1-7. Bamboo Penis-cases. 8-12. Carved Blades of Paddles.
PAPUAN ARTISTS
I have had occasion above to mention the artistic carvings on the canoes and drums. Their paddles too show a very good idea of design, as will be seen from the illustration p. 144. Nothing amused them more than to be provided with a pencil and pieces of paper and to attempt to draw figures. Their efforts were not always very successful, and some of the drawings which I have kept would be quite unrecognisable for what they are, if I had not labelled them at the time. Like the young of civilised races they always preferred to draw the figures of men and women, and some of these are remarkable for having the mouth near the top of the head above the level of the eyes. The method of drawing is very simple; the pencil is held almost upright on the paper and the outline of the figure, begun at an arm or leg or anywhere indifferently, is drawn in one continuous stroke without removing the pencil from the paper. The end is always rather exciting, like the feat of drawing a pig when you are blindfolded, for the artist is never quite certain of finishing at the point whence he started. Besides human figures they liked drawing dogs, pigs, birds and fishes. Two pictures of a dog and a bird both done by the same man are peculiarly interesting, because they were both drawn upside down. I watched the man making the drawings, and when they were finished I saw that the legs of the creatures were uppermost; so I turned the papers the right way round and handed them back to him, but he inverted them again and admired them in that position. Curiously enough the same man drew human figures in the correct attitude, head uppermost, so that the state of his mental vision offers rather a puzzling problem.
a. Cockatoo. a1 b. Designs for scarification. b. Hornbill.
c. Pig. d. Dog. e. Bird. f. Man. g. Woman.
Most of them had a keen appreciation of pictures and they were surprisingly quick in identifying photographs of themselves; in this respect they showed a good deal more intelligence than some of our Gurkhas, who held a photograph sideways or upside down and gazed at it blankly, as if they had not the faintest idea of what it portrayed. The illustrated papers were a source of endless delight to them, and the portraits of beautiful ladies, who they felt sure were our wives, were greatly admired. Horses, sheep, cattle and all other animals were declared to be dogs.
CAT’S CRADLE
Another amusement—it can hardly be called an art—of the Papuans is the game of cat’s cradle, at which many of them are extraordinarily proficient. It is not, as with us, a game played by two persons; with them the part of the second person is performed by the player’s teeth, and he contrives to produce some wonderfully intricate figures, none of which, I regret to say, we had patience or skill enough to learn. The most elaborate figure I saw was supposed to represent a bird, and when the features of it had been pointed out some resemblance was certainly apparent.