. With great difficulty we picked out fifty who, though they had little appearance of strength, were not obviously crippled by disease, and the forty-six others were sent away without having done a single day’s work.
CANOE-MAKING: ROUGHLY SHAPING THE FELLED TREE.
AMBONESE COOLIES
The question of coolies, as we were to find by bitter experience during the ensuing months, is the point that determines the success or failure of an expedition. Mr. Stalker had left England charged with the duty of engaging coolies for this expedition. It was hoped that he would be able to get a number of men in the Ké Islands, but failing to engage them there he had seen in Amboina his only chance of recruiting a sufficient number of men. No blame can be attached to him, for he had had no experience of the kind before and his instructions were not very detailed, but it was a mistake which seriously delayed the progress of the expedition.
As well as the trouble involved in trying to make a silk purse of efficient coolies out of the sow’s ear of the Amboina rabble we were confronted by another difficulty of transport. It has been mentioned above (page 43) that before we arrived in the country it was expected that we should find rising ground close to the sea, and that in a few days’ journey at the most we should reach an altitude of three thousand feet or upwards, but the discovery that there was a tract of level country hardly above sea level extending from the coast to the foot of the mountains thirty miles inland entirely upset our calculations. Had we known this before we should necessarily have brought a launch and boats to tow our stores up the many miles of navigable river, and by so doing we should have saved ourselves many weeks of valuable time and an infinity of labour. It is worth while to record this fact, not for the object of drawing attention to any deficiencies in the organisation of the expedition, but to demonstrate the uselessness of entering an unknown country without having made a preliminary reconnaissance.
An urgent message was despatched to the Navy Department in Java begging them to supply us with a steam launch at the earliest opportunity, but communications are slow in that part of the world, and it was not until ten weeks afterwards that the launch arrived at the Mimika. Its career was brief and inglorious. It made two or three journeys at snail’s pace up the river before it finally broke down altogether and was sent back to Java.
In June we purchased from the pearlfishers at Dobo a petrol motor-boat, which made several successful trips up the river towing large quantities of stores, and then it was badly damaged by coming into violent contact with a sunken tree, and it was several months before it could be repaired sufficiently to float. Thus it happened that nearly all the river transport of the expedition was laboriously carried out in canoes.
THE NATIVE CANOE
The canoes used by the natives on the Mimika and neighbouring rivers are simple “dug-outs,” that is they are made from one tree trunk without any joinery at all. They vary considerably in size but the length of an average canoe is about thirty-five feet. The sides curve inward towards the gunwale so that in section the canoe forms a large segment of a circle. The breadth at the gunwale is about eighteen inches and the breadth at the widest part from eighteen to twenty-four inches. The gunwales are almost horizontal, though in some boats there is a considerable “sheer” towards the end of the canoe. They end in a square bow and at the stern they come together to a fine point. The bottom of a canoe—there is no keel—slopes finely up from the middle towards the ends so that when the canoe is afloat several feet of its length at bow and stern are out of water.
The square bow of the canoe is carved in a more or less symmetrical fashion and there is usually a narrow margin of ornamental carving at intervals along the sides. A common feature of this carving, as also of the other native ornaments, is an object which is intended to represent the human eye. Occasionally they attach to the bow of the canoe, one on either side and one in the middle, three long boards carved in a sort of fretwork manner and painted red and white. These project about four feet in front of the bow and give it somewhat the appearance of a bird’s beak. The inside of the canoe is sometimes whitened with lime or sago powder but is otherwise not ornamented. A few feet from the stern, where the bottom begins to slope upwards, a low partition of wood is left forming as it were a sort of bulkhead; the space behind this is filled with sand on which a fire is kept burning.
Before we came to the country the whole business of canoe-making from the first felling of the tree to the final hollowing out of the inside was done with stone axes and the carving was done with sharpened shells, a labour which it is difficult to realise, so it is not surprising that the natives take very great care of their boats. They never allow water to stand in them for long, and at the end of a storm of rain the first thing they do is to go to the river and bail the water out of their canoes, which they do by scooping it out with the blade of a paddle. They also take good care of the outside and frequently char them with fire to kill the worms, which otherwise quickly destroy wood in brackish water.
The tree most commonly used for making canoes is Octomeles moluccana, which has a smooth pale trunk devoid of branches for a long way above the ground. When they can do so they choose a tree growing close to the river bank, but this is not always possible and we found a place where a tree for a canoe had been felled fully three hundred yards from the water. The trunk is roughly shaped where it lies and is then hauled with immense toil over logs laid on a rough track to the river; thence it is towed to the village where the hollowing and shaping is done at leisure. We saw a large number of canoes made at Parimau, and in nearly every case the balance was perfect when they were first put into the water.
CANOES, FINISHED AND UNFINISHED.
The canoes are usually propelled by paddles with long thin shafts and wide blades which are often beautifully carved, but in shallow places or rapid water the natives generally employ a long pole in the use of which they are very expert. It is easy enough to stand up and paddle or pole in large canoes, but the smaller craft are very top-heavy, and the natives perform wonderful feats of balancing in navigating them. Their education begins early for we saw in one of the villages small canoes three or four feet long, in which the children begin to learn the craft of the waterman almost before they have learned to walk.
PURCHASING CANOES
Though the people value their canoes very highly they were anxious enough to part with them in exchange for our knives and pieces of metal, of which they had none at all, and we very soon had a small fleet of canoes. The first two were bought for a knife apiece, but the price soon rose to an axe for a canoe, and in the course of several months it had still further risen to two axes or even two axes and a knife.
Within a few days of the arrival of our coolies we had purchased half a dozen canoes and preparations were made to send an exploring party up the river. At that time we were none of us skilful canoe-men and it was considered safer to use the canoes as rafts by lashing two side by side and securing a platform of bamboos across the top. This was a most cumbrous arrangement which added enormously to the labour of paddling, and after the first journey it was never repeated.
On the 18th January, Goodfellow, Rawling, and Shortridge with twenty-four coolies, six Gurkhas, and a small party of Javanese soldiers in the charge of a Dutch sergeant started up the river. They took with them about a dozen natives, hoping that they would work hard at paddling and would be useful in other ways, but they were a perpetual nuisance calling out for their wives and wanting to stop to eat or sleep; they finished by stealing one of the canoes and deserting the night before they would have been sent back to their homes. With them went another of our cherished illusions that we should be able to get a great deal of assistance from the natives of the country. The party proceeded up the river at an incredibly slow rate on account of the clumsy rafts, and for four days saw no signs of inhabitants. On the fifth day they found one isolated hut, and two days later after passing a few scattered huts they arrived at the village of Parimau, above which place the river appeared to be hardly navigable.
The welcome accorded to the party by the natives of Parimau was as enthusiastic as that at Wakatimi described above, the people showing their delight by smearing themselves with mud and shedding copious tears. During the following days, when a camp was being made, hundreds of natives flocked into the place to see the strange white men, who were exhibited to the new-comers with a sort of proprietary air by the natives of Parimau.
TIDES OF THE RIVER
In the meantime a great deal of work was necessary to put in order the base-camp at Wakatimi, and to render it secure against an attack, should the natives ever alter their friendly attitude towards us. The bush was completely cleared for some distance and a stout fence built about the camp. Then it was found that at high tide, and especially at spring tide, a large part of the camp was flooded and this necessitated a great amount of levelling and trenching and banking, a task which appealed to the fenland instinct of Cramer. The tide made itself felt in the river for several miles above Wakatimi, where there was a rise and fall of about ten feet, but the exact tidal movements were very difficult to recognise. On some days two tides were distinctly seen, while on many others there appeared to be only one. Their movements were further complicated by the very variable amount of water brought down by the river. Sometimes the river was almost stagnant, but at other times it swept down bank-high with a strong current for days at a time, and no flow of the tide could be noticed. The river Watuka, which joins the Mimika a few miles below Wakatimi, had a much greater volume of water than the latter river, and often when the tide was rising its waters were easily recognisable by their white colour floating up past the camp and holding back the waters of the Mimika in the same way that the Blue Nile, when it is in flood, forms a pond of the White Nile.
It was unfortunate that no suitable place for the base-camp could be found above the tidal water, because it increased the difficulty of supplying the camp with drinking water, and at times when there was not much fresh water coming down the river the ebb and flow of the tide washed the refuse backwards and forwards in front of the camp. Water was boiled and filtered every day in quantities large enough for every man in the camp to have as much as he wished, but the value of this precaution was to a large extent neutralised by the Malay habit of washing out the mouth with the water in which the man bathes.
