The Javanese convicts were the same sort of material, but their case was not quite the same as that of the soldiers, for they had not voluntarily entered a profession (if the condition of convict can be called a profession) that involved service in foreign lands. The justice of the Dutch practice of employing convicts as coolies in military and exploring expeditions is very much open to question, but it need not be discussed at length here. The transport for the military operations in Atjeh is carried out almost entirely by convict labour, and all the Dutch exploring parties in New Guinea have made use of convict coolies, assisted in two instances by paid Dayaks. It is intended officially that only long-sentence men shall go on expeditions, so that by good behaviour they may earn some substantial remission of their sentences, but that is not invariably the case, for several young men left our expedition because their terms had expired. It is also supposed that only men shall be sent on expeditions who volunteer to go; but the supply of convict volunteers is not inexhaustible, and there were men with us whose last wish would have been to come to New Guinea.

But even if they were all volunteers and all long-service men, it is doubtful whether it is justifiable to send any but free men to work in a country so full of risks as New Guinea. The native of Java is a poor creature, particularly susceptible to beri-beri and other diseases of the tropics, and when I saw convicts die, as did unfortunately happen, I came to the conclusion that the balance went heavily against the system. It must, however, be recorded that the convicts are extremely well treated. Except in the matter of pay—convicts on expeditions receive about one guilder (1s. 8d.) a month—they are treated in all essentials exactly like the native soldiers; they have the same rations of food and the same tent accommodation, and many of them enjoy themselves a good deal more than if they were occupied in sweeping the roads in a town in Java. Their hours of labour in camp are comparatively short, and the loads they are given to carry on the march are by no means excessive. Nothing could exceed the kindness of Cramer’s treatment of the men under his command, and I have no doubt that the same may be said of the treatment of convicts elsewhere.

CHAPTER VIII

Description of Wakatimi—The Papuan House—Coconut Palms—The Sugar Palm—Drunkenness of the Natives—Drunken Vagaries—Other Cultivation—The Native Language—No Interpreters—The Numerals—Difficulties of Understanding—Names of Places—Local Differences of Pronunciation.

The native village of Wakatimi lay directly opposite to our base-camp on the W. bank of the Mimika, which was there about 150 yards broad. Beyond the margin of the river was a strip of grass intersected by muddy creeks, where the natives moored their canoes, and beyond that was Wakatimi. The village consisted of a single street about two hundred yards long lined on one side by huts, which usually numbered about sixty. But occasionally, as for instance when we first arrived, and once or twice subsequently when large crowds of natives from other villages visited the place, it happened that the street was a double row of houses, and every available spot of dry ground was occupied.

Shifting house is a very simple affair, as most of the building materials are carried about in the canoes, and the canoes come and go in the most casual and unaccountable manner. Sometimes there were perhaps a thousand people at Wakatimi, and then there would be days when there was not a soul in the village. There were times when for weeks together there were large villages at the mouth of the river, and there were other times when the coast was utterly deserted and hardly a trace of the villages remained. We were never able to learn what it was that prompted these migrations of the natives, but it is probable that the pursuit of food was the guiding motive. The wandering habits of the people will certainly make it very difficult to administer the country and civilise the people, if an attempt to do so is ever made.

The typical native house of the Mimika district is a simple rectangular structure with a framework of light poles driven into the ground, the cross-pieces and roof pole being tied to the uprights by strands of rattan. In some houses the roof is a simple slope downwards from front to back, but in most cases there is a central ridge pole from which the roof slopes to the back and front, that at the back being longer and going lower than that in front. The height of the ridge is about eight feet; after we had been for some time in the country the people improved their building in imitation of our houses and built their huts ten, and even twelve feet high. The roof is made of “atap,” the thatch described above (p. 60), and the walls are mats made from the leaves of a Screw-pine (Pandanus). The area of an average hut is about 9 by 12 feet, the longer dimensions being from front to back.

