Our little house at Rabaul was a meeting and eating place for my inspectors, drifting in from the field. For a week or two before we left, the lot of them were at my table. In the kitchen their boys gathered around Jerope, matching their tall stories against his. We were a busy, uproarious family, getting ready to push on or say good-by. We had added up our mileage for that New Guinea campaign: 9,958 for all of us, traveling on everything that would walk, pull or float. My score was 3,523, not counting steamer trips to and from Australia—and Beach came next with 1,893.
When young Byron Beach joined our farewell house party he looked like a schoolboy fresh from tennis and a shower. He didn’t show a scratch, although by all the laws of chance he should have been dead. For our young adventurer had gone alone 165 miles up the Sepik River, a region so wild and dangerous that only armed expeditions dared it in 1921, and they came back with shuddering horror stories. Beach had tackled it in a frail canoe, paddled by jittering natives—he wasn’t literally alone, but he was the solitary white man. Beach had no business risking his fool neck without a white companion. If he had waited for me I would have joined him.
Almost his first act when he came to our house was to hand Eloisa £400 for safekeeping overnight. He grinned nonchalantly next morning when he took the money back, and doubled it in a tortoise-shell investment. The boy had heroic qualities, but he never forgot that he was a trader.
I wish I had the space to show you the diary he kept on that fantastic trip. I had sent him up to inspect Father Kirschbaum’s mission, not far from the wide brown mouth of that mysterious river whose upper waters lie in the howling darkness of the unexplored. With the good Father praying for his soul Beach set out on July 17, carrying plenty of tins for hookworm specimens and blandly intending to offer his wares to a jungle full of naked killers. The lad had the cheek of the devil, and that probably saw him through.
Some of the villages were unexpectedly friendly. In one of them the men were fiercely armed and hideously painted, awaiting another attack from an enemy who had burned half their houses and carried away thirty-seven villagers just before lunchtime. Beach distributed tins among these people, and told them, through a scared interpreter, how to use them.
When the Sepik folk were good to Beach they let him sleep in a Tambarand House, which is a tribal chamber of horrors, decorated with the skulls of relatives and valorous foemen. Artists decorated the family skulls to a semblance of life, and the good tribesmen took them to bed with them.
The natives were disappointed when they found that Beach’s specimen tins did not contain red paint for sale. Some of them punched holes through the tins and hung them around their necks. He had to scold them for this.
There were days of paddling into queerer and queerer regions. Time and again Beach saw headless corpses floating down stream. Probably they were the bodies of relatives; enemy meat would have been otherwise disposed of. In another village, bristling with spears, Beach made so bold as to prick a boy’s finger for a blood test. At sight of blood the warriors began to howl like wolves, but Beach was there with his everready salesmanship. He smiled winsomely as he presented the tribe with a collection of mirrors and fishhooks. As he wrote in his diary, “I’ll say I was thankful. Things were almost jolly when I left.”
At Timbunke, twenty-five miles farther up, it wasn’t so jolly. On the shore was a reception committee of 200 painted devils, brandishing spears and yelling at the top of their lungs. “I tried not to be in a hurry getting back in the canoe,” he wrote, “but the boys paddled for their lives, with all that bellowing mob scampering along the shore. Perhaps they were just wishing me a safe journey. No white man has ever slept there.”
All along it was playing poker with death. A fire on the shore might mean that friendly people were guiding your canoe to a safe landing. Or it might mean that the oven was heating up for a neighborhood roasting. Beach visited dozens of these places, and in most instances carried away the specimen tins, properly filled. Some of the villagers were timid, in deadly fear of their neighbors; others were so dangerous that Beach never let them get behind his back. In one of the tamest villages he was knocked down—by an earthquake. At the tip end of his journey 165 miles up the Sepik, he scored his triumph. He cajoled a warrior into submitting to the whole treatment, and recovered 105 worms.