hH^
~VAHIN£
"IRENE
ANDREWe
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o
THE NEW NEW GUINEA
HIS EXCELLENCY THE LIEUT.-GOVERNOR OF PAPUA
MAJOR J. H. P. MURRAY
IN THE UNIFORM OK THE NEW SOUTH WALES FORCES SERVING IN
SOUTH AFRICA
Frontispiece.
THE NEW
NEW GUINEA
BY
BEATRICE GRIMSHAW
author of
"in the strange south seas"
"from FIJI TO THE CANNIBAL ISLANDS '
ETC.
WITH FORTY-NINE ILLUSTRATIONS
AND A MAP
PHILADELPHIA
B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY
LONDON : HUTCHINSON &r- CO.
191 1
Printed in Great Britain
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
PACK
What is Papua ? — The tropical martyr — How not to see Queens-
land— Beche-de-mer— The inevitable " B.P."— The history
of Papua — Port Moresby , . . . i
CHAPTER II
The sea villages of Port Moresby — Motuan trading instinct — A
visit to the Bird-cage houses — The curse of Babel — How to
catch a murderer — Village dancers — The cold country of
New Guinea — A start for the Astrolabe — What is a swag ?
In jail . . . • • • 34
CHAPTER III
Along the Laloki — Wonderful Rona — The country of copper
— A roadside camp — A plantation bungalow— Where are
the English ? — The humours of manslaughter — Up-and-
down country — The daily lucky-bag — " Heaven sends wal-
nuts . . ." — Unknown fauna of New Guinea— On the long
trail again . . . ... 70
CHAPTER IV
The simple savage and his simple life — Off to the Purari River
— A day aground — Western war canoes — The town of the
devil-temples — " Pig ! " — Plantation recruiting — The secret
of the Rabi — Into the innermost chamber — What is it ? —
Lost in the delta — The praying of the Mantis — The light
that failed — lai, the place to spend a happy day — "Tha-
latta ! " . . . . ..114
2038658
vi THE NEW NEW GUINEA
CHAPTER V
PAGE
Among the rubber plantations — Prospects of Para — The gold-
mine of the soil — Land that goes begging — The cost of
rubber — About the cocoanut — A sisal hemp plantation —
Ficus rigo — A splendid sugar country — Timbers still un-
touched . . . . . . 159
CHAPTER VI
The wizard and the crocodile — Training for sorcery — The
Great Fly River — To Thursday Island — The pearl fishers
— " Walking alone in the depths of the sea " — Wicked
Goari-Bari — Willie and the soap — The scene of Chalmers'
murder — A bit of boiled man — The rescue of Chalmers'
bones — The incredible West — Very nearly an adventure —
The hysterical man-eaters — Order of the Imperial Shirt —
The loyalty of Kaimari . . . . 199
CHAPTER VII
Eastward in the Merrie England — The prettiness of Samarai —
"Very feverish" — Hunting the Japs — The island world
again — What they did in Milne Bay — A day in the gold
mines — The man who lost his head — The unbelievable island
— Did they eat the Chinamen ? — A two days' man-hunt —
Where the money is made . . . .257
CHAPTER VIII
Sud-Est and its Queen — Historic jewels of Papua — Two brave
Mrs. Crusoes — A new voyage of Maeldune — Unchaperoned
Sim-Sim — The Island of Silence — Too good to be true —
The curious Trobriands — Catching fish with kites — A
ghastly locket — The gentle art of poisoning — Strange fruits
— The pearls in the dust heap— Back to Port Moresby . 297
APPENDIX
How to reach Papua . . . • • 3^7
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
His Excellency the Lieut.-Governor of Papua, Major J. H. P.
Murray, in the uniform of the New South Wales forces
serving in South Africa . . . Frontispiece
TO FA
CE PAGE
Papuan coastal steamer . . . . .
i6
Cattle raised in Papua . . . .
22
Fort Moresby girls . . . .
32
The tempestuous petticoat . . . .
36
Native canoe . . . . .
42
Dwarf from the interior . . . .
46
Native dancers : Northern division
50
A Papuan barber . . . .
52
Papuan Government nursery for supplying economic plants
66
Carriers crossing a river . . . .
76
A home in Papua . . . .
80
Native house servants , . . .
90
The village beauty . . . .
118
Taken by surprise , . . .
126
Main street of Maipua . . . .
130
Purari canoe . . . .
134
The bridge that failed . . . .
138
The cannibal temple . . . .
142
Making sago . . . .
148
Lost in the delta . . . .
150
lai Town . . . •
156
The labourer's welcome home
160
In the lower ranges . . . .
166
Building a planter's house . . . .
. 168
The empty lands . . • •
170
vii
Vlll
THE NEW NEW GUINEA
TO FACE I'AGE
A Papuan high road . . ...
172
A plantation holiday . . . .
176
Cattle farming : Sariba Island . ...
188
Labourers in the gold-fields
190
Carriers on the way to the gold-mines
196
A widow's weeds : Fly River
206
Fly River folk ....
208
"Willie" ....
226
Where Chalmers was killed . . .
228
The bones of the murdered missionaries
228
The 6oo-feet-long dubu . . . .
230
Aird River natives (showing the flat foot of the swamp country
1 232
A patent of nobility . . . .
242
Dancing masks : Gulf of Papua
25 +
Samarai Island . . . .
258
The shores of Samarai . . . .
260
A happy afternoon . . . .
266
The palmy shores of Papua
270
Samarai . . . .
• 274
Misima canoes . . . .
. 304
Among the islands . . . .
308
Trobriand village . . . .
. 310
Trobriand islanders . . . .
. 312
British New Guinea
MAP
to face page
\i/
THE NEW NEW GUINEA
CHAPTER I
What is Papua ? — The tropical martyr — How not to see Queensland
— Beche-de-mer — The inevitable " B.P." — The history of Papua
— Port Moresby.
TIKE everybody else, I thought New Guinea be-
longed to England ; that it was a most unget-
atable place ; that it was inhabited almost solely by
the fiercest cannibals in the world ; that it was so
unhealthy as to be called the " White Man's Grave,"
and that there was nothing worth having there except
Birds of Paradise.
Even after spending some months in the New
Hebrides, which are not many hundred miles re-
moved from the great island continent of Papua, I
did not know much more about New Guinea than
I had known in my schoolroom days at home. The
countries of the Pacific world are separated from
each other with a completeness undreamed of in
Europe. The New Hebrides know nothing of New
Guinea. The Fijis are ignorant of the New Hebrides.
The great central groups — Cook Islands, Tonga,
Samoa — tell fairy tales of Fiji, and believe the
B
2 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
Solomons to be something like the end of the world.
If you want to get from one to the other, there is
only one way as a rule — take ship (when you can
get it) to Sydney, or possibly to Auckland and
thence to Sydney, a little round of a couple of
thousand miles or so — then, from Sydney, take ship
again (if there is one to be had) for the group you
wish to visit. It is quite possible you may have to
travel four or five thousand miles, and spend two or
three months in traversing a distance that is only
eight or nine hundred as the crow flies. That is the
joke of Pacific travel. It is well for you if you can
see the humour of it.
Of course, I had heard tales of New Guinea in
the " Islands." There was a trader in Niue — may
he see this, and be ashamed ! — who recounted to me
some of his amazing experiences up the Fly River.
" I was purser of a passenger steamer on the river,"
he said, " and I assure you it was really painful to
see some of the passengers we took up. There's
gold in the Fly, you know — it's found sticking among
the roots of the mangroves, in those deadly river
swamps — and prospecting parties go out to get it.
We used to find the remnants of them later on,
yellow-faced skeletons staggering out of the swamps
and waving a quinine bottle full of gold dust at us,
to get a passage anywhere away from the place.
We took up one party of fourteen, and afterwards
brought back three — all that were left."
A striking anecdote, well told. . . . Four years
THE TROPICAL MARTYR 3
later, when I had been up some of the great New
Guinea rivers, had seen a good deal of the country,
and realised in what stage of civilisation it stood, the
tale appeared more striking yet. If there are pas-
senger steamers running on the Fly in twenty years*
time from now, the Government will consider itself
fortunate. If there is ever any gold found on the
river, it will consider itself more fortunate still. And
if the gold so far departs from all known geological
and metallurgical laws as to be found conveniently
sticking in the roots of the trees that stand in deep
water and are daily washed by strong tides, the whole
country will no doubt make pilgrimages to the shrines
of the Blessed D'Albertis and Saint William Mac-
gregor to offer up thanks for a special miracle.
What really drew my attention to New Guinea as a
place where people did go and did live was (paradoxi-
cally enough) a death — the suicide in 1904 of the
Chief Judicial Officer, who was temporarily in charge
of the country. The tale of that wretched and un-
necessary disaster will be told in another place. Its
effect upon the country at large (strange to say) was
not exactly disastrous. All over the world flashed
the startling news that the " Governor of British
New Guinea " had committed suicide — had shot him-
self dead in front of Government House, at the foot
of the flagstaff that carried his country's flag. Such
a sensational incident was bound to attract attention
to the colony, and it did. To the ordinary citizen it
did not cast any discredit on Papua — people com-
4 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
mitted suicide everywhere — for various reasons ; but
it made him wonder where and what British New
Guinea was, and occasionally induced him to look it
up in a library. The seed thus sown bore fruit later
on in assisting settlement.
Like the other ignorant persons, I went to a library
and began to read up New Guinea. I found out
some astonishing things. First of all, England did
not own the country. Holland had a liberal half of it,
and Germany a quarter. Our share looked very small
till one began to compare it scale for scale with
European countries, and it then appeared, amazingly
enough, to be twice as big as England.
The scenery was said to be very fine, and the bird
and insect life wonderful. For the rest, the books
told of cannibals and crocodiles, fevers and snakes and
swamps, unexplored rivers, unknown mountains. It
sounded interesting, but calculated to give the un-
escorted woman wanderer food for rather serious
thought.
Still — how can one put it without offending a
number of excellent writers and worthy travellers ? —
still, I was conscious of a doubt somewhere, like the
lady in Har^ Times who could not exactly say she
had a pain, but thought there was a pain somewhere
in the room. I did not think the writers lied. But
I had been to various queer places on the surface
of earth and sea, and never found them just what
they were represented to be. It was clear that New
Guinea could not be worse than it was made out.
THE ROUTES TO NEW GUINEA 5
It was equally plain, therefore, that it might be
better.
Not until November, 1907, did I get a chance of
finding out for myself. At that time, other engage-
ments being cleared away, and much talk about
British New Guinea being in the air, after its recent
transfer to Australian government under the title of
" The Territory of Papua," I somehow found myself
saying good-bye to friends who evidently regarded
the occasion as the next thing to a funeral on board
an A.U.S.N. steamer at an obscure Sydney wharf —
luggage labelled " Port Moresby."
And thereafter came ten days of pure happiness.
The routes to New Guinea are not nearly so long
or so out of the way as one supposes, looking at the
isolated position of the country. After you end your
luxurious P. and O. voyage of five weeks from Mar-
seilles, you may be in Port Moresby in ten days if
you go through with the mails, taking train part of
the way. If you go by A.U.S.N. and Burns Philp
boat, you will be there in a fortnight, travelling along
the coast of Queensland. If you take the Burns
Philp through steamer by the Solomon Islands, you
will be three weeks on the road. Each route, in its
way, is fascinatingly interesting, but perhaps the best
for the absolute "new chum" is the Queensland coast
way, as it allows the seven times wonderful land of
Papua to produce its full impression, undimmed by
the strange sights and experiences met with travel-
ling through the Solomons.
6 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
The cut of a sleeve or a skirt, the fastening of
a tie, changes not more surely with the years than
does the cut of a prevailing emotion. In Gold-
smith's day the traveller was of necessity more or
less an exile. He might — no doubt he frequently
did — enjoy himself extremely, and much prefer
foreign countries to his native land. But it was not
the fashion to speak or to feel after such a cosmopoli-
tan style, and the eighteenth-century wanderer was
inexorably constrained to sing his wanderings in a
minor key.
His grandson, in the early days of railways, was
content to regard the continent of Europe as an
entirely delightful playground. Tropical climates,
however, were his especial terror. African explorers
who suffered unheard-of things from sunstroke and
wild beasts — Indian officials who became "nabobs"
and acquired diseased livers, both in accordance with
some mysterious law of nature — represented to him
the only connection with the torrid zones that was
known or possible. Nobody went to the lands of
monsoons and man-eaters for pleasure, and only the
most amazing discoveries or the biggest possible
fortunes could compensate anyone for the hardships
that must of necessity be faced.
It must be confessed that this idea dies hard, and
though moribund, is not yet ready for its coffin.
People in general will allow that there is pleasure in
seeing the wonderful East and the amazing South —
— that one may indeed live near the Line for a few
LIFE IN NEW GUINEA 7
years, if compelled to do so — but the convention of
hardship and horror still lingers. There is some-
thing dreadful about the tropics. The heat is a
ceaseless torture. The wild beasts and reptiles are
a constant danger. The natives are always ready to
murder you. The gorgeous scenery may be all very
well, much as a painted belle in a ballroom is good to
look at ; but one would give a thousand miles of the
one, or the other's whole battery of charms, for a
simple green English lane with a primrose in it, or
a smile from an innocent country lass. . . .
Which is all very pretty, and calculated to draw
approving murmurs from the gallery. But it does
not happen to be true. A good many men, if put on
oath, would be obliged to acknowledge that they find
the society of the finished belle more amusing than the
bread-and-milk conversation of the provincial young
woman. A good many people who keep putting off
the purchase of that saloon single, outside, amid-
ships ticket that will open the gate of the country
lane and silence the whisper of the starlight-silvered
palms for ever, would have to tell you, were they
sworn to truth, that the tropic world is almost
wickedly fascinating, and that they fear they will feel
a little out of place — ^just at first, of course — when
they go home to stay. . . . But then what becomes
of the heroism, the wonder, the distinction, of living
in the lands that to " most people " are only a geo-
graphical expression for something perilous and
unpleasant :
8 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
No, it is time that somebody really told the truth
about these wicked tropics ; that the augurs who
have resided in Calcutta or Colombo, Townsville,
Cooktown, or Fiji, Buenos Ayres, Barbados, or
Singapore, should cease to wink at one another when
they meet in London drawing-rooms and hear each
other relating frightful tales of suffering and depriva-
tion. • . . Here, on the big comfortable Australian
steamer, with warmer and warmer breezes blowing in
upon the dainty sea-blue curtains and cushions and
cool white enamelled panelling, every day — with a
keener, more crystalline sun dancing each morning
on the waveless sea that lies inside the Great Barrier
Reef — with clean white clothes coming out all over
the ship, and passengers' mattresses mysteriously
appearing like night-blooming flowers upon the pro-
menade decks when the moon gets up — with a sense
of lazy ease and hurry-no-man's cattle drifting down
on each of us like a blessing sent by Marconigraph
from the gods of Cancer and Capricorn — here, going
north and north and north along immense Australia,
to the countries of the crocodile and the palm once
more, the passengers look like nothing in the world
less than martyrs.
One must confess that it is more or less the fashion
to complain of one's lot, even among these con-
tented-looking: beings. It seems that there is a famine
of theatres, music-halls, and races in the hot countries ;
that you have to do your shopping by steamer,
and only get your newspapers at intervals. You
THE WAY TO SEE QUEENSLAND 9
see too much of the same small set of people. There
is not enough of variety in the food. The mosqui-
toes are troublesome. ... It is exactly the same
tone of complaint, somewhat varied in the arrange-
ment of the notes, that one has heard in London, in
America, in every corner of the earth where necessity
compels men to earn their bread under conditions
short of Paradise. . . . One seems to remember,
too, that the catering and the amusements did not
satisfy, even in the original garden.
All the same, the passengers are quite evidently
"going back to Dixie," and not sorry to go.
The way to see Queensland — if you are not going
to see it — is to travel up the coast on an A. U.S.N.
boat, bound for Papua. No qualms of conscience as to
mines unvisited, rising pastoral districts unseen, brand-
new town-halls unadmired, beset the steamer traveller
who has no intention of doing Australia's second
largest and most interesting State otherwise than by
lazily looking on as he is carried past. Like Harold
Skimpole, who could lie on the rug before a good fire,
imaginatively travelling up an African river, and
"seeing the wonderful forms of the foliage just as
clearly as if he were really there," we lie in our deck
chairs day after day, absorbing iced drinks and novels,
imagining the mines and the herds of cattle, and
looking up now and then to note a new stretch of
exquisite heliotrope-coloured hills, rising away in the
distance behind a coast of creamy gold, or to see a
fresh archipelago of little bright green islets rising
lo THE NEW NEW GUINEA
out of a sea that is rich blue without the reef, warm
aquamarine within. And still the endless coast goes
on. And still, day by day, we come to baking little
towns with verandahed tin-roofed stores and houses,
and great hotels that are evidently the resort of thou-
sands of square miles of townless country. And we
stop to take up cargo or passengers, to bring all the
latest news and mails, and to give the people a change
(strange reversal of the eager rush for news and
diversion from ship to shore, in the busy ports of the
Old World ! ). And each of the towns is the rising
town of Queensland, though all look like one
another.
But at Rockhampton, if my memory does not lie
(perhaps it does — I was not seeing Queensland), the
first of the palms is met with, a mere handful of dusty
and unhappy featherbrooms : still, a landmark of
importance. And at Cairns you get out and go to
the hotel for a night, and do not go to see the Barron
Falls, and feel all the pleasure of one who boldly and
shamelessly sins, without the guilt. But you walk
about the town, and think that there is nothing in it
so interesting as the stuffed blue-helmeted cassowary
in a back-street shop-window. . . . Somehow, until now,
you had not realised that there were actual cassowa-
ries anywhere except upon the plains of Timbuctoo ;
it is astonishing to know that in Papua, where you
are going, there are plenty of them, and to see for
yourself that they look quite tall enough to eat any
member of the L.M.S. or the Methodist Mission
BECHE-DE-MER n
who might happen to incur their displeasure — not for-
getting the " hymn-book too."
Bcche-de-mer cutters and schooners abound on the
Great Barrier Reef, and we see them almost every
day. The b6che-de-mer has long been known as a
dainty to the Chinese, than whom there are no finer
cooks in the world, but it is only of late years that
Europeans are beginning to realise they have missed
something in dismissing this hideous sea slug as
uneatable. Once taste beche-de-mer soup in a
Queensland hotel or private house where they know
how to make it, and you will never say thank-you for
turtle again.
There are many kinds of beche-de-mer, varying in
size, in colour, and in value. About thirty pounds a
ton (dried) is the price of the worst grades. The
better grades sometimes rise as high as two hundred.
The process of collecting is simplicity itself. The
slugs live in the shallow water of the coral reefs, and
are picked up by the native employees of the boat-
owners without any trouble of hunting or catching.
They are boiled, cleaned, smoked for twenty-four
hours, and then sold to the large exporting dealers
at so much per ton. On the enormous stretches of
the great Barrier Reef the supply is practically limit-
less, and a good deal of money is made by lucky
traders. 1 heard a tale at Cairns of two Sydney
clerks who got tired of their work, and being smart
boatmen, as nearly all Sydney young men are, ran
a cheap cutter that they had bought right up the
12 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
Australian coast to the reef. A few black " boys "
were engaged at a trifling wage, a curing hut put
up on an uninhabited island, and in a few months the
two enterprising tape-measurers had made several
hundred pounds. . . . Does not the heart of the
English clerk wax faint with Gnvy for the opportuni-
ties of his Australian brother ? If any couple of Mr.
Peter Robinson's young men could only go away and
make a little fortune in the summer holidays, catching
and drying bloaters off the Yarmouth coast, how
many young men learned in " the " ribbons, and
tactful with " the " haberdashery, would Mr. Peter
Robinson have ? Just as many as Mr. Farmer or
Mr. Hordern of Sydney, no doubt. He that will to
Cupar, maun to Cupar : the man who was cut out by
nature for a manly life will find it, if it lies in Yar-
mouth or Yucatan, while the man whom an all-wise
Providence has intended for the safe and the gentle
life, will not stray beyond the limits of his fourpenny
tram for all the songs of all the sirens in the seven
seas of the world.
We came into Cooktown, which is very far away
indeed, and a long distance past the railway world, in
ten days after leaving Sydney. I have not forgotten to
tell about Brisbane, which I saw and loved, and went
back to by and by, but have deliberately left it out,
because it is dangerous to begin talking seriously about
anything in Queensland if one does not want to be
led into writing a book about it. Queensland is so —
COOKTOWN 13
I said I would not — but it really is most — well, go
and see something of it for yourself, even if you can
only visit Brisbane, which in itself is . . . Please
change the subject.
We came into Cooktown, as I said, and dis-
embarked, for the coastal steamer goes no further,
and one must here take one of the boats of the wild
and wicked Burns Philp Line to make one's way on
to Papua. I do not mean to cast any aspersions upon
the spotless reputation of this excellent, pawky, pious
Scotch-Australian shipping firm, nor upon the be-
haviour of anyone who lives upon, or travels by, its
ancient but hardy vessels. One instinctively calls
them wild and wicked, however, as one used to call
the plains of Western America wild and woolly,
because of the prevailing character of the surroundings
of the line. B.P.'s boats go nowhere that is settled,
nowhere that is civilised, nowhere devoid of the local
colour furnished by the gentle cannibal (he really
is gentle), and the modest head-hunter, and the coy
crocodile. Their captains and officers have one and all
lived lives of adventure that would make the most
lurid of blue-and-yellow twopenny dreadfuls on a
cheap tobacconist's counter read like a kindergarten
baby prize. Because of this, they are very quiet and
rather blase people as a rule, not intensely interested
in anything, and usually ambitious of growing beans
for Sydney market gardens, or living in a bungalow
up the Hawkesbury River, and taking in boarders
when — or if — they get old.
14 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
The firm are keen traders, and the ships generally
go out of port staggering with cargo. It is all
prosaic enough to "B.P.'s" own people no doubt,
but travellers from far countries cannot help having
an idea that there is something quite romantic in
making your money out of pearl-shell and pearls and
sandalwood and cedar, even out of beche-de-mer and
cocoanuts — not to mention ivorynuts, tortoise-shell,
dried fungus, and half a score other odd products
about which most people know nothing. There is
always vivid local colour on a " B.P." boat, quite
apart from the extraordinary places into which she
is sure to take you. She will have native boats'
crews — half-tamed savages who dress in a rag and
a dozen necklaces, and do war-dances on the after-
deck in the moonlight ; there will be yam and turtle
and other strange foods among the dishes at the
ordinary saloon meals ; you are almost sure to have an
explorer among the passengers and a gold prospector
or two, and a queer, dead-silent or devastatingly
talkative trader from the back of nowhere, who has
been half-eaten by sharks, crocodiles, or natives at
least a dozen times, and who has been so long
restricted to the three classes of society above
mentioned, that he has almost lost taste for any other.
And as you near the New Guinea coast . . .
But how careless to have left out Cooktown !
Where Captain Cook once made a call, eventually to
be commemorated by a statue that got as far as the
pedestal many years ago, and seems likely to stop
"NEW CHUMS" 15
there — where there is a large street, and two rows
of shops, and several hotels that introduce you to
the unpleasing Australian custom of penning guests
in scores of iron tanks or cubicles, all under one hot
iron roof — where the mango trees grow in a splendid
double avenue all down the street as big as English
beeches, and hang out tantalising green ovoid fruits
that will be ripe in just a few days — after we have
sailed ; where you can go driving in the dust, and
see many low mountains covered with grey-green
eucalyptus, and many immense anthills, fifteen feet
high and more, just like the pictures in the geography
books. . . . Well, one cannot go back, and it is two
days since we left Cooktown now, and we must all get
up early to-morrow morning, for at daylight we shall
be in sight of New Guinea.
The " new chums " are very busy absorbing infor-
mation, this last evening, and, like most travellers,
they know a good deal more of local history by this
time than the residents of the place. We have been
looking things up on the A. U.S.N, steamer, more or
less, but the extraordinary prevalence of the alligator
story along the whole Queensland coast leaves little
room for general reading or conversation. As every
traveller knows, the shark story dominates most tropic
liners ; the alligator story is certainly a welcome
change, but neither the one nor the other satisfies the
hunger we feel for minute information about the
country we are going to see.
1 6 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
As the Makambo ploughs along to-night over a
calm, dark, hot sea, with thunder somewhere very
near us, and phosphorescent gleams twinkling about
the bows, one of the voyagers, at all events, seated in
a quiet corner of the deck, is thinking seriously
enough about this strange island-continent lying un-
seen upon our beam, and wondering how it is that in
these days of universal exploration, when the secrets
of South America are almost all told, and even Cen-
tral Africa and Central Asia have little more to give,
New Guinea should still flaunt defiance in the face of
all research. There have been numberless exploring
parties, but not one has done all that it set out to do,
though each has added a little to our knowledge of the
interior. Not a single one of the great rivers has
been traced to its source. Most of the high moun-
tains have not been ascended. No one knows what
lies in the great blank spaces of the Western Division
of Papua. In fact, the greater part of the country is
a riddle still unread. . . . Why ?
I leave the reason to disclose itself later on, and
return to the information that I have been collecting
out of various books owned by passengers and
officials.
New Guinea, these tell me, was discovered in 151 1
by Antonio de Abrea. The great archipelagoes of
islands lying to the south and east were not dis-
covered until the end of the eighteenth century, by
D'Entrecasteaux and other French navigators. It is
amazing, but true, that the whole eastern end of the
SIR THOMAS M'lLWRAlTH 17
country remained unmapped and unknown, no one
being able to say where the great " tail " of New
Guinea came to an end until so late as 1873, when a
British man-of-war charted it out.
England, in the person of her more enlightened
statesmen and commanders, made no less than three
attempts to secure a footing in New Guinea. In
1793 the whole country was annexed by officers of
the East India Company, and an island in Geelvink
Bay was used as a residence for British troops. The
Government of the day, however, refused to ratify
this wise and far-seeing act. In i 873 Captain Moresby
annexed some of the islands at the eastern end of the
country. This too was disapproved, although by
now the Dutch had been in possession of the whole
western half of the country for generations. In 1883
a still more determined attempt to benefit the home
country against its will was made by the late Sir
Thomas M'llwraith, Premier of Queensland. This
able statesman, alarmed by the rumour of German
annexation, and rightly fearing to see a foreign Power
established in a country not a hundred miles from
the Australian coast, annexed the eastern half of the
country, and asked in terms of the greatest urgency
for a ratification of his action from the Home
Government.
It was refused. Lord Derby, at that time Premier,
was opposed to the idea of colonial expansion, and
considered the Queensland Minister's fears of German
aggression to be unfounded. He did not hesitate to
1 8 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
say so in a biting phrase that must have come back
to his memory a year later, when Germany actually
did take possession of a good half of the open terri-
tory and of the better part of the Solomon Islands.
On this the British Government so far relented as to
allow the " protection " of the remaining portion if
the Australian Government would guarantee ;;^ 15,000
a year towards expenses. Under this arrangement
the country remained a dead weight upon the hands
of all concerned for four years, after which it was
annexed to the British Crown, and for seventeen
years simply went to sleep. It is a little hurtful to
one's national pride, but must in justice be admitted,
that British administration of the country was not a
success, and that the Australian Government, short as
its time has been, has, on the contrary, been conspicu-
ously successful.
Concerning various administrators who held the
reins of British New Guinea between 1884 and 1906,
it can only be said that one and all systematically,
determinedly, and successfully resisted all attempts
towards opening up and developing the country. I
do not say this as a stranger to Papua — the truth had
not even dawned on me that night when I sat on
deck and conned over the few geographical facts that
I had been able to gather. I say it after a residence
of a year and a half in the country, after meeting
almost every white person in it, seeing every division,
and travelling into every part attainable without an
exploring expedition — after seeing and talking to the
THE HISTORY OF PAPUA 19
men who know the history of Papua, here and in
Australia, and after reading for my own information
a mass of papers, reports, and general literature dating
back nearly thirty years.
This, then, is, or was, the reason of New Guinea's
apparent uselessness and inaccessibility. Difficult
though the country is to the traveller — seriously as
development has been handicapped by hostile natives,
local fevers, want of proper roads — not one, or not
all, of these dead-weights has pressed down the
balance half so far as the real clog and hindrance —
the fact that Papua's rulers wished to keep the place
shut up.
There are two sides to every question. Some of
those who held the destiny of the country in their
hands were moved in their exclusive policy by an
honourable wish to secure the welfare of the native.
It really seemed to them that this could best be done
by keeping out the white man, except in so far as he
was represented by missionaries. They feared that
planters, miners, traders, would corrupt the simple
Papuan, and that a rapid influx of white population
would deprive the native of his lands and condemn
him to slavery.
A frivolous little volume of Barry Pain's, pub-
lished some year ago, contained a sentence that de-
served wider quotation than it has received —
" Bear with me, dearest, for being no more than
I am. Many people are no more than they are, and
one has to put up with it."
20 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
One must bear with even a well-meaning Colonial
Administrator for being no more than he is. It was
not the fault of these gentlemen — some of them
honest and worthy men — that they were no more
than they were — that they thought a valuable colony
could and should be kept in the pocket of anyone ;
that they were so tender of the man-eaters' morals
as to desire to keep them eternally unspotted from
the contact of vile coffee planters ; that, travelling
through the known parts of the country, and even
discovering many new districts, month by month,
they should walk through the land with their eyes
shut and not see millions upon millions of acres of
splendid country lying waste and unclaimed ; and
that the possibility of guarding the natives from
enslavement by means of laws never seems to have
occurred to these curiously short-sighted law-givers.
It was not their fault, perhaps. Still, seeing what
Australian methods and government have done for
the country in less than four years after we had
successfully spoiled it for over twenty, one cannot
help regretting that British rule enjoyed quite so
long a run.
CD
But, as the early Victorian novelist used to say,
after designedly giving away the chief interest of his
plot, " I am anticipating," and must return to the
Makambo.
It was a disappointment on rising at a compara-
tively early hour next morning to find the great peaks
of the Owen Stanley Range invisible. An endless
THE HISTORY OF PAPUA 21
pale blue coast, thin and unsubstantial in the heat,
lay stretched out along our port beam. There were
hills behind it, but a thick mantle of cloud covered
them all. We could only imagine the splendid cone
of Mount Yule, rising ten thousand feet straight
into heaven, the gradual slopes and scarps of Mount
Victoria's majestic thirteen thousand feet, the aston-
ishing humps and domes of the smaller seven or
eiffht thousand feet mountains nearer the coast. Here
and there, as the steamer plodded steadily along the
great equatorial island, one would catch just a
glimpse of a whitey-blue summit, very far away and
amazingly high up, or see the rise of some long
range of foothills leading away and away . . .
whither ?
The nameless charm of Papua — the fascination
which many have felt but none can express — first lays
its compelling hand upon the traveller when he looks
at such scenes as these, and knows for a certainty that
his eyes are resting upon hills unprofaned by the
white man's foot — upon lands where " no one has
been " ; upon rivers, known and navigated indeed in
the lower reaches, but rising from mystery, and taking
their growth in the unseen. The plantation country,
with its busy hordes of labourers, its comfortable
managers' bungalows, its loads of coffee and fibre and
copra coming down to meet the steamers, takes on
actual romance viewed against this background of the
ever-fascinating unknown. Scarce a dainty arm-chaired
verandah but looks out upon mountain ranges that
22 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
shut in unvisited mystery ; scarce a trader or miner
but goes every now and then, in the course of his
ordinary work, to the verge of the "Never Never,"
and sometimes even beyond ; hardly a creek supply-
ing water to the horses and baths to the plantation
house which does not carry in its heart secret on
secret of the strange places whence it has come.
Much exploration has been done of late, bit by bit,
after a quiet, unadvertised fashion, by the Govern-
ment officials of the outermost districts, by miners
and prospectors, and by a few of the missionaries of
the Sacred Heart, who have the true pioneering spirit.
But so much remains quite unknown, that one may
safely prophesy it will be very many years yet before
Papua loses the greatest of its charms — mystery.
The continent, or island, of New Guinea is nearly
1500 miles long, its greatest width being 430 miles.
Its entire area is estimated at 235,000 square miles.
In spite of the huge piece claimed by the Dutch and
the goodly section belonging to Germany, England
has no reason to complain of her share, since it
amounts to 90,540 square miles, nearly 88,000 of
which are on the mainland, the rest being made up
of islands. The British-owned section is in many
ways superior to German New Guinea. It is long
and narrow — 800 miles from east to west, and from
200 to 50 in width, its coastline being proportionately
very great — 3664 miles.
It is easy to understand, from a glance at the map,
that Papua must be much more readily accessible, and
THE HISTORY OF PAPUA 23
less troublesome and expensive to open up, than either
of the foreign-owned sections. This impression is
carried out by the actual facts. Both Dutch and German
New Guinea are less known, less developed, less
effectively controlled than Papua. Our share is, in-
deed, more valuable in many ways. To mention one
or two only — the mineral resources of the country are
richer, the pearl fisheries are more valuable, and the
great extent of seaboard offers perfect facilities for
cultivating the cocoanut, which, in the form of
" copra " or dried kernel, is one of the most important
products of Australasia.
It must be confessed that the name — the new
name — of the English-owned section is a little confus-
ing. In our childish days we were taught to think
of the largest island of the world as " Papua, or New
Guinea." It is indeed marked as such on most maps.
But when the part known as British New Guinea
was taken over by the Commonwealth Government
in 1906 it became necessary to find a new name, and
the country was rcchristened "The Territory of
Papua" — much as though a foreign Power were to
take possession of Ulster or Connaught and insist on
calling it " Ireland." The result, of course, has been
confusion outside of Australia. Few people at home
know that " British New Guinea " no longer exists,
and the term " Papua " means, to the English reader,
either the whole country or (if it is qualified by the
addition of "New Guinea") some small obscure
portion of which no one has ever heard. It certainly
24 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
does not mean the " British New Guinea " of which
he has probably heard something from time to time.
This trouble will no doubt set itself right in a few
years. There is at least one strong argument for the
name adopted. If " Australian New Guinea "■ — an
easy and obvious title — had been chosen, the colony
would still have continued to suffer, as it has done in
times past, for the sins of the Guinea Coast of Africa.
There can be no doubt in the mind of anyone who
has visited New Guinea that some such misalliance
of name has always haunted the ideas of the general
public, and given the island continent of the south an
ill reputation that it never honestly deserved. New
Guinea is not a health resort for invalids — no tropical
colony is — but it never was " the White Man's
Grave," or the "Land of the Lost," or any other of
the unpleasant things it has been miscalled. Perhaps,
at the price of even a good deal of inconvenience and
confusion, the Commonwealth Government did well
to cast overboard every relic of the bad old days, and
make an entirely fresh beginning.
We round a green headland — we pass through the
jaws of an encircling coral reef — and the Makamho
is at anchor in Port Moresby Bay. This is the
capital that lies before us. There are only two towns
in Papua ; you here behold the chief.
Well ... it is not a collection of log huts or
bark " humpys," but there is no mistaking the
pioneering stage, and Port Moresby has clearly not
MORESBY BAY 25
emerged from it yet. The curious, peaky, pale
green and deep blue hills that surround the town in
a phantasmagorical array, quite unlike any hills as one
has known them in other countries, are bare of all
houses save three or four Government offices and
bungalows and the residence of the London Mis-
sionary Society. There are no roads to be seen (in
reality there is one, and several foot-tracks, but they
are hidden behind the hills). The town itself, clam-
bering up and down one or two of the lesser hills,
does not own more than a score or two of houses,
most of them Government offices. All the buildings
are of wood or iron, painted white, all the roots of
grey iron. The houses are surrounded with deep
verandahs and perched on piles eight or nine feet
high, so that they look like huge many-legged beetles
out for a walk. This is not because the ground is
marshy in the town, but because white ants, snakes,
iguanas, and other local fauna are rather too fond of
making their homes with the residents in wet weather
if not discouraged in this manner. A new building
is being put up on a square of cleared ground ; the
carpenters have got as far as the laying of the piles,
and the bare earth is dotted at regular intervals with
some dozens of black wooden posts capped with
shining zinc. . . . It is extraordinarily like a pin-
cushion seen through a magnifying glass.
There are no paved or macadamised streets in the
town. Grass alone covers the space between the
houses — grass and bare red earth. There are three
26 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
long wooden piers, but the steamer discharges pas-
sengers and cargoes from boats. We land on the
central pier, and, walking up the sharp slope into
the town, are assailed by a rich odour that somehow,
in the midst of all the heat and glare, seems to recall
the scented, shaded coolness of drawing-rooms far
removed across the seas of the world and the seas of
Time. . . . Sandalwood, as I live ! and there it is,
piled up by the side of the track in a heap that looks
like somebody's winter firing. Rough logs, big
straggling roots, knotty branches — all as sweet as only
sandalwood is sweet — the very dust and splinters
might perfume a lady's wardrobe. We steal a little
piece or two, and pocket it to make a pleasant smoke
against mosquitoes later on. And now comes the
question of finding quarters — often something of
a difficulty. More fortunate than most, I was in-
vited to stay with friends, and was thus enabled to
see the wonders of Papua under the pleasantest
circumstances.
How is Papua governed, and what changes have
been made in its administrative system since the
Commonwealth took over the country ?
In past times British New Guinea was classified as
a Crown Colony, the government being carried on
by an Administrator, with the help of a small Legis-
lative Council. The correspondence of the Ad-
ministrator with the Secretary of State had to go by
a somewhat roundabout route, first through the
Governor of Queensland, and then on to England.
SIR WILLIAM MACGREGOR 27
Five resident magistrates, each in charge of one of
the five divisions of the country, assisted in keeping
order. Sir William Macgregor, during his Adminis-
tratorship, instituted a useful system of Armed Native
Constabulary, of whom, in the Crown Colony days,
there were about a hundred and fifty. The native
village constables also date from this period.
At the present time Papua is ruled by a Lieu-
tenant-Governor appointed by the Commonwealth
Government. He is assisted by an Executive
Council of four official members, and a Legislative
Council of four official and three non-official. The
title of " Administrator " has been preserved, with
a change of meaning. It is now borne by the
Government officer next in rank to the Lieutenant-
Governor. This official is supposed to take charge
of the colony in the absence or illness of the Lieu-
tenant-Governor, and in case of the death of a
Governor he would hold the position until a new
appointment could be made. The arrangement is
in the nature of an insurance, providing against the
possibility of the country being left at any time
without a responsible head. This, in a new and
uncivilised colony like Papua, far removed from post
or telegraph, is very necessary ; but the somewhat
sinister suggestion which it conveys as to the perils
of Papuan existence is a little out of date, the health
conditions of the country having so greatly improved
of recent years.
There are now eight divisions in the colony ad-
28 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
ministered by eight resident magistrates, with the
help of eleven assistant resident magistrates and four
patrol officers.
The Customs, Post Office, Lands, Mining, and
Agricultural Departments have their quota of officials
— a small one — in Port Moresby and Samarai. The
colony, on the whole, is run at very small expense,
and has a considerable balance of revenue over
expenditure. Correspondence now goes direct to the
Commonwealth Government offices in Melbourne.
Appointments of officials are recommended by the
Commonwealth, and made, if approved, by the Lieu-
tenant-Governor.
There has been only one Australian Lieutenant-
Governor so far — the present occupier of the position,
His Excellency Judge Murray (John Hubert Plunket
Murray). The officials next in rank, the Hon. Miles
Staniforth Smith, Director of Agriculture, and the
Hon. A. M. Campbell, Government Secretary, are
respectively Australian and Scottish. The lesser
officials belong to various countries, but are all of
English-speaking nationality, with a preponderance of
Australian.
The present Lieutenant-Governor has held the
post since April, 1907, when he was appointed tem-
porarily to the charge of the country — the appoint-
ment being made permanent in November, 1908.
His Excellency John Hubert Plunket Murray, and
late Colonel of the New South Wales Irish Rifles, is
a son of the late Sir Terence Aubrey Murray, at one
JUDGE ROBINSON 29
time President of the Legislative Council of New
South Wales. He was educated at Oxford and on
the Continent, and has had a notable career at the
New South Wales Bar. He is Chief Judicial Officer
for Papua, as well as Lieutenant-Governor. During
the late Boer war he served with distinction in the
New South Wales Mounted Infantry, and was
honoured by the British Government with the rank
of Major. Papua is a country that at times makes
demands on the military capacity of its rulers, and
the Lieutenant-Governor's experience of war has no
doubt assisted largely in keeping peace among the
tribes — a paradox with which no student of history
will find fault.
The history of Papua, up to the last two years, is a
tale of disaster and unsuccess. During 1907-8, and
still more during the present year, a notable change
has been taking place. Some such development had
been prophesied and hoped for by a few far-seeing
ones ; but time seemed to bring it no nearer, and in
the stormy years of 1904-6 the colony seemed to be
steadily losing ground. It is scarcely possible to give
any account of Papuan history, however brief, without
referring to the incidents of this unhappy period,
although little, naturally, can be said about occur-
rences with which living and well-known people have
been intimately concerned.
Early in 1903 the country came temporarily under
the care of Judge Robinson, Chief Justice of Papua, a
member of a well-known Queensland family. Judge
30 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
Robinson was a man still in the thirties, of a
sensitive, humane, and conscientious character — too
sensitive and high strung, it may be, for the very
difficult and trying task that had devolved upon him.
Among other matters that weighed much upon his
mind, after he had become responsible for the peace
of the country, was the bad effect that, among the
western tribes, had followed the murder of the mis-
sionaries Chalmers and Tompkins — an outrage that
made a deep impression upon the whole religious
world. The murder had taken place in 1901, and a
year later the natives who had committed the crime —
Goari-Bari islanders — still kept possession of the
victims' skeletons, holding them as trophies of war,
and defying the whites to regain possession of them.
Nor had the actual murderers ever been caught,
though punishment of a general nature had been
inflicted on their villages.
Judge Robinson decided, therefore, to pay a visit
to Goari-Bari, and see whether it might not be
possible to bring away the murdered missionaries'
remains. He went in the Government steam yacht
Merrie England, and took a number of armed native
constabulary with him. The natives of Goari-Bari,
being assured that the mission was peaceful, came on
board from their canoes, a flotilla of which had
surrounded the ship on her arrival. Among the
visitors to the ship one of the native constables de-
clared that he saw the actual murderers of Chalmers
and Tompkins. Judge Robinson ordered the arrest
JUDGE ROBINSON 31
of the men. Their capture was the signal for a general
attack by the' natives in the canoes, who began firing
arrows into the ship. One man aimed an arrow at
the Acting-Governor himself, and would probably
have shot him had not a constable put a bullet through
the archer before the arrow could fly. At this the
fight became general. It seems clear that the armed
police and the white men shot a number of the natives
who were firing at the ship, but how many, and
under what circumstances, was never exactly or satis-
factorily explained. The natives were soon beaten off
and retired to their village, while the Merrie England
steamed away.
The wildest reports of what had happened at
Goari-Bari soon became current throughout the
Territory, and some of them spread southward. The
Commonwealth Government ordered an inquiry into
the whole matter. There is no reason to believe that
Judge Robinson would have suffered by this, but he
himself, isolated from his friends, involved in a mesh
of local quarrels, and feeling the whole trouble with
extreme acuteness, could not take a reasonable view
of the situation. He did not await the result of the
inquiry, but was found one morning lying at the foot
of the flagstaff in front of Government House, with
a half-loaded revolver in his hand, shot through the
head.
The violent feelings caused by Judge Robinson's
death did not tend to smooth down local differences,
which were already active enough. After the Acting-
32 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
Governor's suicide the colony broke up into a series
of mutually hostile and mutually distrustful factions.
A new Governor was appointed, but during his
rule things went from bad to worse, and the official
life of the country became a blaze of continual
quarrels. The Commonwealth of Australia sent
a special Commission up to Papua to inquire into the
trouble of the colony, and for some months the
members of the Commission were very fully occupied
travelling from place to place and taking the evidence
of officials, planters, traders, anyone who had any-
thing to say about the matters under dicussion.
The Governor went home to England on leave, and
did not return when his time was up. Meanwhile,
the Chief Justice of the colony, His Honour Judge
Murray, was appointed Acting-Administrator, and
afterwards confirmed in his appointment as Lieu-
tenant-Governor.
Papua, under the rule of an Australian-born
Governor, appointed by the Commonwealth Adminis-
tration, now began to advance in a way little calculated
to flatter the pride of the nation that had industriously
made nothing of the country for nearly a quarter
of a century. Between 1907 and 1909 it changed
from a useless tract of savage country, where the
natives were more than half out of hand, the whites
almost at war, land scarcely obtainable, property
insecure, to a habitable, peaceful, and flourishing
colony. The change has been so rapid that hardly
anyone outside of Australia even knows that it has
PAPUA 33
taken place, and the British public, assuredly, does not
yet realise that Papua of to-day is by no manner of
means British New Guinea of yesterday, either in
name or in nature.
Figures may (proverbially) be made to prove any-
thing. But there cannot be much doubt as to what
the following extract from the records of the Govern-
ment proves : —
Total land purchased and leased in
the Territory of Papua, from the
annexation in 1884 up to 1906 . . 28,999 ^cres.
Total up to March, 1909 . . 319,853 „
So ends the tale of the bad old days in Papua.
We return gladly to the happier present.
CHAPTER II
The sea villages of Port Moresby — Motuan trading instinct — A
visit to the Bird-cage Houses — The curse of Babel — How to
catch a murderer — Village dancers — The cold country of New
Guinea — A start for the Astrolabe — What is a swag ? — In jail.
TT is impossible to take Papua seriously at first, nor
indeed is it necessary. You cannot understand
the country if you set about the task after too grave
a fashion. You must remember, above all things, that
when the steamer slips away round Paga Hill, she
snaps the last link connecting you with things
commonplace, accustomed, even probable. You are
left in the Land of the Impossible, where the thing
which is not happens every day, and, in the truest
sense of the phrase, nothing arrives save the un-
expected.
A walk through the native village which lies a
couple of miles beyond the township is the recognised
way of opening one's acquaintance with Papua. More
or less under white influence for thirty years, in
constant association with the white community for at
least fifteen, the village (one would naturally expect)
should be by this time civilised out of all interest.
It is not, however. Apparently the people of the
harbour and the bay swallowed all the civilisation they
could digest a good many years ago, and there stopped.
34
SEA VILLAGES 25
They know the value of money to a certain extent,
though most of them prefer tobacco to coin in
small amounts, and do not seem to be able to
understand that coppers, if collected, are worth the
same as silver. They have a liking for shirts, singlets,
dresses, cotton kilts, but only wear them for ostenta-
tion, and as a piece of show-off when going into the
town. Otherwise they prefer to go clad in a waist-
cloth or a grass kilt, according to sex. They know a
good deal of pigeon-English, work for hire as servants,
labourers, store assistants, go to church or school off
and on, and are on the best and most friendly terms
with the white population. Yet they believe heartily
in magic and sorcery, and in many instances practise
it ; their marriage customs are still those of the
primitive savage, and all the hard work both in
village and field is done by the women.
So it is, therefore, that the twin villages of Hanua-
bada and Elavara have lost nothing in their interest
for the casual white visitor, although the antiquarian
might find much to regret, and something to rejoice
over, in the decay of native customs good and bad.
These sea villages of Papua are very numerous,
and when one has visited many the sense of wonder
is apt to wear off, though the sense of pleasure in
their artistic beauty remains as an abiding delight.
Still, the first view is one that is long remembered.
The strange brown houses, with their high-pitched
gables and deep verandahs, set up on a forest of sea-
worn piles, the rough sketch of a ladder in front of
36 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
each, fit indeed for the light movements of bare feet
and slight naked bodies, but a very trap of destruction
for booted climbers — the jolly-looking crowd of mop-
headed men and women loafing on the platforms,
almost naked, save for the swaying ballet-skirts of
the girls and the masses of beads worn by men and
women alike — the cool lapping of the water right
underneath the houses, and the green gleam that
flickers through the half-transparent floors, when
we climb inside to look round — all have a quaint
exotic charm of their own, and an absolute fitness
with their surroundings, sure to mark the memory
deeply. The "street" of Hanuabada is of white sand
and gravel shaded by tall old palms that lean down-
ward to the sea after the graceful fashion of their
race, and make matchless pencillings of woven leaves
and waving plumes across the pathways, when the
sun is shining low among the black stilts of the
houses, and the girls are going down to the spring
with their round brown water-pots poised in the
crook of their round brown arms, to get water for the
evening meal.
It is a merry-looking village, this of Hanuabada.
There are about two thousand people in it, and the
number of small fat naked children climbing perilously
up and down the ladders, or splashing under the
houses, seems to suggest that there is no diminution of
numbers to be feared in this branch, at least, of the
" disappearing brown races." These Papuans are of
Motuan and Koitapuan race, a handsome and amiable
L.
THE TKMPESTUOUS rKTTICOAT
To face page 36.
MOTUAN TRADING 37
type. They were never great fighters, and they deny
having been cannibals at any time. Like all the other
inhabitants of sea-built villages, they adopted that
form of building to protect themselves as far as
possible against the attacks of the fiercer mountain
tribes, who, until the coming of the white people,
used to make constant raids upon the coast dwellers.
The people of these villages originally lived a little
way from the coast, and supported themselves by
hunting and gardening. It is scarcely credible, yet
true, that after a century or two of life literally in the
sea, they have not yet "adapted themselves to their
environment" so far as to make themselves into
decent fishermen. Although the bay is swarming
with excellent fish, and the canoes go out now and
then in a perfunctory way, very little fish finds its
way under the brown thatch roofs unless a crowd of
Hula people, from a district some fifty miles down
the coast, happens to be making a visit. Then plenty
is to be had, for the Hula tribe belong to the sea
from time immemorial, and they know how to feed
themselves in the way most natural to sea-dwellers.
What they do not know is how to make clay pots
such as Hanuabada manufactures, and they are pleased
to go home laden with these objects of use and
beauty, in return for the fish that they have supplied.
