He afterwards told me that his first impression of me was, that I was the most callous brute in the Service, for he had hardly been half an hour at the Station before he was seized with violent colic and collapsed in a heap on the floor of my office, groaning like a horse with gripes. “Here!” I yelled to the police, “get some blankets and put them in a corner out of the way; then put this man on top of them and undress him.” I then gave the “fat man,” as he was ever after called in the Division, a dose of opium and brandy. “How do you feel now?” I asked. “I am dying,” groaned Oelrichs. “Well, I consider it a most ungentlemanly thing, your coming here and choosing my office as the most fitting place to die in: still, I suppose the dying wishes of a man should be respected; die there, by all means, but do it as quietly as possible,” I remarked. “What is all this?” asked Macdonnell, as he came in and gazed surprisedly at the quaking mountain of misery. “A dying elephant, and a particularly noisy one,” I replied, looking up from my papers; “see what you can do for him, I’ve no time. He is grieved also at the lack of a coffin; I’ve told him such luxuries as coffins are unknown north of Cape Vogel, but I will allow him a blanket to be sewn up in, perhaps as he is extra large, two blankets.” Off then I went to the Merrie England and Samarai.
Arriving at Samarai, I went in search of Moreton, and found him fairly broken up. “This last affair of Yaldwyn’s is the finishing touch,” he said, “and the Judge has been giving me hell for accepting the charge in its present form; also for allowing a missionary to remove a female witness from my Court, and adjourning the Court until your arrival, instead of fining or jugging the man for contempt. The fact is, there is such a stew of trouble already, that I didn’t want jugged missionary added to it.” “Well,” I remarked, “we had better begin at once on Yaldwyn’s case; you send for Yaldwyn and I will send a couple of my own men for the missionary and the girl.”
We held and concluded our inquiry. The evidence showed plainly that, though Yaldwyn had been with the girl in his own camp, yet she was there of her own will and accord. Some Mission natives knew of the affair and told the missionary, by whom the girl was promptly taxed with her offence, and she naturally said that she had been unwilling; whereupon the missionary—not the girl or her father—had laid the charge. The criminal charge against Yaldwyn was dismissed; and I submitted the evidence to Sir Francis Winter, who noted, “The magistrates were quite right in dismissing this case; there is not the slightest criminal element in it.” The Governor’s minute was short and sweet. “R.M., North-Eastern Division, dismiss Yaldwyn at once.” I went to his Excellency and begged him to permit Yaldwyn to resign; pointing out that, though his conduct had been highly improper, he had been most unfairly charged with a horrible crime of which he was not guilty, and that the disgrace of that alone was a punishment he felt severely. It was no use, however; Yaldwyn was dismissed. He then slunk away to Milne Bay, where he moped and pined for a month, and then died. Symons, the man responsible for the state the district had got into, was reduced from magisterial rank, and sent as a clerk to the Treasury; the fact of his being a married man with a family being taken into consideration by Sir George. Moreton was reduced and transferred to the South-Eastern Division, the R.M. there being sent to Samarai in his stead. This was rough luck on Moreton, who was innocent of all wrongdoing, and had married in Australia during his last leave; for, when he was transferred from pleasant Samarai to unpleasant Woodlark, his wife refused to come up and live with him. The miners received varying punishments, from fines up to sentences for manslaughter.
A man was now wanted for Milne Bay, pending the arrival of Campbell, the new R.M.; and Turner, Macdonnell’s assistant—who had consistently loafed ever since he had been in the Service—applied for and got the job, he pointing out to his Excellency that he intended to marry at once; that was enough for Sir George, the domestic virtues always appealed to him, and so Turner got the easiest job in New Guinea at fifty pounds a year more salary than the sweating Assistants of the Northern and North-Eastern Divisions. Macdonnell, his late chief, who had toiled like a tiger, had his services dispensed with; mainly because Turner’s supineness and laziness on the north-east coast had prevented Macdonnell doing the amount of work his chief expected. Turner’s appointment always struck me as a particularly silly one: the reason that he received it was undoubtedly owing to the fact that he was about to marry; but Turner was to marry the daughter of Mrs. Mahony, a Samarai publican. Now, of all things the natives were to be guarded against, it had always been instilled into us that the chief one was any suspicion of their obtaining liquor; and yet here, one of the watch-dogs appointed was to have a direct and intimate connection with the liquor trade in his own district: a man could hardly be expected to watch, gaol, or heavily fine his own wife’s mother. My work in Samarai was now done, and it behoved me to return to my regular duties; accordingly, I went back to Cape Nelson.
