When we left the northernmost end of the Aru Islands behind us the wind rose and torrents of rain descended, and the Arafura Sea, which is almost everywhere more or less shoal water, treated us to the first foul weather we had experienced since leaving England. At dawn on the 4th January we found ourselves in sight of land, and about five miles south of the New Guinea coast. A big bluff mountain (Mount Lakahia) a southern spur of the Charles Louis range determined our position, and the head of the Nias was immediately turned to the East. As we steamed along the coast the light grew stronger, and we saw in the far North-east pale clouds, which presently resolved themselves into ghostly-looking mountains one hundred miles away. Soon the rising sunlight touched them and we could clearly see white patches above the darker masses of rock and then we knew that these were the Snow Mountains of New Guinea, which we had come so far to see. Beyond an impression of their remoteness and their extraordinary steepness we did not learn much of the formation of the mountains from that great distance and they were quickly hidden from our view, as we afterwards found happened daily, by the dense white mists that rose from the intervening land.

Following the coast rather more closely we soon found that our approach was causing some excitement on shore. White columns of the smoke of signal fires curled up from the low points of the land and canoes manned by black figures paddled furiously in our wake, while others, warned doubtless by the signals, put off from the land ahead of us and endeavoured to intercept us in our course.

In some of the larger canoes there were as many as twenty men, and very fine indeed they looked standing up in the long narrow craft which they urged swiftly forward with powerful rhythmic strokes of their long-shafted paddles. At the beginning of each stroke the blade of the paddle is at right angles to the boat. As it is pulled backward the propelling surface of the paddle is a little rotated outward, a useful precaution, for the stroke ends with a sudden jerk as the paddle is lifted from the water and the consequent shower of spray is directed away from the canoe.

The shore was low and featureless, and it was impossible to identify the mouths of the rivers from the very inaccurate chart. It was not safe for the Nias to approach the land closely on account of the shoal water, so Capt. Van Herwerden dropped anchor when he had been steaming Eastwards for about eight hours, and sent the steam launch towards an inlet, where we could see huts, to gather information. A bar of sand prevented the launch from entering the inlet, so they hailed a canoe which ventured within speaking distance, and by repeating several times “Mimika,” the only word of their language that we knew at that time, learnt that we had overshot our destination by a few miles. That canoe, it should be noted, was remarkable on account of two of its crew. One of them held aloft an ancient Union Jack; the other was conspicuously different from the scores of men in the canoes about us, who were all frankly in a bare undress, by wearing an old white cotton jacket fastened by a brass button which was ornamented with the head of Queen Victoria. How the flag and the coat and the button came to that outlandish place will never be known, but it is certain that they must have passed through very many hands before they came there, for certainly no Englishman had ever been there before.

When the launch returned to the ship a crowd of natives, fifty or sixty at the least, came clambering on board leaving only one or two men in each canoe to paddle after the steamer as we slowly returned towards the Mimika. Two men were recognised by Capt. Van Herwerden as having belonged to a party of natives from this coast, who had been taken some years earlier to Merauke, the Dutch settlement near the southernmost point of New Guinea. At Merauke they had got into mischief and had been put in prison from which nine of them escaped, and these two men, probably the only survivors of the party, had contrived to find their way along four hundred miles of coast, peopled by hostile tribes, back to their own country.

The behaviour of our new fellow passengers was very remarkable and different from what one expected, though it was obvious enough at the first glance that these were people totally different from the Malayan races both in appearance and demeanour; yet there was none of that exuberance of spirits, child-like curiosity and exhibition of merriment and delight in their novel surroundings described by Wallace3 and Guillemard4 and which I had myself seen on the coast of German New Guinea. A few of them shook hands, or rather held hands, with us and talked loudly and volubly, while the rest stared dumbly at us and then wandered aimlessly about the ship seeking a chance to steal any loose piece of metal. They showed no fear nor did they betray any excitement nor any very keen curiosity about the marvellous things that they were seeing for the first time. They were quite unmoved by the spectacle of the windlass lifting up the anchor, and a casual glance down the skylight of the engine room was enough for most of them. They appeared to take everything for granted without question, and a stolid stare was their only recognition of the wonderful works of the white man’s civilisation. In one respect it is true they were not quite so apathetic and that was in their appetite for tobacco, which they begged from everyone on board, brown and white alike. When they had obtained a supply, they sat in groups about the deck and smoked as unconcernedly as though a passage in a steamship were an affair of every-day occurrence in their lives.