The Hanuabada native, indeed, is a born trader.
His women cannot make the grass " ramies " or skirts
in which they love to array themselves, piling on one
over the other until an effect resembling a crinoline
38 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
is attained. Kabadi, a district some forty miles away,
makes these, and trades them to the Motuan and
Koitapuan belles — always for pots. The sago that
they love might be grown in any swampy ground
near the village, but they do not grow it, preferring
to send out a sort of Argosy every October, when the
north-west trades are near setting in, to the western
district, returning months later without the immense
cargoes of pots that weighed down their "lakatois,"
and bringing with them many tons of Gulf sago which
they have bought with their crockery-ware. They
also work occasionally in the town, and spend the
money, in European fashion, on various luxuries that
appeal to them — scent, print "ramies," mosquito nets,
blankets, beads, barley-sugar and bull's-eyes, tobacco,
knives, tools. They are a cheerful and pleasant
people, ready to fraternise with the whites, and very
ready to take advantage of any over-indulgence —
fairly industrious, rather clever, and not distinguished
by over-nice ideas on the subject of morality.
This afternoon, as we tramp through the village in
a heat that seems to slap one's face and crisp the very
hair upon one's head (nevertheless, no one minds it,
since it is the custom of the whites to defy and despise
the heat in this equatorial land), most of the men are
away, for the wallaby-hunting season is on, and the
grass on the hills about the bay is being burned to
drive out the game, so that it can be hunted down with
dogs and speared. There are plenty of women, how-
ever — old women, black, with wrinkled hippopotamus-
BIRD-CAGE HOUSES 39
like skins and bald-shaven heads, sitting at the eternal
toil of the pots, shaping the clay with fingers and stick,
and burning it in the fire ; young married women
coming home from the manioc and banana gardens,
laden with nets full of roots and fruit ; unmarried
girls, gay with bead necklaces and many-coloured
ramies, their huge woolly heads bright with cocoanut
and sandalwood oil, their tattooed faces and breasts
further adorned with stripes of black soot and
washing-blue, swaggering about in front of the
houses with an eye on possible beaux. All these
look at us without interest — they are quite tired
of white visitors and their eternal cameras, and only
want us to throw them a stick or two of tobacco and
go. One elderly man, however, trots after us
persistently, and begs us to come in and see his
house. He makes a living showing it to people
from the steamers, and is not minded to let a patron
escape.
So we climb up the rickety ladder and enter the
dim, cool brown room opening from the verandah.
There is another room beyond that, and yet another
beyond that again — each running further and further
out over the cool green water that we can see
sparkling between the rough split logs of the floor.
The doorways furnish the only light, but no other
is needed, when you do not read or write, and do
all your net-making and other fine work, such as
tattooing, carving out combs and shell ornaments,
etc., on the verandah outside. The roof is of brown
40 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
thatch, the floor and walls exhibit the native idea of
a plank — a slice cut from the outside of a tree and
left in its primitive semicircular shape. There is no
furniture, save for a stray box or so of the camphor-
wood variety, fitted with a lock that rings when the
key is put in. I recognise this box as a very old
friend, having found it in every prosperous native
house that I have visited in the whole Pacific, from
Tahiti eastwards. It seems to be the one link con-
necting all the brown races of the Southern Seas.
Why Melanesian, Micronesian, Polynesian, and
Papuan alike should be consumed by the same desire
for yellow camphorwood boxes with locks that ring,
is one of those matters that one prefers to leave to
professed ethnologists — confident in the belief that
they do not know any more about it than oneself, and
are therefore sure to pronounce the problem un-
scientific, and let it alone.
There are a few mats in a corner — rudely plaited,
and little or not at all ornamented. The Papuan is
not much of a mat-maker, skilful as he is in work
demanding much higher ability. There is a selection
of the locally made fire-clay pots for cooking and
storing water. The girls' spare ramies are piled in a
heap on the floor ; the men's hunting spears, made of
hard wood like ebony, and all in one piece, are stacked
together underneath an odd-looking object that hangs
on the wall — something like the beginning of a piece
of basketwork, or the frame of a rude shield. This,
we hear, is a snare for wild pigs. When the hunter
BOAR-HUNTING 41
has brought a wild boar to bay and the brute is about
to charge, he holds the snare at arm's length to one
side, and the animal attacks it furiously, plunging its
head right into the middle, where there is an opening
that seems to invite the action. Once in he cannot
pull his head out again, and is so confused and
crippled by the snare that the hunter can spear him
with little danger. . . . One would like to know
how many sportsmen there are at home who would
stand still to the charge of a furious tusked boar, with
nothing but a wooden spear and a wicker snare to
protect them ?
The Impossibilities of Papua once more loom large
in the path. These peaceable and timid Motuans are
not all peaceable and timid, that is quite evident. . . .
When we are told about another of their diversions —
going into a marshy lagoon haunted by crocodiles, to
drag the monsters out by the tail on to dry land, and
slaughter them — we realise that these people are not
so easy to understand as they appear at first sight.
The cap is added to the climax by somebody who
asks if all the houses in the village have hurricane
lanterns, like the one we are visiting. No, the
owner says, they cannot all afford them, and that is
a pity, for nothing keeps off the spirits on the road to
Port Moresby so effectively as a good hurricane lamp
bought from the stores. All the men in the village,
of course, are afraid to be out in the dark, but some-
times they cannot avoid it, and then " he plenty fright
that man 1 "
42 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
To Elavara we proceed over a bridge several
hundred feet long built right out in the water. It is
quite a nice and safe bridge, according to native ideas,
but a positive nightmare to ours, being made after the
inevitable Papuan fashion, of small fragile sticks
supported on high posts, without anything in the
shape of a guard-rail. If you are barefoot, practically
naked, smallish, and light, nothing could be more
convenient ; you trip over the sticks with the gait
of a bird in a tree, and should one or two break, you
merely stammer in your walk, so to speak, and catch
up on the next. But the cumbrously clad and shod
European is at a disadvantage, and very thankful to
get safely over to the other side.
Elavara is more of a fortress than Hanuabada. It
is built in the open sea and partly on the verge of a
small solitary island, the bridge being the only con-
nection with the mainland. The original reason for
existence has passed away, in the case of these towns,
and no new ones are being built in any known part of
the Territory. But the natives still keep to the old
ones, and repair them as they fall to pieces — partly
from habit, no doubt, and partly because of the cool-
ness that is only to be found in the sea-built villages.
We of the superior races are very fond of laughing
at native conservatism, but there are glass panes in
our own houses for all that. Why is it that in such a
hot climate it has never occurred to any of the
people who have built, and are building, houses
in Port Moresby that a European house can be set
BUILDING HOUSES 43
out on piles in the sea just as well as a native one,
and that this style would certainly be more healthy
than the present plan, not to speak of the difference in
temperature? Mosquitoes would be less troublesome
in such houses than they are in the midst of the grass
and trees, the full benefit of every breeze would be
enjoyed, and instead of heated earth under the house,
collecting rubbish and retaining all the warmth of the
day, there would be the clean, fresh, cool water of the
sea, ebbing and flowing with the tide. Nor would
any risk from storms lessen the pleasure of such a
dwelling, Port Moresby harbour being so safe and so
sheltered that no wind could make the least difference
to the people of the sea-houses.
Europeans are not much more easily moved out of
their customary way than Papuans, however, and the
hot little box of corrugated iron, set on a baking
plain, still continues to be the ideal of the Port
Moresby builder.
So much as we have seen to-day, every passing
tourist on the steamer sees, every traveller who comes
to the Unknown Land makes the first chapter of his
book. From a literary point of view, the native
villages about Port Moresby are almost as much
used up as Mount Vesuvius or the Palaces of
Versailles.
Yet they are significant to one who is interested in
the future of Papua. They are among the straws
that show what way the winds are blowing. The
adaptability of the Papuan, the conservatism that
44 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
underlies his adaptability, giving it something to stand
upon, and preserving him from the fate of the fluid-
minded Eastern Pacific races — the trading instinct
that he undoubtedly possesses, his submission to
authority, coupled with an unacknowledged reserve
that allows him to retain individuality and self-respect
— all these, and more, are suggested to any considering
mind by the native life of Hanuabada and Elavara.
Such are the straws. Whither does the wind of
progress seem to be sweeping them ? Towards a
completer civilisation, there can be no doubt — but
not towards that well-intentioned philanthropic system
of nation-making that has somehow contrived, with
the best intentions, to make a gigantic shambles of the
Pacific island world. The Papuan is not going to die
out. He is a native of a different kidney to the soft
Tahitian, the gentle, generous Samoan, the easily-
moulded, pleasure-loving Hawaiian. The missionaries
find him almost an impossible job, the traders need
all their wits to make a living out of him. What
time will make of him we can only guess, but judging
from the past (short though that has been) we may
fairly conclude that he will never become what the
moribund races of the island world hastened to make
themselves from the first — the white man's " sedulous
ape."
Certain facts about Papua have been so often men-
tioned in works of travel much more serious in
intention than the present, that they may almost be
" taken as read " at this time of day. Everyone who
THE CURSE OF BABEL 45
has ever opened a book about New Guinea knows
that it is a country of innumerable tribes, often
unlike in physical type, and, generally speaking,
different languages. This is interesting to the
student of philology or ethnology, but only strikes
the average wanderer as a decided nuisance, when
the difficulty of getting interpreters for out-of-the-
way districts first comes home to him. It is a
constant trouble to the Government, and the stum-
bling-blocks it throws in the way of the courts of law
are almost incredible. Quite incredible, unless one
has actually seen the process, are the means adopted
to clear the path of justice ; nevertheless, I cannot
refrain from relating a sample or two.
The Resident Magistrate of an out-of-the-way
division hears a rumour, filtered down through half
a dozen native tribes, that some member of a tribe
that no one has ever seen, living in a district totally
unknown, has killed and eaten his wife. Moreover,
he hears that this man is a murderer of notoriety, and
a terror to the country in which he lives. The
R.M., who is probably an Australian of five or six
and twenty, boasting just so much military training
as home life on a cattle station and a few months in
Port Moresby Government offices can give him,
" sees his duty, a dead sure thing, and goes for it
there and then." It is, to arrest that murderer.
He calls out a dozen of his native constabulary,
loads them with provisions and a little " trade "
(tobacco, beads, knives), packs his marching kit in a
46 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
small oilskin sack, and sets forth. In a couple of
days he strikes unknown country and incomprehen-
sible tongues. Perhaps one of his police can act as
interpreter — he himself does not know more than
a couple of languages, and neither of them is any
use here ; but his dozen constabulary among them
may muster fifteen or sixteen different tongues, and
they try them all. . . . A hit ! the natives speak
the language that Corporal Boromai used to know as
a child, or something very like it. All is well for a
day or so ; provisions are bought at the village ; the
R.M. takes industrious notes of the country he is
passing through, and the little party slides, and
scrapes, and scrambles, and smashes on its slow way
up and down the interminable mountains and through
the dense dark jungles in the direction given them
by the villagers. The next tribe they meet runs
away with howls of terror and is seen no more. The
next is never even seen, leaving only a handful of
empty houses as a sign of its existence. After this
the party keep a sharp look-out, and succeed in
forcibly capturing a small boy, who nearly dies with
terror of the unknown white demon who has seized
him. They take the boy back to the nearest village
that speaks a language spoken by one of the men, and
find that the said village can't speak the language of
the boy, but they think there is a place not very far
off where there are people who speak a language that
the boy might conceivably know. . . . The village
is found, but it does not speak any language known
Photo ir. IV/tiiten.
DWARF IROM THE IM F.RIOR
To face page 46.
SEEKING FOR A MURDERER 47
to the boy, and it adds the gratuitous information
that the boy is a devil, and that only devils live in
the mountains beyond that district, whose language
no decent person would think of knowing.
By this time the provisions are out, one of the
police has got a spear wound in his foot (acquired
from a " cache " of spear-heads concealed in a forest
track with the view of discouraging callers), and the
R.M. is down with fever. He tells the boys to put
him in his hammock and take him home ; he'll
attend to that matter of the murder later on.
Back at the station they are greeted with delight
and envy by the police who have been left behind, and
who spent the whole night of their departure crying
bitterly because they were not taken too. The boy,
who is as wild as a captured bird, refuses obstinately
to eat. He is quite certain that the white devil
wants to fatten him for his table, and he does not
wish to make a dainty dish for his conqueror. The
white devil does his best to win the little wild
creature's confidence, and aided by the friendly black
faces about him succeeds in doing: so. The child
consents to eat, accepts the wonderful presents that
are made him, and becomes quite at home. In a few
weeks he has picked up enough pigeon-English to
interpret roughly with his tribe, and then the expedi-
tion starts again — always after that murderer. The
left-behind police cry themselves nearly sick this
time, for they see that the Taubada (chief) is taking
plenty of cartridges, and they expect there will be
48 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
what they live in hope of and are constantly denied —
a real row.
The same tramp, the same villages, once more the
unknown district and the flying people, and, it may
be, a stray arrow or spear flung from behind a tree as
they pass. Now they reach the point attained before,
and here comes in the use of the boy. The child is
dressed up in gay cottons, hung with beads, and given
a knife or two. He is then sent off alone into the
bush, and the expedition sits down to wait. They
may wait an hour, they may wait a couple of days.
The boy is finding his people, and telling them that
the white devils called Government are not bad devils
— that they have treated him splendidly and given
him marvellous presents, and that they want to be
friends with the tribe. ... It ends in the shy birds
of the forest coming to hand, timidly, but with grow-
ing confidence. They are given presents, and told,
through the boy, that the R.M. wants guides and
interpreters to go on into the country of the mur-
derer. Both guides and interpreters are forthcoming.
From village to village, from hill-range to hill-range,
through swamp and river and unbroken forest, the
expedition takes its way, and, after adventures enough
to fill a book, finds and surrounds the delinquent's
refuge. There may be a fight before he is taken —
the white lad and his dozen natives may have to beat
off a couple of hundred Papuans armed with bows,
clubs, and spears, or they may have to besiege and
take a whole large town, with nothing but their pluck
JUSTICE IN PAPUA 49
and their rifles to see them through. These things
have been done over and over again in Papua without
attracting special notice — it is merely the magistrate's
duty. In any case, the murderer is secured, hand-
cuffed, and taken away amidst yells of distress from
his tribe, and the first part of the play ends.
There may be a second when it is discovered that
the murderer speaks a language which nobody at all
understands — not the police, or the villagers on the
way to the coast, or the captured boy or his tribe. If
an interpreter cannot be found, what is to be done .''
The man must, for the good of the country, be
punished. There is no reasonable doubt that he is
the murderer ; and he is quite prepared for any treat-
ment that may be meted out to him, including eating.
Some colonies would hang him forthwith. That is
not the system of Papua, however. The native must
have justice, even if justice has to be compounded of
unusual and inconvenient elements, including geo-
graphical and philological research ; travel complicated
by the attentions of alligators, snakes, and swamp
leeches, and patient investigation into a tangle of
sorcery and pig-stealing (two items almost always
present in a Papuan murder case). An interpreter is
procured by the same lengthy process that resulted in
bringing in the murderer, and at the last he is brought
to trial. He will not be hanged unless he has killed
a white man (a rare offence), or unless his crime has
been one of an aggravated kind. Common sorts of
murder among the natives are punished by imprison-
50 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
ment only. In any case, he is heard in his own
defence, and knows what is being done and why.
And the interests of justice and of comparative philo-
logy have been attained.
That is what the curse of Babel means in Papua.
Some days after my arrival in Port Moresby there
was a native dance in the village, and I went down
with a party of friends to see it. It took place at
night, lit up by the moon and a number of cocoanut
torches, which latter were carried by the dancers.
There was no danger of setting anyone's clothes on
fire, because no one wore any, except the small con-
tingent of girls, who were more like penwipers than
human beings with the number of grass skirts they
had put on. It was a display of male rather than
female agility and grace, the women taking no part
except a little shuffling up and down.
The spirit of Papua was there that night — the in-
tangible, indescribable " spirit of place " that gives to
travel three-fourths of its charm. It had haunted me
all day long, in the monstrous shapes of the dark
contorted hills through which I had been riding in
the afternoon — in the huge antennae of the "lakatoi"
canoes that swept across the bay like flights of demon
moths, through a sunset of volcano-red ; in the
thrumming, booming note of the native drums, beat-
ing like a restless heart all the evening in the village
below — in the extraordinary hues of phosphoric blue
that lit the uppermost reaches of the sky when the
VILLAGE DANCERS 51
dark was near at hand (a colour I saw many a time in
Papuan sunset skies, but never elsewhere). Papuan,
and nothing else, was the spirit of the dance. The
grace of the island measures was not there, nor the
art of European dancing ; there were hardly any
" steps," merely a general capering, which now and
then concentrated itself into a slow advancing shuffle,
made with swaying bodies and sleepy eyes. But the
intoxicating throb of the drums carried by the
dancers, the loud, brassy, booming song which they
sang hour after hour, the ceaseless rippling and
flickering of plumes and coloured leaves and grasses
fastened on the heads and limbs of the naked brown
bodies, the nodding and stamping and prancing, the
savage measure of the dance — two-four, with a strong
accent on the second beat^were fascinating enough
to keep us watching there on the bare stretch of open
ground above the village, in the glare of the torches
and the smell of smoke and sandalwood and cocoanut
oil, for more than an hour. After which — as a native
dance may go on for a day and night, once started —
we gave up and went home. As we left, a new series
of leaps and bounds began in a squadron of dancers
led by a wild naked figure with a woolly head of tre-
mendous size, and a coiffure composed of six paradise
plumes, two sets of parrot wings, and a halo of
miscellaneous feathers.
" Who is that man-eater ? " demanded a visitor,
looking back at the pantomime demon leader with
astonishment and a little awe.
52 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
" Garia ! " called one of the whites.
The demon stopped his capers instantly, and came
out of the dance, painted, perspiring, panting. He
brought his right hand up to the salute, and stood at
attention.
" You wanting the boat to-night, sir .? " he inquired
with deference. " I left my watch in my house, did
not know the time. I go fetch the crew t"
It was Garia, the coxswain of the Governor's
boat's crew, whom we had seen in the afternoon
uniformed, grave, and responsible, handing the white
visitors in and out of the boat with the air of a man-
of-war officer.
*' No, you're not wanted to-night," he was told.
" We only wish you to show the ladies those feathers
of yours, and your drum. Where did you get it ^"
" I made him myself, when I was quite little boy,"
answered the coxswain, handing over the drum — an
hour-glass-shaped instrument of dark wood, hollowed
out and carved, and covered at the top with iguana
skin, which is thin, semi-translucent, and rather like
parchment.
The drum was admired and returned, and the party
once more prepared to start.
"You want anything else, sir.''" asked the cox-
swain.
" No, you can go."
With a long howl like a wild beast he leaped back
into the dance and into savagery again at once, shak-
ing and beating his drum, flinging his nodding plumes
\j:y-r
i^^^mm
GEOGRAPHICAL FACTS 53
in the air, and showing his betel-stained teeth in a
grin of fierce delight, as the capering squadron closed
round him and drew him into the whirl once more.
Enough of the Port Moresby native. He is
interesting in his own way, but one tires of him soon.
The truth is that, in spite of his superficial quickness,
he has less intellect and less character than many
other of the Papuan races. And of the country about
Port Moresby one soon sees enough. It is beautiful
as to colouring — here, as everywhere throughout the
Territory, sea, sky, and earth are painted with a
palette of gems and fire — but the soil is barren, and
there are no plantations. Now, it is the new plan-
tation life that is the real attraction in Papua of to-
day ; and to see that we must go up into the
mountains.
Anyone who has ever read geography for pleasure
or of necessity must have noticed the peculiar dead-
ness of facts as embedded — interred one might rather
say — in geographical works. Nothing seems surpris-
ing ; little is even interesting. . . . "This neigh-
bourhood exhibits much volcanic activity at times,
resulting in serious destruction of property." —
"Metalliferous tracts of value abound." — "The river
here precipitates itself into the valley of the . . .,
down a perpendicular descent of several hundred
feet." . . . Burnincy mountains that overflow vine-
yards and villages — gold-mines where one makes a
54 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
fortune in a day — huge waterfalls dropping in smoke
and spume down half a mountain side — these things
may be objects of interest outside the covers of an
educational work, but inside one merely yawns over
them. So, in reading about Papua, one sees without
emotion the statement that the main range of the
country ascends rapidly from the coast, and reaches a
heiofht of thirteen thousand feet. It does not seem a
CD
thing to laugh or weep over, anyhow.
Yet here, as always, "things seen are mightier than
things heard." That thirteen- thousand - foot range
becomes a matter of extreme personal interest when
once one has realised what it means. When one has
ridden twenty miles from scorching Port Moresby up
to the little bungalow at Warirata, nearly three thou-
sand feet higher, and felt the cold of nights that
demand warm rugs on the bed, and mornings when
one must wear a serge coat till breakfast-time — when
one listens to the complaints of the native mail-
carriers coming down from the Kokoda track twenty
miles further back, of the bitter chill and frost at the
eight-thousand-foot gap — when one looks out on the
long rises of Mount Victoria, lifting pale violet curve
after pale violet curve up to the dim faint blues of a
far-off summit near as high as the Jungfrau, and sees
climate after climate — torrid, tropic, temperate, cold,
from Calcutta to Shetland — spread out before one's
very eyes — then one realises that the bald geographical
fact one noted with so little emotion is really " some-
thing to make a song about," after all.
COOL CLIMATES 55
Where else, in all the British colonies, is there a
country that offers almost every variety of tempera-
ture within a space of some fifty or sixty miles ? We
have been accustomed to speak and think of New
Guinea as a place where the climate is terrible and
the heat exhausting, deadly, inescapable. The de-
scription is scarcely correct from any point of view —
Papua is not so hot as either India or Ceylon, and
certainly not less healthy on the whole — and it is
most incorrect when one pauses to remember that a
great part of the country is colder than England.
True, that part is inaccessible at present. But it will
not always remain so. India had not always her cool
hill stations, reached by marvellously graded roads,
for the refreshment of tired officials and their families.
The Cordilleras of South America must have been
impassable, except to the Indians, for many a long
year. And in Papua the distances to the hill country
are in reality so small that, once the difficulties of
the ground are overcome, the cool climates will
be accessible to everyone without trouble or ex-
pense.
Back from the future to the present we come with
a run, for it is seven o'clock in the morning, and
three saddle-horses are standing in the shade outside
the house, with three pack-horses and several " boys "
visible further away. We are off into the Astrolabe
Range, three of us, to have a look round and a good
time ; and it is not the day after to-morrow, but
to-day, and there are no real roads, no bridges, no
56 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
carriages, no hotels on the way — nothing, in fact, but
ourselves and our horses to get us through.
We are bound for the Sogeri country, some thirty-
six miles away, and we intend to make a three days'
journey of it, so as to add on some small detours and
see everything thoroughly.
The day is hot already, and promises to be appal-
lingly so later on, but nobody troubles about that. It
does one's heart good to see the sensible, plucky way
in which the resident of Papua accepts every dis-
advantage of the country, climatic and other, and in
so doing takes the edge off most of them. In any
other country only nine degrees south of the equator
it would be thought a hazardous proceeding for a
couple of ladies and their escort to start out on a
twelve miles' ride in the middle of the day over an
unsheltered road in the worst of the hot season. But
the white settlers of Papua simply laugh in the face of
the weather at all times, nor do they appear to suffer
on that account. No one in this country arises at
dawn to take an early cup of tea and a ride in the
morning twilight, preparatory to a day spent mostly
behind close blinds ; no one fills up the hot hours
with a siesta and creeps cautiously out at sundown.
On the contrary, everyone is busy all day long at
ordinary employments, indoor and out ; meals are
held at English hours ; houses are not built with any
special provision for heat, and nobody thinks of
abandoning a day's ride or walk because the thermo-
meter happens to be standing at ninety in the shade.
A TRAVELLER'S SWAG 57
In justice to Papua, it must be added that ninety is a
figure not often reached.
We travel, in this country, as people travelled all
the world over before roads and railways were made —
as they travelled in England during the Middle Ages.
Ride when you can, and walk when you must, is the
rule. There is always, however, a bridle-track to
a plantation, and the arrival of guests is heralded by
the jangling of pack-horse bells from afar. As we were
bound for plantation country, we had the luxury
of horses — how much a luxury it is, experiences
in uncleaned districts painfully impressed upon me
later on.
Does the English reader know what a " swag" is ?
It is not a collection of burglariously acquired silver
in a Gladstone bag, as popular literature might lead
one to suppose. In Papua, a swag is a sack of painted
sail-canvas, fitted with slings at the back and fastened
by draw-strings of strong cord. It is the traveller's
one indispensable possession, and takes the place of
all the complicated apparatus of trunks, portmanteaux,
dressing-cases, and hat-boxes, which he is obliged to
leave behind in port. What you cannot put into a
swag, or into two or three swags, you cannot have up
country, for cabin-trunks and dress-baskets are not
convenient to sling on the backs of horses or native
carriers. There is a certain amount of art in packing
for one of these journeys. Into one swag go your
blankets (you may think you cannot want them, but
you will), your mosquito net, your woollen suit or
58 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
dress for wet evenings in high altitudes. Into
another go your clothes, rolled into many tight
little bundles. Another is filled with tins of meat,
parcels of biscuit, and rice, tea, sugar, and tinned
milk. These are all fastened on the pack-horses, two
swags apiece, and a couple of billy-cans are added —
no one can possibly travel without a billy-can in any
part of Australasia. If the English reader wants to
know what a billy-can is, I can assure him that there
is nothing mysterious about it. It is simply a plain
tin can with a lid, such as is used in England for
carrying milk. Simple though it is, the British
traveller will bring derision upon himself if he does
not know one when he sees it, and especially if he
makes any mistakes about its inseparable companion,
the pannikin. Let him not suppose rashly, as I did,
that a pannikin is a small frying-pan ; and let him
carefully refrain, when he does find out what it is,
from calling it a mug, lest the epithet should be
insultingly transferred to himself.
Strictly by the way — Micawber was right for once,
when he fitted out his young family for their
Australian travels by tying tin drinking-vessels round
their waists. It is the correct practice to ride thus
ornamented in Papua. A sheath-knife is also in-
valuable — not for any purpose of self-defence, but
for a score of miscellaneous jobs, such as tin-opening,
cutting bread, lifting a hot billy-can off the fire,
splitting nuts, peeling fruit, etc. etc. etc. Thus
accoutred, with a wide cowboy hat of thick felt,
ON THE ASTROLABES 59
nailed boots, putties, and a short skirt, the eques-
trienne of Papua is suitably outfitted, though she
would certainly not pass muster in Rotten Row.
The first few miles of the ride were easy, if rather
warm. The road was an actual carriage road, and
made our bush equipments look rather silly, though
there was no one to see except a native or two,
plodding along under loads of manioc or banana.
Open grassy plains, sprinkled with the pale grey-
green of the eucalyptus tree, surrounded us for miles,
with a few low hills in the distance. This went on
until we reached an ascent, turned a corner, and faced
a sudden down-slope, when the splendour of the hill-
country suddenly broke upon us.
I am afraid it was not the beauty of the scene —
though that was marvellous — that chiefly impressed
me as I reined up on the top of the slope, above
a sea of weltering peaks and ridges and clambering
crests, all veiled and softened in velvety green forest.
I only said to myself, in a kind of stony despair,
" Good heavens, have I got to get through that ? "
and wondered how, short of an aeroplane, it was
to be done.
Another sentence out of the geographies came back
and hit me in the face — " The vegetation of New
Guinea is notably luxuriant."
Luxuriant .'' Well, if luxuriance means an inunda-
tion of dense, tall, dark forest, knitted inextricably
together with creepers, canes, and lianas, overflowing
every level, filling every valley, rushing up every
6o THE NEW NEW GUINEA
mountain and down it again, submerging the whole
land under a flood of triumphant and impenetrable
greenery fifty to a hundred feet deep — then the " vege-
tation " of Papua fairly deserves the title. I could
not see the smallest scratch of a track up to the verge
of the horizon, except the road on which we were
travelling, and it obviously came to an end before
long. How travel was to be managed through such
a country taxed one's imagination to guess. I knew,
however, that the problem would be sure to work
itself out somehow or other, and abandoned it for the
present.
And here I will add — what did not come to my
knowledge until some time later — that this luxuriance
of growth advertises the value of the land to the
experienced eye. 1 can imagine the dismay with
which it must strike the settler from home countries,
who has taken up land from a map in Port Moresby,
and views for the first time the impenetrable tangle
of primaeval forest under which his estate lies con-
cealed. But the knowing: hand looks at the unbroken
masses of velvety green with satisfaction. Land
that can raise that can raise anything ; and every
week will see a bigger handful of clearing plucked
out of the smooth surface of tree tops.
People accustomed to the leisurely forestry of
Europe have no idea how little " clearing " means to
an Australian or New Zealander. It takes a month to
cut down a small copse in England, with a dozen
labourers hacking patiently away at tree after tree.
NEW GUINEA VEGETATION 6i
digging out stumps, cutting off branches, tidying
things up as they go. ... In Papua, an Australian
"cocky" (as the outback farmer who shoots cockatoos
for the pot is rudely called) would set to work with
fifty native " boys " at seven shillings a month, and
have twenty acres open to sun and wind in the same
time. No landscape gardening there — the big trees
are hacked down and left where they fall until it is
convenient to set fire to them ; the stumps and roots
rot away in a little time, and add value to the soil. It
seems untidy and desolate and ugly ; but the stretch
of bare brown earth littered with splintering logs and
black stumps is beauty itself to the planter's eye, and
in a very few months, when the coffee, or the rubber,
or the cocoanut palms begin to spring up, it will be
as picturesque as any English park.
The richness of soil that I have mentioned is one
of the many wonders that are commonplace, even
matter of course, to the dweller in the tropics, yet
not in any degree realised or understood by Euro-
peans. The rainfall in Papua is enormous, amounting
to as much as i 80 inches per year in some places. The
heat is great at times, and the constant decay of vege-
tation in the warmth and damp makes the whole
country one vast forcing-bed. In other words, the
conditions that we produce with care and expense
under five or six feet of glass, are the natural con-
ditions of the continent of New Guinea.
The plants that grow in such a soil are valuable in
proportion. Where the products of poorer lands
62 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
bring their fives and tens of pounds per ton, those of
the tropics bring twenties, fifties, and hundreds.
Rubber is worth over five hundred pounds a ton. Hemp
fibres are worth thirty or more. Coffee brings sixty
upwards. There is a gold mine in the earth of these
rich countries, and the planter is the prospector and
miner.
I had known this in a vague and general way, but
the sight of the tropic forest was the first thing that
really brought it home to me. And I wondered, as
we turned our horses down the slope and got on our
way again, how it was that the millions at home knew
so little, and cared so much less, about these golden
lands lying unawaked and untouched, like the Sleeping
Beauty of the fairy tale, in the far-away corners of
England's wonderful empire.
That night we all slept in jail.
We had not committed any crimes — any that were
found out, at all events. Our stay in prison was not,
therefore, enforced. We only put up at the jail
because there was nowhere else to sleep, unless we
had camped on the track. The hostelry in question
lay at the end of our first day's ride (only eleven
miles), on the banks of the Laloki River, and in the
midst of country nearly all uncleared. Some acres
of land lying about the jail had been cleared for
vegetable gardens and for a Government nursery ;
there was a native overseer in charge of the place, and
IN JAIL 63
a few Papuan prisoners wandering in a lost sort of
manner about the track and the banana fields when
we arrived. I imagine they were looking for us ;
we had wasted time on the way, and it was dark
when we arrived.
The jail buildings, three or four in number,
irresistibly suggested fowl-farming on a large scale,
or summer-houses of an eccentric kind, or large
clothes-baskets left out and forgotten by a party of
giant washerwomen. What they did not suggest
was restraint or imprisonment of any sort. And,
indeed, I found out later that there is not a jail in
Papua out of which any prisoner could not break
with a little determination and a one-bladed pocket-
knife.
The prisoners, cheerful-looking brown men in
broad-arrowed tunics, live and sleep in these peculiar
bird-cage houses, and spend their days doing a little
gardening, planting, and clearing. They were de-
lighted to see us, and most eager to do anything they
could for our assistance. The head jailer, a woolly-
haired native who spoke a good deal of English,
received us with the air of a host doing the honours
of his mansion, and all the jolly brown prisoners,
that day and the next, were so amiable and so kind,
chasing fowls for our dinner, picking fruit, catching
our horses, that we really felt they regarded us as
their personal guests. Which no doubt they did.
" What are these people imprisoned tor ? " I
asked, with some perplexity. I am sure they could
64 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
not be criminals in the ordinary sense of the
word.
Well, they were not. Most of them had mur-
dered somebody, and concealed the crime by eating
the victim ; hardly a commonplace peccadillo. A
great many were sorcerers, sorcery being an offence
fully recognised by the Government and classed as
criminal, for excellent reasons. Some of them were
in prison for libel, or " spreading false reports," which
would seem to point to rapid development of the
Papuan mind along the lines already laid down by
the Caucasian. The presence of a single forger — so
far unique in Papuan criminal history — marked the
high-water level reached in the struggle of the black
man's mind after the white. This New Guinea Jim
the Penman had been sent with signed orders to
fetch goods from a store many times. One day it
occurred to him (since he could write) to pencil his
master's name on a piece of paper and get various
desirable things for himself. The plan was good so
far as it went, but the brilliant mind that had thought
out for itself this new way of circumventing the
universal curse of labour stopped short at the idea
of concealment. Consequently arrest, trial, and a
term in the Laloki bird-cage.
Nothing is singular in Papua, simply because
everything is. It would have been singular in any
other country for two white women and one white
man to go peaceably to sleep in a couple of wooden-
barred cages, eleven miles from anywhere, in the midst
A NIGHT IN JAIL 65
of some dozens of savage murderers confined only
by wickerwork walls, without any apprehension as to
unpleasant results. It was not singular here, be-
cause we all knew quite well that the prisoners had
no intention in the world of giving anybody any
trouble. They had certainly killed and eaten a wife
or so, or an inconvenient aunt or grandfather, for
good reasons of their own. The white rulers,
for reasons of their own, had chosen to object, and
the gentleman who had smashed in the head of
another gentleman fully understood that he had to
pay for it, and that if he expressed his feelings after
that fashion again he might even be hanged. He did
not bear malice ; like the man in Kipling's poem, he
only said to himself that he had " taken his fun
where he found it, and now he must pay for his fun "
— it was quite simple. As to annoying this ex-
tremely interesting and exciting party of visitors who
had come to enlighten the dullnesses of his garden-
ing, why, he would have given them anything he had,
even to the half of his supper !
My first night in jail (the phrase somehow reminded
me of the title of a tract) proved peaceful enough, in
spite of the loud whirring and rattling of the swarms
of crickets in the trees and the croaking of giant regi-
ments of frogs in the river. My cell was part of the
head jailer's house. It was built of slabs or slips of
wood which were very far from meeting ; the floor
was of the same material, and allowed one to look
right through down to the ground several feet below
F
66 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
and see the rats and fowls running about underneath.
The furniture consisted of a single sloping shelf. My
hammock and net were slung from the supporting
posts of the roof, isolating me from the possible atten-
tions of centipedes and scorpions in a way that added
a good deal to my peace of mind. As for snakes and
giant lizards, there were plenty of them in the bush
close at hand, and plenty of alligators in the river not
twenty yards away, but I had learned by this time
that they were not to be feared, being quite as much
afraid of the traveller as the traveller could be of
them.
We spent the whole of the next day in the neigh-
bourhood of the jail, as no one was pressed for time,
and I wanted to see the Government nursery, one of
several organised by the Director of Agriculture, the
Hon. Miles Staniforth Smith.
It was about half an hour's walk from the jail
grounds. The way led first of all through the garden,
where yams, manioc, and other vegetables are raised
for the prisoners' food. A garden in Papua, it must
be explained, never means an ornamental flower-
ground ; it is always a strictly practical place, devoted
to small useful crops. There were a few acres of
bananas here spreading out their great green flags and
enormous crimson flowers above the steep bank of
the sliding, muddy river. We stopped in the shade
long enough to take a good look at the Laloki, a
bigger river than any in England, though it is only
one of the minor streams of Papua. Alligators abound
SWIMMING THE LALOKI 67
in its yellow depths, and a native who swims the
stream does so at the risk of his life.
Nevertheless a number of them did swim the
Laloki in flood, and at a very dangerous point, not
long ago. The Governor of the country was making
a tour of inspection, and wanted to get to the other
side of the river. No boat or canoe was available,
and His Excellency expressed his intention of swim-
ming. The small official staff of course accompanied
their chief, as they accompany him into a hostile
cannibal village or a swamp full of snakes, leeches,
and scrub ticks, or any other warm corner where
Governmental duty may demand their presence. The
natives, seeing that the white men intended to take
the risk, plunged in to the number of a dozen or two
along with them, simply to make the swim a little less
dangerous by force of numbers. All got across with-
out accident.
One wonders at times how the gilded and ribboned
A.D.C.'s and secretaries of the Government Houses
in older colonies would enjoy the amazing duties that
fall to the share of their confreres in Papua !
Beyond the jail gardens, beyond the banana groves
on the river bank, past the clearings in the forest
where enormous trunks of valuable timber lay wast-
ing and rotting on the ground, by a cool pathway
through the bush and along a rough fence, we came
upon the Government nursery.
Judging by the title, it ought to have been some-
thing like a botanical garden at home, with tidy
68 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
gravelled walks and beds full of labelled specimens,
and big official buildings, and a neat house for a
curator. It was a newly-cleared space of ground
without any walks at all, with a number of beds, a
few brushwood-roofed sheds for young plants, and a
native hut for the man in charge. There are no
" frills " of any kind about Papuan administration.
Nevertheless, the rough place, with three more
like itself in different parts of the Territory, has
proved itself useful and practical. It is from these
nurseries that the planters get their seeds and cut-
tings — their cocoanuts of good kinds for setting out,
their rubber seeds or stumps, their coffee plants, their
hemp slips, and almost anything they may want to
experiment with in the way of spices, drugs, etc.
They can also get instructions that will enable them
to start their plantations in the best way — how to
line and trench and plant out, how to make nurseries,
how to weed and prune — in general, how to make
their estates pay. The old idea that a man must
have served an apprenticeship of years before attempt-
ing to grow tropical products on his own account has
quite died out in these new go-ahead colonies. There
is no jealously-guarded mystery about the raising of
coffee, hemp, rubber, or any other paying plant. If a
man knows something from past experience, all the
better. If not, however, he can see all the standard
books on his subject in Port Moresby, can get his
plants in the country, and learn enough theoretically
to keep him from wasting his money. This is what
SUCCESSFUL PLANTERS 69
more than one really successful planter has already
done. I am compelled to add, however, that the
successful planter rather often ranges himself on the
side of those who declare that " a man must have prac-
tical experience," once his own experience is gained,
and is very ready to laugh at the presumption of the
" new chum " who wants to defy tradition by going
into the water before he knows how to swim.
CHAPTER III
Along the Laloki — Wonderful Rona — The country of copper — A
roadside camp — A plantation bungalow — Where are the English ?
— The humours of manslaughter — Up-and-down country^The
daily lucky-bag — " Heaven sends walnuts . . ." — Unknown
fauna of New Guinea — On the long trail again,
"^TEXT morning our cavalcade set off again —
three riders, six horses, and several " boys "
afoot. Several agreeably-mannered assassins saw us
to the beginning of the track, and begged us, so far
as we could gather, to come back again soon.
There was a " good road " all the way, it appeared,
in spite of the unbroken look of the country. You
cannot always see your road about the Astrolabe
until you reach it — and not invariably then, truth
compels me to add. You may, if you are not a good
" bushman," mistake the highway for a pig-track, or
a casual landslip, or the bed of a dried-up stream ;
or you may, on the other hand, mistake any one of
these for the road. The moral is, that you must
have a guide. It is not a good thing to get hope-
lessly off the track anywhere in New Guinea. One
is not likely to die of thirst ; but hunger, in these
unpeopled solitudes, would rapidly put an end to any
white man who strayed away from his party and did
not succeed in finding it again. True, there is game,
70
ALONG THE LALOKI 71
but explorers know the danger of relying entirely on
what one may shoot in a country so encumbered by
mountain and forest that rapid progress is impossible.
Often enough, riding along the narrow ribbon of
forest track, I have looked at the huge, silent, scarce
penetrable dells and billows of woodland beside me,
much as a passenger on a steamer may look at the
unfathomable sea below the rail. So safe upon this
tiny space of plank, or clearing — so close to death,
one step outside ! . , . The intense silence of the
Papuan forests, the immovable star of light standing
fixed on each glossy leaf in the depths of the ocean
of green, while high above, the lofty crests may be
struggling furiously with a south-east gale, and
breaking up the sunrays into scintillating fire, seems
to add to the almost personal fear excited by these
great solitudes. The spirit of the wilderness is there,
and none of the little shelters erected by Old World
peoples for their shivering souls to creep into, in the
presence of the unknown, can serve our turn. Pan,
the god of river reed-beds and sunny thickets,
through which a soft-skinned nymph might flit like
a butterfly — Baldur, stately and gentle spirit of mur-
muring pine-woods, and green mountain slopes where
sweet-breathing cattle wander — all the quaint and
graceful and poetic figures of northern and southern
mythology alike — do not their very apparitions
tremble, and reproach us with gentle frightened eyes,
when we set them down in fancy in these primaeval
wildernesses .''... Nature in the Old World has
72 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
been for so many hundred and thousand years just
" the old nurse " of her children, that it is terrifying
to meet her face to face in the lands where she turns
a hard unseeing countenance upon us, and crushes us
— not for sport, simply not knowing of our existence
— with one least finger-tip of the giant hand we have
unwittingly brushed against. Yet our revenge is
waiting, for in the generations that are to come we
shall seize and crush her and tame her to our will, as
throughout the centuries long since forgotten she was
tamed in the countries that we have made our own.
Not to-day, but to-morrow, our way lies through
these great forests. To-day we are riding merrily
and easily enough upon a mighty highway full three
feet wide in places, leading up the course of the Laloki
River, along the side of a valley that is certainly one
of the most beautiful valleys in the world, but that,
not possessing a hotel with a brass band and a motor-
car service, nor being advertised in tourist time-
tables, is only thought to be rather pretty by the few
settlers who occasionally pass that way.
The Laloki gorge is here at least a thousand feet in
sheer depth, and looks a good deal more. Closed in
by magnificent ramparts and castellations of basalt,
with here and there an unconsidered forest or two
dropping down its sides like a green kerchief for-
gotten by some giant queen, with tall tree-ferns
spreading spider-webs of emerald lace into the blue
sky, and cockatoos soaring like flights of white butter-
flies against the thunder-purple ranges in the far
COUNTRY OF COPPER 73
distance — with the great river itself singing away far
below, like a silver thread wound by unseen hands
from the giant spindle of the great white waterfall —
it is indeed a spot worth much travel and many pains
to see.
Immense black masses of stone, looking like
sponges steeped in ink, lie scattered all over the
valley. These are indications of the mineral wealth
of the Astrolabe country ; to the trained eye they
spell " COPPER " in large capitals. There are
several paying claims rather lower down, and a com-
pany has lately undertaken the further exploitation of
the district. Papua is as full of valuable minerals as
a pudding of plums ; unfortunately, they take a good
deal of finding, and a good deal of getting at when
found. But they pay well for discovery when the
prospector has money enough to fit out a small
expedition, and stay away in comfort some months it
necessary. It is the small miner, with his dish and
pannikin and swag for all wealth, who comes to grief
in Papua, thinking, misguidedly, that the methods
which answer in Australia will answer in Australia's
neighbouring colony. They will not, and do not,
but they have filled many a roughly dug grave on
the Mamba and Gira rivers and in the steaming
Woodlark Islands, and they have succeeded in giving
this unlucky dog of a Papua a bad name that it never
fairly deserved, in consequence.
We have to get off and tramp for a mile or two at
the steepest part of the track. In this country you
74 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
do not exactly ride when you go out riding — you
take a walk accompanied by your horse, and get a lift
every now and then. We have had several long lifts to-
day, and do not at all grudge the walk up the big hill,
especially as we follow the custom of the country in
taking hold of our horses' flowing tails and letting
them drag us behind. This rests the horse and rests
the rider at the same time — a matter of some import-
ance on roads that are for the most part quite steep
enough to sit down upon with support for the feet
and something to lean against at almost any part of
the journey.
At the top of the hill comes our reward — we are in
sight of Rona Falls.
We have heard them booming in the distance for
a mile or more, and here they are below us — at least
half a mile away, and not to be reached save by a climb
that nobody ever has time to take at this stage of a
long day's journey — but grand beyond description.
Has anyone ever made a satisfactory pen-picture
of a great waterfall .'' To say that Rona Falls is about
three hundred feet in sheer height — considerably
higher than Niagara, though wanting in the immense
breadth of that famous cataract — that it drops down
into a deep black gorge, and makes a lake clear as grey
agate at the foot of the fall — that there are flights of
white cockatoos on the heights, and great dim moun-
tains in the distance — this is to say as much as a page
of word-painting could say, which is nothing at all.
. . . One is, perhaps, not sorry. To keep Rona
A ROADSIDE CAMP 75
Falls to oneself, as the lover of an unknown mountain
maid may keep his pleasant secret hidden in his heart,
is well worth while, after all.
That night we came to the camping ground fairly
satiated with beauties of scenery. I know that to-
wards sunset we passed through wonderful peaks and
passes, and in view of exquisite river country, but I
looked at it as stolidly as my own horse, being quite
incapable of appreciating any longer. Most travellers,
one fancies, must have noticed this dulling of the
mind that takes place towards the end of a day of
special beauty, though few are egotistic enough to
mention it. If anyone had pointed out to me a
replica of the Great Pyramid of Cheops, or one of the
fire-fountains of Hawaii, springing up a hundred
yards from the track, I should only have resented the
interruption at that hour of the day. What really
interested all of us was — should we get to the camp
before dark, and especially, how we should get across
the river ?
There is nothing more charming and poetical — in
a picture gallery or a poem — than a ford. At home,
where bridges follow roads as naturally as feet follow
legs, the ford is merely a picturesque spot where the
little girl in a sunbonnet drives the cattle across of an
evening, or where the fisherman from the great house
on the hill wades in long boots and fly-trimmed hat,
casting a line across the oily shallows. In "the new
and naked lands " it is something very different —
something that makes or spoils the comfort of an
76 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
entire journey, that holds the fortunes of a great dis-
trict in its capricious hand, that may measure out
death or life, even, as the rains in the hills and the
rising of the flood may decree.
It had been raining a good deal that day, and we
had all got wet through a good many times, though
no one thought a trifle like that worth mentioning.
More, it had been raining up in the mountains for
several days, and there was no knowing what the
Laloki might be doing, up here above the falls. And
the light was failing as a lamp fails when the oil runs
out. And the track was so slippery with clay and
water that our horses could only crawl. It did not
seem certain that we should get across.
But in the livid green gloom that follows a wet
sunset among the hills, we did strike the slope leading
to the river, and in another minute all our horses
were sliding and slithering horribly, right down to
the ford. It looked very high, and the stream gushed
up to the girths at once, so that we had to put our
feet on our saddles and cling on as we might. The
force of the river was tremendous, and the beasts
staggered under it so that they could scarce make way.
In places it was so deep that the saddles were wet,
and there was a very nasty little fall close to our
crossing place ; but the light held good till we were
across ; and nobody fell down. ... It was a relief
to be out of the river and scrambling up the darken-
ing slope on the other side, for lives have been lost on
the Laloki ford before now ; and besides, it is not
A ROADSIDE CAMP 77
easy to keep the unbidden thought of crocodiles out
of one's head, when traversing a New Guinea river.
Waterfalls do not stop the crocodile in its up-stream
migrations ; it simply gets out and travels overland
when a fall is reached ; and so it comes about that the
rivers of the Astrolabe range are not by any means
free from these troublesome brutes, in spite of their
height above the sea.
The camp, when we reached it — quite in the dark
now — looked almost homelike, so glad was the wet
and tired and hungry party to see its night quarters.
There was not much to see, however. The " rest-
house " consisted of a thatch roof supported on four
tree trunks, with a sort of rough divan made of split
branches running along one side of the space below.
Walls there were none. A good fire was blazing
under the roof on the bare ground, and a Papuan
native with a very large head was tending a big billy-
can out of which issued tempting smells.
There was a small surveyor's tent near which
served as dressing-room to the ladies, and when we
had extracted dry clothes from our *' swags," and
changed, we came out on to the high, dark, windy
plateau, where the night breeze was crying among the
eucalyptus trees, and the ripple of the Laloki rose up
from far below. The Papuan boy had taken off the
billy-can now, and produced another from a second
fire ; and we all sat down on the fowl-perch divan to
enjoy milkless tea and curried tin as one only enjoys
food eaten " on the road."
78 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
Rolled in our blankets, for the night was quite cold,
Mrs. and I slept on the fowl-perch (it really did
not look like anything else) to the music of clanking
horse-bells. You tie a large iron bell round your
horse's neck when you camp, so that you may know
where he is, and you link his forefeet together with
leathern handcuffs called hobbles so that he cannot
wander very far away. He revenges himself as a rule
by walking round and round your uneasy couch all
night long, shaking his head violently. Towards dawn
you get up, and saying things to yourself which you
hope no one overhears, you unstrap the bell, and slap
the harmless creature's face as hard as you can. He
sidles away, and you go back to sleep. . . . And in
the morning the boys take an hour to find the beast
in the valley where it has betaken itself It did not
care to stay about the camp, once you took off that
bell.
We were in the coffee country now, nearly two
thousand feet above sea-level. The climate was
notably changed. There was still plenty of heat in
the middle of the day, but it was not oppressive, and
the mornings and evenings were crystalline and cool.
