Some Experiences of a New Guinea Resident Magistrate

by C. A. W. Monckton

On arrival at Pusa Pusa, Silva donned the diving dress and descended, only to ascend in about ten minutes, holding a large shell in his hand and gesticulating to have his helmet removed. He said that it was a good shell bottom, promising very well indeed, but that immediately on descending he had met a groper larger than any he had ever seen, and he would prefer to remain on deck until the fish had had time to remove itself. Half an hour elapsed, Silva descended again, and almost immediately signalled, “Pull me up.” Pulled up accordingly he was; he then complained that he had met a shark, and that—though as a general rule he did not mind sharks—this particular one was longer than the Mizpah, and he thought he preferred to be on deck! Again we waited perhaps an hour, and again Silva descended, and again came the urgent signal, “Pull me up.” Upon his helmet being removed, he at once demanded, with many oaths, that his whole dress should be taken off; and then, seizing a tomahawk, he declaimed: “The first time I went down in this blank place I met a groper, the next time I met a shark as big as a ship, the last time there was a —— alligator, and if any man likes to say there is shell here I’ll knock his —— brains out with this tomahawk!” A hero of romance would now have donned the dress and descended, but I freely confess that I—as an amateur—was not game to take on a work that a professional diver threw up as too dangerous.

Doubtless Silva’s rage was increased by the extraordinary effect air pressure has upon a man’s temper when diving. A diver may be in a perfectly amiable mood with all the world while the dress is being fitted on, but the moment the face glass is screwed home—the signal for starting the air pump—he begins to feel a little grievance or irritation; as he descends, this feeling increases until he is in a perfect fury of rage against every one in general and usually one individual in particular. After that, he spends his time in wondering how soon the dress can be taken off in order that he may half-kill that particular person, usually the tender, for some wholly imaginary offence. Another peculiar fact is, that the moment the face glass is removed and he breathes the ordinary air—even though he may have come up boiling with rage against some special individual—the bad temper evaporates like magic and he wonders what on earth caused his anger. This has invariably been my experience, and other divers have told me they have felt the same sensations. There is usually a perpetual feud between the diver on the bottom and the men on deck working the air pump. The diver always wants sufficient air to keep his dress distended and also to keep himself bobbing about on the bottom; if he gets too much he can let it pass away, by releasing the valve of his helmet; if he gets too little, he can signal for more, but there is no tug signal on the life-line for less air.

A diver’s helmet is really not a helmet in the ordinary acceptation of the term, but is a small air chamber firmly bolted to the corselet and incapable of movement from any volition on his part. He simply turns his head inside it and looks through either side or front glasses, exactly as a man looks through a window. A diver’s most real danger is probably the risk he runs of being drowned when on his way to the surface, and it occurs in this way. After a time the best of diving dresses becomes leaky to a more or less extent, and the water that finds its way through, settles about the feet and legs. Divers become quite accustomed to having their dresses filled with water up to the knees and even to the thigh; the water is no inconvenience to them whilst upright on the bottom, and they are very rarely conscious of it. Well, suppose a diver has his dress full of water to the knees or thighs; as he ascends, he may involuntarily or by accident allow his body to assume a horizontal position, in which case the water at once rushes into the helmet, overbalances him, i.e. really stands him on his head, and drowns him inside his dress.

In a diving dress every beat of the air pump is perfectly audible to the diver, and any irregularity or alteration of the pace, at which the air-pump wheels are turned, is to him irritating in the extreme—an irritation he invariably works off by signalling for more air and thus increasing the manual labour at the pumps. It takes four men, straining hard, to keep a diver properly supplied with air at any depth over twenty fathoms. One of the greatest discomforts a diver has in the tropics is the smell of warm oil, more or less rancid, with which the pumps charge his air; I have had to struggle hard to prevent being sick, and I leave to the imagination the beastly situation of a man, with his head confined in a small helmet, overcome by nausea! Another exasperating thing is the scroop made by a grain of sand or grit getting into the plunger of the air pump, which is only comparable to the feeling caused by a drop of water falling upon one’s head at regular intervals.

Apart from the noise of the pump beats, communicated through the air pipe—which, by the way, is rather comforting, as it shows one is not completely cut off from the upper world—the under seas seem absorbed in extreme silence and gloom, and unless one is in a current or tide, in a sort of unholy calm. One of the things which appear as most remarkable is the lessening of the weight of objects in the water; for instance, a fully accoutred diver can hardly waddle on the deck of his ship, but as he descends, his weight seems to become less and less until he can bob about in a fairy-like manner on the bottom. The same lessening of weight applies equally to inanimate objects; and it is a common trick, when competing vessels are working upon a small patch of shell, for the diver of one of them to pull his rival’s anchor out of the ground and tangle its anchor round the fluke, with the result, that the vessel drifts off with the tide or the wind, towing her diver after her. A lot of time is thus wasted in pulling him up and working back against tide or wind to her old station.

