The hunting spears are of two kinds, a plain straight shaft of heavy wood, very sharp and hardened by fire at the tip; and a straight shaft of a lighter wood, to the end of which is fixed part of a straight bone (generally the tibia) of a pig, sharpened to a fine point. There is another kind of spear made of a soft wood, finely pointed and with a wide blade carved in a sort of open-work fashion (see illustration p. 150); the blade and the point are painted red with clay and the shaft is generally decorated with feathers or plaited fibre. Spears of this sort are of no use in hunting but are employed at dances and other ceremonial functions.
Two more pieces of furniture, the head-rest and the sago bowl, complete the list of articles made by the Papuans. The head-rests, which were seen only in the villages of Obota and Nimé, are made of a strip of elaborately carved wood four or five inches wide and between two and three feet in length, and are supported at each end by a stout wooden prop, which raises the head-rest about four inches above the ground. The longer head-rests are supposed to support the heads of two sleeping persons.
Fire is nearly always taken by the Papuans wherever they go; in almost every canoe a fire is kept burning, and when they travel through the jungle the men carry a smouldering stick. There must be occasions when all these fires are extinguished, but how they produce them we were unable to learn; the Papuans of Parimau could not make fire with the friction stick and rattan used by their neighbours, the Tapiro Pygmies.
From the description of them which has been given in this and the two preceding chapters it will be seen that the conditions of life of the Papuans are as primitive as those of any people now living in the world. There are very few other places, where you can find a people who neither make nor possess any metal and who have no knowledge of pottery. The only vessels that they have for holding water are scraped-out coconuts and simple pieces of bamboo. Water boiling they had never seen before we came among them. Their implements and weapons are, as I have shown, of the most primitive kind, and their ornaments are of the rudest possible description.
Cultivation of the soil is only practised by the people of one or two villages, and even then it produces but a very small proportion of their food, so it follows that most of their time and energies are devoted to procuring the necessaries of life.
STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE
The struggle for existence is keen enough, the birth-rate is low and the rate of infant mortality is, I believe, very high. Nor do diseases spare them; syphilis is exceedingly prevalent, and was probably introduced by Chinese and Malay traders to the West end of the island, whence it has spread along the coast. Tuberculosis is happily absent, but two natives of Wakatimi were suffering from what appeared to be certainly leprosy. Skin diseases, notably tinea imbricata, are very common; and almost every person appears to suffer occasionally from fever of one sort or another.
But in spite of all these drawbacks the Papuans of the Mimika are not such a very miserable people. They are strong, those of them that survive the ordeals of infancy and sickness; they have food in plenty to eat, if they choose to exert themselves sufficiently to obtain it; they have their amusements, songs and dances; and the manner of their lives is suited to the conditions of the country in which they live. It is this last consideration which ought ultimately to determine their fate: they live in a wretchedly poor country which is constantly liable to devastating floods, and their habit of wandering from one place to another, where food may be obtained, is the only way of life suitable to the physical and climatic conditions of the country.
Any attempt to “civilise” them must inevitably destroy their primitive independence, and if it succeeded in establishing the people in settled communities it would reduce them at many seasons to absolute starvation. We were visited once by the Director of the Sacred Heart Mission at Toeal, which has done admirable work amongst the natives of the Ké Islands and at one or two places in New Guinea itself. When he had seen the people and the nature of the country and had been told something of their habits, he decided that the Mimika was not, at present at all events, a proper field for missionary enterprise. Setting aside all other considerations, one dares to hope that such an interesting people may for a long time be left undisturbed; they do no harm to their neighbours and the effects on them of civilising influences would be at the best uncertain.