Fever, I was not surprised to hear, does not exist in
the Astrolabe range (unless in the case of people who
have brought it up with them from the lowlands), and
white people enjoy excellent health.
"What about the natives.?" I asked. It had
puzzled me a good deal, during the past day or two,
to note that the country was apparently desolate of all
HIDDEN VILLAGES 79
native life. We had not passed a single house or
village, nor had we seen a solitary Papuan on the
track, except a few carriers.
There were villages — a good many of them — on
the road we had traversed, I was told. The country
was peaceful now, but in the times when the natives
were ceaselessly raiding and killing one another, it
was necessary to build the villages where they could
not easily be found or surprised.
So, if you went off the track and climbed about
among the apparently inaccessible peaks of the high
ranges, you would find village after village, some
quite near to the road, others far away, but all cleverly
concealed from sight in the dense vegetation. Many
of them were built on the sides of precipices in such a
way that the inhabitants could only gain access to
them by climbing up long ladders. Others, again, were
set on the top of sharp peaks. There were even some
of the celebrated tea houses not many miles away, but
it was not likely that we should have time to visit
them. Anyhow, it was a fact that the natives of that
part of the country were not easily visited. No, they
were not hostile ; they simply kept to their old ways,
and did not trouble about the whites. And in any
case their numbers were small. Most of the land
about the Astrolabe was vacant ; that was one of the
reasons for its becoming a centre of settlement. The
Government in Papua did not allow settlers to have
any land that was or might be useful to the native
tribes. Fortunately, there was plenty for all — millions
8o THE NEW NEW GUINEA
of acres in the Territory that nobody needed ; and
there was plenty even up here, where the whites had
been nibbling about for twenty years.
I was soon to see for myself. The third day's
ride — a short and easy one — led us through tracts of
dense dark forest and over many little ranges unseen
in the surrounding " bush," but felt as we scrambled
slowly up and down to our destination for the pre-
sent — a plantation in the very heart of the Astrolabe
mountains, some seven-and-thirty miles from Port
Moresby.
It is easy to do the journey in two days, and
some of the residents can do it in one. We had
come slowly, as my companion was not able for trying
rides ; but we had certainly not lost by the delay,
since there had been all the more time to enjoy the
wonders of the scenery.
Anything more beautiful than the little mountain
house to which we came in the declining sun of the
late afternoon was surely never seen out of a fairy
tale. It stood tiptoe on the very peak of a sharp
little hill, with a clump of giant bamboos, like huge
green ostrich plumes a hundred feet high, serving as
background to its quaint prettiness of architecture. It
was a mere three-roomed, one-storeyed bungalow,
almost all deep verandah and overhanging eaves, with
a flight of rustic steps leading up to its little brown
door, and a high, deep, palm-thatch roof set low down
on its walls of woven bamboo, like a shady hat pulled
over a planter's sun-browned face. It looked abso-
Photo W. Whit lot.
A IliiMh, IN I'AI'L'A
To face page 80.
A PLANTATION BUNGALOW 8i
lutely harmonious, and as much a part of the place as
a bird's nest built in a tree.
William Morris would have liked that little bunga-
low, for it unconsciously illustrated many of his ideas ;
perhaps yet more those of Ruskin. It was nothing
whatever but a small cheap house, put together out of
native materials because planking and iron were dear
and difficult to carry ; but it had somehow managed
to capture just that perfect simplicity and inevitable
beauty after which our own *' rustic " and " artistic "
styles too often toil in vain. The deep vault of the
roof, the immense eaves, the warm brown tones of
thatch and wall, the steps and verandah rails made
out of saplings roughly barked, the windows — shutters
of bamboo panelling that swung outward on a hinge
and fastened with a bar — all were perfectly fitted to
their end and perfectly satisfying to the eye. And
the view 1
When one had climbed slowly up the steep cork-
screwed path that led to the bungalow — passing
between borders of pineapples in full bearing, and
close by a trailing mass of granadilla vine heavy with
varnished fruit — one stood upon a very small space
of artificially levelled ground, just large enough to
support the house. In front and at each side the red
earth fell suddenly away, so that the tops of the
young rubber trees shook their fimbriated leaves
almost under the verandah, and the coffee shrubs
made a quaint pattern of foreshortened foliage right
down to the river below. W^hen one stood upon the
G
82 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
steps, the scarlet and pink foliaged crotons seemed to
stretch their leaves right across a small, bright minia-
ture painting of stream and coffee plantation and
green grass and brown-roofed machine houses, into
the high blue sky above the belt of uncleared trees.
It was as if the house had been built upon a watch-
tower.
The plantation was a mere handful of some sixty
acres snatched out of the heart of the bush. It lay at
the bottom of a cup-shaped hollow, surrounded on all
sides but one by perpendicular walls of grass and
trees. On that one side the river had made an open-
ing, and through the rent in the dark green tapestry
of forest one saw the far-away blue hills. . . .
All through the Astrolabe mountains one comes
every now and then, unexpectedly, upon these lovely
glimpses of sapphire and hyacinth-coloured ranges,
framed in rugged gaps of dark-green forest. . . .
Pages of unwritten poetry every one, full of fantastic
dreams and butterfly fancies that only break in the
capturing. . . .
But in actual travel, one does not often make
the proper reflections at the proper moment — indeed,
it may be taken as a rule that one makes the wrong
and un-proper reflections, at any time when fine feel-
ings might seem to be called for. I certainly did not
begin poetising about distant views of the Astrolabe
on the moment of our arrival at the coffee plantation.
That came days later. At the moment, I was too
hungry to think seriously of anything except food,
SCENERY AND FIREFLIES 83
though only a Burns Philp pack-mule could have
been totally insensible to the beauty of the place.
We gave the horses to the boys and went into the
house. Most of its furniture was a makeshift, con-
cocted out of local materials, but there was not a bit
of it that you could not have put into an "interior,"
and delighted in if you were a great painter. There
were no pictures on the wall, but you could always
have one — much better than anything Corot or
Turner could have done for you — by simply swing-
ing wide one of the oblong bamboo-plait shutters and
instantly painting on the wall a matchless landscape
study, four feet by three. The door generally framed
in a larger and more brilliant piece of *' genre," com-
posed of several rose and madder-red croton shrubs,
and one or two of bright daffodil colour, with a
butterfly as big as a swallow, and most brilliantly
blue, hovering in the sun above the leaves. The
back door opened upon a picture after the Japanese style
— a gigantic arcade of feathery bamboos fluttering with
the pretty black and white wings of small birds that
came after the drying coffee. And after dark, that
you might not miss the beauties of the day, fireflies
came and made illuminations of ghost-like green all
along the edges of the overhanging thatch, where
glass-like drops of the sunset shower hung still and
clear, sending out crystal rays in the faint light of the
lamps inside the house. And all day and all night
the little cool river down below kept on singing.
If luxury is wanting in the life of a Papuan planter
84 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
beauty never need run short. There is scarcely a
plantation in the Territory that is not picturesque by
nature, and none that cannot be made so. The more
favoured beauty spots — and of these there are many —
need little to turn them into very Paradises of loveli-
ness. Brilliant shrubs and trees take root and grow
for the asking ; flowers are neglected for the most
part, but would grow, practically without attention, if
once sown. The numbers of rivers and streams that
cut through the mountain ranges and the natural lie
of the ground, always more or less sloping, suggest
fountains, ponds, terraces almost of themselves.
There is not one of the economic products of Papua
that is not beautiful in itself. Moreover, nothing
could be more stately than the avenues of splendid
palms that make up a copra plantation. Coffee might
well be grown anywhere as an ornamental shrub of
the highest beauty, apart from its value. Sisal-hemp
is to all appearance the same as the ornamental aloe
that is grown in pots all over the Continent. Rubber
is an extremely handsome tree at any stage of growth.
I know well there are many who will laugh at the
very idea of considering appearances where a plan-
tation is concerned ; but if a man can combine the
pleasures (which are undoubtedly great) of orna-
mental gardening and park-making, with the profit
of copra, or coffee, or rubber trading, it is surely so
much to the good for him.
For many weeks after that visit to the Astrolabe,
when wandering about the Territory seeing district
WORK FOR PIONEERS 85
after district emerge from savagery to civilisation and
beauty, the vision of certain houses in England and
Ireland used to haunt me with a sense of painfully
wasted forces. The pioneering and reclaiming in-
stinct is so strong in the whole British race that it
finds an outlet in many strange ways when denied its
natural career. I have known well-to-do families in
the country who did their own building, gardening,
baking, soap-making, out of sheer pleasure in handling
elemental things ; some who regarded the clearing of
a bit of copse, or the altering of the course of some
small stream, or the planting of a thousand young
trees, as a tit-bit much too dainty to be left to the
hands of labourers, and who would ask instead a few
favoured friends to come and enjoy the task in their
company. I have seen men of high education and
refinement absorbed in the poor and unprofitable
haying of their own grounds to such an extent that
they could scarcely be got into the house for a meal,
and counting every hundredweight of crop with far
more interest than they ever showed in the harvesting
of dividends, patients, or clients. And — {^pace Emil
Reich and his school) — 1 have known hundreds of
country ladies who loved the handicrafts of the house
and garden to the full as much as their grandmothers
did, and sadly missed the many absorbing little house-
hold tasks that recent civilisation had placed out of
their reach. And I longed to see a few hundred
such people settled in this half-tamed land, to use
their northern energies and their snow-fed strength,
86 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
and their dormant powers of organisation, contriv-
ance, adaptation, in the service of the new young
country.
After all, why not ? What are the sons of these
families doing ? Entering overcrowded professions
that will provide bread and butter for middle age at
the price of all their youth, and some thousands of
pounds to boot — going out to colonies where a
living must be wrenched from bitter soils buried half
the year in snow — spending their lives in airless
offices, with a fortnight's shooting in the autumn,
and a stray week-end on the golf-links, for all their
share of the great out-of-door world that calls to
every Englishman so insistently and often, perforce,
so vainly. It is true that in colonial life, as else-
where, you cannot have your cake and eat it. You
cannot enjoy the pleasure of breaking in a new
country and the pleasures of all the newest plays and
latest exhibitions at the same time. You cannot shut
the door on that tiresome and costly jade. Society, and
yet have her at hand to amuse an occasional dull
moment. It is exciting and pleasant to follow the
hounds and carry a gun across the stubble, and it is
also exciting and pleasant to hunt crocodiles on your
plantation river and make trophies of teeth and jaws,
or to go after wild boar in the hills ; but the man
who has the one must not look back and hanker after
the other. Still, all in all, the right kind of man finds
the colonial life the more satisfying and profitable of
the two. As for the wrong kind of man, he, like the
LANDS FOR SETTLERS 87
poor, is always with us, but, unlike the poor, he is
not with us (individually) for long. You can waste
your capital and go to the dogs in Papua just as com-
pletely and as quickly as in London, if you are the
kind to do it.
It may as well be said here as anywhere else that,
once for all, Papua is no country for the man who
cannot raise at least a couple of thousand to start on ;
no country for the old, the delicate, the idle, the fine
gentleman or fine lady. For the well-bred man who
because of his breeding will turn a hand to anything,
and because of his racial pride will never say die, for
the man with youth and strength and common sense,
and the woman who will *' do without " and see him
through — Papua is the country.
Lands are given for nothing (actually, for ten years,
and at a trifling rental for long leases). Seeds and
plants are given at cost price, instruction and advice
free. Speculators in land are kept out, and suitable
settlers encouraged in every way. Settlers without
money are not wanted, not asked for, not welcomed
— in fine, are requested to go elsewhere ; but settlers
with anything from two to five thousand may be pro-
mised (with ordinary industry and luck) a fortune in
a very few years' time.
To return to the coffee plantation and our visit,
Mrs. C. and myself unpacked our swags and settled
down for a week or two ; our escort and the horses
went back to port ; and we were left, two solitary
women in the Astrolabe mountains, among a heathen
88 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
and uncivilised population, with only a couple of
white men, some miles off, in the whole surrounding
district. We were on the verge of the unknown
country, as one is in most inland districts of Papua.
The natives in the hills at the back of the plantation
had, in some cases, never seen a white man, and very
few of them had ever seen a white woman, as witness
the many personally conducted touring parties that
came down to stare shyly at us during the course
of the next few days. We had only a native girl and
man to look after us, and we were living in a house
that was a mere shelter from heat and rain, as easily
broken into as a basket.
Yet we were perfectly safe — much more than we
should have been under similar conditions in the
suburbs of any great city. The truth is that the
Papuan native in these days scarcely ever attacks
white men, and certainly never does so in the planta-
tion districts. They do not mean him harm, he
knows ; they have not taken away his land ; they
employ him at times on the plantation, and pay him
and feed him well for his work ; they give him
tobacco for his fruit and vegetables when he wants to
trade — why should he destroy the goose that lays
these golden eggs .? It is true that he keeps up his
old habits of murder and man-eating on the sly, but
he gracefully conceals these little failings from the
whites as far as possible, fearing, like Martin Chuzzle-
wit's American Colonel, " to awaken their prejudice."
It is perfectly true that the country about us and at
HUMOURS OF MANSLAUGHTER 89
the back was fairly reeking with murder at the time ;
and it is also true that the murders were so inexpres-
sibly humorous that no one could have heard of them
without laughing — which sounds heartless, but is
nevertheless a fact.
Example : A and B, two fine young men from a
mountain village, were walking along the banks of
the Laloki, when they came upon a third, a man who
was rather ill, and asked their help to get across the
river. They did not feel inclined to give it, because
the invalid would probably have bothered them all
the rest of the way to their destination. But they
did not feel inclined to leave him planted there either.
So one of them put his head under water and the
other held his legs till he was drowned. After which
they continued the walk.
Example 2 : C, D, E, and F were out for a happy
day in the country. They came upon two men by
themselves. C, D, E, and F murdered them and
went on their way. When asked in court afterwards
why they committed such a deed, they explained
that " the two men looked so very cold and
hungry ! "
Example 3 : A young man killed his father. No
cause apparent. The strong arm of the British Gov-
ernment took hold of him, and he was asked if he
could " assign any reason for the rash act " before the
passing of sentence. The native interpreter of the
High Court replied, after putting the question to the
prisoner (who did not seem to feel his position at all
90 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
acutely) : " He says, Sir, that the old man was not
much good to anybody."
In all these cases the murderers were imprisoned
for several years.
If we had met any of the culprits (as no doubt we
did meet and converse with others, undiscovered) we
should have found them pleasant, well-mannered men,
ready to trade for a bit of tobacco or act as guide to a
village with the utmost amiability. Truly, Gilbert's
enterprising burglar, who was so pleasant and sociable
when not engaged actively in his profession, would
have felt at home in Papua.
It must be understood, therefore, that I have no
moving tales of personal peril to relate, in spite of
the fact that we two women were left alone, among a
population largely consisting of murderers, in the
interior of savage New Guinea. We passed the fort-
night of our stay very pleasantly and quietly. There
was not so much opportunity for out-of-door excur-
sions as one could have wished, since we were in the
heart of the rainy season, and, in the mountains, that
means at least half the day in the house. The morn-
ings were exquisitely fine as a rule, displaying the
perilous beauty of light and colour that, in every
climate, inevitably suggests something too good to
last. About noon the sky would cloud over, and
punctually at one or thereabouts the mist-wreaths
would begin their witches' dance against the dark
green rampart of forest over against the house. In
another quarter of an hour it would be raining as if
ASTROLABE COFFEE 91
the Rona waterfall had been lifted into the sky above
the valley and then let go. The red earth would run
rivers, the young rubber trees would bend and droop
beneath the deluge, the deep thatched eaves of the
house would send down a continuous waterfall. If
you looked closely at the leaves near the verandah,
you would see under many a one some prudent butter-
fly clinging upside down, its great green or blue or
golden wings clapped close together, so as to get the
full benefit of the shelter. Most of the birds retired
into the close-set labyrinth of the bamboo trunks,
there to preen and chatter like a company of school-
girls all the afternoon. The wonderful blue land-
scape framed in by the gap in the valley put on a
veil of grey mist and disappeared. As for ourselves,
I am constrained to admit that we generally lay down
for a siesta, covered up with a warm cloak (what a
delight it was to need it 1) until it was time for
afternoon coffee.
And what coffee it was ! I had heard down in
Port Moresby that the quality of the berries on the
Astrolabe range was exceptionally good. This, how-
ever, had impressed me not at all, because I had
learned by experience in many countries that every
plantation in the world surpasses every other of the
same kind in the quality of its products. But when
Mrs. C. and I tasted the Astrolabe coffee . . .
Well, we knew no moderation after that. There
was only a fortnight to enjoy in full something that
we should never get again, and we lost no time. The
92 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
cook-boy's life was made a weariness to him by reason
of the number of times he was called on to roast and
shell handfuls of beans from the verandah, and the
open fire in the little cookhouse outside was never
without a tall tin pot "drawing" within reach of the
warmth. It was certainly the very best coffee that I
had ever tasted ; one could fancy it served by the
dark-eyed houris to the faithful in a Mussulman's
dream of Paradise. I was not surprised to hear that
the guests at the Christmas house-parties som.etimes
held on that plantation suffer so much from want of
sleep that they have all been found at once wandering
helplessly among the coffee bushes at two o'clock in
the morning, unable to rest ! Fine though it may be
in flavour, this coffee is much stronger than a novice
would suppose, and ten or twelve cups in a day is
enough to upset the nerves of the strongest.
The reader who knows all about coffee will pardon
a little digression here for the sake of his less favoured
brethren.
Coffee is a rather small bush, not more than three
or four feet high when well tended. It has dark
varnished leaves very like those of the laurestinus. It
flowers, in Papua, three or four times a year, for only
a day or two at a time, the flowers being small, white,
and exquisitely scented. Later, the branches are
covered with small scarlet berries much like a cherry.
The stone of the berry is the coffee " bean." Picking
lasts as a rule from January to March, successive
crops following each other closely on the trees. Each
COFFEE INDUSTRY 93
plantation has its pulping-house, where the berries
are separated from the "beans" by a simple machine
which can be worked by a couple of men. This
machine, in medium sizes, costs only about thirty
pounds. The berries are poured into a hopper,
through which, driven by a stream of water, they pass
into a compartment which is partly blocked by a
metal disc. This disc is covered with sharp pro-
jections, against which the berries are crushed as the
handle of the machine is turned. The "bean" is
thus pressed out of its succulent envelope, and sepa-
rated into two lobes, covered with a gluey saccharine
matter in which they are allowed to lie until a slight
fermentation takes place, when they are washed in
several waters and dried in large trays. The " parch-
ment " or inner skin of the bean is not removed but
allowed to remain ; usually, the buyer of the coffee
has it taken off by machinery of a more com-
plicated and expensive kind than the pulping-
machine.
As regards the prices obtainable, the coffee industry
is severely handicapped by the Australian duty of
threepence a pound (which will probably be removed
before long), but even under these circumstances it
has been made to pay. There is not a coffee planta-
tion in Papua at the present date run on economical
and businesslike lines. Nearly all the work is left to
natives, who know only so much as a Papuan over-
seer, himself ignorant and careless, can teach them.
Carriage, owing to the lack of roads, is very costly.
94 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
And yet the plantations somehow or other pay for
their keep. The moral is obvious.
A small plantation of fifty acres or so should cost
about ;^200 to clear and plant, and, if carefully
looked after, should be run for about £25'^ ^^ ;^45°
a year, including ;^200 salary for a manager. Coffee,
in the Astrolabe country, bears in two years, so the
planter has not long to wait for his returns. About
5 to 7 cwt. an acre may be safely reckoned on, and
this sells, in Port Moresby, for £6o a ton, or if
graded by a machine that costs the planter about
^loo to buy and set up, £()0 a ton.
There is nothing in the growing and preparing of
the coffee that any sensible man cannot manage for
himself, with the aid of a few of the best and most
recent handbooks. The native labour is not equal to
that of Ceylon or Malaysia, being less intelligent and
more expensive. It suffices for the purpose, however,
and one must always remember that neither in Ceylon
nor Malaysia can the planter obtain valuable estates
for nothing.
The rains, even in the rainy season, generally clear
off about sunset. Waked up by the afternoon coffee,
we were usually ready to enjoy that wonderful display
when it came, and six to half-past found us on the
verandah looking out over the valley.
In Port Moresby the sunsets had been a marvellous
riot of flaming jewel-like colours, shot through by
a certain peculiar and very lovely blue that 1 never
noticed in the sunsets of any other land. Up here
SUNSET IN THE ASTROLABES 95
in this green cup of the hills they were quite different,
but equally wonderful in their way. When the sun
had sunk in an angry welter of red and copper, just
before the dusk came on, the whole valley would fill
up with a tide of translucent green as if the sea had
suddenly submerged us under a thousand feet of clear
salt water. This extraordinary afterglow lasted about
a quarter of an hour, and then darkened down into
night. With the first rising of the green tide burst
forth in an unanimous chorus the evening cry of the
crickets, like thousands of little whistles all sounding
together, or like the escape-valves of a myriad of toy
steam-engines — so loud that it was necessary to raise
one's voice in speaking while the chorus lasted. It
was of short duration. When the light went out the
crickets ceased, and the frogs, who had been croaking
and crying like strange birds from the river below all
the time of the sunset, crept into their marshes and
were silent. Outside the stage, I never imagined
anything so completely Wagnerian in my life. Light,
sound, mise-en-scene, were all the spirit of the
Nibelungen Ring. And if the wild dance of the
mist-maidens across the dark hill-sides early in the
afternoons was not a Valkyrie-Ride, or the very next
thing to it, then no natural phenomenon ever
suggested an idea to a poet since time and poets
began.
One cannot recommend the Astrolabe country as
a suitable residence for the aged or the infirm. It is
almost entirely made up of hills. When you leave
96 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
the bungalow door you plunge down a descent as
steep as a waterfall or crawl up a height like a sharply-
sloped roof, reversing the process when you return.
This is supposed to be very good for the coffee. It
is also good for the planters' muscles, without doubt.
One begins, after a little of this sort of exercise, to
understand why the native of the high mountain
ranges is said to be unable to walk when he comes
down to the flat for the first time. It is a fact that
the mountain tribes do seem to suffer a little when
travelling on the flat, until they get accustomed to it,
and that they step " high and disposedly," like
Queen Elizabeth when she danced, until they learn
to alter their mode of walking.
The weather was so wet in the afternoons, and all
the tracks were in such a state of bog, that we could
not go about the country as much as we wished, and
had to amuse ourselves watching the small operations
of the plantation. The coffee of the last two pick-
ings was being seasoned and dried in the sun. This
needed constant watchfulness on the part of the native
workers, to seize and carry under the house all the
huge trays with which the backyard was spread as
soon as the sky became overcast, and to carry them
out again as soon as a gleam of sun appeared.
Weeding was always going on among the trees, and
at the picking season there was no doubt a good deal
of stir, if one had been there to see. But, on the
whole, the work of the place went forward so quietly
that one scarce noticed it at all.
A PAPUAN GAME BAG 97
One of the chief events of the day was to see
what our nearest neighbour's shooting-boy would
bring in. His employer kindly shared the game with
us, as there was generally more than he needed, and
we had no means of obtaining fresh meat for our-
selves. When the big Papuan appeared below the
verandah, shaking the rain out of his huge mop of
hair like a water-dog, and dripping little rivers from
every curve and corner of his naked brown body, it
was as good as a dip into a lucky-bag to see him
open his netted string sack and spill out its contents.
Pea-green parrots with yellow wings — parrots blue
and grey and crimson — parrots almost all white ;
pigeons with iridescent breasts — great hornbills as
large as a turkey, with incredible bills that looked
like masks put on for fun ; Gaura pigeons (a true
pigeon as big as a goose, with clusters of beautiful
grey aigrettes on its head), a plump young wallaby,
a hind-quarter of wild pig ; some indescribable bird
that we had never heard of and could not identify —
for what we knew, it might be a new species — but we
ate it all the same ; these were some of the things
that used to appear on the verandah towards the
sunset hour. I would have given a good deal for
the company of that omniscient character who always
makes one of a shipwrecked party in a book of
adventure, and who can tell the sailors where to look
for edible nuts and roots, and what fruits are
poisonous, and the Latin name, personal habits, and
domestic history of every bird, beast, and reptile
H
98 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
that the exceedingly miscellaneous desert island con-
tains. He might have saved us more than once, if
all the truth were known, from the hideous disgrace
of making a dinner off some bird that a hundred
scientific swords would have leaped from their scab-
bards to defend had the orgy taken place within hail
of civilisation.
Within the last few months the beautiful Gaura
pigeon, all the birds of paradise, and one or two
other species, have been placed under legal protec-
tion. At the time of my visit this was not the case,
and we might have plumed ourselves from head to
foot with bird of paradise tails had we wanted. It
was only a little while since a nest of these beautiful
creatures had been found in the midst of the bamboo
clump at the back of the house, and the bush all
round seemed to be full of the " Raggiana " — the
commonest kind — although I only once saw a bird.
Their cry was unmistakable, a harsh and rather ugly
call that one was sure to hear two or three times
a day. I was always on the look out for them, like
everyone who goes to New Guinea, and always being
disappointed. The comet-like flash of a long orange
tail across the track, one day when I was riding
through the hills, was all I actually saw of these
famous birds. I do not fancy the fault was mine, as
almost every traveller has the same tale to tell, unless
his journeying has been undertaken with the object
of collecting birds. In that case a camp is made in
the best-known haunts and the whole day given up
STRANGE BIRD NOISES 99
to searching and snaring. Even so, the hunters may-
be days without catching a glimpse of anything
remarkable.
It was tantalising to know that Raggianas, Gaura
pigeons, the beautiful black-velvet rifle-bird, possibly
a "magnificent" or two, with their incredibly long
tail feathers, and other rare and lovely species, were
close beside us in the bush all day, and yet never to
see one. The extraordinary bird noises that sounded
night and day out of the forest were, however, some
consolation. Birds in New Guinea laugh, chatter,
curse, ring bells, saw wood, make all kinds of noises
except one — singing. The butcher bird has a pretty
note in the early mornings, not unlike the English
blackbird, and there is a small black and white
creature closely resembling a Willie Wagtail, that
chirps very sweetly. But for the most part the birds
devote their energies to the most amazing clowneries.
The leather-neck — an ugly dark-coloured creature,
not at all shy — scolds and carps in companies high up
in the trees, exactly like a party of quarrelsome old
washerwomen. The bell-bird sounds a clear tink-
tink from the unseen depths of the bush, so like the
bell of a pack-horse that it is often hard to distinguish
the two. There is a pheasant that makes a noise
exactly imitating the glug-glug of water being poured
out of a narrow-necked bottle, even to the sudden
rush at the end. Another chops wood all night long,
like a goblin forester. Another cracks a loud cart-
whip continually. Yet another saws and planes indus-
loo THE NEW NEW GUINEA
triously in an unseen recess of the liana-tangled trees.
The cockatoos scream in a note that is the very
acme of shrewish indignation when the tread of a
horse or the pad of a human foot sounds in the
solitary gorges that they love to keep to themselves.
The crows laugh hideously ; the parrots chuckle and
squeal ; the bird of paradise — I am sorry to have to
say it, but it is true — simply squawks. One hears
little of all this chorus while on the road, but at night
or in the early morning, if one is camped near the
bush, the noises are strange enough to send a " new
chum " almost out of his mind.
Many of the most beautiful birds are only to be
met with above a certain height. The blue bird of
paradise is not found below the five-thousand-foot
point, and the " magnificent " also prefers the higher
ranges. Now that protective legislation has been
introduced there is no danger of these wonderful and
beautiful birds becoming extinct ; but before the laws
that forbid the exportation of birds were passed, so
many thousands were sent away each year that there
was every reason to fear rapid extermination.
In German and Dutch New Guinea birds of para-
dise are not protected, and the supply is still kept up
to the European markets from these sources. It is
probable that along the boundaries between the three
countries there will be a good deal of migration later
on when the birds have been hunted up to the divid-
ing line, and that Papua will eventually become a
refuge for the whole tribe of birds of paradise.
BIRDS OF PARADISE loi
I might write a good deal about these birds — about
their exquisite plumage, the dancing-grounds which
they clear for themselves beneath the high trees so
that they can display their beauty and grace before
each other in wonderful evolutions of stepping and
springing; the many different varieties that are found
in various places ; but that I feel myself restrained by
the drawback of utter ignorance. I have read a good
deal about birds of paradise, as anyone in England
may. I wanted to see them, but I did not succeed in
doing so except in the instance mentioned above.
Not one in ten jf the white inhabitants of Papua ever
does see a bird of paradise alive, and not one in a
hundred out of the thousand or so of whites has been
fortunate enough to see the dancing-grounds. How
many Englishmen have seen a reed-warbler at home ?
How many could produce a kingfisher at short notice
for the pleasure of a curious guest ?
With some diffidence — since it is disturbing to
find oneself in opposition to writers of standing and
celebrity— I would here offer the opinion that books
of travel are all the better, though possibly the nar-
rower, when the writer confines himself to his own
personal knowledge and experience as far as possible.
It is easy enough and showy enough to make a hand-
some volume out of one's own experiences padded
out with the doings and sayings of as many others as
possible ; to add flounces of borrowed history, geo-
graphy, ethnology, and philology on to the meagre
robe of the traveller's personal observations and
I02 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
thoughts — in fine, to make a " work " out of a mere
book by processes familiar to every reader and re-
viewer. The result, however, is in most cases the
destruction of any little independent value that the
book may possess. If one is not qualified for the task
of unravelling the complications of Papuan race and
language, for trained observation of scientific or
zoologic phenomena, for the collecting of folk-lore
and noting of native customs, one may regret the
deficiency, and may even, in the midst of such a
wonderful field as Papua, deplore the unfortunate
tendency of Providence to " send walnuts to those
who have no teeth," but it is best not to try and
remedy the evil. Every traveller has his own point
of view : let him use it for what it is worth. There
are quite as many readers desirous of knowing how
white people live in New Guinea, how one gets about
the country, what adventures one meets with, what
money can be made in Australia's new colony, as
there are readers who wish to be enlightened on the
question of how the original inhabitants got there or
what form of stone celt has been longest in use. For
the former alone I write. Not everybody can get to
New Guinea, and the number of travellers who really
see something of the country is still so small that
each should offer what he can to the sum of general
knowledge, poor though the offering may be.
There are always collectors in Papua — Baron
Rothschild's employes, men sent out by the govern-
ing bodies of scientific institutions, private workers.
ORCHIDS AND INSECTS 103
The country is famous among entomologists for the
number of new species of insects that it produces,
and bird-collectors rarely go away without something
hitherto unknown to add to the science of ornitho-
logy. It costs a good many hundred pounds to fit
out even the smallest of these expeditions, and the
larger ones run into thousands. They can hardly
"pay" from the commercial point of view, even
though the value of the new finds is very large. No
doubt they are not expected to do so. It is the
planter, the prospector, the leisurely traveller, who
could make money out of Papua's rarities, animal
and vegetable, if he only had knowledge enough to
turn to account all that he sees. He never has the
knowledge, however ; like myself, he passes the pale
wreaths of orchids in the forests and wonders if the
bloom is a well-known species worth a shilling, or
something new worth its weight in diamonds, and can't
guess, and leaves it there. Or he catches a brilliant
butterfly in the net the plantation hands use for cray-
fish-hunting in the river, admires it, sees that it has
a body as big as his own finger, which will have to be
stuffed if he wants to preserve the creature, and lets
it go. A week after he meets a Rothschild collector,
who shows him a big green butterfly with a fat body,
and says casually that it is a new kind and worth
fifty pounds. He recognises the insect, and spends
the next week looking out for another — that fifty
pounds would buy him two more horses — but it
never comes back again. Or he meets a bird-hunting
I04 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
party coming down from the high ranges and sees
them rejoice immoderately over a couple of small
finches and a minute lory among the big brilliant
birds of their catch. These small specimens are
absolutely new, they say, and heaven only knows
what the men of science will not say they prove or
disprove — in any case, there will be a dozen pur-
chasers ready to weigh those tiny bodies against
ten-pound notes by and by. . . . The planter, who
perhaps has begun his place on a too limited capital,
and is sadly cramped in consequence, wonders what
the clouds of birds that come picking among his
coffee or hemp for insects may be worth, if a man
could only tell which were the specimens that science
had caught and branded, and which, in the language
of the cattle-station, were still *' clean-skins." There
might be the worth of a shed full of new machinery
in the carcase of any one of those screaming little
nuisances. . . .
A good book or two on orchids, on butterflies, on
tropic birds, with plates, would be a valuable invest-
ment for many a plantation, apart altogether from the
interest that it would lend to the surroundings of
the planter's life.
What with butterfly chasing, short but dirty
rambles, swimming in a river guaranteed to be free
from crocodiles, but certainly infested with leeches —
reading, loafing, and watching the work of the planta-
tion, a week or more passed quickly. On an evening
that was rather less wet than usual we heard the distant
ON THE TRACK TO WARIRATA 105
jangle of pack-horse bells, and knew that our escort
had returned. Next morning we made a start for
Warirata, some seventeen miles away, where we were
to spend the night.
A thousand feet we mounted during the day,
the air growing cooler and brighter mile by mile,
the wonderful great gorges and valleys spreading out
ever wider and wider below the narrow ridges on
which we climbed along. The clouds gathered under
us in rolling seas, though we were less than three
thousand feet up ; they rose and drifted and danced,
long and ghost-like, upon the dark sappy green of
the opposite hills, and at last they wrapped us alto-
gether round, and burst upon us in cataracts of heavy
mountain rain. Up something that might have been
a road, and might have been a river, but was an un-
satisfactory sample of either — because you couldn't
swim in it, nor could you walk along it comfortably
— we led our sliding horses, and slid and slipped our-
selves, until in the dark we came upon the lights of
the little plantation house at Warirata, and knew we
were going to be clean and dry and fed again before
very long.
If one wants to travel in New Guinea one must
not mind getting dirty, both frequently and ex-
cessively. We did not mind, nor did our hosts, the
plantation manager and his wife, object to the incur-
sion of three exceedingly wet and miry creatures
into their sitting-room. Nobody does mind "clean
dirt" in the Territory ; you are sure to want hanging
io6 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
out over a line whenever you come in after a ride or
a walk. Our swags, great sacks of painted canvas,
were taken off the pack-horses ; we retired and
tidied up ; and then came supper. One never knows
how welcome supper can be until one has climbed
a mountain to get it and been wet through in the
process.
The little estate of Warirata was, like the last we
had visited, planted with coffee. Like almost every
plantation in New Guinea, it was insufficiently
financed, and I fear me it did not bring in much
profit to anyone. If it did not bring profit, how-
ever, it certainly brought pleasure to very many, for
of all the beautiful places to be found in the Astrolabe
range there is not one that comes up to Warirata for
sheer loveliness.
The house itself was scarcely beautiful, being of
the popular tin-roofed colonial type, with walls of
some sort of composition that resembled very thick
paper. It was the surroundings that gave the estate
its real attraction, and brought party after party of
visitors up from Port Moresby to see it, in spite
of the twenty miles of bad road that lay between.
From the front of the verandah we could see the
whole magnificent thirteen thousand feet of Mount
Victoria scaling up into heaven, range after range,
step after step, in a colossal flight of skyward-sweep-
ing stairs. It looked as if one could get to the top
in a couple of days, or three at most, taking things
easy and camping at night. As a matter of fact, .the
MOUNT VICTORIA 107
great mountain was so far away and approached by
so many dividing foot-hills that three weeks would
have been good time. Mount Victoria has been
ascended more than once, and is fairly well known.
Practically all climates, from torrid to frigid, are
found upon its slopes. It is below the perpetual
snow line, but snow falls occasionally upon the upper
peaks, and the smaller streams arc constantly coated
with ice.
The whole peak is not visible during the day, as
a rule. Like most New Guinea peaks. Mount
Victoria is veiled in mist during the greater part of
the forenoon and afternoon. Only in the early
morning is the whole mountain to be seen. It is well
worth getting up for.
A couple of hundred yards away, on the other side
of the house, there was yet another wonderful pros-
pect. One followed the crest of the hill to its very
edge, and there, where the mountain range broke off
into a sharp descent of a thousand feet or more, with
another eighteen hundred sloping away below, one
could see across twenty miles of country, spread out
small and fine like a map, with silver threads of rivers
winding across it, and distant forests close set as fur
upon the limbs of the giant hills. Beyond this wide
extent of flat, the sea seemed to rise up high in the air,
delicate and blue and finely wrinkled, set with one or
two large pale islands, and edged by a waving coast-
line that trended gradually away to the south-eastward.
Port Moresby lay hidden behind a hill, but the road
io8 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
leading to it was plainly visible for the greater part of
the way.
The air on this high plateau was quite cold in the
morning and at night, warm during the day, but not
oppressively hot. As it was then the middle of the
hot and rainy season, the difference between Warirata
and Port Moresby was all the more noticeable. We
had left decidedly oppressive weather — hot nights
without a breath of air, still steamy days — in the plains
below. Less than three thousand feet had made all
this difference, and we were within a day's ride of the
port.
At the time of my visit it was supposed that Wari-
rata would eventually be used as a Government
Sanatorium, but a rival site was fixed upon not long
after on the summit of Hombron Bluff, a mountain
rather nearer to Port Moresby. By the time these
lines are in print it is probable that the Hombron
Bluff station will be completed, and that any resident
of Port Moresby will be able to enjoy a Saturday to
Monday in the cool mountain climate after an easy
half-day's journey.
There was a price to pay for that beautiful view,
and we found it out when we started off down the
Port Moresby track. As a general rule beautiful
views do have to be paid for, but one always forgets
that part of it when admiring the picture. Still, even
if we had remembered, we should have said it was
worth while.
Everywhere in Papua one is confronted with the
UNKNOWN WAYS 109
tantalising certainty that the absolutely unknown lies
close to one's track. Up here in Warirata, which
has been a favourite resort with Port Moresby
people for more than twenty years, the unexplored
lands lie under one's very eye. This tall, blue mountain
seemingly less than a day's march away, has never
been ascended. That whole extent of wave-tossed
green, like a stormy sea turned to hill and forest, is
the beginning of a great stretch unknown as yet to the
white man. There, in that mere patch of bush, lying
some miles below, one of the smartest bushmen in
Papua was lost with his carriers for days, and had to
make a rush back for the coast, depending solely on
the guns for food. Go a couple of days' travel in
almost any direction you may mention and you strike
into country where no one has ever been. It is
fascinating, and maddening, too. Why cannot one
take a rifle and a couple of carriers and a few days'
food and plunge down at once into the mysterious
untrodden districts that look so near .'' Why does
not someone go ?
Well, after even a few days' travel on the well-
known tracks one has a glimmering of the barriers
that block up unknown ways. The inland districts
are simply a series of precipitous ridges, or rather
wedges, that succeed one another without a yard of
flat ground. Mountain tribesmen brought down to
the coast often find themselves unable to walk with
comfort for weeks, as they have never set foot on any
level ground. This sort of surface makes progress
no THE NEW NEW GUINEA
inconceivably slow, and, further, the jungle off the
tracks is so dense that all the way must be hacked out
with axes and tomahawks. Generally no food can be
obtained save what is carried by the men. If the
carriers desert, as they often do, the explorer is left to
play skipping-rope with the scythe of Death, and
get back to the world of white men again in time if
he can.
Stanley's journey to Central Africa was a mere
picnic-party compared with the lot of the New Guinea
explorer. There have been a good many such from
time to time. More Governments than one have
spent money on the country. Private capitalists of a
scientific turn have sent armed and provisioned
columns into the mysterious island-continent, and
still you cannot sail an hour along the coast or travel
a day into the interior without coming in sight of
untouched lands. Papua keeps her secrets well.
For all that, there is, and has been for many years,
a very large extent of safe, known, and accessible
country available for settlement. In a country twice
as large as England there is room for a good deal of
unexplored land, and its existence does not trouble
the settler, who knows all about his own little estate,
and has no need to occupy himself with what may lie
beyond.
We started for port early in the morning. About
seven o'clock a disciple of G. P. R. James "might have
observed three travellers on horseback making their
way down the narrow and winding track that leads
A MOUNTAIN TRACK iii
from the wild and romantic regions of the Astrolabe
range to the little town of Port Moresby." He
might also have observed that the travellers were only
moderately clean in appearance, and that they further
defied the dramatic unities of the situation by hanging
their steeds over with pannikins, billys, baskets,
bundles, lanterns, and even bottles. One fears that
they would have made but a poor impression at the
inevitable inn of early Victorian romance. However,
we were so far behind the early Victoria here — being,
in point of fact, somewhere in the Middle Ages — that
there was not such a thing as a roadside inn to be
anticipated in the length and breadth of the Territory.
Inside of half an hour the procession had (as is
usual in the mountains) resolved itself into its primary
constituents, and three human beings were sliding and
scrambling after three horses down a scratch in the
mountain-side that might have been taken for a drain
or an earthquake crack or a giant flight of stairs in
exceedingly bad repair — for anything you like, in fact,
except what it was — a track. The hopping and slip-
ping and climbing and crashing through long grass
and bushes, and going up nasty rises that all too visibly
dropped down again within the next two hundred
yards, went on for over an hour, and then, just as we
were preparing to mount and reap the reward of our
hard work in an easy canter along the level, came an
urgent messenger from a copper mine, far above our
heads, begging us to come up and stay for lunch. . . .
One almost wanted wings to get to the top of the
112 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
pyramidical hill on which was perched the miners'
camp. But once up, there was a brilliant view of the
Laloki Valley, and a fresh, cool wind blowing through
the little bird-cage hut, and plenty of tea. So we
stopped, as invited, and I had my first view of a
miners' camp,
I do not know just what I had expected — some-
thing like Bret Harte's early Californian stories
possibly, or else something that recalled the exciting
tales told of Australian mining fields in the early days
of a rush. Whatever I expected, however, it was not
what I saw. Papua always presents one with the
unexpected. 1 had before this been almost painfully
impressed with the rigid respectabilityof Port Moresby,
as compared with the lawless lotus lands of the true
South Seas, but it had not prepared me for the miners'
camp of the Astrolabe ranges in the latter end of
1907.
There were at that time only three claims in this
particular valley — all copper, and all, it is said, excep-
tionally rich. That which 1 saw belonged to a couple
of young retired Government officials, both gentle-
men, and excellently educated and mannered, in spite
of their rough miner dress. Their hut was only a
hut, but it was clean and tidy. Their " boy " served
lunch much as it is served in Sydney, and we all
talked " Shakespeare and the musical glasses," after-
wards looking down over the lonely Laloki Valley to
where the unknown countries and the undiscovered
mineral riches lie waiting for the pioneer.
ON THE ROAD AGAIN 113
. . . Next to the safety of Papua, its respectability
is certainly the dominant feature.
I shall have more to say about these mines later on.
At the time of my visit there was little to see, and
we were in a hurry to get on our road again. Some
months later a considerable development of the Astro-
labe field took place, and the mines are now in a fair
way to prove themselves a paying property.
After that one headlong descent, the rest of the
twenty miles was easy going. The last seven were along
a real carriage road, which so excited the horses that
they promptly bolted, and the last of the way home
resolved itself into a series of races, not a little aston-
ishing when one considered how much our steeds
had done. But the New Guinea horse, like many
other things in this astonishing country, is a good
deal better than he looks.
CHAPTER IV
The simple savage and his simple life — Off to the Purari River — A day
aground — Western war canoes — The town of the devil-temples —
"Pig!" — Plantation recruiting— The secret of the Rabi — Into
the innermost chamber — What is it ? — Lost in the delta — The
praying of the Mantis — The light that failed — lai, the place to
spend a happy day — "Thalatta ! "
"LTAVING seen something of plantation life (I was
to see much more afterwards), the labour ques-
tion naturally became interesting to me. A good
deal depends upon names and terms in the matter of
"interest." The "problem of the labour supply of
Papua" sounds like something extremely dry ; but it
is likely to awake an interest little short of passionate
in the breast of anyone who really understands the
conditions of Papuan life. For it is certain that the
whole future of the colony turns on the question of
whether the native supply of workers is sufficient to
keep the plantations, present and future, in going
order, or whether it is not.
The native population of the colony is large —
about three-quarters of a million by the latest esti-
mates. In some districts the natives have made a
habit of engaging themselves for plantation or carry-
ing work, and a supply is always to be depended on.
In other parts of the country — especially those not
114
SUPPLY OF WORKERS 115
fully opened up — the idea of working for wages has
never entered the native's mind ; he knows nothing
of the white man or his ways, and does not even
understand the nature of money. Other districts
still are in a stage of transition. Now and then a
shipload of young men goes away to the plantations,
returning in a year or in three years to their village
life — possibly to stay at home for good, possibly to
go back to work after a year or so. On the whole,
the supply of workers keeps up satisfactorily, and I
have never seen a plantation that was short of labour,
although 1 have heard a good many melancholy pro-
phecies as to what may happen in the future.
It is hard, in these primitive places of the earth, to
believe that the admirers of the gentle savage in his
natural state, the passionate advocates of the " simple
life " for black and white alike, whom one meets so
constantly at home, can be genuine in their belated
Rousseauism of idea — can really think that it is a
wrong against the savage to take him out of his
natural state and introduce him to new wants and
new aspirations. The truth is that these city-bred
sentimentalists, who are so ready to discourse upon
the natural man and his virtues, do not know what
they are talking about. They are like the much-
quoted German philosopher who first evolved the
idea of a camel out of his inner consciousness of what
a camel ought to be, and then lectured upon the
natural history of camels in general. The natural
man, to take the definition that seems generally
ii6 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
accepted by the sentimental-crank school, is stronger
and healthier than his civilised brother. He is
full of a simple generosity and a supernatural inno-
cence. He has no work to do, and is the better for
it. The generous earth provides him with food
unasked. He understands " herbs and simples," and
possesses medical secrets unknown to the College of
Physicians. He loves fresh air and pure water, and
feeds by preference on fruits and the inevitable herbs,
with which all primitive virtue is inextricably bound
up in the mind of the simple-lifer. (One would like
to ask the simple-lifer for his definition of herbs ; I
have never yet met with one who could go beyond
the bunches of dried flavourings that may be seen
hung to the ceiling of cottage kitchens.) He has
keener sight and hearing than any civilised person.
He will give you everything he has and want nothing
in return. He spends his time in innocent sports
with his pleasing wife and charming children, and is
in every way a worthier person than yourself — "instead
of which " you go about trying to make him drink
gin and use fountain pens. . . .
Alas for the coldness of the cold truth concerning
the natural man 1
There never was in any country or state of society
known to history such a savage as that pictured by
the simple-lifer. A few uncivilised races — very few —
have a finer physique than the ordinary white man ;
the Zulu or the Samoan, for example. No savage
race in the mass is equal to the white race in pluck
THE SAVAGE AT WORK 117
and endurance. No single savage but can be matched
and surpassed by some white in any feat of strength
or agility he may perform. As for the sentimental
side, most savages require a full return, direct or
indirect, for anything they give, and all will take
everything they can get. It is a mistake to suppose
that any uncivilised man has no work to do — the
mere defence of his village in a savage state entails
heavy labour in the building of war canoes, making
of stockades, manufacturing all sorts of weapons.
Game, moreover, must be hunted and houses built
and kept in repair. The generous earth does not
grow his food for nothing. Yams, taro, manioc, and
other nourishing roots require more cultivation than
potatoes or cabbages. Of really wild fruit there is
little in any country; and cultivated fruits require
care. His knowledge of herbs passes over nineteen-
twentieths of the useful plants of his country, and
only includes the remaining fraction because some of
them are good to eat or to paint your face with, and
others to poison your enemy. His medicine is sorcery
pure and simple. He shuts out every breath of air
from his hut if he can manage to do so, and washes
only when he is caught out in the rain. He eats
roots out of his garden when he cannot get meat,
and meat when he cannot get superfluous aunt or
undesirable neighbour. He sees and hears things in
the bush which a new chum misses, but his eyes and
ears, tried by medical tests, are no better than those
of the white man. His life is a tissue of murder.
ii8 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
fraud, and oppression, and his pleasing wife (one of a
large number, regular and irregular) never enjoys a
moment's pleasure, amusement, or peace during the
whole of her miserable life if he can help it. As for
the " health of the primitive savage," it is at best not
much to boast of. Primitive man grows up at four-
teen, is middle-aged at twenty-eight, and usually dies
before fifty. He takes everything that is going in
the way of disease, and takes it very badly. In spite
of the fact that he lives without clothes, he is liable
to bad colds. He suffers from some skin disease,
usually repulsive, in three or four cases out of ten ;
he gets tumours and cancers, and dies of them, just
as if he were a City grocer, and he can even show you
some very pretty cases of hypochondria and hysteria
if you like to look for them.
Such is primitive man, in almost all uncivilised
countries. Such he is in Papua ; and it is from this
simplicity of existence that the plantation owner lures
him away, to corrupt him with the complexities of
civilisation, give him good wages and regular meals,
provide him with a blanket and mosquito-net for the
night, and a calico loin-cloth for the day, teach him to
wash himself and keep his hands off other people's
goods, and give him the habit of regular and steady
work.
If the planter is not a missionary, and one of the
best kind, then the name of missionary has no mean-
ing. As a matter of sober fact, he does a good deal
more reclaiming and improving than all the missions
'iiiK \ II. LACK r.i';AL'rv
To face page ii3.
MICAWBER'S EXAMPLE 119
put together. In so doing he has benefited himself
as well as the native. So has the missionary. But he
gets all the credit, and the planter gets none.
If this is a digression, it is a necessary one. There
arc very many good people, at home and in Australia,
who are quite certain that the native is wronged by
those who wish to develop his mind and change
his ways of living. I hope, by showing the real facts
of the case, gathered on the spot, to convince them of
their mistake.
Returning to the question of the supply of labour,
there were, and still are, different opinions on that
point. I heard every variety while in Port Moresby.