By the time that we eventually anchored off the mouth of the Mimika River it was beginning to grow dark, and Capt. Van Herwerden ordered the natives on board to leave the ship, not having noticed that the canoes had already departed towards the shore. No doubt this was a preconcerted scheme of the natives who wanted to stay on board, but by dint of much shouting two canoes were persuaded to return and take away some of our passengers. It was then quite dark and there was a white mist over the sea, and the spectacle of the procession of black figures passing down the gangway into an apparent abyss, for the canoes were invisible in the gloom, was singularly weird. There was not room for all in the canoes, so about a score of fortunate ones had to stop on board, where they slept in picturesque attitudes about the deck. Five young men chose a place where the iron cover of the steering chain made a pillow a few inches high; they lay on their sides all facing the same way, their arms folded across their chests and their bent knees fitting into the bend of the knees of the man in front, and so close together that the five of them occupied a space hardly more than five feet square.

Soon after daylight on the following day the steam launch left the ship with a party to proceed up the Mimika and find a suitable place for a base-camp. The river has a fine wide mouth about a mile across guarded by a sand bar, through which runs a narrow channel navigable at all stages of the tide except during rough weather. For some distance the river is a noble stream two or three hundred yards wide winding in fine sweeps between low mangrove-covered banks. About three miles from the sea the river divides into an East and West branch. The East branch, the Mimika proper, brings down not more than one-quarter of the volume of water of the West branch, of which it may be said to be a tributary. It is remarkable that the party who visited the Mimika in 1902 apparently overlooked the fact that the West branch is actually the main river. Above the junction of the two branches the water of the Mimika is of a brown chocolate colour which proclaims it, though we did not know it at the time, to be a mere jungle stream rising from comparatively low ground. The water of the West branch on the contrary is pale in colour and at times of flood almost milky-white, being charged with lime-stone from the high mountains where it rises.

Proceeding for two or three miles up the Mimika, which had become above the junction a comparatively insignificant stream forty or fifty yards across and very tortuous, the exploring party in the steam launch arrived at the village of Wakatimi situated on the right bank of the river. The village was crowded with natives, numbering perhaps one thousand people, who gave the visitors a most remarkable reception. As soon as the boat appeared in sight the natives crowded down to the bank and shouted shrilly, men, women and children. When they came nearer the people threw themselves into the shallow water and many of them plastered themselves with mud, while the women performed their curious dance, if dance it can be called. It is not a concerted performance, but rather a pas seul executed by each woman independently of the others, and it is a peculiarly ungraceful exhibition. The body is bent forward from the hips, the hands rest on the knees or on the hips, and then with a shuffling movement of the feet the woman swings herself from side to side or up and down, always presenting her back and the narrow strip of barkcloth, which usually hangs down like a tail behind, to the astonished gaze of the spectator. She sings all the while a monotonous whining chant and occasionally looks back over her shoulder, as if to see that the onlooker is properly appreciative of her charms. Many of the people both men and women on this and other occasions of great excitement were so overcome with emotion that they actually shed tears of rapture.5 For many days after this boats were constantly coming up the river from the ship, and they were always welcomed in a similar manner by the natives.

The river was explored for a few miles further up, but the only suitable place for a camp was found to be on the left bank of the river immediately opposite to Wakatimi. Lieut. Cramer and a party of his soldiers established themselves there the same afternoon and the work of clearing the ground and landing the stores was immediately begun. The Nias was anchored about two miles outside the river and the launch went very slowly when it had two or three heavily laden boats to tow against the strong current of the river, so the business of landing the expedition was a very slow one, and as there was at first but very little space for pitching tents on the camping ground some of us remained for a few days on board. During those days that were spent on the ship outside the Mimika we had opportunities in the early morning of getting a general idea of the broad features of the country.

