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

by A. F. R. Wollaston

Like other Dutch settlements Merauke is laid out on a regular and spacious plan, plenty of room being left between the houses of the officials and the quarter occupied by the shops of the Chinese, of which there are about a dozen. There are (or were in 1910) sixteen Europeans[23] in the place, all of them in the employment of the Government except two, the representatives of an European trading firm. The principal trade of the place is in copra obtained from the hundreds of thousands of coco-palms, which line the neighbouring sea-shore. These palms are the property of the natives, who are too lazy to take advantage of the wealth that lies (or rather hangs) at their doors, and they do not encourage other people to come and make use of it.

There is a small force of native police under a Dutch officer, and a few convicts are employed in keeping the station in order. It may not be out of place to remark here that the nearest Dutch settlement is at Fak-fak on the S.W. corner of the MacCluer Gulf, seven hundred miles in a straight line from Merauke. Besides these two places the only other Dutch garrison is at Manokwari (Dorei Bay) on the north coast, where there has been a mission station for more than fifty years. Apart from civilian and military officials, missionaries and two or three agents of a commercial firm there are no settlers in the huge territory of Dutch New Guinea.

A former Resident of Merauke, who had somewhat inflated ideas of the future of the country, established an experimental botanic garden on the only patch of dry ground near Merauke. Attached to the garden is a large building containing rooms for three Europeans, laboratories, a dark room and so on, which (it was hoped) would attract scientific agriculturists and botanists from other countries to come and study the local flora. But no sane person wishes to study the flora of New Guinea in the middle of a swamp, and already the scanty soil was showing signs of exhaustion at the roots of the experimental bananas, and the practically-minded Resident was considering the removal of the house to Dobo or elsewhere as a dwelling for himself, when the contemplated abandonment of Merauke as a “Residency” should take place.

Another interesting building at Merauke is the house of the Mission of the Sacred Heart, an offshoot from the mission at Toeal. It must, I am afraid, be admitted that Merauke is not a favourable field for missionary enterprise, and the most notable achievements of the good fathers there are the admirable house they have built, and the herd of cattle which they contrive to keep. They teach a very small class of the native children, but nearly all of them relapse again very soon into savagery, and the adults, who have remained faithful to the mission, are very few, and they are not the best specimens of their race.

BOAT BUILDERS

Recently the ubiquitous Chinese have discovered that the sea in the neighbourhood of Merauke is a most profitable fishing ground, and the results of their labours are spread abroad to dry in the sun, so that there are times when the air is almost too strong to be breathed. The fishery has attracted some men from the Ké Islands, who are the best boat builders in the Eastern Archipelago, and I spent many hours watching them at their work. Their tools consist only of an axe, an adze and an auger, and no nails or metal are used in the construction of a boat. The planks are about three inches thick and are made each from a single tree hewn to the required shape. Holes are bored at intervals along the edge of the plank, and into these are fixed pegs of wood which fit into corresponding holes in the edge of the succeeding plank. When the shell of the boat is completed, the ribs, each made from a single piece of bent wood, are fitted to the inside. The fitting of the planks is so accurate that the boats require little or no caulking, and they are ready to take the water as soon as they are built.

NATIVES OF MERAUKE

But by far the most interesting feature of Merauke are the natives of the place, whose independent mien and conservative customs fill the observer with admiration if not with approval. It is now nearly ten years since the Dutch settled at Merauke, but in all that time, apart from curbing somewhat their head-hunting propensities, they have made very little impression on the natives, who still cling (if one may use somewhat of an Irishism) to their scanty costume of nothing at all, and refuse absolutely the beads and cloth and other “trade-goods” of the invading white man. They stroll about the place in a most lordly manner, and they like to visit the houses of the Europeans, where they spend hours disdainfully watching other people at their work.

In appearance they differ from the Papuans of the Mimika in their somewhat paler skin and in their features, which are markedly of the (so-called) “Semitic” type with prominent eyes and long, curving, fleshy nose. They are very fond of personal adornment and paint their faces with white, red, and yellow colours; a fashionable but very unsightly decoration is to paint the eyelids and eyelashes white. Through the septum of the nose is thrust a long piece of white bone or shell, and in the alae nasi, which are also pierced, are often worn the claws of a large eagle which project forwards, and give the man a most ferocious aspect (see illustration opposite).