The eye of the Papuan child is the eye of any bright dark-eyed child here or elsewhere; the white of the eye is white and the iris dark and clear. But very soon the white becomes bloodshot and yellow, and the iris blurred. The expression in the eyes is a thing that haunts one by its forlornness and hopelessness; it cannot be described, but you may see it in the eyes of certain animals. They show a strong disinclination to look you straight in the eyes, and when you rarely make them do so you seem to be looking into an unlighted and empty space.
The teeth are strong, but not conspicuously white and perfect like those of some other black races. A good many men file or chip the upper incisors to a point, but this has not, so far as we know, any particular significance.
The nose is almost bridgeless and is of a somewhat hooked and fleshy type with wide nostrils. The septum of the nose is pierced when the boys are young, and the hole is kept open by a rolled-up leaf thrust through it; in this way it is gradually dilated until the man is able to wear a carved ornament of a piece of the bill of a hornbill or a curved boar’s tusk, with which he decorates himself on festal occasions. The nose-piercing is attended with a good deal of ceremony, but we were never fortunate enough to see it; it is done when the child is about five years old, and the operation is made (according to native accounts) with a piece of sharpened bone heated in the fire. Small ornaments are sometimes worn in holes in the alae nasi which are pierced in all the children, both boys and girls, when they are small infants.
Many of the people pierce the lobes of the ear, but the custom is not universal. The ornaments worn in the ear are strings of two or three beads, or small rings of plaited fibres or rattan, or the claw of a cassowary. We took with us a large number of Jew’s harps as trade goods, but the natives did not care for them, and two (the only two, I believe) that we did succeed in making the people accept, were worn by them as ear-rings. Another man, a constant smoker, in default of a better cigar case always carried a cigar in the lobe of his ear.
Tattooing, in the proper sense of the term, is unknown to the Mimika Papuans, but a great number of them practise cicatrisation or scarring. The usual places for these markings are the buttocks and the outer side of the upper (usually the left) arm. On the buttocks the marks are almost always the same, a cross, about two inches square, on the left buttock, and a cross surrounded by a circle on the right. The mark on the arm is about four inches long and sometimes represents a snake and sometimes a scorpion or a crayfish, but the meaning of it, and whether or not it had some totemistic significance we were unable to learn. Some of the women affect a scar between the breasts, which makes a very unsightly contraction, and we occasionally saw people with irregular scars all over the upper part of the breast and back, but it is probable that most of them were the signs rather of former quarrels than due to a spirit of coquetry.
They are fond of painting their faces with a bright red earth, lumps of which they sometimes find and prize very highly, and not infrequently we saw men with their faces smeared black with a mixture of fat and charcoal, or whitened with powdered sago, but the reason, if there were any but vanity, for this adornment we did not discover.
| CICATRIZATION. | PAPUAN WITH FACE WHITENED WITH SAGO POWDER. |
The average height of men measured at Wakatimi and Parimau is 5 feet 6 inches. No women were measured, but it would probably be found that the average height of the women was about two inches less than that of the men. Such a height is small compared with that of many races, but the first impression you get of the Papuans is that they are tall, for they hold themselves well, and all naked people look taller than those who go clothed. Their legs are thin and rather meagre, due in a great measure to the large proportion of their lives that is spent in canoes, but they walk with a good swinging gait and cover the ground easily.
DRESS
It is a curious thing that a black man never looks naked; a white man undressed looks a naked man, so too does a yellow man, but a Papuan—and nobody could wear much less in the way of clothes than he does—always seems to be sufficiently clad. The dress of the Papuan men, as has been suggested above, is scanty in the extreme. They have, or had before we visited them, no cloth except a very inferior bark cloth made from the bark of a species of fig tree. Some of the men wear a narrow strip of this bark cloth, which hangs down in front from a string round the loins and keeps up an ineffectual pretence of decency.