But it must be admitted that their amusements are not always so innocent as drawing pictures and playing cat’s cradle. I have referred above to the gang of drunkards, who used to create such turmoil at Wakatimi. The people of Parimau, who had no means of getting intoxicated, were just as quarrelsome as the Wakatimi people, and fights were of frequent, almost daily occurrence. Some one does something, it matters not what, to offend some other person, and in an instant the village is in an uproar. Spears fly through the air—we never saw anybody touched by one—and stone clubs are brandished furiously, the combatants all shout horrible threats at the tops of their voices, while a few people look on stolidly or hardly take any notice at all. There seems to be a certain etiquette about the use of clubs, for the person about to be hit generally presents a soft part of his person, the back or shoulders, to the clubber, and we never saw a man intentionally hit another on the head, a blow which might easily be fatal; but blood flowed in plenty from the flesh wounds.
The part of the women in these village squabbles is always to scream loudly and generally to begin by banging the houses with sticks or spears and to end with pulling them to pieces. In a fight at Wakatimi we saw a party of infuriated women absolutely demolish three or four houses. The fights end almost as suddenly as they begin and in a short time the village settles down to its usual tranquillity. Neither the sight nor the sound of these village quarrels is very agreeable, but they have no regularly organised games and, at the worst, not a very great amount of damage is done.
The clubs used in these village fights and doubtless also in their tribal wars—but of those we know nothing—are of two kinds, wooden and stone-headed. The wooden clubs are about four feet long and consist of a plain shaft, of which the last foot or rather more is carved into a saw-like cutting edge; some of these are made of a very heavy wood and they are exceedingly formidable weapons. A more simple type of wooden club is a plain wooden shaft rather thinner at the handle end than at the other, round which is fixed a piece of shark’s skin or the prickly skin from the back of the Sting Ray and often with it is tied the saw of a small Saw fish; such a club appears to be capable of inflicting a very nasty wound.
SPLITTING WOOD WITH A STONE AXE.
STONE CLUBS
There is a great variety of stone-headed clubs, but they are all alike in being furnished with a wooden shaft, which is usually a plain piece of wood, but occasionally carved near the club end. The stone head is pierced in the middle by a round hole about an inch in diameter, through which the shaft is passed and fixed firmly by wedges. Most of the heads are made of a rather soft limestone, but where the people obtain it we do not know, for there is no stone of any kind near the coast. The simplest type is merely a round water-worn pebble with a hole bored through it. More commonly they are worked and the labour of producing them must have been considerable. Some are flat discs with sharp cutting edges or blunt and roughly milled edges, and some are cut into the form of five or six or more pointed stars; rarely they are triangular. Others again are round or oval and are cut into more or less deep teeth, or they have small bosses left projecting here and there, but no two of them are exactly alike. The weight of the club head is usually two or three pounds. The most savage-looking club we saw was simply a rough lump of coral, not trimmed in any way. It was pierced and mounted on a finely carved shaft of extremely heavy wood, and the whole thing must have weighed fifteen or twenty pounds.
Not a little credit is due to the Papuans for their industry in making these elaborate weapons, for it must be remembered that until we visited the country they had no metal tools whatever, with the exception of two or three scraps of soft iron, and all their work was done with shell knives and stone axes. The knives are simply the shells of a common freshwater bivalve (Cyrena sp.); when these are rubbed down on a stone, they take on an exceedingly sharp edge and are used by the natives for carving the canoes and drums and sharpening their spears and arrows.
The stone axes used in the Mimika district are all of the same type, though they vary greatly in size from about four inches to large ones of nearly twelve inches in length. The stone of which they are made is always the same, a quartzite. The shaft is about two feet long and is invariably made of the butt end of a bamboo. A hole is bored and burnt in the lower end of the bamboo, that is to say in the solid part of the wood below the first joint, and the pointed end of the stone is jammed into the hole. The stone is always fixed axe-fashion, i.e. with its broad surface and cutting edge in the same plane with the long axis of the handle, and not adze-fashion, as is the custom in some other parts of New Guinea (see illustration p. 142). The axes quickly become blunt with use and they are sharpened by being rubbed upon another stone. At Wakatimi stones are very rare and one man appeared to be the stone-smith of the village. I remember seeing him one day sitting outside his hut sharpening an axe, with three or four others lying beside him waiting to be done, while a few yards away a woman was splitting a log of wood with a stone axe. It struck me as being one of the most primitive scenes I had ever witnessed, really a glimpse of the Stone Age.
