Some Experiences of a New Guinea Resident Magistrate

by C. A. W. Monckton

At the time the murder took place, I was stationed at Cape Nelson on the north-east coast, and amongst my constabulary were some of the men of the Mekeo detachment, who had been transferred to me there. I have no hesitation now in saying, that I am convinced that all the facts as to how Giulianetti was murdered were not elicited at the trial, and that I believe some of Giulianetti’s police were concerned in it. Firstly, it was not clear how Aia got the rifle and cartridges without the consent and knowledge of the owner; secondly, Aia swore that Giulianetti was sleeping with his mosquito net raised and a lamp burning, thereby allowing Aia a clear view of him. Now, it is utterly impossible for a European, in the Mekeo district, to sleep without a mosquito net; and to say that a man could sleep unprotected, in a room with a light attracting mosquitoes in myriads, is rank absurdity. If the mosquito net was down—as I am convinced it must have been—Giulianetti’s body would not have been visible to the man shooting at him, and some one must have raised it to allow Aia to aim. The shot, according to Aia’s statement, was fired from the doorway; this must have been true, for otherwise, the flash would have scorched the mosquito net or bed-clothes. Two shots were fired: now, Aia was a first-class shot, and had—according to his own statement—killed Giulianetti with the first; why, therefore, did he remain to reload his rifle and fire again, after the first shot had alarmed the house? That second shot came from a rifle other than Aia’s I am convinced. Another point to be considered is, that when the sorcerer first commanded Aia to shoot Giulianetti and threatened him with death if he disobeyed, why did he not appeal for help to the police, who were his friends, and some of whom came from his own village?

My own opinion is that Aia did tell the police, and that some of them were concerned in the murder. This view of mine was shared by my own police at Cape Nelson, and by nearly every member of the constabulary with whom I talked. Another reason I had for thinking that the Mekeo detachment—at that time—would not have been above making away with an unpopular officer was, that on one occasion, while they were under Bramell’s command, the whole lot had arranged to fire at him on the parade ground during inspection. When the time came, however, only one man carried out the plot by raising his rifle, firing, and missing him at about ten paces; Bramell had then deliberately walked up to the man, taken his smoking rifle from him and led him up to the police cell, into which he had shoved the offender, after which, he had resumed his inspection of the squad. Bramell punished the man afterwards, but, as he was in hot water at the time at Headquarters, did not report the incident for fear of—somehow or other—being blamed himself. The punishment he allotted to the culprit was a peculiar one, and one that I cannot say commended itself to me, richly though the mutineer deserved it. At that time there were in the Station two dark cells, one of which was never used, for the reason that on a previous occasion a man had hanged himself in it, and the police thought it was haunted by his ghost; Bramell gave his would-be murderer twenty-four hours in it, telling him that if he lacked company, he could call the ghost.

The police of Mekeo Station had a most extraordinary yarn of a strange happening there, on the night of Giulianetti’s murder (Amadeo, they called him). A group of them were sitting talking together, when one man jumped to his feet, pointed to Giulianetti’s house and exclaimed in surprise, “When did Amadeo return?” They all looked, and saw that the house, which had been in darkness, was lit up, and that Giulianetti, clothed in his usual white clothing, was seated in his chair in the open place between the rooms, looking across the parade ground. They all ran up to the house, to ask him how and when he had returned, and where his police were. As the men went up the steps of the house, it became plunged in darkness: puzzled, they called to Giulianetti and struck matches, and to their surprise could not find him; the lamp, which a few seconds before had apparently been burning brightly, was dead and cold. This story was told me by Sergeant Kimai, who was not an imaginative person.

The attempted murder of Bramell by his police was afterwards the cause of a serious quarrel between him and me, and for a time we were not on speaking terms, though we lived in the same house and dined at the same table. I did not know that Bramell had not reported the matter, and one day, in the course of casual conversation with the Government Secretary, referred to it. Mr. Musgrave pricked up his ears, asked me several questions, and then ordered me to put in a written report; I demurred, pointing out that the alleged shooting at Bramell by the police was all hearsay and Station gossip. Muzzy insisted; whereupon I made out a garbled version of the affair, to which Bramell had no difficulty in giving a flat denial. He, however, then took it into his head that I had been trying to get him into trouble, and “words” ensued, which resulted, as I have said, in a total split between us.

The quarrel ended in a funny way. I had a temporary Port Moresby boy engaged as a servant, who of course knew of the split between Bramell and myself; coming home one day unexpectedly, I found the young reprobate smoking one of my pipes and brushing his hair with my brushes, whereupon I cuffed him soundly. The boy whimpered, and I told him to shut up or he would get a little more; this had the desired effect, and I left. Mr. Musgrave at this time made pets of the Hanuabada boys, as they were called, and always came down like a sledge hammer on any officer who struck one, for whatever cause. After I had gone, the boy sat down outside, waited until he saw Mr. Musgrave in the distance, and then set up a terrific bellowing, as though he had been half murdered. Bramell heard the howls and asked the boy what the row was about; the boy said I had hit him, and he was howling to attract Mr. Musgrave’s attention: Bramell promptly cuffed the howler into silence, and kept him with him until the Government Secretary was safely out of sight. I heard of the incident from the boy, and when Bramell came home that night and went to his side of the verandah, I called after him, “Bramell, have a drink?” He came, had a drink, remarked that, “We were two fools,” and buried the hatchet.

