Fig. 17.
Drawings by Gizu of the process of harpooning a dugong. One man stands on the nēĕt waiting for a dugong to approach. In the second sketch a man has harpooned the dugong, and has thrown himself backward in the water so as to be out of reach of the coils of the rope as it runs from the nēĕt. Another man is swimming, and is tying a spare rope on to the tail of the dugong.
Charms which were supposed to ensure the approach of the dugong to the platform were often suspended to it, or hung on to a canoe. I have obtained several very small and neatly carved models of dugong at Murray Island that were employed for this purpose, but those I obtained from the western islands were of much greater size. A fine one from Moa is a foot and a half in length. This has a cavity hollowed out in the back, which, when in use, was filled up with red earth and various plants, including some eel-grass which had been chewed by the sorcerer who employed it; dugong fat completed the mixture. A bunch of eel-grass was tied to the tail, and along its back were lashed the thin leg-bones (fibulæ) of the sorcery man who carved the image. These were added after his death, to render the charm more effective. The whole was painted red, and fastened to a dugong platform, as in [Plate XI., B (p. 123)].
About the mouth of the Fly River, and I believe along the New Guinea coast and islands as far as Saibai, queer carved pegs called agumanakai are stuck in the canoes when going turtle or dugong hunting. I believe the word agumanakai means “the spirit (manaki) of the trophy;” the agu is a platform on which the carapaces of turtle are arranged as a trophy. A dugong trophy may possibly also be called agu, but I am not sure of this. Some have the end carved in the form of a bird’s head, while others represent a very conventional dugong’s head; they were decorated with feathers. Seligmann collected a very interesting specimen of the latter class, which, in addition to the dugong, had carved on it a representation of a sting-ray, which was evidently the totem of the owner. This particular specimen not only acted as a charm to make dugong come to be harpooned, but it would turn round towards where the dugong were swimming, and thereby indicate to the owner the direction in which he should steer.
Fig. 18. Wooden Dugong Charm
Obtained at Moa in 1888
The sorcerers were credited with the power of compassing the death, by strangulation, of a dugong harpooner. In leaping into the water to harpoon a dugong care has to be taken not to get entangled in the rope. It has happened that the head of a man comes up within a coil, and as the rope is rapidly drawn out by the retreating dugong, the luckless harpooner is speedily strangled. Not unnaturally the sorcerer would claim such an accidental death as being due to his own powers of magic, and thus increase his reputation. This could be the more easily asserted, since all disease and death, even from old age, were firmly believed to be due to sorcery, and not to natural causes.
The dugong naturally enters into several of the native legends. One of them relates how Sesere of Badu, who was afterwards transformed into a bird, first discovered the dugong as an article of food and how to catch it, by divining with the skulls of his parents. I have already alluded to the fancied resemblance of the hill of Gelam, in Murray Island, to a dugong, for which there is, as usual, a myth of origin.
Like the dugong the turtle is an important article of food in Torres Straits. There are two periods for turtle-fishing, really lasting all the year, the one during October and November, which is the pairing season, and when turtle are easily speared, owing to their floating on the surface of the water. The pairing turtle is called surlal, and that season is called surlangi. The other turtle season extends throughout the remaining months of the year, when the turtle, then called waru, frequent the deeper water and the channels between the reefs.