A wooden landing stage for canoes was built out over the muddy bank, and a bathing place was cut off from the river by a wooden fence to protect bathers from crocodiles and sharks, both of which were occasionally seen, but as the natives bathed constantly without showing any fear of either animal the precaution was perhaps needless.
FLIES AND CRICKETS
At that time when the ground was being cleared we began to be plagued by large blue-bottle flies, which swarmed about the camp and laid their eggs everywhere. One of their favourite laying grounds was in our bedding, which in a hot damp climate must always be hung out to air when the sun shines. You would find two folds of your blanket stuck together with horrible masses of eggs and if, as sometimes happened, you did not scrape them all away you would wake up at night and find yourself crawling with maggots. There are some people who are afraid of spiders, but the most timorous of mortals must find the homely spider preferable to the loathsome blow fly. The house where we mostly lived at Wakatimi and where we had our meals was immediately filled with blue-bottles the moment our food was brought in, so we encouraged the larger sort of spider to live there and one old fellow who lived under the corner of the table used to come out at meal times and take his toll of flies, and in the course of time he became so tame that he would take a living fly out of your fingers.
At the same time, and indeed during the whole of our stay in the country, we were greatly annoyed by the depredations of very large crickets. Not content with making a most distracting noise by night these horrible creatures did endless damage to our eatable possessions. They invaded the sacks in which we kept our scanty garments, socks, vests and the like, and riddled them into holes, and they appeared to have a special partiality for sponges and brushes, which they devoured completely. Even more serious were their attacks on folded tents or sacks of rice and flour, which had to be constantly taken out of the store houses and repaired. When these things were taken out of the house a large number of crickets were taken out too, and then was the chance for the Kingfishers (Halcyon sanctus) which darted down and snapped them up. A pair of these beautiful little birds haunted the camp and became so tame that they would fly down from the roof of a house and pick up a cricket within a foot or two of a man.
BUILDING MATERIAL
When the ground had been well cleared and levelled, we set about the business of building barracks for the men and store houses for the provisions and equipment. The Dutch contingent had brought with them regulation army barrack frames, pieces of seasoned wood of definite lengths which are fitted together by bolts and screws, and form the skeleton of excellent houses. We had nothing of the kind, but the jungle supplied plenty of wood and our houses, though less regular than those of the Dutch, were very soon built. It is easy enough to put up the framework of a house in a place where there is plenty of timber, but the walls and the roof are a more difficult matter. Fortunately the natives were adepts in the art of making “atap,” which they use for roofing their own huts, and they were soon eagerly making it for us in exchange for our trade goods.
MAKING “ATAP” FOR ROOFING.
The best “atap” is made from the leaves of the Nipa palm (Nipa fruticans) which grows abundantly in the swampy country. Almost equally good “atap” can be made from the Sago palm, but the leaves of the Coconut palm shrivel quickly and are of no use for the purpose. The method of the manufacture of “atap” is briefly as follows: Leaflets of the palm are stripped from the stem, which is then split into three or four sticks of about an inch and a half in diameter and five or six feet in length. The man begins by taking up a leaf and folding it in the middle, thus breaking the mid-rib of the leaf. He then frees the mid-rib from the surrounding leaf for a short distance and breaks off a piece about three inches long for use presently. Then holding the stick near the end he pushes the free end of the mid-rib, which is separated from the leaf, into the soft substance of the stick and folds the leaf once round the stick in such a way that its two free ends lie one upon the other. He then clips together the free ends with the short piece he had broken from the mid-rib. He then repeats the process with another leaf, making each one slightly overlap the last, until the stick is completely covered with folded leaves. It should be said that each leaf is about three inches wide and four feet long so that the free ends, when the leaf is folded, lie about two feet from the stick. “Atap” is always made by the men, never by the women, and a quick worker will make a complete piece in about ten minutes.
The method of roofing with “atap” is very simple. Pieces are fixed by strands of rattan to the timbers of the roofing beginning from below and overlapping each other like tiles. The stick end of the “atap” is uppermost and the free ends point downwards. When there is no lack of “atap” and the pieces can be laid on the roof very closely together it forms a most efficient thatch, which keeps the house tolerably cool in the hot weather and is impervious to the heaviest downfall of rain.
The demand for “atap” started our regular trade with the natives, it brought us into friendly relations with them and they soon discovered that they could put confidence in us. When they found that we really paid them, as we promised, in beads and cloth, there was keen competition in the “atap” trade and they brought us as much as we wanted. For a few pieces only they received beads, while for ten pieces and upwards we paid them in cloth and they adopted various tricks to obtain cloth, when they knew that the amount they brought was only worth beads. One of their dodges was to bring old pieces of “atap” from their own houses to increase the size of the pile, and sometimes a man would steal two or three pieces from the pile of another man who had already been paid, but they were always found out and were not in the least ashamed of themselves. It was important to keep the price low, because we very well knew that when the people had obtained as much cloth and as many beads as they wanted they would never do any more work, and that did occur after a few months. They greatly enjoyed a little foolery. For instance, when you were paying them in cloth it was much more appreciated if you wound it artistically about the recipient’s head than if you merely thrust it into his hands; and in paying a man in beads it was thought a great joke if you let them slowly trickle into his palm out of your closed fist. His smile would grow with the pile of beads in his hand, and he always hoped to find some more concealed between your fingers.
In addition to “atap” they also brought other things for trade, sometimes fish from the sea which were generally uneatable, and sometimes delicious prawns six or eight inches long from the river estuary. There was a constant trade in coconuts which grew in some numbers about Wakatimi, and occasionally we bought a bunch of bananas. Living birds of many kinds, cassowaries, pigeons, kingfishers, lories and parrots were often brought for sale, but the poor creatures were generally taken straight from the nest, and the soldiers and coolies who bought them quickly stuffed them to death with rice. Some of the lories throve and became tame enough to fly about at liberty, and the cassowaries became quite a pest in the camp.
TRADING WITH THE NATIVES
So keen did the people become on trading that they would barter all their worldly possessions for European goods. Stone clubs and axes, bows and arrows, spears and drums, the skulls of their forebears, indeed all their moveable goods were brought to us for exchange. It may sound rather a mean transaction to buy from a Papuan a stone axe, which has probably been in his family for generations, for a small knife or coloured handkerchief, but he was always delighted with the exchange and when both parties to it are satisfied a bargain may be considered a just one.
Our trade goods consisted mostly of coloured beads, red cloth, knives of various sizes, and axes. Of these the red cloth was by far the most useful and the most sought after. The Dutch had cloth of various shades and patterns, but the natives, with a true eye for colour, knew that our red stuff suited their dark skins better than any shade of green or blue. The axes were given in exchange for canoes, and knives were mostly used to pay the men who carried for us in the interior. Fish hooks were greatly appreciated by the natives of the coast villages, but the Jews’ harps of which we had a large quantity, though they are greatly in demand among the Papuans of British New Guinea and in some of the Pacific Islands, were of no use to us for trade, and the few we gave away were used either as ornaments round the neck or as ear-rings. There was always a great demand for cast-off clothing, but a Papuan wearing a pair of tattered trousers or a fragment of a shirt was so unpleasant to look at and he generally became so demoralised in character, that we made it a rule not to give them any of our rags. Empty bottles were of course greatly sought after and the many thousands of tins which we emptied during the course of the expedition were wealth untold to a people, who up to that time had possessed no sort of vessel.
PAPUAN WOMAN CANOEING UP THE MIMIKA.
(Smoke is seen from the fire in the stern.)
[CHAPTER VI]
Difficulties of Food—Coolies’ Rations—Choice of Provisions—Transporting Supplies up the Mimika—Description of the River—A Day’s Work—Monotonous Scenery—Crowned Pigeons—Birds of Paradise and Others—Snakes, Bees and other Creatures—Rapids and Clear Water—The Seasons—Wind—Rain—Thunderstorms—Halley’s Comet.
One of the principal obstacles in the way of successful exploration in Dutch New Guinea is the lack of food in the country itself. It is true that in the low-lying swampy districts near the coast there are plenty of Sago-palms, but the majority of Malays are not sago eaters except under compulsion, and the preparation of sago to make it only tolerably palatable is a tedious business. Moreover the first object of an expedition to the mountains is to leave the swamps behind as soon as possible. So it follows that every scrap of food, for the coolies as well as for the Europeans, has to be brought into the country from outside, and it will be evident that, when the means of transport are distressingly slow, the provisions must diminish considerably in quantity as they are carried towards the interior.
