“Fine boy of mine that,” remarked old Giwi to me when he heard the tale, “nearly as good as I was in my youth; the people tell me that it was a very large strong man he killed; I think I had better see about arranging wives for him.” “You will do nothing of the sort, you match-making old begetter of strong sons,” I said; “he will remain looking after my shirts and things for two years, and be whacked at intervals for his good; then I will draft him into the constabulary, and, when he is a second-year man, I will find the price of a really good wife for him.”
Again I find I have digressed. Muzzy once remarked to me—after telling me the same story for about the fiftieth time—that he trusted he was not getting into his “anecdotage.” As a matter of fact he was, but I was wise enough not to tell him so; now I sometimes wonder whether I am not going the same way.
I have written about benevolent sorcerers as opposed to the ordinary ones in New Guinea. The latter are about the most malevolent and malignant brutes unhung: they undoubtedly possess certain powers, such as a rough knowledge of the poisonous properties of some plants or fish for internal administration; and how to set up a virulent form of blood poisoning ending in tetanus, by the application to a wound—or the weapon causing the wound—of either a dried serum obtained from decomposing human bodies, or from the mud of a mangrove swamp. The statement that New Guinea natives poison their spears or arrows has frequently been made, and as often denied, but seldom has any direct evidence been adduced that they do so poison them. Personally, I am of opinion that the actual fighting man never stoops to use poison; but I think in some cases he pays a sorcerer, or perhaps his wife or father does, to “strengthen” his arms, and that then the sorcerer does poison them. For instance, on the Stuart-Russell expedition, Russell lost a carrier by death and buried him: when I picked up Russell, we found the body of that carrier had been disinterred and was acting as a pincushion for dozens of spears; sharp slivers of wood had also been inserted, these being intended for use as foot spears or stakes to be planted in the ground to catch the unwary traveller’s leg.
New Guinea sorcerers, in my experience, kill their subjects by two methods: firstly, by material means, that is, by the administration of actual poison; secondly, by esoteric means, that is, by working on the fear of the intended victim. Sir Francis Winter once told me that though he had tried many murder cases in which sorcery was alleged, he had never found any direct evidence that the sorcerer had caused the death; notwithstanding the fact that in some cases the sorcerer had actually admitted his guilt. To this I reply, that poisoning by animal or vegetable poisons is always very difficult to trace, or bring home to the prisoner; even when the poisons used are common or well known, and when highly skilled chemists are employed to detect them. In New Guinea there were no chemists, and the poisons used were probably either very rare or quite unknown to science. The second method to which I referred, as being employed by the sorcerer, namely, that of fear, was worked in this way: the sorcerer sent a message to his intended victim, telling him that he had bewitched or poisoned him, thus so preying upon the mind of the unfortunate receiver of the threat as to cause him either to fret himself into a fever or commit suicide—usually the latter. In New Guinea the law warranted a magistrate sending any native convicted of sorcery to gaol, for a term of six months. This was all very fine; but the sorcerer always over-awed the witnesses by saying, “I may get six months, but then I shall be free again and you will pay.”
Among the Binandere people on the Opi River were two distinct tribes, speaking different dialects. Tabe, the village constable of the lower tribe, who was quite one of the most intelligent of the natives, once gave me an instance of the manner in which the emotions will overcome the habits of order and control instilled into the Papuan. I sent him to arrest a noted sorcerer: after a struggle, in which many men took part, he effected his object; then, securing all the sorcerer’s charms and drugs, he placed them in a canoe, together with the sorcerer, now securely tied up with native ropes, and started for the Government Station at Tamata. On the way thither, among the chattels of the sorcerer, a small net was found into which was plaited twenty-seven small pieces of wood. Inquiry on the part of the village constable elicited the fact that it was the sorcerer’s tally of lives, claimed to have been taken by him, or of deaths induced by his arts. The sorcerer bragged to Tabe that among the number were certain relations of his, whom he named; and he also threatened that he would add some more, including Tabe’s wife and children, when his six months were done. Whereupon Tabe, incited by this threat and also by the relations of the dead people, decided to try his own methods of curing a sorcerer, which he did by sinking him in twelve feet of water for an hour. He then made inquiries as to whether there were any others requiring his treatment; an inquiry which resulted in the immediate and hasty departure of several prominent sorcerers of the community. Proceeding to Tamata, he surrendered himself on a charge of murder laid by himself, and in which the principal evidence was his own statement.
