The boy explorers in darkest New Guinea

by Warren H. Miller

“I didn’t!” shivered Dwight, recalling the hours they had spent unprotected on the raft. “That’s more in your line. Real sea serpents, eh?”

“Yep. I still believe in the sea serpent,” laughed Nicky. “There are plenty of small ones among the New Guinea coasts and up the lagoons. They have a broad, finny tail like an eel, but are true serpents. They swim up near the surface and live on fish, but have poison fangs just like many of the land snakes. That’s why I am still convinced that there may be a larger species, sometimes seen far at sea by ships. They have been too often reported to be a myth. But these islands are too dry and rocky for anything but lizards. Where’s the curator gone?”

“He went after a black cockatoo which came through the grove awhile ago. I heard his gun recently.”

A little later the curator returned, carrying a specimen of the great black cockatoo, a rare find, but it was nothing to his delight over the magnificent bird of paradise that Nicky sprang on him unawares.

“Man dear, where did you get that!” he yelled, examining it avidly. “That’s the big prize of the expedition, so far. I guess we can go on to New Guinea, now!”

On the next day camp was broken and the party steered out of the jungle by compass and hunter’s paths, arriving back at the bungalow by nightfall. The following two days were mighty busy, for Nicky, as “snakeologist” of the expedition, had a large assortment of reptile skins to prepare, and the curator, as ornithologist, likewise; and all of them had to be packed in ant-proof tin receptacles before leaving. Dwight, as entomologist, mounted his specimens in flat, glass-covered wooden boxes, which could be packed a dozen at a time in tin cases.

That evening the curator hunted up the captain and crew of the proa and they warped her out into the harbor, for they were to sail for New Guinea the next morning. They all slept aboard once more, and at dawn stood out of the coral reefs and headed around Kobror for the hundred-mile run across to the coast of Dutch New Guinea. Two mornings after, the lofty chain of the Charles Louis Mountains, as the northern end of the Snow Mountains has been named, jutted out of the sea under banks of clouds. Navigators have measured the height of these mountains at six to nine thousand feet, taking observations from the decks of passing vessels, while the higher peaks of the Snow Mountains to the south rise to sixteen thousand feet. The mouths of a few rivers in that country have been noted on the map; but the hinterland remains a mystery to the world. Even the South and North Poles are better known.

By afternoon, the mainland had become quite visible, jungly foothills rising ridge on ridge to the base of the Great Precipice, which stretches south for two hundred miles, the greatest precipice in the world. Above it towered the snowy peaks far back in the mainland. They came to realize how utterly unknown and impenetrable it all is, when they awoke next morning to find the proa at anchor in a deep bay, with the jungly mountains all around them and a lagoon thirty miles long stretching back into the hinterland. Mangrove swamps lined the shore in an unbroken line. Here and there a dent in them told of the mouth of a stream. No living human was in sight, but the smoke of signal fires rose from points along shore, and scouting parties of native savages could be made out through the glasses already watching them, swinging through the trees over the mangroves like troops of monkeys. Now and then a long black canoe, with high carved prow, would cross the upper lagoon, driven by lines of paddling blacks. The very haste of them spelled danger, the passing of the word through the villages that a strange proa was here. A short raid on shore, a few miles into the jungle at most, unless attempted by a whole regiment of soldiers, would be certain to end in ambush and murder. As for those dense jungles and towering mountains back a day’s march into the interior—Unexplored! Danger! Pygmies! Head hunters! was written all over them!

They were examining the shore curiously, with a sense of the utter hopelessness of the undertaking oppressing them, when a huge black lakatoi, or native catamaran, jutted its prow around the point of a cape to seaward. Everyone turned to watch it, and with chatterings and gesticulations the crew sprang to life.

“Lakatoi, Orang-kaya!” sang out Sadok, pointing to seaward. She towered like a castle out of the sea. A single mast rose out of her amidships, carrying one long triangular mat sail with deeply incurved ends. Around the mast was a wooden platform, a sort of fighting deck with rails around it, and it was held down on the two log canoes which floated the structure by long bamboo arches like the backs of a bridge. The lakatoi was crowded with warriors whose spears and bows and clubs could be made out jutting up through the serried ranks like tiny black jackstraws.