SUPPLIES
The mainstay of the food of Malay coolies and soldiers is rice, of which the daily ration is one katti (1-1/3 pounds); to this is added about a quarter of a pound of dried meat or dried fish. Once or twice a week the rice was replaced by kachang ijau, a small round green bean, which is supposed to be of use in preventing the onset of beri-beri, though it is very doubtful whether this is the case; the beans are boiled and are eaten either with salt or with brown Javanese sugar. A full ration for a coolie also includes tea, coffee, salt and chillies. When it is remembered that the numbers of the expedition were never less than one hundred and twenty and were often more than one hundred and sixty, and since it was considered advisable always to have a supply for several months in advance in the eventuality of communication with Amboina becoming impossible, it can be imagined that the amount of stores necessary for the whole party was no small thing. The management of the stores of Cramer’s party alone, of which every detail had to be accounted for to the Government, occupied the full time of a Dutch sergeant and a native clerk.
Not only was a great deal of labour involved in dealing with such an immense bulk of stores, but there was considerable difficulty in preserving them from the ill effects of the climate. Our first consignment of rice arrived in sacks, and the futility of that method of packing was apparent, when a great quantity of it was spoilt by a shower of rain between the steamer and the base-camp. The next lot was packed in tins with lids; when these were turned upside down the rice trickled out or water trickled in, and again a large quantity was lost or spoilt. After that it was put into tins of which the tops were soldered down, but even that was not quite successful, for it often happened that a pin-hole was left unsoldered, through which moisture would eventually find its way and the rice be spoilt.
Even more difficult than the rice to keep dry were the dried fish and dried meat, which were sent to us packed in wooden boxes; the stuff quickly became sodden from the moisture-laden atmosphere, and although we kept coolies constantly employed in drying it in the sun, an enormous amount of it became rotten and was thrown away. The only effectual method of preserving the dried meat and fish is to seal it up like the rice in soldered tins. The tin always used for this purpose is the rectangular tin in which kerosene oil is imported to the East; filled with rice it weighs about forty pounds.
In writing the history of this expedition I should not be honest if I were to refrain from mentioning the fact that some of our own stores were, to say the least, ill-chosen. It appeared that a large quantity of stores had been bought from the Shackleton Expedition, which had returned from the Antarctic a few months before we left England. However suitable those provisions may have been for a Polar expedition, they were not the sort of thing one would have chosen for a journey in the Tropics. For instance, large tins of “bully-beef” are excellent in a cold climate, but when you open them near the Equator you find that they consist of pallid lumps of pink flesh swimming in a nasty gravy. Pea-soup and pea-flour, of which we had nearly four hundred pounds’ weight, strike terror into the stoutest heart, when the temperature is 86° in the shade. Pickles are all very well in their way for those that like them, but one hundred and sixty bottles was more than a generous allowance. Punch, in commenting on a newspaper misprint which stated that “the British Ornithologists Union Expedition to Papua was joined at Singapore by ten pickled Gurkhas,” suggested that it was “no doubt a misprint for gherkins.” We were glad that Mr. Punch was mistaken and that we had not increased our store of pickles at Singapore.
The packing was almost as remarkable as the choice of the stores themselves: they were secured in strong packing cases of large and variable size fastened with bands of iron and an incredible number of nails, suitable enough to withstand the banging of Polar storms, but not well adapted to their present purpose. The boxes were all too big for convenient transport, and as each one was filled with food of one kind only every box had to be opened at once and a selection made from them.
SUPPLIES
Here it must be said that, in response to our comments on the stores and the packing, the Committee sent out to us an excellent supply of provisions from Messrs. Fortnum and Mason, properly packed in light “Vanesta” cases. These reached us at the end of August and during the rest of our stay in the country we fared well.
JANGBIR AND HERKAJIT, GURKHAS.
We took with us a small supply of whisky and brandy, which was often acceptable, and I believe that in an excessively damp climate a small quantity of alcohol may be beneficial. The Dutch took with them dry Hollands gin, which is drunk with a small quantity of bitters before dinner; it certainly has the effect of coaxing your appetite for tinned foods, all of which, when you have lived on them for a few months, have the same dull taste.
It may be thought that the above discourse on the subject of food is unduly long, but I shall make no apology for it, because equally with the question of transport the question of food is of paramount importance. The recital of some of the mistakes that we made may serve as a warning to others, who wish to visit a similar district. In countries like Africa and many parts of Asia, where the people cultivate the soil and where there are numbers of game animals, you may always look forward to varying your fare with some fresh food, either animal or vegetable; but when you go to New Guinea you must be prepared to live wholly on dried and tinned foods, and that is only possible when they are varied and of the best manufacture.
THE MIMIKA RIVER
During the first months of our stay in New Guinea most of the energies of the expedition were spent in transporting supplies from the base-camp at Wakatimi to the camp at Parimau up the Mimika River. And indeed it may be said that this was one of the principal occupations of the expedition from beginning to end; for our coolies were very soon worn out by sickness and the unaccustomed labour, so that they had to be sent back to their homes, and by the time that a fresh batch of coolies arrived in the country the store of provisions at Parimau was exhausted and the process of taking up a fresh supply had to be begun again.
It was not until our third batch of coolies came at the end of December, that we were able to accumulate enough stores at Parimau to serve as a base for a moderately long expedition from that place. Before that time it had never been possible to make a longer march than three days from Parimau, and there had been long periods when from lack of coolies everything had been at a standstill. Those times were of course excessively trying both to the health and to the tempers of the members of the expedition. It was irksome beyond words to see day after day the mountains in the distance and to be unable to move a step nearer to them.
HAULING CANOES UP THE MIMIKA.
The distance from Wakatimi to Parimau, though only twenty-two miles as the crow flies, was about forty miles by water, and it took from five to seven days, according to the state of the river, to accomplish the journey in canoes. While the coolies were still comparatively fresh, we sometimes sent off as many as six canoes at a time from Wakatimi to Parimau, but with sickness and fatigue their numbers quickly diminished and two or three canoes laden with stores, accompanied by one “escort” canoe manned by Javanese soldiers and convicts, was the size of the usual river “transport.” The larger canoes were paddled by five or six and the smaller by four men; the average load carried by one canoe was about eight hundred pounds’ weight, of which a considerable amount was consumed on the journey. The men were given one day’s rest at Parimau, they came down the river in two days and rested for two days at Wakatimi before starting up the river again. One of us accompanied them on nearly every journey with a view to preventing the men from lingering too many days on the voyage and partly as a protection from the natives, who paid great respect to us but were inclined to behave rudely to the coolies, if they were not accompanied by an European.
Those days of canoeing up the Mimika River were some of the most monotonous of my life and I shall never forget them. For the first few miles above Wakatimi the river is about as wide as the Thames at Windsor, the banks are covered with smallish trees with here and there clumps of palm trees, from which fresh young coconuts may be gathered. Occasionally the rising tide helps you on your way, and if you are particularly fortunate you may even see at the end of a straight reach of the river a glimpse of the distant mountains. But very soon the river narrows to half its width, the huge trees of the regular New Guinea jungle shut out all except a narrow strip of sky, and the river twists and meanders towards all the points of the compass, until you wonder whether it will not eventually bring you back to the point whence you started. There was one bend of the river which was particularly remarkable; it made an almost complete circle of about a mile and a half in circumference, ending at a point exactly forty yards distant from its commencement, so that by landing and walking across a narrow neck you could wait for more than half an hour for the canoes to overtake you.
The rate of travel varied with the efficiency of the coolies and according to the strength of the current in the river, which was sometimes very sluggish, and at other times came swirling down at three or four miles an hour. We cleared camping places at various points along the river, and, if the pace was good, the average stage was about six hours, though it often took ten or even twelve hours when the river was in flood. The pleasantest camping places were on mudbanks, where the coolies could bathe and pitch their tents without trouble, but they were very liable to be flooded by a sudden rise of the river during the night, and we generally had our own tents pitched on a space cleared in the jungle at the top of a steep bank.
CANOEING UP THE MIMIKA
It will be convenient to describe a day’s voyage up the Mimika by taking an extract from my diary:—
“May 13. The monotony of the river is beyond words, and one day is almost exactly like another. I get up at six o’clock and breakfast off cocoa and biscuits and butter, whilst the camp is coming down, i.e. tents, etc., being packed. Spend the next hour or rather more in hurrying on the coolies with their food, which they ought always to begin to cook half an hour earlier than they do. See everything put into the canoes and then start with the last. After that anything from five to twelve hours’ sitting on a damp tent with one’s feet in more or less (according to the weather) water swishing from side to side of the canoe. Sometimes I paddle, but not so much now as I did the first time I came up the river, not from laziness but because the irregular time is so horribly irritating. If the coolies would only paddle lazily but regularly all would be well, but they will not; they paddle all together furiously for perhaps twenty or thirty strokes and then vary between a haphazard rag-time and doing nothing at all.