The floor is covered with sand to a depth of several inches, which is prevented from escaping into the street by a board placed on its edge along the front of the hut. The sand is brought from the seashore and must be of great value in preserving the health of the people: the huts are frequently under water in the big floods and without the sand, which quickly dries, it would be impossible for them to live there. Unfortunately the sand aggravates the sores and ulcers from which too many of them suffer, but that is perhaps a lesser evil than always sleeping on sodden ground. Racks made of sticks, on which are stowed bundles of arrows, spears, clubs, tobacco, sago and all the other portable property of the family, extend from one wall to another, so that it is almost impossible to stand upright inside a hut. The door is an opening about two feet square in the front wall; as well as being the means of entrance for the members of the household the door serves as the principal means of escape for the smoke of the fire, which is constantly kept burning inside.

It is only rarely that a house remains for long separated from others; when a second house is built it is attached to the side of the first, and the dividing wall is removed. In a large village the houses are built in rows of varying length, according to the nature of the ground, and there may be as many as fifty or sixty joined together. If you go inside you find that it is a single long house without any dividing walls, but each family keeps to its own particular section and use its own private entrance. When the place is crowded with people, and a number of fires are burning, the atmosphere inside the house may be more readily imagined than described.

The feature that most distinguishes Wakatimi from all the other villages that we saw is its fine grove of coconut palms. The village street is bordered with them on the side opposite to the houses, and there must be three or four hundred trees in all. They afford a very pleasant shade to the village, and their graceful trunks curving this way and that are really picturesque and conveniently relieve the ugliness of the Papuan houses. It is rather dangerous to live so close to coconut trees, and sometimes when the wind blew in gusts before the rain we heard warning shouts and the heavy thud of a nut falling to the ground; but accidents never seemed to happen. The nuts are, of course, a source of great wealth to the Wakatimi people, who exchange them for bananas and tobacco with the people of Obota, and while we were in the country they brought us altogether thousands of nuts for which they received riches undreamt of before. At one or two places near the sea, and at several places on the Mimika River we found coconut palms, but far up the river they did not occur, nor did we see any on the Kapare River; and I believe all those we saw were planted by the natives, and that none of them were self-sown.

The method of cultivation is extremely simple. A ripe nut is left out on the roof of a hut and allowed to sprout; when the shoot is about a foot or more in length, a small patch of ground is cleared, preferably in a sandy place on the river bank or near the sea shore, a hole is dug and the sprouting nut is planted. From time to time, if he remembers to do so, the native will clear away the strangling vegetation from the young plant, and in about five years, under favourable conditions, the palm begins to bear fruit.

Growing commonly near Wakatimi is another species of palm, which, though it has not the value of the coconut palm, is yet more prized by the natives. This is the Sugar palm (Arenga saccharifera), and from it is made a very potent and intoxicating liquor. When the palm is in fruit—it bears a heavy bunch of dark green fruit—a cut is made in the stem below the stalk of the fruit, and the juice trickles out and is collected in the shell of a coconut. Apparently the juice ferments very rapidly without the addition of any other substance, for it is drunk almost as soon as it is collected and the native becomes horribly intoxicated.

During the first few weeks of our stay in the country the people were on their good behaviour, or else they found sufficient amusement in coming to see us and our works, but they soon tired of that and went back to their normal habits. Many of them went to the drinking places by day, and we often saw them lying or sitting at the foot of the tree, while one of their party stood at the top of a bamboo ladder collecting the palm wine. But the worst was a small gang of about a dozen men, the laziest in the village, whose custom it was to start off towards evening in canoes to their favourite drinking tree, where they spent the night drinking and making night hideous with their songs and shouts. In the morning they returned raving to the village and as often as not they started quarrelling and fighting and knocking the houses to pieces (a favourite occupation of the angry Papuan) before they settled down to sleep off the effects of their potations.

As a rule, the men were the worst offenders, and the women drank but seldom, but I well remember one day seeing a man and his wife both hopelessly drunk come over to our camp. It was pouring with rain and their canoe was several inches deep in water, but they danced up and down in it and sang a drunken ditty; it was a ludicrous and at the same time heart-rending exhibition. The man, when we first knew him, was a fine fellow who one day climbed up a palm tree to get us coconuts, a feat which no man out of condition can perform; a few months later he was hardly ever seen sober, and in January he died. A smiling round-faced youth called Ukuma, who was one of our particular friends at first and was privileged to wander where he liked about the camp, attached himself to the drinking party, and before we left the country he looked an old man, and I had difficulty in recognising him.

