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.
CHAPTER IX
The Papuans of Wakatimi—Colour—Hair—Eyes—Nose—Tattooing—Height—Dress—Widows’ Bonnets—Growth of Children—Preponderance of Men—Number of Wives—Childhood—Swimming and other Games—Imitativeness of Children—The Search for Food—Women as Workers—Fishing Nets—Other Methods of Fishing—An Extract from Dampier.
The Papuans of the Mimika district may be divided into two classes or tribes: those who live in the villages on the lower waters of the river and make periodical migrations to the sea; and those who live on the upper waters of the river near the foot of the mountains and who never go down to the coast. There is a wide interval of uninhabitable country between the regions occupied by these two tribes, and communication between them, if it takes place at all, is very rare; but they resemble each other so closely, both in physical characters and in their manners and customs, that a single description will suffice for both.[9] The other native race of the district, the pygmy people who live in the mountains, will be described in a later chapter.
FEATURES OF THE PAPUANS
The skin of the Mimika native is a very dark brown, almost rusty black, but a dark colour without any of the gloss seen in the skin of the African negro. Not infrequently we saw men of a lighter, nearly yellow, colour, and in the Wakatimi district there were three pure albinos, a man, a woman and a child. The man and woman were covered with blotches of a pinkish pigment and were peculiarly disagreeable to look at, the child, a sucking infant, and the offspring of black parents, was as white as any European baby, and was called, out of compliment to us, “Tuana.”[10]
The hair is black and thick and frizzly; it never, or seldom grows long, so you do not see the ornamental coiffures characteristic of the natives of some other parts of the island; but they are skilful in plaiting what there is of it and take some pride in the result. Three- or four-pronged combs are worn in the hair more as a means of carrying a useful article than as ornaments. The hair of young children is often quite fair, but it becomes dark as they grow up; some of the adults have the custom, common in other places, of dyeing the hair yellow with lime.