As I have described above (p. [97]) the houses in a village are joined together under a common roof, but each family enters by its own doorway, and, except for the publicity resulting from the lack of dividing walls or partitions, it finds itself in its own private house. It is difficult to say exactly of what the “family-group” consists. There are the man and his wife and the children, and sometimes an extra man or two, and, rarely, an extra woman, who is, I believe, always a second wife of the man of the house; but the position of the extra men and their relationship to the rest of the family I cannot define. At the village of Obota a detached house, rather larger than the rest, was said to be occupied by young men only; we did not see any other instance of this elsewhere.
Families are small, as might be expected from the severity of their conditions of life and the long period of suckling by the mothers, and we did not know definitely of any couple who had more than three living children. Though the women do a large amount of the work of the community they are not mere drudges; they do a great deal of talking, and the men appear to pay considerable respect to their opinion. This was frequently noticeable when we wanted to buy something, such as canoes, from a native; he would say that he must first of all go and consult his wife, and when he returned it often happened that, prompted by his wife, he insisted on a higher payment than he had asked before.
On one occasion only did we see a woman ill-treated, and the performance was a particularly brutal one. Two men and a woman walked down from the village of Wakatimi to the river bank, dragging another woman, who shrieked and struggled violently. After throwing her into the mud they dragged her into the shallow water and tried to drown her by holding her down under a fishing-net. We shouted at them, and were just going with some soldiers in a canoe across the river to rescue the woman, when they desisted and allowed the poor creature to crawl out on to the bank, where she lay for some time exhausted. Some natives who came over to us shortly afterwards laughed about it and treated the whole affair as a joke.
PAPUAN SUPERSTITIONS
With regard to the superstitions and beliefs of the Papuans, owing to our unfortunate difficulties with the language we learnt nothing whatever. Religion, in the accepted sense of that term, I am sure they have not. It is true that they make curious carved effigies, but these are not idols, and there is no evidence to show that they ever consult or worship them; on the contrary, they treat them with contempt and often point to them with laughter. These images are ingeniously and skilfully carved out of wood, and they represent a human figure always grotesque and sometimes grossly indecent. They vary in size from a few inches to twelve or fourteen feet, and when they are not neglected they are ornamented with red and white paint.
We had opportunities of observing the outward signs of what were probably superstitions in connection with certain phenomena of the weather. For instance, the first peal of thunder that was heard in the day—it occurred almost every day—was greeted by the men with a long-drawn tremulous shout. On the occasion of a particularly alarming thunderstorm, when the lightning flashes were almost unceasing, the men came out of doors and with long sticks beat the ground in front of their huts; then they waved the sticks in the air, shouting loudly meanwhile. Curiously enough the rare whistle of a certain bird, which we never identified, was always greeted by the men of Parimau with a shout precisely similar to that with which they greet the thunder.
The first sight of the new moon was signalised by a short sharp bark rather than a shout. Several times on the day following the first sight of the new moon I noticed a spear decorated with white feathers exposed conspicuously in the village, but whether it had any connection with the kalendar I cannot say.
When the first drops of rain of the day began to fall, the men were sometimes seen to snap their fingers four times towards the four quarters of the compass.
A curious ceremony was twice observed at a time of heavy rain, when the Mimika was rising rapidly and threatening to sweep away the village of Parimau. A party of men walked down to the edge of the river, and one of them with a long spear threshed the water, while the others at each stroke shouted, “Mbu” (water, flood). Then they went up to the village, and in front of each door they dug a hole, into which they poured a coconut-full of water; again they shouted “Mbu,” and then filled up the hole with sand.
That they have some belief in the supernatural is certain. We learnt a word niniki, which undoubtedly means ghosts; they described niniki as things which you could not see but were here and there in the air about you. When they were asked where a dead man had gone to, they talked of niniki, and pointed vaguely to the horizon, saying the word which means “far.”