Though the drunken vagaries of the natives were usually food for tears, they sometimes provided us with amusement. One afternoon one of the principal men of Wakatimi came down to the river bank quite intoxicated and took a canoe, which he paddled out into mid-stream and there moored it. From there he proceeded to shoot arrows vaguely and promiscuously at the village, raving and shouting what sounded to be horrible curses. Some of the arrows fell into the village and some sailed over the palm trees, and now and again he turned round and shot harmlessly into our camp, but nobody took the slightest notice of him except his wife, who went down to the river bank and told him in plain language her opinion of him. This caused him to turn his attention to her, but his aim was wild and the arrows missed their mark, so he desisted and went back to the shore, where the woman broke across her knee the remainder of his bundle of arrows, while he cooled his fevered brow in the river. Then, while she delivered a further lecture, he followed her back to their hut looking like a whipped and ashamed dog. It can hardly be doubted that palm wine shortens the lives of many of the Papuans, but one must hesitate before condemning an absolutely untaught and savage race for excessive indulgence in one of the pleasures that vary their monotonous lives.

As well as coconuts the Mimika people have also bananas, papayas (Carica papaya), water-melons and pumpkins, all of them of a very inferior kind. It cannot be said that they cultivate these fruits; they occasionally get a banana shoot and plant it in the ground by the riverside, where it may or may not grow and produce fruit, but they make no clearings and take very little trouble to ensure the life of the plant. The papayas and the melons and pumpkins are sometimes seen growing about the native dwellings; but they, too, seem to be there more by accident than by any design on the part of the people. At Obota we found a few pineapples, which were probably the descendants of some that were brought to the Mimika by M. Dumas a few years earlier.

It has been stated in the previous chapters that the natives told us this or that, and that we asked them for information about one thing or another. From this the reader must not conclude that we acquired a very complete knowledge of the native language, for that, unfortunately, was not the case, and even at the end of the fifteen months that we spent in their country we were not able to converse with them. Lieutenant Cramer and I compiled a vocabulary of nearly three hundred words,8 and we talked a good deal with the people, but we never reached the position of being able to exchange ideas on any single subject.

In the Eastern and Northern parts of New Guinea it has always been found possible to communicate with the natives through the medium of some known language; even if there were many differences noticed in the language of a new district, there were always some common words which formed the foundation of a more complete understanding. The Western end of New Guinea has been for centuries visited by traders speaking Malay dialects, some of whom have settled in the country; or Papuans from those parts have travelled to Malay-speaking islands and have returned with a sufficient knowledge of the language to act as interpreters to people visiting those districts.

But the long stretch of the South-west coast from the MacCluer Gulf as far as the Fly River has been quite neglected by Malay-speaking traders, partly on account of the poverty of the country and partly by reason of the shallow sea and the frequent storms which make navigation difficult and dangerous, so that the Malay language was of no use to us as a means of talking with the natives. It is true that two men from the Mimika district had been taken a few years previously to Fak-fak, the Dutch Government post on the South side of the MacCluer Gulf, but though they spent two years there and attempts were made to teach them Malay, in 1910 the extent of their knowledge of the language was the two words Tida, tuan (No, master).

It is unfortunate that there is no common language along the S. coast, nor even a language with words common to all the dialects in use. We were visited on one occasion by the Dutch Assistant Resident from Fak-fak; the native interpreter who came with him, and who knew all the native dialects of the Fak-fak district, could not understand one word of the Mimika language. On another occasion some natives from Mimika were taken down by steamer to Merauke, the Government post in S.W. New Guinea, not far from the boundary of British Papua, and there they found the language of the natives quite unintelligible to them.

