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

by A. F. R. Wollaston

MAKING FIRE

By far the most interesting of the possessions of these people is the apparatus for making fire, which consists of three different parts, the split stick, the rattan, and the tinder. The split stick is a short stick of wood an inch or so in diameter, which is split at one end and is held open by a small pebble placed between the split halves. The rattan is a long piece of split rattan wound upon itself into a neatly coiled ring (see illustration p. 202), and the tinder is usually a lump of the fibrous sheath of a palm shoot and sometimes a piece of dried moss.

The method of making fire is as follows: In the split of the stick, between the stone which holds the split ends apart and the solid stick, is placed a small fragment of tinder. The operator—if one may use so modern a word in describing so ancient a practice—places the stick upon the ground and secures the solid, i.e. the unsplit end with his foot. Then, having unwound about a yard of the rattan, he holds the coil in one hand and the free end in the other and looping the middle of it underneath the stick at the point where the tinder is placed he proceeds to saw it backwards and forwards with extreme rapidity. In a short space of time, varying from ten to thirty seconds, the rattan snaps and he picks up the stick with the tinder, which has probably by this time begun to smoulder, and blows it into flame. At the point where the rattan rubs on the stick a deep cut is made on the stick, and at each successive use the stick is split a little further down and the rattan is rubbed a little further back, so that a well-used fire-stick is marked with a number of dark burnt rings. It was only with the greatest difficulty and after many attempts that we succeeded in producing fire in this manner, but the Tapiro do it with the utmost ease and they scorned our boxes of matches, which we offered them in exchange for their apparatus, and showed no signs of surprise at a suddenly kindled match.[18]

The most frequent use of the fire-stick is in lighting the tobacco, of which nearly every man carries a supply in his larger bag. These people cultivate tobacco in sufficient quantities to be able to supply the Papuans of the low country. The leaves are dried and neatly rolled up into long bundles weighing three or four pounds; the flavour is strong and rather bitter, but it is not unpleasant to smoke. The Tapiro smoke tobacco chiefly as cigarettes, using for the wrapper a thin slip of dry pandanus leaf. When, as is often the case, the wrapper is very narrow and the tobacco is inclined to escape, the man smokes his cigarette in a peculiar manner; he holds the unlighted end in his fingers and with his mouth draws out the smoke from between the edges of the wrapper in the middle of the cigarette, this he continues to do until the cigarette is about half consumed when he puts the end in his mouth in the ordinary way.

The Tapiro also smoke tobacco in a pipe in a fashion of their own. The pipe is a simple cylinder of bamboo about an inch in diameter and a few inches in length. A small plug of tobacco is rolled up and pushed down to about the middle of the pipe, and the smoker holding it upright between his lips draws out the smoke from below. The Tapiro never make large cigars like those of the Papuans of the Mimika, and the Papuans never smoke pipes, nor did they take readily to those that we gave them.

MAKING FIRE: (2) BLOWING ON THE SMOULDERING TINDER.

WEAPONS OF THE PYGMIES

Besides the bone daggers mentioned above the only weapon of the Tapiro are the bow and arrows, which they always carry. The bows are a very little shorter than those of the Papuans, but otherwise they are very similar, viz.: straight tapered strips of hard wood “strung” with a slip of rattan. The arrows are shorter and lighter and of finer workmanship than those of the Mimika Papuans, but like those they have neither feathers nor nocks. The best, which they were not at all anxious to sell to us, are ornamented with simple carvings and are tipped with a very sharp point of black wood. An arrow which ended in a curious blunt lump of wood was used, so we understood, for shooting birds.

The Tapiro have no spears and neither they nor the Mimika Papuans know the use of the sling. They set quantities of little nooses for small animals, and we once found a rattan noose fixed to a root of a tree and evidently set with the purpose of catching a pig.