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

by A. F. R. Wollaston

The wind continued all through the night and the sea did not moderate, so at daylight, after having been for sixteen hours at anchor, we decided to leave the motor boat hoping that it would not be swamped before we were able to come back and fetch it. We all got into the yawl, which we pulled through quite a nasty sea for about three miles to a sand-bank in the estuary of the Timura river, where we camped until the rising tide enabled us to reach the mainland about midnight. On the following day, the sea having become calmer, we rescued the motor boat, which was by that time half full of water, and towed it slowly to the Timura.

But it was a most arduous business and without the help of a party of natives, who fortunately came along the coast in canoes and were prevailed upon to assist us in paddling, we should never have been able to bring back both of the boats. The arrival of the motor boat at the Mimika on the fifth day, propelled by native paddles instead of by its own power, was not a very dignified affair—it resembled rather the formerly familiar sight of the motor-car in tow of a horse from the plough —but it was a piece of good fortune that it and we returned at all.

We stopped for a night on the way at Nimé, a village at the mouth of the Keaukwa River. This is a very large village—I counted four hundred and thirty huts—but there were hardly a dozen people in the place, the whole population having gone off on one of their periodical migrations to a vegetable diet up the river. It was evident from the immense piles of fishbones and empty shells about the houses that the inhabitants must live largely by fishing, when they are there. The houses are better made than those at Wakatimi, and they are arranged in terraces and crescents along the water’s edge. It was there that we saw the elaborate dancing-houses described above (p. [143]).

Just as we paddled laboriously into the Mimika estuary we saw far down on the horizon the smoke of a steamer, and in an hour or two a white painted vessel, which turned out to be the Dutch Government ship Zwaan, drew inshore and anchored outside the bar. We naturally supposed that this was a ship that had come to take away the expedition, as we had informed the Government some months earlier that we hoped to be ready to leave the country by the end of March. But that communication had taken a long time, as everything does in those regions, in reaching its destination, and the Zwaan had come, not to take away the expedition, but to bring the means of prolonging the expedition still further.

AT SUMBAWA PESAR.

LATE ARRIVAL OF DAYAKS

It appeared that in the previous December the Committee of the Expedition at home, hearing of our scarcity of coolies some months earlier, had decided that a further supply of coolies should be sent to us without delay. Though cables work quickly enough between London and Singapore, communications beyond that are matters of days and weeks, and it was not until the 18th of March that the party of Dayak coolies, who had been engaged in Sarawak by the kind permission of H.H. the Raja, arrived at the Mimika. They were in the charge of Mr. C. B. Kloss, Curator of the Government Museum at Kuala Lumpor, who had brought with him six months’ provision for himself and the men. Almost at the same time that the Committee in England had taken this step, we in New Guinea had decided that three months more was as long as we were prepared to stay in the country, and a request had been sent to the Dutch Government to take us away at the end of that time.

When the Zwaan arrived we were all ready to depart, and Cramer’s party, numbering more than a hundred men, were chafing with impatience to get away; it would have been impossible for the Government to keep them there yet another six months. Even if there had been a possibility of our staying on in the country, the number of Dayaks, thirty-eight, was quite insufficient for a long journey into the interior and the prospect of reaching the moderately high ground of Tapiro Mountain, the best that could be hoped for, was not sufficient inducement to tempt any one to paddle again up the Mimika river. Added to this was the further consideration that in a week or two the more rainy season would begin and that for five or six months very little progress would be possible even with an unlimited supply of the best coolies.

So there was nothing for it but for Mr. Kloss and the Dayaks to go back in the Zwaan, which sailed for Amboina on the following day, taking also Marshall, as many sick and useless coolies and soldiers as could be crammed on board, and an urgent request to the authorities to remove us as soon as might be. The Dayak episode was altogether an unfortunate one; had the men reached us six months earlier, we should have made a very good use of them, few though they were; but coming as they did when we were on the point of leaving the country they merely illustrated the uselessness of attempting to conduct an expedition from the other side of the world.