We were met by the teacher, a Port Moresby native, who accompanied us all the time and acted as interpreter. We photographed the village from the shore, with a group of natives on the sand beach. All the women were richly and thoroughly tattooed. We got off in a canoe paddled by girls, and clambered up the horizontal poles that serve as a ladder to one of the houses, and wandered from one end of the village to the other along the platforms. The planks of which the platforms are made are irregularly placed, often with spaces between them; and one has to cross from the platform of one house to another on poles which may be fastened or may merely be lying loose. The natives run along these easily with their bare feet, but we, with our boots on, found it a very different matter.
PLATE XIII
THE MARINE VILLAGE OF GAILE
BULAA
Crouching behind and beside the entrance of one house was a widow in mourning for her recently deceased husband; her head was shaved, her body smeared all over with charcoal, her chest was covered with netting, she wore a long petticoat, elongated tassels of grey seeds (Coix lachrymæ) hung from her ears, and on each arm she had four widely separated armlets of coix seeds, and round her neck were numerous necklaces and ornaments. She would not come on to the platform to be photographed, the reason assigned being that she would get a bad name for disrespect to the memory of her husband if she showed herself in public. She had no objection to being photographed in the house; but that was impossible as it was so dark.
Although all the people fish, one man had a great display of nets, and he was pointed out as the chief fisherman of the village; probably he was more expert than the others, and so had become more wealthy. We bought a few ethnographical specimens, and we were surprised to find that they wanted money for everything, and prices as a rule ran very high. We stayed so late that the sun had set before we got away.
We started fairly early on June 3rd, but as the wind was against us we had to make any number of tacks and our progress was exceedingly slow, and it was very wet sailing. The weather was, however, favourable enough, and we had a fine panorama of the coast and of the tier upon tier of hilly land behind that became lost to view in the misty distance. The hills appeared to be but thinly covered with trees, and presented a great contrast to the dense umbrageous foliage that overwhelms the mountainous Philippine Islands.
Taking the south-east peninsula of New Guinea as a whole, it is composed of a central range of lofty mountains, consisting largely of gneiss, slates, and crystalline schists of uncertain age, which, so far as is known, have an east-north-east strike. The less lofty lateral mountains, which form occasional massives, are composed of acidic and basic volcanic rocks, of which the former appear to predominate. To the east these mountains are bounded by contorted Tertiary beds that form a tumultuous hilly country, which extends to the coast-line. Most of the mountains and hills appear to be built up of contorted or much-tilted beds, and may be described as well-dissected folded mountain ranges.
But few extensive alluvial plains occur in the peninsula. The lower reaches of the Laroki and Vanapa rivers and the basin of the Aroa constitute a very fertile plain, inhabited by the well-to-do, independent Kabadi tribe, who exchange all kinds of native food for the earthenware vessels of the Motu potters. The largest of these plains is found in the Mekeo district, and here the natives seem to have advanced further from savagery in several respects than elsewhere on the mainland.