They were extraordinarily adept at handling their light, cranky canoes, and they were more at home in the water than any people I have either seen or heard of, and appeared to stand upright in that element without any perceptible effort; the one thing that my Mambare police feared, who were all very powerful swimmers, was entangling clinging water-weeds, but the Agaiambu would dive among them without the slightest fear. They told me they caught duck and water-fowl by squatting in a bunch of reeds, or covering their heads with water-weeds, until a flock settled near, whereupon they would dive under the flock and pull a bird or two under without disturbing the rest; then, regaining their reeds or lump of weed, they would draw breath and repeat the performance. They told me that they had once been a numerous tribe, but that about thirty years before some epidemic had swept through them and killed most of the people. They did not know how long they had occupied the marsh or from whence they came; they had, however, a vague tradition to the effect that their ancestors had originally taken refuge in the marsh, and built a village on an island to escape from raiding enemies—the island, however, had long since disappeared. Their language was a dialect of the Baruga of the Musa River; so I conclude they originally came from that part, probably bolting in canoes before the attack of some raiders down the flood waters of that river, which had borne them to the site of their present abode.
Their diet consisted principally of fish, water-fowl, sago, and the roots of water-lilies. They kept pigs swung in cradles underneath their houses, lying on their bellies with their legs stuck through the bottom, and fed them upon fish and sago; the pigs never had any exercise, and most of them were procured as suckers from the Baruga, but some they bred in their houses. The Agaiambu houses were of rectangular oblong shape, and built on poles stuck in a depth of about ten feet of water. Their dead they disposed of by wrapping the body in mats made from pandanus leaves, and then tying it upon a stake stuck in the water; the body itself was secured well above flood level. I both saw and smelt two of their “graves.” At one house they had a tame half-grown crocodile tied up at the end of a rope. I tried to induce two of them to return with me to Cape Nelson, as I knew my account of them would be ridiculed; but their fear of the hard dry land was too great to overcome.
AGAIAMBU WOMAN
Captain Barton later took a photograph of an Agaiambu man, which I here insert, but the individual he photographed was by no means a good specimen of this strange people; for, by the time I took Barton there, most of the tribe had been decoyed ashore and slaughtered by a raiding party of Doriri, an event I refer to later. Sir Francis Winter, who also on one occasion went with me to see them, gives the following account in an official dispatch to the Governor-General of Australia:—
“The Ahgai-ambo have for a period that extends beyond native traditions lived in this swamp. At one time they were fairly numerous, but a few years ago some epidemic reduced them to about forty. They never leave their morass, and the Baruga assured us that they are not able to walk properly on hard ground, and that their feet soon bleed if they try to do so. The man that came on shore was for a native middle-aged. He would have been a fair-sized native, had his body, from the hips downwards, been proportionate to the upper part of his frame. He had a good chest, and, for a native, a thick neck, and his arms matched his trunk. His buttocks and thighs were disproportionately small, and his legs still more so. His feet were short and broad, and very thin and flat, with, for a native, weak-looking toes. This last feature was still more noticeable in the woman, whose toes were long and slight and stood out rigidly from the foot as though they possessed no joints. The feet of both the man and the woman seemed to rest on the ground something as wooden feet would do. The skin above the knees of the man was in loose folds, and the sinews and muscles around the knee were not well developed. The muscles of the shin were much better developed than those of the calf. In the ordinary native the skin on the loins is smooth and tight, and the anatomy of the body is clearly discernible; but the Ahgai-ambo man had several folds of thick skin or muscle across the loins, which concealed the outline of his frame. On placing one of our natives, of the same height, alongside the marsh man, we noticed that our native was about three inches higher at the hips.
“I had a good view of our visitor, while he was standing sideways to me, and in figure and carriage he looked to me more ape-like than any human being that I have ever seen. The woman, who was of middle age, was much more slightly formed than the man, but her legs were short and slender in proportion to her figure, which from the waist to the knees was clothed in a wrapper of native cloth.”
CHAPTER XXIV
At the time we were camped on the shore of the Agaiambu lake, I noticed growing on the bank of a stream leading into it, a D’Albertia creeper, with white blossoms instead of the usual vivid scarlet; I had never seen a white one before, and have never seen it since. The D’Albertia, whose botanical name, by the way, is Mucuna Bennetti, is quite the most marvellous and beautiful creeper in the world; but as yet all attempts to transplant it, or introduce it into cultivation, have failed. No water colour nor slickness of oils can reproduce the wonderful brilliance of scarlet colour of the ordinary variety of this plant; its blossoms simply strike one dumb with their startling beauty. Perhaps, in time to come, some Yankee millionaire may charter a special steamer and transplant a D’Albertia, as they transplant grown pine trees; but, until that day comes, the people, who do not care to seek it in its haunts, will lack the sight of the most wonderful plant in the world.