At the top of the white sandy beach was in most places a narrow belt of Casuarina trees, which are accustomed to grow on sandy or stony soil. They resemble pines and their pale stems have a fresh green foliage, which is a pleasing contrast to the dense monotonous green of the majority of the trees in the country. Behind the Casuarina belt dense jungle, for the first few miles consisting entirely of Mangroves and beyond that of various trees, extends with hardly any rise of altitude to the foot of the mountains thirty miles away. This last observation was one of supreme importance and it affected the whole prospect and conduct of the expedition. Those of us who had been to New Guinea before had been accustomed to seeing a steep shore rising very quickly to the hills. This is the usual formation along practically the whole of the North coast of the island, also along a considerable extent of the South-east coast and again on the West coast in the neighbourhood of MacCluer Gulf. It was known of course that the South coast on both sides of the mouth of the Fly River and about Prince Frederick Henry Island was low swampy country, but it was assumed that, considering the fact that the highest peaks of the Snow Mountains were known to be not more than seventy miles from the sea, the foothills would certainly extend to within a short distance of the coast.

Before we had reached the country we had had the idea that in a few days’ march we should find ourselves in the hills at perhaps three or four thousand feet above the sea, but the view of the country which we saw from the Nias effectually put an end to any hopes of that kind. It is probable that more searching enquiries made at Batavia would have revealed the existence of this wide belt of low land, but it seldom occurs to you to question the truth of such an assumption. However that may be, a serious mistake was made and we paid for it dearly enough. The mountains appeared to rise very steeply from the low ground, and seen from a distance they appeared to be composed of parallel ridges lying one behind the other, each one successively higher than the one in front of it. It was only in certain lights, and more particularly when the clouds began to form on them, that you could distinguish deep and narrow valleys running into the mountains. The nearer ranges rose steeply enough, but were not too steep to be covered with dense forest easily discernible from a distance. The furthermost ridge on the other hand rose in huge precipices of bare rock, which showed reddish yellow in the morning sunlight with here and there downward stripes of black colour, presumably water, and in other places streaks of pure white rock. This precipice, of which more will be said later, grew smaller towards the West until it ended at the deep valley, which divides the Snow Mountains from the range of the Charles Louis Mountains.

In the opposite direction towards the East the range rises gradually, until at a point about North-east from the Mimika three snow-capped tops are seen. I use the word “top” advisedly, for these three points are not peaks but are elevations on an otherwise fairly even mountain outline. The vertical extent of the snow is not very great, a few hundred feet at the most, the South face of the mountain being so steep that snow cannot lie on it save on the horizontal terraces of the strata, which could plainly be distinguished. Continuing the ridge East from the three snow tops (Mount Idenburg) is a long plain of almost level snow about three miles long. From the East end of the snow plain a ridge of shattered rock, looking like Dolomite towers from that great distance, forms a connection with Mount Carstensz, the highest point of the range.

Seen from afar, Mount Carstensz appears to be of a different formation from the rest of the range. Mr. Dumas of the Dutch Expedition to the Utakwa River clearly identified masses of slate on the Southern face from a distance of twenty miles, and this would quite account for its different appearance. There are two principal tops, a Western black and irregular rock with scattered patches of snow, and an Eastern top more even in its outline and entirely covered with snow. Between the two a glacier of moderate size flows down the South face of the mountain. Still further East from Mount Carstensz could be seen yet other ridges, apparently a continuation of the Carstensz ridge. Occasionally these were covered with snow in the early morning, but no other points of permanent snow could be seen from the Mimika, and indeed there is no other until Mount Wilhelmina is reached more than one hundred miles to the East. But studying the mountains with field glasses was an occupation which could only be pursued for a short time, for the clouds formed early on the ridges and by nine o’clock at the latest all the higher mountains were hidden from view.

During the first two days that we lay off the Mimika we were visited by numbers of natives in canoes, who came some to trade and some merely to stare at the ship and the people on board. The articles that they brought for sale consisted chiefly of fish, coconuts and bananas of a very poor kind, though we afterwards came to regard these latter as a delicious luxury. They also brought a few young pigs, young cassowaries, and other birds and they received payment in beads, scraps of cloth, empty bottles and tins and pieces of metal. It is worth while to record, as showing the indolence of these people, that on the third day no natives came to visit us. Those who had before come to look at us had presumably satisfied their curiosity, while the others who had come to barter were content with the treasures they had won, although they might have added greatly to their wealth if they had had the energy to catch a few fish or pick a few more coconuts.

