“Judge,” said Sir William, “under the Prisons Ordinance, has the R.M. power to flog prisoners without reference to me?” “Yes, your Excellency, I believe he has; though it has never been exercised by a magistrate in New Guinea before. Mr. Monckton, give me the Ordinance. Yes, sir, see, here is the section, the R.M. was within his powers.” “I still consider your action ill-considered and ill-advised,” remarked the Governor. I waited a few minutes, and finding Sir William continued to talk to Judge Winter, I said: “If, sir, you do not require me further, I will wish you good-night.” “Good-night,” was the gruff reply; and walking to the gangway, I whistled for my boat, which was waiting at the wharf. As I waited for her to come alongside—meditating the while on my iniquities—I heard a step behind me, and turning round saw the Governor. “Mr. Monckton,” said Sir William, “it is not late: I should like to present you to Lady MacGregor, and offer you a glass of wine in my cabin.”
After meeting Lady MacGregor and drinking my wine, I went ashore to my house and found there the Commandant, Private Secretary, the Commander of the Merrie England and several other officers, all sitting in solemn state discussing my fate. “They have drunk up all your whisky, sir,” said Poruma; “I told them you had only one bottle, and hid the glasses, but they took tea cups.” “Go to Billy’s pub and get me some more,” I said, to get rid of Poruma; I then unfolded to sympathetic ears my tale of woe. Poruma, the whisky and Armit arrived at the same time. “What is this mothers’ meeting about?” said Armit; “you all look as if you had dined on bad oysters!” “A bucket full of bad oysters would not have put me in the state I feel in now,” I said, “thanks partly to you: it’s that flogging business. I’m sending in my papers in the morning.” “Don’t be a damned fool,” said Armit; “I’ve just come from the Merrie England, and Jock never once used the word ‘reprimand,’ when he blew you up. You swallow your pride, and take the pricks as well as the plums; you ought to feel jolly proud of the position in which Jock has put a young man like you.”
The following morning I was up bright and early, and went off to the Merrie England, where I found that the Governor had risen still earlier and intended inspecting the gaol; accordingly, I departed to make all ready. At that time the whole Government reserve—included in which was my house, police quarters, the gaol compound and the cemetery—was surrounded by a high wooden fence, with a gate across the only street of Samarai, leading into it; at this gate there was a guard house, occupied by a married gate-keeper and a few police. As the gate-keeper admitted me, I called for the police, but found they were at a parade ordered by the Commandant; I then told the gate-keeper to close the gate, and ran to the gaol to tell the gaoler to keep in all his prisoners for inspection, instead of sending them to work as usual. Hardly had I reached my house, than, looking back, I saw Sir William arrive at the gate; the gate-keeper’s wife gazed at him, horror-stricken at the thought of the Governor waiting and her husband away, then—rising to the occasion—she rushed at the gate and, throwing it wide open, stiffened herself and flung her hand up to the salute. I met the Governor who, drily smiling, remarked, “I see, Mr. Monckton, ye drill the women as well as the men.” Crimson with shame, I dropped to the regulation half-pace behind his Excellency, and softly cursed to myself the misplaced zeal of the woman.
The Governor’s inspection over, the Siai was prepared for sea. In the evening she dropped down the harbour with the tide, and stood away to Taupota on the north-east coast, carrying, as well as her own complement, Butterworth and fifteen men of the constabulary. There she picked up some twenty natives, to act as carriers for the heavy luggage of the police, in order to allow the force freedom of action and mobility when camped away from the Siai.
With these men on board, we were badly crowded, and it accordingly behoved us to make a rapid passage to our anchorage at Goodenough; in our haste, Sione ran the Siai upon a shoal off the north-east of that island, where we apparently stuck hard and fast. Sending out a kedge anchor astern and lightening the vessel in every possible way had no effect; whereupon I recalled a story told me by my father, of an experience of his in the Baltic during the Crimean War, when Captain Fanshawe got the Hastings battleship off a shoal, by commanding her crew to stand at the stern and jump as one man to the sound of the bo’sun’s pipe. Accordingly I stationed six of the Siai’s crew at the windlass, to haul on the kedge at my whistle, and ordered the remainder of the crew, police and carriers, at the same sound to rush aft and jump violently. This was done, and worked like a charm; as the men jumped, the Siai’s bow flew into the air, the strain on the kedge caught her, and away she went into deep water again. A few hours after this we dropped anchor off Thompson’s plantation, and prepared for another attempt at the hill villages.
