PAPUA, WHERE THE STONE-AGE LINGERS
BY DR. ALFRED GOLDSBOROUGH MAYER
WITH their undaunted spirit for braving the wilds, the English entered New Guinea in 1885. For centuries the great island had remained a mere outline upon the map the fever-haunted glades of its vast swamps and the broken precipices of its mountain ranges having defied exploration, more than the morose and savage character of its inhabitants. Even in the summer of 1913, Massy Baker the explorer, discovered a lake probably 100 miles or more in shore-line, which had remained hidden in the midst of the dark forests of the Fly and Strickland River regions, and here savages still in the stone age, who had never seen a white man, measured the potency of their weapons against the modern rifle.
To-day there are vast areas upon which the foot of the white man has not yet trodden, and of all the regions in the tropical world New Guinea beckons with most alluring fascination to him to whom adventure is dearer than life.
Far back in the dawn of European exploration, the Portuguese voyager Antonio de Abreu, may have seen the low shores of western New Guinea, but it is quite certain that sixteen years later, in 1527, Don Jorge de Meneses cruised along the coast and observed the wooly-headed natives whom he called "Papuas." The name "New Guinea" was bestowed upon the island by the Spanish captain, Ynigo Ortz de Retes, in 1515, when he saw the negroid natives of its northern shores.
Then there came and passed some of the world's greatest navigators. Torres wandering from far Peru, to unknowingly discover the strait which bears his name; Dampier, the buccancer-adventurer, and, in 1768, the cultured, esthetic Bougainville, who was enraptured by the beauty of the deep forest-fringed fjords of the northeastern coast. Cook, greatest of all geographers, mapped the principal islands and shoals of the intricate Torres Strait in 1770; and a few years later came Captain Bligh, the resourceful leader of his faithful few, crouching in their frail sail boat that had survived many a tempest; since the mutineers of the Bounty had cast them adrift in the mid-Pacific. In the early years of the nineteenth century the scientifically directed Astrolabe arrived, under the command of Dumont D'Urville, and, later, Captain Owen Stanley in the Rattlesnake, with Huxley as his zoologist, Then, in 1858, came Alfred Russel Wallace, the codiscoverer of Darwinism, who, by the way, is said to have been the first Englishman who ever actually resided in New Guinea.
The daring explorers and painstaking surveyors came and went, but the great island remained a land of dread and mystery, guarded by the jagged reefs of its eastern shores, and the shallow mud flats, stretching far to sea-ward beyond the mouths of the great rivers of its southern coast. So inaccessible was Papua that even the excellent harbor of Port Moresby, the site: of the present capital, was not discovered until 1873. One has but to stifle for a while in the heavy air that flows lifeless and fetid over the lowlands as if from a steaming furnace, or to scent the rank odors of the dark swamps, where for centuries malaria must linger, to appreciate the reason for the long-delayed European settlement of the country. But those who blaze the path of colonial progress are not to be deterred by temperatures or smells; let us remember that Batavia, "the white man's graveyard," is now one of the world's great commercial centers; and Jamaica, the old fever camp of the British army, is now a health resort for tourists.
Papua, the land of the tired eyes and the earnest face, of the willing spirit and the weary body, waning as strength fails year by year in malaria and heat, the land wherein the heart aches for the severed ties of wife and home; its history has hardly yet begun, but the reward of generations of heroism will be the conquest of another empire where England's high standards of freedom are to he raised anew. A victory of peace it is to be, as noble as any yet achieved in war; and great through its death roll, and forgotten though the workers be, the fruits of their labors will bless that better world Great Britain is preparing for those of ages yet to come.
There are great resources in Papua with its area of 90,500 square miles. Untrodden forests where the dark soil moulders beneath the everlasting shade; swamps bearing a harvest of thousands of sago and nipa palms, and mountains in a riot of contorted peaks rising to a height of 13,200 feet in the Owen Stanley range.
It is still a country of surprises, as when petroleum fields, probably 1,000 square miles in area, were discovered only about four years ago along the Vailala River, the natives having concealed their knowledge of the bubbling gas springs through fear of offending the evil spirits of the place. It is evident that although the country has been merely glanced over, there are both agricultural and mineral resources of a promising nature in Papua. It remains but for modern medicine to over-come the infections of the tropics for the region to rise into prominence as one of the self-supporting colonies of the British empire.