Some laughed at the idea of any possible shortage.
Others were convinced that most of the plantations
would be "held up" for want of boys in less than a
year. Others did not know. Others again were
sure that they, or their special friends, would never
want, because they had the invaluable knack of
"getting on with natives " (a gift that I have noticed
is claimed by most white men in tropical colonies, and
equally denied by most to others) ; while they were
certain A. and B. and C. would never be able to keep
their places going, because no boy who knew them
would stay with them.
When in doubt about any matter of fact it is an
excellent rule to go and see tor yourself. The classi-
cal example of Mr. Micawber, who wanted to embark
in the Medway coal trade, and therefore made it a
point to go and see the Medway, offered an excellent
I20 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
example. I heard that the small steamer Kia Ora
had been chartered by the Government to go up the
Purari River and visit some of the little-known
delta villages. The Purari delta is expected by all
who know the country to be one of the most impor-
tant, if not the most important, sources of supply in
the future. It therefore became my clear duty to
"go and see the Medway " — so I went.
The visit of the Kia Ora was certainly a happy
chance. The Government steam -yacht Merrie
England is too deep of draught to go up the rivers,
and, in consequence. Government visits to the Purari
had been few. On this occasion His Excellency the
Lieutenant-Governor was anxious to visit as much as
possible of the delta, and so the small steamer, which
only drew about seven feet, aud was not more than
eighty tons register, was to take the place of the
official yacht. I was fortunate enough to be invited
to join the Government party, and accepted very
readily, as the west is still largely unbroken and
little explored, and not at all the sort of place where
an ordinary traveller could go about unescorted.
We travelled from Port Moresby in the Merrie
England^ and transferred to the Kia Ora off the mouth
of the Purari. The distance was not so small as it
looked, and it took two days' steaming to bring us
into the gulf and up to the mouth of the river.
The Purari was only discovered in 1879. Before
that date, so little was known of Western Papua that
it seems to have been possible to overlook a river as
THE PURARI RIVER 121
big as the Mississippi, and not even suspect it was
somewhere in the neighbourhood. At the present
date (June, 1909), the river still remains in great part
unknown. Messrs. Mackay and Little, in the end of
1908, ascended it over one hundred miles further
than Sir William McGregor had done in 1893,
reaching a point where it divided into two main
streams, about two hundred and seventy miles from
the mouth. The river evidently extends for a great
distance further back, but at the spot where the
explorers halted it runs through a high, narrow,
rocky gorge, and becomes impassable on account of
the rapids thus created.
At the time of our visit, early in 1908, only one
hundred and forty miles of the river were known,
and the delta was practically not known at all. Two
Government visits have since been paid to it, adding
on each occasion something to the still very imperfect
knowledge of the delta. It is about five hundred
square miles in extent ; the number of waterways can
only be guessed at, and the population is very much a
matter of guesswork also, as no one knows how many
towns may lie concealed in the inner mazes of the
great labyrinth of rivers.
The trip began unluckily. Steam launches had
been up the river, but no one had ever tried to take a
seventy-ton steamer in, and no one, in consequence,
knew whether the Kia Ora could get over the bar or
not. We reached the river mouth when the tide was
nearly low, and boldly made the attempt. It failed.
122 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
The steamer, though drawing less than nine
feet of water, stuck fast, and it became evident
that we had at least got to spend the day where
we were.
There is not perhaps in the whole world a more
melancholy and depressing piece of scenery than the
mouth of the Purari River on a dull, sunless, glaring
day in the hot season. For miles and miles about
the low dark green line of coast the sea is insipidly
fresh and hideously yellow, with the tremendt)us out-
pour of river water. Steamers can fill their boilers
with the water to a depth of several feet below the
surface, and if no other drink were available, the
Purari water, as it overlies the surface of the sea
a mile or two out, would probably support human
life. It is thick to look at ; there is no trans-
parency in the livid flood, and every ray of light is
cast back into the sky as from a brazen mirror. The
resulting glare is something indescribable. Hats,
awnings, umbrellas, are of no use at all, for one lies
between two surfaces, each almost as light as the
other. One cannot take refuge in the cabins ; they
are appallingly hot. The thermometer in the wheel-
house, which is comparatively a cool place, stands at
something over a hundred. The shore is far away,
and there is no coolness or shade in its low, dark-
coloured flats. From the unseen river mouth huge
dusky trunks and branches of trees come sweeping
past the ship on their way out to sea, and, simul-
taneously, terrific shocks pass through her small steel
STRANDING THE KU OR A 123
hull and shake the simmering brains of her luckless
passengers to jelly.
" How those logs are knocking her about," says
one wretched creature, lifting a languid head from
a lounge that seems to float between two furnaces,
but that is, at least, a degree cooler than the cabins.
Everyone is more or less seasick with the hideous
rolling and kicking of the helpless ship, so there is
an appreciable pause before another unhappy being
answers —
" That isn't the trees — it's the Kia Ora banging
on the bottom ! "
So it is, and so she does for all the rest of that
endless morning. If a tree or two docs strike her,
no one could tell, until the rising tide begins to lift
her from the bottom, and the banging and pitching
ceased. In another hour or two we float oflf again,
and now we are fairly started up the Purari, for here
lies the opening of the river — one of the openings,
that is— and the banks are beginning to narrow in at
last.
In the life of the traveller — perhaps one of the
happiest lives that Providence grants to man or
woman — there are moments of pure delight that
stand out through all the years, as mountain islands
stand out from shining tropic seas. The first sight
of a foreign town — the first day on a great ocean
liner — the first morning in the tropics — can the gipsy
whom the Red Gods call, and have called through
life, ever forget the rare fragrance of those perfect
124 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
moments ? The Red Gods are hard masters. They
ask much, if they give much, and when they offer
the " kingdoms of the earth, and the glory of them,"
they demand the full price asked of old worship,
unmingled and complete. Nor life, nor death, nor
love itself can stand before the power of the Red
Gods of wandering when they call. Let a thousand
and ten thousand gipsy hearts, scattered over " all the
seas of all the world," make answer.
Yet they pay their wages. It is worth having
lived to see some things that most men die without
seeing. And a great tropic river is not among the
least of these.
It is hard to say why the Purari, as one enters the
lower reaches of the main channel, to forge slowly
upwards against the tearing current, through a fever-
smitten solitude, that is deathly in more senses than
one, should be such a wonderful sight. An immense
tea-coloured flood, fully half a mile wide, dotted with
downward-skimming logs, on which the tall white
cranes perch fearlessly — shut in by low swampy banks,
closely set with dense jungly growth, bordered by
stretch after stretch, acre after acre of the melancholy,
drooping, lovely nipa palm, which stands with its root
in the water and the mud, lifting a splendid crov/n of
tall green plumes to the heavy heat-brooding sky —
this is what one sees — no more. If there are strange
birds in the untrodden miles of swamp land, they are
shy of our little steamer and its beating screw, and
do not leave their safe retreats. If there are alii-
UP RIVER 125
gators — indeed, wc know there are thousands — in the
depths of that opaque, swift flood, that keeps its
secrets so well — they never lift a snout or a paw as
we pass by. Only the cockatoos, screaming as no-
thing but a cockatoo can scream, rise from the palms
near the bank and rush far away inland, yelling wrath
and indignation unspeakable.
It is, perhaps, the inner. rather than the outer eye
that sees the wonder of the place. These great rivers
of the burning tropic world have a personality of
their own — a personality that is strong, malign, trea-
cherous ; a force arrayed against the traveller,
challenging him to pit his strength and his cunning
against theirs, with death, in a hundred ugly forms,
as the penalty of loss. More, there is, in some
fashion hard to explain, but easy to feel, something
of the spirit of every great river in every other. It
is not only the Purari, second largest of the many
huge unexplored rivers on the strange island-conti-
nent, that we are going up. It is the Congo, the
mighty Amazon, the guarded, remote White Nile —
all the long, mysterious rivers that in every age of
the world have called to the spirit of adventure and
the love of things unknown, lying deep in the heart
of man. The name and the place may be different,
but the soul is the same.
The afternoon wore on, and we slipped steadily up
the river against the strong current, forced to keep in
the middle by the smallness of our knowledge as to
its depth. The great yellow flood was over half a
126 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
mile wide, in places fully ten miles inland. Here
and there tall melancholy pandanus trees stood black
and weird against the livid sky, and at rare intervals
a few cocoanut palms lifted their plumy heads eighty
feet above the water.
"Shows we're getting near a village," commented
our captain. " There are never any cocoanuts, unless
where the people have planted them."
The words were scarcely out of his mouth when a
loud yell tore the murky air, and round a bend of the
river rushed three large canoes, each containing about
twenty men, paddling at a rate of speed that was
simply amazing. The men wore no clothes, but their
taste in ornament was certainly striking. Every one of
them had a magnificent feather headdress, worn like a
halo,and made of paradise-bird tails, cassowary feathers,
parrot feathers — all vividly coloured by nature in
scarlet, pink, blue, green, orange, and snowy white.
Necklaces of dogs' teeth adorned most of these war-
riors, and armlets of white shell, bands of scarlet
leaves and green or white grasses, strings and strips
of many-coloured bark, added to the general effect of
full dress. The natural expression of these river
gentry was wild and fierce enough, but they had
further emphasised it, to the best of their ability, by
painting nose, forehead, and cheeks in crimson stripes,
and sticking a sort of white pencil or shell, with
pointed ends, through the septum of the nose, so that
the ornament projected on each side, and gave the
wearer a singular resemblance to a tusked wild boar.
PURARI PADDLERS 127
There were some spears in the boats ; there may have
been arrows also, but no firearms, which, happily for
the white resident, the Papuan docs not possess.
Both then, and afterwards, I was much struck with
the speed and skill of the Purari River paddlers.
Their canoes are simply a large hollowed log, without
any supporting outrigger, and a white man cannot
keep his balance in one for a second, so insecure is its
hold on the water. The natives, however, paddle
them, standing up in the canoe, at a rate that would
leave many a racing outrigger far behind. Their
time is magnificent, and the sweep of the paddles,
plunging in and out, and making the water tairly
boil along the sides of the long light log, is a thing to
remember for the rest of one's life.
The men in the canoes — sixty or thereabouts —
greeted our appearance with yells of the wildest
excitement, and at once began paddling their hardest
to overtake the steamer — which, working against the
fierce current right in the middle of the stream, they
did in a few minutes. No steamer had ever been up
here before, and very few boats ; the men hardly
knew what our arrival might portend, and certainly
did not understand the significance of the Union Jack
flying at our masthead, to indicate His Excellency's
presence on board. However, it was clear that they
had no fears, for they did their best to catch up the
ship, and having succeeded in doing so, took a tow
with the utmost enjoyment. Thus we went on our
way, accompanied by the yelling crowd ot painted
128 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
cannibals, into Maipua, the first of the villages we
meant to visit.
Even in Papua, the country of impossibilities, the
sight of Maipua comes with a shock of amazement.
The huge rabis — or men's living-houses and devil-
temples in one, that stand out in inescapable promi-
nence along both sides of the stream, perplex the
mind with a mist of nightmare bewilderment. It is
a curiously disturbing thing to come upon something
so unlike every other object of its kind, that your
mind has no simile to offer, no past experience upon
which the new sensation may stand. The largest
rabi in Maipua is fully ninety feet in height and four
hundred in length. Its shape cannot be described
otherwise than by suggesting that the idea may
originally have come from the form of an alligator
lying full length and open-jawed on the bank. The
gable end, facing the river, runs up into an immense
horn or point, the sides being rounded off in a sweep
that shows considerable architectural skill. Asmal
door gives access to the interior. In front of every
rabi there is the usual Papuan verandah, built high
up on posts, to protect the inhabitants of the house
from wandering alligators.
Smaller houses, all built in the same style, stood
along the bank, each house perched high on piles out
of the swampy mud. The Maipuan lives in mud
almost as much as an alligator, but he does not care to
sleep in it. Logs of wood lie about the swampiest
places, where the youth of the community might be
ALLIGATORS HAUNTS' 129
in danger of disappearing altogether, and the innumer-
able small creeks and inlets that seam the villages
through and through have generally a crossway log, a
moored canoe, or even a light, neat, well-made bridge
to convey the native from one side to the other. As
every Papuan of the coast districts can swim like a
shark, the precaution is a significant one. Indeed,
although we did not chance to see any, there is no
doubt that these swampy places swarm with alligators.
The piles of alligator skulls kept as trophies in the
rabis would prove this if nothing else did.
Sometimes, it is evident, natives do brave the
dangers of the river so far as to swim down it with
the current, taking their chance of an encounter with
the great grey monsters that lurk hidden in the slime.
A Papuan did this some months before the time of
our visit. He belonged to a tribe living some dis-
tance away, and when the people of Maipua saw his
black, frizzy head making its way down the river they
went out in their canoes to see who it mi^ht be.
Finding he was a stranger, they picked him out of
the river, and promptly ate him to teach him not to
come trespassing in their waters.
A stroke of bad luck had knocked me over with
temporary sickness, and I was not able to go ashore
with the rest of the small party when we anchored in
Maipua and the captain proceeded forth to do his
recruiting. Lying on a lounge on deck, not a little
feverish and with the mind in the tense, overstrung:
state that a high temperature brings, I watched the
I30 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
strange sights about me and wondered whether it
could possibly be real. The sky was still a sulky
purple grey, the river gleamed like tarnished brass
against a lowering sunset, the gigantic rabis stood up
black and threatening. The party from the steamer
could be seen ashore standing on the verandah of one
of the houses and holding negotiations that seemed
likely to last a long time with a group of feathered
and painted Maipuans. In the stillness of the almost
deserted ship one could hear from far away the deep,
resounding boom of a native chant — a chant with
something distinctly warlike in its tone : no cheerful
song about the river or the fishing or the gardens,
such as natives used to while away their idle hours all
over the Pacific lands, but a loud, long yell, broken
at regular intervals, coming nearer and nearer to
the ship, and sounding stranger and fiercer as it
approached. At last it came under the bows, and
with it passed by a sight worth going many hundred
miles to see.
Two great canoes had been lashed together and
connected by a platform of canes and small timber.
They were decorated with a perfect forest of fresh
green palm leaves and other foliage, so that the whole
structure looked like a floating garden drifting down
the stream. On the canoes stood a score or two of
natives, gorgeously painted and feathered, but other-
wise absolutely unclad. Their feather headdresses
quivered against the gloomy sky ; their fierce dark
faces, streaked with scarlet and tusked with the nose-
MAIPUA 131
shell, looked half beast-like, half devil-like as they
chanted, open-mouthed and swaying, their loud,
monotonous song. In the centre of the platform lay
a trophy of some kind, so much decorated with leaves
and grasses that it was impossible to say what it might
he. I heard later that it was a newly-slaughtered
pig, and saw no reason to doubt the fact; but it was
clear, all the same, that pig was not invariably the
centre of the ceremony.
In fact, I looked at the raft with peculiar interest,
since it seemed very probable indeed, from the elabo-
ration of the whole affair and the warlike demeanour
of the men, that I was witnessing a cannibal ceremony
minus the corpse. Natives have a way of substitut-
ing pig for man, much as an economical housewife
would substitute margarine for butter on occasions
when the superior article would prove too expensive.
It certainly would have proved very expensive for
the Maipuans in this instance, and they doubtless
knew the fact.
The people on the occasion of this visit were sullen
and not inclined to be civil. Maipua, being low down
in the delta, had been seen by a few white men,
traders, and recruiters, but it was not very well dis-
posed towards them. White visitors interfere with
the simple sports of a native village (such as tying up
a captured enemy over a fire and roasting him alive)
and get in the way of tribal warfare ; and Maipua at
this time was scarcely awake to the fact that the white
man possessed many things it was extremely desirable
132 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
to have. The people were not actively rude, but
they followed our party about in silence, watching
them closely with sullen stares, and kept the women
out of sight — always a sign of hostility.
The captain of the steamer nevertheless was bent
on recruiting some of the unmarried men for the
eastern plantations, and laboured to that end with the
utmost industry. He used to go into one of the
large houses inhabited by young men and sit down
for a smoke. By and by, through his interpreter, he
would ask one of the men if he had any tobacco. The
man would acknowledge rather shamefacedly that he
was out of that essential. " Poor fellow ! " the cap-
tain would say, " I'll give you some," and hand him
over a few sticks. Then he remarked casually that
the boys who worked on the plantations had an allow-
ance of so many sticks a week. By and by he began
again. " Got a tomahawk .? " No, the man explained,
there were only half a dozen in the town, and they
were very valuable things indeed ; he did not hope to
possess one. " Got a calico ? " (waist-cloth). No, the
man hadn't that ; he had only a garment of bark. By
this time he was beginning to feel very low in his
mind; but the relentless captain went on. "Got
fish-hook .'' " No, the man did not own such a trea-
sure, invaluable though it was to a river native.
Then would come the crucial question, "Got a wife.'*"
The Maipuan would nearly shed tears at this. How
could a man without so much as a scrap of calico of
his own afford to buy a wife .''
LABOUR RECRUITING 133
" I tell you what," the captain would say, struck by
a new and brilliant idea, " you come away with me
and go to work for a year on the white men's planta-
tions. You plant cocoanut, you cut down tree, all
the same as you do here. You get plenty-plenty
tucker, meat all the days, biscuit, rice, tea, plenty
tobacco. By and by you go back Maipua, you take
calico, fish-hooks, tomahawks, beads, knives ; you
big man ; you buy wife."
Money was not mentioned, as the Maipuan
scarcely understands the value of coin, and prefers
to think in concrete terms. The prospect proved
attractive to a good many, and there was some ani-
mated talking among the young men. " How many
moons till we get the goods .'' " was the next question.
The captain had come prepared with a knotted string,
which he produced. It had twelve knots, and each,
he explained, represented a moon.
The matter stayed there till the next day, as we
meant to stop overnight. Till morning we lay in
mid-stream, separated by only a narrow channel of
water from two thousand covetous and bloodthirsty
savages, who valued the trade goods stored in our
hold much as the crew of one of Drake's caravels
would have valued the contents of a Spanish treasure
ship on its way home from Eldorado — and who cer-
tainly would not have had the slightest scruple in
spearing and eating every one of our little party ot
ten or eleven whites if they had only known that
we were practically unarmed, and that the mysterious
134 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
smoke-breathing monster which had brought us to
their town was no more to be feared than a whale-
boat. But they did not know ; therein lay our
safety.
Next morning the captain went ashore again with
the rest of the whites. I was obliged to stay on
board, being still on the sick-list. Lying on my
lounge on deck, the ship very still, with only one or
two of the crew left in charge, I took a photograph
or two, and watched the canoes passing timorously up
and down beside the steamer. They were not angels,
these Purari folk, and they did not look angelic.
None too lovely to begin with ; by the time they
had painted and feathered themselves, thrust the
hideous white tusk through their noses, and tilled
their mouths with chewed betel-nut, that looked
exactly like blood, staining lips and teeth a hideous
crimson, they were as devilish-looking a set of gentry
as you might find in a year's wanderings.
The captain came on board later in the day with
a score or two of Maipuans, half-scared, half-excited,
but quite determined to go with the white men and
earn the goods that were to make them so important
in their village. Not one of these untamed savages
but would have to be " signed on " by a magistrate,
according to the laws of the country, before he could
be set to work. It sounded a little absurd, but all
the regulations of the Native Labour Ordinance
have been framed with the view of preventing in-
justice between employer and employ^, and they are
PLANTATION WAGES 135
all based upon good reasons. The plantation hand
in Papua knows before he signs his agreement just
what he is doing, how long his engagement is to last
(it cannot in any case be more than three years), what
wages he is to get, and how and when he will reach
his home again. The employer is obliged to feed him
on a liberal scale, give him blanket, mosquito net,
tinware for his food, and a proper house to sleep in.
No employer or overseer is allowed to strike a boy in
punishment of any neglect of duty — nor on any other
occasion, unless in self-defence. Punishment on a
plantation means deprivation of some luxury, a little
extra work, or (if the labourer leaves before the end
of his engagement) a compulsory visit to a magis-
trate, who will look into the matter, and if he is
satisfied that there has been no just cause of com-
plaint on the boy's part, will sentence him to a short
term of imprisonment in jail.
Wages are usually ten shillings a month, and are
paid at the end of the engagement. They must be
handed to the labourer in the presence of a magis-
trate, and a minor official has to satisfy the magistrate
and himself that the local store does not cheat the
boy of any value for his money. In the Government
offices are to be found huge piles of papers dealing
with the purchases made by hundreds of boys at a
time when being paid off. So many fish-hooks, so
many strings of beads, so many tomahawks and
knives, so many yards of calico, etc. etc. — even, in
some cases, so many bars of soap 1 The Papuan is
136 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
usually much impressed with the wonderful powers
of soap when he sees it for the first time, and is quite
anxious to introduce it to the ignorant people who
have remained at home in the village.
At the end of his engagement the employer has to
return every man to his own home, even if it is four
or five hundred miles away. This is undertaken at
so much per head by the recruiting schooners, and is
not a serious expense. If by any chance the native
should have died during his engagement, the em-
ployer is obliged by law to send the amount of his
wages, in cash or goods, to the man's relations in
his native village.
A man who has once been on the plantations gene-
rally goes back again, sooner or later. He may be
glad to see his own people for a while, and to sink
down into the ways of savagery for a certain time.
But the leaven of civilisation works. He has learned
to want many things that he cannot have in his own
cannibal village ; he has acquired a taste for good and
regular food and undisturbed sleep — two blessings
that are not to be found in native villages — and he
grows impatient with the tiresome stone axes and
adzes, the tedious fish-spearing, the bamboo knives
that will only make one cut before they have to be
re-edged. After handling European tools for a year
or more it is disconcerting to be dropped back into
the Stone Age. And when you are accustomed to all
the glories of red calico tunics, leather belts, and
shirts to wear v/hen the sea-breeze blows wet and
COUNTRY OF THE IMPOSSIBLE 137
chilly, it is hard to go back to scraps of bark and
tufts of leaves. The goods brought from the planta-
tion are shared out all over the district, and do not
last long. The labourer finds himself much where
he was before long — only discontented, which he
never used to be. . . . By and by the recruiter
comes along again, and the first boy he gets is the very
one who was so glad to get home a few months ago.
One might reasonably ask. Is there no risk to the
planter in filling up his plantation with ferocious man-
eaters miles and days away from the nearest white
settlement .'' . . .1 have said before that Papua is
the country of the Impossible. This is another of
its impossibilities. It is perfectly safe, as all ex-
perience proves. The Papuan cannibal, taken away
from his own village, set to work in a district of
which he knows nothing, among men who are largely
strangers to him, seems to change his nature alto-
gether for the time being. There are occasional
fights among the plantation hands themselves, but
nothing serious as a rule. Attacks on the white
masters are practically unknown. It is hard to say
why this is the case, while in the neighbouring
Solomon Islands and in the New Hebrides the planter
often runs serious risk from his men, but the fact is
one that cannot be denied. Something is probably
due to the excellent treatment of the labourer which
the law enforces in the one case and merely assumes
in the other, but this hardly accounts in full for the
extraordinary fact that one white man can live alone
138 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
among five hundred natives, mostly cannibal, order
them about, keep them hard at work, let them see
that he is in possession of countless stores of the very
treasures for which they are painfully labouring, and
yet remain perfectly safe in their midst. The prestige
of the Government and the fear of its displeasure
are both alike strong in Papua, but that again is
scarcely enough to account for the astonishing tame-
ness of the man-eater away from his home. He is
not tame in his home, and not friendly to the white
either ; until within the last two years it was almost
impossible for any white man to venture into the
western river districts except at the imminent risk of
his life ; and yet, at that very time, men who came
from the hostile country made excellent workers.
One must be content to "give it up," as one gives
up many problems in this country of living riddles.
The men we took on board at Maipua and later
amounted to over a hundred. The little ship was
packed to overflowing with them. They might have
risen any night and massacred the whole of the
whites and looted the ship, but they did not, and we
knew that they would not. 1 do not know why we
knew. They might conceivably have attacked us on
shore, when we should have been still more at their
mercy — again, I do not know why. The amount of
ignorance that I accumulated on that journey through
the delta would fill three volumes, and I never ran
out of it all the time I remained in the country after-
wards.
A DELTA VILLAGE 139
Next day we got away from Maipua. I had not
seen anything on shore, not even the interior of one
of the great rabis, but another visit, paid a year later,
made up for the deprivation. On this occasion I
went ashore with the Government party, who had
come up from the Merrie Englafid in a steam-launch,
and saw the principal rabis. The change that had
taken place during the course of the year was very
notable. Instead of sulking sullenly apart and watch-
ing us with suspicion, the Maipuans rushed to meet
the launch, helped us by the muddy river bank,
seized any parcels we were carrying, insisted on
relieving us of their weight, and shook hands with
us by the score. When I broke through a rickety
bridge and got covered with mud half a dozen man-
eaters " ran to help me when I fell," pulled me out
on to the dry land (what there was of it) and pains-
takingly cleaned my skirt with grass and water. The
village was really transformed. Though still un-
civilised in other ways, we heard that they had
definitely given up cannibalism, and that they were
rapidly learning the use of white men's tools. They
made no objection to letting anyone enter the rabis,
and, as I was most anxious to see one, I followed with
the Government party along the river bank to the
platform of one of the largest.
Walking about in a Purari delta village is not an
easy performance. The whole town is built in the
mud — black, thick, ill-smelling slime, half land and
half water, cut up by numberless canals and streams
I40 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
of all sizes. The houses, made of bark and sticks,
are set upon high piles, and connected with each other
by fallen logs laid across the worst of the quagmires,
and by a nightmare kind of bridge constructed of
fragile sticks, which are placed in careless handfuls
upon tall, trembling supports eight or nine feet high.
These structures have no handrail or guard of any
kind, and if you fall off one when nobody is about
you may very well be suffocated in the slime below.
It is said — with how much truth I cannot tell — that
many of the natives of the Purari delta can support
themselves safely in this slime by a kind of half-
swimming, half-paddling motion, and can even get
about in it, like mud-turtles. We did not see anyone
performing the feat ; but no doubt the native prefers
a bridge when it is to be had.
The outside platform of the rabi was very wide
and very rickety indeed, and you could plainly see the
black, deep mud below through the gaps between the
twigs. Our booted and heavily-moving party (all
white people seem to move heavily and slowly com-
pared to the light-footed, naked natives) came very
near breaking through once or twice, but we got
safely to the entrance of the rabi and entered,
one at least of the party full of excitement and
anticipation.
Very little indeed has been known about these rabis
in the past, and even on the occasion of our second
visit we were sure that not twenty white men had
seen before us what we were seeing that day. No
A MAIPUA RABI 141
white woman had ever been inside the rabis, but
there seemed to be no objection to my entering.
Coming out of the dull glare and heat outside, the
dark coolness of the rabi made one draw a breath of
relief. There is no heat in Papua like the black heat
of the delta country — glaring yet gloomy sky ; inky
mud, warm as a witch's cauldron ; palms and lianas
bright with an unwholesomely vivid green, void of
refreshment — it seems as if there were not a single
spot upon which the eye could rest without strain.
Under the huge arching roof of the rabi, however,
there was a pleasant dark-brown light, and something
like a breath of wind seemed to filter through the
long arcade in front of us as we stood in the outer-
most division looking at the strange treasure of the
Maipuans.
The photograph which I was fortunate enough to
obtain on this occasion will give some idea of the
extraordinary appearance of the building. It was
partitioned off into four separate sanctuaries, the
three first being divided from each other by rows of
wooden pillars. The outermost was the largest and
highest; as the building went back it became narrower
and lower, and each division lessened accordingly.
The first contained alligator skulls set in neat rows
on the ground ; pigs' jaws hung in strings down the
pillars ; wooden shields carved into representations of
nightmare faces — faces crab-like, pig-like, devilish,
bogy, goblin, comic, or fierce. The gargoyles of
Notre Dame would seem banal compared with the
142 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
imagination of the Purari artist. I never saw any-
thing like it, except in some of Aubrey Beardsley's
drawings. Indeed, an artist of the decadent type
would find himself thoroughly in sympathy with the
Purari country in general. It is very much like the
sort of thing an unusually morbid impressionist
painter would create after a course of reading selected
from Poe, De Quincey, and the once notorious
Yellow Book.
Besides the shields there were a few spears — wood,
with long barbed points — and a number of belts
made of bark ; also some plaited baskets, evidently
the property of the men who were lounging about on
the floor of the first division. We knew tliat strings
of human skulls generally decorated the posts of the
rabi, as they had been seen on the occasion of the
former visit ; but the Maipuans had evidently re-
moved them when they heard the steam-launch
coming, out of a well-bred reluctance to shock our
feelings. Between the two visits there had been a
punitive expedition into the delta to warn another
tribe against chasing white men and threatening to
eat them, and the manners of the various towns had
undergone a wonderful improvement since then,
although no one had been killed in punishment for
the outrage. The Maipuan people, at all events,
fully recognised the power of the Government, and
were almost effusively anxious to curry favour with
its representatives.
The second division of the rabi contained much
>
THE CANNIBAL TE.Ml'LE
To face page 142.
FOUR DRAGONS 143
the same things as the first, and so did the third, but
in each division the treasures were larger and better
selected — the alligator skulls bigger, the pig jaws
more numerous, the shields and weapons handsomer.
The fourth division we could not see into, as it was
shut off by long drooping curtains of fine fibre ; but
we approached it with extreme interest and curiosity.
The whole rabi seemed designed with a view of
D
gradually leading up to and enhancing something . . .
what ^
We dived through the curtains, and saw.
We were standing in a little innermost room at the
very end of the immense length and height of the
rabi. Here the roof sloped down low, and the sun
came in through the slats of the branchwork at the
back. We could see the contents of the room quite
clearly, and they were .-. .
Four dragons !
Yes, it was certainly worth the elaborate prepara-
tion that led up to the surprise. Whatever one
might guess as to the contents of that inner shrine —
that Unholy of Unholies — one was not likely to have
guessed dragons. And yet there they were, as large
as life, and quite as unnatural as anything ever seen
in the pictures of a tale-book about goblins and genii.
They had a certain resemblance to alligators, a slight
suggestion of shark ; but dragons they were in all
essentials. They were made of plaited wickerwork,
and seemed about nine feet long. They had tapering
tails and small sprawling feet. They had large red
144 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
eyes, made of the rind of some fruit, and immense
gaping mouths which could easily have engulfed a
man. All in all, they were bogies of a very high
class, and evidently held in awe as such, for only one
man entered into the inner shrine with the whites to
look upon them, and he had apparently an official
connection of some kind with the mysteries of the
rabi.
It is extremely difficult to get at the meaning or
use of these images, as the natives are very shy of
talking about them, and take refuge in obvious lies if
too closely questioned. This much is known, that
they are in use as oracles, being consulted before the
natives go out to hunt. The Governor questioned
our guide through an interpreter, and was told that
the Ukiaravi tribe had consulted their images before
going out to chase the white man some months
before, and that the images told them they would
have bad luck, but they had gone all the same.
They themselves had always consulted these figures
before going out to hunt wild pig, in order to know
what success they would have. Of course they never
hunted anything but pig ; it was only the bad people
of Ukiaravi who hunted men (self-righteously).
How did the images answer .''
By tilting on their feet — so many raps for yes, so
many for no, the guide informed us.
(Spirit-rapping of the good old pattern among the
Purari cannibals ! — si je my attendais I)
He told us further that when the men came home
SECRET OF THE RABI 145
from hunting with a load of pig they brought out the
images on the platform in front of the rabi and offered
the pig to them. That " excellent-substitute-for-the-
real-article " idea occurred to me again. The Purari
mind is transparent enough at some times, though at
others dense and dark as the mud of the swamps that
breed it.
We had heard dim rumours of other uses for the
images — ceremonies in which a man, hidden inside
the wicker body, feigned to devour the victim of a
cannibal feast, stabbing him as he was put into the
mouth of the figure. But questions about cannibal
ceremonies may as well be left unasked, for it is
impossible to get replies. All cannibals are shy and
secretive about their anthropophagic practices, and
take refuge from inquiry in blank innocence or the
inevitable pig. The figures were evidently designed
to hold a man, but when or for what purpose we
could only guess.
A good deal impressed, we left the inner chamber
and began the long walk back up the rabi to the
platform. The floor was made of split palm sheaths,
or something similar, and was very elastic, and not at
all secure. The walls, however, were well built of
small parallel branches and split logs, and the roof
was sloped and narrowed with notable skill. Alto-
gether the rabi was fully as remarkable inside as out,
and that was saying much.
The life of a Purari village centres round the
rabi, which seems to be used partly as a club, partly
L
146 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
as a devil-temple. The unmarried men all sleep in
it, and spend much of their time in it. All the men
of the town join in the ceremonies that take place
there from time to time, but what these are no white
man knows. Few whites have visited the district,
and none have had an opportunity of unravelling the
secrets of the rabi. The natives guard its privacy-
most jealously ; Maipua is the only town where
strangers have been willingly admitted into the
interior of the building and shown the images, and
even in Maipua the ceremonial side of the temples is
kept rigidly secret. In Ukiaravi a rabi was destroyed
by the Government to punish the natives for attempt-
ing an attack upon two harmless white traders, and
the images were confiscated. I was therefore able to
secure a photograph of two of these figures, taken at
Port Moresby. They are quite unique as curios, since
no other specimens have ever been obtained, and
none could be obtained unless under similar circum-
stances. No village would sell its images for any
money that could be offered.
In other parts of the Gulf of Papua there are
buildings somewhat resembling these rabis, though
less remarkable. The Resident Magistrates say that
the rabi, in the coast towns, is really a sort of savage
university, where the boys of the tribe are brought
up, taught the use of weapons, and initiated into the
ceremonies of the tribe by the old men. They spend
several years undergoing this educational course. A
man who has not undergone the rabi training is held
RIVER MAZES 147
of small account by his fellows and finds difficulty in
getting a wife. It is a curious point that children of
illegitimate parentage are not admitted.
In all probability the Purari River rabi has much
in common with these. The fiercer nature of the
people, however, no doubt introduces more of the
murderous and man-eating element into the cere-
monies of the rabi than obtains along the open and
better known districts of the coast.
We steamed away from Maipua on the occasion
of our first visit with a large number of untamed
savages, and made our way to Kairu — -or tried to.
But in the Purari delta man proposes and the
river channels do the disposing. Nobody really
knows this marvellous tangle of great rivers, narrow
deep channels, broad shallow creeks, sago swamps,
and mangrove and nipa country, half land, half water.
The chart is a mockery when you really want to find
your way about. It is the most amazing piece of
geography in the world. Your steamer butts her
way solidly up against the current of a river the size
of the Mississippi for half a dozen miles, takes a
crosscut down a creek at right angles to her former
course, and plunges out into another river about the
size of the Upper Nile this time, running parallel to
the last, and not a hundred yards from it. This is
not the direction for our villages, however, so we
take another crosscut and strike yet another great
river nearly a quarter of a mile wide and four or five
fathoms deep. It branches off by and by into two
148 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
large rivers, each big and deep enough to malce the
fortune of an Australian State. We choose a branch
at random and proceed along it for the greater part
of the day, the Papuan leadsman throwing the lead
constantly as we go and calling out the depth, which
is rather too variable to be safe. What a river ! An
unknown and unnamed branch of the great Purari,
but yet a mighty flood, bearing along huge logs like
straws, taking our 8o-ton steamer in perfect safety,
and showing here and there a depth of as much as
seven fathoms. A wonderful but a melancholy place ;
a land where no man lives, where it seems that no
man has come since the beginning of the world.
Thirty, forty, fifty miles we must have gone, and
nothing stirs on those green burning banks but the
stalking crane, no sound but the harsh cry of the
cockatoo breaks the deathly stillness of the dense,
swamp-nourished bush. All the criminals of all
the world might hide here and never fear discovery
— an invading army might lose or conceal itself and
never have its presence so much as suspected. Yet
if the place is desolate, it is not barren. The endless
groves of nipa palm bear eatable if not attractive
fruits, and the sago palm lines the banks with
veritable forests, each trunk a storehouse of food for
a family during almost a year. Even the great popu-
lation of the delta — a population which has never
been more than guessed at because of the careful
concealment of most village sites — cannot use one
tithe of the supply of this most valuable food. No
MAKING SAGO
To face page 148.
KAIRU 149
one who has seen the river people — stout, muscular,
well nourished, and fed from babyhood almost entirely
on the starchy food washed from the inner pith of
the sago palm — can doubt its value as a food.
Why has no attempt been made to use these
forests of sago commercially ? Difficulty of transport
is the chief reason. They are " a long way from
anywhere," and white men could not live in the
deadly swamps where the tree most flourishes. A
good deal might be done by cutting along the outer
edge of the bank, but, with so many other industries
waiting to be exploited, the turn of the sago palm is
not likely to come for a long day yet. Sago, pre-
pared and cleaned, can be bought in large rolls in
many parts of Papua at about a halfpenny a pound. It
is not at all like the sago of the shops, cither in
appearance or flavour, being dark reddish-brown in
colour and of a glutinous, jelly-like substance. Its
nourishing qualities, however, for the old, the sick,
and children are unrivalled.
We found Kairu, I do not know how, and I am
sure the captain did not know how himself. It was
certainly worth finding. Though not so imposing as
Maipua, it was far prettier. The houses of Kairu are
built more in the water than in the mud, and over-
hang the deep green river in quite a Venetian manner.
There were many little side canals running in and out
among the houses, with wickerwork verandahs look-
ing down upon them and trails of leafy liana netted
across their cool arcades. There were bridges, too, of
I50 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
a better pattern than the Maipuan type, crossing these
narrow rivers — in fact, the whole town (a large one,
with a population running into thousands) may fairly
be described as the Venice of the Purari.
It gave one's mind the disconcerting kind of jolt with
which one becomes so familiar in Papua to observe in
the middle of this poetic prettiness of architecture a
solemn row of cannibals sitting on the front verandah
of every large house. They were very much painted
and feathered and very little dressed ; they were as im-
movable as stone, and apparently took no interest at
all in the unheard-of phenomenon of a steamer. We
judged them to be sentries of some kind — not an
unnecessary precaution in this part of Papua.
Here we got twenty or thirty men, and some bundles
of sago, and in the afternoon proceeded twenty para-
sangs — (I beg the reader's pardon) — we left Kairu and
went a few miles down the nearest river, and then got
lost again, trying up wrong creeks and rivers that led
to nothing. The current in the narrower rivers was
very strong, and in consequence every half-hour or
so brought a warning cry from the helmsman, "Look
out 1 " clearing everybody immediately off the deck
and into the nearest shelter, while the ship plunged
her violent way into the bank, carrying off branches
of trees wholesale and strewing the deck with frag-
ments. After she had been backed off the passengers
would come out again and begin hunting about for
insects, which always came on board in thousands on
these occasions. Ants of every kind were passed over
PRAYING MANTIS 151
as uninteresting (would that they had consented to
pass us over in like fashion !) ; grasshoppers were
common ; but now and then something really odd
rewarded our search. A praying mantis was one of
the most amusing. It was a brown stick-like creature
some three inches long, with four ordinary legs and
two long serrated forelegs. Every now and then it
raised itself upright in a kneeling posture and held
up its forelegs devotionally before its face. This pious
action was always followed by shrieks of laughter
from the travellers. Its head, perched on a long
slender neck, was usually drooped on one side in a
manner suggesting extreme weariness of the world in
general, and of its present company in particular. At
times, however, especially when deluded into climbing
an endless ladder of someone's fingers, presented one
after the other, it wakened up to wrath and squared
at the offender fiercely, challenging him to come on.
If the challenge passed unnoticed, it made a fierce
leap at his face, and then, without having inflicted
any damage except a severe blow upon itself, it would
drop back into its languid attitude of prayer and
seem once more to forget the world. As a matter of
fact, this attitude of prayer is its way of catching
smaller insects, which mistake the immobile creature
for a piece of stick and fly heedlessly against its out-
stretched arms.
Another insect of a very strange appearance came
aboard in dozens and scores during this part of the
journey. Most of us had an idea that it was new to
152 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
science (Papua is full of discoveries for the entomolo-
gist, as we all knew), but no one could say for certain.
It was a sort of rough sketch of an insect, from a
quarter to half an inch long, looking like a pinch of
pale green cotton wool oddly fitted out with two
black eyes and six legs. It had no wings, but stalked
or skipped according to its mood. On its back was
surely the oddest appendage ever seen on an insect —
a bird-like tail, fan-shaped and set straight up in the
air. The tail was apparently made of another pinch
of cotton-wool, white this time, and rather carelessly
stuck into place. It looked exceedingly like a minute
green peacock with a white tail (four of its legs being
inconspicuous), and the conceit of its aspect and
demeanour as it strutted along the backs of the seats
was something incredible. No one in Port Moresby,
we afterwards found, had ever seen or heard of the
curious little beast. We were sorry not to bring any
away, but at the time no good method of killing
or preserving them seemed to suggest itself to
anyone.
That night we went aground again, rather seriously,
and remained fast for some hours. We were running
in the dusk across a huge dim lagoon that shone
under the fading sky like a shield of tarnished silver
when the disaster occurred, and the banks were too
far away to give us any assistance in getting off. For
the time being we accepted things as they were,
remembered that the delta was all tidal, and trusted
to the flood to get us away. Meanwhile we left the
THE LIGHT THAT FAILED 153
deck, which was veiled with drifting rain, and went
down to dinner.
Later on, the rain having slackened a little, we
were all sitting on lounges with our feet tucked up,
talking about murders and crocodiles, as one does in
New Guinea, when somebody remarked that we were
in a very lonely spot. It was a place perfectly un-
known to white men, and it looked as if not even a
native had been there since the creation of the world.
There was not a stir on the whole dim face of the
great lagoon, not so much as a fish leaping under the
moonlight ; no sound but the pattering of the desul-
tory rain on the deck. It felt unpleasantly as if the
Day of Judgment had somehow come and gone in
the world outside without our knowledge, leaving us
the last of men in a doomed and depopulated world.
Then, while we were talking and the steward was
going round with the coffee, somebody exclaimed
" Look 1 "
We looked. On the other side of the lagoon, not
more than a furlong or so away, an immense fiery
transparency eighty or a hundred feet high reared
itself into the dark, where a moment before had been
nothing but gloom. It was shaped like a pointed
arch, but the lower part was hidden by thick bush,
and we could not see exactly where it rose.
'* A rabi, and a big one," said the captain. " There
must be a town quite close."
Not a sound came from the direction of the great
temple. The light burned steadily, dim and red, as
154 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
though filtered through some semi-transparent screen.
A huge veil of mats as big as the mainsail of a tea-
clipper is sometimes placed over the front of a rabi
to conceal all sight of the ceremonies within from
passing eyes. We guessed that the strange appear-
ance before us was caused in some such manner.
What devilry might be doing behind the screen only
Satan himself could tell, and none of us wished to
speculate about it.
The vision faded as quickly as it had arisen. In
an instant, as we watched it, the light went out and
the glowing arch vanished as though it had never
been.
For all that, it did not leave the Kia Ora as it
found her. We were no longer in a primaeval soli-
tude ; on the contrary, we had some thousands of
near neighbours about whom no one knew anything
at all, except that they were savages of a pretty bad
kind. Further, we were stuck fast, and could not
get away for many hours. Also, we had no arms to
speak of. In addition, we were loaded with covetable
goods. And there was no particular reason to think
that our score or two of recruits would take our side
in case of trouble.
It sounds like an " adventure," but it did not feel
like one. According to all the canons of literature,
we should have been fortifying the ship against
attack, posting sentries in the crow's-nest, looking up
our one rifle and two pistols, and preparing, if neces-
sary, to sell our lives and our beads and tomahawks
LOST ON THE RIVER 155
as dearly as possible. As a matter of fact, we were
complaining about the quality of the coffee, and
wondering if the rain was going to stop. No one
troubled particularly about the rabi and its inhabi-
tants. Of course, we might have been attacked, but
we did not think it likely, and one cannot afford to
trouble about improbabilities in a place so entirely
incalculable as Papua.
Next morning we got away with the sunrise, and
proceeded to lose ourselves as complexly and com-
pletely as ever a ship and ship's company were lost.
"We steamed for hours and miles and scores of miles
up creeks that led finally to nowhere and had to be
backed out of. We went up big rivers that were not
on the map, and careered along deep waterways where
dry land was distinctly charted. We went round
and round and in and out, all the time seeing not
a sign of life or even a cultivated tree. We sat
down on shoals and got warped off with infinite
difficulty ; we smashed into the banks with the force
of the current at the corners times without number,
and carried away large sections of the surrounding
forest. At last it became perfectly evident that the
steamer was " bushed " (Anglic^, lost in the bush).
This was the unexpected again. In Australia you do
not get bushed with a steamer, nor do you go across
country in one ; but anything may happen in Papua.
The Kia Ora, under these trying circumstances,
behaved as other things do that have lost their way.
She sat down half on, half off a convenient shoal.
156 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
and bellowed loudly with her siren. It had no result
whatever. She then got off the bank, pulled herself
together, and made a last effort to strike, at least, the
path by which she had come. In this she was not
successful, but she found something — the Pacific
Ocean — and immediately trumpeted her discovery
like a pleased elephant. It was now clear that, if we
did not exactly know where we were, we knew where
we were not.
A forlorn hope in a boat was then sent out, duly
provisioned and watered, and after the lapse of half
a day returned with the cheering report that the coast
mission station lay only a few points away on the
port bow, and had furnished a pilot. With the guide
(a native who knew something, not much — no one
knows much about the delta) we started back for the
river-maze again to look for another village, and
succeeded in finding one — we were not at all particu-
lar by this time as to what we found or where we
found it. Its name, we learned, was lai. The people
were an ugly-looking lot, and seemed terrified of the
steamer at first, trembling and crying out when she
let off her whistle. By and by, seeing our people
come ashore, they gained confidence, and, keeping
tight hold of their bows and arrows, came in a
perfect flotilla of canoes round the ship, staring,
muttering, spitting gory betel-nut, and all the time
keeping an eye on the captain, who was busy recruit-
ing ashore, followed by about half the men of the
village. The women did not hide themselves, but
SAGO BEATING 157
none of them ventured near the ship ; they kept
away by themselves, and did not even stop their
monotonous sago-beating work to look at us. Very
few white people had ever been seen in lai, but you
cannot be curious if you are miserable, and no one
who looked at the degraded, brutalised, smileless
faces of these poor women could have doubted the
fact that they were utterly wretched. They were a
shade lower than anything we had yet seen in the
delta or elsewhere. They had not even the grass
petticoats worn in other districts ; save for a small
strip of bark, they were naked. Some of them wore
the white tusk thrust through the nose, which we had
noticed in the men of the river tribes, but not in the
women. It looked, if possible, even more repulsive
on a woman's face than a man's.
The sago-beating in which they were employed
takes up most of a woman's time in the delta country.
The men fell and bring in the palms, and there their
task stops. With crude stone adzes the women
hollow out the trunk, loosening the pith, and collect-
ing it in the hollow of the gutted tree. They then
pour water into the trunk and wash out the starchy
matter of which the pith is full, letting the latter fall
on the ground. The starch or sago is dried in the
sun and tied up in bundles, which are neatly packed
in leaves. The work is slow and tedious. On the
recent Mackay exploring expedition the carriers made
sago for the food of the party, and it was found that
they could not make more than two days' supply in
158 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
a whole day's work. In all probability the Purari
woman does not get through so much.
At lai, rather to our astonishment, there was quite
a furore to engage, and we went away with the Kia
Oras accommodation pretty severely taxed — " the
connection of which with the plot" did not appear
until some days later, when we heard that the lai
warriors had been in mischief and were very anxious
indeed to get out of the way of possible vengeance.
If anyone ever deserved retribution, they did. They
had asked eleven of the people from a neighbouring
village to come over and spend a happy day with
them. The people (who certainly ought to have
known their neighbours a little better) accepted the
invitation. They put on their dogs'-teeth necklaces
and their parrot-feather haloes, painted their faces in
fresh black and red, and arrived in canoes, prepared
to have a good time. There was a good time ; but,
as things turned out, only the laians had it. They
also had the visitors — boiled, with sticks of sago.
A return call was confidently expected before long
from the survivors, and the laians, innocent and
guilty alike, were very anxious to be " not at home."
For this reason a score or two of the party-givers
came away with us, hoping, no doubt, that any local
prejudice would have time to subside before they
came back from the plantations. The actual murder-
ers did not enlist. They were captured by the police
some time afterwards.
CHAPTER V
Among the rubber plantations — Prospects of Para — The gold-mine of
the soil — Land that goes begging — The cost of rubber — About
the cocoanut — A sisal hemp plantation — Ficus r'lgo — A splendid
sugar country — Timbers still untouched — Copper and gold.
T7ROM lai we made our way out into the open sea
without any further disasters, and took our way
Port Moresby-wards with our cargo of plantation
hands. All of them on arrival were taken up to the
magistrate, who satisfied himself that they understood
what they were going to do and how much they were
going to get. If any one of them at this stage of the
proceedings had changed his mind about going on
with the affair, the recruiter would have been obliged
to take him back to his home at the earliest oppor-
tunity, and meantime provide him with food and
lodging. None of them did change their minds, how-
ever, and in the course of a few hours the whole
hundred had affixed their marks to the contract which
the recruiting agent had already signed. It was dis-
covered about this time that there were several men
more than could be accounted for — in fact, that we
had actually been carrying stowaways ! The extra
hands were as anxious as the others to sign on, and
went away quite pleased with themselves.
159
i6o THE NEW NEW GUINEA
Well, 1 had " seen the Medway," and that was
more than any one of the planters who anticipated
shortage of labour had done. What conclusions were
suggested ?
This only — that the alarm was the purest of myth.
Since that visit a year and a half has passed, and the
plantations that were to have been long ago " held
up " for want of boys are still working full pressure.
