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.