INTERESTING PEOPLE
Crowds of people lined the river bank and some of them, holding short bamboos in their hands, jerked them in our direction and from the end came out a white cloud of powdered lime, which looked like smoke. This custom was noticed by Rawling when he first visited the village of Nimé, and it was recorded by some of the early voyagers,[20] but the meaning of it has not yet been explained. The suggestion that it is a means of imitating the appearance of fire-arms is ingenious, but it can hardly be seriously considered.
While most of the people stood on the bank to see us pass, a number of men jumped into their canoes and came racing after us. The current of the river was about two, and the speed of the Valk was seven knots, so they had to move quickly, but they easily overtook us and followed us for some distance down the river. Their canoes are simple “dug-outs,” but they differ from those of the Mimika in coming to a fine point at both ends. The bow is roughly notched on the upper side, which gives it somewhat the appearance of a bird’s beak. They seem also to be considerably lighter than the Mimika craft, and so narrow that a man could hardly sit down in them. The usual number of a crew is nine or ten men, who all stand up and all paddle on the same side of the canoe. The regular swing of their bodies and the perfect precision of the paddling was a sight prettier than any “eight” I have ever seen. They called to us and waved bundles of arrows, evidently anxious to trade with us, but the captain of the Valk was unable to stop, so we threw overboard for them empty tins and bottles, and it was marvellous to see how they raced up to these things, and with a sudden backward stroke of their paddles brought the canoes to a standstill, while they recovered the prize, and then raced on again.
From the mouth of the Island River, as we went out to sea, we saw through a break in the clouds to the far North the snow on Mount Wilhelmina, which was reached by Mr. H. A. Lorentz in November, 1909. Steaming in a south-easterly direction we kept some way out from the land, which is so low as to be invisible at a distance of a few miles. When we were opposite the Digoel, the greatest (excepting the Fly) of all the South New Guinea rivers, we found the sea strewn with logs and trees, in some places so many together as to form floating islands, on which crowds of gulls and terns were seen to settle at nightfall.
The tide favouring us, we chose the Marianne Strait between the mainland and Prince Frederick Henry Island. Sometimes, when the south-east monsoon has been blowing regularly for a few days, it is quite impossible for a ship of only moderate power to steam through it against the current. The Strait is a winding channel about ninety miles long and has an average width of about two miles, and it is not surprising that early voyagers, even as late as Kolff, in the Dutch brig-of-war, Dourga, in 1826, mistook it for a river. The banks are low and forest-covered, and we only saw two small clusters of houses. From one of these some men put off in a canoe to intercept us and followed us for some distance, calling “Kaya-Kaya” (friend).[21] They were tall and powerful-looking men, entirely naked except for a small shell attached to a string about the middle, and their great mats of hair extending down to the shoulders and beyond showed most clearly that we had come to yet another tribe quite distinct from the people of the Island River.
JAN CARSTENSZ
Jan Carstensz, who visited this coast in 1623, gives a good description of the land and the people:[22] “It is impossible to land here with boats or pinnaces owing to the clayey and muddy bottom into which a man will sink up to the waist, the depth of the water being no more than three or four fathoms at three or four miles distant from the land. The land is low-lying and half submerged, being quite under water at high tide; it is covered with wild trees, those on the beach resembling the fir-trees of our country, and seemingly bear no fruit. The natives are coal black like the Kaffirs and they go about stark naked. They have two holes in the midst of the nose, with fangs of hogs or sword-fishes through them, protruding at least three fingers’ breadth on either side, so that in appearance they are more like monsters than human beings, they seem to be evil-natured and malignant. The lands which we have up to now skirted and touched at not only are barren and inhabited by savages, but also the sea in these parts yields no other fish than sharks, sword-fishes, and the like unnatural monsters, while the birds too are as wild and shy as the men.” Further to the East he found the people “cunning and suspicious, and no stratagem on our part availed to draw them near enough to us to enable us to catch one or two with nooses which we had prepared for the purpose.” Suspicion of the unknown is in the nature of savage people, and when we read that “in order to frighten them the corporal fired a musket, which hit them both, so that they died on the spot,” we no longer wonder that they appeared to Jan Carstensz to be “evil-natured and malignant.” But times have changed and the Dutch navigator of to-day is not less humane than any other.
MERAUKE
After coming out of the Marianne Straits we noticed a change in the appearance of the land; the smoke of villages appeared at frequent intervals and the shore was seen to be fringed by a continuous belt of coco-palms in place of the mangrove to which we had become accustomed. In a few hours from the Marianne Straits we came to the mouth of the Merau River and after steaming up it for about four miles we dropped anchor opposite the Dutch station of Merauke, where we left the ship and went ashore.
