Agriculture.
Agriculture is never communistic, being entirely an individual or family matter, men and households and families having their own gardens and plantations. The trees and plants chiefly cultivated are those already mentioned as being used for food.
The clearing of the ground is done by men, and is begun about the end of June. The trees and their branches are used for fencing, the fencing being also done by men. The clearing away of the undergrowth is done by women, who pile it in small heaps, which are spread over the cleared space, being so close together that they almost touch one another. When these have got quite dry, which may be in a few days, or not for some time, they burn them, and the ashes add fertility to the soil. There is no general digging up of the ground, as distinguished from the digging of holes for individual plants. The clearing of the trees is done with stone adzes, or in difficult cases by fire; but some of the people now have European axes, of which some have been acquired from white men, and some from plain and coast natives. In clearing for planting yam and plants of the yam type they leave the upright stems of some of the trees and shrubby undergrowth for the yams, etc., to trail over. Cultivation of some of the more usual plants is done as follows.
Sweet potatoes and vegetables of similar type are planted by the women in August and September. They make little holes in the ground about 2 feet apart, and in them plant the potatoes, the roots used being the young sarmentose runners, which they cut off from the parent plants, the latter being merely cut down to the ground, and the old tubers being left in it. These runners are left to grow, and in about three or four months the young potatoes are ready for eating, and afterwards there will be a continuous supply from the runners. The digging up of the day-to-day supply of potatoes is done by the women, the work in this, and in all other digging, being done with small pointed sticks, roughly made and not preserved; though now they sometimes have European knives, these knives and axes being the two European implements which they use in agriculture, if they possess them.
Yams and similar vegetables are planted by men in August and September, near to the young tree stems up which they are to trail, and at distances apart of 2 or 3 yards. In this case, however, there are two plantings. In the first instance the yam tubers are planted in pretty deep holes, the tubers being long. The yams then grow, and twine over the tree stems, and spread. After about ten months the men dig up the tubers, which in the meantime have grown larger, and cut away from them all the trailing green growth, and then hang the tubers up in the houses and emone, to let the new growing points sprout. Then in about another two months the men replant the smaller tubers, while the larger ones are retained for food.
There are two curious Mafulu practices in connection with yam-planting. First, before planting each tuber they wrap round it an ornamental leaf, such as a croton, which they call the “sweetheart of the yam.” Against this leaf they press a piece of limestone. They then plant the tuber with its sweetheart leaf around it and the piece of limestone pressing against its side, and fill in the soil; but as they do the latter they withdraw the piece of limestone, which they use successively for other yams, and, indeed, keep in their houses for use year by year. In the villages near the Mafulu Mission Station the limestone used is generally a piece of stalactite, which they get from the limestone caves in the mountains. The belief is that by planting in this way the yams will grow stronger and better. Secondly, there is a little small-leafed plant of a spreading nature, only a few inches high, which grows wild in the mountains, but which is also cultivated, and a patch of which they always plant in a yam plantation. This plant they also call the “sweetheart of the yam”; and they believe that its presence is beneficial to the plantation.
Yams are ready for supplying food eight or ten months after planting. They are not, like the potatoes, dug up from day to day, as they can be stored. The usual period of digging and storing is about June or July, and this digging is done by both men and women, the former dealing with the larger yams, which are difficult to get up, and the latter with the smaller ones.
The yam is apparently regarded by the Mafulu people as a vegetable possessing an importance which one is tempted to think may have a more or less superstitious origin-witness the facts that only men may plant it and that it is the only vegetable in the planting of which superstitious methods are employed, and the special methods and ceremonies adopted in the hanging of the yams at the big feast. But I fancy this idea as to the yam is not confined to the Mafulu; and indeed Chalmers tells us of a Motu superstition which attributes to it a human origin;[5] and a perusal of the chapter on sacrifices in Dr. Codrington’s book, The Melanesians, leaves the impression on one’s mind that among these people the yam is the one vegetable which is specially used for sacrificial purposes.