The great unknown and uncivilised West has enough
men to supply the plantations ten times over for
many years to come. I do not wonder that those
who have never seen the dense population of the
rivers should imagine — ^judging by the more thinly
peopled districts of the East — that the supply might
have a limit. But no one who has seen the West,
and been actual witness of the readiness which the
natives display to enlist, can think that there are not
" hands " in plenty for all Papua.
The eastern districts supply very good men, better
in some ways than the "Kiwai," as the western people
are called. They are less quarrelsome among them-
selves, and seem to learn the plantation work quicker.
The intellect of the western, however, appears to be
capable of a higher development in exceptional cases. I
have seen a coflFee plantation left under the sole charge
of a "Kiwai" overseer, who attended to the weeding,
picking, pulping, and drying of the coffee without
any regular help, though the owner used to make a
visit to the place once in a few weeks. On another
plantation not far from this, the native labourers
A NEW SYSTEM i6i
under charge of a Kiwai got in the whole crop of
coffee without any direction during the absence of the
owner, who had always seen to it himself before.
It would be a great deal too much to say that the
Papuan is as satisfactory, or as cheap, as the Cingalese
or Chinese worker ; but his wages (ten shillings a
month) are not high, and he serves his turn well on
the whole. The importation of foreign labour is for-
bidden by the laws of the Papuan Government, so,
for good or ill, he must be made the best of.
On one of the plantations a new system is at
present being tried with very good results. It has
been recognised for some time that there are draw-
backs to the custom of taking away a large number
of the young men from a village, sometimes for years
together. Some of the women are left without their
husbands, and quarrels and murders often occur in
consequence ; others remain unmarried, and the popu-
lation does not increase as it should. The workers
themselves often grow discontented at the absence of
their women, and do not sign on for a second term,
though well enough contented with the work and
pay. To remedy this one planter is putting up
married quarters for his men, and enabling them to
bring their wives with them free of expense. Ground
for yam and manioc growing is given them, and
rations provided free for the wife while the first crop
of native food is being raised. Each couple is given a
neat little separate house, built by the carpenter of
the plantation. The wife is not asked to work unless
M
i62 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
she chooses, but if she cares to take a hand with light
weeding, mat and basket making, gathering crops, or
other temporary labour, she is paid by the piece, and
so are the children if any of them are old enough to
help. It is hoped that in this way permanent villages
of skilled workers will be gathered about the planta-
tions and the expense and trouble of recruiting much
lessened. On the plantation referred to the manager
has actually taken the step of presenting the boys
with sufficient " trade " to buy a wife, provided they
bring their wives with them to stay out their engage-
ment. The offer has created unprecedented excite-
ment, and the consequent demand for wives has
almost caused a rise in the market. This is easily
understood when one considers that a good many of
the " boys " recruit almost solely with the object of
accumulating wealth enough to purchase a wife at the
end of their term of labour.
I wanted to see this plantation, so I took advantage
of an opportunity that presented itself later on, and
left the Merrie England one morning very early in
a whaleboat towed by a launch. It is rather incon-
veniently situated, being twelve miles up a river,
but nevertheless the country immediately round
seems to be popular, as seven other plantations are to
be found in the same district.
Through water-forests of nipa palm, under tower-
ing mangrove trees a hundred feet high, the ugly,
useful little steam-launch panted her way mile after
mile. Sometimes we crossed great shallow lagoons
PARA RUBBER 163
where a good look out for sand-banks had to be kept ;
sometimes we glided along through dense overarching
shade in a stream deep enough to float an ocean liner.
There were no banks to this river ; the trees sprang
straight up out of the stream after the strange fashion
of New Guinea, and one could see the sparkle of
dark stagnant water far in among the depths of the
surrounding forest. It seemed as if there had been
a huge inundation, burying all the land, and only-
allowing the trees to emerge. Very still indeed was
the whole weird tangle of forest and river through
which we threaded our way — these rivers are always
still as sleep, running as they do sheltered and hidden
at the bottom of their great canons of mangrove,
where not a breath of wind can stir the palms and
the trailing, suffocating liana creepers. There was
only one obvious thing to do — go to sleep until the
plantation was reached ; so I did.
Three hours later we got to the landing-stage,
a rough, strong platform of logs, with a " corduroy
road," also of logs, leading up from it towards the
plantation manager's hut. The place is interesting
in this land of brand-new plantations, being the only
one where rubber is being tried on a fairly large scale.
Eight thousand acres have been taken up. At the
time of my visit six hundred were cleared and
planted with Para rubber. It looked rather a deso-
late scene, as the whole six hundred acres was in one
large bare block, covered with a raffle of decaying
branches and black half-burned trunks of trees.
i64 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
among which the slender young saplings of rubber
were scarcely noticeable. Another year or two would
see a beautiful park of many shady avenues take the
place of this wilderness, but only the eye of faith
could see anything attractive about the plantation as
it looked early in 1909.
One of the assistant managers, in the absence of
the head, took our little party round and explained
with enthusiasm all that had been done. It was
evident that he loved every straggling rubber-stump
and each feathery little seedling like his own child.
The " nursery " almost moved him to tears ; and in
truth it was a pretty sight, with the hundreds of
bright green seedlings clustered together in beds and
the taller plants set neatly in hedges beneath the
shelter of the surrounding forest. A good many of
the saplings had attained the height of fourteen feet
in fourteen months from the sowing of the seed.
The soil of this district is like most Papuan soils,
rich enough to act as a natural forcing-house on any-
thing that is planted in it. Rubber is a very greedy
tree, and cannot be grown without plenty of rain,
plenty of sun, plenty of the richest constituents in
the soil — in fact, unless " done well " in every way,
it will not do you well. If you can satisfy its de-
mands, however, it will make you wealthy in a very
few years. Here are some of the figures put briefly.
A hundred acres of rubber costs about a thousand
pounds to clear and plant, including every possible
expense, and leaving a margin of a hundred pounds
RUBBER PROSPECTS 165
or more for contingencies. The weeding and upkeep
of the plantation for six years, until the trees are
ready to tap, will cost another fifteen hundred, if the
owner manages himself. If he employs a manager,
he will have to pay him about three hundred a year,
which adds eighteen hundred more. Assuming that
the owner does his own managing (always the best
plan if possible), the plantation will have cost him
about two thousand five hundred pounds by the
time it begins to pay back. He will also have had
to keep himself, but if he lives on his plantation the
expense of this is small.
In the sixth year the trees, at a low estimate,
should give a pound of rubber each. At five shil-
lings a pound, eighty-six trees being planted to the
acre, this is equal to ^2150 — very nearly the whole
of the expenditure already. In the next year the
yield should be doubled, and later on it will, under
ordinary conditions, rise as high as eight pounds
a tree — possibly much more. An income of seven-
teen thousand a year, from an original expenditure of
not much over two, should be good enough to please
the most exacting.
Will the present price of rubber keep up ? There
is every reason to suppose that it will, as the demand
constantly increases. But even if it falls considerably,
there will still be a large profit. It has been calcu-
lated that when, or if, rubber is procurable at three
shillings a pound, it will pay street paving contractors
to make very extensive use of it. In that case the
1 66 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
demand for paving work will be enormous. Any-
thing over a shilling a pound is profit to the grower.
There is another word to be said about the matter.
All these calculations are based on what has been done
by rubber planters in Ceylon, the Malay States, and
other well-known colonies, as it is not yet six years
since the first of the rubber trees (those in the
Astrolabe plantations) were set out. But there is
good reason to suppose that Papua may do better.
It is the natural home of the rubber tree. For a
good many years, off and on, a certain amount of
rubber from the wild trees of the country {Ficus
rigo) has been irregularly sent to the home and
colonial markets, and has always fetched high prices.
Now the Haevia Brazi/iensis, or Para rubber, which
is of late being planted, is much superior to the
Ficus rigo, which in this country seems to equal
the Para in others. The inference is that the Para
will do better in Papua than it has done anywhere
else.
So far as experience goes, it carries out this suppo-
sition. The manager of the plantation I visited had
come to Papua from Ceylon, one of the chief rubber-
growing countries of the world. He was of opinion
that his plantation looked better and promised better
than anything he had ever had under his hands before.
The rapid growth of the young rubber was phe-
nomenal, and it did not seem to be suffering in any
way from its quick development. It must be re-
membered in this connection that all the Asiatic
LAND OF RIVERS 167
countries have been inhabited for centuries by civi-
lised, industrious peoples, who have fully understood
the value of the soil and taken all they could get out
of it. Papua, on the contrary, has been in the hands
of absolute savages of the lowest kind. They know
nothing of agriculture, except so far as concerns the
raising of a minimum of easy crops of vegetables
and fruit, and the ground that has already been used
for this sort of farming bears about as much relation
to the virgin soils as a biscuit might to a large dining-
room table. Further, the soil of Papua is very
probably richer in itself than that of any other
British colony, owing to the local conditions of con-
stant heat, large rainfall maintained by very high
mountains, dense vegetation, and numberless rivers.
It is indeed a land of rivers. On the plantation
I was visiting there are so many rivers, large and
small, that they are simply known by numbers —
" Creek " number one, number two, and so on.
Water carriage is easy everywhere in the low country ;
even the plantations that are many miles inland can
always have a river to act as beast of burden. In
the mountains you must use mules, which are costly,
but then the mountain climate is perfect, and that of
the low country is not, though by no means so bad
as it has been represented. Each district has its own
advantages and its own drawbacks.
On these lowland plantations life is much the same
as in the mountains, with this difference, that com-
munication with Moresby or Samarai is quick and
1 68 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
easy, being carried on by the plantation launch or
cutter. Food is largely supplied by the shooting
boys, who spend their time tramping the bush with
a shot-gun and an allowance of cartridges, stalking
wild pig, wallaby, pigeon, duck, and miscellaneous
birds. Most kinds of English vegetables — lettuce,
cabbage, carrots, radishes, etc. — can be grown on the
plantation with little trouble. There are many
tropical vegetables which are very good of their
kind, such as yams, sweet potatoes, pumpkins,
chokos, aubergines, manioc, and which help to make
a variety. Bananas and plantains, which are a variety
of cooking banana, will in any case be grown for the
labour. Cocoanuts are most useful in the tropical
cuisine, and can be obtained elsewhere. Fish are to
be caught in most of the rivers. Fruit can be grown
in any quantity — pineapples do rather too well,
having a tendency to " take charge " of the place if
not restrained : pawpaws (a kind of tree-melon)
spring up like weeds, and granadilla, which is cer-
tainly the queen fruit of the tropics, as well as
passion-fruit, not much its inferior, can be trained
over trellis work near the house to add to the beauty
of the surroundings with their lovely flowers and
leaves. Oranges, lemons, and limes grow wild in
many places, and can be quickly raised where they
do not. On the whole, the planter lives well in a
simple way, and his food costs him as nearly as
possible nothing.
Houses are generally built of native materials out
UUliniNC. A I'l, AN I i:u'S IIOUSK
To face page i63.
A PLANTER'S HOUSE 169
of the bush at first, as a wood and iron bungalow
costs several hundred pounds, and the other, if built
by plantation labour, need not cost more than fifty.
These houses of thatch, bark, and split branches arc
quite comfortable and weatherproof and very pictur-
esque. They harbour insects, however, rather more
than is convenient and need a good many small
repairs ; for which reason the prosperous planter
generally orders himself a bungalow of wood and
corrugated iron from Sydney when he feels that he
can afford luxuries, and settles down in a house with
glass windows (which are never closed), an iron roof,
a boarded verandah, and (if he has a wife) a drawing-
room full of cane and bentwood furniture, framed
photographs, and mats. The sitting-room is quite
certain to be decorated with native clubs and arrows
arranged in trophies on the walls, stone axe-heads,
alligator-jaws, swordfish swords, huge clam-shells,
pearl-shell necklaces, head-dresses of coloured feathers,
and other Papuan curios. There will be saddles and
bridles on the back verandah, and samples of hemp
or rubber or coffee — un pen partout. There will be
half a dozen home-made canvas stretchers and some
mosquito nets and blankets stowed away somewhere
for the accommodation of any unexpected guests who
may happen to sail or ride in and demand a lodging.
Nothing more is necessary ; a Papuan planter house
can put up an extra dozen without feeling it at any
time. Most people sleep in the open air by preter-
Qwz^^ and the verandah of even the smallest house
lyo THE NEW NEW GUINEA
can easily be made into a comfortable dormitory for
as many as you may please.
At the present time the tendency of settlers is to
take up land in a district where they are sure of a few
neighbours, such as Galley Reach, which has eight
plantations, large and small, or Sogeri, in the Astro-
labe, which has three. This is very natural, but
restricts the planter a good deal in his choice. Some
of the very best districts in Papua have not yet been
so much as inquired after. It would be a great
advantage to the colony and to settlers themselves if
they could come in parties and take up a good extent
of country among five or six friends. This would
avoid the complete isolation which new-comers natur-
ally dread, and at the same time would open up
excellent country which is at present being neglected.
It will scarcely be believed, but is nevertheless
true, that land of the best quality, lying close beside
the towns, still remains to be taken up. While stay-
ing at Samarai I spent a day walking in the bush to
gather some personal impression of what yet remained
in the way of " plums " for the enterprising selector.
The tale of that day is worth telling in a chapter
about plantations.
I had been staying on Samarai for some weeks, but
was busy with other work, and had (like most people)
taken it for granted that at the present stage of the
country's development all the good land lying close
up to the largest town in the Territory must neces-
sarily have been secured. Samarai is built on a small
LAND GOES BEGGING HERE 171
island some two miles from the mainland of Papua,
and is surrounded by very beautiful scenery of hills
and valleys sloping down to the shores of the many
bays and inlets that indent the coast. From the
verandah of the hotels you can almost count the trees
on the shores, and can see every little clearing and
every patch planted with native food as clearly as if
you were beside them.
" I suppose all that is taken up long ago.''" I said
vaguely one day, hanging over the verandah railing
and looking out at the splendid view across the
harbour.
" All what ?" asked the resident, who was lounging
In a hammock-chair close at hand.
" That land in sight of Samarai, on the mainland.
I wonder why they don't clear it."
" Some of it's native — not much. The rest isn't
anybody's — most of it."
" What's the matter with it ? "
" Nothing that I know of."
" Then why does no one apply for it .'* "
" What for .? "
" To plant — land only half an hour from the steamer
wharf ! "
" Oh— to plant! Yes, somebody has taken up some,
1 believe — a few acres somewhere to grow something,
I forget what."
" Don't you think it will be worth a good deal of
money by and by.''"
" I don't know. It never was worth any that I
172 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
remember. Soil ? Oh, yes, I suppose it's all right.
But nobody wants it."
" Why in the name of common sense don't
they ? "
" Well, come to think of it, you can't plant for
nothing, and we're none of us millionaires here."
The argument seemed sound so far as it went. It
appeared worth while, all the same, to take a boat
across to the other side and see what there was to be
seen. Guessing from previous experience what that
might be, I was careful to put on hobnailed boots and
a dress that had seen so much service as to be inca-
pable of further damage. It is not in silk attire that
one must walk the bush country of Papua.
The boat landed myself and a friend on a narrow
strip of shore backed up by primaeval forest country
standing on its hind legs — the usual conformation of
the bush. A small red scratch ran through it. This
was called the track. 1 did not call it a track : what
I did call it at various times during the day that
followed I should prefer not to repeat. It was almost
entirely composed (like the diet of a fasting saint) of
roots and water, and you used your hands as much as
your feet in getting along it. After a mile or so of
this rough going we came out into a clearing where
there was a little house built of native materials and a
white man moving about in the open. This was the
pioneer of the district — the only man who has made a
settlement in that part of the coast.
Mr. S greeted us very hospitably, and offered
/'/;,'/,' ;;■. Whit ten.
A I'Al'UAN IIIC.II ROAD
To lace page 172.
UNCLEARED LAND 173
to guide us to a hill some miles away, where we could
get a good view of the surrounding country. His
own little clearing — but a very few acres — was on
a modest, not to say a minute scale, and nothing was
yet planted. Want of capital was the handicap here,
as in other cases. But Mr. S hopes to be able
to put in some rubber by degrees, and he is as
enthusiastic about the possibilities of the surrounding
country as if he were a squatter owning hundreds of
thousands of acres.
It is hard for people who have never been out of
the civilised countries to realise the difficulties of
moving about in absolutely untouched tropical lands.
Every yard of the way must be made, and the
making is of the roughest kind. When you face
the edge of a clearing you are confronted by a wall
of forest that does not indeed look quite impene-
trable, but that is nevertheless as complete a barrier
as a brick wall. It Is not all composed of huge trees
— the growth is too dense for that — but of moderate-
sized trunks and saplings for the most part, knitted
and laced together with inconspicuous little creepers,
many of them thorny, that must be cut through
before you can set one foot before the other. Fallen
logs, half-fallen logs, slanting broken boughs, holes
and pits where dead roots have rotted away, still
further block your progress. A " track " in country
still unsettled means simply a part of the bush trom
which the worst obstacles have been removed, more
or less. The logs lying crossways at a height of four
174 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
or five feet, all filled up with rubbish, have been
taken away ; those that can be scrambled or stepped
over are left. Some of the small trees have been cut
down and most of the slanting branches removed. It
is now possible to proceed along a footing of roots
and slippery clay, clambering over a log now and
then, and dodging branches every few yards, walking
through a stream when you come to one and follow-
ing its bed wherever the water is shallow enough,
climbing up hills that are almost perpendicular every
few minutes with caked dirt on your boots and
despair in your heart as you realise that the next
hundred yards will wrest from you in one rapid
down-plunge all that you have painfully gained in
the last half-mile, and avoiding as best you may pit-
falls everywhere laid for the unwary foot by loops
and snares of root-fibre. This you will be told is a
track.
When a district is cleared and opened out, and
constant trafHc of carriers, mules, and horses begins
to pass along, the miry bottoms are filled up, the
trees kept permanently cut, and log bridges built
over the gullies. I have seen astonishingly good
roads up in the mountain districts made by the
workers of a plantation on a spot where only a few
months before the worst of " tracks " used to ex-
asperate the unfortunate traveller. The Government
spends every year a certain amount of money on
roads, but the funds available for this purpose are
small, and at the present time almost every planter
CLOSE TO SAMARI 175
has made, or is making, his own roads. It is not
a very serious matter after all when one has already
undertaken the job of clearing the forest off hun-
dreds of acres of land ; and once made, a very little
work will keep the roads in fair order.
After three miles or so of track scrambling we
reached a tiny native village, standing on the top of
a sharply pointed hill. Here, Mr. S informed
me, I could get a view of the surrounding district
and see what there was to be had.
The view was pretty but not enlightening : a sea
of dark green tree-tops sparkling after recent rain ;
heights and hollows filled up and covered by billows
of leafage ; land somewhere underneath, no doubt,
but no visible sign of it. Mr, S , however, was
enthusiastic in his praise of the whole district — all
close to Samarai, all within sight of the sea if the
tree-tops were not in your way, all the richest of soil,
all well watered (I could answer for that, and so could
my clothes). There was no gold thereabouts, he
added apologetically, as if he felt that it was an un-
pardonable omission on the part of someone — the
creeks had been prospected, and there was not so
much as a colour. But there were two or three
other things that would repay investigation. Did
I see that tree with the orange-red bark ? It was the
kind of bark that would make excellent paper with
a little treatment. There was a great deal of good
brick clay about the district, and he had seen plenty
of ironstone. There was forty acres of sago all in
176 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
one plot not very far away ; it was good sago
country. On the whole, an excellent district, and he
wondered that no one but himself had taken up land.
I went back again in the afternoon, very wet and
dirty, but satisfied with the day. If I were taking up
land in Papua I should certainly select it on the coast.
The coast lands are as good as any others, and the
advantage of easy access in a country of such irregular
surface is too great to be neglected.
But one could imagine the new settler — especially
if he is just out from home — being struck with despair
as he sees his newly acquired estate for the first time.
A dark, wet, gloomy, silent forest, impenetrable as a
wall, slimy underfoot, dripping overhead — it takes
the eye of faith to see in all this promise of future
prosperity and comfort ; to realise that the hideous
soil is almost pure leaf-mould, generations old and
full of fatness ; that the encumbering trees are in
many cases valuable timber, and that most of the
sopping, spongy wet will pass away when the land is
laid open to light and air. . . . The pioneer earns
his prosperity dearly enough ; still, here as elsewhere,
all things come to him who can afford to wait.
Rubber is by no means the only culture to be
recommended, although it is one about which much
has been heard. Copra is preferred by a good many,
and it certainly has its advantages. Copra is the
trade term for the dried kernel of the cocoanut. The
demand for this product is steady and safe and not
much subject to market fluctuations. It is very
A COPRA PLANTATION 177
largely used in the composition of some of the best-
known soaps in the world, and is also much in
demand for cocoa-butter, oil, oil-cake, and other
manufactures. Little or no skill is required in its
preparing, since that is simply a matter of cutting
and drying the nuts. The work of planting and
weeding cocoanut palms and preparing copra is one
that the native takes to very easily, as he is already
familiar with most of it. Six years is the average
time before the trees come into bearing ; they remain
in bearing for something like seventy or eighty.
Half a ton of copra an acre is safe to reckon on ;
good trees well looked after should produce much
more when ten or fifteen years old. The present
price of copra sold in Papua is £1^ a ton. It has
been on the increase for years past, and there is no
reason to suppose that it will be less in future.
A plantation of a hundred acres, therefore, after six
years should begin by producing about £joo yearly,
and will eventually be worth almost double as much.
Its first cost will depend very much on the district it
is in, as clearing expenses vary largely. I have seen
a fine plantation that was cleared and planted for less
than £2 an acre ; but the price is generally more.
Local contractors will undertake any kind of clearing
and planting for -(^6 an acre ; and no doubt a good
profit is made out of this.
The truth is that it is hardly possible to give
precise figures as to expenses that will provide for
all conditions. Most planters keep accounts rather
1 78 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
loosely, and not all are willing to tell what their
profits may be. It can be generally said about copra
that it is as safe and simple a thing as a man can
undertake, and that it is pre-eminently the culture
for the settler who wishes to make a future provision
for his children. The uses of the cocoanut are so
many that there is no reasonable possibility of its
being driven out by chemical manufactures. An
estate in going order will always sell well if the owner
wishes to dispose of it, and it takes less money to
keep up than almost any other kind of plantation, nor
does it go to pieces if altogether neglected for a few
years.
The item of working expenses is another that can
hardly be figured out precisely without actual condi-
tions as a guide. Some planters find that ^150
a year, exclusive of manager's salary, will keep a
plantation of a hundred acres going ; others place
the figure a little higher ; one puts it a good deal
lower. -There is nothing to do during the six
years of waiting but keep the place weeded ; and
in some districts labour of a casual kind, quite
suitable for such work, can be had for seven shillings
a month.
This six years' waiting is the principal trouble with
the two great cultures of Papua, rubber and copra.
At first sight, sisal hemp and other quickly paying
plants seem so much more profitable that one wonders
why anyone ever undertakes the slow-growing cocoa-
nut or Haevia Braziliensis. But it must not be for-
CATCH CROPS 179
gotten that these two trees make a life provision, and
something more, for their cultivators, whereas hemp,
cotton, etc., only last a short time. If one does not
care to keep on an estate indefinitely, the copra or
rubber plantation sells for a high figure, since, once
made, it is made for a generation or more, and will
go on producing money beyond the life of its makers.
This is the real value of rubber and copra.
The interval of waiting is of course a serious diffi-
culty to small capitalists. " Catch crops," however,
can be made use of to lessen the expense. There is
a good market for maize in the Territory, and two
crops a year can be produced almost anywhere — in
some cases three or four. Bananas, which bear in
fifteen months, have not yet been grown commer-
cially in Papua ; but there is no reason why they
should not be cultivated in the coast districts, as the
monthly steamers can take them to the Australian
markets without transhipping. Peanuts and millet
pay well in the New Hebrides, and should do well in
Papua also if tried. The number of possible catch
crops is large, but the nature of the country would in
most cases limit choice to one or two. With good
management and economy, the planter should be able
to keep himself and his plantation going by catch
crops during the whole of the six years. As regards
rubber, there are several kinds of temporary crops
that actually benefit the young tree, since it demands
a good deal of shade.
The native rubber of Papua, Ficns rigOy has hardly
i8o THE NEW NEW GUINEA
received the attention that it deserves. It has some
disadvantages, the chief of which is that it takes a
year longer to come into bearing than the Para, and
that it does not at first produce so much rubber,
though what it does produce is quite as valuable.
But it can be grown in the " dry belt," where the
climate is bright and comparatively cool almost all the
year. The country is open and grassy, and clearing
is extremely light. This dry belt, which extends for
about a hundred miles along the coast near Port
Moresby, and is only a few miles wide, is eminently
suited to the Ficus rigo. One planter has put in a
good many acres, but as this variety of rubber does
not bear till eight years old, there has been no oppor-
tunity of seeing what can be done with it on a large
scale. The trees on this plantation look extremely
well, and require little care. They are easier to plant
and rear than the Para rubber. In the eighth year a
Ficus rigo gives about half to three-quarters of a pound
of rubber, and goes on increasing in yield till it is
fifteen or twenty years old, by which time a healthy
tree should be producing as much as seven or eight
pounds. The life of the tree, judging by the wild
specimens, is very long, some rubber trees of great
but unknown age being quite a forest in themselves,
and covering many hundreds of feet with the spread of
their immense branches.
The advantages of native rubber over Para may be
summed up in a few words. It is somewhat cheaper
to plant (exact figures cannot be given, as the only
A SEA VILLAGE i8i
native rubber that has been planted was worked
together with other products). It flourishes in a dry,
bright climate and in open country, where the Para
rubber could not be grown. It is native to the Terri-
tory, and therefore more resistant in all probability to
any form of parasite or disease than Para would be.
Its disadvantages are : eight years before tapping,
as against six years, and a slightly lesser return than
the Para when first tapped.
I am enabled to give some pictures of the native
rubber, as I visited the plantation where it is being
grown together with sisal hemp. Several planters
have taken up this last product, which seems likely
to become very popular. There is no long waiting
for returns, as the hemp bears in two and a half
years, and the prices obtained are very paying.
The plantation is in the "dry belt," about three
miles from the sea.
A beautiful little sea village is built far out in the
water near the landing-place. It belongs to the
natives of the coast, and is inhabited by several
hundred people. The houses are not connected in
any way with the shore, but stand out by themselves
in the clear green water some hundreds of yards
from the beach. They are built on strong piles about
ten feet high, with ladders reaching up to the doors
and verandahs hanging clear out over the cool salt
waves. We had no time to visit the village, but one
could easily imagine how fresh and pleasant the
houses must be, especially in the trying " between
1 82 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
seasons " period, when the trade-wind has knocked
off work and the monsoon has not yet begun, the air
is dark with heat, and the mosquitoes rival the
Plagues of Egypt in virulence. The architectural
skill shown in these houses is remarkable. Although
sheltered by the reef from actual storms, they must at
times experience a good deal of bad weather ; yet all
the piles stood straight and firm in the water, and
none of the roofs seemed tilted. One wonders how
the supports were ever driven deep enough by a
people entirely ignorant of all but the roughest tools.
One wonders also what the mortality from drowning
may be among the babies : the moated granges of
Old England, which must have been such a source
of trouble to anxious mothers, were nothing com-
pared with the water villages of Papua.
Once landed, we had an exceedingly enjoyable walk
up a grassy avenue three miles long leading to the
plantation. The avenue was bordered with graceful
young cocoanut palms, tall flamboyant trees alight
with geranium-coloured blooms, white-flowered aca-
cias, kapok or silk-cotton trees, and the beautiful
frangipani, with its dark-green, lance-shaped leaves
and perfumed creamy flowers. Grassy plains stretched
away to left and right, hemmed in by distant hills,
while in front, as the long avenue unwound, the
distance began to show blue-green with the slopes
and levels of the planted hemp. It was a beautiful
scene, and none the less lovely for the fact that all
this picturesqueness had cost no more than the
A HEMP PLANTATION 183
making of a country lane in England. In the opulent
tropics, the man who at home would have to put up
with a semi-detached villa and half an acre of clayey
garden, vacant six months out of twelve, can be master
of an estate more beautiful and better laid out than a
nobleman's park.
We passed through the hemp plantation before
reaching the house — a pretty bungalow on the peak
of a hill, reached by a little avenue of huge hemp
plants set in borders. Sisal hemp is in appearance
like the aloe that flourishes in tubs in the courtyards
of so many continental hotels. Set out in the end-
less rows of a plantation, it is stiff, quaint, and
picturesque, and its glaucous blue-green colour gives
a certain coolness — often illusory enough — to the
landscape.
The planter told me that about ^1500 would clear,
plant, and keep up a plantation of 100 acres, in-
cluding house, living, wages, etc., until the plants
bear ; but it would be well to contemplate something
beyond this sum for the unforeseen, such as illness,
journeys, etc. The life of the hemp plant for crops
is five or six years ; it is ready for cutting in the
third year from planting. The supply is kept up by
occasional planting in between the first rows.
Looking at the results the figures certainly seem
attractive, as over ^1500 can be expected for the first
year's crop, and there will still be four or five more
crops to come on, while the capital expenditure has
been but ;^2000. The preparing of the fibre is
1 84 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
not a complicated matter, and the small amount of
machinery used by this plantation was at the time
of my visit being driven by a Papuan native quite
successfully.
It is only fair to state that in hemp as well as in
rubber the inquirer sometimes finds theory ahead of
fact in Papua. No one has yet made cent per cent
on his capital out of either Haevia Braziliensis or
Ficus rigo. The figures given are based on calcula-
tions of what small plantations worked by men of
small means have done and on the excellent appear-
ance of the coming crops on the larger and newer
plantations. If a score or two of fortunes had been
made in the country (as they certainly will be made
in the next few years) it would be widely known and
extensively " rushed," and anything that the present
writer could tell would not have the advantage of
novelty. It is hardly necessary to say that the
wildest estimates as to possible profits on hemp,
rubber, cocoanuts, etc., are current in many parts of
Papua, but the sensible settler will take these for
what they are worth. The reality seems good enough
for any reasonable person.
A good many small islands, mostly about the
eastern end of Papua, have been taken up from time
to time by various people. There is something
perennially attractive to the Briton in the idea of an
island of his own. The longing finds its expression
in endless songs, in half the stories that delight the
youth of the country, and in the rush of purchasers
CORAL ISLANDS 185
that always follows the rare advertisements of islands
for sale about the English or Scottish coasts. Settlers
anxious to find an island home in the Pacific are
known to every Australasian steamship company, and
some of (hem find their way to Papua.
There is plenty of choice for the would-be island
king about the immense coasts of the Territory, but
one cannot conscientiously recommend island life in
Papua for anyone but the hermit or the crank. The
coral isles of the poet's dream are indeed here, but
the South Sea atmosphere is not. The attractive,
well-mannered native of Polynesia is here replaced by
the Stone Age savage, or by no one at all, many of
the islands being quite uninhabited, and a good many
of them are so far removed from the mainland as to
be useless to anyone who does not want to cut himself
off from his kind for life.
But of these islands I shall have more to say later
on.
So far, the planters of Papua have confined their
energies to the production of coffee, copra, rubber,
and hemp. There are many other tropical products
that would pay equally well, but all is so new and so
untried in this first colony of a colony that the
industries of the place can scarcely be said to have
found their feet.
Cotton has been experimentally tried and proved
to be of very fine quality. A number of spices and
drugs have been grown in the Government nurseries
with good results. Few planters so much as think
1 86 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
of drugs or spices, but they have their good points,
not among the least of which is comparative smaUness
of bulk. This saves a great deal of expense in
transit, and in the case of certain drugs even allows
the grower to dispose of his produce by parcel
post.
In the near future there can be little doubt that
sugar will take a place superior in importance to that
of rubber, copra, or fibres.
Papua is pre-eminently, by nature, the sugar
country of the south. Sugar-cane grows wild all
over the Territory, from sea-level up to 6000 feet of
altitude ; and its quality, even in a natural state, is
so high that planters in Fiji and Queensland con-
stantly send to the country for cuttings. One agent
lately sent out by a well-known sugar-growing com-
pany succeeded in obtaining over 200 varieties of
cane, nearly all of them new. A visitor who had
been in charge of a large Queensland plantation gave
it as his opinion that much of Papua was ahead of
the famous Johnson River sugar-growing country,
and would produce record crops if planted. In the
north-eastern division there are hundreds of square
miles of open, well-watered country, fit to grow the
finest cane in the world, that have never so much as
been seen by a white man, with the exception of the
Resident Magistrate, who patrols the district at inter-
vals of a few months. None of it is occupied or
needed by the natives, and most of it is within easy
reach of the coast. This district is sure to be among
SUGAR-CANE 187
the first taken up when the sugar industry gets a fair
start.
Sugar, however, is one of the things that do not
concern the individual planter. It requires capital
running into many thousands to start a business of
this kind, and companies are needed to furnish the
money. Nor need the canny speculator hope to
"grab" large districts in the sugar country and hold
them until they become valuable, for the land laws
of Papua have been framed with the object of nipping
just such brilliant ideas as these in the bud. Land
cannot be held unless it is improved ; the speculator
who tries to block large areas for his own purposes
will find himself obliged to make way for someone
with less desire for the " unearned increment " and
more inclination towards hard work. Nor can any-
one take up more than a limited amount of land,
10,000 acres being the most allowed to one person.
If these regulations are at times harassing to the
company promoter, especially to the speculative type
that makes its profits at the expense of the share-
holders, they are protective to the individual worker,
and it is, after all, the man with a moderate capital
and a hard-working disposition who does the making
of new countries.
Several companies have taken up land in Papua for
rubber, copra, and hemp-growing, and are understood
to be doing very well. The Government is not " down
on " the company promoter who is prepared to de-
velop his holding in a reasonable time and to
1 88 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
acquiesce in local labour conditions and laws. New
countries need the company as well as the private
individual to set the wheels going. But it is certain
that in Papua, at all events, there will be no money-
made by locking up lands, whether it is an association
or an individual that attempts to do the locking.
This is a detail that carries small significance to an
Englishman. It carries much more to an Australian,
since the greatest social difficulty that Australia has
at present to face is this very problem of locked-up
lands. Large areas of highly productive land taken
up by the early settlers were held for generations as
sheep and cattle runs or left unused, and have now
to be bought back by the Government at high prices
and subdivided among a crowd of eager settlers.
This is a difficulty that only affects some of the
States, but nevertheless the inconvenience and expense
have been serious enough to make Australians shy of
incurring a repetition in the new colony where all
things are possible. The new land laws of Papua are
the work of the present Lieutenant-Governor, who
belongs to New South Wales, a State that has suffered
more than others from " locking-up " troubles.
In a chapter devoted to the industries of Papua it
would be impossible to omit the timber trade,
although nothing has been heard of it as yet outside
the colony. Indeed, one might almost say that so
far the timber trade does not exist. A good deal of
land has been taken up and some clearing done, but
sawmills have not at the time of writing been intro-
TIMBER OF PAPUA 189
duced (with the exception of two small mills used by
the missions), and it is scarcely possible to make
money out of Papuan timber if it cannot be cut up
on the spot, as freights are rather high. Still, the
hopes of the industry are rose-coloured. The amount
of good timber is unlimited, most of it is very easily
got at, and the sale even in Papua may be depended
on as large and constant.
One of the Government Forest Inspectors of
Queensland was lately sent up to Papua to report on
the timbers by the Commonwealth authorities. His
account, compiled after many months of travel and
investigation, spoke in the highest terms of the value
and variety of Papuan woods. Among those specially
noted were sixteen varieties suitable for beams,
girders, railway waggons, or other positions in which
a heavy strain is encountered ; ten suitable for car-
riage building ; fifteen suitable for joinery, lining,
and flooring ; and fourteen woods of great beauty,
suited to furniture and cabinet work. The cedar of
the country is exceptionally well fitted for boat-
building, and one of the canoe woods, the " ilimo,"
found up to five or six feet in diameter, would prob-
ably be valuable to yacht builders, from its notable
lightness and strength. The " mahia," the '* ohabu,"
and the " oma " are also good boat-building woods.
The " kasi-kasi," " porou," " mariau," and "togara"
have the very valuable property of being incorrodible
in water and resistant to the attacks of marine insects.
They have been used for piles with much success.
I90 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
Very many of the hardwoods are reported as suitable
for sleepers and street paving blocks. There is plenty
of cedar to be had ; the sandalwood is almost used up,
but some still remains. Woods resembling mahog-
any, rosewood, satinwood ; woods that are dark red
or deep yellow in colour, full of natural oils, hard
almost as iron, and so heavy as to sink in water, fine
and firm of grain as box, light and tough as pine, are
to be found among the treasures of the forests. There
are also many woods that are known to produce dyes
and gums, but it is not yet known what their com-
mercial value may be.
At the present time, anyone who likes is at liberty
to cut and carry away these valuable woods for prac-
tically nothing. The charge made by the Govern-
ment for the use of timber lands — los. per loo acres
— is only intended to prevent anyone taking up more
land than he can make use of. There is a regulation
obliging every lessee of timber areas to put up a saw-
mill within a reasonable period ; but this is what the
timber speculator would naturally wish to do in his
own interests.
It is impossible to say what any man might make
out of the almost untouched timbers of Papua,
because no one has as yet made a fair trial. But
certain facts speak for themselves.
Australian timbers are being so rapidly worked out
that material for building is in some cases beginning
to run short. It must be remembered that wood, not
brick or stone, is the chief building material of all
^^
FORTUNES WAITING 191
Australasia outside the towns, and that this creates an
enormous and constant demand. Papua— at one
point only ninety miles from the Australian continent
— is in an excellent position to satisfy this demand.
At the present moment, however, sawn timber is
actually being imported into Papua from Australia at
very high prices for building purposes, because as yet
the local supply cannot be got at. Without sawmills,
the immense virgin forests arc as useless as so much
grass, although they lie right along the course of all
the great rivers, in many cases so close up that the
timber-getter has nothing to do but cut his trees and
let them drop into the stream, where they will be
floated to the sea.
This curious condition of affairs — a country rich in
timber buying it at a high price from a country which
is beginning to run short — cannot in the nature of
thinofs last much lon^rer. There are several fortunes
waiting for the people who first bring about a change.
In the present quickly developing state of the country
all the sawn timber available will be taken up by local
needs for a good while to come ; but there are still
greater possibilities in the future, when the huge
forests are really opened up and Papua becomes, as it
undoubtedly will, the chief source of supply for the
paving, carpentering, and paper-making needs of the
Australasian world.
The gold mines of Papua have had much to do
with the history of the colony. It is an open ques-
tion whether Papua owes them more of good or ot
192 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
ill. On the one side, it may be said that the miners
and prospectors drew attention to the country,
that they have done a great deal of valuable exploring
work, and that they provide the greater part of the
revenues. On the other must be set the count that
the enormous death-rate on the fields in the days of
the early rushes — a death-rate not by any means all
due to climatic influences — gave the country a bad
name, from which it has not even yet recovered. If
Papua has been, and is, described as " The White
Man's Grave " — if insurance companies fight shy of
it and Government clerks going to take up a place in
the Port Moresby offices are seen off by weeping
friends who count them as good as dead — it is very
largely due to the horrors of the early mining days.
In the eighties and nineties men died like flies in the
steaming forests of Woodlark and up the wild, inac-
cessible rivers of the mainland, hunting for the gold
that could not bring them a minute's longer life once
the fever fiend had laid good hold of their enfeebled
bodies.
Want of proper food, absence of decent lodging,
neglect of precautions against chill, against mosqui-
toes, against sun and rain, had quite as much to
do with the terrible mortality among the early
miners as the fevers themselves. The general public,
however, did not discriminate, and the tale of horror
that came down from the Yodda, the Mambare, and
other well-known fields were applied equally to Port
Moresby, where white people enjoy excellent health.
MINING INDUSTRY 193
or to Samarai, from which fever has been completely
weeded out.
Health on the goldfields is now quite satisfactory.
Fever, it is true, is not unknown, but it is not of a
bad type, and will probably disappear when the food
supply is improved.
But the effect of the early death-rate will hamper
the country for many a long day yet. The public is
loth to relinquish its horrors, and a New Guinea
where sensational and startling fevers do not carry off
half the population every year seems flat and uninter-
esting compared with the lurid country of the stay-at-
home imagination.
The mining interest is to the full as important as
the planter interest at the time of writing. Papua is
a country exceedingly rich in valuable minerals. Gold
has been sought, and successfully, for more than
twenty years. Copper exists in large and paying
fields. Other minerals are known to exist, but have
not been prospected for. Coal has lately been dis-
covered. The mining industry, however, is severely
handicapped by want of capital. All the gold hitherto
found on the mainland is alluvial; reef gold is known
to exist, but prospecting is costly work in a country
of extremely rugged conformation covered with dense
forest. At all the mining centres one hears the same
story — excellent possibilities, but not money enough
to attain them. The beds of some of the rivers are
known to contain gold in large quantities, but the
strong currents and numerous rapids have prevented
o
194 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
any attempts at dredging, which is at best a costly
process. Gold has been taken in moderate quantities
from Woodlark Island for many years, and of late a
small company has done some reef mining. There
remains a rich underlying bed, which is, however, too
deep to get at without serious expenditure, and no
one seems anxious to expend. New Guinea is too
far away ; it has a bad reputation ; there are plenty
of established and well-paying mines in Australia. So
the capitalist says. In the meantime the gold lies
there ungetatable.
There were 162 white miners in the country
during 1907-8, employing over a thousand native
labourers (in Papua the miner does not do his own
digging, but employs a number of indentured "boys").
The value of gold cleared was only about ;^52,ooo,
but there is good reason to think that at least as
much again was actually obtained. This sum was of
course very irregularly distributed, some men making
a great deal, and others again very little. Mining in
Papua is rather a costly business. The best paying
fields are for the most part many days' journey into
the interior, and the interior cannot be reached with-
out a train of carriers, an outfit of tents and camping
apparatus, and a supply of food enough for a good
many people during the march out and back. Much
of the loss of life among the old prospectors was due
to the fact that they insisted on treating New Guinea
like Australia, and started out up the deadly
Mambare River or into the Louisiade bush with
COPPER FIELDS 195
scarce any outfit beyond the traditional swag and
billycan.
All said, however, the miners continue to make a
fair living out of their occupation, and many of
them believe that it can only be a question of time
until rich discoveries are made. A gold rush to
Papua is no new thing, but the next (so the miners
say) will be better justified than those of 1889 and
1896.
The reports of the copper fields arc, of course,
"very encouraging," after the manner of mining
reports all the world over. There is, however, solid
fact at the back of the encouragement. Not to trouble
the non-mining reader with technicalities, it may be
briefly said that the copper in Papua is of a quality
that pays excellently in Australia, but that does not
pay in the country for want of smelting plant. No
matter how rich your ore may be, it is scarcely a
profitable business to ship it at high rates of freight
to another country and pay someone else a good deal
to extract the metal when the whole operation could
and should be done at the mouth of the mine. By
the time these lines are in print, however, it is prob-
able that the want will have been remedied.
The copper fields are within a few miles of Port
Moresby, upon the one good road which the country
boasts. Many claims have been taken up, mosdy by
people who cannot afford to work them, but a good
deal more remains to be found and taken posses-
sion of in the surrounding country. A curious and
196 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
certainly an easy method of prospecting has been
employed by one or two residents of the country.
The Papuan native, like most savages, is very ob-
servant, even of things that he does not understand.
If you give him a lump of copper ore and promise
him a pound of stick tobacco for any more that he
can pick up about the hills or in the bush, he will find
copper for you, should there be any within tramp-
ing distance of where he lives. Some of the Port
Moresby natives, who have keen trading and money-
making instincts, have in this way learned to prospect
for themselves, and more than one native has made
a good deal out of his mining rights by selling them
to white speculators.
Take it all in all, the mineral wealth of Papua is
enough to furnish very good opportunities of money-
making to any man with a thousand or two to spend,
but it is more immediately profitable and safer to
develop existing discoveries than to go prospecting
after new ones. This is not likely to deter the man
who loves change, chance, and adventure from going
gold-hunting. The possible prizes of the gold-
hunter are great, and of adventure and discovery he
will have enough to satisfy Marco Polo himself.
There is not a miner in the country who cannot tell
you of a gold-bearing district that is still unpro-
spected — perhaps actually unvisited, its auriferous
qualities being guessed by the appearance of the sur-
rounding country. The Government, which has
rather more than enough to do with its small income
PROSPECTORS' DIFFICULTIES 197
as things are, yet manages to squeeze out a few
hundreds occasionally for prospecting work and to
keep a reward standing of £1000 for the discovery
of a new field. To go and hunt up possible gold-
fields in Papua costs anything from ^^500 or ;^6oo
upwards after landing at Port Moresby or Samarai.
Experienced prospectors, wise in everything but the
art of keeping their gold when they find it, are
always ready to guide a trip of the kind. Prospect-
ing and exploring are inextricably mixed up in Papua;
the gold-seeker is sure to find a new tribe or two,
a mountain that nobody has seen, a branch or source
of some great river — one cannot say what the sur-
prises of the interior may be. As a rule, the
prospector passes these things over with simple con-
tempt. He has no use for them — you cannot eat a
mountain range if your boys are short of food, and
rivers that deposit no gold upon their shores are mere
nuisances. . . . When one thinks of the medals
and the fellowships and the lectures and the inter-
views claimed and given by men who have followed
up a new bit of an old river through a valley that not
quite everyone knows, or climbed an unknown in-
ferior peak of a mountain whose main crest has been
worn by the feet of travellers for generations, one
wonders at the modesty of many of these miner-
explorers. Nothing stops them in the search for
gold. There is a perpendicular cliff" 300 feet high,
shutting in the end of a river valley in the far
interior, which is garlanded to this day with the
198 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
decaying vestiges of a ladder made of wild vines and
lawyer cane, put up by a hardy band of pioneers who
wanted to get to the end of the valley and did not
see why a trifle of that kind should prevent them.
It is on record that the ladder remained in its place
for a long time, being used as a road by miners
travelling to and fro, and that a certain prospector,
travelling thither from easier countries, was exceed-
ingly grieved when he saw it, insomuch that he
turned back and went home again, declaring that
a place where they called that thing " a road " was no
place for him.
So much, then, for the money-making possibilities
of Papua. If some of my readers have found this
chapter a little dry I do not apologize to them, since
it is open to every man to skip what he does not care
for. Others, I know, will have read it with interest,
for the pioneering spirit yet runs strong in the English
race, and keys to open the doors to a wider and freer
life than that of our own safe and comfortable little
islands are eagerly sought by many.
CHAPTER VI
The wizard and the crocodile — Training for sorcery — The Great Fly
River — To Thursday Island — The pearl fishers — " Walking alone
in the depths of the sea " — Wicked Goari-Bari — Willie and the
soap — The scene of Chalmers' murder — A bit of boiled man —
The rescue of Chalmers' bones — The incredible West — Very
nearly an adventure — The hysterical man-eaters — Order of the
Imperial Shirt — The loyalty of Kaimari.
TN Papua, when you see two or three residents
talking together, you may safely guess that one
of three subjects occupies their attention — crocodiles,
sorcery, or the Merrie England.
I do not know why one talks so much about croco-
diles. The number of white men known to have
been taken by them could be counted on the fingers
of one hand. They are very seldom seen, although
there the waters of rivers and seas alike are infested
with them. They do not damage the crops, and
seldom eat a labourer. Nevertheless the interest
taken by the white resident of Papua in the crocodile
is little short of passionate. In the absence of daily
papers, the latest crocodile gossip is retailed from
mouth to mouth, and the movements of any well-
known specimen are canvassed like those of British
royalty. The twenty-footer that came ashore at two
in the mornino: under the houses of Hanuabada
199
200 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
village, glittering with green phosphorescence, and
grabbed a native dog ; the monster that was seen
tearing a dead mule to pieces in the shallow of the
swamp by the shooting butts ; even the black oily
streak that was seen crossing the bay yesterday morn-
ing, are discussed with every variety of detail. A
crocodile is seen in the distance, out at sea, swimming
along with a pig in its jaws, and the whole of the
capital musters on the jetty, rifle in hand, as though
the safety of their verandahs and homes (one does
not have hearths in Papua) trembled in the balance.
The crocodile is fired at a dozen times and very
much frightened, drops its well-earned dinner, and
dives below. Half a dozen amateur Tells claim the
credit of the deed ; the dead and mangled pig comes
ashore in the afternoon of the next day, rather
" high," and the armed native constabulary banquet
upon it. . . . The incident provides gossip for a
week.
If crocodiles are not the subject of conversation,
the latest cases of sorcery no doubt occupy the field.
Sorcery is in the very air of Papua. Your cook-boy
will probably explain an unauthorised absence by the
excuse that the sorcerer who lives next door put a
spell on him so that he could not go out of the
house. The little brown lady in a brief frilled skirt
and nothing else who does your washing will tell you
quite calmly, when you ask how she came by a
deformed shin-bone, that she met a " spilit stop long
bush " (apparition walking in the forest), whom she
SORCERY 20I
judged to be a disembodied s(3rcerer of great power,
since his mere look at her bent her leg almost in two
. , . and there is the leg to prove it. The highly
intelligent mission-trained youth who " does out the
rooms" in your friend's bungalow will give notice
and retreat to his palm shanty in the bush because
his master showed him a conjuring trick of the six-in-
a-box-for-a-shilling kind, and he is quite certain that
the Taubada (chief) was practising sorcery on him.
It is not by any means a joke, this question of sorcery.
The Government recognises it as a crime, and pun-
ishes it by a long term of imprisonment — ^justly, too,
since the sorcerer is almost always a murderer as well,
and the practice of sorcery, with its attendant petty
tyrannies, cruelties, and extortion, does more than
anything else to keep the native in a state ot
savagery.
