KAILI KAILI
At last the Merrie England turned up, weeks overdue, and renewed my supplies. She also brought Richard De Molynes, a brother-in-law of the then Governor-General of Australia, who was engaged hunting for lands suitable for sugar growing, on behalf of some syndicate or other: I believe the De Molynes brothers had previously gone in extensively for sugar planting in Queensland. He remained with me, as a guest, after the departure of the ship, in order to pursue his search throughout the north-east. The Merrie England also brought me old Bushimai and his son Oia, from the Mambare; they had been sentenced to gaol for murder by the Central Court, but were now to be held by me at Cape Nelson on a sort of parole, during the Governor’s pleasure. Bushimai had already broken out of the Port Moresby gaol, with five companions, and crossed the island to his home; but of his five companions, only one remained, when he reached the Mambare; and the fate of the others has always been shrouded in mystery. Bushimai said they died of exposure and cold on the high mountains; but when I asked him what they had found to eat on the way, he told me that they had caught an alligator! He may have caught an alligator; but if so, it is the first alligator I have ever known or heard of as having its habitation on the side of a bleak mountain range! Subsequently, after having been re-arrested, he also succeeded in escaping from the gaol at Tamata.
Bushimai was sent to my care at Cape Nelson at his own request. I now had one of his sons, Oia, in prison for manslaughter; and Poruta (who was another) serving as a private in my detachment of constabulary. Bushimai, by all conventional rules, should have been my mortal enemy, as I had once flogged him for mutiny, and he had killed my brother magistrate; but, as a matter of fact, we were always rather dear friends. He was allowed to bring one wife, and a small son, with him to Cape Nelson; I made his wife matron to the gaol, and general over-looker of the wives of the police. Bushimai, on his first day at the Station, began by sitting on the steps of my house; on the second day, he had oiled himself into my office, where he sat upon the floor, whilst I did my work or heard native cases, throwing in a little advice at intervals; on the third day, he had made up his bed in my room; and on the fourth day, he had picked out the largest axe on the Station, and was acting as general overseer and adviser. “The master,” said Poruta, “gives an order, and hits us if we are not quick; my father hits us first to make us quick.”
I now found that a gold-prospecting party of miners had set their hearts on penetrating into the country to the south of Collingwood Bay, up a stream named the Laku, their cupidity having been excited by a tomahawk stone, which had been purchased by a trader in the Bay, and which was shot through with veins of gold. I knew quite well that if they went in alone among the uncivilized tribes they would only end in stirring up a lot of trouble for me; I therefore decided to escort them beyond the range of the coastal people. Accordingly I left for the Laku, accompanied by my police, De Molynes, the miners and their Suaus.
Arriving there, we camped on a low-lying sandy beach at the mouth of the river, in the midst of heavy rain. The stream rose and rose in height, until I became anxious as to the safety of my camp; and in order to make it quite secure, shifted, late in the evening, some four miles up stream on to higher and more solid country, and among the Kuveri people. The Kuveri were at first much alarmed at our incursion into their territory, and inclined from fear to be hostile; but at last, finding that we intended no harm, and instead of interfering with them, paid them well for any assistance they gave us, they became very friendly. They told us that they were shut in between the Maisina on one side, and the hostile Kikinaua tribe on the other: the former descended periodically upon them, and carried off all their best-looking young women, as well as levying a blackmail of pigs; while the latter tribe constantly swooped down on their villages, murdered and carried off—for culinary purposes—any one they could lay hands on. Our advent they had at first regarded as their crowning misfortune, thinking that we were yet another enemy. As they put it to me afterwards, they would have “run away at sight of my force, but had nowhere to run to.” I told the poor devils that, instead of adding to their woes, we would protect them from their enemies—a promise they at first apparently regarded as mere words. “The Maisina,” they said in awed accents—“the Maisina are very brave and very numerous.” Old Bushimai, who was sitting in my tent during the discussion and listening to it with growing impatience, got up and, leaving the tent, soon returned with his hand covered with biting crawling ants. “Look at this,” he said to the trembling deputation through the interpreter; “these things are even as the Maisina, and thus will we treat them.” Then with a couple of sharp smacks he smashed the ants, and sat down to smoke. That deputation left much impressed; meanwhile my sentries were being posted for the night.