So we found ourselves confronted with the task of learning a language with neither grammar, dictionary nor interpreter. This may not seem to be an insuperable difficulty, nor is it perhaps where Europeans and educated people are concerned, but with Papuans it is a very different problem. The first thing to do—and very few of them would even grasp the idea—is to make them understand that you wish to learn their words. You may point at an object and look intelligent and expectant, but they are slow to take your meaning, and they soon tire of giving information. The facial expression, which amongst us conveys even to a deaf man an interrogation, means nothing to them, nor has the sideways shake of the head a negative meaning to Papuans.

In trying to learn a new language of this kind most people (I imagine) would begin, as we did, with the numerals. But our researches in this direction did not take us very far, for we made the interesting discovery that they have words for one and two only; ínakwa (one), jamaní (two). This is not to say that they cannot reckon beyond two, for they can, by using the fingers and thumbs, and beginning always with the thumb of the right hand, reckon with tolerable accuracy up to ten. For numbers above ten they use the toes, never, so far as we observed, two or three toes, but always all the toes together to indicate a large but uncertain number. Sometimes they opened and closed the fingers of both hands two or three times and uttered the word takirí, which appeared to mean “many.” They did not, as some people do, use the word which means “hand” to indicate five or a quantity of about that number.

With patience we learnt a great number of substantives, the names of animals, the parts of the body, the various possessions of the natives and so forth, and with more difficulty we learnt some of the active verbs. But when we came to abstract ideas, our researches ceased abruptly for lack of the question words, who, how, where, when, etc.; these we were never able to learn, and it is impossible to act them.

Thus we were never able to find out what they thought of various things; we could point to the moon and be told its name, but we were never able to say, “What is the moon?” We learnt the names of lightning and thunder, but we never knew who they thought produced them. We could not find out where their stone axes came from, nor how old they were, nor who made them; and a hundred other questions, which we should have liked to put, remained unanswered.

These limitations of our knowledge of the language were particularly annoying when we tried to find out the simplest ties of relationship. It may be thought very unintelligent of us that we never learnt the word for father, in spite of many attempts to do so. If you pointed to a child and asked a man, knowing him to be the father, what the child was, he would slap himself on the chest and answer, “Dorota kamare” (my penis); then if you pointed to himself he would tell you his own name, but never any word that could possibly be construed as father. If you tried the same thing with the mother she would point to the child and say, “Dorota auwë” (my breast). The child on being questioned pointed to the father and always said his name, the mother it would call Aína (woman), but perhaps this word also means mother.

There were two men at Parimau so much alike as to be unmistakably brothers; we learnt their names and that they were Inakwa kamare (one penis), but we never found out the name of their relationship.

Seeing that some of the people have a very good idea of drawing on the ground a map of the country, I tried one day a graphic method of obtaining the relationships of a man whose name and whose wife’s name and son’s name I knew. I put sticks on the ground to represent him and his wife and son, and then in a tentative sort of way put in a stick to represent his father, whose name he mentioned, but the game did not interest him and my researches came to an end.

Even the apparently simple matter of enquiring the names of places is not so easy as one would think. When the first party went up the Mimika to Parimau they pointed to the huts and asked what the village was called; the answer given was “Tupué,” meaning I believe, the name of the family who lived in the huts pointed at. For several months we called the place Tupué, and the name appeared in various disguises in the English newspapers. When I was at Parimau in July, it occurred to me to doubt the name of Tupué, which we never heard the natives use, so I questioned a man elaborately. Pointing in the direction of Wakatimi, I said in his language: “Many houses, Wakatimi,” and he nodded assent; then pointing in the direction of another village that we had visited I said: “Many houses, Imah,” to which he agreed; then I said. “Many houses,” and pointed towards Parimau. This performance was repeated three times before he understood my intention and supplied the word “Parimau,” and then he shouted the whole story across the river to the people in the village who received it with shouts of laughter, and well they might. It was as if a foreigner, who had been living for six months in a place which he was accustomed to call Smith, enquired again one day what its name was and found that it was London.