I have spoken of pulling up a diver; this is not literally true, as a diver really ascends of his own volition, by closing his helmet’s air valve and thus blowing out his dress with air. The “pulling in,” when the water is calm, merely consists of taking up the slack of the air pipe and line and, when there is a tide or current, of hauling him along the surface to his vessel. Great care has to be exercised by him in coming to the surface, as, should his ascent be too fast, he may smash his helmet on the bottom of his boat or lugger. The usual way is in a half-lying position on the back and with one hand on the air valve, watching carefully for the light near the surface, and for the shadow of the vessel’s hull. Occasionally, though it very rarely happens, a diver’s air valve sticks; in which case, he at first rises slowly from the bottom, but as the pressure of the water decreases, the pace of his ascent increases, until at last he is rising at such a pace that he shoots violently above the surface. The first thing that shows those on board the lugger what is happening is a splash, and the sight of the diver floundering about on the surface nearly suffocated by pressure of air.

From Pusa Pusa, the Mizpah and Silva’s boat returned to Iasa Iasi; and when I had rejoined my luggers, Silva sailed away for Sudest, being by this time quite convinced that nothing was to be gained by shadowing my boats. I found that my crews were at last recovering, and departed with them for the islands of Tubi Tubi and Basilaki. On the way we called in at Awaiama Bay on the coast of the mainland, in order to replenish our fresh-water supply, the water obtainable at Cape Vogel being brackish and disagreeable to the taste. Here I found Moreton with the Siai; he was engaged in buying land from the natives for a man named Oates. New Guinea law did not permit the sale of land by natives to any other than the Crown; the Crown could then transfer to the European applicant. Oates had come up from Sydney in a cutter of some twenty tons burthen, accompanied by his wife and family, which consisted of a son and daughter, aged respectively about fourteen and seventeen, their intention being to start a cocoanut plantation. He had formerly been the master of the Albert McLaren, the Anglican Mission vessel; but this latest speculation of his was not fated to turn out well. The first thing that happened was that his daughter became disgusted with the prospect, and, on the family visiting Samarai, she took the first opportunity of departing for Sydney, where I believe she married a draper and, I trust, found life happier than she had in New Guinea. Then his wife died and was buried by the son, as Oates himself was delirious at the time with malarial fever and all the native servants had fled. Finally Oates died also, and the unhappy boy had to bury him as well. This boy, Ernest Oates, afterwards entered the service of Whitten Brothers and eventually became manager of their branch at Buna Bay, and he was still in that position when I finally left New Guinea. After a most strenuous ten years, he was endeavouring to scrape together enough money to start a small business of his own in Sydney—something quiet and contemplative, like growing mushrooms.

I remember, some years after the death of his parents, an extraordinary performance on the part of this lad. He was then stationed by Whitten Brothers at the mouth of the Kumusi River as their agent, and had charge of a receiving store for goods landed at that port, which had to be sent up the river to Bogi, a mining camp. With the exception of a few Samarai boys, Ernest Oates was absolutely alone, living surrounded by some thousands of particularly dangerous natives. He possessed two fire-arms, one, a Winchester repeating rifle, for which he had a large store of cartridges; the other, an old Snider with only some half-dozen charges. By some means or other, he broke the lock of his Winchester, and therefore was left with the weapon for which he had practically no ammunition. At this time a large alligator collared several pigs from near the store and narrowly missed securing odd boys of his. Whilst Oates was sitting on his verandah one evening, he noticed the alligator crawl out on a mud bank and, with its mouth wide open, proceed to go to sleep. As he did not wish to use one of his sparse supply of cartridges, the idea occurred to him of creeping over the mud and throwing a dynamite cartridge down the reptile’s throat. No sooner did the thought come than it was acted upon; crawling over the mud he got, unperceived, to within a few feet of the saurian and, standing up, hurled his cartridge. Unfortunately, as he threw the explosive, his feet burst through the hard, sun-baked crust of mud, and he sank to the waist with a plop and a yell; his boys, who were keenly interested spectators, dashed to his assistance, but with little hope of reaching him before the alligator. Luckily, however, he had attached a very short fuse to his charge, and the dynamite exploded, wounding the reptile’s tail and causing it to turn round and snap at an imaginary new enemy. This allowed Oates’ boys to come up, drag him from his hole, and drive off the alligator with their spears.

Oates’ father, “Captain” Oates as he was usually called, once gave me the peculiar pleasure—as a magistrate—of receiving a complaint about myself. I was relieving Moreton at the time as Resident Magistrate at Samarai, and had been engaged, to the common knowledge of all traders and labour recruiters, in a punitive expedition to Goodenough Island. Having finished my work there, I took the Siai across to Cape Vogel with the intention of searching for unsigned or kidnapped boys, by running unseen down the coast in the night and boarding any labour vessels I might find bound for the Mambare gold-fields, either rounding or anchored off East Cape. Labour vessels had a trick of starting their little games when the cat in the shape of the Siai—or Black Maria as their owners called her—was safely out of the way.

It was a rough boisterous night, dark as the inside of a black cow, and blowing nearly a full gale; the Siai was showing no lights as I did not want her seen, nor did I want her movements reported by the natives; and as she was crowded with men, I could afford to carry on sail until the last minute, which I accordingly did. Passing Awaiama we sighted the lights of a vessel hove-to outside the harbour, and, as we ran close down to her, there came a brilliant flash of lightning from behind us, which for a moment illuminated her like day, and allowed us to identify her as Oates’ cutter, the Rock Lily; whereupon we sheered off and passed her at about sixty feet distance. At East Cape I found no vessels, and accordingly went on into Samarai.