Papuan Pictures

by H. M. Dauncey

Next morning there was more time and more energy for getting into touch with the people, but unfortunately that had to be done through an interpreter.

Sitting by the side of Naiti on the Dubu platform was a little toddler, who seemed loth to let go his hand. She was too young to do more than return love for care and affection, or she would have known how much she owed to Naiti. Her mother had died when she was a few weeks old, and her father, according to native custom, took the child into the bush and left it there to die. Fortunately Naiti found her, nearly dead from starvation and covered with sores, and took her to the village. He had no wife to tend the child, and no milk to give her, but he had his gun, and there were birds around. Some of these he shot and made broth for the little one, in which he soaked pieces of his hard biscuits; not perhaps according to the latest theories as to how a child should be fed, and Naiti, big man that he is, was not a dainty little nurse in cap and apron, but he managed grandly, and showed us the child with pride.

Many of our teachers have rescued little children in this way, but in most cases by taking them out of the grave of the dead mother, with whom they were to be buried, and rarely does the father take any notice till the child is grown enough to be useful and then he claims it. Another of our teachers found a Korona boy abandoned in the bush because, owing to a large ulcer on his foot, he was unable to keep up with the party on a journey.

The season was a good one for food, and the people were determined we should not go hungry while staying with them. Yams, sweet-potatoes, pumpkins, and sugar cane were brought from the gardens, and piled in front of the Dubu where we were sitting.

Then the pig was brought. He was a lively customer, and objected to the manner in which he was handled, and no wonder. It took three men, sitting on his back, to keep him down, and even then he had the better of it in the matter of voice. The men could not silence him, and he sadly interrupted the speech of the chief.

I should have liked to have recorded the whole incident in a picture, but, alas! my camera was at the bottom of the sea off Maiva, and I can only deal in words.

When all was ready the chief stepped down from the Dubu, and with the village people looking on from the verandahs of their houses, and the pig violently protesting, began his speech. Some natives are very demonstrative when they talk. They use their whole body, and it was not difficult to follow part at least of what the old man was saying, though none of us knew his language. It all had to be translated later on. First there was the welcome, and then the typical native regret that he and his people had no food to offer us. They had managed to provide “sisina hona” (a very little bit). Their idea of little in quantity seemed as elastic as their idea of the village being near on the previous day, for try as they would our boys did not manage to get through that “little bit” during our stay in the village, and had to get the donors themselves to help them. It was a present, the old man said; but presents are expensive luxuries in Papua, for they cost two or three times as much as if bought in the ordinary way. It was so in this case by the time the return present was completed.

I was expected to kill the pig, but not caring for the job, with due courtesy I trust, in any case with emphasis, I informed the old man that I was not in that line of business, and turning to Naiti asked him to be my deputy. The pig had to be killed in Papuan fashion and Naiti did not relish the business, so handed it on to Kone.

Then came the explanation as to why we had been asked to visit the village. Becoming very dramatic the chief received from his wife a small basket, out of which he took a human skull. This he held in one hand and a tomahawk in the other. The skull, he said, was that of his brother, who together with two of his wives and some of his children had been killed by people living on yonder hill. He showed how the tomahawk fitted into the holes in the skull and asked me to request the Governor to take vengeance (payment, he called it) for that murder, and then to send him a teacher to “teach him and his people peace.” No forgiveness. Revenge first, and then peace; but it was something that the desire for peace was there at all.

I felt sad, for I had neither the men nor the money to comply with the old man’s request. The sadness was the deeper when I remembered that down on the beach, not many miles below us, was the spot where the Christian teachers had landed as long ago as 1872, and yet till the arrival of my wife and myself the previous day, these people had never seen a white face in their village. Friends in England have since offered to support a teacher in the village, but dysentery has practically exterminated the people. The opportunity was lost.