“Most of the time I watch the banks go by and wonder how long it will take us to get to the end of this reach, which bears a remarkable resemblance to the last and to the next. The jungle is as ugly as it can be, rank undergrowth, trailing rattans and scraggy rotting trees. In forty miles I do not think there are half a dozen big trees worth looking at. Very occasionally you see a flowering creeper, one with clusters of white flowers is here and there, and I have seen a few of the gorgeous flaming D’Albertis creeper (Mucuna pruriens). Butterflies are seldom seen and birds one hardly hears at all. The banks are steep slimy brown mud, littered with the trunks and limbs of rotten trees, which also stick up all over the river like horrid muddy bones.
“Altogether it is as gloomy and depressing as it can be, there is no view, not even a glimpse to shew that we are getting near a mountain range. In the midst of all this it generally rains hard and you arrive in camp soaking wet. Then see everything taken out of the canoes, tents pitched, canoes securely moored, food given out to the coolies, and by that time it is well on into the afternoon. Wet wood is somehow coaxed into boiling a kettle and I get a cup of tea, very good. At six o’clock the meal of the day, rice or a tin, but one eats very little on these journeys. After dinner a book and tobacco and to bed about nine o’clock, or earlier if the mosquitoes are troublesome. It does not compare favourably with being ‘on safari’ in Africa, and I frequently wish myself back on one of those interminable roads which I have so often cursed.”
BIRDS
But it must not be supposed that there were not occasional pleasant moments, which to some extent were compensation for the monotony of those days. Sometimes you saw a Crowned Pigeon (Goura sclateri) by the water’s edge, and by paddling quietly you could approach within a few yards before it flew lazily across the river and alighted on a low branch. The Crowned Pigeon is one of the handsomest of New Guinea birds; it is as big as a large domestic fowl, of an uniform mauve grey colour with a large white patch on the wings, and on its head is a crest of delicate grey plumes, which it opens and shuts like a fan. These birds feed mostly on fruits, but they also eat small molluscs and crabs, which they pick up on the river bank. As they were almost the only eatable birds in the country, we killed a good many of them, but their numbers appeared to be in no way diminished when we left the country; the flesh is white and excessively dry.
A PAPUAN OF MIMIKA WITH CLOSELY PLAITED HAIR.
The little red King Bird of Paradise (Cicinnurus regius) is heard calling everywhere, and from the upper waters of the river you hear the harsh cry of the Greater Bird of Paradise (Paradisea novae guineae), but both of these are birds of the dense forest and I do not remember ever having seen one from the river.
Green and red Eclectus Parrots (Eclectus pectoralis) and white Lemon-crested Cockatoos are fairly numerous and their harsh screams, though sufficiently unpleasing are a welcome interruption of the prevailing silence.
Lories were not often seen on the river journeys, but they were extremely common near Wakatimi, where a certain clump of trees was used by them as a regular roosting-place. For an hour or more before sunset countless hundreds of Lories (Eos fuscata) flew in flocks from all directions towards the roosting-trees, chattering loudly as they flew and even louder after they had perched. Often a branch would give way under the living weight and then the whole throng would rise in the air again and circle round and round before they alighted once more and the shouting and chattering continued until it was dark.
Crocodiles were very seldom seen, but Iguanas of two or three feet in length were often seen sunning themselves on a log or a stump, from which they would splash hurriedly into the water as the canoes approached. Several times at night I heard a splash as loud as the plunge of a man into water, but I could never discover what was the animal that caused it; there may yet possibly be some large unknown reptile in the river. Snakes were sometimes seen curled up in the overhanging vegetation and very commonly they were found swimming in the water; one day I counted eleven small harmless snakes swimming within half a mile of the same place.
On many days during the months of May and June the river swarmed with large bright yellow flies very similar to, but about twice the size of, the Green Drake of the fly-fisher. They hatched out about mid-day and took longer or shorter flights over the water, rising from it and alighting again like miniature aeroplanes. Many of them fell a prey to swallows and bee-eaters and other insect-eating birds, while the rest were quickly drowned, and I have seen long stretches of the river completely covered by the dead insects.
At some of the camps on the river and elsewhere we were a good deal bothered by small bees, the Stingless Honey-bee (Melipona praeterita). These annoying little creatures—they are about half the size of the common house-fly—buzzed about you in swarms and strove most persistently to settle on any exposed part of your body in pursuit of the sweat, which is never absent from you in those places. No matter how you beat about and killed them they were back again immediately and once, while writing, I kept my hands quite still on the book and in a few moments I counted forty-six on my two hands before their crawling became unbearable. They have a disagreeably sticky feeling as they crawl over you and your hands, when you have squashed a number of them, become sticky too.
NIGHT ON THE RIVER
At night, when the rain was not drumming ceaselessly on the roof of the tent, the silence was broken now and then by the grating call of a Brush Turkey (Talegallus fuscirostris)[6]; or a flock of Pale Crows (Gymnocorax senex), which are curiously nocturnal in their habits, would fly over the camp cawing like muffled rooks. Lizards and frogs uttered all sorts of strange cries and whistles, and the mournful unbirdlike note of the Frogmouth (Podargus papuensis) was heard on every side.
Sometimes, even when there was no wind stirring, you would hear at night a noise like thunder as some great tree went crashing down. Most of the trees in the jungle do not attain a very great girth, but they grow up very rapidly to reach the light and in their upper branches there is soon accumulated a dense mass of climbers and parasitic plants, which in the course of time become too heavy for the tree and cause it to collapse. The floor of the jungle is strewn with the limbs and trunks of fallen trees and the smell of rotting wood is everywhere.
The last, usually the fifth, day of the journey up the river was always pleasant, partly because one knew that there were only a few more hours of the tedious voyage, and partly because the scenery was beginning to change. Beautiful Tree-ferns appeared upon the banks and the soil, firmer than in the swampy lands near the coast, supported trees of finer growth. Scattered pebbles and then banks of clean sand and shingle began to take the place of the hideous mud of the lower river, and after spending, as frequently happened, many weeks at Wakatimi, where the smallest pebble would have been an object of wonder, it was a peculiar pleasure to feel the grit of stones under your feet again. At the same time the cocoa-brown water became clear and sparkling and one drank it for the very pleasure of drinking. Going further we came to rapids, where the river ran over stones, or piled-up barriers of fallen trees. Passages were cut through many of these obstacles, but every succeeding flood brought down more trees and new barriers were formed.
When the river was low, the last four miles to Parimau were covered by wading and hauling the canoes over or under the great logs. Every man had to get out of the canoe and do his share of the work, and sometimes we had to take the cargo out as well, when the canoe had to be dragged over a particularly high obstacle. When the river was in flood, the last day’s journey was the most arduous of all, and it sometimes took twelve or fourteen hours’ hard labour to accomplish it. The water was then too deep for poling, and the current was so swift that vigorous paddling hardly did more than prevent the canoe from following the stream, and it was only by dodging from one side of the river to the other and by hauling on overhanging branches that progress was made.
Head-dresses made of plaited fibres, worn at festivals and ceremonies. 1. is ornamented with tufts of plumes of the Greater Bird of Paradise.
Considering the want of skill of the coolies and the great number of journeys that were made up and down the river, it was wonderful that no accidents of any consequence occurred. It is true that a good many canoes capsized—I think all of us had at least one involuntary ducking—but a well-laden canoe is comparatively steady, and most of the upsets happened to empty canoes going down the river and nothing was lost but coolies’ scanty baggage, which was easily replaced. The Javanese coolies of the escort, who were even less skilled watermen than ours, suffered rather more accidents, but one boat-load of provisions and two rifles were the total of their losses.
THE LONG WET SEASON
There were periods, lasting for several weeks, when the river was almost continually in flood, and there were other, but always shorter, periods when the river was low; but though we spent fifteen months in New Guinea the time was not long enough to determine at all accurately the limits of the seasons, for the first three months of 1911 differed considerably from the corresponding months of the previous year. Speaking generally, it may be said of the Mimika district that the weather from mid-October to the middle of April is finer than the weather from the middle of April to the middle of October. These two periods correspond more or less with the monsoons, but it is notable that whereas in British New Guinea the period of the Eastern monsoon, May to November, is the drier, here the reverse is the case. The finest weather appears to be in November and December, and the wettest weather is in July, August and September. The terms “fine” and “wet” are used only relatively, for it is almost always wet. In the first twelve months of our stay rain fell on three hundred and thirty days. It was very unfortunate that we did not provide ourselves with rain-gauges for use at Wakatimi and Parimau, where interesting observations might have been recorded for a year or more. A roughly constructed rain-gauge, which was used for a short time, more than once recorded a fall of over six inches of rain in one night, and that was in the comparatively dry season of March.
