Pygmies & Papuans: The Stone Age To-day in Dutch New Guinea

by A. F. R. Wollaston

The wet season, which we hoped had reached its maximum of wetness in July, when sometimes for days together the rain hardly ceased, continued in a series of greater or less floods through the months of August and September. Often it was impossible to move a yard from the camp, and without books life would have been almost insupportable. On one of the wettest of those days I came across the following passage, which seemed to describe the situation exactly:—

“With five ... what we call qualities of bad,

Worse, worst, and yet worse still, and still worse yet.”

It need hardly be said that this very disagreeable season produced ill effects on all the members of the expedition. The Europeans became depressed, and if we were not sick of life itself, we were certainly sick of New Guinea, while in the case of the coolies and soldiers, who were accustomed to sunnier climates, and who had no interest or goal to look forward to in the country, the results were disastrous indeed. Hardly a man escaped fever of greater or less severity and chills brought on by the unceasing rain and the consequent impossibility of securing a change of dry clothing. Several men suffered too from dysentery of a very intractable type, which completely incapacitated them from any further service.

BERI-BERI

But worse than either fever or dysentery was the beri-beri, which made its appearance after we had been in the country for a few months. This is not the place to give a scientific account of beri-beri; it will suffice to say that it is a disease, of which the most important feature is a degeneration of the nervous system. The results of this are seen in the curious and characteristic walk, loss of sensation in various parts of the body, interference with the circulation and swelling of the body and particularly of the face and limbs, and in very many cases sudden heart failure. It is almost conclusively proved now that the cause of the disease is an error of diet, and it appears to be certain that the fine milling and polishing of the rice, which forms the staple food of the natives of so many countries in the East, deprives the rice of a very necessary constituent as a food. Those people, who grind their own rice and do not mill or polish it finely, but leave a small portion of the husk still adhering to the grain, are free from beri-beri. The disease varies in severity from time to time and from place to place, but at its best it is a very deadly scourge and it causes a very large number of deaths. Occasionally it occurs in an epidemic form, but fortunately that did not happen to our expedition.

In the six months from the beginning of June to the end of November, thirty-nine men shewed definite symptoms of beri-beri, and seven deaths were directly attributable to this cause. Our coolies, who came from the Eastern islands of the Archipelago, were much less susceptible to the disease than were the convicts and soldiers, most of whom came from Java and Sumatra; these latter contracted the disease in a much more serious form and most of the fatal cases took place among them. It was a curious circumstance that at Parimau, which was in most respects by far the healthier place, many more cases of beri-beri occurred than at Wakatimi, where it is doubtful if any cases originated.

SICKNESS

Still more remarkable was the case of the camp on the Wataikwa River, which ought to have been the healthiest place we occupied anywhere in the country. For several months a guard of two Javanese and two Gurkhas was kept there to look after the store of food, and though they were very frequently changed and replaced by others, several of the Javanese developed beri-beri and two of them died. The Gurkhas, perhaps because they led more active lives than the Javanese, remained free of the disease until one of them, Havildar Mahesur, a most useful man, had the misfortune to damage one of his eyes; it was necessary for him to remain in the darkness of his tent for some days and within a fortnight he developed all the signs of beri-beri so that he had to be sent away from the country.

A welcome interruption in those dreary months was caused by the arrival at Parimau on August 26 of canoes bringing Mr. C. H. B. Grant, who had come out from England as naturalist to the expedition in the place of W. Stalker. He brought with him two Dayak collectors[15] and a quantity of various and excellent stores, and a large mail, the first we had received since the end of May. Shortridge had arrived in the country by the same ship on his return from Australia, but his change of air had not completely cured him and he was compelled to leave the country at the end of November. Goodfellow, whose fever continued almost without interruption, became so weak that he also was obliged to leave the country early in October. From that time we had only a dozen men and no forward movement was possible until the arrival of our third batch of coolies on the 22nd December. By the same boat that brought the new coolies in December came instructions to Captain Rawling to take over the command of the expedition.