Another occupation, which served to pass the time, was fishing for the sharks with which that shallow sea abounds. They are blunt-nosed animals with large dusky patches on the skin. It is very seldom that you see them at the surface of the water, and they appear to feed always at the bottom. The first that was caught was found to be full of fragments of large crabs. Nobody on board was found willing to eat the flesh, though it is probable that a few months afterwards they would have been less fastidious, so the fish was thrown overboard, and an hour or two later a second shark, a monster about twelve feet long, was hauled, on board, and on being opened it was found to be full of large undigested lumps of (presumably) the first.

On January 8th those of us who had remained on the Nias left the ship and proceeded to Wakatimi, where we found that Lieut. Cramer and his men had already done an immense amount of work in clearing the ground for the camp. It appeared that the place chosen had been cleared of forest at some time, for there were no large trees growing on it, but it was covered with a dense jungle of shrubs and small trees, a foot or so in thickness and a tangle of creepers. Already in four days a strip along the river bank about eighty yards long and thirty yards wide had been cleared of bush, and as time went on the clearing was gradually extended until there were twenty acres or more of open ground about the camp.

During the first two or three days the natives, who had assembled in large numbers at the village of Wakatimi, helped a good deal in clearing the ground and landing the stores. When the steam launch towing the laden boats arrived at the camp they fell upon the boats in hordes and quickly carried everything up the steep mud bank, but this amusement palled upon them very soon, and they stood about doing nothing and hampered the men at their work of unpacking. Accordingly a stout wooden fence was built about the landward side of the camp and over this they were content to gaze from morning till night. They stood packed together five or six deep, and the press of those at the back trying to catch a glimpse of what was going on was so great that two or three times the fence fell bodily inwards, and with it a struggling mass of black humanity; but it was not many days before their curiosity was satisfied, and though they did not afford us very much assistance it was fortunate that they were not inclined to molest or interfere with us in any way.

We had only been in our camp at Wakatimi for one day and it already seemed as if the place was beginning to show some sign of order, when a melancholy tragedy threw a gloom over the spirits of the whole expedition. On the afternoon of January 9th Mr. Wilfred Stalker, who had had plenty of experience of tropical and Australian jungles, went out from the camp taking his collecting gun to shoot some birds. The usual daily rain began at about four o’clock, but as we were all busy with various occupations in our tents his absence was not noticed until after six o’clock, when it was already pitch dark and the rain was falling in torrents. Beyond the camp was dense jungle intersected by creeks and pools of water, difficult enough to traverse by day but absolutely impassable in darkness, so there was nothing to be done that night but to hope anxiously that Stalker’s bushcraft had prompted him to make a shelter of some kind, if disaster had not already overtaken him. At dawn Lieut. Cramer sent out parties of soldiers in all directions, and soon all of us, Europeans, Gurkhas, and native soldiers were out searching and shouting and firing shots. With some difficulty we explained to the natives what had happened, and we offered them large rewards if they were successful in finding him, and many of them joined with us; but though the ground was carefully quartered and the search was continued all that day and a part of the next not a trace of him was found anywhere, and it was evidently hopeless that he could ever be found alive. On the second day, when the search had been abandoned, the natives were convinced of his fate, and two of the more important people came over from the village and wailed loudly outside his empty tent.

On January 12th all doubts as to his end were set at rest when a canoe manned by four Papuans, smeared with mud as their custom is in such circumstances, brought back his body from a creek about half a mile from the camp, where it had been found. Up to that moment there had been present in our minds the horrid suspicion that he might perhaps have fallen the victim to foul play. We thought that natives finding him wandering alone might have been tempted by his possessions and have murdered him, but it was evidently not so and we could only hope that by drowning death had come swiftly to him.