A great deal of the rain fell in thunderstorms. From January 4th, 1910, to January 4th, 1911, I heard thunder on two hundred and ninety-five days, not including days on which I saw distant lightning but did not hear the thunder.
Before we left England it was thought that the party ought to include a geologist, but it was impossible to add to our numbers, which were already sufficiently great. As it fell out, we hardly reached geological country at all and a geologist would have spent an idle time, but there would have been plenty of occupation for a well equipped hydrologist.
The winds, whether from the East or from the West, were very variable both in force and constancy. Sometimes there would blow a fierce wind for two or three days followed by several days of calm. At other times a steady wind would blow for two or three weeks and so great would be the surf on the sea-shore that no ship could approach the mouth of the river. The wind usually dropped before sunset and the nights were calm.
HALLEY’S COMET
It followed naturally from the heavy rainfall that the nights were seldom clear, and at one time Marshall waited for three months before he could take an observation from a star. But there were times even in the wet weather, when the rain poured down during the day and at night the heavens were clear. One of these times fortunately occurred in May, when Halley’s Comet was approaching the Earth. On May 9th the comet, looking like a muffled star, was seen in the East and its tail, a broad beam of brilliant light, extended upwards through about thirty degrees. Below the comet and a little to the South of it Venus shone like a little moon, appearing far bigger than any planet I have ever seen. The comet grew enormously and in the early morning of May 14th, the last time that we saw it completely before it had passed the Earth, the tail blazed across the heavens like an immense search-light beam to the zenith and beyond. On May 26th it appeared again in the evening, reduced in size to about forty-five degrees, and several nights we watched it growing always smaller, until it vanished from our sight. Superlative expressions will not describe Halley’s Comet as we saw it in New Guinea; it was a wonderful appearance and one never to be forgotten. Our coolies and the Javanese declared that it portended much sickness and death. Though we tried to question them about it, we never learnt how it impressed the minds of the natives.
[CHAPTER VII]
Exploration of the Kapare River—Obota—Native Geography—River Obstructions—Hornbills and Tree Ducks—Gifts of Stones—Importance of Steam Launch—Cultivation of Tobacco—Sago Swamps—Manufacture of Sago—Cooking of Sago—The Dutch Use of Convict Labour.
Towards the end of January Capt. Rawling, who had gone up the Mimika River with the first party to Parimau, made an excursion to the N.W. of that place, and at a distance of about four miles he came to a river, which we afterwards learnt to know as the Kapare, of much greater volume than the Mimika, and therefore likely to spring from mountains much higher than those that gave rise to the Mimika. Had we known at the time that our real objective, the highest mountains of the range, lay far to the N.E., we should have neglected the Kapare River, and by so doing we should have spared ourselves many weeks of labour; but at the same time we should have missed seeing a wide area of unknown country, and we might possibly have failed to make the discovery of the pygmy tribe, who inhabit the hilly country between the Kapare and the upper waters of the Mimika River.
UPPER WATERS OF THE KAPARE RIVER. MOUNT TAPIRO IN DISTANCE.
It appeared that the Kapare might offer a better route to the higher mountains than the Mimika, so it was decided that we should explore its lower waters and see whether it was possible to reach it from our base-camp. Accordingly on February 14th Lieut. Cramer, Marshall and I set out in three canoes, taking with us provisions sufficient for a week’s journey. Two miles below Wakatimi we entered and began to ascend the Watuka River, of which, as has been noted above (p. [40]), the Mimika is but a tributary. After proceeding a mile or two up the Watuka we came to another junction of two rivers, and for the first time we began to realise the extraordinary network of waterways, which traverse the low-lying lands of that part of New Guinea. We learnt afterwards that there are inland channels joining several of the rivers to the East of the Mimika in such a way that it is possible to travel by water from Wakatimi to villages far distant along the coast without going by sea, and no doubt the same is true in a Westerly direction.
The junction we had then reached was formed by a wide river coming, apparently, from due North and a much smaller branch, not more than ten yards wide, but deep and swift, joining it from the West. It appeared to be quite certain that the river we were in search of must be the Northern branch, and we should have followed it at once had not a number of natives appeared on the bank, and asked us to go and visit their village, which, they explained, was a short distance up the Western branch.
VISIT TO OBOTA
We soon reached Obota, as the village was called, a collection of about one hundred huts on both banks of the narrow river, and there we were accorded the usual welcome by a large crowd of people. As it was still early in the day we were anxious to continue our journey, and we proposed to go up the Northern branch, but the natives assured us that that led to nowhere and broke up into branches in the jungle, while the small stream which flowed through the village was the river flowing directly from the mountains.
It should be explained that this information was conveyed to us partly by long speeches of which we understood little or nothing, but chiefly by means of maps drawn on the ground. Some of the men drew their rivers crossing one another in a rather improbable manner, but many of them drew charts very intelligently, and at different times we obtained from the natives a good deal of geographical information which was substantially correct. On this occasion their maps all agreed in tracing the big river to branches in the jungle, and the small river to the mountains, so we were rather reluctantly persuaded that they were right, and we tried to induce some of them to go with us. Many of them offered to go the next day, but not one would start then—it was too late, it was going to rain, they had not eaten, and many other excuses—so we got into our canoes and attempted to paddle up the stream and found, what the natives doubtless knew, that we could not advance at all. Several times we tried, but were always driven back by the strong current, to the great delight of the natives who lined the banks and laughed at our feeble efforts, so there was nothing for it but to make a camp near the village and wait till the next day.
RIVER OBSTACLES
There was some difficulty about inducing the men to start in the morning, for it was raining, and, like other naked peoples, the Papuans dislike being wetted by rain, but we got off eventually with two natives, one at the bow and one at the stern, in each canoe, in addition to the crews of four Javanese soldiers and convicts. It was soon evident that without the help of the natives we could not possibly have ascended the river. For a mile or two above Obota the water ran like a mill-race in a very narrow channel full of rocks and sunken trees, and it was only by the most skilful poling and, when a chance occurred, by hauling the canoes along a side channel that we were able to proceed. When we returned a few days later, we skimmed in fifteen minutes down the rapids which we had taken more than three hours to ascend.
Above the rapids the river widened to about forty yards and the strength of the current was proportionately less, but in a few miles we met with another difficulty. At a sharp bend of the river the whole channel was blocked by an enormous barrier of huge trunks and limbs of trees piled high upon each other and wedged below into a solid mass. For larger boats this might have meant a delay of many days spent in cutting a channel, but the dug-out canoe is narrow and, if not flexible, it can be squeezed through the most unlikely openings, so that we passed the barrier without the loss of many hours.
When we started from Obota we had been doubtful whether it was possible that so small a river could possibly come from the mountains; but a little way above the barrier of logs our doubts were set at rest, when we found that our river was a mere off-shoot from another more than twice its volume, which flowed down to the sea at a village called Periepia. The main river, the Kapare, where we joined it, was more than a hundred yards wide, and in the next two days’ journey it hardly diminished at all in size. The character of the river differed markedly from that of the Mimika; its bed was of sand, denoting its mountain origin, in contrast to the brown mud of the Mimika and other jungle rivers, and its course was a procession of magnificent bends, quite unlike the paltry windings of the Mimika.
Paddling slowly up the river we disturbed companies of Hornbills (Rhytidoceros plicatus) which were feeding at the tops of the trees. These peculiarly hideous birds bark like dogs, and the loud “swishing” of their wings, as they slowly take flight, has been likened (not inaptly) to the starting puffs of a railway train. On this and on the other rivers we were often pleasantly reminded of home by the note of the Common Sandpiper (Totanus hypoleucus) which seemed to be quite as much at home in New Guinea as in its northern haunts. The last of these were seen in early April, and they began to reappear before the end of July. Very interesting birds, of which we saw a great number on this river, are the black and white Tree Ducks (Tadorna radjah). They have the curious habit of perching very cleverly on the topmost branches of the trees, and they make a pretty whistling by night.
VEGETATION ON THE BANKS OF THE KAPARE RIVER.
There were no signs of human habitation along the banks, until on the third day we came to a small village of a dozen huts, in the middle of which was a tall house built of bamboos, used for ceremonials and dancing. The few people inhabiting the place were of a very low order of intelligence, if one may judge from the apathy with which they received us and saw us go on our way.
As we proceeded further, on the fourth day the river became a good deal smaller, having derived several tributaries from the low hills which were by that time not far distant on the right bank, and as the current became increasingly swifter it was evident that the Kapare did not promise a better means of approach by water to the mountains than the Mimika.
