Some Experiences of a New Guinea Resident Magistrate

by C. A. W. Monckton

I was a full week at Wedau getting the boat mended, for I managed to strike Holy Week; the carpenter, being an aged and particularly holy man, would drop his tools four or five times a day and scoot off to some sort of service, whilst I would endeavour to carry on his work: the day of silence and prayer was especially trying to me, as I was in a fever of anxiety about my men left at Cape Nelson. At last, however, I got away and started back, the Bishop coming with me as far as Cape Vogel, where we had established a Mission Station. By the way, I nearly drowned him on that trip, for there was no wind when we left late in the day, and the police had fairly well exhausted themselves at the oars long before we were across the bay; then night and a big wind came, and we got into a tide rip off the Cape, which nearly swamped us. Curiously enough, I never afterwards travelled at sea with Bishop Stone-Wigg without having the most marvellous escapes from drowning.

I remember on one occasion sighting his vessel just before dark off Cape Nelson, and—after directing that a light be hoisted at the flagstaff—I went out in the whaleboat to pilot him into the harbour: it was pitch dark by the time we got alongside, with nasty rain squalls coming up at intervals. The Albert McLaren started to stand in for the narrow rock-bound entrance of the harbour, when suddenly the light at the Station flagstaff was obscured by a rain squall, and when the squall had passed—during which we had hove-to—the light had vanished. After waiting for half an hour for it to reappear, I came to the conclusion (the right one as it afterwards proved) that the police had not noticed that the light was out, and therefore it was not likely to be relit at all. We groped our way out to sea for some distance, and anchored over a sunken reef, whilst I sent the whaler to try and nose her way into the harbour and have the lamp relit: that was the last we saw of the whaler that night, for she lost her way in the rain squalls, and could find neither harbour nor Albert McLaren again. Meanwhile, the night got worse, the schooner’s anchor carried away, and we blew up the coast in the dark, missing, Heaven only knows how, the many reefs with which the coast is sown.

I spent my time on deck with the skipper, vainly trying to fix our position on the coast from the village fires, and trying to imagine a fit punishment for the police on shore, by whom the light had been allowed to go out. Inman, who was now captain of the Albert McLaren, was full of groans and despair. “If I had not seen your light go up and your whaler coming out, I should have crept behind a reef and anchored,” he complained; “now we are bound for Kingdom come.” “It is no part of my work to be drowned in a missionary boat; it is just an obliging disposition that has got me into this fix,” I told him. Then I went down to the cabin, where Bishop Stone-Wigg was peacefully writing, in spite of the racket on deck. “Well, R.M., what news?” he asked. “The news is that we are driving through the night amongst a lot of reefs, and the first thing that we shall know will be the crash of the schooner’s forefoot on one; we can’t heave-to, or we’ll inevitably smash up on the coastal rocks.” “There is a Guiding Hand,” said the Bishop calmly. “There is no guiding hand,” I said; “neither Inman nor I have the slightest idea where we are, and the prospect of all of us being drowned before morning is particularly bright.” “Oh, I meant we are in the power of a Higher Hand,” remarked the Bishop, and calmly went on writing and making references from books. “Well, of all cool customers,” I thought, as I returned to the deck, “the Bishop about takes the cake.” Some few hours before daybreak the wind abated, the rain squalls cleared away, and Inman was able to drop a kedge at the end of about one hundred and fifty fathoms of rope, and anchor until morning showed us our position. Daylight came, and a few hours afterwards my whaler appeared searching for us, and I went back in her to my Station, while the Bishop went on in his schooner to the Mambare.

At the Mambare the Bishop heard of the Opi villages, a thick cluster of people at the mouth of that river, who at this time were by no means too safe to deal with, or to be trusted. On his return voyage, he calmly ordered the schooner to be hove-to off the mouth of the river, and, accompanied by only a few Mission boys, went ashore in a tiny dingey to pay the villages a visit, with the object of ascertaining the suitability of the site for a Mission Station. The mouth of the Opi is one of the most shark-infested spots in New Guinea, and of course the Mission boys contrived to capsize the dingey in the surf; fortunately the Bishop was a very good swimmer, as were also his boys, so he managed to swim ashore; but an enormous shark swam alongside him to the beach and, marvellous to relate, did not attack him. I heard the tale from the Bishop, his boys, and the Opi natives who witnessed it.

I was not at all pleased when I heard of the Bishop having gone into the Opi villages, for though they were not in my Division, I knew from the officers of the Northern Division how unsafe they were; and I begged the Bishop to come to me for an interpreter the next time he wished to go there. It was a long time before he did want to go, and by that time I had two police recruits from the Opi, and I gave them to him as interpreters. “You will interpret truly for the Bishop,” I told my two men, “but you must first tell the people that he is my friend, and if anything happens to him I shall take such vengeance that the women and children of the furthest Binandere people will cry at the mention of it.” Privates Kove and Arita, the two men I sent, swore that the Bishop should be safe, and that they would fittingly picture the horrors that would befall the people if they threatened or injured him. When the Bishop returned from the Opi and gave me back Kove and Arita, he told me that he was very taken with the kindness and friendliness of the natives, and had decided to put a Mission Station there. Some time afterwards, I heard from Armit, then R.M. for the Northern Division and in whose district the Opi was, asking why I had been putting the fear of God or of the Government into the Opi people, and saying that he was the only person officially entitled to do that. I soothed Armit, by pointing out that if the Bishop had got killed, he was the man who would have had to face the music with the Governor, and that I had only been trying to do him—Armit—a good turn.