We had a fine, clear, starry night, and the whole camp of tired men settled down for a comfortable rest. Bushimai slept under my hammock. An hour before dawn, I awoke in a jumpy state of nerves, and called to Bushimai but got no reply. More and more jumpy, I got out of my hammock, buckled on my belts and revolver and, taking my rifle, walked out through the sleeping camp to the sentries; as I did so, I met Bushimai walking slowly backwards and forwards with his axe on his shoulder. “Why don’t you sleep?” I asked him. “I felt danger in my sleep,” he answered; “did you too?” “Yes,” I replied, “I fear I don’t know what.” We both walked towards the sentries and met the sergeant. “Sergeant, why are you not asleep?” I asked; “the corporal is in charge of the sentries.” “I cannot sleep, sir,” he answered, “I woke feeling trouble; I should like to turn out the men, but there is no reason.” Bushimai, the sergeant and I waited until dawn, roosting round a small fire, and watching the different men being relieved by a puzzled corporal; then, yawning, we went off to bed again.
Later, I learnt that the Maisina had heard I was camped at the mouth of the Laku—the camp I had vacated a few hours before—and had flung three separate bodies of men upon it just before dawn, only to find my expiring fires. Had we been in that camp, I am convinced that they would have smashed us, as we should have been taken by surprise. I leave it, however, to the psychologist to say why an attack upon a vacated camp should affect the nerves of men four miles distant, and why it should only affect the nerves of three men out of over one hundred.
The following morning we marched inland into uninhabited country. The three miners I was taking in and protecting were named Driscoll, Ryan, and Gallagher; three wild Irishmen, whose sole topic of conversation was the wrongs of Ireland, as extracted by them from a Fenian “History of Ireland” which they carried. De Molynes was fool enough to argue with them; but, after the first day, I confined myself to the society of my police and Bushimai, in consequence of being asked: “Phwat is the —— Government making out of us?” I felt annoyed, as, at the time, I was feeding the men from my personal stores, and the Government was incurring considerable expense in protecting them during a search for gold for their own private benefit. “Blank, purse-proud Englishman, too stuck up to speak,” I was then termed. As a matter of fact, I happened to have been born in New Zealand, and my pay was considerably less than that of any working miner in New Guinea.
We marched inland on a straight compass line, through jungle and forest, cutting a track as we went; De Molynes, some police and I were ahead, then followed a long line of carriers, then the miners and their boys, all brought up by a rear-guard of police. At last we struck an extensive plain, covered with wild sugar-cane from ten to twelve feet high, through which we began to bore our way; the stuff grew as closely together as raspberry canes, was as dry as tinder, and as tough to cut as galvanized wire rope, the knives of the men rebounding from it like peas off a drum. We cut our tunnel through it for about a mile; then, noticing how extremely dry and inflammable it looked, I asked De Molynes how sugar-cane burnt. “Like a Jew dealer’s over-insured second-hand old clo’ shop,” he remarked; “if this catches fire, we shall have less chance than a snowball in hell.” I halted the line, called back to the rear-guard that there was to be no smoking, and any tinder carried by the carriers was to be put out at once; and again we went on. Suddenly, I heard an ominous crackling sound from behind and, gazing back, saw a black pall of smoke rising over the rear of the line; fortunately, there was little or no wind.
At once the long line of men in single file began to press hard on our heels, screaming with fright: frantic with rage, I joined the police in a solemn oath that, if we escaped, we would kill without mercy the man or men responsible for the fire. Then in frenzied haste we cut on, two men chopping until they fell from heat and exhaustion, then others dashing over their prostrate bodies, seizing their tools and taking their places, while behind came the ever-increasing roar of the fire. Old Bushimai toiled like a man possessed of devils, dashing repeatedly at the wall in front, and smashing with his axe, whenever the two choppers slacked for a moment in their efforts. At last, when the situation was apparently desperate, I sent word along the line to the constabulary to blow out their brains as the flames reached them, after shooting any carriers within their reach, who might prefer a bullet to roasting. Suddenly we cut into a cabbage tree, up which one of the men climbed. “Master,” he yelled, “the fire comes fast and the cane extends for miles, but I see a green swampy patch with trees on the left, close to us.” Magi, the man up the tree, extended his arm in the direction of the wet patch, and by it I took a compass bearing, along which we cut, emerging after about two hundred yards into an oasis formed by springs, of about two acres of green swampy land. Man after man struggled through by the cut track, until all were there; then, with our clothes saturated with water and plastered with mud, we buried our faces in moss and wet plants, and that stifling fire rolled past and over our sanctuary.