[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.