The Psychical Research Society would have its
hands full in Papua. Nearly all the well-known
though rare phenomena which exercise the attention
of the members in England flourish in wild luxuri-
ance among the Papuans. Spirit-rapping, as I have
already said, is common both among the Purari tribes
and elsewhere. Ghosts are constantly seen, being
variously described as men, as indefinite " debil-
debils," and as white or blue lights hovering above
the surface of the ground. The sorcerers claim power
to raise the dead, and the natives are quite convinced
that they do. In connection with this it may be
interesting to give an illustration.
202 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
I had been some weeks in Port Moresby, and was
anxious if possible to see something of the sorcerers'
powers. Two retired practitioners of wide reputa-
tion were induced to come up on to the verandah of
the house where I was staying and give an exhibition
of their feats, being first assured that the Government
had granted leave. They said that they would kill
something and bring it to life again — a dog or a cat,
or anything I wished.
I suggested a lizard, knowing the cruel nature of
the Papuan, and judging that they were less likely to
mis-handle an insensitive cold-blooded reptile than
a lively dog. The sorcerers — two middle-aged men
with dark sly faces — disappeared among the cook-
house buildings at the back, and returned with a
small lizard, recently killed, and still warm. It
seemed to have been put an end to by a blow, as it
was not outwardly injured. The sorcerers squatted
down on the floor with the lizard lying between them,
and began stroking it with their finger-tips, much as
if they were trying to mesmerise it. They continued
doing this for some time, muttering to themselves
and breathing hard. At the end of a few minutes
they sat up and declared the charm would not work.
It was not their fault, they said — they had not done
any sorcery for a long time, and were out of training.
To be sure of success they should have trained for a
week at least.
How did they train ? I asked.
They practised various ceremonies, it seemed, and
GINGER MAGIC 203
they ate a great deal of wild ginger. There was nothing
like ginger for giving you magic powers.
The cook-boy said that this was undeniably true, for
if you tied ginger on your gun when going out to
shoot wallaby or alligators, it was much more likely
to shoot straight. Also, when they wanted to make
their dogs run very fast they put ginger down the
animals' throats.
The connection between cause and effect here did
not seem to require magic to help it out ; however, I
let it pass without comment, as I wanted to hear
some more. But the cook-boy had a roast of kangaroo
to attend to, so he went away, as the amusement of
the morning seemed over.
The sorcerers gathered themselves up, accepted
a gift of tobacco, and went off to the village. It
seemed as if the experiment had been a complete
failure, and yet
And yet — I remembered that the two old villains
looked genuinely and unmistakably disappointed
when the lizard did not revive. Nothing was clearer
than the fact that they thought it would. I did not
suppose that the Papuan sorcerer possessed any power
over the mysteries of life and death, still
What about anaesthetics .'' The tale of the man
who was killed and brought to life again by the local
sorcerer is one of the commonest *' yarns " of a New
Guinea village. In nineteen cases out of twenty it
is probably untrue. There may be something in the
twentieth, and that something may be the use of a
204 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
native anaesthetic, not known to the people in
general.
In any case, the incident added to the material
available for the three subjects of local conversation.
And this brings me to the third — the Merrie England.
If no one is discussing alligator gossip or retailing
spicy bits of sorcery, the Government steam yacht is
sure to be the subject of conversation. The regular
mail boats, which come up from Australia at intervals
of about three weeks, do not furnish much food for
talk, as everyone knows just what they are going to
do. But the Merrie England may go anywhere and
do anything. She runs down the coast to punish a
cannibal raid in the " Wild West " ; she goes to chase
a Jap schooner that has been poaching about the pearl
fisheries ; she takes stores to a far-out station, or lays
buoys along a dangerous passage in the coral reef
near a port, or runs suddenly south to Thursday
Island with despatches, or brings a party of explorers
to their '*jumping-ofF place" and bids them good
luck and good-bye. She is a man-of-war, a passenger
steamer, a cargo tramp, a Court of Justice, and a
Government House. Trials are held in her saloon,
meetings of the Legislative Council — Papua's Parlia-
ment — take place there ; the Governor and his
modest suite of two private secretaries, six native
boatmen, and a couple of Papuan valets spend more
time on the yacht than in the house with the Union
Jack flying above, outside Port Moresby. The Merrie
England carries mails, brings news, transfers officials,
AT DARU 205
and incidentally gives everyone something to talk
about most of the time — an incalculable boon in
an isolated colony with mails three weeks apart.
She is a handsome little ship, some 190 tons
register, built originally as a sailing yacht and later
converted to a steamer. She has been twenty years
at work about the Territory, but is still going well.
It was inevitable that I should make her acquaintance
sooner or later, and indeed it was not many weeks
after my arrival that I found myself in one of her
pretty gilded and looking-glassed cabins, bound on
a long trip West.
Part of that trip has already been told. It was
from the Merrie England that I went up the Purari
delta to study the labour question. After our return
she went on down the coast, across the Gulf of
Papua, to Daru.
Daru, the port of entry and seat of Government
for the Western Division, is not an interesting place
in itself. At high tide it is a jetty, a handful of man-
groves, a grass street, and half a dozen tin bungalows.
At low tide (and in defiance of all the rules of
physical geography tides seem to be oftener out than
in at Daru) it is a black swamp emblazoned with
crabs and weeds, the town an indefinite addendum
somewhere in the distance. I have heard Daru
called pretty, but it is a poisonous-looking prettiness
at best — flaming toadstool-coloured croton bushes in
rows, grass and bush much too green, soil too black,
sun too brilliant for anything with a hide inferior in
2o6 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
resistant qualities to that of a basking alligator.
Daru is not healthy, and not unhealthy. There is
some malaria there, but nothing like so much as one
might expect from the surroundings. Indeed, all
over the western and gulf districts Papua gives the
lie to quite a number of theories of hygiene. Bevan,
the explorer of the eighties, long ago noticed with
astonishment the excellent health and fine physique of
the delta tribes, who live literally in a sea of rotting
swamp, where, by all the laws of ordinary hygienic
science, they ought merely to die.
It is the surroundings of Daru that lend the little
town any interest it possesses. In the first place, it is
situated on an islet at the mouth of the Fly, and the
Fly is one of the largest and most important rivers in
the world. Like every other Papuan river, it is
known only for a certain distance. In this case the
sphere of the explorer extends over 500 miles, but
no one knows where the stream rises, and the upper
reaches, though navigable to steamers of a good size,
are very seldom visited.
There is no white settlement along the Fly. Land
there is in plenty, lying a very little way back from
the river, and not apparently used by the natives,
except in certain districts, where the great extent and
regularity of the Papuan banana groves has excited
the admiration of all the travellers — they are not
many- — ^who have visited the great river. Sugar
country is found along the Fly inferior to none in the
world. There is open grass country a few miles
%
rhoto II'. Il'/iitten.
A w I HOWS \\Ki:i>s: i i,v ki\i:r
To face page 206.
THE GREAT FLY 207
beyotnl the banks in many districts. The river pro-
vides a matchless water-way for the conveyance of
produce to market, and the lower part of the estuary
is within a day's steam of Australia. Still, for all
that no one expects to see the Fly country settled
yet. It is too far away.
There are no white people at all in the huge
Western Division, save two Government officials and
half a dozen traders and missionaries. The country
has an ill reputation, scarcely correct as regards health,
but as regards the natives something truer. You are
not in the comfortable plantation country, with its
mail steamers and its known and mapped divisions,
and its useful, tractable natives, when you get into
the Wild West. This is Papua very much in the
rough, as yet.
No one can doubt, all the same, that this mighty
river will be a highway of traffic some day. We did
not visit it in the Merrie England. We did not even
see it, though we were lying in its estuary a night
and a day — for the estuary is over eighty miles wide,
and you are quite out of sight of the shore, anchored
in the midst of this great river mouth. But you can
infer the nearness of the Fly when you look at the
yellow flood of fresh water on which the steamer is
floating, and you are not surprised to hear, amazing
though it seems, that the Fly River pours forth every
twenty-four hours into the Gulf of Papua enough
water to give every man, woman, and child in the
world an allowance of sixty gallons twice over, sixty
2o8 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
gallons being the accepted standard in places where
water is plentiful.
From Daru and the West we ran over to Thursday-
Island — only eighteen hours, even at the seven-knot
pace of the leisurely Merrie England — and found our-
selves once more in Australian territory.
If you wish to find Thursday Island on the map,
you must follow the huge peninsula of North Queens-
land with your eye right to the end, and mark down
a tiny speck lying close to the edge, among the big
islands of Torres Straits — Mulgrave, Banks, Prince
of Wales, and Horn. Thursday lies close to Prince
of Wales' Island, and is almost dwarfed out of sight
by its neighbour, but it is much the more important
place, all the same. All the big islands are almost
uninhabited ; little Thursday, however, has a town
and a barracks and a fort and quite a number of call-
ing steamers. It is the centre of the great pearling
industry of North Queensland, and keeps a good-
sized fleet of pearlers constantly at work.
The place looked like nothing in the world so
much as a small, bright, painted view inside a glass
paperweight when we came up to it in the full morn-
ing light. The clear air cast a crystalline sparkle over
the green central hill, and the red and white town
climbing up its slopes, and the fiery blue sky and flat
blue sea. Thin black masts of sloops and schooners
stood out like sharp pen-strokes against the hill and
the town in rows as thick as rushes. The fleet was
laid up in the harbour, for there was a strike on
I'hoto W. li'kitnii.
1 i.v rivi:k folk
To face page 2o3.
THURSDAY ISLAND 209
among the lessees of the boats, and no one was going
out to dive. In consequence we saw practically
nothing of the chief industry of Thursday Island. We
could not, indeed, have come at a worse time.
The Merrie England, however, had come over on
Government business, and did not concern herself
about the doings of the fleet. While her officials
were busy in the saloon with mails I went for a walk
about the town and saw what was to be seen.
It was a most bewildering place. If I had not
known I was in Australian territory, I should cer-
tainly have thought that the Merrie England had
made a mistake and landed me somewhere in Japan.
Japanese were the yellow-faced, under-sized men in
ill-fitting slop-made suits who passed up and down
the pretty boulevarded streets. Japanese were the
women in kimono and obi, with puffed and oiled
black hair, who sat on the verandahs of the rickety
tin-roofed houses or walked in and out of the shops
with their quaint little slant-eyed children buying
groceries and prints. Japanese were the shops them-
selves, full of sandals and crapes and silks for the
most part, with a few inferior and costly European
goods thrown in, the whole presided over by a yellow
little man in an unbecoming black suit — unless by
chance the shopkeeper was a tall Chinese in a blouse,
with a thin pigtail hanging down his back. Of the
celebrated courtesy and grace of Japan the Thursday
Island Jap emigrant knows nothing. He has taken
up the footpath in groups of threes and fours, and it
p
2IO THE NEW NEW GUINEA
goes hard but he will make you turn off into the mud
for him if he can. He is not too anxious to serve
you if you patronise his shop (with one exception — a
very smart and businesslike little yellow heathen,
who appears to have most of the European custom in
his hands, and deserves it), but gives you to under-
stand as clearly as he can that he is conferring a
favour on you in accepting your money. He is
superior to the white in numbers, as there are
about two thousand Japanese and Chinese in the
little Island, and only seven hundred Europeans or
Australians. The truth is — and it is not a pleasant
truth for Australia — that Thursday Island practically
belongs to Japan. The pearling trade has gradually
slipped into Japanese hands, and practically all the
boats at the time of my visit were owned directly or
indirectly by Japanese. The costliness of white labour
is supposed to be the chief reason. Whatever the
cause may be, the fact is regrettable, for the pearl and
the shell of Thursday Island, even in these days of
diminished takings, are worth very many thousands a
year. Twenty-three thousand pounds is the average
value of the pearls alone, and they are much the least
part of the profit, the shell — which sells at any price
you like to mention from £ S^ to £100 a ton — being
the chief stand-by of the trade.
As it was impossible to see the pearling fleet at
work, I was constrained to do the next best thing —
take a trip on a sloop owned (for once) by a white
man and see how the diving was done. Mr. and
TORRES STRAIT 211
Mrs. F , residents of Thursday Island, very
kindly offered to take me for the trip, and further
pressed upon me the loan of a diving dress to go
down and see for myself what the bottom of the sea
looked like.
I wanted very much to go down over the pearling
grounds, but my hosts assured me that this was
impossible. They arc pearling now at Thursday
Island in a very great depth of water, the shallower
places having been fished out, and even experienced
divers find the pressure of a hundred feet and more
most trying. It would scarcely be safe, I was told ;
and as to another diver going down to ensure against
accident, that was the very way to bring them about :
life-lines and air-tubes got tangled, the pumps were
easier to manage for one than two — in fine, I had
better go down in shallower water, and I should find
it best to go by myself.
So it was agreed ; and the little sloop was towed
out a mile or two beyond the town to a spot only
a few fathoms deep, where it was agreed that I might
safely make my diving debut.
Now, Torres Straits, as everyone in Queensland
knows, is full of sharks, common and tiger, and also
of alligators, devil-fish, sting-ray, and various other
unpleasant creatures. I could not help thinking about
them a little as we cast anchor over the selected
place and began to prepare the diving gear. It
is considered rather bad form and rather silly to
make a fuss about sharks and alligators in the
212 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
countries where they abound ; still, I ventured a
timid inquiry.
*' Oh, that's all right," 1 was told ; " the alligators
don't take this track crossing the Straits ; and as for
the sharks, accidents are very uncommon — very un-
common ; besides, this is not a likely place. If by
any chance you should see a shark, don't be the least
alarmed ; just pull up the cuff of your jumper a little
so as to let out a few bubbles of air, and he'll be
frightened off. Don't pull the cord till he is well
away ; you're all right on the bottom, but they have
been known to make a grab at a man when he was
being pulled up — as they do at a fish on your line,
you know — and bite his boots off. I don't suppose
for a minute you'll see one, however."
All this was so businesslike and so thoughtful, and
the men were so kindly and carefully preparing the
pumps and looking to the tubes and putting the
ladder in the easiest place for me to get over, that it
was impossible to be scared, so of course I was not.
I did not feel like myself — like someone else, rather,
whom I had only recently met and did not care for —
but I was not scared. I thought a good deal about
a French model dress and hat I had been tempted
into buying in Melbourne, and wished I had been
less chary of wearing it, because now . . . But I
was not scared. I wished I had told the captain of
the Merrie England about the piece I had burned out
of one of his inestimable varnished floors, and asked
him not to grieve for it, or me, or something — it
A DIVER'S SUIT 213
seemed a little involved, but I was not scared. . . .
I reflected. . . .
" Now, if you'll come down into the cabin, I'll
help you into your dress," said my hostess cheerily.
And I went, because I was not at all frightened.
Mrs. F is a tall, powerfully-built Australian,
with muscles equal to a man's. It takes two people,
as a rule, to get another into a diving dress, but she
managed to push and punch and kick me into mine
unaided — no mean feat of athletics, as anyone who
has ever seen a diver's toilet will understand.
First of all came a jersey and tights of white wool
nearly half an inch thick. I got into these without
difficulty, as they were large and loose, but the heat
in that torrid atmosphere made me fairly gasp. I
was assured, however, that the warm clothing was
very necessary down under water if one wanted to
avoid chills.
Then came the real difficulty. The diving suit
itself— an all-over garment, with legs, feet, and
sleeves all made of stiff thick rubber-cloth — was
produced, and I was told I had to crawl in feet fore-
most through the neck !
It was done at last, an inch at a time, with pauses
for rest, and two panting creatures climbed out on
deck, one in a cool white dress and hat, the other in
a shapeless shambling sort of costume that made her
look like a toad with a tendency to apoplexy.
1 sat down on the hatch, and two " tenders," as
they were called (men who look after the diving gear),
214 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
completed my toilet. They took a pair of rubber-
cloth boots with lead soles that weighed twenty pounds
each and put them on my feet. They got a wrench,
pulled up the metal yoke of my dress tight round my
neck, and screwed me into it by means of nuts. Then
they brought a mass of copper and iron that seemed
a fair load for a horse and clapped it over my head.
This was the helmet. The glasses were not yet
screwed on, so I could look out of the windows and
wonder what was going to happen next, and how
I was ever going to move a limb encased in all that
panoply of metal. I felt a sympathy I had never
known before — for the knights of mediaeval days
cased in unyielding steel, for a lonely lobster prisoned
in its carapace, for birds shut up in hard, uncomfort-
able eggshells, for everything that was screwed tight
into something and couldn't get out. Meanwhile the
tenders went on tending. They took the big end of
the wrench and more nuts and screwed my helmet
down on to the metal yoke, hauling on their tools
and pressing the nuts home as if they were never to
be loosened any more. Then they let go and told me
to try and walk.
I got up, feeling like a fly that had fallen into a
treacle-dish, and slowly dragged one heavy foot after
another, six steps a minute across the deck. This
created much satisfaction. The diving dress is con-
structed on the principle of giving you just as much
weight as you can support, and sometimes a weak diver
finds it too much and cannot move in the costume at all.
READY TO DIVE 215
All the same, I had to crawl very slowly to the
bulwarks, where the industrious tenders had hung
the ladder, and I was glad to hear that the necklace
of lead weights, weighing forty pounds, which I had
already been eyeing uncomfortably, was not to be put
on till the last moment.
My host was busy with the air-pump, looking over
the length of rubber tubing carefully, seeing that the
machinery was in good order, and assuring me —
rather too emphatically, I thought — that he meant to
take charge of the pump himself and let the tenders
merely watch the line. I did not know how grateful
I ought to have been, but I learned all about that later
on. Three-fourths of the accidents that put an end
to divers occur through carelessness on the part of
the man at the pump. When the diver is below, a
tender is deputed to keep the life-line and air-tube
clear and make sure that all signals are instantly seen.
It is a serious business this diving, and nobody treats
it like play.
The use of the line and valves was explained to me.
The rope fastened round my waist was meant to let
me down and haul me up. The smaller line, fastened
to my helmet and dropping in front, was to be kept
in my hand. There were a lot of signals one could
make with it, but I had better not try to learn them,
they would only confuse me. 1 could recollect that
a good pull on this line meant " I want to come up"
— that was all that was necessary. As for the valve,
it was turned one way to increase the air supply.
21 6 THE NEW NEWJ GUINEA
another to lessen it. Now, was I ready to get over
the side ?
I repeat that 1 was not afraid. Is it being afraid to
wish oneself in bed at home with the blankets pulled
up over one's ears and the door locked ? Is it being
afraid to call oneself a fool, softly and silently, and say
that never, never again . . . ? Is it being afraid if
one thinks suddenly and strangely of dentists' waiting-
rooms and the horrible nod that beckons you forth
from your uneasy seat and the dread command to
" open a little wider " ? Certainly not.
They lifted my feet for me and put them down
singly on the ladder. They helped me a step or two
down into the water. They took that horrible lead
necklace and laid it gently, almost caressingly, round
my copper and iron neck. And then they said
*' Good-bye," and put the glass window in, and
screwed down the coffin — I mean the helmet. Their
faces were faint through the glass, but they smiled and
signalled (for I could hear no longer), and I knew
that they were asking " Are you ready .'' "
It is at this point that the novice usually clutches
hold of the rail and insists on being taken back. It
was at this point that my fiction broke up, and I
realised that I was extremely afraid. The sober truth,
I think, is that a woman always is afraid of doing
dangerous things. Generally she lies about it, partly
through conceit, and largely because she is curious
and does not mind being horribly afraid if )'Ou will
give her what she wants. But the truth is as I have
ON THE BOTTOM 217
said. The cold courage of the male — the Nelson
courage that " never saw fear" — is not in any woman
who ever was born. We take our risks as the Botany
Bay convict took his walks — with a shrinking brute
irrevocably chained to our side, dragging it wherever
we go.
The brute disliked that dive. It hated the plunge
to the bottom — scarcely thirty feet, but it might have
been a thousand — that followed when 1 carefully slid
those gigantic boots off the ladder. It was disgusted
when I landed — as all beginners do — on my head, and
had to struggle to get right. It told me that my
hands were bare and that sharks could nip them off,
and that I had no knife as a diver should have, and
that there might be "something" in every black
cavern of the dead coral over which I found myself
walking. But it got interested in the surroundings
by and by and forgot to nag.
After all, it was worth some trouble and discomfort
to find oneself walking on the bottom of Torres
Straits, down where the divers had been at work a
year or two ago, seeing just what they saw when they
went out for their day's strange labour, all but the
pearl-shell, which had of course been taken away.
The water chanced not to be very clear, and the
bottom was so weedy that one was simply walking in
a green garden of weeds half-way up to the knee.
But there was a little coral to be seen, pearly white
among the weeds (it was dead coral — a living bed is a
veritable flower-garden of vivid colours), and the
2i8 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
light that came down from above, dim and green and
softly diffused, showed the surroundings plainly
enough.
It is a strange sensation this " walking alone in the
depths of the sea," and one that I think no one could
describe adequately. To get away from the laws of
gravity as you have known them all your life is in
itself a somewhat disorganising experience. And the
laws of gravity do not act at the bottom of the seas as
they do on land. All that weight of lead and iron
that you bore so painfully up on deck barely suffices
down here to keep you on the ground. You walk
with strange, soft, striding steps ; your arms and legs
obey your will, but slowly and after consideration.
Everything is muffled — your movements, your breath,
your sight, your hearing. You do not feel awake ;
you are not sure that you are alive. The pump
beats in your ears like a huge pulse, but you feel it
rather than hear it. You are conscious that your
nose and ears are hurting you, and that your lungs do
not feel as they ought, but it seems somebody else's
pain rather than yours. Fish swim past you, green
and grey in the green water. You realise with some-
thing of a shock that they are not afraid of you. On
the deck of the sloop, the mere shadow of your hand
would send them flying as they glide past the ship's
counter, but here in the depths of the sea they fin
their slow way up to the very windows of your
helmet, and look in at you with their cold glassy
eyes, unafraid. You stretch out a hand to grasp
UP AGAIN 219
them, and they avoid It quietly and without haste.
You look ahead through the darkling water for the
swoop and rush and horrible scythe-shaped tail of the
monster that you fear, but there is no sign of it. . . .
Still — you have been down some minutes now, and
honour is amply satisfied. It would be very pleasant
to see the light of day again. . . . You stoop down,
slowly and *' disposedly," as one moves under water,
and gather up a bit of weed and a fragment of coral
for a souvenir ; and then you pull the cord.
No sensation of movement follows, and for a
moment your heart stands still. Has the tender
forgotten to tend after all.'' . . . But in another
second you notice that the air bubbles are rushing in
a long stream past the windows of your prison, and
you realise that you must be going although you do
not feel it. . . . The rungs of the ladder appear,
glide downwards, vanish. The light suddenly bright-
ens — you are up 1
It is easy to catch the bulwark and stand on the
top of the ladder while the tender unscrews your
helmet-glass. And the sweetness of that first rush of
warm tropic air breaking upon your cold, perspiring
face and going in a grateful rush right down your
swollen lungs is a thing to be thankful for evermore.
The undressing is full as trying a job as the dressing;
as you were squeezed and pounded into the costume,
so you have to be dragged and pinched out of it when
the tenders have done unscrewing the endless nuts
and have taken off the leaden jewellery and removed
220 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
the mighty boots. But you are so glad to be out
again and alive again that you do not care.
It was interesting to hear during our short stay at
Thursday Island that the shell was by no means so
completely fished out as reports of the day had
declared. True, most of the good shell is now at the
bottom of those depths of two hundred feet and more
into which no diver can venture, but it is not all out
of reach. Enough shallow water shell remains to
keep a good-sized fleet at work. If we had only
been there sooner or later, we could have gone out
and seen the divers working ; but this pleasure was
denied us.
Instead, one had to content oneself with the pearl-
ing gossip that floated about every verandah universal
as tobacco-smoke. Home people are apt to think
that the chief interest of a pearling-station lies in the
pearls ; but this is not the case at all. Pearls are
regarded as an extra something that you cannot rely
on ; you may get them, and you may not ; but in any
case the shell is there, and your divers cannot steal
that. Many boats are let to Japanese, who are allowed
to take all the pearls that are found and sell the shell
to the owners of the boat at ;^8o a ton. The price of
this commodity varies a great deal, as it is chiefly
used for articles of dress and fancy goods, which are
constantly affected by fashion. Still, the ;^8o leaves a
large profit.
The pearls are mostly bought by dealers in Thurs-
PEARL DOCTORS 221
day Island. Pearl-doctoring is thoroughly understood
and constantly done by the buyers. It is not in any
way an illegitimate process, any more than is the
cutting and polishing of a gem. Pearls are sometimes
skinned to give them a liner lustre ; the irregular
formation known among jewellers as "baroque"
pearl is occasionally trimmed into useful shapes, and
"blister" pearls are sometimes destroyed on the
chance of finding something better inside. Indeed,
the blister pearl is quite a fascinating form of specu-
lation. It is generally unattractive to look at — a
flattish, irregular mass that can only be set in some
fanciful way for a cheap pendant or brooch — and one
has little compunction in sacrificing this form of gem.
But sometimes it is good-looking enough, well-
coloured, and worth a fair sum ; and then the ques-
tion arises, Is it worth while to cut the pearl up or
not ? If the answer is in the affirmative, the buyer
carefully chisels off the outer skin, goes a little
deeper, and finds — perhaps an empty blister worth
nothing at all now, perhaps a beautiful, large, regular
pearl, loose inside or lightly attached to the walls of
the covering formation. Some of the finest pearls
ever sent out of Thursday Island have been dis-
covered in this way. How many ladies, one wonders,
are carrying about gems worth hundreds of pounds,
unknown and unsuspected, inside the irregular shell
of the cheap " baroque " pearl that makes up their
" new art " necklace pendant .''
We had only a flying visit to Thursday Island, for
222 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
there was work for the Merrie England to do all along
the coast, and time was flying. The second day
found the Government yacht under steam again,
gliding northward to Papua through the bright green
coral islets of Torres Straits. We were bound now
for no less a place than Goari-Bari — the scene of
Chalmers' murder in 1901, and of the much-discussed
fight in the year 1904 that led to the suicide of the
Chief Justice.
There had been no call at Goari-Bari for two years
past, and no one knew just what frame of mind the
natives might be in. Their reputation has always
been one of the worst, and they are as treacherous as
they are cruel and cowardly. The Governor expressed
his intention of making a peaceful call, but it must be
allowed that no one on the ship thought His Excel-
lency's desire very likely of fulfilment.
We steamed up to the island in the forenoon and
cast anchor about a mile from the village ; nearer the
Merrie England's draught would not allow her to go.
The famous, or infamous, Goari-Bari lay right before
us — a long, low, swampy island near the mouth of a
great river (the Aird), with a row of ill-constructed
brown huts showing prominently on the mud of the
foreshore. The sky was yellow-grey, low, and hot,
the sea lumpy and choppy ; the wind blew strong,
but it had no freshness in it. An ugly day, an ugly
place.
For an hour or two the Merrie England waited, and
then, greatly daring, one or two canoes stole out from
WICKED GOARI-BARI 223
the town and paddled near us. Our interpreter called
to them, assuring them of our friendly intention and
displaying calico and tobacco. But for a considerable
time the Goari-Barians hesitated, paddling up and
down excitedly in their canoes, chattering like parrots,
shivering with excitement — ready at any moment
either to grasp the arrows in the bottoms of the
canoes or to turn tail and rush for shore. They were
the ugliest crowd I had yet seen in the country —
naked, save for a scrap of bark or fibre ; lean and
ungraceful, their heads shaved bare to the middle,
with a bunch of greasy curls hanging out behind,
their faces painted with red stripes and patches.
Feathers streamed and grass armlets fluttered about
their restless persons ; they were jumpy, excitable,
and (to use an Americanism) "skeery" almost beyond
belief.
This was my first, but not my last, visit to the Aird
River cannibals, and I had plenty of opportunity
later for confirming the first impressions made by
these strange people. In Papua, more truly than in
any other country in the world, it may be said that
nothing happens save the unexpected. But the ex-
perience I had already had of the Country of the
Impossible did not prepare me for the Aird River
people. The popular and apparently the reasonable
idea of a cannibal is that he is the fiercest of human
beasts, warlike, fearless, and determined, knowing
nothing of nerves, nothing of feeling — a creature of
iron. . . .
2 24 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
Instead of which, he is the most hysterical, the
most nervous, twittery, jumpy, wire-hung creature
that ever existed outside of a ladies' boarding-school.
If you hold out a finger, he starts. If you speak
suddenly, he squeaks. If you look fixedly at him
for a few seconds, he vanishes into the bush so swittly
and silently that you are half convinced he never was
there at all. It is extraordinarily difficult to take him
for what he is really worth, and to realise that this
silly, painted, prancing creature with the hysterical
giggle and the childish manner is actually a dangerous
brute at bottom, and that he would desire nothing
better than to knock you on the head and eat you —
only for that Nordenfeldt gun on the bridge and the
rack of rifles in the pretty little gilded and brocaded
saloon.
All that day we lay at anchor and endeavoured to
win the confidence of the timid and retiring cannibal.
The canoes came thick and fast round the ship by and
by, and their occupants were delighted to receive the
gifts handed down over the side — red calico, tobacco,
common knives — all inestimable treasures to a village
that knows no traffic with the white districts of Papua,
and does not possess so much as an inch of hoop-
iron for making adzes. With dusk our visitors
cleared away, but at night we could hear loud singing
on shore and see the light of fires in the village.
They were evidently excited in the highest degree,
and did not know what to make of our call.
Next morning, while sleeping peacefully in my
•' REAL JAM 225
berth, I was awakened by a clinking noise, and looked
up to see a long, brown, filthy arm and hand extended
through the port, making a snatch at my water-bottle.
I called out angrily, and the arm vanished with the
water-bottle ! Looking out through the nearer port
I could see a flotilla of canoes round my cabin, and
at least half a hundred unclean heathen hustling one
another for a look in I I got up to slam the ports
and screw them, but while I was fastening one the
lean arm shot in again through the other, grabbed at
the satin curtain, and all but secured it. 1 think the
owner did pull a brass curtain hook off the rod before
I snapped the port. It is a consolation to know that
he just missed leaving a finger-tip as pledge.
Later, at breakfast, it became manifest that Goari-
Bari had made up its mind to accept our visit as
harmless. I should not like to say how many hun-
dreds of savages were dodging each other in canoes
under the ports of the saloon fighting for places to
look in. Every porthole was a mosaic of ugly-
painted faces and bobbing feathers. One middle-aged
person of a cheerful and foolish countenance, whom
we christened Willie (he learned his name almost at
once, and answered to it like a dog), made himself
especially prominent, and stared at the food with so
much interest that I was moved to get up and offer
him a tablespoonful of apricot jam. He seized the
spoon promptly, and tried his best, amid shrieks
of laughter from the saloon, to pull it out of my
hand. Failing in this, he scooped the jam out,
Q
226 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
looked at it, smelt it, rubbed it into his hair, and
vanished.
By and by we went on deck and found the ship in
possession of the heathen, who were scampering and
squeaking all over the place, watched rather sullenly
by our dozen of armed native constabulary, who
thought it a hard thing indeed that they were not
allowed to pick off even one of these outer bar-
barians. The white sailors kept a good look out on
the visitors, for it was clear that these latter meant to
make hay while the sun shone, and were bent on
carrying off anything that was not nailed down. They
tried for the brass stanchions of the gangway, they
dragged at the canvas of the deck chairs, they pulled
the belaying pins out of the rack, and were very loth
indeed to put them back. Willie (among the
foremost, as usual) attracted my attention by the
extreme dirtiness of his person, and I brought out
a tin basin of water and a piece of soap and began
giving a demonstration in the art of washing one's
hands.
Willie watched it rather nervously at first ; it was
clear that he suspected sorcery in the mysterious pro-
ceeding. I offered him the soap by and by, and
made signs that he should rub it on his hands. I
shall always honour Willie as the bravest of cannibals.
Convinced as he evidently was that the thing was
dangerous, the spirit of scientific investigation was
stronger in his breast than mere personal fear. He
washed his hands.
WILLIE'S FIRST WASH 227
Then, like the countenance of
" The watcher of the skies,
When some new planet swims inlo his ken,"
Willie's face expanded with the joy and awe of dis-
covery. He looked at the soap. He looked at his
hands almost with reverence, scarcely knowing them
for his own. In an instant — nervousness and indeci-
sion swept away like snow before the sun — he had
grabbed the basin, let it go after a brief tug-of-war,
grabbed the soap, secured that, and . . .
Where was Willie ? There was a canoe, paddling
madly across the bay, faster and faster, further and
further, almost out of sight. There was a man in it.
It was Willie, and he had the soap.
I have not the slightest doubt that the town sat up
all night after we had gone trying the new sensation
with shrieks of joy. The missionary vocation is one
that has never descended upon my unworthy person,
but if I was not a missionary for that one afternoon,
and a good one too, then let me never see soap again
till I die.
The boats were ordered out not long after this, and
we started for the town. In the first boat went His
Excellency the Lieutenant-Governor, several armed
native constabulary, and an Australian colonel who
was visiting the country. I was allowed to accom-
pany the party in the second boat, which consisted of
two or three more police, a couple of visiting mis-
sionaries, and an official.
228 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
It was almost the first time anyone had made a
peaceful visit to the town, with the exception of the
disastrous call that ended in the death of Chalmers
and Tompkins. The Goari-Barians are frankly at
war with society. The position of their town in an
inner curve of the stormy Gulf of Papua, on an
island surrounded by shoals and shallows, has always
protected them from sudden attack. Ships keep away
religiously from the Gulf, which has a sinister reputa-
tion for wrecks and strandings ; and the great clumsy
"lakatois " of the Papuan native cannot approach the
west at all during a good part of the year. Of willing
visitors, therefore, Goari-Bari has had scarcely any,
while of the unwilling visitors who must have been
swept up to the town now and then by the strong
currents of the Gulf, as Chalmers' luckless schooner
was swept, none ever returned to tell the tale. Bits
of brass fittings from ships which we saw while in the
town suggested ugly stories that had never come to
lio-ht. Heretofore the people of this infamous little
place, when visited, had been either executioners or
victims of their visitors. The peaceful call was new.
Evidently they did not know what to make of it.
When our party landed on, or rather in, the black
mud of the beach and walked up among the houses,
with the native police straggling about in the rear and
fervently praying for just that chance of a row that
our leader had determined to avoid, the fighting men
of the town seemed to go nearly out of their minds
with excitement and indecision. They giggled and
WIIKKI'. ( IIALMKRS WAS KILI.KD
THE nONES Ol' THE MLRDEREL) MISSIONARIES
To face page 22S.
THE VANISHING TRICK 229
grinned more than ever ; they hovered and danced
about on tiptoe, nearly off the ground ; they ran
after us, touched us, and withdrew as if we were red-
hot. The wild nervousness of their demeanour was
very much emphasised by the style of their dress,
which consisted solely of ornaments, nearly all of a
fluttering and trembling kind — waving plumes of long
grass thrust into armlets, feathers ingeniously moun-
ted on a stem that quivered with every movement,
sweeping tails of grasses and fibres tied on at the back
of the waist and swinging wildly as the wearer turned
about, haloes of long shaking white and yellow parrot
quills fastened round the head with tight bands.
They really made one giddy to look at ; and it was
better, in any case, not to look at them too much, for
(as I have said above) the Goari-Barian has an ex-
traordinary knack of vanishing in some incredible
way under a house or into a thicket, if you look at
him fixedly, which is, at the least, embarrassing. They
carried bows and arrows and long spears of some
wood like ebony, barbed and pointed at the end.
Some of them wore close-fitting gaiters of bark cloth,
extending from the ankle to the knee and neatly fast-
ened with rows of small white cowry shells. They had
no beads, save the native kind made from small shells,
which are common among the uncivilised tribes.
Cassowary feathers, which are like black horsehair in
texture, seemed to be favourite adornments, worn
either as sweeping plumes or as head ornaments
shaped exactly like a miniature chimney-brush. Most
230 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
of the men, in addition to painting their faces and the
shaven part of their heads bright red, had circled
their eyes with a large black ring, which added
considerably to the wild savagery of their appearance.
The nose-bone was not worn.
The big dubu or communal house was of course
the first place to visit in this odd sight-seeing tour.
It stood close to the landing-place, on a bed of black,
swamp alive with small crawly crabs, and was ap-
proached by a very rough skeleton ladder some eight
or nine feet high. The place had a special interest,
for it stood on the spot occupied by the dubu in
which Chalmers was murdered by these people in
1902. The Government had the dubu destroyed, but
another was put up shortly after.
This was the first of the very long dubus that I
had seen, and I looked at it with interest, knowing
that I was seeing something which had never been
described in print — which, indeed, was known to but
a mere handful of the white race as yet. These long
dubus are found only among the still unbroken and
uncivilised cannibal tribes, and in most of the villages
that possess them an unprotected stranger would be
promptly massacred. We owed our safety to the fact
that a dozen police armed with rifles accompanied us,
and to the memory that the people still retained of
the "massacre" of 1904. They might, of course,
have rushed the party and overpowered it by superi-
ority of numbers, there being some hundreds of men
in the town ; but our leader counted on the cowardice
IN A DUBU 231
of the Goari-Barian — and rightly so, as events
proved.
The dubu, as paced by some of the ship's party,
was just upon 600 feet long. Its height was uniform
all through, and seemed about twelve feet. Like an
immense brown centipede it wound its way backwards
through the swamp, supported on innumerable feet
of upbearing piles, and covering an extent of ground
that seemed practically endless. It took us quite a
long time to walk down the dim brown tunnel of the
interior, looking at everything as we went — the walls,
of close-fitted stick-work ; the roof, nipa-palm thatch ;
the curious little sections into which the whole place
was divided, like the pens in a cattle-show, each pen
being the abode of a more or less happy family, as
proved by the domestic goods lying about — woven
baskets, clay pots, belts, pieces of bark cloth. In the
very centre of the building there was a sort of little
bay looking out over the swamp and the creek. Here
certain treasures, probably communal, were placed —
two or three small wooden images of human beings,
very rudely carved (we tried to buy them, but they
seemed to be without price), several skulls, some
carved into patterns of a rather Celtic character,
some fitted with artificial snouts of bone fastened on
with clay, which made them look extremely like the
heads of beasts until closely examined.
And here " a strange thing happened." Ever since
we had landed in the town, strange, inhuman howls
and wails had been resounding from the river that
232 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
ran back from the shore. We had not paid much
attention to them, supposing them to be the excited
cries of dogs. But here, from the point of vantage
furnished by the bay, we could see a good way up the
river, and it became clear that the howling was only
in part attributable to the brute creation. The women
of the town were fleeing up the river in canoes,
uttering the most dismal of wails, in which they were
joined by the dogs they were taking with them.
Women, dogs, and skulls — in fact, all the treasures of
the town — formed the cargo of every canoe.
We called to them, and even sent an interpreter to
hail them from the bank, but they only paddled the
faster, and were soon altogether lost to view.
This was hardly sociable of the Goari-Barians on
an alleged friendly visit, the removal of the women
being always a sign of distrust and hostility. How-
ever, our party abandoned the point for the moment,
to return to it later, and continued the walk down
the dubu. We emerged at the farther end into sun-
shine that seemed almost blinding and heat that
struck upwards from the black mud of the swamp
like the blast of a furnace. A few natives were hover-
ing and twittering about beyond the dubu, running
lightly up and down the slimy logs that served as
pathways through the mud. We gave them some
beads and some calico, both of which excited an
almost religious emotion of delight. I do not think I
shall ever forget the spectacle of a dozen sturdy
cannibals sprawling on their hands and knees in the
RIBBONS OVERCOME FEAR 233
mud and reeds, trying to pick up about an ounce of
small embroidery beads that someone had let fall into
that hopeless tangle. There is little doubt that, if
they took a week to it, they would manage to
succeed.
While some of us were thus engaged, a canoe
reappeared tentatively in the far distance, hovering
about the corner of the river. Feminine curiosity, it
seemed, was, after all, stronger than fear — an incident
scarcely new in the history of the world. We seized
the opportunity and, advancing to the bank, hailed
the canoe. It vanished instantly, much to everyone's
disappointment.
Then an inspiration seized me, and getting away
from my party a hundred yards or so, I stood up on a
log, called out loudly, and began waving some coloured
ribbons. The canoes must have been within watching
distance after all, for one crept cautiously out. Call-
ing, signalling, and displaying the ribbons, I managed
to lure the shy game to hand, and by and by we had two
or three exceedingly ugly old women, wrinkled, bald-
headed, and almost naked, standing trembling on the
bank, eyeing the ribbons with covetous gaze. W^e
gave the poor old souls a liberal portion of the
treasure, and started back through the dubu to rejoin
His Excellency, who was making a speech to the
natives on the other side.
Of all the odd incidents of this odd, mad day, that
which followed was the oddest and the nastiest. We
— myself, the Government official, and a missionary —
234 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
stopped for a moment under the shade of the dubu
verandah before going in ; and at this moment two
or three men came out of the dubu carrying a lump
of meat in their hands. It was ugly-looking meat,
— watery, pale lead-coloured, fat ; it smelt abomin-
ably, and did not look like the known joint of any
known animal. The men held it up before us as they
passed, and one of them pulled off a morsel and thrust
it under my nose. The stench made me nearly sick.
1 got out of range as quickly as possible, and took
another look at the strange object from a safer dis-
tance. . . . Was it .'' . . .
With a loud, savage laugh the men leaped down
from the platform and rushed away into the bush,
carrying their unsavoury morsel with them. I had
my suspicions as to what it was, and my companions
were quite certain. We had seen a bit of boiled
man !
It was, of course, the flesh of a native victim. The
people of Goari-Bari are very determined cannibals ;
short of other food, they even eat the dead, provided
the corpse is fairly young and well nourished. They
are an ill-made, ugly-looking set of ruffians, and not
at all healthy-looking, which is certainly what one
would expect.
We found the Governor having a heart-to-heart
talk with some of the worst-looking of the crew on
the other side of the dubu. He spoke through an
interpreter, and they listened with much seriousness,
having apparently laid aside their nervousness for the
ONE IS ENOUGH 235
moment. They were not to go on eating each other,
the Governor told them. It was disapproved by the
Government ; besides, they had to consider that if
they went on eating their young people, by and by
the village would die out. They were not to bury
their corpses under houses or hang them up in trees
(a picturesque local custom of which we had already
had an illustration). They were, especially, not to
kill any white men, but to receive them civilly if they
came. The Government wished to be friends with
them, and would protect them from their enemies if
they behaved themselves.
The speech was received very gravely, and the dis-
tribution of calico and tobacco among the chief men of
the town that followed seemed to cause much gratifi-
cation. And now the proceedings were enlivened
with a touch of humour.
" Here is some calico for yourself," said the dis-
tributor of the goods to an old man who appeared to
be a person of some importance. " Here is another
piece for your wife. Have you more than one .'' "
holding a third piece in readiness.
" No ! " cried the old man unexpectedly.
*' Why not ? " asked the dispenser of favours, rather
surprised at such an admission from a chief.
" Because," yelled the old man, dancing with
excitement and feeling, " one is enough — quite, quite
enough 1 "
There were three married men in our party. When
the old chief's remark was translated to them they all
236 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
roared. The unmarried men, on the other hand,
scarcely seemed to think the joke remarkable for wit.
It was now after four o'clock, and we felt ready for
afternoon tea. The native boat's crew, who were
accustomed to this picknicking business, lit a fire, got
out the hamper, and in a very short time had an
impromptu table ready, covered with a damask cloth
and shining with silver and china. We sat down on
logs all round and began to enjoy our tea.
Words cannot depict the amazement, fear, and horror
caused by the proceeding. It was of course taken at
once for sorcery, and sorcery of the very worst kind.
Astounding objects, such as no one had ever seen>
put to incomprehensible uses by these scarcely com-
prehensible people — why, a man's life was not safe
for a moment in the neighbourhood of such unholy
mysteries ! Nearly every soul cleared off into the
bush like rabbits, leaving us in possession of an
empty town — all but.
There were three or four, however, who still hung
about, trembling with fear, but devoured with
curiosity.
Watching cautiously from under the houses, they
crept out by and by and ventured close up to the tea-
table, their faces a very mask or representation of the
emotion of astonishment. We offered them biscuits
and cake, but not a soul would touch anything until
he had seen the giver bite off and swallow a piece,
when he usually took the remainder and ate it eagerly,
yet cautiously. Any gentleman, they evidently thought,
CHALMER'S BONES RESCUED 237
might be moved at any time to poison another gentle-
man : it was the part of the other gentleman to see
that he did not do it.
By now wc thought it time to go back, so the
boats were ordered, and the visitors took their
departure. Goari-Bari had, for once, known a
peaceful visit.
Next day the Governor went on shore, and after
the exercise of a little diplomacy succeeded in getting
possession of the bones of the murdered Chalmers
and his fellow-worker Tompkins. They were easily
identified by means of certain known peculiarities.
The Merrie England conveyed them to the London
Mission Station at Daru, where the representative of
the Mission saw to their decent burial. And so the
prestige of Goari-Bari was broken.
A year later the Merrie England made another call,
when I had again the luck to be present. We found
the town much as it had been on the occasion of the
last visit — it could not be called more friendly. Still,
judging by the experience that the Government has
had with other intractable tribes, civility and trust
will come in time. On this occasion the people of
Goari-Bari visited the ship while the Government
party was absent, and, in spite of the care of the
sailors, stole one or two items that betrayed a strange
taste in booty.
Item : His Excellency's toothbrush.
Item : Newspapers — all they could get.
Item : One pair of gloves, picked up in the water.
238 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
Item : One umbrella — theft vigorously attempted,
but did not quite come off.
This was no mere chance selection. You can buy-
nearly any thing in Goari-Bari for newspaper — politics
indifferent — and as for an umbrella, the Goari-Barian
would sell his soul, if he knew he had one, for even
half of such a treasure. An aeroplane ascent in the
midst of a Cockney crowd never created half so
much excitement as did the unfurling of my umbrella
in Goari-Bari on the day of our second visit. The
people danced and shouted with excitement, and
fought each other for a chance to touch the spring
and repeat the miracle. Had I not been very strongly
escorted they would certainly have had that umbrella ;
they could scarcely restrain themselves from snatching
it as it was.
As for the toothbrush, I do not suppose for a
minute that they meant to put it to its legitimate use,
or had the slightest idea of what that was. They
probably wanted it for a " pourri-pourri," or charm
much as one of the Western tribes wanted a shoe-
horn, which they stole from a trader and hung up in
their biggest temple for the adoration of the faithful.
All in all, the tastes of Goari-Bari, coupled with its
exceedingly primitive state, forcibly recall the saying
of the famous philosopher who expressed his readi-
ness to do without the necessities of life if he might
only have the superfluities !
It was on the occasion of our second visit to the
Wild West — in January, 1909 — that we came upon
NOT FOR TOURISTS 239
something that really was rather near being an adven-
ture. The story is worth telling, not for any small
part that I took in it myself, but simply as an
illustration of something not known to most British
colonies — the art of making peace peacefully.
This great unbroken and unexplored district of the
West, with its smaller neighbour the Gulf Division,
is perhaps the chief of the many sources of anxiety
that render unquiet the pillow of Papuan rulers. All
in all, this part of the country is as large as England,
and nobody knows much about it. The peaceful
planter of the Central and Eastern Divisions scarcely
knows that it exists, and takes little interest in it, save
in so far as it supplies him at times with wild, savage,
but very useful labour. The tourist who comes up
in the alle2;ed cool season from Sydney or Melbourne
for a trip round the Solomon Islands and Papua in
a Burns Philp steamer never goes within a hundred
miles of it — first, because steamers do not call ;
secondly, because everything that sails the seas goes
in terror of the Gulf and its storms and currents and
deadly river bars ; thirdly, because it is not a place for
the irresponsible tourist to " monkey with " anyhow,
and he is usually advised to keep away. The Merrie
England — a small, strongly built steamer made of
wood, with a huge leaden keel, can take chances with
reefs and bars that other vessels dare not encounter,
and what she cannot do her steam-launch can. It is the
duty of her officials to visit the district, and they do
so ; it is the duty of the Resident Magistrates to
240 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
patrol, and they try, under difficulties the like of
which Stanley never even imagined ; it is not the
duty of anyone else to go there, and no one else goes
except an occasional explorer.
The Government, therefore, is left to wrestle alone
with the tremendous task of subduing, reforming,
and bringing into line as a useful and civilised colony
this immense preserve of murderous cannibals — an
unknown land protected by dangerous coasts, by
trackless marshes, by natural mazes of rivers hun-
dreds of miles in extent, by vast unbroken forests,
and, more than all, by a conformation of country
almost inconceivably rugged and entangled.
The tools with which the Government has to work
are almost laughably inadequate — two Resident
Magistrates, thirty-four armed native constables, a
couple of whaleboats, and two small ketches. The
Government yacht makes not more than a couple of
visits in the year, unless any serious disturbance calls
for a special expedition.
One would like to see what kind of reception such
a programme would meet with if put before one of
our Indian, West African, or Burmese officials.
"Utter impossibility" would be the mildest term
likely to be used in describing it. And yet the
impossible thing is being done in Papua, that land
where, truly, " nothing arrives save the unexpected."
The West is being broken in slowly, carefully, without
violence, step by step, yet unmistakably. Two years
ago the tribes of the delta country and the Aird
FRUITS AND SAGO 241
River openly defied and even attacked white men
whenever they saw them. Now, like the sailor in
the wise saw, if they have no decency they sham a
little, and, at all events, receive the ruling race with
civility — paying it the further compliment of conceal-
ing cannibal murders and outrages as far as possible
from the prejudiced mind of the white, Goari-Bari
may seem to be an exception, but the fact that a small
party of whites, with a very small guard, now visit
that notorious town in safety every year, proves an
enormous advance over the state of a very few years
ago. Further, the Western and Gulf tribes have
recently begun to ask help from the Government
when oppressed and attacked by their enemies, and
one or two of them have, entirely of their own
accord, sent in tribute of fruits and sago.
