CHAPTER XIV
The Camp at the Wataikwa River—Malay Coolies—“Amok”—A Double Murder—A View of the Snow Mountains—Felling Trees—Floods—Village washed Away—The Wettest Season—The Effects of Floods—Beri-beri—Arrival of C. Grant—Departure of W. Goodfellow.
If I were to write a true and complete account of the expedition, I should fill many pages with repeated stories of rain and floods, sickness among the coolies and our consequent inaction; but that would be as wearisome to the reader as it was trying to our own patience. During July and a part of August we sent out parties of coolies to the Wataikwa camp, where a considerable depôt of food was formed, but about the middle of the latter month the number of our coolies was reduced to twenty, of whom not more than half were capable of any hard work, and it became quite evident that any further progress in the direction of the mountains was out of the question until we should get a fresh supply of men.
As the number of coolies grew fewer we sent natives with them to carry stores out to the Wataikwa, but the supply of willing natives was very uncertain and it became a matter of some difficulty to keep up a regular communication with that camp. Two Gurkhas and two Javanese soldiers remained always at the Wataikwa and one or other of us went out there and stopped to make natural history collections or to superintend the cutting of the road on the other side of the river for a few weeks at a time, while the others were at Parimau or at Wakatimi. We managed to continue this arrangement until the end of October, when it became no longer possible to keep an European supplied out there; thenceforward until the beginning of January the camp at the Wataikwa was occupied only by the guard of Gurkhas and Javanese, who in the meantime consumed nearly all the stores that had been so laboriously accumulated there.
CAMP OF THE EXPEDITION AT PARIMAU.
MALAY COOLIES
We often said hard things to and of our Malay coolies, but the poor wretches were not to blame for being such incompetent carriers. At their proper occupations of carrying cargo to and from the ships at Macassar, or working on the boats of the pearl-fishers, or doing odd jobs in their native places, no doubt they excelled; but at struggling through the New Guinea jungle with even the lightest of loads they were hopeless failures and the wonder was that they survived as long as they did. Taking them all round, the majority of them worked as well as they could, and some of them even became quite attached to us.