We buried him under a tree about one hundred yards behind the camp, and in the absence of the leader of the expedition, who had gone away with Rawling and Cramer to reconnoitre the river above Wakatimi, I read the short burial service. Besides Marshall and Shortridge and myself there were a Dutch soldier, two convicts and about fifty Papuans, who stood quietly in a wide circle about the grave. I think the ninetieth psalm was never read to a more remarkable congregation. The grave was the first of the graves of many who left their bones in New Guinea.

Wilfred Stalker was in his thirty-first year when he died. Previously he had spent many years as a naturalist in Australia and several months in New Guinea. Early in 1909 he returned to the East where he spent a part of his time in engaging coolies for the New Guinea Expedition, and he had time to make an interesting journey in the Island of Ceram, where he made a remarkable zoological collection. He joined us at Amboina on January 1st so that we had not time to know him well, but his unflagging energy in the preparations at the base-camp, where he landed with the first party, showed that he was a man whom the expedition could ill afford to lose.

CHAPTER V

Arrival of our Ambonese—Coolie Considerations—Canoes of the Natives—Making Canoes—Preliminary Exploration of the Mimika—Variable Tides—Completing the Camp—A Plague of Flies—Also of Crickets—Making “Atap”—Trading with the Natives—Trade Goods.

After all the stores and equipment of the expedition had been landed at Wakatimi, an operation which took six days and some ten or more journeys of the steam launch towing many boats to accomplish, the Nias returned to Dobo, and brought back from there on the 14th January our Ambonese coolies, who had arrived there by mail steamer from Amboina. To those of us who had had experience of native carriers in other countries, the appearance of the ninety-six Ambonese came as something of a shock. When the boats crowded with them came within sight of the camp the natives cried out that our women were coming, and they might well be excused for their mistake. With their wide straw hats and coloured coats and shirts and gay sarongs they had not much the appearance of men, and we wondered what sort of people they would be to force a way through the trackless country. When they landed, our first impression of their unsuitableness was rather strengthened than otherwise. Every man (to give them a dignity which very few of them deserved) had a large wooden or tin box as well as a huge bundle of bedding and mats. Their average age appeared to be about sixteen years, and though they were said to be the best men obtainable in Amboina, the physique of most of them was wretched. It was evidently useless to keep so many feeble creatures, so it was decided to keep fifty of the more promising and send the rest back to Amboina by the Nias, which was waiting at the mouth of the Mimika until the following day. The whole gang was paraded and a more hopeless looking lot it would be hard to imagine. With great difficulty we picked out fifty who, though they had little appearance of strength, were not obviously crippled by disease, and the forty-six others were sent away without having done a single day’s work.

The question of coolies, as we were to find by bitter experience during the ensuing months, is the point that determines the success or failure of an expedition. Mr. Stalker had left England charged with the duty of engaging coolies for this expedition. It was hoped that he would be able to get a number of men in the Ké Islands, but failing to engage them there he had seen in Amboina his only chance of recruiting a sufficient number of men. No blame can be attached to him, for he had had no experience of the kind before and his instructions were not very detailed, but it was a mistake which seriously delayed the progress of the expedition.

As well as the trouble involved in trying to make a silk purse of efficient coolies out of the sow’s ear of the Amboina rabble we were confronted by another difficulty of transport. It has been mentioned above (page 43) that before we arrived in the country it was expected that we should find rising ground close to the sea, and that in a few days’ journey at the most we should reach an altitude of three thousand feet or upwards, but the discovery that there was a tract of level country hardly above sea level extending from the coast to the foot of the mountains thirty miles inland entirely upset our calculations. Had we known this before we should necessarily have brought a launch and boats to tow our stores up the many miles of navigable river, and by so doing we should have saved ourselves many weeks of valuable time and an infinity of labour. It is worth while to record this fact, not for the object of drawing attention to any deficiencies in the organisation of the expedition, but to demonstrate the uselessness of entering an unknown country without having made a preliminary reconnaissance.

An urgent message was despatched to the Navy Department in Java begging them to supply us with a steam launch at the earliest opportunity, but communications are slow in that part of the world, and it was not until ten weeks afterwards that the launch arrived at the Mimika. Its career was brief and inglorious. It made two or three journeys at snail’s pace up the river before it finally broke down altogether and was sent back to Java.

