Chapter VIII
Santo (continued)—Pygmies
The term of service of my boys had now expired, and I had to look about for others. Happily, now that I was known in the region, I had less trouble, especially as I held out the prospect of a visit to Nouméa. With six boys of my own and a few other men, I started on another journey.
I had always suspected the existence of a race of pygmies in the islands, and had often asked the natives if they had ever seen “small fellow men.” Generally they stared at me without a sign of intelligence, or else began to tell fairy-tales of dwarfs they had seen in the bush, of little men with tails and goat’s feet (probably derived from what they had heard of the devil from missionaries), all beings of whose existence they were perfectly convinced, whom they often see in the daytime and feel at night, so that it is very hard to separate truth from imagination.
I had heard stories of a colony of tailed men near Mele, and that, near Wora, north of Talamacco, tailed men lived in trees; that they were very shy and had long, straight hair. The natives pretended they had nearly caught one once. All this sounded interesting and improbable, and I was not anxious to start on a mere wild-goose chase. More exact information, however, was forthcoming. One of my servants told me that near a waterfall I could see shining out of a deep ravine far inland, there lived “small fellow men.”
It was an exceptionally stormy morning when we started, so that Mr. F. advised me to postpone my departure; but in the New Hebrides it is no use to take notice of the weather, and that day it was so bad that it could not get any worse, which was some consolation. Soon we were completely soaked, but we kept on along the coast to some huts, where we were to meet our guide. Presently he arrived, followed by a crowd of children, as they seemed to me, who joined our party. While climbing inland toward the high mountains, I asked the guide if he knew anything about the little people; he told me that one of them was walking behind me. I looked more closely at the man in question, and saw that whereas I had taken him for a half-grown youth, he was really a man of about forty, and all the others who had come with him turned out to be full-grown but small individuals. Of course I was delighted with this discovery, and should have liked to begin measuring and photographing at once, had not the torrents of rain prevented.
I may mention here that I found traces later on of this diminutive race in some other islands, but rarely in such purity as here. Everywhere else they had mingled with the taller population, while here they had kept somewhat apart, and represented an element by themselves, so that I was fortunate in having my attention drawn to them here, as elsewhere I might easily have overlooked them.
WILD MOUNTAIN SCENERY IN THE DISTRICT OF THE PYGMY POPULATION.