One of my difficulties at Mekeo was to make the natives keep the roads and tracks clean; each village was compelled by law to keep the roads throughout its own lands clean and open, and each village did its best to dodge doing so. One village in particular gave me a lot of trouble; say what I would, and do what I could, they would not clean their roads. Mohu was the name of this village. At last, in exasperation, I threatened, that if at my next visit the tracks were not cleaned, I should shoot the village pigs. Time went on, I visited Mohu again and found the roads worse than ever. I caught several of the prominent men, and cursed them; then I said, “You know what I told you last time, that I should shoot your pigs if you did not obey me; now I am going to shoot your largest and best pig, as a warning that I am in earnest. At the end of a week I shall return and kill the rest, unless you clean the roads.” The police drove out an uncommonly fine pig; I pointed it out to the chief and said, “I am going to kill that pig.” “Kill it, if you want to,” he said contemptuously. Shot the pig was, and I left the village, the chief and natives not appearing to worry much about the killing. Hardly had I gone a mile, before a fat Belgian brother of the Sacred Heart Mission came running after me. “For why?” he asked, “for why, Monseigneur, have you slain the pig of my lord the Bishop?” I sent humble apologies to the Mission, and offers of payment for the pig; the apologies were accepted, the payment they declined, telling me that they hoped I should succeed in making the lazy Mohu villagers clean their roads. Jumping with temper, I returned to Mohu, arrested the chief and all his most prominent followers, and sentenced them to a month’s gaol with hard labour. “We can only get three days’ simple imprisonment for neglecting to clean roads,” he complained. “Yes, you villain,” I replied, “but you are now getting a month’s hard labour, as accessory before the fact, to the stealing of a pig; and unless your roads are cleaned within a week, I’ll forget my judgment and make it six months.” Cleaned those roads were, within the week.
Mohu was a village that had always given a great deal of trouble; once it even went to the length of fighting Sir William MacGregor. A Station of the Sacred Heart was established near it, and the people, not caring about sending their children to school, tried to drive the missionaries away by depositing filth close to the Mission house. I cured them of that trick, by making the prominent men clean up, and carry away the mess, with their bare hands; they were all very angry, but one man especially so. Father Victor told me that one day afterwards, when he was walking towards the village, this particular individual slipped out in front of him from behind a bush, with bow bent, and arrow pointed straight at the father; he yelled at the man, who then apologized and explained that he thought the father was I. I sent for the man, and gave him three days’ solitary confinement on a pumpkin diet. “How do you like that?” I asked him at the end. He candidly said that words could not express his opinion of it, that he had never felt so lonely nor so empty in his life before. “Very good, then,” I told him, “don’t you play the fool any more with your bow and arrows, or you will get ten years of it.” Some time afterwards I made this individual a village constable, which position he filled in a very satisfactory manner.
Mekeo Station was absolutely the worst place for snakes I have ever known; they were there in all sizes, from pythons, that came after my fowls, to deadly little reptiles, that coiled up in bunches of bananas. If one sent a boy up a cocoanut tree, he had to beat at the bunches of nuts with a stick, before putting his hand in, to make certain that there were no snakes concealed. It is a fact, not generally known, that snakes climb trees in exactly the same manner that they go along the ground: they don’t coil round them, as picture books show, but I think they must grip the bark by elevating their scales; when they want to come down, they merely release themselves and fall like a wet piece of rope. I’ve only known two men in my life who really liked snakes: one was Armit, and the other was a camp-keeper he had, called Rohu. Once at Cape Nelson, I got my knee-cap knocked to one side, and went up by boat to get Armit, who was then stationed at Tamata, to fix it up for me. Rohu and Armit had half a dozen tame snakes, which used to crawl over their beds and chairs, in fact they were everywhere; if either of their owners wished to sit in a canvas chair, very frequently he had to pick a snake out of it first. To the contempt of the pair, I declined a bed in the house in favour of a bunk in the police barracks. “They are quite harmless,” said Armit. “That may be,” I remarked, “but if I must have bed fellows, I prefer constabulary to snakes.”
It was quite a common thing for the store-keeper on the gold-fields to have a small python—one eight or ten feet long—in his rice store, to keep down the rats; these pythons usually became very tame. I remember one big fellow, that my police caught in the Mambare and sold to Hancock, a store-keeper at Tamata. Hancock got this particular snake very tame; it would come to his whistle for a bowl of tinned milk, and it used to climb about the beams in the roof of the store. At that time, there was working in the Mambare district, a miner named Finn, whose habit it was to come in once a year, pay his debts, have a week’s wild drunk, buy a case of brandy and some hams, and return to his claim again; he then usually camped a few miles from the store, and lived on raw ham and brandy until it was done, by which time he was seeing horrors. One day, I was sitting writing at a table in Hancock’s store—he and I being the only men in it at the time—when Finn came in on his annual visit; he handed over his gold to Hancock, asked for his bill and a drink, then, seeing me at the table, came and sat down opposite, and said, “Give me a new Miner’s Right, Warden.” As I began to fill up the form, Hancock’s snake swung down from the rafters, and waved its head about over the table, looking for somewhere to alight. Finn’s jaw dropped, his eyes bulged in his head; then he got up, and, without a word, left the room, leaving his drink untasted behind him. I finished his “Right,” and Hancock, turning from his desk with Finn’s account in his hand, asked, “Where has Paddy gone?” “I don’t think he liked your snake,” I replied, “he seemed to think it wanted to kiss him.” Hancock waited for about half an hour, then sent up to the rival store to find out whether he was there, only to learn that Finn had called his native boys and gone straight back to his claim.