The language spoken by the people of Mimika is by no means unpleasant to listen to, and with the customary sing-song intonation it would be almost musical, if it were not for the harsh voices of the natives, both men and women. There are many agreeably soft gutterals, and there is no hissing sound in the language, as they are unable to pronounce the letter “s.” Many of their words are really very pleasing, notably some of their names, such as “Oonabë,” “Inamë,” “Tébo,” “Magena,” “Awariao,” “Idoriaota,” “Poandio,” and “Mareru,” to mention only a few; some of the names were so long that I never succeeded in writing them correctly.

The people who lived near the upper waters of the Mimika appeared to speak the same dialect as those living near the coast, with one noticeable difference. Those words containing a “k” in the language of the people at the coast lose the “k” in the mouths of the up-river natives, thus: Ké (rain) in the Wakatimi language becomes ’é at Parimau; Kie (a leech) becomes ’ie, Pokanë (an axe) becomes Po’anë.

The only rule of grammar that we learnt was the simple method of constructing the possessive case by adding the suffix ta. Thus from doro (I) you have dorota (mine); from oro (you), orota (your), and in the same way Tebota (Tebo’s); Mareruta (Mareru’s), and so on.

They were curious to know our names and liked to address us by them; Goodfellow’s and Rawling’s names baffled them completely; Marshall’s became “Martë”; they made a good attempt at mine in “Wollatona,” and Cramer’s they pronounced perfectly.

So far as I know, they never finish a word with a consonant, and when they adopted a Malay or Dutch word which ended in a consonant, they always added a vowel; for instance, tuana (master), Kapítana (Captain), maíora (Major).

Some of their newly-constructed words will puzzle future philologists who go there; for instance, the Malay word písau (a knife) they called pítau, substituting “t” for the “s” which they cannot pronounce; petau was found easier to say than pítau, and eventually it became changed to pauti, which was the finally accepted version.

Probably the best means of learning the local dialect would be to encourage an intelligent child to visit your camp daily, where it would learn Malay and in course of time might be able to act as interpreter; but the process of education would be a slow one, and it would be constantly interrupted by the wandering habits of the natives. The time that we spent in the country was too short for any such attempt to be made, and indeed it was not until we had been there for several months that the children came fearlessly into our camp. But now that the natives have full confidence in Europeans a patient scholar might make a complete study of a quite unknown language.

CHAPTER IX

The Papuans of Wakatimi—Colour—Hair—Eyes—Nose—Tattooing—Height—Dress—Widows’ Bonnets—Growth of Children—Preponderance of Men—Number of Wives—Childhood—Swimming and other Games—Imitativeness of Children—The Search for Food—Women as Workers—Fishing Nets—Other Methods of Fishing—An Extract from Dampier.

The Papuans of the Mimika district may be divided into two classes or tribes: those who live in the villages on the lower waters of the river and make periodical migrations to the sea; and those who live on the upper waters of the river near the foot of the mountains and who never go down to the coast. There is a wide interval of uninhabitable country between the regions occupied by these two tribes, and communication between them, if it takes place at all, is very rare; but they resemble each other so closely, both in physical characters and in their manners and customs, that a single description will suffice for both.9 The other native race of the district, the pygmy people who live in the mountains, will be described in a later chapter.

The skin of the Mimika native is a very dark brown, almost rusty black, but a dark colour without any of the gloss seen in the skin of the African negro. Not infrequently we saw men of a lighter, nearly yellow, colour, and in the Wakatimi district there were three pure albinos, a man, a woman and a child. The man and woman were covered with blotches of a pinkish pigment and were peculiarly disagreeable to look at, the child, a sucking infant, and the offspring of black parents, was as white as any European baby, and was called, out of compliment to us, “Tuana.”10

The hair is black and thick and frizzly; it never, or seldom grows long, so you do not see the ornamental coiffures characteristic of the natives of some other parts of the island; but they are skilful in plaiting what there is of it and take some pride in the result. Three- or four-pronged combs are worn in the hair more as a means of carrying a useful article than as ornaments. The hair of young children is often quite fair, but it becomes dark as they grow up; some of the adults have the custom, common in other places, of dyeing the hair yellow with lime.