Taro and similar vegetables are planted by women in August and September among the yams, at distances of 2 or 3 feet apart. For this purpose they take the young secondary growths which crop up round the main central plants during the year.[6] They are ready for eating in, say, May or June of the following year. They are dug up by women from day to day as wanted, as they, like the sweet potato, cannot be kept, as the yams are, after being taken up. There is, however, a method when the taro is ripe and needs digging up, but is not then required for eating, of making a large hole in the ground, filling it with grass, digging up the taro, putting it on the grass in the hole, covering and surrounding it with more grass, and then filling up with soil, and so preserving the taro for future use by a sort of ensilage system. I was told that this was not done on the plains.
Bananas are planted by men, this being done every year, and off and on all through the year, generally in old potato gardens. In this case they take the young offshoots, which break out near the bases of the stems. The closeness of planting varies considerably. The fruit is gathered all through the year by men. A banana will generally begin to bear fruit about twelve months after planting, though some sorts of banana take as long as two years.
Sugar-cane is planted by men off and on during the whole year, generally in old potato gardens, the growing points at the tops of the canes being put into the ground at distances of 5 or 6 feet apart. Each plant produces a number of canes, and these begin to be edible after six or eight months. They are then cut for eating by both men and women.
As regards both banana and sugar-cane, the people, after planting them in the potato gardens, allow the potatoes to still go on growing and spreading; but these potatoes are merely used for the pigs, the people only eating those grown in their open patches.
Beans of a big coarse-growing sort, with large pods from 8 to 18 inches long, are planted by women about September by the garden fences of the potato and yam gardens, and allowed to creep up these fences. They furnish edible fruit in about three or four months from the time of planting, and are then gathered by the women. Only the inside seeds are eaten (not the pod); and even these are so hard that twenty—four hours’ boiling does not soften them—indeed, they are usually roasted.
Pandanus trees are grown in the bush and not in the gardens. The ine which is a large form ([Plate 80]), is always grown at a height of not less than 5,000 feet; but there is a smaller one which is grown by a river or stream. The malage is always grown in the valleys near brooks and rivers.
As regards the gardens generally, they may be roughly divided into sweet potato gardens and yam gardens. In the former are also grown bananas, sugar-cane, beans, pumpkin, cucumber and maize; and in the latter taro and beans, and the reed plant with the asparagus flavour to which I have already referred. The general tending of the bananas and sugar-canes, and to a certain extent the yams, is done by men; but in other respects the garden produce is looked after by women, who also attend to the weeding and keeping of the gardens clean, the men looking after the fences.
Having planted a certain crop in a garden, they let it go on until it is exhausted, the period for this being different for different crops; but afterwards they never again plant the same crop in the same garden. When a crop is exhausted, they may possibly use the same garden for some other purpose; but as a rule they do not do so, except as regards the use of old potato gardens for banana and sugar-cane. When fresh gardens are wanted, fresh portions of bush are cleared; and the old deserted gardens are quickly re-covered by nature with fresh bush, the growth of vegetation being very rapid. Most of the gardens are bush gardens, and, though these may sometimes be close to the village, you do not find a regular system of gardens within the village clearing, as you do in the Mekeo district, the situations of the villages being indeed hardly adapted for this.
[1] I have never seen the animal called the “Macgregor bear,” and I do not know what it is. The Fathers assured me it was a bear; but in view of the great unlikelihood of this, I consulted the authorities at the Natural History Museum, and they think it is probably one of the marsupials. It is named after Sir William Macgregor. It is found in the mountains, where the forest is very thick.
[2] Compare the Motumotu (Toaripi) practice of rubbing the dogs’ mouths with a special plant, referred to by Chalmers (Pioneering in New Guinea, p. 305).
[3] The birds of paradise which dance in trees include, I was told, what the Fathers called the “Red,” the “Blue,” the “Black,” the “Superb” and the “Six-feathered.” Those which dance on the ground include the “Magnificent.”
[4] In Mekeo the weir is made with wicker-work, at the openings in which basket fish-traps are placed.
[5] Pioneering in New Guinea, pp. 3 and 4.
[6] Dr. Stapf tells me that taro is usually propagated by means of tubers or division of crowns, that is that either the whole tuber is planted or it is cut up, as potatoes are done, into pieces, each of which has an eye, and each of which is planted. It would appear that the Mafulu method, as explained to me, amounts to much the same thing, the only difference being that instead of planting a crown, or a piece with an eye from which a fresh shoot will proceed, they let that shoot first grow into a young plant and then transplant the latter.