After we had given them their presents we walked towards the canoes, and then they began to set up their horrible wail. A few of them picked up pieces of cloth and matting, through the middle of which they thrust their heads and then began to howl with their hands over their eyes. I took a last look round the houses to see that nothing of value had been left behind and on going to the store-house I met a man, one of our best friends, coming out of it with a tin of rice under his arm. He immediately put down the tin, tore off from a climbing bean that grew by the house a trail of leaves a yard or two long, and wound them about his head and body. Then he burst into tears and the most heartrending sobs, which changed in a moment, when he caught my eye, into a shout of laughter.
When we finally got into the canoes all the men came down to the water’s edge and wailed, while some of them sat down in the water and smeared themselves with mud. In the meantime we could see their women going off into the jungle carrying tins full of their possessions to hide there, and it is probable that after we left there was a good deal of quarrelling and fighting over the spoil. The wailing is a purely perfunctory politeness, but I think there were a few men who were genuinely sorry to lose us. On the following day a strong ebb-tide bore us quickly down to Wakatimi and our navigations of the upper Mimika river were at an end.
In the meantime Rawling had made an interesting exploration of the coast and of the river mouths to the East of the Mimika. The motor boat, which had been badly damaged some months earlier, had been repaired by two Dutch pioneer soldiers and was more or less sea-worthy. In a four days’ trip he had entered the Atuka river, or rather the Atuka mouth of the Kamura river, a few miles up which he came to Atuka, a large village of about six hundred huts surrounded by coconut palms and tobacco plantations. Proceeding up the river into the main Kamura river he went on almost to the junction with the Wataikwa river, thus filling in a large gap of unknown river. On his way back he chose the left (East) branch and after passing the village of Kamura, where the inhabitants showed an inclination to plunder the boat, he came to the lake-like estuary of the Kamura and Wania rivers and entered the sea by a deep channel. It is worth noting that the inhabitants of Atuka and Kamura villages, many of whom visited us two or three times at Wakatimi, are of a decidedly lower type (in appearance) than the people of the Mimika district, though the distance that separates them is only a few miles. They have a fiercer and more brutal aspect and many of them, both men and women go completely naked, a habit which is never practised by the people of Wakatimi. Scarcity of petrol and an irregularly sparking plug brought that excursion to an untimely end, before the lower waters of the Wania had been investigated.
EXCURSION TO THE WANIA
From our hill-top (see p. 239) the Wania was evidently by far the most considerable of all the rivers of the district, and apart from our desire to see the people of the Wania, of whom the Mimika natives always spoke with great respect, we felt bound to explore that river as far as possible. Accordingly on March 14, Rawling, Marshall and I, with a Dutch pioneer, two Gurkhas and three coolies, set off in the motor boat towing the yawl, a ship’s boat about twenty feet long, laden with tents and provisions for a week. In a few hours we arrived at the mouth of the Wania river and found that owing to the low tide there was no way of crossing the sand-bar that lay across the entrance. This circumstance was the more remarkable, because only a few days earlier Rawling had come through this bar by a very deep channel. The frequent changes in the banks make the navigation of this coast and particularly of the river mouths exceedingly difficult.
On this occasion the sea was already rather rough, so that we could not anchor and wait until the tide rose, and as the wind was increasing in force there was nothing for it but to turn back and try to take shelter in one of the rivers between the Wania and the Mimika, if not in the Mimika itself. All went well for a few miles and then, as happened frequently, the leather band jumped off the driving wheel and the engine was stopped. When it was replaced and the engine was started again, there was no churning of water in the stern and we realized with some consternation that we had lost our propeller. We were about twelve miles from the mouth of the Mimika, in a shallow sea of less than three fathoms, with a strong wind blowing towards the shore where the waves began to break within a few hundred yards of us, and we were ten men with a heavy motor boat and a heavily-laden yawl to get along somehow. We put four men into the yawl to row and they tried to tow, but the current was so strong against them that they made no headway at all, so we had to anchor where we were and hoped for better things. We pitched and rolled and bumped about most horribly and soon most of the party were deadly sea-sick, perhaps luckily for them, because in that condition one cares nothing for the prospect of shipwreck.
SCREW PINES (Pandanus).
AN UNPLEASANT EXPERIENCE
Our anchor rope was short and none too strong, and the rope between us and the yawl was thoroughly rotten—it had snapped once earlier in the day—and we expected that every sudden jerk of the lumpy sea would break it again. Had that happened, there might have been a nasty accident, as the men were too sick to row, even if they had known the art, and their chances of swimming ashore through a sea swarming with sharks were not very bright. Our own predicament in the helpless motor boat would have been unpleasant too, if the yawl had gone adrift, but happily the ropes held. Another drawback was that the motor boat leaked like a sieve, so that a man was kept constantly at work baling her out, and we did not know that the strain might not open her old timbers even more. There was a glorious full moon which one would have enjoyed seeing from the smooth deck of a steamer, but there we could only think how uncomfortable it was lying (without having had dinner) on boxes and tins and gear of all sorts huddled in the bottom of the boat.