THE FIRST PEBBLES
We were rather amused, when we came to the first bank of shingle, by the natives who were with us bringing us gifts of stones, as though they were something new and rare: probably they thought that as we came, for all they knew, from the sea, we had never seen such things before.
On the fifth day we left the baggage behind and went on in one unladen canoe, hoping to reach the point where Rawling had met the Kapare River by walking overland from the Mimika, but we were stopped a few miles short of that place by heavy rapids, which effectually prevented any further investigation of the river.
The excursion up the Kapare was a further illustration, if one had been needed, of the futility of undertaking an expedition in that country without a steam launch or motor-boat. When it was found that the Mimika was only an insignificant river, which the first excursion up it would have shown, the Kapare River might have been explored from Periepia, a matter which could have been done in two days instead of the seven occupied by the journey in canoes, and after that other rivers to the East might have been explored until one convenient for approaching the mountains had been found.
After spending a night on a sand bank from which we were very nearly washed away by a sudden flood, we paddled leisurely down the river and came in one day again to Obota. Though the two places are so close together and communication between them is very frequent, the inhabitants of Obota are a much better lot of people than those of Wakatimi. The Obota men, who came up the river with us, worked steadily for several days, a thing we never could persuade the Wakatimi men to do, and, a more striking sign of their superiority, the Obota people cultivate the soil, whereas the Wakatimi people never do anything of the kind.
TOBACCO
Many acres of ground on both sides of the river were cleared of bush and planted with bananas and sweet potatoes; we never succeeded in obtaining any of the latter, but bananas were brought for us to buy and in the circumstances they seemed to us to be excellent. The most extensive crop cultivated at Obota is tobacco; they plant out the seedlings and shelter them with a low roof of bent sticks covered with leaves, until the young plants are strong enough to bear the full force of the sun and rain. Almost every native smokes, men and women, and very often the children. A small handful of the dried leaves is taken and very carefully rolled up in the form of a cigar, and then wrapped round with a sirih leaf, which has been previously warmed over the fire; the ends are bitten square, and sometimes the leaf is tied round the middle with a thread of fibre to prevent its unrolling. The tobacco is strong in flavour, but not at all unpleasant to smoke. The only other place, except among the pygmy people of the hills, where we found cultivation was up the Keaukwa River, a few miles to the E. of the Mimika River.
The distribution of tobacco in New Guinea is rather a puzzling question. There are many places on the coast where its use was unknown until quite recently, while at the same time the mountain people, for example, in the Arfak Mountains and on the upper reaches of the Fly and Kaiserin Augusta Rivers, have been accustomed to cultivate it and to barter it with their neighbours in the lowlands. The Tapiro pygmy people, who live in the mountains, cultivate tobacco and exchange it with the Papuans of the upper Mimika who grow none themselves. These facts have led some people to suppose that the tobacco plant is indigenous in New Guinea.
The people of Obota were rich in worldly possessions, for as we walked through the village we saw two Chinese brass gongs and a large porcelain pot, which they told us came from “Tarete.” It may be that at some time a Malay or Arab trader from Ternate came over to this part of the coast, but it is impossible to know; perhaps the things had been stolen and exchanged from one village to another, from the West end of the island, which is often visited by Ternate traders.
SAGO
But the chief reason for the prosperity of Obota is the fact that it lies at the edge of an extensive sago swamp, and sago is the mainstay of the food of the Papuans. Sago is made from a palm (Sagus rumphii) which always grows in wet places, generally in low ground near the sea, and it will even grow where the water is brackish.[7] The palm is thicker than a man’s body, and its height is about 25 or 30 feet. The trunk is covered with large leaves bearing long hard spines. A mature tree produces a large vertical spike of flowers and then dies. When they wish to collect sago, the natives cut down a full-grown palm and clear it of its leaves and leaf-sheaths. A wide strip of the bark is then cut off from the side of the tree which lies uppermost and the sago is exposed. The bark of the tree is really nothing more than a shell about an inch in thickness, enclosing the pith or sago, which is a brownish pulpy substance separated by fibrous strands. The pith is separated from the bark by means of the sago-beater, which is a sort of wooden hammer made in two pieces, a handle about a foot and a half long, carrying a head about twelve inches long; the hitting face of the head is about two inches in diameter, and it often bears a rather sharp rim which is useful in clearing the pith from the bark.
PAPUAN WOMAN CARRYING WOODEN BOWL OF SAGO.
When all the pith has been beaten out of the shell of the tree it is carried away to the nearest water, where the sago is extracted. A trough made of two wide basin-like leaf-bases of the sago palm is set up on crossed sticks about three feet from the ground in such a way that one basin is a little higher than the other. Lumps of the pith are then kneaded in the upper part of the trough with water which is constantly poured into it; the water carries away the sago into the lower part of the trough, and nothing remains above but the coarse fibrous stuff which is thrown away; the lower trough gradually becomes filled with sago and the water flows away. The sago, a dirty white substance with a rather sour smell, is made into cylindrical cakes of about 30 lbs. weight, and neatly wrapped up in leaves of the palm to be carried back to the village. Most of the work of collecting and preparing the sago is done by the women.
According to Mr. Wallace, one fair-sized sago palm will supply one man with food for a year, so it will be seen that the amount of labour required to feed a community in a district where sago is plentiful is not very overwhelming.
The usual method of cooking employed by the Papuans is to roll the sago into lumps about the size of a cricket ball and roast them in the embers of a fire. On one or two occasions I saw them prepare it in a different way, which was to wrap up the sago in banana leaves and cook it on hot stones; the result was probably more wholesome food than the charred lumps that they usually eat.
Very often the natives of the Mimika eat the crude sago, that is to say, the pith simply as it is cut out of the tree, without having been washed or pounded. The stuff is roasted in the usual way and the separation of the sago is done in the mouth of the eater, who spits out the uneatable fibre.
As well as providing the Papuans with the bulk of their food, the sago palm supplies them with excellent building poles in the mid-ribs of the leaves, which are straight and very strong, and are sometimes fifteen to twenty feet long, and the leaflets themselves are used for making “atap” in the districts where the Nipa palm is not found.
It was mentioned above that the crews of our canoes on the excursion up the Kapare River were made up of Javanese soldiers and convicts. Our first batch of Ambonese coolies had by that time failed us, so Lieut. Cramer very kindly lent us some of his men for the occasion, and we had an opportunity of testing their worth. Speaking generally, it is not unfair to them to say that the Javanese are wholly unsuited to rough work in a savage country; they are a peaceful race of peasants and their proper place is in the rice fields. As soldiers they appear to the civilian eye to be clodhoppers masquerading in (usually misfitting) uniform. They have no military bearing and no alertness, and one ceases to wonder that when the Netherlands East Indian native army is almost exclusively composed of Javanese, the war-like people of Atjeh have kept the field for so many years. It is a matter for surprise that the Dutch do not enlist more of the warlike Bugis of Celebes, and natives of the Moluccas, and even the Achinese prisoners themselves; ten thousand of such men would surely be of more worth than the 30,000 Javanese who fill the ranks of their native army. Of course there are exceptions; there are men among them who have performed splendidly valorous deeds in time of war; but the majority are of a stuff of which it would be impossible to make soldiers, they are soft and unathletic and of a curiously feminine form of body, as a glance at a group of bathing Javanese will show.
CONVICT LABOUR
The Javanese convicts were the same sort of material, but their case was not quite the same as that of the soldiers, for they had not voluntarily entered a profession (if the condition of convict can be called a profession) that involved service in foreign lands. The justice of the Dutch practice of employing convicts as coolies in military and exploring expeditions is very much open to question, but it need not be discussed at length here. The transport for the military operations in Atjeh is carried out almost entirely by convict labour, and all the Dutch exploring parties in New Guinea have made use of convict coolies, assisted in two instances by paid Dayaks. It is intended officially that only long-sentence men shall go on expeditions, so that by good behaviour they may earn some substantial remission of their sentences, but that is not invariably the case, for several young men left our expedition because their terms had expired. It is also supposed that only men shall be sent on expeditions who volunteer to go; but the supply of convict volunteers is not inexhaustible, and there were men with us whose last wish would have been to come to New Guinea.
But even if they were all volunteers and all long-service men, it is doubtful whether it is justifiable to send any but free men to work in a country so full of risks as New Guinea. The native of Java is a poor creature, particularly susceptible to beri-beri and other diseases of the tropics, and when I saw convicts die, as did unfortunately happen, I came to the conclusion that the balance went heavily against the system. It must, however, be recorded that the convicts are extremely well treated. Except in the matter of pay—convicts on expeditions receive about one guilder (1s. 8d.) a month—they are treated in all essentials exactly like the native soldiers; they have the same rations of food and the same tent accommodation, and many of them enjoy themselves a good deal more than if they were occupied in sweeping the roads in a town in Java. Their hours of labour in camp are comparatively short, and the loads they are given to carry on the march are by no means excessive. Nothing could exceed the kindness of Cramer’s treatment of the men under his command, and I have no doubt that the same may be said of the treatment of convicts elsewhere.
