This was a very picturesque village, shaded by thousands of coconut and betel nut palms and large spreading trees, among which was a very fine tree, with very beautiful green and yellow variegated leaves (Erythrina sp.). There was also a great variety of dracænas, striped and spotted with green, crimson, white, pink and yellow.
In most of these villages there were many curious kinds of trophies—crossed sticks, standing in the middle of the village, with a centre pole carved and painted in various patterns, and with a fringe of fibre placed near the top. Hanging on these sticks were the skulls and jawbones of men, pigs and crocodiles. I went out in the afternoon with gun and rifle, and saw several wallabies, but could not get a shot at them on account of the tall grass.
In the evening the chiefs of the large Notu village who had in our absence killed and eaten the two runaway carriers, visited us in fear and trembling. Monckton told them they must give up to us the actual murderers and send them up to the residency at Cape Nelson (or Tufi) within the next three weeks. He did not ask for those that ate them. Possibly one hundred or more partook of the feast, and for this they could hardly be blamed, as, being cannibals, it is quite natural that they should eat fresh meat when they got the chance. Indeed, our own carriers could not understand why we would not allow them to eat the bodies of those we had slain.
The next morning we five white men parted company, Walsh and Clark, with the Mambare and their own police, returning to the north, while Monckton, Acland and I went southward again to continue our explorations in another direction.
Our Discovery of Flat-Footed Lake Dwellers.
Our Discovery of Flat-Footed Lake Dwellers.
Rumours at Cape Nelson of a “Duckfooted” People in the Interior—Conflicting Opinions—Views of a Confirmed Sceptic—Start of the Expedition—Magnificence of the Vegetation—Friendliness of the Barugas—The “Orakaibas” (Criers of “Peace”)—Tree-huts eighty feet from the ground-Loveliness of this part of the Jungle—Description of its Plants—A Dry Season—First Glimpse of Agai Ambu Huts—Remarkable Scene on the Lake—Flight of the Agai Ambu in Canoes—Success at Last—A Voluntary Surrender—The Agai Ambu Flat-footed, not Web-footed—Sir Francis Winter’s subsequent Visit and fuller Description of these People—Their Physical Appearance, Houses, Canoes, Food, Speech and Customs—My Account Resumed—Making Friends with the Agai Ambu—A Country of Swamps—Second Agai Ambu Village—Extraordinary Abundance and Variety of Water-fowl—Strange Behaviour of an Agai Ambu Women—Disposal of the Dead in Mid-lake Food of the Agai Ambu—Their Method of Catching Ducks by Diving for them—An Odd Experience—Mosquitos and Fever—Last View of Agai Ambu—An Amusing Finale.
Many were the wild and fantastic rumours we had heard at the Residency at Cape Nelson, on the north-east coast of British New Guinea, concerning a curious tribe of natives whose feet were reported to be webbed like those of a duck, and who lived in a swamp a short way in the interior, some distance to the north of us. I myself had at first been inclined to sneer at these reports, but Monckton, the Resident Magistrate, with his superior knowledge of the Papuans, as the natives of New Guinea are called, was sure that there was some truth in the reports, as the Papuan who has not come much in contact with the white man is singularly truthful though guilty of exaggeration.
I knew this, but I had in mind the case of the Doriri tribe, who lived in the interior a little to the south of us. These Doriri (who had had the kindly forethought to send us word that they were coming down to pay us a visit to eat us, for the Papuan, though a savage, is often most suave and courteous and by no means lacking in humour), were reported to us as having many tails, but needless to say when we made some prisoners, we were scarcely disappointed to find that the said tails protruded from the back of the head (in much the same fashion as the Chinaman’s pigtail); in this case each man had many tails, which were fashioned by rolling layers of bark from a certain tree—closely allied, I believe to the “paper tree” of Australia—round long strands of hair.
We three white men had many a long talk as to whether these swamp-dwellers were worth going in search of, but I soon came round to Monckton’s way of thinking. Acland, alone, however, maintained to the last that the whole thing was a myth, and jokingly said to Monckton: “When you find these duck-footed people, you had better see that Walker does not take them for birds, and shoot and skin a couple of specimens of each sex and add them to his collection.” (For my chief hobby in this and many other countries all over the world consisted in adding to my fine collections of birds and butterflies in the old country.)