In June we purchased from the pearlfishers at Dobo a petrol motor-boat, which made several successful trips up the river towing large quantities of stores, and then it was badly damaged by coming into violent contact with a sunken tree, and it was several months before it could be repaired sufficiently to float. Thus it happened that nearly all the river transport of the expedition was laboriously carried out in canoes.

The canoes used by the natives on the Mimika and neighbouring rivers are simple “dug-outs,” that is they are made from one tree trunk without any joinery at all. They vary considerably in size but the length of an average canoe is about thirty-five feet. The sides curve inward towards the gunwale so that in section the canoe forms a large segment of a circle. The breadth at the gunwale is about eighteen inches and the breadth at the widest part from eighteen to twenty-four inches. The gunwales are almost horizontal, though in some boats there is a considerable “sheer” towards the end of the canoe. They end in a square bow and at the stern they come together to a fine point. The bottom of a canoe—there is no keel—slopes finely up from the middle towards the ends so that when the canoe is afloat several feet of its length at bow and stern are out of water.

The square bow of the canoe is carved in a more or less symmetrical fashion and there is usually a narrow margin of ornamental carving at intervals along the sides. A common feature of this carving, as also of the other native ornaments, is an object which is intended to represent the human eye. Occasionally they attach to the bow of the canoe, one on either side and one in the middle, three long boards carved in a sort of fretwork manner and painted red and white. These project about four feet in front of the bow and give it somewhat the appearance of a bird’s beak. The inside of the canoe is sometimes whitened with lime or sago powder but is otherwise not ornamented. A few feet from the stern, where the bottom begins to slope upwards, a low partition of wood is left forming as it were a sort of bulkhead; the space behind this is filled with sand on which a fire is kept burning.

Before we came to the country the whole business of canoe-making from the first felling of the tree to the final hollowing out of the inside was done with stone axes and the carving was done with sharpened shells, a labour which it is difficult to realise, so it is not surprising that the natives take very great care of their boats. They never allow water to stand in them for long, and at the end of a storm of rain the first thing they do is to go to the river and bail the water out of their canoes, which they do by scooping it out with the blade of a paddle. They also take good care of the outside and frequently char them with fire to kill the worms, which otherwise quickly destroy wood in brackish water.

The tree most commonly used for making canoes is Octomeles moluccana, which has a smooth pale trunk devoid of branches for a long way above the ground. When they can do so they choose a tree growing close to the river bank, but this is not always possible and we found a place where a tree for a canoe had been felled fully three hundred yards from the water. The trunk is roughly shaped where it lies and is then hauled with immense toil over logs laid on a rough track to the river; thence it is towed to the village where the hollowing and shaping is done at leisure. We saw a large number of canoes made at Parimau, and in nearly every case the balance was perfect when they were first put into the water.

The canoes are usually propelled by paddles with long thin shafts and wide blades which are often beautifully carved, but in shallow places or rapid water the natives generally employ a long pole in the use of which they are very expert. It is easy enough to stand up and paddle or pole in large canoes, but the smaller craft are very top-heavy, and the natives perform wonderful feats of balancing in navigating them. Their education begins early for we saw in one of the villages small canoes three or four feet long, in which the children begin to learn the craft of the waterman almost before they have learned to walk.

Though the people value their canoes very highly they were anxious enough to part with them in exchange for our knives and pieces of metal, of which they had none at all, and we very soon had a small fleet of canoes. The first two were bought for a knife apiece, but the price soon rose to an axe for a canoe, and in the course of several months it had still further risen to two axes or even two axes and a knife.

Within a few days of the arrival of our coolies we had purchased half a dozen canoes and preparations were made to send an exploring party up the river. At that time we were none of us skilful canoe-men and it was considered safer to use the canoes as rafts by lashing two side by side and securing a platform of bamboos across the top. This was a most cumbrous arrangement which added enormously to the labour of paddling, and after the first journey it was never repeated.