Writing about Bishop Stone-Wigg reminds me of an occasion when he accompanied me to the Yodda Gold-field; the Yodda miners at this time being about as hard-bitten, hard swearing, and as utterly reckless a lot of “hard cases” as could be found under the British Flag. They had got a cemetery—which, I might remark in passing, was afterwards washed out, with the bones of its inhabitants, because a payable streak of gold was found in it—and it was well filled with dead diggers. The Bishop, after looking at it, suggested that he should read the Burial Service over the graves. I agreed that it might be a good thing; making a mental note that afterwards, when anxious relations wrote to me about their dead relatives, I could say that the Bishop of New Guinea had given them Christian burial. I sent a summons to the miners, telling them what was to take place, and they rolled up in strength to attend. The Bishop read the impressive service of the Church in a voice and manner that struck home to those miners, and produced an unexpected result. Mat Crow, a prominent man among them, was deeply affected; and, at the end, he strode up to the Bishop, struck him heartily on the back, and broke forth: “Boys, this is kind of the Bish. There’s Alligator Jack and Red Bill, there’s blank, and blank, and blank planted here, and Gawd, ’E knows whether they have rested easy; we know what they were like, and we know what the Warden is like who read prayers over them; he was better than nothing; but he is no good alongside a parson, and a Bishop is fifty parson-power in one. Boys, I move a vote of thanks to the Bish, with three times three, and may we all have a Bish to plant us. Alligator Jack would be a proud man to-day if he knew what was being done for him.” Bishop Stone-Wigg fled, as the vote of thanks was carried with enthusiasm, and the cheers for the fifty parson-power parson echoed over the graveyard.

Returning to Cape Nelson from Wedau, I found my men bottled up inside the stockade; and was told that the Okein, a pugnacious tribe to the north, had paid them a visit, swaggered about the Station, interfered with the working Kaili Kaili, and generally made themselves a nuisance.

The following is a brief description of the different tribes inhabiting the North-Eastern Division, and also a general review of the feeling existing between them at this time. The Cape Nelson (Kaili Kaili) people, under the leadership of their chief, Giwi, were a confederation of shattered tribes, regarding every one to the north or south—or, in fact, any stranger—as enemies, by whom they might be attacked or slaughtered at a moment’s notice. To the north there lay the Okein, a branch of the Binandere; a strong, warlike, and colonizing people steadily pushing their way south, but halted in their southern march by the necessity of defending the land occupied by them, against the attacks of inland raiding tribes. To the south lay the Maisina tribe of Collingwood Bay, a race of pirates, who terrorized the coast as far as Cape Vogel, but were in their turn harried by incursions from the Doriri, a mountain tribe behind them. The Kaili Kaili, who inhabited the mountains and hills at Cape Nelson, were therefore really remnants of tribes shattered by attack from either the Doriri, Maisina, or Binandere people; and also the remnants of a tribe frightfully weakened by an eruption of Mount Victory.

For some time after they had occupied the inhospitable rugged lands of Cape Nelson, they had been subjected to periodical incursions and slaughterings by the Okein fleet of canoes; but were eventually saved by the good sense of their elected chief, old Giwi, who had an uncommonly fine head and exceptional reasoning power. The Kaili Kaili were not an aquatic people, but Giwi noticed four things: firstly, that all attacks against his people must come by sea; secondly, that the canoes of the invaders were made of a heavy hard wood; thirdly, that the missiles of the invaders were heavy spears having a limited range; and fourthly, that once the northern men landed, his lighter people stood no chance against their charges. Giwi, in his way, was a Napoleon. He saw that to fight the invader successfully, he must fight on the sea; he saw that he must not fight at close quarters, but must have faster canoes, and also missiles outranging those of the Okein; and he laid his plans accordingly. First of all, Giwi made his people learn to swim in the pools of the streams running into the fiords of Cape Nelson; then he ordered canoes to be cut from a particularly light wood, of shallow draft, and capable of great speed, though they would not last many months; then he had made a great stock of a particularly light and long spear, capable of being thrown a great distance. Having completed his preparations, Giwi built an ostentatious and sham village at the head of a fiord, round the shores of which he concealed his new fleet, and then awaited developments. The developments soon came: a strong Okein fleet of canoes swept down the coast, sighted the village, and at once attacked it; it fell an easy prey, being undefended and of no value, and the disappointed Okein fleet attempted to put to sea again, only to find hovering on their flank a swarm of light canoes, with whom they could not possibly close, and by the crews of which they were, man by man, slaughtered at long range. Out-generalled, out-paced and out-ranged, they had no hope. Very few of the Okein canoes escaped, and, for many years afterwards, they gave Cape Nelson a wide berth as they passed on their southern raids. Giwi and his canoes, however, at the time I went there, were the sole obstacles to their occupying the coast south of Cape Nelson, though they could still raid it.

The account of this fight, I had from Giwi himself, and also from some of the Okein who took part in it, years after it had taken place; but all their accounts tallied. In fact, the way in which I first heard of it was rather peculiar. I was staying for the night in old Giwi’s house as an honoured guest, and rolling over on the floor to sleep, I was disturbed by the old boy’s chuckles. “What are you laughing at, you old reprobate?” I demanded. “You are lying on the exact spot where I kept the body of the Okein chief, before I ate him,” he said, and then he unfolded the tale I have just told.