In connection with this man’s action, the following is an instance of the power ascribed to and claimed by a sorcerer, which is generally accepted by the natives as true. Some sorcerers possess the power of transmitting their spirits to a crocodile, whereupon the crocodile becomes a devil with power to assume the shape of any person known to the sorcerer; the devil-crocodile then, at the instigation of the sorcerer, waits near a village, until it sees the man against whom it is to act, go alone down a track or to a garden; then it assumes the shape of a young married woman or girl well known to the intended victim, and follows him. Upon a sufficiently secluded spot being reached, the sorcerer-cum-crocodile-cum-girl approaches the man and endeavours to induce him to have sexual intercourse: should he do so, he will not discover his error until evening, when he will feel a desire to go to the river, there to vanish for ever. It is not until the sorcerer claims the result as his work, that the people know what has become of him, and that he has fallen a prey to the crocodile. Sometimes the shape assumed by the witch-crocodile is that of a well-known and good-looking young man, and then a young married woman or girl is seduced. In such case the woman’s first male child will be taken by the crocodile, and the disembowelled body be later discovered floating in the water. Occasionally, I have been told, the most careful of persons and the most moral are entrapped by the actual shape of husband or wife being assumed by the crocodile; and so any one may be tricked to his or her death.
From the point of view of a native constable, thoroughly believing in all this, and infuriated by the loss of those dear to him, it is an injustice that a sorcerer claiming occult powers of this awful description should be lightly punished, and then released to seek vengeance by the exercise of dreadful esoteric means. Should he not rather, he argues, be sought out and killed in a public, violent, and showy manner, that will deter others from following in his footsteps?
Absurd though sorcerers’ claims to such powers be, as the foregoing instance portrays, yet sorcery or witchcraft on the north-east coast is no child’s play, and the shadow of the fear of it is over the whole tribal life. Much of it, I am convinced, is due to the administration of poison, but a great deal more is effected by suggestion; and, to my mind, there is little difference in the measure of guilt of one who hits his enemy on the head with a club, and of him who secretly gives a poisonous drug and causes death by physical means, or of him again, who, by acting on a man’s fears, administers a moral poison to the mind and frighten his victim to death.
Some sorcerers claim to possess the power of sending forth their spirits to work evil during the dark watches of the night or while they slept. The Binandere people hold that the spirit of a sorcerer is the only really dangerous one, for though two other kinds of spirits exist, namely, “devils” and ghosts of the dead, such ghosts and devils are innocuous; in fact Oia, a son of Bushimai’s, once told me that he considered they served a useful purpose in frightening the women and children from straying out of the village at night. Most New Guinea natives have a great dread of the dark; not so, however, the Binandere; a man of that tribe thinks nothing of travelling all night along lonely unfrequented paths by forest, jungle, mountain or swamp, devil-haunted though he believes them to be: whereas a Suau, Motuan or Kiwai would die of funk. The Suau believes that when a man is asleep, his spirit has gone forth from him, and they are very careful how they wake one another, in order that time may be allowed for the sleeper’s spirit to return; the Binandere does not care two straws how rapidly or noisily he stirs up a sleeper.
I remember once an epidemic of measles breaking out at Paiwa on Cape Vogel, and the cheerful sorcerers persuading the people that it would continue until a live man was cut open by them, which was accordingly done. On another occasion, at the back of Collingwood Bay, Oelrichs, who was then my Assistant R.M., heard of a case where they shoved lawyer vines, with thorns like this