The eye of the Papuan child is the eye of any bright dark-eyed child here or elsewhere; the white of the eye is white and the iris dark and clear. But very soon the white becomes bloodshot and yellow, and the iris blurred. The expression in the eyes is a thing that haunts one by its forlornness and hopelessness; it cannot be described, but you may see it in the eyes of certain animals. They show a strong disinclination to look you straight in the eyes, and when you rarely make them do so you seem to be looking into an unlighted and empty space.

The teeth are strong, but not conspicuously white and perfect like those of some other black races. A good many men file or chip the upper incisors to a point, but this has not, so far as we know, any particular significance.

The nose is almost bridgeless and is of a somewhat hooked and fleshy type with wide nostrils. The septum of the nose is pierced when the boys are young, and the hole is kept open by a rolled-up leaf thrust through it; in this way it is gradually dilated until the man is able to wear a carved ornament of a piece of the bill of a hornbill or a curved boar’s tusk, with which he decorates himself on festal occasions. The nose-piercing is attended with a good deal of ceremony, but we were never fortunate enough to see it; it is done when the child is about five years old, and the operation is made (according to native accounts) with a piece of sharpened bone heated in the fire. Small ornaments are sometimes worn in holes in the alae nasi which are pierced in all the children, both boys and girls, when they are small infants.

Many of the people pierce the lobes of the ear, but the custom is not universal. The ornaments worn in the ear are strings of two or three beads, or small rings of plaited fibres or rattan, or the claw of a cassowary. We took with us a large number of Jew’s harps as trade goods, but the natives did not care for them, and two (the only two, I believe) that we did succeed in making the people accept, were worn by them as ear-rings. Another man, a constant smoker, in default of a better cigar case always carried a cigar in the lobe of his ear.

Tattooing, in the proper sense of the term, is unknown to the Mimika Papuans, but a great number of them practise cicatrisation or scarring. The usual places for these markings are the buttocks and the outer side of the upper (usually the left) arm. On the buttocks the marks are almost always the same, a cross, about two inches square, on the left buttock, and a cross surrounded by a circle on the right. The mark on the arm is about four inches long and sometimes represents a snake and sometimes a scorpion or a crayfish, but the meaning of it, and whether or not it had some totemistic significance we were unable to learn. Some of the women affect a scar between the breasts, which makes a very unsightly contraction, and we occasionally saw people with irregular scars all over the upper part of the breast and back, but it is probable that most of them were the signs rather of former quarrels than due to a spirit of coquetry.

They are fond of painting their faces with a bright red earth, lumps of which they sometimes find and prize very highly, and not infrequently we saw men with their faces smeared black with a mixture of fat and charcoal, or whitened with powdered sago, but the reason, if there were any but vanity, for this adornment we did not discover.

The average height of men measured at Wakatimi and Parimau is 5 feet 6 inches. No women were measured, but it would probably be found that the average height of the women was about two inches less than that of the men. Such a height is small compared with that of many races, but the first impression you get of the Papuans is that they are tall, for they hold themselves well, and all naked people look taller than those who go clothed. Their legs are thin and rather meagre, due in a great measure to the large proportion of their lives that is spent in canoes, but they walk with a good swinging gait and cover the ground easily.

It is a curious thing that a black man never looks naked; a white man undressed looks a naked man, so too does a yellow man, but a Papuan—and nobody could wear much less in the way of clothes than he does—always seems to be sufficiently clad. The dress of the Papuan men, as has been suggested above, is scanty in the extreme. They have, or had before we visited them, no cloth except a very inferior bark cloth made from the bark of a species of fig tree. Some of the men wear a narrow strip of this bark cloth, which hangs down in front from a string round the loins and keeps up an ineffectual pretence of decency.

The more usual covering is the bamboo penis-case, which is kept in position by pulling the preputium through a hole in the lower end of the case. There are three or four different patterns of penis-cases, and they are always ornamented with carved designs. Another equally common fashion of covering is the shell; this is an oval or roughly squared segment of a large white sea shell, sometimes as much as six inches in diameter. It is worn on a string which passes through two holes bored in it, and is tied tightly round the loins. The convex surface of the shell faces forwards, and the preputium is pulled upwards and clipped under the lower margin of the shell. Both the bamboo case and the shell are useful as a protection against the leeches and thorns of the jungle.