The old-fashioned system, now done away with,
was the same that is being carried out in nearly all
savage or semi-savage colonies to-day. It is very
simple. You let your dangerous savage alone till he
kills a missionary or a trader, and then you go and
burn down his village and shoot as many of him as you
can catch, which is not many as a rule. After this
you return to your seat of government and let him
alone. When the process has been repeated a good
many times, you take a large armed force and march
through his country fighting as you go in the hope
of teaching him a lesson that he will not forget. He
does not forget ; on the contrary, he keeps a stone
up his sleeve for you, and waits years, if need be, for
242 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
an opportunity to throw it — not necessarily at you ;
if you are unattainable, the newest missionary or the
latest settler or trader will do just as well. Then you
go out and exterminate him some more, and if land
has been taken up in his neighbourhood you " dis-
perse " him (with a rifle) as often as he comes near
the settlements. By this time he is getting dis-
couraged, and (after the fashion of the discouraged
native) he begins to die out, aided considerably by
the gin to which the traders have introduced him.
(You told them not to, but they would do it,
and how were you to catch them ? . . . besides,
it really does add on to the revenue very con-
veniently, and gives you something to build your
bridges with.) . . .
The process takes anything you like from fifty to a
hundred years, but it comes to an end at last. The
country is civilised. The native is dispersed — to the
Elysian fields or elsewhere (not your fault, again ;
you told him to go " to hell or to Connaught," and if
he chose the former, are you to blame }). You have
imported nice, clean, sensible Indian and Chinese
coolies to fill his place; his hunting-grounds are
covered with sugar plantations, and his mountain
fastnesses are haunts of the winter tourist. In fine,
you have civilised the country. And as for the
" native "... did we say you were his keeper .?
Did anyone tell the first agent of civilisation on
record — he who built the first cities, and was the
ancestor of " those that work in brass and iron " —
A rATi;NT or Nor.ii.nv
To face paje 242.
A BROTHER'S KEEPER 243
that he was the keeper of the inconvenient personage
he " dispersed " ? . . .
That is the old way of our colonies. The new way-
is something so simple, yet so astonishing, that 1
count myself fortunate to have had the luck of seeing
it in person. It is easy to understand an account of a
punitive expedition or a fight. It is not so easy to
see the inner meaning of a report that deals only with
a peaceful call on a hostile tribe. 1 am glad that I
was there to see and to realise how peace is being
made in the West.
It was a wet, warm, blowy morning, and the Gulf
looked very nasty indeed. The great inlet upon
which the Merrie England, had been pitching and roll-
ing all night was livid yellow in colour under a sky
of dirty grey. The little party of seven white people
and eleven armed native police who were going ashore
had to watch their time getting into the launch and
the boat, and jump when the pitching seas allowed.
Rain beat hard in our faces as the launch towed us at
top speed to Goari-Bari, where we meant to get a
guide if possible. We were going to a town called
Maipare, some few miles away, but no one knew
exactly where it was, as it had never been visited by
whites except in 1902, after Chalmers' death, when a
general punitive expedition had landed a large body
of soldiers from Australia, accompanied by native
police, and shot everyone who appeared.
244 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
We did not expect a peaceful reception, and it was
all the more important, therefore, to get a guide who
could act as interpreter and call out encouraging
remarks as we approached. (Of course the village
had a language of its own. You might as well be
without a detached villa in London Suburbia as with-
out a detached language in the back country of
Papua : the absence of either would argue an un-
aristocratic familiarity with miscellaneous neighbours.)
They were not up when we got to Dopima Beach,
below the town commonly called Goari-Bari. It was
getting on for eight o'clock, but the morning was
unpleasant and gloomy, and the simple savage (who
is always up with the golden dawn, carolling like a
lark as he seeks his breakfast of " herbs " and fruits,
according to the simple-life theorists) had not turned
out yet, and did not want to. W^e shouted for him
till he did get up, however, and came down to the
beach, two or three of him, looking sulky and sleepy.
With infinite persuasions and the promise of a
good steel axe (produced) we succeeded in getting
one man to qo with us, after we had calmed his naive
fear that the Big Chief wanted to keep him altogether
and his various coquetries about doing what was
wanted of him. (Jlfaut se /aire mousser, he seemed to
be saying to himself in Goari-Barian.) It was well
on in the morning when we got away, still under a
fall of gusty rain, and made our way through the
lumpy, pounding seas in the direction of Maipare.
Our guide was quite happy for a while, and did not
NOT AT HOME 245
seem much astonished by the mechanism of the steam-
launch, although the ingenuities of my umbrella on the
day before had nearly frightened him into a fit. Things
entirely outside the grasp of the native mind do not
astound it, as a rule ; it is small matters, such as
gloves, tea-kettles, eye-glasses, that strike visible
amazement into the soul of the simple cannibal. The
speed of the launch seemed to delight him, and when
he was told to get up into the bows of the boat and
con us through the shoals, he obeyed with evident
pleasure.
But now, after an hour or two, we were getting to
Maipare. The line of black swampy coast was closing
in ; thatched houses could be seen in the distance,
and small coloured specks were moving excitedly
about. Our guide began to look as if he were asking
himself the old riddle about what is better in a rail-
way accident than presence of mind. He made a wild,
weird picture enough, perched up against the sky-line
in the bows like some demon figure-head, his body
flung forward almost beyond the limits of statical
laws, his black bark-cloth mantle flying in the wind,
every feather in his halo streaming and quivering,
his fierce, painted face strained towards the rapidly
approaching shore. It was plain to everyone in the
two boats that Maipare did not want us, and was pre-
pared to say " Not at home " in terms the most
emphatic. The shore was lined with fighting men,
several hundred of them, painted, feathered, and
armed to the last degree. They were uttering a most
246 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
extraordinary cry, like nothing on earth but a dog-
show in torment, loud yelps being mixed with piercing
howls in a peculiarly canine way. As we came nearer
they began to dance, and it was then that I first had
the pleasure of seeing what very few people have ever
looked on — a real war-dance, danced in earnest by
genuine savages.
If anyone wants to see an exact reproduction of the
performance, let him take a children's jumping-jack
and pull the strings. That is the Aird River war-
dance to a hair. Just so did the people throw up an
arm and a leg, rapidly and alternately, with a curious,
wooden, unlifelike effect, that yet managed to convey
its meaning with remarkable clearness. " Come on!"
it said. "Come on, and take what you will get!"
The tall bows and the bunches of arrows, the long
thin spears shaken defiantly in the air, the fluttering
feathers and fringes of the dancing warriors, added to
the general effect, and made one at least of the party
curse the luck that had covered the sky with drifting
rain-clouds and rendered the camera useless. I had
secured a snap of a Goari-Barian rudely doing a war-
dance by himself the day before ; but the splendid
picture of four or five hundred men in full war-dress
dancing with all their souls was not to be mine or
anyone else's.
The steam-launch puffed on, and we rushed nearer
and nearer to the shore. Our interpreter and guide
swung wildly by a stay in the bows, yelling himself
hoarse, calling to the people to put down their arms,
LANDING AT MAIPARE 247
assuring them no harm was meant, urging them to
stop dancing, to listen ; but they took no more notice
of him than if he had been a screaming cockatoo. We
were almost within bowshot now ; and some df us
were beginning to wonder what was coming next —
only to wonder, however. We had seen something
of the Governmental methods before, and knew that
they had a knack of turning out right side up.
When close to the shore the Governor stopped the
launch and started for the shore with nine of the
police and four of the white men, leaving myself,
two police, and two engineers in the steam-launch,
all very bitterly disappointed at being out of the
fun, though I was told I should be sent for as
soon as possible. We were immediately surrounded
by a swarm of canoes filled with lively gentry from
the town, who hovered about us, darting to and fro,
and trying to grab everything portable that the
launch contained. It took up all our attention for
a few minutes to protect the Merrie England's property
without creating a disturbance, and so I missed the
sight of the landing, which must have been worth
seeing. The howls of the interpreter had succeeded
so far as to induce the natives to lay down some of
their weapons and to stop dancing. On this the
party landed, and the five white men and nine police
then went for a walk among the four or five hundred
excited cannibals, talking to them, looking at them,
and offering them smokes. This unprecedented con-
duct first puzzled, then interested, then reassured the
248 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
warriors. They could not understand very well what
these lunatics were doing, but they thought the
strangers must be in possession of some extraordinary
unseen force to behave in such a manner, and they
inferred that their intentions were nevertheless not
evil. They did not abandon their arms, and they
kept up an extremely wild and excited demeanour,
but they made no attack, and when asked to bring out
their women, so that the white woman might come
ashore, they actually produced two or three wrinkled
old hags and brought them down to the beach.
The boat was now sent for me, and brought me
into the town. I had scarcely set foot on the mud
of the beach when the two old women seized me by
both hands and grasped me as if they were drowning.
They were evidently very badly frightened, and
clung to the idea of a hostage as their only safety.
Surrounded by a wildly excited crowd — the hysteria
of Goari-Bari was really nothing to the hysteria of
Maipare — they, and an old man who seemed to be
a chief, led me to the dubu of the town, and half
dragged, half pushed me up the ladder. Some of our
own party followed, but the old hags were evidently
not interested in them. They towed me down the
whole length of the dubu (nearly as long as that of
Goari-Bari), still led by the old chief, and still cackling
and chuckling with joy. At the end of the building
they paused, and seemed undecided what to do. The
far door led out into the depths of unknown, slimy,
swampy thickets, and 1 had no fancy at all to go there, as
SIT DOWN 249
their looks suggested they wanted me to do. Possibly
the rest of the women were concealed somewhere in
the swamp and wished to sec mc, but I thought the
chance too uncertain to take, as treachery is the very
soul of the western savage. We all lingered for
a moment, apparently admiring the very unadmir-
able view, and then, on the motion of the whites,
started back down the endless length of the dim,
dusty, shaky brown tunnel along which we had
come.
The women still kept up their drowning grip, and
the old man still towed the entire outfit. When we
reached the centre of the dubu they came to a deter-
mined halt and began pulling downwards towards the
floor, motioning to myself and the two white men
who were with me that we should sit.
Nobody knew exactly what to do. There were
a good many natives in the dubu, and although the
people were civil enough, one could not quite forget
that the preliminary to the end of Chalmers and
others had been just such an invitation to " sit down."
There was silence for a moment or two. The sun
sifted in through the roof in long thin spears, making
a warp of dusty gold across the transparent gloom.
The curtains of brown combed fibre that hung from
the rafters dropped straight and still in the windless
air, like worn-out banners from some forgotten battle-
field, hung in a dark cathedral. Dusky faces and
forms, scarce visible in the shadow, and motionless
save for the trembling of a grass armlet or the flicker
250 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
of a plume, waited for our reply. And the women
pulled my hands.
It was only a few seconds before the white men
answered. We would not stay, they said. It was
getting late, and we had to remember the fall of the
tide.
So we went out again into the rainy sunlight of
the beach, where the mud-crabs crawled by millions
in the slime, and the poisonous green bush clustered
low on the black quagmire of the land. Maipare
was still at fever-point of excitement, running about,
staring, skipping, bolting into the bush and coming
back again, and (like Goari-Bari) instantly converting
itself into a dissolving view if you looked at any of it
too closely. But it had altered its demeanour to a
certain extent. The presents given by the Govern-
ment party — wonderful red calico, beads, knives,
tobacco — had convinced it that these strange people,
headed by the very tall chief, did not intend to use
the mysterious powers of offence that they no doubt
possessed. It had brought out more of its women —
young ones this time — and a few children, to share in
the good things that were going ; and it was laughing
I10W — laughing with a wild nervous excitement, but
evidently not without some sort of pleasure. W^hen
we re-embarked, at least a score of long light canoes
pushed off from shore to accompany us as far as
possible. The men paddled with astonishing vigour,
and kept up with the launch as long as the smooth
water lasted, but when we got out into the lumpy
COME AGAIN 251
water of the bay the cockle-shell crafts fell behind,
and the last we saw of Maiparc was a vision of wild
painted faces, with feathers streaming in the wind,
and long mantles of new scarlet calico slatting and
flying like loose sails, all falling into the rear, with
shrieks and cries that needed no interpreter to translate
them into their obvious equivalent — "Come again ! "
One knew, without being told, that the next party
of official visitors who came to Maipare would find
the town friendly and well-disposed. Another step
had been taken towards the pacification of the West.
There is not space to tell of two or three other
calls that the Government party made while I was
with them in the same district; calls that took us into
villages never before seen by whites, where sometimes
nearly the whole population cleared oflF into the bush,
only a few brave or curious souls remaining to see what
manner of people these white conquerors might be, of
whom they had heard so much. The plucky minority
were always well rewarded, for gifts of red calico,
beads, tobacco, and knives were always made, and all
these are valued in the Gulf and river country much
as Russian sable robes, diamonds, and fine solid silver
tableware would be valued in an English provincial
town if suddenly distributed broadcast by an eccen-
tric travelling millionaire.
None of the odd experiences for which people
spend their time and money in travelling is more
piquant than this playing of Lords and Ladies Bounti-
ful among untamed savages. It is as gratifying to one's
252 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
natural human vanity as the part of a great Royalty
might be to one unaccustomed to such honours. When
your boots are obviously regarded as a miracle, your
hat as a piece of magic — when a stray button from
your clothes is cherished like the relic of a saint, and
the back of an old letter out of your pocket is
accepted with trembling joy — when your lordly
munificence in giving away halfpenny sticks of
tobacco, and your splendid generosity in bestowing
inestimable fourpenny knives seem to drive the lucky
beneficiaries half out of their minds, it is hard not to
feel that you are great and good to a degree that even
you yourself had not previously suspected. Of
course, real gratitude is an emotion not known to
these simple souls, any more than it is known, as a
rule, to your greengrocer, or your county member, or
your patient, or your client, or your tiresome greedy
nephew or aunt. They (the savages) think you silly
for giving them all these treasures, but they worship
the power that has made you master of such things,
and they understand dimly, imperfectly, yet unmis-
takably, as men black, brown, and white, cannibal or
Christian, do understand the things that really matter
— that you mean to be their friend.
With this knowledge goes also the conviction —
much older, and based on manifold rumours that
have drifted in from the wider civilisation beyond —
that the Government does not like cannibalism and
tribal murder, and that these pleasing diversions are
best kept away from its knowledge " lest some worse
ORDER OF THE SHIRT 253
thing happen." Later on will come the step which
Maipua has taken during the year and a half that
have elapsed since 1 first made its acquaintance —
actually abandoning these practices, and fast be-
coming the copy-book example of the river country.
The cannibal of the West is by no means deficient
in brains, and when he realises once for all that it
pays to be "in" with the Government, he becomes
almost obtrusively loyal.
In a new village the Government always cements
the allegiance of the chiefs by a curious ceremony,
which might be called the Investiture of the Order of
the Imperial Shirt. Clothes-wearing, it may be added
in parenthesis, is not encouraged among the natives,
as science has proved that it helps to produce disease,
but an exception is made in the case of chiefs with
whom the ruling Powers wish to open up friendly
relations. Anything like a ceremonial dress or
uniform has an incalculable effect upon the Papuan
mind. The force of village constables that helps the
Armed Native Constabulary in keeping order would,
like the constabulary, be more comfortable, and per-
haps more healthy (though no ill results have been
noted) without the serge tunics and jumpers, braided
with red, that they wear as a sign of office ; but it is
certain that they would be much less happy, and that
they would exact scarcely any respect from the other
natives without uniform. In the unsettled and scarce-
visited districts of the West, where a rude kind of
bark cloth is the only material available tor covering,
254 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
the smallest fragment of cotton is highly valued, and
the possession of a whole shirt is enough to make a
man a king among his fellows. Therefore, at each new
town, where the foot of the white man had never
before attempted to tread (we say attempted, as the
treading was mostly done on half-submerged logs
with occasional disasters), the principal old man was
picked out and solemnly invested by the Governor's
Private Secretary with a shirt, a cotton tunic, and a
leather belt.
One and all they took the ceremony in exactly the
same way. It was possible to be excited and hilarious
over a knife or a handful of beads, but for great
matters great emotions were appropriate. They
understood fully that the presentation of these royal
robes conferred a rank upon them higher than they
had ever possessed, and made them in some way
allies of the mysterious power known as " Gova-
mena." With a dignity surprising to see in a naked
heathen who had only the moment before been pranc-
ing and skipping with excitement, and scrambling in
the mud for beads, the chief, under operation, would
stand up to be dressed, head in air, chest thrown out,
eyes half closed with pride, and utter never a word
while he was being put into the strange garments that
were to change the whole current of his life. Once
shirted, tunicked, and belted, he would march down
the dubu with long slow strides, collecting and enjoy-
ing the popular homage as he went, but never casting
a glance at the common folk who offered it. Hence-
AT UKIARAVI 255
forth he was somebody, and very likely, indeed,
to be on the side of the mysterious power that
had promoted him, if it happened to come down
looking for a murderer some months later, or to
want men for carriers, or to require any other little
service.
Kaimari, a neighbour of the copy-book Maipua,
has progressed so far as to become actually embar-
rassing by excess of zeal. It even sent out seven
hundred warriors in war canoes to meet and join
the Government party, on one occasion in 1908,
when the Government wished to investigate an
attempted attack on two venturesome white traders,
which had occurred at another delta town — Ukiaravi.
The very last thing the party desired, naturally, was
an army of bloodthirsty, howling fiends to accom-
pany them on a mission that was delicate and diplo-
matic in the extreme, but they had almost insur-
mountable difficulty in inducing the loyal militia of
Kaimari to go home. Ukiaravi — a town of some
thousands of people, determinedly hostile to whites —
was on that occasion taken possession of by the usual
four or five white men and handful of police, and a
number of prisoners carried away handcuffed, and in
mortal terror, to several years of jail in Port Moresby.
It was done by a determined show of force, a little
quick action, and no violence at all ; the people of
Ukiaravi, as the result of this salutary action, have
been sending tributary canoes of sago and fruit, when-
ever they could, ever since, to express the extreme
256 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
and enthusiastic character of the loyalty they have
so suddenly acquired.
After I had left the West and gone back to Port
Moresby in the Merrie England^ the Government party
— His Excellency the Lieutenant-Governor, five other
white men, and eleven police — left the yacht altogether
for more than a week, going inland in boats to dis-
tricts of the Aird River country never seen by whites,
and discovering a number of new, largely populated
towns. This voyage of adventure added a good
deal to the imperfect geographical knowledge of the
district, and did much to bring the country in touch
with civilised influences. No attacks were made and
no trouble met with. The peaceful display of
authority thus shown, and the knowledge that the
tiny handful of whites had no fear whatever of the
hordes of murderous cannibals among whom they
were journeying, far from all possible help, no doubt
laid the foundations of a future reign of law and
order among the hitherto intractable savages.
This is the new way. Those who know the
country are beginning to hope that it may have a
new result — the preservation of the native races, an
end hitherto not achieved in any similar possession of
Great Britain.
CHAPTER Vll
Eastward in the Menu' Englauii — The prcttiness of Samarai — " Very
feverish " — Hunting the Japs — The island world again — What they
did in Milne Bay — A day in the gold mines — The man who lost
his head— The unbelievable island — Did they eat the Chinamen ?
— A two days' man-hunt — Where the money is made.
TT Is half-past five o'clock.
The stars seem to be cooling down before
they go out. All night they have danced and swayed
in the space between the bulwark and the awning,
hot, yellow, and restless. They are turning pale now,
and their white faces look chill. The warm river of
wind that has been flowing steadily down from the
bowsprit across my mattress since eleven o'clock now
takes on a touch of grateful coolness. The east is
growing orange — the lurid, volcanic orange of a tropic
dawn.
I sit up on my mattress, dressing-gown clad, and
look round. On the bridge-deck above, the sheeted
dead seem to be lying in heaps, limbs cast abroad,
heads thrown back to the lightening sky. It is only
the Government officials and the ship's officers
wrapped in the quilts that they have pulled up as the
chill of the dawn began, but it certainly suggests a
battlefield in the dead stillness of this early hour while
the Merrie England is yet asleep. She will not long be
s 257
258 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
asleep, however. It is close on deck-washing time, so
I gather up my pillows and go down reluctantly to
my pretty, roomy, dainty, but most outrageously hot
and stifling cabin on the deck below. The tempera-
ture is over 100, for the ports have to be kept shut
owing to the liveliness of the yacht out at sea ; and
we are in the worst of the hot season, thrashing
round the south-east corner of New Guinea on a tour
about the islands.
We left Samarai yesterday — the second town in
Papua ; the " other " town, in fact, since there are
but two. Samarai is surely one of the very prettiest
places in the whole tropic world. Its situation is
unique — a tiny island, which you can walk round in a
quarter of an hour, set in the midst of a bright blue
strait surrounded by high, steep, densely wooded
hills. There are other islands dotted about the strait,
some large, some small, some near, some far away,
but all alike bright green, palmy, fringed with snow-
white coral beaches — in fact, the typical South Sea
island of a schoolboy's dream. People live on one
or two — a man and his wife, looking after their cocoa-
nut plantation ; a solitary German, who keeps cattle
and sends milk over to Samarai every day in a boat ;
a Chinaman, who grows cabbages and beans to supply
the hotels. Native canoes, made out of hoUowed-out
logs and gaily decorated with big white shells, ply
constantly up and down among the straits and islets.
The tribes who live on the mainland are all friendly
and on good terms with the whites. Looking down
PRETTY SAMARAI 259
through the narrow neck of China Straits (if you ask
me why " China " I cannot tell you ; no one seems
to know) on a clear day, one can see the dark blue
mass of Ferguson Island, which is much bigger than
the Isle of Wight, standing up on the horizon some
forty miles away. They are naughty little people on
Ferguson — ill-tempered small cannibals who hide in
mountain fastnesses and throw spears at the Govern-
ment officials when the latter go out on patrol. But they
keep to themselves, and are never seen near Samarai.
As for Samarai itself, it is a much more imposing
town than the capital. It has several large wooden
hotels, three miscellaneous stores, and a whole street
of little tin-roofed offices and bungalows. It is neat
and tidy to the verge of primness — white sanded walks,
bordered by gorgeous hedges of crimson and orange-
leaved crotons ; shaven green lawns ; garden seats set
out at picturesque points all round the island. Roses
red, white, and yellow ; scarlet and cream-coloured
hibiscus, jasmine in hedges, climbing allamanda (a
flower like a large yellow gloxinia), strange blossoms
that fall like showers of tiny blood-drops through
feathery green foliage, pink begonias, and all sorts of
quaint-foliaged trees, from the huge forest king that
bears thousands of sweet nuts, and is generally half
scarlet, half green in leaf, down to the weird, stiff,
witch-like pandanus with the twisted chevaux-de-frise
of saw-edged swords — all these brighten up the park-
like, dainty little place and add still further to its
cultivated look.
26o THE NEW NEW GUINEA
There is, in truth, not much cultivation about it
after all — a few prisoners from the jail kept cleaning
and weeding ; no more. In countries like Papua,
nature simply leaps to meet the gardener's hand.
The mainland is just as fertile as Samarai. When
you take up land you can clear away your " bush " or
forest, leaving the ornamental trees and plants, of
which there are many ; pull branches off anything
that you fancy in a neighbour's place, and stick them
in anywhere you like ; give one or two flowering
creepers carte blanche to behave as they please ; bring
a little white sand from the beach or a few stones and
ferns from the river — and in a few weeks' time behold
a result that would make Kew Gardens sick with
envy ! Orchids you can find anywhere, and they
will grow on any tree to which you tie them. Butter-
flies as big as birds and as bright as jewels, white and
coloured parrots, fireflies, many-coloured dragon-flies,
will come without being asked. Palm trees — the
scaly-trunked sago palm ; the stately cocoanut, queen
of the tropic world ; the brilliant green " fan " palm ;
the incredible betel palm, with its white trunk no
larger than your neck, and seventy or eighty feet
high — you will find established on your ground when
you arrive. . . . How much do you think it used to
cost to raise those half-dozen gloomy little palms in
the steaming hot-house at the castle ^ How many
gardeners did that stretch of " carpet bedding " at
the deanery employ } . . . You are a little trader
and you do a little planting, and your boots wear out
VERY FEVERISH 261
before you can afford to increase your bill at the
store by fifteen shillings for a new pair, and you have
to make your dining-room tabic yourself out of old
packing-cases ; but nobody under ten thousand a year
could match those grounds of yours at home.
1 have wandered some way from the Merrie England
and her tour. Breakfast is over now ; the ship has
been behaving very badly, progressing for the most
part " the way the divil wint through Athlone — in
shtandin' leps," with an occasional right and left roll
that shakes the passengers exactly as a gigantic terrier
might shake a rat. In consequence people are feeling
"very feverish to-day," and appetites are uncertain.
. . . Fever in Papua covers more sins, secrets, and
weaknesses than ever did the proverbial cloak of
charity. Is there a vicious roll on the steamer, and
does your face grow green as the swinging seas .''
You are feverish ; you must go and lie down. Have
you been dining unwisely last night, and do you find
your hand unsteady and your eyes watery and your
head racked with pain next morning .'' Fever — you
know you've got a temperature, and you won't have
any breakfast, thanks — only soda-water — which every-
one knows is good for malarial troubles. Has your
pretty fane t'e written up from Melbourne to say that
she is tired of waiting for you, and that Mr. Solomon-
stein's attentions (Solomonstein, Aarons, Levi, and
Co. own half of Swanston Street) have met with so
262 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
much approval from her family that— that, in fact,
she returns your ring and hopes you will find some-
one more worthy of you ? . . . Fever — that is what
makes you look so dark under the eyes and so sallow
about the cheeks and keeps you awake at nights for a
week or two to come ... at least, you can say it is,
and you will be believed, for most people take a little
fever now and then as all in the day's work, and are
almost inclined to resent the impudence of the lucky
minority who never have any. Yes, there is some-
thing to be said for even the malarial nuisance.
o
By and by we run under the lee of the first of the
Louisiade group, and the fever patients get better
with astonishing quickness.
The Government yacht does not trouble much
about the Louisiades as a rule, since the natives are
fairly civilised and give no trouble ; but we are on
a special mission this trip. One versatile vessel is
appearing in an entirely new character — that of a
man-of-war. We are out chasing certain Japanese
luggers which have been awaking suspicion by their
movements, and if we catch them we are going to
give them "what for" — that is, we shall confiscate
them, put our chief officer on one and our boatswain
on another, and tow the prizes triumphantly into
Samarai.
What have they been doing ? Well, they have
been taking Papuans, without leave or license, off to
the pearling grounds at Thursday Island ; further-
more, they have walked clean through customs and
HUNTING THE JAPS 263
quarantine regulations wherever they have been, and
recklessly profaned the sanctities of " pratique " — an
offence that only the ocean-going traveller can appre-
ciate at its full value. Short shrift they will get if
we catch them, armed with the full authority of our
racks of rifles and our Nordenfeldt gun. But shall
we catch them .'' A pearling lugger draws little more
water than a whale-boat ; we scrape the bottom at
fourteen feet. What we know about the reefs,
shoals, and " vigias " on this semi-charted coast is no
small thing — more than the "B.P.'s" know — much
more than the Admiralty surveys know — but not so
much by a good way as the wily little Jap knows.
That sort of thing is his speciality. He possesses
charts of the Great Barrier Reef of Australia that
make legitimate Government surveys look foolish.
He knows more than he has any business to know
about Australian harbours. He could tell the Com-
monwealth much that they would like to hear about
the Northern Territory and the Gulf of Carpentaria.
And if we could get hold of all the information he
possesses about the dangerous, half-charted, all un-
lighted and unbeaconed coasts of Papua, a great deal
of work would be saved the Survey Department of
that colony.
What does he want with it .'' Well, you must not
ask me, because you do not really want to hear — you
nice people at home. He is your ally, and your ally
can do no wrong ; and the colour line is a nothing —
a chimera — " an idee in folks' heads," as the prosaic
264 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
lady of Maine defined the science of psychology.
Only those people who have really met and lived
among yellow and chocolate and red and black fellow-
creatures think that colour means anything — and
somehow they are always prejudiced. In the days
when I lived among white people, and white people
only, myself, I used to think that residence in the
tropics destroyed anyone's power of unprejudiced
thought on these questions of colour. Now I am
prejudiced myself; I will not talk to you at all,
because I know what you feel ; but I think — yes, 1
think very hard and very loud indeed !
We did not catch those Japs — those dear little,
intelligent, gentle, open, straightforward Japs, who
had doubtless such excellent views on art, and spoke
so courteously to each other about " honourable tea."
We never even caught a glimpse of their sails in the
distance ; nor did anyone else, then or later. I
inclined at the time to think that they had been met
and warned by a third lugger which had put into
Samarai a few days earlier, and had been unkindly
fined £i§ for sending its crew ashore wooding and
watering without the formality of passing the doctor.
. . . When the Resident Magistrate reproved the
captain for this lawless deed the captain was very
innocent, very sorry, very shy. He had not under-
stood, that was all. He did not know ships had to
have papers, had to satisfy customs and quarantine
NO ORANGES TO-DAY 265
officers ; he had never heard of pratique. Pratique ?
. . . What was that word ?
" You say you're from Thursday Island ?" queried
the R.M. " How long were you there ? "
" Fi-ive ye-ear," drawled the gentle little captain.
I wish I could reproduce the snort that expressed
the R.M.'s opinion of the yellow races in general,
and the captain in particular.
The lugger went out, warned and fined, and the
two other luggers — the really naughty ones — vanished
from Papua almost immediately after. So we did not
catch them — much to my regret ; it seemed to me
that it would have been the next best thing to living
in one of Marryat's novels.
However, our investigations took us into several
places quite off the ordinary track. Teste Island was
one of these. It is a small bit of country, two and a
half miles by a quarter of a mile, but very pretty in
the South Sea style — cloud-white coral beach, rust-
ling, swaying palms, green lagoon, and light, bright,
flowery soil. Coral soil does not as a rule grow
heavy bush, and these islands in consequence are full
of clear sunlight and gay colouring, with scarce a
shadow where you can escape from the midday
glare.
The orange groves were the only shady spot on
Teste Island; we coveted the golden fruit as we
stood beneath the boughs, but alas! the Hesperidean
dragon, in the person of official Methodism, barred
the way. The day was Sunday ; it was wicked to
i66 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
pick fruit on Sunday, more wicked to sell it — the
Teste Islanders would none of us.
Still, the island is interesting to spend a morning
in. We walked over the little village, and saw its
quaint houses, all set up, Papuan fashion, on long
wooden legs, all with transparent floors of split sticks,
cool, heavy roofs of sago thatch, and perpendicular
ladders leading up to the doors. Inside, there were
piles of fishing-nets, beautifully spun and netted out
of bush fibres, a few baskets of native make, a
number of netting needles prettily carved, some
large clay pots, and in the middle of everything,
carelessly set down inside the slightest of wooden
fences, the inevitable native fire. How it is that
every village in Papua is not burned down, wholly
or partially, every day in the year, is a problem that
an insurance company's secretary might find difficulty
to solve. Fires are always kept burning in the houses
— it would be hard to say what for, in a country
where cooking is only done once a day, and the
temperature is like the stokehole of an Indian liner.
These fires are set on a bed of white ashes, which
in its turn apparently lies right on the fragile stick
floor, and is surrounded with inflammable things of
every kind — leaf baskets, grass skirts, wooden sleeping
pillows, etc. — the whole being roofed over by thatch,
and surrounded by walls that are crackling with in-
flammable dryness. A single spark ought to set a
whole village afire, and yet, somehow, it never does,
not even when the whole population goes out fishing
MEETING OF GREEKS 267
and leaves all the fires untended, and all the doors
open. If this is not a miracle, one would like to
know what it is. It is not so surprising after all,
however, for in this impossible country ordinary
laws of nature seem the last things that can be
counted upon to act in an ordinary way.
The people of Teste Island wear a good deal of
clothing, in some cases, though in others the narrow
native girdle is considered enough. The women
are liberally tattooed, often with considerable art.
They were curious about our ship, and interested in
the call, but obviously not unfamiliar with the ways
of white people. Indeed, there are two white men
who spend most of their time on the island, or in its
vicinity — Greeks from Southern Europe, speaking no
English except a very little of the " pigeon " variety.
They trade with the natives for copra. Greeks were
among the very earliest of visitors to the island,
many years before Papuan colonisation had begun.
Perhaps one of the oddest incidents of the voyage
was the litde scene that took place under the palms
of the village, our chief officer, who was half Greek
by descent, conversing in fluent phrases with the two
queer white wanderers, and importing a bewildering
atmosphere of scholarship and ancient colleges and
stately resounding sentences learned in the cool
leisure of the old country, long ago, when there was
time for everything, into this remote tropic island, so
far away from " anywhere." No news was derived
from this " meeting of Greeks," however. Our
268 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
quarry had not been seen ; and we went back to the
ship unsatisfied.
Next day we reached another coral island, set in
another beautiful lagoon — Nivani, about the same
size as Teste Island. It was a Government station,
with a resident magistrate, until a few years ago.
But it is now deserted, and the Government buildings
and jail are falling into ruin. There are a few
natives on the island cultivating the copra, which is
leased to a resident in Sud-Est. Exquisitely pretty,
like all the Louisiade group, is this little island, lying
in the midst of a brilliant green lagoon, encircled with
a snowy white beach, and decked with waving palms
and feathery casuarina, one of the loveliest of tropic
trees. There are many gay red and yellow crotons
in the bush, scarlet-flowered hibiscus, too, and white
and yellow flowers of several kinds. Pawpaw grows
freely, also edible nuts. The climate appears to be
good, and free from the damp heat of the mainland.
This is an example of a good many similar islands
clustering about the outer end of New Guinea, which
seem to offer possibilities to the would-be copra
planter. They are the best possible places for the
cocoanut, which loves the near neighbourhood of the
sea, and many of them are already extensively planted,
naturally or artificially. A man who wished to settle
down on his own plantation might do worse than look
up the available islands about the New Guinea coast.
Health is always better on the small islands than on
the mainland, and there are pleasant places to live
ISLANDS TO LET 269
in, not to mention the convenience of transport of
produce, as compared with inland districts.
Two more islands next day of the same kind,
beautiful, peaceful, remote, full of the sound of the sea
and the low murmur of palms, and thinly inhabited
by peaceful and harmless natives. Moturina and Pana
Pom-Pom it was this time. We went ashore and made
the usual grand tour, returning to the ship with a
feeling of vague dissatisfaction at the requirements of
official, literary, and business life, that forbade us one
and all to buy islands and settle down upon them, and
cease from troubling about Parliaments, or mails, or
dates, or times, or seasons, any more for ever.
I, who had known the true Island world well and
long, and seen many who realised the curiously
universal dream of taking an Island to live In, as
in a kingdom of their own, saw many memories flit
across the empty sky. In the long pull back to the
ship. . . . How often in far-away Tahiti, or Samoa,
or In little-known Isolated groups, I had seen that
dream realised — the trader or planter settled down in
his own little country, perhaps a few acres, perhaps
many square miles in extent, with his wife and family,
and his small following of native labour, for all society,
and his cutter the only means of communication with
the outside world. . . . Were they happy, these new
Swiss Family Robinsons, in that life that so many
envy them ? Yes — and no. I have heard a Fiji
planter, who had tried the life for some years, declare
that no man would keep It up, except out of interest.
270 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
after the first five seasons, and that those who were
obliged to hang on were heartily sick of it. I have
known a man and his wife, used to a complex and
cultured society, perfectly happy for more than twice
five years in an island isolated from all but the
rarest calls. I have known a good many who dropped
down to the level of the surrounding natives — usually
through that curse of island life, a native marriage —
and some who kept well above it, yet became never-
theless partially unfitted for white society. On the
whole, one is compelled to allow that the ideal life on
an island of one's own does not appear to have ideal
effects when translated out of the visionary into the
concrete. It is best suited to the very old or the
very young — those who have done with life, and only
desire to rest and dream until the end, or those who
are still so rich in the unspent capital of golden years
that they can afford to throw away a few on the chance
that the life may really prove to be all that they desire.
We returned to Samarai after a cruise of several
days, disappointed as regarded the Japs, but well
pleased with what we had seen. I cannot say exactly
what lands are to let, and what' are still free among
these island groups, but it may be generally stated
that there is a good deal to be had, practically without
rent (though with conditions as to improvement), and
that the land is in most cases excellent for copra. The
natives of the Louisiade group are among the most
civilised in New Guinea, and have in most cases been
Christianised (more or less) for many years.
ROAST PIG 271
The Government nursery at Milne Bay, half a
day's run down the coast, had to be visited after this.
Milne Bay is a very peaceful place in these days ; you
could take your aged grandaunt, or your timid sister-
in-law who has never been out of her own country,
and leave her there for six months, with a comfortable
certainty of finding her all in one piece, if somewhat
bored, when you returned. It was not always so,
however. Less than twenty years ago the Milne Bay
tribes used to eat any stranger who landed there ; and
it took much "faithful dealing" on the part of the
Government, backed up by the Armed Native Con-
stabulary, to improve their company manners. Milne
Bay was one of the districts where the gentle Papuan
used to roast his game alive — pig when there was
nothing better, man when he was to be had. Roast-
ing pigs alive is an amusement by no means extinct in
the Territory even yet. The Papuan is fully alive to
the value of self-advertisement, and by simply omit-
ting the preliminary knock on the head, he has it in
his power to let every native for two miles around
know most unmistakably that there is going to be
roast pork for dinner at a certain village by and by —
which is naturally gratifying to the village, if not to
the pork. Roasting men after the same fashion has
been so sternly discountenanced by the Government
that the practice is supposed to be extinct ; although
it would be hard to say what may or may not go on
in the unexplored inner country of the main ranges.
To Milne Bay, some time in the early nineties,
272 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
came a ship with certain sailors, and they went ashore
for wood and water. One of them was missing on
the return to the boats, and the others set out to look
for him. They did not find him, and retreated dis-
consolate. On the next day they hunted again ; still
no trace of the missing comrade, but the sailors —
rough men though they were — were sickened and
disgusted by the awful cries of a pig which was evi-
dently being roasted alive in the neighbourhood.
Their numbers were small, and they thought it wiser
not to incense the natives by interference, so they
went back to the ship and next day hunted again
with despairing hearts. . . . They came upon the
village of the feast unexpectedly, but they found no
remains of the pig. There had not been any pig.
There had been a man — a white man — a man whose
voice they had mistaken for the voice of a brute —
their comrade.
Well, Milne Bay is improved since then. We
went ashore and walked to the Government station,
and I got separated from the rest of the party as
usual, looking for illusory iguanas and mythical
orchids, and found them (the party) again, as usual,
without causing anxiety or feeling it. And we spent
a pleasant hour or two there looking at things nobody
understood, and came back to the Merrie England
quite happily and safely, nothing having been cooked
but tea, and nothing eaten but ship biscuit.
The Government nursery — one of four — was very
like the specimen I had already seen on the Laloki
NINETY-DAY MAIZE 273
River. No "frills" of any kind -a bungalow of
native materials for the curator ; a few long sheds
with brushwood roots, sheltering rows and rows of
neatly labelled plants in boxes, beds, and pots ; rough
walks outside, leading to little plots of industrial
plants, kept ready for sale. A useful, cheap, sensible
sort of place not meant to show to visitors. A place
where you can go and buy your rubber seeds or
stumps, your hemp plants, your cocoanuts, your
coffee, cotton, spice, or drug seeds cheap and fresh,
and take them down to your plantation in good
condition.
" Ninety-day " maize was growing here among
many other plants that illustrated the richness of
the soil. Four crops a year you can grow of this
maize in suitable districts. It would be an exacting
planter who would ask more.
There seems to be no good reason why the Papuan
planter should not grow the food for his own labour,
and avoid the heavy expense of purchasing imported
rice. At present rice is the chief food on all planta-
tions ; but the small experiments that have been made
with maize seem to prove that the natives would rather
have it, and that they work better on this tasty and
nourishing grain than on the ordinary rice ration.
Why does no one grow it on a large scale ? Ap-
parently because all the plantations are new, and all
the planters are in a terrible hurry, and it is easier
to order a couple of hundred mats of rice from the
stores at seven shillings a mat than to sow maize, and
T
274 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
wait three or four months for it. . . . Another
of the "reasons why" that explain the unprofitable-
ness of certain profitable and promising - looking
estates.
Another quick-change for the Merrie England fol-
lowed our agricultural trip. This time we were out
on salvage work. One of the Government schooners
had been wrecked on a reef at the back of nowhere-
in-particular, and we had to get her off, or at least to
see how it could be done.
It was near East Cape, not far from the D'Entre-
casteaux Islands, that the schooner had come to grief.
The D'Entrecast-eaux, like the Louisiades, would be
regarded as a group of considerable importance if they
were situated anywhere else than off the end of this
great island-continent. Normandy is seven or eight
times as big as Malta. Ferguson would make nearly
four of the Isle of Man, and there are others in the
group by no means negligible in size. But Papua
does not trouble very much about them, nor about the
Bouvonloirs, the Lusangays, the Laughlins, and other
miscellaneous groups scattered here and there. The
Trobriands and the Woodlarks, on the contrary, are
much thought of ; one has pearls and the other gold,
and that is something worth talking about.
We started out from Samarai on a squally, windy
day, and made our way through China Straits out
among the D'Entrecasteaux.
Very beautiful is the scenery in this remote corner
of Papua — green, forest-clad mountains rising steeply
SALVAGE 275
from the stormy edge of the sea ; blue vaporous
peaks, four to seven thousand feet in height, soaring
away into heaven beyond. There are many islands,
too, each exquisite enough to make the beauty of
miles of coast-line, were it set by itself. But the
wind and the rain, and the ceaseless squalls, through
which the ship plunged and squattered in her own
violent way, veiled most of these beauties in driving
folds of mist. The wreck was sighted late in the day
— a decent little schooner, lying comfortably on a reef
in a sheltered bay, within a cable's length of land.
We tried to tow her off, but she sank in deep water,
and her latter state seemed worse than her first. The
ship could not stay to make any more attempts at
rescue, but it was arranged that the unlucky schooner
was to be refloated — with cocoanuts ! — by men sent
out from Sumarai, and we went on our way again.
Did anyone, outside of Papua the Peculiar, ever hear
of filling the hold of a vessel with unhusked cocoa-
nuts, and so floating her to the surface .'' Yet this
has been done before in the Possession, and seems to
be one of the recognised methods of salvage.
The Woodlarks were our next port of call. They
are a fairly important group, consisting of one large
island, 35 miles by 7, and several islets of small area.
Gold was discovered here many years ago ; and ever
since there has been a fair-sized mining population,
scraping out a living somehow or other in various parts
of the big island. The death-rate among the miners in
the early days was appalling. As was the case on the
276 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
notorious Mambare River some years later, the pro-
spectors of Woodlark came ill-provided with money
and stores, ignorant of medicines, reckless about chills
and fever, and they paid the penalty. The place is no
sanatorium at best ; under the conditions of the early
gold rush it became a death-trap from which few
escaped. Health conditions are much improved now-
adays ; but Woodlark has certainly given its full
contribution to the bad name that has handicapped
this unlucky dog of a Papua for so many years.
Woodlark has an evil reputation as an incurably
rainy place, and it fully lived up to its bad name
during the three days of our stay. The low, dark
green shores were swathed in wet mist when we came
to anchor in the bay, and squall after squall of fierce
rain swept over the ship, each promising by its very
violence to bring about a " clear up," and each hope-
lessly failing. We went ashore in a steady downpour,
which hid everything of the scenery save a glimpse of
a long dark creek running inland, a canyon between
veritable cliffs of gloomy forest, and stumbled upon
a wet clay track to the Customs Collector's house.
Papua is a place well worth incurring any hardship or
any inconvenience to see, but there are times — yes,
there certainly are — when one asks oneself what one
is doing in a country that obliges the luckless traveller
to live the most of his time afoot on slippery tracks
as steep as a roof, in a temperature like that of a
Turkish bath, with rainstorms, mud, mosquitoes,
scrub itch, and ants as an almost invariable accompani-
WHY ? 277
mcnt of the day's march. Why, or how one finds
pleasure in starting forth every morning in clean, cool
clothes, and coming back every evening a mass of
heat-sodden dirt, and only fit to go into the bath
at once — why one submits tamely to an absence of
mails, news, new clothes, fresh food, amusements,
everything that makes life pleasant to live, in other
countries — and all to see a few savage cannibals in
their native homes, to visit a few gold mines, pearl
fisheries, plantations . . .
There is no answer to questions like these —
only the old illogical reply that such things are,
because they are. It may be that the savage ancestor
calls, and must be heard. It may be that the over-
flavoured, over-complicated life of cities creates an
irresistible thirst for simpler food. At all events,
countries like Papua beckon, and catch, and hold as
do no others in the world — reason or no reason.
The three-mile walk to the Kulumadau fields is
one of the most beautiful pieces of scenery in Papua,
even in the midst of a downpour — but it does not
look healthy. The track runs across low, inky,
gluey swamps, tangled over with poisonously rich
and heavy greenery. Huge tropical trees, with
heavy leaves, tower into the black sky, and shut off
half the dim light spared by the rain. Dead logs
lie across dark stagnant pools ; weird fungi like the
ghosts of pale lilies star the rotting limbs of fallen
trees. There are orchids by the thousands in these
forest swamps, clinging to the immense branches that
278 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
curtain the heavy sky — many of them rare and valu-
able, but all hard to distinguish from one another, in
this season when flowers are comparatively few. The
track is not of the worst ; one can take an occasional
look round as one walks, whereas on most Papuan
paths the scenery must go unnoted if the traveller
is to keep his feet.
Kulumadau is a desolate-looking spot enough.
The mills are not working to-day, and the ramshackle
buildings, rough tram rails, and raw heaps of " tail-
ings " are depressing in aspect under the gloomy sky,
without the life of passing workmen and the throb-
bing of engines to enliven the place, as no doubt
they do when the mines are " going." This field,
we learn, has been twelve years open, and the best of
the gold has long since been taken out of it. It has
not been worked for some time, but the two rival
companies which owned the gold-bearing district have
lately amalgamated, and the field, which is now known
as the Kulumadau and Woodlark Proprietary, is ex-
pected to do rather better.
A hundred and twenty acres are owned by the
company. It is not certain that the whole of the
gold-bearing reef is included in this claim ; indeed,
an Australian miner of much experience lately gave
it as his opinion that the reef might run right across
the island. According to the same authority, there
is sure to be more in the uncleared timber. Prospects
on Woodlark, however, either here or at the alluvial
fields, are not good enough to warrant anyone in
GOLDFIELDS 279
England leaving his own country to seek his fortune
there.
Eighty thousand tons of tailings, the relics of
earlier workings, are lying close to the mills waiting
for treatment by the cyanide process, which is ex-
pected to produce a fair return of gold. A good
quantity of concentrates have been sent down to New
South Wales, with satisfactory results. The reef at
the time of my visit was being worked at a depth of
470 feet, and producing from five pennyweights to
an ounce per ton.
At Busai, several miles further inland, the workings
are almost entirely alluvial. Here again the best
days are over, but there is something still to be had.
The field is rather restricted, not covering more than
about one square mile. There are less than twenty
white men on it, and most of the field is owned
by three of them. These three employ 100 of the
150 boys working on the field. No one, it seems,
can make much on Busai unless he can afford to
employ a fair number of boys, as it is only the cheap
Papuan labour that makes the field payable at all.
Each boy can obtain about half a pennyweight a day,
the gold running half a grain to the dish. In the
early days a great deal of rough gold was found in
the coral, under the thin surface of soil, but this has
been almost all worked out. One man was reported
to be doing well out of a claim of dyke formation,
20 feet wide, composed of quartz, gossan, and iron-
stone, and producing three to ten pennyweights per
28o THE NEW NEW GUINEA
ton. This was the only claim of its kind at Busai,
the rest being all surface. No prospecting at all had
been done of late, although it was thought very pos-
sible that more gold might remain to be discovered
in the bush.
The health of the goldfields is good, and fever now
almost unknown.
The current rate of wages for native boys is los.
per month. Their food — rice and tinned beef —
costs 8s. There seems to be little or no trouble with
the labour, the boys being tractable and industrious,
and capable of really responsible work, such as feed-
ing batteries, etc. The natives are well treated, and
seem to enjoy good health.
All this is told me by the manager of the Kulumadau
mine. I do not understand most of it, and it does
not interest me in the least. Our Australian tourist
passenger, on the contrary, drinks in every item of
information he can get, and talks and listens with
sparkling eyes. I am wet and dirty and bored ;
I want to yawn very badly, and when the manager
takes a lump of dirty grey slag out of the office safe
and shows it to me triumphantly, saying that that is
gold, almost pure, I feel like crying. If this is a
gold mine, give me the mouth of a Cardiff coal-shaft
for real interest by preference.
I do not go on to Busai, and am sorry afterwards,
as one always is sorry when one has shirked a
" sight," and it is too late to repent. I go back to
the beach and take the Alerrie England's whaleboat up
THE UNBELIEVABLE 281
the river looking for alligators. I do not know why
I am looking for them ; neither myself nor any one
of the "boys " has a gun, and the "boy " who says
he comes from the parts where they catch and drag
alligators out of rivers by their tails does not seem at
all anxious to sight a wicked fishy eye or a black
scaly paw among the mangrove roots, in spite of his
boasting. We glide in whispers up and down the
creeks ; it is intensely still and dim and green and
deathly. The trees have long mossy beards, hanging
down straight as plumb-lines. The knitted and
tangled liana ropes drop loose above the river with
never a sway or quiver. The mangroves and palms
and sword-leafed pandanus are mirrored without a
flaw in the dead, still, tea-green water. One feels as
if one were living in a stereoscopic photograph
roughly coloured with a wash of green paint. The
boys and 1 have had enough of it before very long,
and head back for the ship again. As we cross the
great open lagoon, outside a thin black streak bars
the yellow reflections of the watery sunset half a mile
away. It is an alligator, at last — hopelessly out of
reach. . . . Just like them !
