“In British New Guinea you can dig gold in hand-fuls out of the mangrove swamps” (O ye gods!) “and prospect for any other mineral you may choose.”
Gold-mining in British New Guinea is carried out under the most trying conditions of toil and hardships, The fitting out of a prospecting-party of four costs quite £500 to £1,000. And only very experienced diggers tackle mining in the Possession. And his Honour the Administrator will not let improperly equipped parties into the Possession.
“It is the simplest thing in the world” to become a pearl sheller. “You charter a schooner—or even a cutter—if you are a smart seaman and know the Pacific, use her for general trading... and every now and then go and look up some one of the innumerable reefs and low atolla... Some are beds of treasure, full of pearl-shell, that sells at £100 to £200 the ton,” etc.
All very pretty! Here is the “simplicity” of it—taking it at so much per month: Charter of small schooner of one hundred tons, £200 to £300; wages of captain and crew, £40; cost of provisions and wear and tear of canvas, running gear, etc., £60 (diving suits and gear for two divers, and boat would have to be bought at a cost of some hundreds of pounds); wages per month of each diver from £50 to £75, with often a commission on the shell they raise. Then you can go a-sailing, and cherchez around for your treasure beds. If you dive in Dutch waters, the gunboats collar you and your ship; if you go into British waters you will find that the business is under strict inspection by Commonwealth officials who keep a properly sharp eye on your doings. If you wish to go into the French Paumotus you have first to visit Tahiti, and apply for and pay 2,500 francs for a half-yearly licence to dive. (Most likely you won't get it) If you try without this licence to buy even a single pearl from the natives, you will get into trouble—as my ship did in the “seventies,” when the gunboat Vaudreuil swooped down on us, sent a prize crew aboard, put some of us in irons, and towed us to Tahiti, where we lay in Papeite harbour for three months, until legal proceedings were finished and the ship was liberated.
“About £150 would be the lowest sum with which such a work” (scooping up the treasure) “could be carried out. This would provide a small schooner or a cutter from Auckland for a few months with all necessary stores. She would require two men, competent to navigate, two A.B.'s, and a diver, in order to be run safely and comfortably; and the wages of these would be an extra cost. A couple of experienced yachtsmen could, of course, manage the affair more cheaply.”
Some of these recent nine letters which I received contained some very interesting facts. One man, an old trader in Polynesia, wrote me as follows: “Some of these poor beggars actually land in Polynesian ports with a trunk or two of glass beads, penny looking-glasses, twopenny knives and other weird rubbish, and are aghast to see large stores stocked with thousands of pounds' worth of goods of all kinds, goods which are sold to the natives at a very low margin of profit, for competition is very keen. In the Society Islands the Chinese storekeepers undersell us whites—they live cheaper.” And “in Levuka and Suva, in Fiji, in Rarotonga and other islands there are scores of broken-down white men. They cannot be called 'beachcombers,' for there is nothing on the beach for them to comb. They live on the charity of the traders and natives. If they were sailor-men they could perhaps get fifteen dollars a month on the schooners. Why they come here is a mystery.... Most of them seem to be clerks or school-teachers. One is a violin teacher. Another young fellow brought out a typewriting machine; he is now yardman at a Suva hotel. A third is a married man with two young children. He is a French polisher, wife a milliner. They came from Belfast, and landed with eleven pounds! Hotel expenses swallowed all that in three weeks. Money is being collected to send them to Auckland,” and so on. There is always so much mischief being done by globe-trotting tourists and ill-informed and irresponsible novelists who scurry through the Southern Seas on a liner, and then publish their hasty impressions. According to them, any one with a modicum of common sense can shake the South Sea Pagoda Tree and become bloatedly wealthy in a year or so.
Did the “Special Commissioner” know that these articles would lead to much misery and suffering? No, of course not. They were written in good faith, but without knowledge. For instance, the wild statement about looking up “some one of the innumerable reefs and low atolls... beds of treasure, full of pearl-shell that sells at £100 to £200 the ton,” etc.—there is not one single reef or atoll either in the North or South Pacific that has not been carefully prospected for pearl-shell during the past thirty-five years.
Then as to gold-mining in British New Guinea, “where you can dig gold in handfuls out of the mangrove swamps”.
Diggers who go to New Guinea have to go through the formality of first paying their passages to that country from Australia. Then, on arrival, they have to arrange the important matter of engaging native carriers to take their outfit to the Mambaré River gold-fields—a tedious and expensive item. And only experienced men of sterling physique can stand the awful labour and hardships of gold-mining in the Possession. Deadly malarial fever adds to the diggers' hard lot in New Guinea, and the natives, when not savage and treacherous, are as unreliable and as lazy as a Spanish priest.
In conclusion, I can assure my readers that there is no prospect for any man of limited means to make money in the South Seas as a trader. Any assertions to the contrary have no basis of fact in them. In cotton and coco-nut planting there are good openings for men of the right stamp; in the second industry, however, one has to wait six years before his trees are in full bearing.