Small boys go quite naked until they reach the time of puberty, when for a short period they wear a sort of skirt made from the shredded leaves of the pandanus. Though the men like very much to wear round their heads strips of our coloured cloth, they do not normally use any kind of head-gear except on ceremonial occasions, when the men who beat the drums wear elaborate hats ornamented with the plumes of birds of paradise. Many of the men wear arm-bands above the elbow and leg-bands below the knee, made of tightly woven fibre or of fine strips of rattan.

The women are rather more clothed than the men, but it cannot be said that they are at all overdressed. The usual garment consists of a narrow belt of bark cloth or grass round the waist, from which there hang a narrow strip of bark cloth in front, reaching about half way down the thigh, and a wider strip, somewhat after the fashion of the tail of an Englishman’s evening coat, extending as far as the knee behind. In addition to this, many of the women wear a sort of short waistcoat or sleeveless bodice made of plaited grass or fibre with tags or tassels hanging down in a sort of fringe from its lower edge. Newly-married women wear a sort of apron, or rather a long fringe of shredded leaves, which hangs down from the waist.

The best dressed, or in any case the most dressed, members of the community are the widows, who wear, in addition to the other articles of female attire, what can only be described as a poke bonnet. In some cases the bonnet projects so far in front of the face as to obscure the features, in some it is of a conical design, and in others it resembles in shape nothing so much as the morion of a mediaeval man-at-arms.

Like the waistcoats worn by the women, the bonnets are made of ingeniously plaited fibre, and both of these look well when they are newly made, but they very quickly become hideous with damp and dirt, and the wearer is a person to be shunned. The small girls, unlike the boys, wear a narrow strip of bark cloth tucked between the legs almost as soon as they can walk. It is perhaps worth mentioning that these people have the art of sewing; they make eyed needles out of sharp fish bones, and with strands of fibre they contrive to sew pieces of bark cloth very neatly together.

There are no milk-producing domesticated animals in the country, so the women suckle their infants for a very long time, and you may occasionally see children of (apparently) three or four years old at their mothers’ breasts; but whether young or old, it is very difficult to estimate the age of these people. In the course of a year we saw little children grow into active boys and we saw young men become middle-aged. I should say—but this is pure speculation—that a man is old at forty years and a woman at an even earlier age; it seems probable, too, that the life of a woman is shorter than that of a man.

Partly on account of the migratory habits of the natives, and partly owing to the fact that at no hour of the day until nightfall are all the people in or about the houses, it was never found possible to take a census of a village, but from our observations we arrived at the conclusion that the number of men was decidedly greater than that of women.

The number of a man’s wives was a favourite subject for boasting and they often assured us that they had two or even three wives, but we only knew two men who certainly had two wives; on the other hand we knew a considerable number of men who had no wives at all. It appears that a man may take a wife from his own village or from a village in the same district; thus a Wakatimi man may take a wife from Obota or Periepia, and a Parimau man from Kamura. There were two women at Parimau who were said to come from Wakatimi, but whether they had been voluntarily exchanged or were the spoils of war we were not told.

It was unfortunate that we learnt nothing about the customs and ceremonies connected with marriage. A wedding took place at Wakatimi when we all happened to be absent, and the only definite description that we were able to get of it was that the bride, who arrived from another village by canoe, crawled on her hands and knees from the water’s edge to the village, a distance of about a hundred yards, and most of it through mud.

Beyond question, the happiest time in the lives of the Papuans is their childhood, when they are free to play from morning to night and need not take part in the ceaseless search for food, which occupies so much of the time of their elders. As infants they are carried on the backs of their mothers and very often of their fathers, secured by a wide strap of bark cloth, the ends of which are tied across the carrier’s chest. It is very seldom that you hear them cry and they appear to give very little trouble; their mothers are very careful of the cleanliness of the infants. Very early in life they begin to walk and almost as soon they learn to swim. In fine weather they often spend the greater part of the day in the river and it is a very pretty sight to see a crowd of little Papuans playing together in the water. Sometimes they are joined by the women, who seem to enjoy the fun quite as much as the children. One of their favourite games is to pretend to be a school of porpoises, whose rolling headers they imitate admirably. They very soon become powerful swimmers, and I remember one day seeing a small boy, who cannot have been more than eight years old, swim across a river in tremendous flood, while the party of men who were with him had to seek a place where they could safely swim across half a mile lower down.