[CHAPTER VIII]
Description of Wakatimi—The Papuan House—Coconut Palms—The Sugar Palm—Drunkenness of the Natives—Drunken Vagaries—Other Cultivation—The Native Language—No Interpreters—The Numerals—Difficulties of Understanding—Names of Places—Local Differences of Pronunciation.
The native village of Wakatimi lay directly opposite to our base-camp on the W. bank of the Mimika, which was there about 150 yards broad. Beyond the margin of the river was a strip of grass intersected by muddy creeks, where the natives moored their canoes, and beyond that was Wakatimi. The village consisted of a single street about two hundred yards long lined on one side by huts, which usually numbered about sixty. But occasionally, as for instance when we first arrived, and once or twice subsequently when large crowds of natives from other villages visited the place, it happened that the street was a double row of houses, and every available spot of dry ground was occupied.
Shifting house is a very simple affair, as most of the building materials are carried about in the canoes, and the canoes come and go in the most casual and unaccountable manner. Sometimes there were perhaps a thousand people at Wakatimi, and then there would be days when there was not a soul in the village. There were times when for weeks together there were large villages at the mouth of the river, and there were other times when the coast was utterly deserted and hardly a trace of the villages remained. We were never able to learn what it was that prompted these migrations of the natives, but it is probable that the pursuit of food was the guiding motive. The wandering habits of the people will certainly make it very difficult to administer the country and civilise the people, if an attempt to do so is ever made.
THEIR HOUSES
The typical native house of the Mimika district is a simple rectangular structure with a framework of light poles driven into the ground, the cross-pieces and roof pole being tied to the uprights by strands of rattan. In some houses the roof is a simple slope downwards from front to back, but in most cases there is a central ridge pole from which the roof slopes to the back and front, that at the back being longer and going lower than that in front. The height of the ridge is about eight feet; after we had been for some time in the country the people improved their building in imitation of our houses and built their huts ten, and even twelve feet high. The roof is made of “atap,” the thatch described above (p. [60]), and the walls are mats made from the leaves of a Screw-pine (Pandanus). The area of an average hut is about 9 by 12 feet, the longer dimensions being from front to back.
PAPUAN HOUSES ON THE MIMIKA.
The floor is covered with sand to a depth of several inches, which is prevented from escaping into the street by a board placed on its edge along the front of the hut. The sand is brought from the seashore and must be of great value in preserving the health of the people: the huts are frequently under water in the big floods and without the sand, which quickly dries, it would be impossible for them to live there. Unfortunately the sand aggravates the sores and ulcers from which too many of them suffer, but that is perhaps a lesser evil than always sleeping on sodden ground. Racks made of sticks, on which are stowed bundles of arrows, spears, clubs, tobacco, sago and all the other portable property of the family, extend from one wall to another, so that it is almost impossible to stand upright inside a hut. The door is an opening about two feet square in the front wall; as well as being the means of entrance for the members of the household the door serves as the principal means of escape for the smoke of the fire, which is constantly kept burning inside.
It is only rarely that a house remains for long separated from others; when a second house is built it is attached to the side of the first, and the dividing wall is removed. In a large village the houses are built in rows of varying length, according to the nature of the ground, and there may be as many as fifty or sixty joined together. If you go inside you find that it is a single long house without any dividing walls, but each family keeps to its own particular section and use its own private entrance. When the place is crowded with people, and a number of fires are burning, the atmosphere inside the house may be more readily imagined than described.
The feature that most distinguishes Wakatimi from all the other villages that we saw is its fine grove of coconut palms. The village street is bordered with them on the side opposite to the houses, and there must be three or four hundred trees in all. They afford a very pleasant shade to the village, and their graceful trunks curving this way and that are really picturesque and conveniently relieve the ugliness of the Papuan houses. It is rather dangerous to live so close to coconut trees, and sometimes when the wind blew in gusts before the rain we heard warning shouts and the heavy thud of a nut falling to the ground; but accidents never seemed to happen. The nuts are, of course, a source of great wealth to the Wakatimi people, who exchange them for bananas and tobacco with the people of Obota, and while we were in the country they brought us altogether thousands of nuts for which they received riches undreamt of before. At one or two places near the sea, and at several places on the Mimika River we found coconut palms, but far up the river they did not occur, nor did we see any on the Kapare River; and I believe all those we saw were planted by the natives, and that none of them were self-sown.
The method of cultivation is extremely simple. A ripe nut is left out on the roof of a hut and allowed to sprout; when the shoot is about a foot or more in length, a small patch of ground is cleared, preferably in a sandy place on the river bank or near the sea shore, a hole is dug and the sprouting nut is planted. From time to time, if he remembers to do so, the native will clear away the strangling vegetation from the young plant, and in about five years, under favourable conditions, the palm begins to bear fruit.
DRUNKENNESS
Growing commonly near Wakatimi is another species of palm, which, though it has not the value of the coconut palm, is yet more prized by the natives. This is the Sugar palm (Arenga saccharifera), and from it is made a very potent and intoxicating liquor. When the palm is in fruit—it bears a heavy bunch of dark green fruit—a cut is made in the stem below the stalk of the fruit, and the juice trickles out and is collected in the shell of a coconut. Apparently the juice ferments very rapidly without the addition of any other substance, for it is drunk almost as soon as it is collected and the native becomes horribly intoxicated.
During the first few weeks of our stay in the country the people were on their good behaviour, or else they found sufficient amusement in coming to see us and our works, but they soon tired of that and went back to their normal habits. Many of them went to the drinking places by day, and we often saw them lying or sitting at the foot of the tree, while one of their party stood at the top of a bamboo ladder collecting the palm wine. But the worst was a small gang of about a dozen men, the laziest in the village, whose custom it was to start off towards evening in canoes to their favourite drinking tree, where they spent the night drinking and making night hideous with their songs and shouts. In the morning they returned raving to the village and as often as not they started quarrelling and fighting and knocking the houses to pieces (a favourite occupation of the angry Papuan) before they settled down to sleep off the effects of their potations.
As a rule, the men were the worst offenders, and the women drank but seldom, but I well remember one day seeing a man and his wife both hopelessly drunk come over to our camp. It was pouring with rain and their canoe was several inches deep in water, but they danced up and down in it and sang a drunken ditty; it was a ludicrous and at the same time heart-rending exhibition. The man, when we first knew him, was a fine fellow who one day climbed up a palm tree to get us coconuts, a feat which no man out of condition can perform; a few months later he was hardly ever seen sober, and in January he died. A smiling round-faced youth called Ukuma, who was one of our particular friends at first and was privileged to wander where he liked about the camp, attached himself to the drinking party, and before we left the country he looked an old man, and I had difficulty in recognising him.
| A PAPUAN OF THE MIMIKA. | A PAPUAN OF THE MIMIKA. |
Though the drunken vagaries of the natives were usually food for tears, they sometimes provided us with amusement. One afternoon one of the principal men of Wakatimi came down to the river bank quite intoxicated and took a canoe, which he paddled out into mid-stream and there moored it. From there he proceeded to shoot arrows vaguely and promiscuously at the village, raving and shouting what sounded to be horrible curses. Some of the arrows fell into the village and some sailed over the palm trees, and now and again he turned round and shot harmlessly into our camp, but nobody took the slightest notice of him except his wife, who went down to the river bank and told him in plain language her opinion of him. This caused him to turn his attention to her, but his aim was wild and the arrows missed their mark, so he desisted and went back to the shore, where the woman broke across her knee the remainder of his bundle of arrows, while he cooled his fevered brow in the river. Then, while she delivered a further lecture, he followed her back to their hut looking like a whipped and ashamed dog. It can hardly be doubted that palm wine shortens the lives of many of the Papuans, but one must hesitate before condemning an absolutely untaught and savage race for excessive indulgence in one of the pleasures that vary their monotonous lives.
FRUITS
As well as coconuts the Mimika people have also bananas, papayas (Carica papaya), water-melons and pumpkins, all of them of a very inferior kind. It cannot be said that they cultivate these fruits; they occasionally get a banana shoot and plant it in the ground by the riverside, where it may or may not grow and produce fruit, but they make no clearings and take very little trouble to ensure the life of the plant. The papayas and the melons and pumpkins are sometimes seen growing about the native dwellings; but they, too, seem to be there more by accident than by any design on the part of the people. At Obota we found a few pineapples, which were probably the descendants of some that were brought to the Mimika by M. Dumas a few years earlier.