On the 18th January, Goodfellow, Rawling, and Shortridge with twenty-four coolies, six Gurkhas, and a small party of Javanese soldiers in the charge of a Dutch sergeant started up the river. They took with them about a dozen natives, hoping that they would work hard at paddling and would be useful in other ways, but they were a perpetual nuisance calling out for their wives and wanting to stop to eat or sleep; they finished by stealing one of the canoes and deserting the night before they would have been sent back to their homes. With them went another of our cherished illusions that we should be able to get a great deal of assistance from the natives of the country. The party proceeded up the river at an incredibly slow rate on account of the clumsy rafts, and for four days saw no signs of inhabitants. On the fifth day they found one isolated hut, and two days later after passing a few scattered huts they arrived at the village of Parimau, above which place the river appeared to be hardly navigable.

The welcome accorded to the party by the natives of Parimau was as enthusiastic as that at Wakatimi described above, the people showing their delight by smearing themselves with mud and shedding copious tears. During the following days, when a camp was being made, hundreds of natives flocked into the place to see the strange white men, who were exhibited to the new-comers with a sort of proprietary air by the natives of Parimau.

In the meantime a great deal of work was necessary to put in order the base-camp at Wakatimi, and to render it secure against an attack, should the natives ever alter their friendly attitude towards us. The bush was completely cleared for some distance and a stout fence built about the camp. Then it was found that at high tide, and especially at spring tide, a large part of the camp was flooded and this necessitated a great amount of levelling and trenching and banking, a task which appealed to the fenland instinct of Cramer. The tide made itself felt in the river for several miles above Wakatimi, where there was a rise and fall of about ten feet, but the exact tidal movements were very difficult to recognise. On some days two tides were distinctly seen, while on many others there appeared to be only one. Their movements were further complicated by the very variable amount of water brought down by the river. Sometimes the river was almost stagnant, but at other times it swept down bank-high with a strong current for days at a time, and no flow of the tide could be noticed. The river Watuka, which joins the Mimika a few miles below Wakatimi, had a much greater volume of water than the latter river, and often when the tide was rising its waters were easily recognisable by their white colour floating up past the camp and holding back the waters of the Mimika in the same way that the Blue Nile, when it is in flood, forms a pond of the White Nile.

It was unfortunate that no suitable place for the base-camp could be found above the tidal water, because it increased the difficulty of supplying the camp with drinking water, and at times when there was not much fresh water coming down the river the ebb and flow of the tide washed the refuse backwards and forwards in front of the camp. Water was boiled and filtered every day in quantities large enough for every man in the camp to have as much as he wished, but the value of this precaution was to a large extent neutralised by the Malay habit of washing out the mouth with the water in which the man bathes.

A wooden landing stage for canoes was built out over the muddy bank, and a bathing place was cut off from the river by a wooden fence to protect bathers from crocodiles and sharks, both of which were occasionally seen, but as the natives bathed constantly without showing any fear of either animal the precaution was perhaps needless.

At that time when the ground was being cleared we began to be plagued by large blue-bottle flies, which swarmed about the camp and laid their eggs everywhere. One of their favourite laying grounds was in our bedding, which in a hot damp climate must always be hung out to air when the sun shines. You would find two folds of your blanket stuck together with horrible masses of eggs and if, as sometimes happened, you did not scrape them all away you would wake up at night and find yourself crawling with maggots. There are some people who are afraid of spiders, but the most timorous of mortals must find the homely spider preferable to the loathsome blow fly. The house where we mostly lived at Wakatimi and where we had our meals was immediately filled with blue-bottles the moment our food was brought in, so we encouraged the larger sort of spider to live there and one old fellow who lived under the corner of the table used to come out at meal times and take his toll of flies, and in the course of time he became so tame that he would take a living fly out of your fingers.

At the same time, and indeed during the whole of our stay in the country, we were greatly annoyed by the depredations of very large crickets. Not content with making a most distracting noise by night these horrible creatures did endless damage to our eatable possessions. They invaded the sacks in which we kept our scanty garments, socks, vests and the like, and riddled them into holes, and they appeared to have a special partiality for sponges and brushes, which they devoured completely. Even more serious were their attacks on folded tents or sacks of rice and flour, which had to be constantly taken out of the store houses and repaired. When these things were taken out of the house a large number of crickets were taken out too, and then was the chance for the Kingfishers (Halcyon sanctus) which darted down and snapped them up. A pair of these beautiful little birds haunted the camp and became so tame that they would fly down from the roof of a house and pick up a cricket within a foot or two of a man.