Our plan of campaign was this. First marched the Siai’s men, flung out as a screen of scouts, with myself as the centre pivot of the line; then came Butterworth and his men in support, about a hundred yards behind, followed by the carriers bearing camp equipment. Some miles inland we came upon a grass patch, not previously found by me, at the end of which was a stony hill topped by a village, which apparently was deserted. My line of scouts slowly converged upon the village, when suddenly—whilst still about fifty yards distant—a shower of sling-stones fell amongst us; to wait for the main body was practically impossible, therefore I gave the word to charge, and the Siai’s men rushed and carried the village, killing some of the defenders and taking several prisoners. Safely in occupation, I looked back for Butterworth and his men, thinking that they were close on my heels, and saw, to my amazement, that they were halted at the bottom of the hill. I called to them to come up and, upon their arrival, asked Butterworth why he had not followed in support. He explained that our arrangement was, that when we encountered hostile natives, I was to signal to him to close up; as I had not signalled, but gone on, he had halted his men to await developments. I thought myself that a sudden blaze of rifle fire, and the sight of my men at the charge, should have been a sufficient signal to any one that we were in action—and with very little warning.
Hardly had Butterworth brought his men into the village, than the dislodged inhabitants started pelting us with sling-stones from a high and commanding ridge; so much so, in fact, that we were obliged to take refuge in the houses, from which safe shelter, half a dozen of our best shots soon inflicted such loss upon them as to compel them to retire and, for the time being, leave us in peace. We stayed in the village to rest our men and eat our midday meal, and whilst so engaged, we were surprised to hear the voice of a man gaily singing and approaching us. On looking over the hill, we saw, to our amazement, a fully armed native walking up the track towards us. “Fire a couple of shots over that man’s head,” I said to the police; upon the shots being fired, the man looked up, gave a howl of surprise, and then fled. “What did you do that for?” asked Butterworth; “we might have caught him.” “It is an obvious thing,” I remarked, “that that man is ignorant of everything going on here, and therefore innocent of complicity in the murders; he is either a local native returning from a protracted visit to a distant tribe, or a stranger paying a visit here, otherwise he would not be walking about alone and announcing his whereabouts by song.” During the afternoon Butterworth’s men took possession of a higher ridge overlooking the razor-backed spurs, on which was situated the village I had previously failed to occupy, and, under cover of their fire, the Siai’s men entered and seized it without fighting. Here we camped for the night, and remained unmolested.
Then, for several days, the constabulary and my men searched the country and took several prisoners; we found that the fight had been taken out of the natives, and they were no longer massing to oppose us but scattering, taking refuge in every possible way. I now decided to return to Samarai, having captured most of the principal men concerned in the attack on Thompson’s plantation; the Goodenough Islanders, too, had learnt that the Government was something more than a name, and also more than their match at fighting.
Having an afternoon to spare on the day before we left Goodenough Island—while the police and the Siai’s men were engaged in chopping wood and carrying water to that vessel—I took the dingey, Poruma, Warapas, and Giorgi, and went shooting duck and pigeons up a small river. I got the most mixed bag I ever made in my life: pulling into the river, a hawksbill turtle suddenly rose about twenty feet in front of the boat; this I succeeded in shooting through the head, and Poruma retrieved it by diving; the turtle must have weighed about two hundred pounds when out of water. Then I got about a dozen duck and a score of pigeons, Warapas shot a wild pig, and Poruma killed a python fully fourteen feet in length with a half-axe (that is, a tomahawk with a long handle like an axe). After this, Giorgi discovered an alligator asleep on a bank some thirty yards away from the river; creeping up, I fired my gun into one of its eyes, and Giorgi gave a yell of joy and rushed at it; but the alligator, which was only blinded on one side and not disabled, pursued him, whilst I pursued the alligator, firing my revolver into its body, as opportunity offered. Poruma, however, gave it the coup-de-grâce, by getting up on its blind side and belting it just behind the head with his half-axe. We returned to the Siai with the dingey’s gunwales nearly awash under the weight of game of sorts.
Whilst on the subject of alligators, I may remark an extraordinary peculiarity of these reptiles, and that is, that in some ports and rivers of New Guinea, they appear to be absolutely harmless, for instance, in the Eastern Division, Port Moresby, and the fiords of Cape Nelson: whereas in the mouths of the San Joseph, Opi, Barigi, and Kumusi Rivers, they are a malignant lot of man-eating brutes, neither hesitating to attack men in canoes, nor to sneak at night into the villages and seize people. The same thing, in a lesser degree, applies to sharks haunting Papuan seas; I have never known a man taken at Port Moresby or in the Mekeo district by a shark, nor do the natives there—who are at the best a cowardly lot—show fear of them; but on the bars of the Opi, Musa, and Kumusi Rivers, I have known the brutes swim alongside a whaleboat and seize the blades of the oars in their teeth. On one occasion, at the Kumusi River, my men caught a shark, the belly of which contained several human bones, a human head, the complete plates forming the shell of a large turtle, and the freshly torn-off flipper and shoulder of a large dugong or sea cow.