In a month, we recovered some thirty odd runaway carriers in lots of two, three, and up to a dozen. Seradi then told me of a little village inhabited entirely by sorcerers, male and female, some seven miles away, where they had another runaway tied up for some diabolical purpose. I sent Seradi and half a dozen police to bring me the captive and arrest the sorcerers; these gentry were not at all popular with the Kaili Kaili, though, like most natives, they stood in awe of them. The police returned, carrying in a net a man so emaciated that his bones were literally sticking through his skin, and his whole body showing the marks of dreadful ill-usage; he was so weak as to be beyond speech, and though we dosed him with tincture of opium and brandy, and filled him up with broth, he died within a few hours. The sorcerers had seen the police coming and escaped. My men told me that their village was unspeakably filthy, so I sent them back, in the middle of the night, to surprise and catch the sorcerers and burn down the village. They only caught two, whom I sent to gaol for six months, their first job being to bury the body of their victim. Where their filthy village had stood, the police left a clean, smoking heap of ashes: the prestige of sorcerers among the Kaili Kaili slumped from that day, and though sorcerers in other parts of the Division continued to give trouble, those amongst the Kaili Kaili people spent most of their time either hiding in the bush, in gaol, or in explaining to a village constable and his posse that they were living virtuous and meritorious lives.
The burning of houses was, as a general rule, strictly forbidden by the Lieutenant-Governor as a punishment, and very rightly so; but I felt sure that he would approve of my smoking out a lot of miscreants, such as those I have mentioned, as indeed he did. Sorcery among New Guinea natives may be divided into two kinds: the sorcerer practising the first kind belongs to a class of wicked, malevolent assassins, doing evil for the sake of evil; he is prepared to perform his devilry, administer poison, or commit any crime for any person paying him to do so. This class of sorcerer does not pretend to perform anything but black magic, or to work anything but harm; and the shadow of the fear of the brute is over the whole tribal life. Sorcerers practising the second kind are men who make use of a benevolent and kindly magic for good only. These pretend to possess powers of rain-making, wind- or fish-bringing, bone-setting, the charming away of sickness, or charming the spot upon which a garden is to be made to render it productive. They understand massage to a certain extent, and are usually highly respected and estimable members of the community to which they belong; and to interfere with this second class in the practise of their arts, would be not only cruelly unjust but decidedly unwise.
Once I had a frantic row with a Missionary Society over a member of the class of rain-makers. This old fellow I knew to be an eminently respectable old gentleman, and famed for many miles as a rain-maker; in fact, I had more than a suspicion that upon occasions my own police had paid for his services in connection with the Station garden. Well, to my amazement, I one day received a complaint from a European missionary, that the old fellow was practising sorcery and levying blackmail. I knew the charge to be all nonsense, and my village constables laughed at it; in fact, they regarded the story in much the same light as a London bobby would a tale to the effect that the Archbishop of Canterbury was running a sly grog shop in Wapping; but missionaries always made such a noise that I had to investigate. I found that there had been a drought in a Mission village, miles away from where the old boy lived, and the natives’ gardens were perishing: the local rain-makers tried their hands, but with no result; the missionary turned on prayers for rain, no result; then the people got desperate, and decided that the services of my estimable friend must be engaged. Accordingly, to the wrath of the missionary, they collected pigs and a varied assortment of New Guinea valuables, and sent them with a deputation to beg him to save their gardens. He accepted the gifts, and oracularly replied to his petitioners, “When the south-east wind stops, the rain will come.” They went off home satisfied; as a matter of fact, the wind had dropped before they got back and the welcome rain set in. Having ascertained the facts, I of course refused to interfere with the rain-maker; whereupon the missionary complained to Headquarters that the R.M. was undermining the work of the Mission by encouraging sorcery, and I was called upon for the usual report. I reported that my time was already so fully occupied that I had none to spare in “attending to harmless disputes due to the professional jealousy of rival rain-makers.” The missionary choked with outraged and offended pride at being put on the same plane as a native rain-maker, and Muzzy squeaked about “contemptuous levity” in official correspondence.
One day, I met an old chap laboriously carrying a heavy round stone up a hill to a yam garden. “What are you doing with that?” I asked. “I have got a job making the yams grow in the garden up here,” he said, “and I’m planting this as an example to the yams, of the size to which they are to grow.” “It’s lucky for you that they are not to be any larger,” I remarked. “If this man had got his yams in a month sooner,” said the yam expert, “I’d have taken a stone much larger than this; but he always was a fool.”
