Barton and I returned to Cape Nelson on the 24th of April, and found all in order; we waited there for the return of the Merrie England, as she was to take Barton and his men away, and bring stores for me. Day after day, week after week, went by; our supplies of European food were soon finished: tea, coffee, sugar, meat, biscuits, tobacco, shot cartridges, all were done; fish and native vegetables, washed down with cold water, our sole fare; and still, daily, we scanned the horizon for the hourly expected Merrie England, or any vessel from which we could get stores, but none came: until, on the 14th of June, the Merrie England put in a belated appearance, and we were told that the Revs. J. Chalmers and O. F. Tomkins had been murdered in the Western Division; so we had been left, while she hunted the murderers. I thought then, as I think now, that however great the excitement might have been over the murders, still some little thought should have been given to two isolated officers on the north-east coast and their possible plight; if a Government vessel were not available, a Mambare trader might have been instructed to call in at Cape Nelson (several passed in the distance), instead of our being left, as we were, from March until June, entirely cut off from the world, newsless and semi-starved.
Captain Harvey and I had a slight breeze over something or other, I have forgotten now exactly what it was, on the occasion of this visit; which resulted in my turning sheep-stealer. The ship had got a pen of sheep for fresh meat, some half dozen or so, on which I cast a hungry eye. “Harvey, old chap,” I said, “tell the butcher to kill one of the muttons, and leave me a joint.” “You did not call me ‘old chap’ this morning,” said Harvey, “you called me a ‘marine Fenian,’ and said my voice was worse than that of the wooden bird in a cuckoo clock; you also said that you were surprised at my being entrusted with the navigation of anything more valuable than the gaol sanitary punt; there were several other things you said, including that you would ask the medical officer at Samarai to examine me for incipient softening of the brain.” “That was in the heat of argument,” I answered; “you must remember that you used language that, if I did my duty as a beak, would be well worth five bob a word to the revenue; but I made allowances, because I fancied you must have put in some of your early training as apprentice to a Bargee. How about my mutton?” “You will see,” said Captain Harvey, and sent for the chief steward. “Thanks, Harvey,” I said, and waited. “Steward,” said Harvey, on that functionary’s arrival, “see that no sheep are killed before we are back at Samarai.” “All right, skipper,” I said, “I will make you sit up for that before long.” “I don’t think you should have meat,” commented Harvey, “you have been living too well, and your blood has got heated.”
The ship was to sail at dawn; accordingly I went ashore and called my constabulary into consultation. “To-night,” I said, “you are to steal a sheep from the Merrie England. Can you grab and lower the brute into a boat, without making a noise and causing it to baa?” “Very simple to do,” they said, “but what about the watch on board?” “The constabulary are all on shore, and wouldn’t tell in any case,” I told them; “and at anchor, there is only one night watchman on duty; I’ll settle him.” That night I went off, and remained on board until all the officers had gone to bed; then I waylaid the night watchman. “Lonely work, yours,” I said, “come to the saloon and I’ll give you a drink; I’ve got a bottle down there. My police will look out while you come.” He rose like a trout at a May fly, and I called out to my corporal, “Corporal, the watchman goes below with me for a few minutes, you must look out sharply.” “I understand, sir,” replied that smart non-com. Five minutes later he came to the saloon, where the watchman was indulging in his second drink. “The men are getting very sleepy, sir, will you be long?” I left at once; a shapeless bundle of sail at the bottom of the boat containing a large fat sheep, with its mouth securely tied, showed how successful the raid had been.
THE “MERRIE ENGLAND” AT CAPE NELSON
Captain Harvey had a happy Irish knack of leading me into crime; from sheep stealing he led me later into body snatching, a still more heinous offence. Time had elapsed; Oelrichs was my Assistant R.M., when the Merrie England one day appeared, and after I had completed my work in the Governor’s cabin and was leaving, Harvey waylaid me and wiled me into his cabin; where, after producing vessels of strong waters and cigars, he mysteriously whispered, “Monckton, I want you to do me a very great favour.” “Well, what is it?” I asked. “Do you want me to let you down lightly if you come before me in my official capacity, or what?” “Well, the fact is,” said Harvey, “I am under great obligations to a doctor in Brisbane, who has been most good to my family; he has an ethnological turn of mind, and hankers for the skull and skeleton of a New Guinea mountaineer, a Doriri for choice.” “Do you expect me, a senior officer of the Service, apart from my judicial position, to go out, shoot and stuff a Doriri for your medical scientific friend?” I asked in surprise; “if so, I must tell you that I draw the line at homicide, even of Doriri.” “Don’t be a fool,” said Harvey, “I am serious; you can buy me a skeleton somewhere, I don’t care how old or decayed.” “I can’t,” I said; “such a request on my part would, in the first instance, start all sorts of yarns of sorcery; and secondly, since one trader bought up a lot of skulls and grew orchids in them like flower pots, afterwards selling them in Europe as sacred or devil orchids worshipped by Papuans, and another chap cleaned out a lot of caves of skeletons and sold them to make bone dust for manure, there has been an Ordinance prohibiting traffic in human remains.” “There is no question of traffic,” said Harvey, “you must find plenty of graves in abandoned villages, and can easily dig me up a skeleton.” “‘Desecration of Sepulchre’ happens to be a penal offence, my dear Harvey,” I remarked; “I wish the favour you ask did not contain a considerable risk of free lodging for the pair of us in one of his Majesty’s houses of entertainment; neither the diet nor the lodging appeal to me.” “Damn your scruples,” said Harvey. “Museums and savants always manage to get skeletons; if you were an Irishman, instead of a cold-blooded Englishman, you would do it for the fun of the thing, not to speak of obliging a pal.” “Skipper,” I said, “my father came from Kent, but my mother came from the Curraugh of Kildare, and the Irish strain is always getting me into trouble, as it will probably do once more over this night’s work. I will give you your bones; though you don’t deserve them after your action last year in turning an eminently respectable magistrate and his police into sheep-stealers. Tell one of your crew to blow your whistle for my boat, and come ashore with me.” The night happened to be very dark, wet and windy, and my boat’s crew had departed for the shelter of the boat shed on shore.