After these digressions I must return to my epidemic and the Mekeo district. I released my chiefs and v.c.’s, after uttering the most blood-curdling threats as to what would happen if they indulged in any more corpse-licking. Again I raced through the district with a patrol, burying the dead and harrying the natives, as well as snapping up a sorcerer here and there. On an average, the patrol covered twenty miles a day, until the men and myself were as thin as catgut, and as tired as a sweated seamstress, from work and worry. We had our prisoners, sorcerers principally, handcuffed on to a chain; one evening, so tired out were we, that I commanded a halt in the middle of a grass patch and told the men to sleep where we stopped. Looking through my men for some one to take charge of the prisoners, I found they were all so utterly done up as not to be relied on to keep awake for half an hour. Aia was the only fresh person, he having sat in charge of our effects, while the constabulary and I worked. Calling Aia, I told him that, seeing the state the patrol was in, I meant to handcuff him on to the chained prisoners, in order that, if during the night they tried to bolt, he might alarm us. Aia protested, but handcuffed he was: in a few minutes I noticed that his hands were so small that he could slip them out of the handcuffs, accordingly I had one clasp of the handcuffs fastened to the prisoners’ chain and the other locked round his ankle, and I also lent him my heavy hunting knife—a most formidable weapon. Then we all slept, the dead heavy sleep that only a tired lot of men know.

Shortly before dawn, one of my men awoke and noticed that Aia and the prisoners had disappeared. He at once awakened the camp, and spreading out in every direction like spokes from the hub of a wheel, one of the men ran into the chain gang, who were soon secured again. They had watched us go to sleep, and had waited until Aia slept also, when they had suddenly seized him and gagged him with their belts—disgusting things those belts were too—then, muffling the clink of the chain with the remainder of their belts, they had slunk away, carrying Aia upside down with them. He had the extreme pleasure of hearing them discuss how they would cut off his ankle with my knife to release themselves, when sufficiently remote from the camp. This incident showed me clearly that it was high time we returned to the Station; for when a patrol is so worn out that it cannot find a man to mount guard, it is evident that its usefulness has ended.

At Mekeo it was my custom to spend a couple of hours on Saturday afternoons attending to any simple surgical cases, or broken bones, brought to me by the village constable. Sometimes I got one that was anything but simple. For instance, on one occasion a native came in with his shoulder all plastered up with mud and leaves; he told me that he had fallen from a cocoanut palm the week before and hurt his shoulder, and that it was so painful that he could not sleep at night and that he meditated suicide. In passing, I might remark that a favourite New Guinea method of suicide is to climb a cocoanut tree, and then drop head first to the ground. I examined the shoulder and found it badly dislocated, but apparently nothing broken. I struggled with that shoulder for a good hour, the man’s howls meanwhile alarming the country for a couple of miles around; then I gave it up in despair. “Are you not going to mend me?” he asked in an injured tone. “Mend you, yes,” I replied. “But I shall have to hurt you a bit, and you make my head ache with your howls.” “I won’t say another word,” he said. Then I sent to the whaleboat for blocks and tackle, which I attached to his arm, after lashing him firmly to pegs driven into the ground; in five minutes, by the aid of that tackle and some lusty police, the shoulder was back in position, and during the whole process the man did not give so much as a whimper.

Another native came in, and exhibited a lot of nasty long gashes about his arms, body and head. “How did you collect these?” I asked. “I got clawed by a bush alligator,” he replied. “Don’t tell me silly lies, there are no alligators in the bush; alligators live in the water,” I retorted. “There are water alligators and bush alligators,” he said; “bush alligators have sharp claws and climb trees.” “Do you mean iguanas?” I asked; “the reptile whose skin you use for your drums?” “No, I don’t,” he said; “the skin of the bush alligator is no good for drums.” I dressed the man’s wounds; and when next I met the Sacred Heart missionaries, I asked them whether they had ever heard a native yarn about a bush alligator. They had frequently heard of it, but had never seen the beast. Old Bushimai, chief of the Binandere, once showed me a lot of scars about his body, which he had got as a young man in an encounter with—as he put it—a devil. Bushimai and his wife were walking through the bush, he being unarmed (I may say he was an enormously powerful man); suddenly the wife, who was following, gave a yell, and, turning round, he saw her in the grasp of a beast strange to him; he got her away, but in so doing sustained the scars he showed me. Bushimai’s description of the beast was like nothing either on the earth, in the sea or sky; he was, however, perfectly satisfied with his own opinion—that it was a devil.

One day, whilst I was engaged attending to my patients, an old woman appeared, followed by a man hobbling along with the aid of a stick; the woman staggered under an enormous bunch of bananas, which she dropped at my feet. “There,” she said, “you cut my husband with your knives and cure him, and I will pay you these bananas.” I looked at the man, and found he had elephantiasis in one limb, which was swollen to an enormous size; I shook my head, and told the woman that I could do no good. “Yes you can,” she said; “I have heard of wonderful things that you have done. I suppose the payment is not enough, but we have nothing else with which to pay you.” Basilio at last made the woman understand that there were things beyond my power, and this was one; and, to make clear to her that it was not for lack of adequate payment, we made her presents of turkey-red twill, tobacco and beads, and also gave her husband an adze, the tool most prized by the Mekeo natives; but in spite of all, it was a very sad couple that went away. A leper once came to me, and he also had to depart disconsolately.