A few days later saw the Merrie England dropping
anchor off the strangest, wildest, weirdest, and most
remote of the many wonderful places that we visited
during that unique voyage — Rossel Island.
I find it hard to say anything about Rossel Island,
because the place is such a tissue of improbabilities
and impossibilities — such a monument of the wonder-
282 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
ful and bizarre — that one cannot entertain even a
faint hope of having one's tale believed down in the
quiet countries where things run along the lines of
the probable and ordinary. But the attempt must be
made, for no one could visit Rossel and refrain from
telling what he had seen.
It is the easternmost and most isolated of the
Louisiade group, eighteen miles in length, six in
breadth, and extremely precipitous in outline. Its
mountains run to nearly 4000 feet in height. Mount
Rossel, the tallest, a gloomy overhanging peak,
wreathed in mysterious veils of cloud, looms high
above the dark inlet in the southern side, where at
long and irregular intervals ships come to anchor.
Round about the intensely clear, intensely green
deep waters of the bay, the lesser hills stand
shouldering one another right down to the precipice
edges that overhang the sea. Dark forest cloaks the
heights ; white cockatoos, small as butterflies against
the towering walls of the mountain, flit and scream
through the fiery yellow green of the sunset, that
fills all the hollows of the bay with weird goblin
lights and shades as we slowly steam up to our
anchorage, and let the long chains roar home. A
wicked-looking place. A place solitary, remote, un-
human beyond the power of pen to describe — a place,
in brief, that only Papua could produce.
A former governor, calling at Rossel in 1891,
described the natives as *' the mildest, quietest, and
most inoffensive in the Possession," and characterised
WERE THEY EATEN? 283
the anecdote (well known to all Papua) about the
eating of 326 shipwrecked Chinamen in 1858, as
incredible. The official no doubt meant well, but
his stay was extremely short, and he had no means of
finding out the real state of affairs on the island, as
there was not then, nor for long after, any white
man in the place who could give information, and
the Rossel language is known to none outside the
islanders themselves — for the best of reasons, as I
shall later show. We had the advantage of a three
days' stay, occupied by a grand hunt for five mur-
derers (whom the Governor, Judge Murray, wished
to bring to justice) and by a good deal of general
investigation. In this last we were much helped by
the information given by two Australian traders who
have lived for five years alone on Rossel — a feat
never attempted before their coming, and one which
has been near costing them their lives many times.
These young men are well educated, know something
of folk-lore and ethnology, and have taken pains to
find out everything possible about the customs of the
people among whom they live — in which they differ
exceedingly from the average trader. They have
done much, in a quiet way, to make the island safer
both to whites and natives than it has ever been
before (which is not saying a great deal, however),
and, in the absence of all missions, have certainly
exerted a restraining anci humanising influence in a
place that wants it as badly as ever did any place on
the earth.
284 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
For the Rossel Islanders are not by any means
mild and harmless. The mistake was a pardonable
one, due no doubt to the fact that this people
seldom carries arms of any kind, while the dangerous
western tribes go armed to the teeth with spears,
bow and arrows, stone axes, or European-made toma-
hawks. The Rossel Islanders are small and not
formidable in appearance, though their expression is
ugly, even villainous. They carry no offensive
weapons as a rule, and they do not look as if they
could harm anyone, even if they would.
And yet these quiet little men are among the most
expert, practised, and determined murderers in the
whole world.
They murder a man or woman at the death of
every chief. They used until very lately to murder
one man or woman for every other who died — in
consequence of which the population of the island is
very small. They murder anyone who is unpopular,
anyone who gives information to Government
authorities, anyone who breaks a taboo. If a man
steals, and they do not wish to inflict the extreme
penalty on himself, they murder the woman who
cooks his food. They have tried to murder the two
traders more than once, but now, realising that these
men are the sole source of their tobacco supply,
they never threaten violence. But nevertheless mur-
der is one of their chief occupations.
How is it done ? In one way only. The Rossel
Islanders are the most expert smotherers ever heard
EXPERT SMOTHERERS 285
of in fact or fiction. They do not carry weapons,
because they do not want them. All they need to do
when they mark down a victim is to signal to their
associates, and in an instant seven or eight ot them
have crowded round the doomed man, and in utter
silence, if need be, are squeezing out his life. One
holds his mouth and nose, others seize his limbs, and
when they have got him down another kneels and
jumps upon his chest. It is over in a minute — there
is little struggle, no bloodshed, no noise, but the work
is done.
If a Rossel Islander wants a pigeon for supper he
has no need of bow or spear. He waits till dusk, and
then steals out to a tree where a row of sleepy pigeons
or parrots are dozing on a branch. Noiselessly as a
cat he climbs the tree, and far more noiselessly than
any beast seizes and smothers one bird after the other,
without even disturbing the rest, until he has as
many as he wants. He will even paddle out to a
rock in mid-ocean and smother the sea-birds roosting
on it before they wake. . . . Truly, a man of strange
accomplishments.
When the " mild and gentle " Rossel Islander does
not wish to kill or eat his victim at once, but merely
desires to secure him, he and his satellites bend the
wretch's limbs one after another back over a log or a
large stone, breaking all his arm and leg bones, so
that he cannot escape. There is a good deal of
cannibalism still in the island, though not so much
as there was four or five years ago, when the men
286 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
employed by the trader to cut copra for him used some-
times to come to work smelling hideously of decayed
human flesh after a feast held the night before.
Sinister indeed, at the death of a chief, are the looks
cast by the relatives and mourners at one another,
before the victim of the funeral feast is fixed on. No
one knows who will be sacrificed, and the savages
wander about eyeing one another suspiciously and
nervously for hours. There is not one of them who
has not many a time choked the life out of warm,
palpitating flesh, and eaten of that very flesh after ;
but bold as they are when banded together like
wolves, they are, like wolves, cowards alone, and
afraid of the pack. ... By and by it is noticed
that the glances of the crowd fall oftener on a cer-
tain man or woman than any other. The creature
thus singled out sees it, and makes frantic eflbrts to
divert attention to someone else, well knowing what
will follow. He may succeed, or he may not —
probably not, for every man is so anxious for him-
self that the first sign of general consent is hailed
as a deliverance by all but the victim. The wretched
creature turns to run, and the pack are on him in an
instant. Not to catch him, however — there would be
little sport in that — but to hunt him, and run him
down by degrees. They will even give him a start,
let him away, and perhaps not attempt to catch him
for a day or so, until they are fairly ready, and then
the whole tribe joins in, each man spurred on by the
deadly fear that the fickle crowd may turn and fix on
FOND OF CHINAMEN 287
himself, and there is hunting over hill and gully,
across river and over crocodile-haunted swamp, hour
after hour, until at last the quarry is run down, and
the deadly circle of the smotherers, of which he has
so often made a part, closes round himself at last,
once and for all.
The story of the Chinamen, according to the
islanders themselves, is not fiction, but truth. They
are fond of relating it as one of the great deeds of
their ancestors, and fairly glory in the tale. In 1858,
a shipload of Chinamen was being taken down to
Australia. The vessel was wrecked upon a reef close
to Rossel Island. The officers escaped in boats, but
were never afterwards heard of. As for the Chinamen,
numbering 326, the natives captured them, and put
them on a small barren island, where they had no
food, and no means of getting away. They kept their
prisoners supplied with food from the mainland, and
every now and then carried a few of them away to eat,
until all but one old man had been devoured. This
last succeeded eventually in getting away, and told
something of the story, which seems to have met with
general disbelief. True it is, however, on the evidence
of the sons of those who did the deed.
Moreover, the natives of the surrounding islands
say that during the years following the shipwreck,
the Rossel Islanders were fond of bringing Chinamen
about in their boats, hawking them like pigs among
the cannibals of other places, and that quite a large
number were sold in this way. Adele Island, at
288 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
present uninhabited, was the prison of the unlucky
Celestials, whose fate was surely hard enough to draw
a sigh of pity even from Australians of to-day, little
cause as they have to like the race.
For years after this wreck — indeed, until quite
recent times — the Rossel Islanders had a large
quantity of coin in their possession, both gold and
silver, which they were willing to barter with stray
traders for a stick or two of tobacco, at any time.
There is a persistent tradition that the safe of the
ship, which the islanders never succeeded in opening,
is still hidden somewhere in the bush, but no one has
ever seen it.
The murder which the Merrie England had called to
investigate was not quite of the usual kind. It would
be impossible, in the present state of Rossel, to
inflict punishment on the natives for every act of
violence among themselves, and, if it were possible,
it would be undesirable. But in this case a boy had
been killed for venturing to come down and inform
the trader of a double smothering up in the moun-
tains, when a chief and his wife were slain, on account
of some local quarrel. In consequence, the island
was in a state of unrest, threatening to throw off the
mild influence of the two white men, and breathing
possibilities of more sinister things, when the big
steamer that they were afraid of should have gone.
Now, it is not good that a native should be killed
because he has appealed for protection and help to a
white man. Moreover, a little check to the mur-
WANTED 289
derous instincts of the natural Papuan is to be com-
mended, when possible. So the village constable
(there are two on the island, Papuans both), with a
force of twenty volunteers, set out to try and capture
the offenders. The island is a big one, a mass of steep
hills, deep gullies, and dense bush. The murderers
had many friends, and the time available for capture
was very short. In spite of all these disadvantages,
the natural hunting instinct of the Rossel Islander
triumphed, and in two days the five men who were
" wanted " had been brought down to the coast under
an escort by this time increased to forty. The
islanders had no scruples whatever about joining in
the hunt or giving over their countrymen to justice.
Anything that involved the chasing of a man was
good enough for them. They would have liked
to smother and eat the prisoners, certainly, instead of
tamely giving them up to the Government, but there
was consolation for this loss in the trade goods given
to them as payment for their two days' work. Decked
out in new red calicoes, with tobacco in their pouches,
and beads round their necks, they went their way
back to the mountains, wishing, no doubt, that a
Government man-hunt might come their way every
day, yet nevertheless resolved not to take part in one
as the quarry, if they could reasonably avoid it. The
murderers were ironed, and removed to the ship, pre-
vious to trial at Samarai. They will probably, if con-
victed, suffer a term of imprisonment lasting some
years, and will be employed during that time on road-
u
290 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
making or clearing work. Apart from the useful
lesson conveyed by the loss of liberty they will benefit
considerably by the healthy life and regular food, and
will, no doubt, return to Rossel at least partially
civilised.
During the two days' wait the ship party amused
themselves visiting some of the bush villages, although
the weather — windy, stormy, and wet — was rather a
serious drawback. On one morning, after a long row
across a wide, beautiful bay, overhung with tall green
peaks, the Governor, myself, and three or four others,
landed upon a narrow strip of beach, with a dense,
wet, tangled mass of tropical forest rising up almost
out of the water, and started for one of the Rossel
villages, two or three hundred feet above. We were
only accompanied by our boat boys, but it was not
considered that we ran any danger, as this murderous
little people are not fond of open attack.
The pathway was, as usual, a mere streak of slippery
clay embedded in the bush, blocked everywhere by
fallen logs and crossing streams, and infested by ants.
It wound upwards so sharply as to try the wind of
the party a little, at the pace set to the native guides
by the energetic Governor. On the top of the hill it
opened suddenly out into a little space covered by
houses — three or four, no more — and overlooking the
sea and the approaches on each side, after a fashion
that suggested a desire to avoid surprise visits.
They had certainly succeeded in avoiding ours.
The village was all but deserted. Only a couple of
LINGUA FRANCA 291
men who had been in contact with white people often
enough to know that no harm was probably meant
them, stood their ground, and waited to see what
could be obtained in the way of tobacco from the
new-comers.
And here we came upon the second of the incredi-
bilities of Rossel. The smothering tales had been
the first. Now we were to find — as we found
elsewhere on the coasts, and as we should have found
even in the hidden villages of the almost unknown
interior — that the natives nearly all spoke English !
To be addressed in reasonably good English of the
"pidgin" variety, by hideous savages who made
murder a profession, and had never come into actual
contact with civilisation, is an experience perplexing
enoucjh to make the observer wonder if he is awake.
Yet that is what happens on Rossel Island. English
is the " lingua franca " of the place, filling up the
gaps — and they are many — in the hideous snapping,
barking dialect that passes for speech along the coast,
and making communication possible among the tribes
of the interior, who vary so much in language that
many of them cannot understand each other. How
did this come about .'' I fancy, through the unsatis-
factory nature of the Rossel dialects. Any that we
heard were scarcely like human speech in sound, and
were evidently very poor and restricted in expression.
Noises like sneezes, snarls, and the preliminary stages
of choking — impossible to reproduce on paper —
represented the names of villages, people, and things.
292 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
Of verbs we could find no trace, though they may
exist. Most of the words are monosyllabic, and
nearly all are spoken from far back in the throat. A
good deal of information was given us by a young
person enjoying the name " Tnmagh " (pronounced
in one syllable), who spoke more English than the
others. Tnmagh had been away in a recruiting ship,
and knew something of the mind of the white man.
Some boys, he told us, had learned English in the
same way as himself, and when they returned to
Rossel they taught it to the rest. The Rossel folk,
who are not deficient in brains, whatever one may say
as to their morals, recognised at once that here was a
means of communicating with each other simply,
easily, and clearly (for there is no tongue in the world
than can be learned so rapidly as " pidgin English "),
and acquired the new language from each other so
quickly that there is now scarce a village where you
cannot find one or two English-speaking natives.
Shock number three came when we began to
examine the houses. They were neat little struc-
tures enough, made of plaited palm and thatch, set
up on tall stilts after the usual Papuan fashion, to
avoid nocturnal visits from alligators, and closed from
wind and rain with palm-leaf doors. Most had a
little front verandah, so deep as to form a sort of
porch. Within, nothing of interest was found except
some plaited baskets, and a number of ebony lime
sticks with carved handles, looking exactly like orna-
mental paper knives. These lime sticks have flat
GENTLE LIFE 293
blades, and arc used for mixing and spooning out the
lime chewed with betel nut. The heads of the sticks
are generally carved into grotesque semblances of
human faces, and sometimes into rough likenesses of
pigeons or parrots. A stick or two of tobacco readily
purchases any one of them.
But it was not the lime sticks so much as the
general surroundings of the houses that puzzled and
amused. These professional murderers, with the
tongues of brutes and the morals of sharks, are
very fond of gardening, and plant pretty red, yellow,
and pink flowers about their houses with considerable
efl^ect. They keep pet cats, which are sleek and well-
fed looking. "You ki-ki (eat) that fellow pussy .? "
we asked. *' No ! no ki-ki pussy — he good fellow,"
was the astounding answer. Not content with land-
scape gardening, studying foreign languages, wood
carving, and keeping pets, they display further
evidences of a taste for the " gentle life " by going
constantly provided with fine toilet sponges, which
they procure themselves from the reef, carry round
their waist in bags, and use to wash their taces !
After this, one was prepared for anything, and it
was only mildly astonishing to stumble across a dead
insect in the pathway exactly like a black crayfish,
some eight inches long, and to hear that this grue-
some creature — one of the stick insect family — was
common in the trees, and was boiled and eaten by the
natives as food. Like a crayfish, it turns red when
cooked.
294 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
Nor were we much amazed, lower down, in a very
wretched, dirty, ill-built village on the coast, to
discover a native drill, made of stick, string, and
shell, with extreme ingenuity, and capable of boring
holes in stone. The inventor — who must be a
Stephenson or an Edison among Rossel Islanders —
was quite ready to accept a stick of tobacco, value
three-halfpence, for his really wonderful achieve-
ment ; but its purchaser, in a fit of generosity, in-
sisted on giving him six times what he asked.
At the foot of the hill we found another of the
surprises of Rossel — a mint, no less. This island
is especially rich in the shell from which the native
money of Papua is manufactured — a bivalve two or
three inches across with a rim of rich deep red inside
the lip, and a layer of the some colour underneath
the white lining or the shell itself Papuan money
consists of certain small button-shaped objects, bored
through the middle, cut out of this red part of the
shell, and commonly worn or carried in long strings.
The natives value it more than anything else that
can be offered to them, and many of the white
traders use it in preference to European money for
purchasing copra or pearlshell, or even pearls. Each
disc is worth about threepence, and a man can cut
out, shape, and finish something like a dozen in a
day. The trader resident on Rossel has instituted
a mint on a small scale, where he employs the natives
making money for him, when he has no other work
for his indentured boys. It is only a shed, where
NUMBER SEVEN 295
the shells are cut up, shaped, and bored, but it is
certainly interesting as another of Rossel's curiosities.
On board the ship in the evening someone asked
the native policeman what the numerals in Rossel
dialect were. He gave them readily enough, but
hesitated at the number seven. You might not
always say that number, he explained — sometimes it
brought on thunderstorms if you did. And you
must never say it at all when you went to Adele
Island to get cocoanuts or fish, because the most
frightful results would undoubtedly follow. In any
case, when a Rossel Islander went over to Adele he
used a different language all the time he was on that
island.
Why ^ Were there natives on Adele who spoke
differently ?
Oh, no, it was uninhabited ; but you must talk
a different language there — it was the custom.
This, of course, is an interesting instance of a
language surviving the people who once used it.
There were no doubt formerly natives on Adele who
spoke a tongue different from those of Rossel, and
the Rossel fishing parties still keep up its use
through a blind tradition. . . . There are traces
among the islanders, too, of a separate language used
by men only, and forbidden to the women on pain
of death. . . . Why does not some man of science
come up to the Louisiades and investigate the many
mysteries of Rossel ? It would certainly be found
a mine of strange and valuable ethnological discovery.
296 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
1 do not expect that anyone will believe me when
I say that in the neighbourhood of Rossel, and
further west, both I and other members of the p&rty
saw fish about two or three feet long, which run
along the top of the water for a considerable distance
on the tips of their tails — but it is nevertheless true.
Why they do it — unless possibly to escape from
enemies down below ; and more especially how they
do it — I could not undertake to say. It is not the
leap of a flying fish, for it does not clear the water.
The fish simply speeds along through the air, keep-
ing the flukes of its tail only under the surface. It
does not appear to turn, which the flying fish does.
It is common about the Louisiades, on shallow shores,
where seaweed grows thickly just under water. If
any zoologist can explain this fish I hope he will —
obvious explanation of the profane vulgar need not
be advanced, as the Merrie E^igland is a temperance
ship, so far as her passengers are concerned.
From Rossel we went on to Tagula, or Sud-Est,
where more strange experiences were awaiting us.
CHAPTER VIII
Sud-Est and its Queen — Historic jewels of Papua — Two brave
Mrs. Crusoes — A new voyage of Maeldune — Unchaperoned Sim-
Sim — The Island of Silence— Too good to be true— The curious
Trobriands — Catching fish with kites — A ghastly locket — The
gentle art of poisoning — Strange fruits — The pearls in the dust
heap — Back to Port Moresby.
\ FTER leaving the incredible island of Rossel we
'^^ turned back in the direction of civilisation again,
and ran to Sud-Est, another of the Louisiades, distant
a few hours' steaming. A long, dark blue moun-
tainous coast stretched out before us as the Meriie
England picked her way cautiously among the many
coral reefs surrounding the shore. Sud-Est is more
than forty miles in length, and as unlike to the
gloomy, evil island of Rossel as day to night. Grassy,
rolling downs slope above the sea as one approaches ;
a coral jetty runs out into the bay ; there are houses
and sheds on the hill above. A cheerful, homelike
place, this Sud-Est, and it is what it appears to be.
The island is nominally, no doubt, owned and
governed by the Commonwealth, but morally it is
the property of the Queen of Sud-Est, and of no one
else. Mrs. Mahony, the adventurous Australian
who bears this title, has been on the island, with an
occasional holiday, for twenty years. She came up
297
298 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
from Queensland with the first of the Papuan gold-
rushes, when there was only one other white woman —
a missionary's wife — in the whole of the Possession.
She lived through the exciting and perilous days of
those early times, always respected and deferred to
by the roughest of the miners, from her innate force
of character, and when the fields of Sud-Est became
almost exhausted, and the whites went away, she still
remained with her husband and children, and ad-
ministered justice and order to the natives with a
strong hand. In consequence the island presents a
picture of industry, peace, and safety that is little
short of amazing, considering the fact that it lies far
out of the range of ordinary Government influence,
and has never been touched by missionary effort.
The large native population is, almost to a man,
gold-mining. Where the white man has given up,
the Papuan still finds enough to make gold-washing
a profitable profession. The popular idea that the
*' nigger " is necessarily a lazy creature unless forced
to work by whites finds little justification on Sud-Est.
This island, indeed, furnished some of the most in-
structive sidelights on Papuan character that I met
with in all my journeyings about the Possession,
If the Papuan has sufficient motive he will work,
and not only for short periods, but steadily and con-
tinuously for years.
When he makes a little money he spends it very
wisely, all things considered. Contact with white
people, knowledge of the English tongue, and of the
SUD-EST 299
habit of steady work, with its attendant advantages
of constant food supply and useful exercise, all tend
to make the Papuan healthy, decent, and peaceful.
These are the lessons of Sud-Est, where, owing to
peculiar circumstances, the effects of generations of
training have been compressed into a single quarter
of a century.
As to proofs, they are plentiful. The natives of
Sud-Est live, and have lived since the departure of the
miners, almost altogether by gold-washing. They
are industrious, and work hard. Almost every man
has his own scales, and weighs out his gold to the
minuest grain, carefully and accurately, before he
takes it to the store to purchase food or tobacco or
tools. There are about a thousand natives on the
island altogether. During the days of the gold rush
there were over six hundred white miners, and Sud-Est
was not by a long way so healthy as it is to-day.
There is still malaria, but it is not of the worst kind,
and both whites and natives now seem to enjoy good
health.
Crime is almost unknown on Sud-Est, though there
is no settled system of government other than a very
rare visit from a magistrate. The lives of the half-
dozen white residents are as safe as they would be in
Sydney. The Sud-Est boys are in considerable request
as labourers when they can be induced to engage, and
many of them have a fair amount of property in
goods and native jewellery, such as armshells and
shell money.
300 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
English is spoken all over Sud-Est. The early-
miners were probably the first to introduce the
British tongue, which was so obviously superior to
the cumbrous local language that it immediately took
root and flourished ; but the most important influence
in that direction has undoubtedly been the rule of the
"Queen." Mrs. Mahony's system of teaching English
to the natives has been marked from the first by the
double merits of simplicity and efi^ectiveness. Her
store and enclosure were, and are, the general rendez-
vous of all the natives, for business, shopping, or
even amusement, as when the " Queen " gives a royal
feast to three or four hundred of her subjects, simply
to promote harmony and goodwill. It is easy to
understand that no Sud-Estian would like to lose the
right of entry to this enchanted ground, and therein
lies the strength of Mrs. Mahony's educational
method. For whenever a single word of Sud-Est
is spoken within the limits of her enclosure, no
matter why, or by whom, the "Queen" issues forth
in all the majesty of her six feet of height, and
promptly runs the offender out. If you cannot or
will not talk English inside the royal grounds you
have to hold your tongue on Sud-Est. In conse-
quence, the island language is rather less spoken
than the foreign tongue to-day, and the natives are
practically all bilingual.
There is not much loss in this, except to philolo-
gists searching for something unique in the way of
languages. The tongue of Sud-Est is to the full
MRS. MAHONY 301
as awkward, inexpressive, and inharmonious as that of
Rossel, though in a different way. Where the
Rossel man speaks in monosyllabic grunts and gasps,
the Sud-Estian talks in words of amazing length
linked together by endless repetitions. The name
of a village near the coast was given to us by the
English-speaking village constable as " Vanamanaman-
dawa." " Finger " was " namandagugyie " ; " head,"
"mbalunda"; and the simple sentence "give me a
lock of your hair," translated by the constable, ex-
panded itself into " Waw ma mwunu umbaludawulu-
wuluye" — the last and most amazing word represent-
ing " hair." As a member of our party remarked,
it would save time to take it without asking.
Mrs. Mahony was absent at the time of our call,
much to the regret of the party ; but we were hospit-
ably entertained in her house, and shown many local
curios. Shell money is among the most interesting
of these. Mrs. Mahony is one of the largest pur-
chasers of the Rossel shells from which the money
is made, as already described. Native armlets
also, carved out of a single large white shell, thick
and firm as a slab of marble, bring an amazing
price among the natives, and are profitable to trade
in. A native will often engage in plantation or
carrier work on the mainland for two years, in order
to have the money to purchase a pair of these orna-
ments, which are kept by almost all traders, though
they are of purely native manufacture. A fairly
good pair will cost three or four pounds, and the
302 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
prices range upward from this comparatively modest
sum, to the twenty and thirty pounds sometimes
given by a sort of native syndicate, for a pair of
really famous bracelets, known to half the Posses-
sion, and named, as all the celebrated shell armlets
are. The love of these ornaments amounts to a
passion with the Papuan, and can be compared to
nothing but the American woman's fancy for big and
historical diamonds. As our own famous gems are
named " The Koh-i-Noor," "The Sancy," " The Pitt,"
" The Cullinan," so the Papuan shell armlets of un-
usual size and thickness have their native names,
known to everyone, and bringing celebrity and
distinction to the possessor of the jewel wherever he
goes throughout the whole extent of Papua.
Some of these facts were given me later on by a
well-known trader in another part of the Possession,
but as Sud-Est is one of the chief markets of native
jewellery, I have mentioned them here.
Misima, or St. Aignan, was the next call. We had,
again, only a few hours to run, as the islands of the
Louisiade group are fairly close together. Starting at
daybreak, we found ourselves by breakfast time
anchored surprisingly close to a brilliant coral shore,
backed with stately, plumy cocoanut palms, and
almost covered with close serried rows of the most
wonderful canoes that I have yet seen, even in this
country of curious boat-building. They were fully
forty feet long, and some were deep enough to con-
ceal a man standing upright within. Most were
STRANGE VESSELS 303
partly decked with platforms of woven cane, and all
were built up in several sections, commencing with a
deep keel cut out of one huge tree trunk, and spread-
ing out above to a considerable width. They fronted
the burning sea proudly, with their high carved
prows, like the beaked war-vessels of the ancient
Norsemen ; their gunwales were gay with chains and
inlayings of dazzling shells ; and the paintings in
red and white and black, of crocodiles, parrots, pigs,
fish, and men, that adorned the bows and stern, and
ran along the sides in bands, were a wonder to see.
We tried to purchase some of the detachable
ornaments, made of carved and painted wood, that
were stuck in various prominent parts of the canoes ;
but their owners, a rather ugly and stupid-looking
set of natives, refused to trade in anything that
we could offer. So the party divided and went
inland, some to shoot parrots and pigeons, some
(and those not among the wise ones) to follow the
Lieutenant-Governor on one of his visits of in-
spection and investigation. As His Excellency usually
set a pace of anything from four and a half to five
and a half miles an hour (a gait rather trying in hot,
wet jungle, and over rough hill tracks, in a latitude
only six degrees south of the line), his division was
not popular on the line of march, and often enough
consisted of himself and one agitated native servant,
trotting in front, and extremely anxious to uphold
the honour of his service and his race, without in
consequence missing the track or getting badly
304 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
"winded." In the second division, as a rule,
followed the rest of the Merrie England party, taking
life easily, and wondering audibly what our gigantic
chief was made of.
In this instance, two separate sections got left, lost,
and finally united. Parrot-shooting — and such
parrots ! green, yellow, red, pink, blue, purple, and
black, all combined on the one bird — passed a
pleasant hour or two ; exploring trips up abandoned
gold workings filled in the balance of the morning.
St. Aignan, like Sud-Est, has been worked out, and
only provides the slenderest living for the seven or
eight white men who still cling to the island.
There were three white women not long ago, but
there is only one now. Thereupon depends a story —
one of the strange, true, unbelievable stories of Papua,
which he who likes may credit.
A white woman lived here on Misima, far away
from the remotest echoes of civilisation, for many
years, with her husband, who was one of the early
miners. He died, and she kept on his claim, though
she was now very old, and worked it herself. After
some years of this strange, lonely life, the old lady
became ill, and had to go down to Queensland to see
a doctor. While there, regaining her health, she
made up her mind to endure her solitary life no
longer, but to bring back with her to Misima a com-
panion who would share her labours and profits, and
lighten the dullness of existence on that uttermost
isle. She chose, not a second husband, not a young
INDEPENDENCE 305
woman, but another white-haired old lady of her own
age, one who had been left ill off, and feared a life of
dependence. In the quiet home lands, an old lady
who has lived her life and become conservative and
stiff in mind and body looks for an almshouse or
"institution" to end her days in, if she is ill provided
with means of support, or at most seeks a position as
chaperon or caretaker or companion. They do things
differently in Queensland. The ancient dame
selected by the heroine of Sud-Est answered gallantly
to the call, and the two old women actually set out
for the wilds of Papua together, travelling by steamer
to Samarai, and thence, some days in a risky little
cutter, to Misima. Arrived there, they went on
working the first old woman's claim, and lived
decently on what they made, asking help from no
one, self-respecting, industrious, and independent.
I should have liked well to meet these two plucky
old Australians, and had been looking forward to my
visit to Misima for that reason. But it was not to
be. Only a week or two before the two good
comrades had died, mostly of old age and infirmity,
it was thought, and within a few hours of each other.
They rest where they laboured, on Misima, far away
in the Ultima Thule of outermost Papua, brave
women of a brave race, who owed naught to anyone,
in life or death.
We were bound for the Trobriands now, calling
here and there on the way. The track lay among
many islands, all beautiful, and most of them interest-
X
3o6 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
ing. Time did not permit the yacht to stop, as a
rule, but there were strange stories to be heard about
some of these out-of-the-way little spots.
The Bosanquet group — a mere handful of small
islets and sand-cays — was passed one afternoon near
sundown. Our captain ran the ship close by Sim-
Sim, the chief island of the group, in order to let us
have a good look at it. Sim-Sim is worth looking at,
for it has worked out for itself what is surely the
most extraordinary social system ever heard of, even
in Papua the Impossible.
It consists of twin islands, not more than a few
acres in extent, separated from each other by a wide
strait of deep water. In the centre of the larger
island rises an extinct volcanic crater, with great forest
trees, and slopes of green grass appearing inside the
cup. This is much the prettier island of the two ;
its palms are taller and thicker, its beach wider, its
grassy slopes richer than those of the sister islet,
which is, nevertheless, a picturesque place enough.
. . . Did the reader, in the days when Plancus was
consul, and summer nights were full of the scent
of roses, and the rustle of tulle and silken skirts,
and the swinging " one — two — three " of " White
Heather," or " Estudiantina " — when rustic seats in
moonlit gardens beckoned insistently, and curtained
bow-windows were magnetically attractive, and the
place to see the race of the day somehow always
seemed to be the back of the grand stand — did he or
she, in those pleasant, miserable days, ever wish hope-
NO CHAPERONS 307
lessly — as one wishes for a million of money, or for
heaven — for an island somewhere in the South Seas
upon which the heavy foot of the chaperon should
never have been set, and over whose flowery shores
the baleful light of her incscapeable spectacles never
should have shone ? Well, here it is, here in the
Pacific Ocean, off the coast of Papua, in the Bosan-
quet group, and its name is Sim-Sim.
They understand the art of gathering the roses
while they may in Sim-Sim. On the pretty island the
big, flowery, palmy island, with the extinct crater-cup
in its centre, lives the youth of Sim-Sim. On the
other, the decent, rather prosaic, rather inferior island,
live the old people. They are well treated, but kept
in their place, and not allowed to spoil sport. The
young people do not want them, have no use for
them, and let them see it. They, the young ones,
can amuse each other ; the time will come soon enough
when they will have to cross the strait and leave the
volcano island, with its green romantic dells and long
white beaches, for the middle-aged place that is not
half so pretty — but in the meantime they pluck the
fruit of the flying hour, and find the world is good.
The captain tells us that if you land on Sim-Sim
you are instantly surrounded by a cloud of sea-birds
and cockatoos, which light on your hands and head,
scream in your face, and generally make themselves
very much at home with the visitor. These are the
island pets and watch-dogs. The natives tame them,
partly for amusement, partly to provide an incor-
3o8 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
ruptible guard for the islands at night. Cockatoos
sleep with one ear and one eye open, and have the
useful habit of making night hideous with blood-
curdling yells if strangers are heard approaching.
We were all sorry we could not call at Sim-Sim,
but you have to be careful about where you find
yourself when dark comes down off these half-
surveyed Papuan coasts. So we kept on our way,
and got out of the tangle of reefs and islets and
cays while there was still light enough to tell a coral
" horse-head " from a floating mass of seaweed.
It was really the Voyage of Maeldune, or some-
thing very much like it. " We came to the Island
of Silence " next day — a far-out bit of the Bonvouloir
group, where nobody lives, or ever has lived. There
were three islands fairly near to one another, real
" desert islands," without even a name to a single one
of them. The first was a high island, standing up
some hundreds of feet out of the calm blue sea. It
was sheer cliff all round — snowy-white coral cliff,
garlanded with long green vines dropping down to
the water's edge. On the top there were trees and
bushes, and a tangle of lianas and trailers of many
kinds. One might have got up, with the help of the
creepers and the projecting spurs of coral, but it
would have been a risky business at best, and all the
Merrie England's passengers declared (after the
captain had thrown certain sailorly obstacles in the
way of a call) that they did not want to land there —
which was untrue.
UNNAMED ISLANDS 309
The two other unnamed islands now came in sight,
two vivid bouquets of foliage set in the midst of a
grass-green lagoon, and fenced round from the blue
deep sea beyond, by the ruffle of the foamy coral-reef.
Here we absolutely demanded that the Merrie
England should be stopped and a boat sent ashore.
One of the guests from Australia wanted a desert
island, and he had fallen in love with the Isles of
Silence at first sight.
So we rowed through the opening in the reef,
across the lagoon (which was pale pea-green in colour,
with heliotrope reflections), over two or three many-
coloured water gardens of growing coral, with striped
and painted fish darting through, and up to a beach
the colour and consistence of fine white table-salt.
Here we landed, and instantly began to overrun the
place. We were aggrieved — though I do not know
why — to find one or two ruined palm-leaf huts on the
shore, and we were somewhat consoled when some-
body told us that the huts were doubtless mere
shelters for natives who might camp on the island
during the long canoe voyage from the Bonvouloirs
to the Trobriands.
The island proved to be much bigger than it looked
from the sea. Two lots of the visitors got lost in its
woods and did not disentangle themselves for an
hour or more. There were open spaces of green
grass and pink flowers shut in by tall forest trees ;
there were dense dark recesses with scarce a ray of
light, and swampy ferny places where the tracks of
3IO THE NEW NEW GUINEA
wild pigs were plain, and sparse-growing brakes
where the sun shone through, and the white columns
of the coco-palms shot freely skyward, and the sparkle
of the cool, salt, tumbling sea flickered low among
the leaves, a long way away. There were sites that
simply cried out for a house, and creeks and coves
that looked painfully empty without a boat. There
was a beach where you could take a long jump off the
sand into eight feet of liquid beryl. There was . . .
** I shall have this place," said the visitor from
Australia, determinedly. " It's got tons and tons of
copra already, and I'll plant more. I'll keep a cutter
to run to Samarai in a couple of days when I want.
I'll bring my brother out, and we'll build a house and
be kings of the place. One couldn't wish it better if
it had been made to order — it's almost too good."
Alas, it was quite too good ! for when we got back
to Samarai, we found that among the latest applica-
tions for land received by the Government was one
from a schooner captain applying for the two little
islands in the lagoon. And so the Australian's vision
faded.
The Trobriands lay before us after this — one big
and several little islands about a couple of hundred
miles distant from Samarai. The Trobriands are
always supposed to be one of the most interesting
places in Papua ; they are certainly among the most
civilised. If I did not find them as fascinating as
the wild and wicked West, that was probably because
they reminded me too much of the South Sea island
TOTEMS 311
life with which I was so familiar, and therefore lacked
the charm of novelty.
The people of the Trobrlands are of the Poly-
nesian type rather than the Papuan. Their hair is
less woolly than that of the mainland tribes ; they are
ruled by chiefs who exercise authority over large
districts, and they are not, and never have been, canni-
bal. In Papua proper, the " chief" idea is almost
non-existent, unimportant village headmen being the
nearest approach to it that one is likely to meet. But
there is a real aristocracy in the Trobriands which
counts generations of descent, and is physically better
developed than the commonalty.
The Trobriand native is fairly good-looking, and
much given to ornamenting himself with pearl and
other shells, dog's teeth, shell beads, and money, and
chains of coloured seeds. The men are almost alto-
gether unclothed ; the women wear the grass petti-
coat. Trobriand houses are beautifully and elaborately
built, set on high piles, with ornamented roofs and
gables, and they often contain curios worth getting,
for the Trobriander is something of an artist, and
carves human and animal figures in wood with
considerable skill.
The totem idea is strong in these islands. Each
tribe has its guardian beast, fish, or bird, which is
regarded as sacred, and never eaten by any member of
the clan. Pigeons, parrots, and fish-hawks are among
the best known of the totems. One notices paintings
of birds and fish on the outside of the houses, which
312 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
have doubtless some connection with the ruling
totems.
A long walk through Kitava, the biggest island,
was practically all I saw of this interesting group.
The distance was under eleven miles, but, with halts
and delays of one kind and another, our party took
nearly all day to do it.
It began with a scramble up a nightmare staircase
some 300 feet high, partly natural and partly
artificial, composed of the coral foundation of the
island in its rise from the sea. Walking on coral of
any kind is very like walking on a pavement of
petrified Turkey sponges, every point as hard or
sharp as a steel pen. In this instance, the difficulty
was added to by the piled-up blocks of the " stair-
case," which obliged one to lift one's feet waist-high
at every step, after the manner of tourists climbing
the pyramids of Cheops.
Arrived at the top, there were the usual sloping
muddy tracks, leading from village to village ; yam
gardens, immense in extent and beautifully kept and
fenced ; natives here and there, not at all scared
(since white people have often visited the Trobriands),
but very eager to do a good bit of bargaining if it
came to curio buying ; the quaint, elegantly built
little towns ; the staring, crowding women, half-timid,
half-curious ; the rattle of small naked boys, deter-
mined to follow our party from end to end of the
island, if necessary — all the familiar scenes of island
life as I had known it in the South Sea world.
NOVELTIES 313
There were novelties, however. The fishing kites
that they eagerly offered for sale were not like any-
thing in " M(f islands" ; nor does one, in the South
Seas, see a disconsolate parent going about with the
jawbone of his deceased child hung like a locket
round his neck — a common practice in Kitava. Nor
yet, in all the South Sea world, shall you have
enormous red-back spiders, as big as small birds and
as poisonous as snakes, offered you — alive — as valu-
able and desirable curiosities.
The kites were really wonderful. They were made
of dried banana leaves stretched on twigs, and
attached to neat coils of fine native-made twine. At
the other end of the twine was an object somewhat
resembling a tennis racquet, strung across with a mass
of yellow, strong, silky net, which is obtained by
twirling the frame round and round in one of the
great bush-spider's webs. This frame is left to trail
loose in the water, while the kite is flown above the
sea. Small fish come after it and strike their teeth
into the web, which entangles them and holds them
long enough for the watching Trobriander to haul in
his line and secure the booty before it gets away. A
long thick tassel of twisted spiders' webs is some-
times trailed in the water instead of the frame, with
the same result.
There are native fruits in the Trobriands unlike
those that one sees elsewhere. One that we
sampled during the day was like a very large apple,
firm and cool, with a taste suggestive of lemons and
314 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
fresh butter. Another — also somewhat like an apple
— was white-fleshed and juicy, but of a peculiar and
deadly sweetness that cloyed the palate hopelessly
after a couple of mouthfuls. Short of saccharine
itself, one could scarcely find a parallel for the amaz-
ing sweetness of this island fruit.
We had tea at the Resident Magistrate's bungalow,
and heard his opinion of the Trobriands and their
people generally. The population is diminishing
here, though on the mainland things are going the
other way. There is much disease among the people,
and they are hard to treat. Missionary work has
been carried on in the islands for some years, and
is meeting with fair success.
The Trobriand people, though not cannibals, are
rather of a murderous tendency among themselves,
and much too fond of avenging insults or injuries by
poison. Their clever and ingenious turn of mind
finds much enjoyment in the study of dangerous
plants and their effects. From the sea also they
obtain certain very dangerous poisons. One, taken
from the gall-bladder of a fish, is so deadly,
that a banana pierced with a thorn which has been
dipped in the poison will kill the man who eats it
within a very few hours. They can also poison
cocoa-nuts without opening them visibly, so that the
unsuspecting enemy may drink and die. ... If one
lived in the Trobriand group one would certainly
wish to be on good terms with its inhabitants.
There was no time to see any of the pearling. The
LOST PEARLS 315
Merrie England had made an extended trip, and the
officials travelling on her were anxious to get back to
Port Moresby. In any case, it is not very easy to see
the pearl fishing. The three or four whites who have
each taken out a pearler's licence (^50 per annum)
are scattered here, there, and everywhere in their
boats, buying pearls from the natives ; and if you ask
them what they are getting or making — why, for the
most part, you 7nay ask.
All the same, truth leaks out ; and most people in
the Territory know that very good pearls go down
now and then from the Trobriands to the dealers of
Thursday Island. A good many are brought in
independently by the natives, who use the pearl-oyster
as food, and are keen nowadays to appreciate the
value of the little round things that, for some odd
reason, the white men want very badly, and will buy
for tins and tins of meat, and pounds and pounds of
tobacco — if you are wise, and stick out for your
price.
Let Bond Street weep when it hears that for un-
counted generations — until a very few years ago, in
fact — the Trobriand Islander used to eat the oysters
and spit out the pearls on the ground under the
house, in the rubbish-heap, anywhere. There are
certain "kitchen middens" of old standing in these
islands that must be richer in pearls than any twenty
jewellers' shops — useless pearls, alas ! for the gem
does not stand ill-usage and exposure to weather
and decay, especially in a hot and rainy climate.
3i6 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
And now, with bowsprit pointed south and west
again, we made steam for the towns, and the planta-
tions, and the waking-up, developing, new New Guinea
once more. We had done with the wilds ; the
wandering voyage was over.
Yet it is true that the half has not been told.
APPENDIX
HOW TO REACH PAPUA
TNTENDING travellers or settlers may be glad of
a little information as to the means of reaching
Papua, and the expenses of the journey.
Contrary to received opinion, Papua is not very
" out-of-the-way." One can do nearly the whole dis-
tance in the best and biggest of the " P. and O " liners,
embarking at Tilbury, and leaving the boat six weeks
later in Sydney. From this point, the regular vessels
of the Australian United Steam Navigation Company,
sailing weekly, take the traveller up the Queensland
coast to Cooktown in ten days — a beautiful and in-
teresting voyage, with many ports of call. At
Cooktown the Burns Philp steamers meet the
A. U.S.N, boat, and, crossing Torres Straits, reach
Port Moresby in two days.
An alternative route from Sydney is that via the
Solomon Islands, in a Burns Philp through steamer,
going to Samarai and Port Moresby without change.
This takes three weeks, and allows the traveller to
see one of the most interesting and beautiful groups
of islands in the world, quite at leisure, as a number
of calls are made.
Occasional boats of Dutch and German lines sail to
Port Moresby or Samarai from Sydney, usually calling
at Brisbane. They cannot be counted on, however,
3'7
3i8 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
as the service is irregular, and depends on the amount
of cargo obtainable.
The expenses of the journey vary, according to the
line selected. By "P. and O." it costs £4.1 to ^82
as far as Sydney ; the ticket to Port Moresby adds on
another £12.
Travellers who do not mind a good deal of
** roughing it " and some mixed company can get to
Sydney for about £10 by the large one-class White
Star boats that sail from Southampton. Messrs. Cook
and Sons, Ludgate Circus, London, E.C., are always
ready to give information about any line.
The " P. and O." Steam Navigation Company,
Leadenhall Street, E.C., can furnish handbooks and
literature descriptive of Papua, if asked. The Aus-
tralian Commonwealth Government Offices at Victoria
Street, Westminster, will also give pamphlets and
information to applicants.
Outfits for Papua should be of the simplest kind.
White duck or drill suits of " patrol " pattern, strong
light khaki clothing, flannel shirts, heavy nailed boots,
woollen puttees, are the principal requisites. Colonial
felt hats are more commonly worn than helmets, as
sunstroke is very rare. Ordinary requirements for
men — such as hats, ties, shirts — can be obtained in
Papua when necessary, as there are one or two stores
of a simple kind. Camping outfits, mosquito nets,
tinware, tinned foods, can also be bought in Port
Moresby and Samarai.
Riding gear is not of much use, as horses can only
be used about Port Moresby and the Astrolabe. A
steam or oil launch is invaluable to any traveller who
can afford to bring one up from Sydney or Brisbane.
VISITING PAPUA 319
Steam is to be preferred for work up the rivers and
along the coasts, as the distances are great and
currents variable, and a launch may very easily run
short of fuel — in which case the steam launch, which
can at a pinch be worked witii wood, will have a
distinct advantage over the oil launch, in spite of the
superior compactness and convenience of the latter.
It is possible to ascend the rivers in native canoes
or boats, though progress is necessarily slow and un-
certain, owing to the great volume and strong current
of the rivers.
The best season for visiting Papua is the time
of the south-east trades, which usually lasts from
about April to October, July and August are
commonly the coolest months. During the north-
west monsoon, from November to March, the weather
is hot and rainy, and winds are irregular. An ex-
ception, however, must be made as regards visits to
the Western and Gulf divisions. These are most
easily reached in December, January, and February.
At other times the river bars are otten quite impass-
able, owing to the surf.
Exploring expeditions into the interior should by
no means be undertaken "lightly or inadvisedly."
There is no country in the world that makes a greater
tax upon the pluck, determination, strength, and
organising power of explorers than Papua ; nor can
the unknown interior be reached without considerable
expenditure. Hundreds are not much use when it
comes to serious exploring ; unless the traveller's
pocket will stand a call of at least four figures, he had
better not try to tempt the fascinating unknown. It
must also be added that exploration in Papua is
320 THE NEW NEW GUINEA
surrounded by restrictions that do not obtain in
Africa. If a Papuan explorer were to hang his men
for misconduct, he would run a fair chance of being
handed himself when he came back. If he ill-treated,
starved, and oppressed his " boys " ; if he armed one
tribe against another, and conducted private wars ; if
he shot natives who had not attempted to harm him,
and set on fire villages deserted by their terrified in-
habitants — as African explorers have done time and
again, not only without remorse, but actually glorying
in their deeds — he would very probably be tried
and imprisoned on his return. The name of science
is respected in this far-away colony, and explorers or
prospectors are always warmly welcomed and given
every possible help ; but the price of blood that has
been paid for so much of modern discovery on the
African continent will never be paid in Papua, even
if the locked doors remain locked for another half-
century.
The possibility of exploration under humane con-
ditions was proved by the Mackay-Little exploring
journey in 1908-9, already referred to. During six
months' journeying through unknown, hostile country,
only one carrier out of nearly eighty was lost, all the
others returning in good condition to their homes ;
and no natives of the country travelled through were
killed.
For information about Papua, whether from the
settler's, traveller's, explorer's, or investor's point of
view, application can always be made to the Govern-
ment officials — Lieutenant-Governor, Government
Secretary, or Director of Agriculture at Port Moresby.
APPENDIX 321
HEALTH CONDITIONS
Concerning the health conditions of the country,
the opinion of Dr. R. Fleming Jones, the Govern-
ment Medical Officer at Samarai, carries special weight,
as Dr. Jones, besides his residence of five years in
Papua, can claim experience and study of tropical
diseases in Cuba, the West Indies, the Southern
United States, and the Philippines.
" Papua is singularly free from tropical diseases,
considering its geographical position, and on the
whole is certainly healthier than India," said this
authority to the writer. "There is no cholera, no
plague, and enteric is unknown. There is no yellow
fever, no Malta fever, no sleeping sickness. Malaria
and occasional outbreaks of dysentery are really the
only tropical diseases of importance, and there is no
disease which yields so readily to proper treatment as
malaria, or that can be guarded against so success-
fully, if people will only take the trouble. The
worst of it is that generally they will not. When-
ever I hear of a new plantation being opened up, 1
confidently expect that the white people engaged
thereon will go down with fever, one after another.
They will come into Samarai sick and debilitated
and complain of the country, not of their own care-
lessness. The Anopheles, which is the malaria-bear-
ing mosquito, bites after sunset as a general rule, and
if a man intelligently uses a good net — in the absence
of a mosquito-proof room, which, however, ought to
be one of the first things provided for him — and
searches this with a light before he turns in, he will
322
THE NEW NEW GUINEA
probably escape fever. The mosquito net should
always be used, even with a mosquito-proof room,
as an additional precaution,
" Papua has certainly suffered by confusion, in the
public mind, with the Guinea coast of Africa, — quite
unjustly, as the health conditions are infinitely better
in Papua. The truth really is that this country is as
healthy as any other lying in the same latitudes.
Tropical and equatorial countries are not as healthy
for white people as temperate climates — everyone
knows that ; but with the application of the most
elementary rules of tropical sanitation, with which
every new-comer to a tropical country should be
familiar, there is no reason why settlers should not
enjoy good health here. With regard to the question
of stimulants, blackwater fever is undoubtedly in
many cases connected with their abuse, though cer-
tainly not caused by drinking. The most important
matter in the prevention of blackwater fever is simply
the prevention of malaria, as it is almost always in
individuals who have had repeated attacks of malaria
that blackwater occurs. I believe that a strictly
moderate use of stimulants does no harm, even good
in some cases, but moderation, in enervating climates
like this, seems to be so difficult that it is safer to
counsel total abstinence"
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