The professions of rain-maker, taro-grower, fish-bringer, etc., in fact all the callings followed by the benevolent sorcerers, are, I believe, hereditary, passing from father to son: the men really have some sound practical knowledge, though smothered in a mass of charms and incantations; for instance, the taro-grower knows exactly what type of vegetable should be grown in different soils, he knows the proper time of year for planting, he can tell the husbandman when to cut away the sprouts, and when he should get fresh seed; he can say where corn will be a success, and where bananas, sweet potatoes, taro or yams. The fish-bringer knows when to expect the different fish, and where to look for them; his reward depends upon results, for if his charms and incantations didn’t give adequate satisfaction, the professor would soon be regarded as “no good,” and deserted in favour of a more successful practitioner.
TOKU, SON OF GIWI
So far as the healing powers of the benevolent sorcerers are concerned, I can vouch for those of one man myself. I was suffering from a severe attack of lumbago, brought about by marching in wet khaki all day and sleeping in wet blankets at night; it had begun with a very bad attack of malaria, which I had squashed by means of twenty-grain doses of quinine, but the lumbago remained. A son of Giwi’s named Toku, who was thirteen years of age, was my personal servant at the time: the young devil disappeared, and I thought that the crankiness and bad temper of a sick man had been too much for him and that he had bolted. I maligned Toku, however, for on the following day he came back, accompanied by his father and the latter’s medical adviser. “My father says this man can cure your pains,” remarked Toku. “Then for goodness’ sake let him start work, for I can’t be made worse,” was my answer. The “doctor” then produced two large flat stones, hung all over with charms, and, after chanting an incantation or two over them and removing their embroideries, demanded that they be made red-hot in the kitchen fire; then he directed the police to make a large fire, and heat many other stones. His directions having been carried out, he commanded that a large iron tub that stood in my room, and which was used by me as a bath, should be filled with hot water, and that I was to get into it. With the assistance of several men, I doubled my groaning carcase into it; whereupon the “doctor” sang an incantation or two over me, called for the pile of hot stones the police had been heating, and dropped them one by one, fizzling and sizzling into my bath, thus raising the temperature of the water until I was in a cloud of steam. “Ask him, Toku, whether he wants to boil the something liver out of me,” I demanded. The “doctor” paused in listening to a long harangue from Private Bia, in which that worthy orderly was pointing out, in blood-curdling language, the precise spot in his ribs where he meant to send his bayonet home, in the event of his ministrations killing me. “Tell your master to have patience, he will soon be better,” he said to Toku; “I am hunting the evil spirit out of him.”
The boiling operations completed, the “doctor” made me lie flat on my face, and then plastered my back with hot wet clay, upon which he plentifully spat; then he had brought from the kitchen his red-hot flat stones, and, wrapping them in cloth made of mulberry bark, he clapped them on the clay plaster. First the clay steamed and seemed to scald right through me, then it burnt hard and set up a steady roasting heat, but it certainly chased away my lumbago. I had, at the time, a Pondicherry Indian as a cook; and he—attracted by my language—appeared, gave a glance at what was happening, and then came back shortly afterwards with some heated flat-irons and flannel, with which he too proceeded to rub my back. The next day I was well, bar a feeling of stiffness and a general sensation of having been scorched. “What pay do you want?” I asked the “doctor”; “I will pay you well.” He had meanwhile been living in the barracks, and had been entertained by the police with tales of what would happen to him if I died. “I want those things that your back was rubbed with by the cook,” he said, meaning my flat-irons; “they will get me a great name.” Accordingly I gave him the flat-irons; and I venture to say, that to this day there will be found on the north-east coast of New Guinea an eminent and famed medical practitioner, using among his stock-in-trade a set of flat-irons.
About a year later I nearly lost Toku, the boy by whom my highly satisfactory attendant had been summoned, in a peculiar way. I was returning from the second Doriri expedition, and we were marching before a strong rear-guard, behind which no one was permitted to lag; Toku was carrying my belts with a very heavy revolver, and I was marching at ease in the middle of the column. I noticed a rare or new orchid in a tree, and sent Toku up to get it, signing to the rear-guard as they came up to pass on with the column; Toku came down with the orchid, and we caught up to the rear-guard, through which I passed, not noticing that the young imp had sneaked back to the tree to catch an iguana he had seen in it. Suddenly I missed Toku, and halted the line to search for him; I found him absent, and hastily retraced my steps with several of the police. We heard a shot, in the direction of which we ran, and found the imp seated upon the corpse of a fully armed native, and holding my smoking pistol in his hand. “I killed him, master,” said the young villain. What had happened was this: Toku had dodged behind the rear-guard and caught his iguana; then, as he descended the tree, he had been snapped up by one of the numerous natives, who were hovering on our rear and flank out of sight, in readiness to snap up any stragglers. The man had clapped his hand over Toku’s mouth to prevent him calling out, and had then started to carry him off into the bush beyond earshot of my force; Master Toku, having one hand free, had contrived to draw my revolver, and pressing it against his captor’s head, had fired and blown the skull to fragments. I regret to say that the hero was hoisted upon the back of a policeman, and soundly spanked by me for “lagging behind the rear-guard, and nearly losing my belts and revolver.”