LANGUAGE DIFFICULTIES
It has been stated in the previous chapters that the natives told us this or that, and that we asked them for information about one thing or another. From this the reader must not conclude that we acquired a very complete knowledge of the native language, for that, unfortunately, was not the case, and even at the end of the fifteen months that we spent in their country we were not able to converse with them. Lieutenant Cramer and I compiled a vocabulary of nearly three hundred words,[8] and we talked a good deal with the people, but we never reached the position of being able to exchange ideas on any single subject.
In the Eastern and Northern parts of New Guinea it has always been found possible to communicate with the natives through the medium of some known language; even if there were many differences noticed in the language of a new district, there were always some common words which formed the foundation of a more complete understanding. The Western end of New Guinea has been for centuries visited by traders speaking Malay dialects, some of whom have settled in the country; or Papuans from those parts have travelled to Malay-speaking islands and have returned with a sufficient knowledge of the language to act as interpreters to people visiting those districts.
But the long stretch of the South-west coast from the MacCluer Gulf as far as the Fly River has been quite neglected by Malay-speaking traders, partly on account of the poverty of the country and partly by reason of the shallow sea and the frequent storms which make navigation difficult and dangerous, so that the Malay language was of no use to us as a means of talking with the natives. It is true that two men from the Mimika district had been taken a few years previously to Fak-fak, the Dutch Government post on the South side of the MacCluer Gulf, but though they spent two years there and attempts were made to teach them Malay, in 1910 the extent of their knowledge of the language was the two words Tida, tuan (No, master).
It is unfortunate that there is no common language along the S. coast, nor even a language with words common to all the dialects in use. We were visited on one occasion by the Dutch Assistant Resident from Fak-fak; the native interpreter who came with him, and who knew all the native dialects of the Fak-fak district, could not understand one word of the Mimika language. On another occasion some natives from Mimika were taken down by steamer to Merauke, the Government post in S.W. New Guinea, not far from the boundary of British Papua, and there they found the language of the natives quite unintelligible to them.
So we found ourselves confronted with the task of learning a language with neither grammar, dictionary nor interpreter. This may not seem to be an insuperable difficulty, nor is it perhaps where Europeans and educated people are concerned, but with Papuans it is a very different problem. The first thing to do—and very few of them would even grasp the idea—is to make them understand that you wish to learn their words. You may point at an object and look intelligent and expectant, but they are slow to take your meaning, and they soon tire of giving information. The facial expression, which amongst us conveys even to a deaf man an interrogation, means nothing to them, nor has the sideways shake of the head a negative meaning to Papuans.
In trying to learn a new language of this kind most people (I imagine) would begin, as we did, with the numerals. But our researches in this direction did not take us very far, for we made the interesting discovery that they have words for one and two only; ínakwa (one), jamaní (two). This is not to say that they cannot reckon beyond two, for they can, by using the fingers and thumbs, and beginning always with the thumb of the right hand, reckon with tolerable accuracy up to ten. For numbers above ten they use the toes, never, so far as we observed, two or three toes, but always all the toes together to indicate a large but uncertain number. Sometimes they opened and closed the fingers of both hands two or three times and uttered the word takirí, which appeared to mean “many.” They did not, as some people do, use the word which means “hand” to indicate five or a quantity of about that number.
With patience we learnt a great number of substantives, the names of animals, the parts of the body, the various possessions of the natives and so forth, and with more difficulty we learnt some of the active verbs. But when we came to abstract ideas, our researches ceased abruptly for lack of the question words, who, how, where, when, etc.; these we were never able to learn, and it is impossible to act them.
Thus we were never able to find out what they thought of various things; we could point to the moon and be told its name, but we were never able to say, “What is the moon?” We learnt the names of lightning and thunder, but we never knew who they thought produced them. We could not find out where their stone axes came from, nor how old they were, nor who made them; and a hundred other questions, which we should have liked to put, remained unanswered.
OBTAINING INFORMATION
These limitations of our knowledge of the language were particularly annoying when we tried to find out the simplest ties of relationship. It may be thought very unintelligent of us that we never learnt the word for father, in spite of many attempts to do so. If you pointed to a child and asked a man, knowing him to be the father, what the child was, he would slap himself on the chest and answer, “Dorota kamare” (my penis); then if you pointed to himself he would tell you his own name, but never any word that could possibly be construed as father. If you tried the same thing with the mother she would point to the child and say, “Dorota auwë” (my breast). The child on being questioned pointed to the father and always said his name, the mother it would call Aína (woman), but perhaps this word also means mother.
There were two men at Parimau so much alike as to be unmistakably brothers; we learnt their names and that they were Inakwa kamare (one penis), but we never found out the name of their relationship.
Seeing that some of the people have a very good idea of drawing on the ground a map of the country, I tried one day a graphic method of obtaining the relationships of a man whose name and whose wife’s name and son’s name I knew. I put sticks on the ground to represent him and his wife and son, and then in a tentative sort of way put in a stick to represent his father, whose name he mentioned, but the game did not interest him and my researches came to an end.
Even the apparently simple matter of enquiring the names of places is not so easy as one would think. When the first party went up the Mimika to Parimau they pointed to the huts and asked what the village was called; the answer given was “Tupué,” meaning I believe, the name of the family who lived in the huts pointed at. For several months we called the place Tupué, and the name appeared in various disguises in the English newspapers. When I was at Parimau in July, it occurred to me to doubt the name of Tupué, which we never heard the natives use, so I questioned a man elaborately. Pointing in the direction of Wakatimi, I said in his language: “Many houses, Wakatimi,” and he nodded assent; then pointing in the direction of another village that we had visited I said: “Many houses, Imah,” to which he agreed; then I said. “Many houses,” and pointed towards Parimau. This performance was repeated three times before he understood my intention and supplied the word “Parimau,” and then he shouted the whole story across the river to the people in the village who received it with shouts of laughter, and well they might. It was as if a foreigner, who had been living for six months in a place which he was accustomed to call Smith, enquired again one day what its name was and found that it was London.
A PAPUAN MOTHER AND CHILD.
(On the right is seen a fishing net.)
LANGUAGE OF MIMIKA
The language spoken by the people of Mimika is by no means unpleasant to listen to, and with the customary sing-song intonation it would be almost musical, if it were not for the harsh voices of the natives, both men and women. There are many agreeably soft gutterals, and there is no hissing sound in the language, as they are unable to pronounce the letter “s.” Many of their words are really very pleasing, notably some of their names, such as “Oonabë,” “Inamë,” “Tébo,” “Magena,” “Awariao,” “Idoriaota,” “Poandio,” and “Mareru,” to mention only a few; some of the names were so long that I never succeeded in writing them correctly.
The people who lived near the upper waters of the Mimika appeared to speak the same dialect as those living near the coast, with one noticeable difference. Those words containing a “k” in the language of the people at the coast lose the “k” in the mouths of the up-river natives, thus: Ké (rain) in the Wakatimi language becomes ’é at Parimau; Kie (a leech) becomes ’ie, Pokanë (an axe) becomes Po’anë.
The only rule of grammar that we learnt was the simple method of constructing the possessive case by adding the suffix ta. Thus from doro (I) you have dorota (mine); from oro (you), orota (your), and in the same way Tebota (Tebo’s); Mareruta (Mareru’s), and so on.
They were curious to know our names and liked to address us by them; Goodfellow’s and Rawling’s names baffled them completely; Marshall’s became “Martë”; they made a good attempt at mine in “Wollatona,” and Cramer’s they pronounced perfectly.
So far as I know, they never finish a word with a consonant, and when they adopted a Malay or Dutch word which ended in a consonant, they always added a vowel; for instance, tuana (master), Kapítana (Captain), maíora (Major).
Some of their newly-constructed words will puzzle future philologists who go there; for instance, the Malay word písau (a knife) they called pítau, substituting “t” for the “s” which they cannot pronounce; petau was found easier to say than pítau, and eventually it became changed to pauti, which was the finally accepted version.
Probably the best means of learning the local dialect would be to encourage an intelligent child to visit your camp daily, where it would learn Malay and in course of time might be able to act as interpreter; but the process of education would be a slow one, and it would be constantly interrupted by the wandering habits of the natives. The time that we spent in the country was too short for any such attempt to be made, and indeed it was not until we had been there for several months that the children came fearlessly into our camp. But now that the natives have full confidence in Europeans a patient scholar might make a complete study of a quite unknown language.