The Story of Chalmers of New Guinea

by Janet Harvey Kelman

Tamate was very glad that his doorkeeper cared so much about this debt. Though he had not meant to be so strict, he yielded to his friend.

But although the doorkeeper would let no one enter a church that was not paid for, he did not mean to keep any one out of church for a single day.

Soon a great noise was heard in the village. Boom went the drums. Boom! boom! High above their booming the voices of the villagers rose. Every one was called together to give what they could spare for the church. Very soon all was paid, and many gifts were left over.

All the time that Tamate was in Rarotonga he was longing to be at more dangerous work amongst those who lived to fight and kill each other, and who had no one to teach them.

His thoughts were so much with these wild tribes that he made others think of them too. Many of his students had caught his spirit, and longed, as he did, to go to the island of New Guinea, where very wild men lived and fought. Some of the teachers he had trained went before him. They knew it was dangerous, but they went with joy, because they too had learned how great and glad a thing it is to live for others.

At last Mr. Chalmers was allowed to leave Rarotonga and to go to New Guinea.

New Guinea is an island three times as large as Great Britain. It is very rich in fruits, in ebony wood, and in other things that traders like to find. It lies near to Australia. But the savages who lived in it were so fierce, and its rocky coast was so wild, that no one had tried to trade in the south-eastern end of it. Those who knew anything about it thought that to go there meant to die.

Four years before Tamate went to New Guinea, some of his teachers had landed at one of its villages, which was called Port Moresby. Here they found Mr. Lawes and his wife, who some months earlier had made their home there. They were the first white people who had lived amongst the natives of that wild coast. They found many tribes of natives, and each tribe was at war with the tribes around it. If two chiefs had a quarrel with each other, they brought their tribes to fight it out. Then the two tribes went on paying each other back in turn, till all their villages were burned and very many of their warriors were killed. Every one was either killing, or being killed, or afraid of being killed.

The men of New Guinea were large and strong, and they liked to look handsome. They thought it very handsome to have their hair standing far out on the tops of their heads and all round, with beautiful bright feathers stuck into it. They liked, too, to wear sticks like tusks through their noses, and rings through their ears, and necklaces of bones.

They daubed themselves all over with bright, sticky paint. But what they thought most handsome of all was to have a great many tattoo marks. When a man had killed another he was allowed to have his skin pricked with coloured dye. Afterwards the dye would never come out, no matter how hard the skin was scrubbed.