CHAPTER XXIII
On my return to Cape Nelson, I found that Oelrichs had recovered, and had made a start with his new duties; he had begun them very vigorously too; for, as we sat at lunch on board the Merrie England while she steamed in for the harbour, an officer ran down to report that my whaler was chasing a lugger, and after that lugger the steamer accordingly went. When caught, she proved to be full of villainous-looking Frenchmen, probably escapees from New Caledonia; they had landed at Cape Nelson for water and vegetables, and Oelrichs, having his suspicions of them, had requested them to await the arrival of the Merrie England, whose smoke was then on the horizon. They had, however, seized a favourable opportunity and bolted. They said they were bound round New Guinea for Singapore; so we got rid of them by towing them up, and turning them adrift well within the German Frontier, for which gift I trust the Kaiser’s subjects were duly grateful.
Shortly after my return I received a complaint from the Arifamu, a tribe living to the north of my Station, that they had been raided, and some of their people killed, by a strange tribe from the north; so, taking a dozen constabulary and my whaler, I set off in search of the raiders. I found them all right; or rather, to their sorrow, they found me! One night we landed and camped at the mouth of a small river, the Barigi, quite in ignorance of the fact that the country near-by was inhabited, and that by the very people we were after. My camp was surrounded on three sides by an impenetrable swamp, and upon the fourth by a smooth strip of beach, which fronted the river; upon this strip I posted a sentry. Late at night, my corporal woke me up and said, “Bia [the sentry] says that there are canoes approaching, which will not reply to his challenge.” I jumped up and grabbed my rifle, while the corporal alarmed the men, and ran down to the sentry who, just as I got up to him, again sharply challenged: “Who goes? Stop or I fire!” Suddenly, close into the beach there shot a canoe, the men in which were paddling standing up, fully armed and plumed for war; while behind it, again, we heard the splash of other paddles. “Fire, Bia!” I said, as I drove a bullet through the steersman and started to empty the magazine of my rifle into the canoes. Corporal Barigi ran up to me and began firing at the still advancing canoes, followed almost immediately by the remaining police, who sent a crashing volley into the first canoe, which fairly emptied it of all but one man, and it drifted away with the current; the sound of retreating paddles was now heard, and we were not again disturbed until just before dawn, when I was again aroused to listen to a strange splashing and snorting. We then lay on our arms on the beach until day broke, when we found that the sound was caused by crocodiles worrying the bodies of the killed, and tearing them away from each other’s jaws. We made things extremely interesting for those crocodiles for a few minutes, and then sat down to wonder why we had been so suddenly and viciously attacked during the night by the natives.
Paddling slowly up the river after breakfast, we heard a slight sound in the mangrove swamp on one side, and on investigating, the police captured a man with his hand badly shattered with a bullet; I dressed and bandaged the wound, pending our return to the Station, when I could amputate it. We then found out that the attack upon us was a mistake on the part of the natives: it appeared that some distance up the river there lived a tribe, an offshoot of the Baruga, under a chief named Oiogoba Sara, a mighty fighting man; these people had recently raided the Arifamu, and were full of pride at their exploit. My camp fire had been seen by a prowling canoe, which had reported it to Oiogoba Sara, who had concluded that it belonged to a small travelling fishing party of Kaili Kaili or Arifamu, and had dispatched two canoes, with instructions to rush the camp and slay every one in it.
“It was most kind and considerate of Mr. Oiogoba Sara to call upon us so soon after our arrival,” I said to the police; “I think we will return the compliment by taking him to Cape Nelson for a few months.” So inland, in search of Oiogoba Sara and his village, we accordingly went; eventually we discovered the village quite unperceived by the villagers. The wailing of women showed clearly, as we crept up, that the reverse of the night before was already known. Oiogoba was keeping no watch, and before he knew what was upon him, we were in his village and he was seized by two police, from whom he at once broke away and seized his club; some of his people fled immediately, others began to put up a fight to rescue him, but, upon two being killed and others wounded, they broke and fled. Oiogoba was an enormously powerful man and fought like a veritable tiger. “Take him alive,” I yelled at the police, as they dodged his club and made repeated attempts to spring upon his back. Oiogoba, charging like a wild boar, broke through the circle and leapt into the river, which was about up to his waist, hotly followed by the police; one private dived and grabbed him by the ankles, whereupon Oiogoba tried to get at him with his club, but another private sprang in and caught him on the club arm with the butt of his rifle, smashing that member; a few seconds then saw Oiogoba pulled down and secured.