“Where will you get the bones!” asked Harvey. I explained that some five or six months before, the Collingwood Bay people had found a Doriri man badly wounded by a wild boar in the forest, and had brought him to me; he was too far gone to cure, when I got him, and died without our being able to ascertain his name or village, and his corpse had been planted in our cemetery. Going ashore, I summoned Oelrichs and my sergeant, a Kiwai man named Kimai, and explained to them that I wanted them to go and disinter the Doriri. Oelrichs said that he did not think that body-snatching, in the middle of the night, was included in the duties of an Assistant R.M.; and Sergeant Kimai said that nothing would induce the Western or Eastern men in the constabulary to go corpse hunting in a cemetery after dark. I persuaded them into undertaking the job, however; and, accompanied by half a dozen Northern police, who had no fear of ghost or devil, they departed on their cheerful quest. Harvey and I waited hours, listening to the rain and wondering why they did not return; at last, about two in the morning, I took Harvey back to the ship, fearing that he would be missed and inquiry made as to what we were up to.
A couple of hours later, alongside came my boat, and a dripping Oelrichs crawled into Captain Harvey’s cabin, followed by Sergeant Kimai and a Mambare corporal bearing a very smelly sack. “My God!” gasped Oelrichs, “give me a drink, and Sergeant Kimai one too; he has seen seventeen ghosts and quite a score of devils. If it had not been for the Mambares, I never should have got the corpse.” “What do you mean, Oelrichs,” I asked, “by keeping me sitting up all night wondering what had become of you? I did not tell you to picnic all night in the graveyard, I told you to bring the Doriri.” Oelrichs flung up his hands and appealed to the universe at large to witness my appalling ingratitude. “The Kiwai men buried that Doriri,” he said, “and the sergeant was not there, so no one knew where he was, and the grass had grown over his grave; we dug up about an acre, and quite six other corpses, before we found him. The smell nearly killed me, and Kimai saw spooks all the time.” “You look out that no one discovers this,” I said to Harvey, “or we shall all be in the devil of a row.” Harvey shoved the smellful remains into a drawer under his bunk, where he kept them until he reached Samarai and got the doctor to fix them up in a cask with disinfectants. He certainly went through a lot for his medical friend.
But I must return to more serious affairs. I have referred in this chapter to the reason of the Merrie England remaining away for such a length of time from Cape Nelson, namely, the murder of the Revs. Chalmers and Tomkins by natives in the Western Division. The death of such a well-known pioneer missionary as Chalmers, of course excited intense interest and sympathy throughout the Empire; much was written at the time in the Press, missionary publications, and by New Guinea officials through official channels, but something yet remains to be said from the point of view of an onlooker, neither swayed by sentiment nor eager to praise or condemn. Firstly, in order to arrive at a proper sense of proportion, one must consider the characteristics of the European actors in the tragedy; the natives we can eliminate, for from their point of view—as it is from my own—the killing of Chalmers and the looting of the vessel was no greater crime than would have been the killing of a wandering trader, at whose hands they had suffered no hurt.
Chalmers, one must remember, was not of the ordinary type of missionary, but was of the type of a David Livingstone; and, though belonging to the London Missionary Society, was—like Livingstone—as much an explorer as a missionary. He was a man of particularly forceful character, who was inclined to take unnecessary risks, and this trait had been accentuated by the recent death of his wife; the very boat he was using on the fateful journey was her last gift to the Mission, or really to him. Tomkins calls for no remark: a young man, but recently from a religious training school, always taught to regard Mr. Chalmers as the wisest and best of men, he was not likely either to understand the danger of the action they were about to take, or to differ in any degree from Chalmers’ views. Next we come to the Resident Magistrate in charge of the Division, who should be, in the first instance, responsible for the lives of all in his district, missionary, trader or native. This officer, at the time, was the Hon. C. G. Murray, who had recently succeeded the experienced Bingham Hely. Murray had arrived in New Guinea as assistant private secretary to Sir George Le Hunte, not so very long before; he had then been transferred to the Government Secretary’s Office as a clerk, and from thence been promoted to be Resident Magistrate of the Western Division, without the slightest district or divisional experience, or training of any description; if Murray had any knowledge of natives, it could only have been acquired at Eton, the Bachelors’ Club, West End drawing-rooms and country houses, or by dint of working a typewriter under Mr. Musgrave’s fostering eye in the Government Secretary Department at Port Moresby, where an irate washerwoman, demanding payment for an overdue account, was the most dangerous native likely to be encountered.