Pygmies & Papuans: The Stone Age To-day in Dutch New Guinea

by A. F. R. Wollaston

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.