The Binandere or Mambare people are the only natives in British New Guinea who have no fear of snakes; I have seen them snatch up a poisonous snake by the tail, and crack its head against a tree.
Most of the Port Moresby snakes are harmless, but I remember one of Captain Barton’s men being bitten by a snake, and as a precaution he filled the man up with whisky, and ordered the remainder of the police to keep him walking about, and not on any account to allow him to go to sleep. Unfortunately he forgot to fix a time limit; the result was, that on the following morning, the feeble voice of a man bewailing a cruel fate was heard, and it was discovered that the constabulary had kept their unlucky companion walking up and down the whole night long. Upon the man recovering from the comatose slumber into which he promptly fell when released, he vowed that in the future—if he were bitten by fifty snakes—he would keep it quiet, as no snake bite could be half as bad as that cure.
At Mekeo I got my first taste of black-water fever, that strange form of malaria of which the cause is not known; and in which quinine—the sovereign remedy for ordinary malaria—is poison. I have never known black-water outside the Mekeo and Mambare districts in New Guinea; the name describes one symptom, another is a constant retching and vomiting of blood. Basilio and the police did all they possibly could for me, which of course, except for the constant attention, did not amount to much; hour after hour the constabulary relieved one another, holding my head and supporting me during the violent paroxysms of vomiting. One funny little interlude occurred, though. The sorcerers in the gaol inquired the reason of the silence and gloom over the Station, and were told by the warders that I was dying; whereupon they set up a loud chant of joy. The constabulary, sitting in a circle round my bed, heard the chant; several of them got up, went to their rifles, took out the cleaning rods, and paid a visit to the gaol, from whence soon came the wails of suffering sorcerers.
“What can we do?” said Basilio at last; “you die fast.” “Dig my grave under the flagstaff, where I can hear the feet of the men at drill,” I replied. Then appeared Fathers Bouellard and Vitali, whom Aia in despair had gone to fetch; they brought me white wine and bismuth. “You are in time for the funeral, Father,” I gasped out, “but that is about all.” “Oh, my friend,” said Father Bouellard, “I want but one little second at the end, and your soul is safe; but we are not going to let you die if we can help it; Sister Antoinette is very skilful with medicines, but as she cannot come here, we will take you to the Mission.” The police picked up my camp bed and carried me to the Mission house, where they nursed me back to life. When stronger, the police carried me to the Monastery at Yule Island, where Dr. Seligman, who was then visiting New Guinea with Professor Haddon’s party, came along and completed the cure, and also told me the name of the cheerful complaint from which I had been suffering. I had enteric some months later, but I call that an infantile thing alongside black-water.
After my convalescence, I was had rather badly one night by the Father Superior, who, by the way, was a most charming man, and was afterwards sent as Parish Priest to Thursday Island. The fever had left me very weak and with a terrific appetite, which the good fathers did their best to appease with all they had to offer. Having slept some time, I woke with a horrible sinking feeling in my tum-tum. “Faith,” I thought, “I should like a good stiff whisky and soda.” I made my way to the Father Superior’s room and, rousing him up, explained that I had a dreadful feeling of coldness in my tummy, and inquired if he could give me something to allay it. “Ah,” he said, “I know the very thing for you.” No sooner said than done, and he handed me a tumbler half full of a horrid tonic draught of iron and other beastliness, which I had to drink; then I slunk back to bed. Long afterwards I told Ballantine how I had aroused the worthy priest to get a drink, and received a bolus instead. He meanly told the Mission, for he said that the story was too good for them to miss. “Why, Mr. Monckton,” asked the Father Superior, “why, if you wanted cognac, did you not say cognac?”
When sufficiently recovered, I took passage in one of Burns, Philp’s vessels, the Clara Ethel, which Inman now commanded. At Port Moresby I reported myself to the Government Secretary, told him the tale of my adventures, and praised the priests of the Sacred Heart as a fine lot of men—my predecessor at Mekeo had always quarrelled with them. “I did not know that you were a Roman Catholic,” said Mr. Musgrave, when I had finished. “I am not,” I replied; “I am a Churchman, and a Churchman I’ll die; but if all Roman Catholics were like the members of the Sacred Heart Mission, there soon wouldn’t be any other Church in the world.” Muzzy was a dissenter of some sort, and regarded the Church of Rome with aversion. “Get away and report yourself to his Excellency,” he growled. I went over to Government House, and reported myself. Sir William told me to send for my things, and take up my quarters at Government House; then he said, “I had a cough like you once, a liver cough; I got rid of it. Captain Jones got one; he died. You should go away for a change, but I can’t spare you at present; you had better take a trip to Thursday Island in the Merrie England: she is taking the Judge west, and then going on there for coal.”