CHAPTER XVII
Difficulty of Cross-country Travel—Expedition moves towards the Mountains—Arrival at the Iwaka River—Changing Scenery—The Impassable Iwaka—A Plucky Gurkha—Building a Bridge—We start into the Mountains—Fording Rivers—Flowers—Lack of Water on Hillside—Curious Vegetation—Our highest Point—A wide View—Rare Birds—Coal—Uninhabitable Country—Dreary Jungle—Rarely any Beauty—Remarkable Trees—Occasional Compensations.
When our third and last batch of forty-eight coolies reached the Mimika towards the end of December, it was at once evident from their appearance that the majority of them would not last very long, and as we had ourselves been already for a year in the country, it was agreed that we should make a final effort to penetrate as far as possible towards the mountains, and that when our means of transport came to an end we should take our departure from New Guinea.
We had long realised the impossibility of reaching the Snow Mountains from our present base. If we had possessed an efficient steam-launch or motor boat, the Mimika was still too small a river and too frequently unnavigable to be useful as a route for water transport. Another consideration even more important than this was the fact that had the Mimika been ten times the size it was, it would still have taken us in a direction many miles to the West of the mountains we hoped to reach. The result of these two circumstances was that we travelled by water with great labour to a place (Parimau), which was still in low and often flooded country, and from there we had to travel across country for many miles before we came to the first rising ground.
CROSS-COUNTRY JOURNEYS
It is difficult enough in New Guinea to make a way up a river valley, but you always have the comforting reflection that the river itself leads you back to your base, when stores are exhausted and it is time to return. But when you attempt to make a cross-country journey, not only is the trouble of cutting a track much greater than it is in a river bed, but there is the difficult and often somewhat dangerous business of crossing the rivers; added to this is the risk, which increases with every river you cross, of being cut off for a longer or shorter period from your base camp and supplies by a sudden flood in those same rivers. For this reason, when coolies were sent back from an advanced camp to the base, they had to be supplied with an extra allowance of food in the event of their being stopped by floods on the way; such a proceeding meant diminishing to some extent the store of food they had carried out and a consequent waste of labour. It is essential, therefore, in trying to make a long journey in such a country, to discover beforehand the river valley which will take you nearest to your goal and thus avoid the risks of a long cross-country journey.
No time was lost in sending a fleet of canoes heavily laden with stores up the river from Wakatimi, and early in January the whole expedition was assembled at Parimau with supplies sufficient for three months. On the 14th January Marshall and Grant with two Dayak collectors, forty-six coolies, thirty-one Papuans, and about forty soldiers and convicts, by far the largest number of men we had ever sent off at one time, set out for the Wataikwa river. A few of them went on with the Europeans to the Iwaka, where a track was cut for two marches up the valley of that river, while the rest, after leaving their loads at the Wataikwa depôt, returned to Parimau to fetch more loads of stores. From the Wataikwa the coolies carried on the stores to the upper camp on the Iwaka river, a three days’ march, and at the beginning of February Cramer and I went up there with the last party. About a hundred and fifty loads of one kind or another had been carried up from Parimau in these various excursions, but unhappily the coolies ate up a good many of the loads on the way, and still more unhappily many of the coolies fell sick, so that if we had wished to send back to Parimau for yet another transport of stores, it would probably have ended in our having no coolies to carry them any further.
The nett result of all this carrying was that when we arrived with the last loads at the Iwaka depôt we found that we had only twelve days’ provisions for our party of three Europeans, two Dayaks and the twenty-two coolies who survived from the forty-eight of a month earlier. Cramer had food for about the same number of days for his party of soldiers and convicts. Such a meagre supply of provisions as that obviously made it out of the question for us to penetrate far into the mountains; but you must in New Guinea, as elsewhere, cut your coat according to your cloth.