There are a number of games too that they play on dry land: they play the universal game of lying in wait for your enemy and suddenly pouncing out on him; they have great battles in which they are armed with miniature bows and arrows, and reed stems take the place of spears, and shrill yells make up for the lack of bloodshed. There is another game which I saw played three or four times in exactly the same manner, and which, by reason of it somewhat resembling a children’s game called “Nuts in May,” is perhaps worth describing. Eight little boys, each one carrying a long flowering grass, stood in two parties of four facing each other a few yards apart. At first they waved their grasses and then danced towards each other, crossed and took the places that had been opposite to them; this they repeated twice. Then they ran round and round in a circle about five yards wide waving their grasses and shouting until they stopped suddenly and sat down in a bunch together. After a rest of about half a minute, they jumped up and ran round again in the same circle, now shouting and grabbing as they ran handsful of sand, which they threw over their heads into the air or between their legs into the face of the one behind; then a sudden stop and again they all sat down in a bunch. After this they jumped up, ran all together for a few yards shouting loudly, hurled all their grasses as high into the air as they could, and the game was ended.

Like the children of more civilised races, the young Papuans are fond of imitating their elders. The boys like to be seen walking about with men, to copy their swaggering walk, and to sit about smoking idly and watch the women at work. The little girls sometimes contrive to make grass garments like those worn by the women; they make small dolls’ houses in which they themselves, or infants still smaller than they, are the dolls, and they like to be seen baling out the canoes or carrying sand for the houses. But in their case pretence is soon changed to reality, and when they are quite young they are made to accompany their mothers in the serious business of life, while the boys are still leading a gay life with no responsibilities. Both boys and girls very early become proficient in the management of canoes, and a child of tender years will confidently steer a canoe through rough water which would end in certain shipwreck for one of us.

The chief business in the lives of the Papuans is that of all animals, human and others, namely, the search for food. But while the civilised races have learnt to foresee wants of the future, and have established a system of agriculture which provides food for everybody and leaves a part of the population free to pursue other occupations, the Papuans take no thought for the morrow, and the search for food becomes literally a hand to mouth business, which occupies the attentions of every member of the community.

They have no cultivation in the Mimika villages, and even at those places such as Obota (see p. 88) where there is some cultivation, the crops that they raise are not nearly sufficient for the whole population, so it can easily be imagined that an improvident people living in a country constantly liable to sudden floods, which swamp the land for weeks at a time, is frequently faced with a prospect of complete starvation. At first you are inclined to think that the whole of the business of collecting food falls on the shoulders of the women, while the men sit at home and do nothing. This is certainly true of a great many days in the year, but certain tasks can only be performed by the men, such as hunting for game in the jungle, and felling trees to make the canoes, without which the people must inevitably starve.

Their working day begins fairly early, and by about eight o’clock the village is almost deserted by the women, who have all gone off in canoes to fish or collect sago. As a rule, two or three women go in each canoe, taking with them a few children, a dog or two, several fishing nets, rolls of matting, some spears and arrows, a little food, a bamboo filled with fresh water, if they are going down to the river mouth, and always a fire burning in the stern of the boat. The usual destination of the women is the muddy creeks among the mangrove swamps not far from the sea; there where the water is brackish and the tide rises and falls several feet they find in the mud banks large mussels (Cyrena sp.), which contain a good deal of food, and the shells of which are useful as knives and scrapers. Hopping all over the mud are seen hundreds of curious little fish (Periophthalmus sp.), whose eyes seem to be starting out of their heads; these little creatures climb up the steepest mud banks, and even up the stumps of trees.