When the ground had been well cleared and levelled, we set about the business of building barracks for the men and store houses for the provisions and equipment. The Dutch contingent had brought with them regulation army barrack frames, pieces of seasoned wood of definite lengths which are fitted together by bolts and screws, and form the skeleton of excellent houses. We had nothing of the kind, but the jungle supplied plenty of wood and our houses, though less regular than those of the Dutch, were very soon built. It is easy enough to put up the framework of a house in a place where there is plenty of timber, but the walls and the roof are a more difficult matter. Fortunately the natives were adepts in the art of making “atap,” which they use for roofing their own huts, and they were soon eagerly making it for us in exchange for our trade goods.

The best “atap” is made from the leaves of the Nipa palm (Nipa fruticans) which grows abundantly in the swampy country. Almost equally good “atap” can be made from the Sago palm, but the leaves of the Coconut palm shrivel quickly and are of no use for the purpose. The method of the manufacture of “atap” is briefly as follows: Leaflets of the palm are stripped from the stem, which is then split into three or four sticks of about an inch and a half in diameter and five or six feet in length. The man begins by taking up a leaf and folding it in the middle, thus breaking the mid-rib of the leaf. He then frees the mid-rib from the surrounding leaf for a short distance and breaks off a piece about three inches long for use presently. Then holding the stick near the end he pushes the free end of the mid-rib, which is separated from the leaf, into the soft substance of the stick and folds the leaf once round the stick in such a way that its two free ends lie one upon the other. He then clips together the free ends with the short piece he had broken from the mid-rib. He then repeats the process with another leaf, making each one slightly overlap the last, until the stick is completely covered with folded leaves. It should be said that each leaf is about three inches wide and four feet long so that the free ends, when the leaf is folded, lie about two feet from the stick. “Atap” is always made by the men, never by the women, and a quick worker will make a complete piece in about ten minutes.

The method of roofing with “atap” is very simple. Pieces are fixed by strands of rattan to the timbers of the roofing beginning from below and overlapping each other like tiles. The stick end of the “atap” is uppermost and the free ends point downwards. When there is no lack of “atap” and the pieces can be laid on the roof very closely together it forms a most efficient thatch, which keeps the house tolerably cool in the hot weather and is impervious to the heaviest downfall of rain.

The demand for “atap” started our regular trade with the natives, it brought us into friendly relations with them and they soon discovered that they could put confidence in us. When they found that we really paid them, as we promised, in beads and cloth, there was keen competition in the “atap” trade and they brought us as much as we wanted. For a few pieces only they received beads, while for ten pieces and upwards we paid them in cloth and they adopted various tricks to obtain cloth, when they knew that the amount they brought was only worth beads. One of their dodges was to bring old pieces of “atap” from their own houses to increase the size of the pile, and sometimes a man would steal two or three pieces from the pile of another man who had already been paid, but they were always found out and were not in the least ashamed of themselves. It was important to keep the price low, because we very well knew that when the people had obtained as much cloth and as many beads as they wanted they would never do any more work, and that did occur after a few months. They greatly enjoyed a little foolery. For instance, when you were paying them in cloth it was much more appreciated if you wound it artistically about the recipient’s head than if you merely thrust it into his hands; and in paying a man in beads it was thought a great joke if you let them slowly trickle into his palm out of your closed fist. His smile would grow with the pile of beads in his hand, and he always hoped to find some more concealed between your fingers.

In addition to “atap” they also brought other things for trade, sometimes fish from the sea which were generally uneatable, and sometimes delicious prawns six or eight inches long from the river estuary. There was a constant trade in coconuts which grew in some numbers about Wakatimi, and occasionally we bought a bunch of bananas. Living birds of many kinds, cassowaries, pigeons, kingfishers, lories and parrots were often brought for sale, but the poor creatures were generally taken straight from the nest, and the soldiers and coolies who bought them quickly stuffed them to death with rice. Some of the lories throve and became tame enough to fly about at liberty, and the cassowaries became quite a pest in the camp.