The commonest type of fishing net is made in an oval framework of wood, or strips of rattan, about 5 feet long by 2 feet wide; the net is a close mesh of native string stretched tightly across the frame, except at the middle, where it sags a little. The usual method of using this kind of net is to grasp it at both ends and by wading through the shallow water to scoop up small fish much in the same way as shrimps are caught. There is another more ingenious method of using it, which sometimes results in large capture of little fish. When the tide is high the bushes along the river bank and many of the drooping branches of the trees are submerged; the natives approach quietly in their canoes, cautiously push the net under the submerged vegetation, and then with a sudden jerk lift it up out of the water, in this way capturing numbers of small fish which had been sheltering or looking for food among the leaves.

Another form of fishing net—though there is no netting in its construction—is made of long, thin strips of bamboo tied parallel to each other at intervals of about half an inch, forming a sort of screen or trellis-work, which can be rolled up if necessary. Strong wooden stakes are driven into the mud at the mouth of the creeks which join the river in many places, and at high water the screens are fastened to the stakes in such a way as to touch the bottom and close the entrance of the creek; the water can run back when the tide falls, but not the fish which are sometimes caught in considerable numbers.

The larger fish are all obtained by the men, who either catch them with a hook and line, or spear them in the shallow water near the river mouth, or along the sea shore. We saw very few hooks; one or two were made of rough metal, the others were neatly fashioned from fish bones, and all of them were plain without barbs. Now they have a large number of steel fishhooks, which they greatly value.

The commonest types of fish-spear are made of thin bamboo or a light wood about ten feet long, and they end in three or four sharp prongs of bamboo or hardened wood. They also use a barbed spear of which the head becomes detached from the shaft, when it becomes fixed in a fish; a light line connecting the shaft with the head causes the shaft to act as a drag on the movements of the fish, which can easily be followed up and killed; this kind of spear is only used for the larger fish, saw-fish and the like, but I never saw it in use. Considering the enormous number of fish that there are—at the mouth of the river the water is sometimes seen to be seething with large fish—it cannot be said that the men are very clever with their spears.

They also shoot fish, using single- or three-pointed arrows; you may see a man standing quietly in a pool of water like a heron waiting for the fish to come up to him, or stalking a shoal of fish stealthily from the bank; in either case he will probably shoot arrow after arrow without effect, for they are absurdly indifferent marksmen with the bow.

The most primitive methods of all of catching fish I saw practised one day coming down from Obota. A native paddling in the bow of my canoe saw a large fish near the bank, towards which he steered the canoe. When he judged that he was near enough to it, he hurled himself flat on to the water with a resounding splash that drenched everything in the boat, and a thud that would have stunned the fish at once had it not darted off an instant earlier.

The sight of a fish, however small it is, always rouses a Papuan to action. When we were travelling with natives, we sometimes came to pools where small fish had been left by some receding flood. Instantly their loads were thrown down and everyone darted into the water with sticks and stones and shouts and as much enthusiasm as if the fish had been salmon and a full meal for everyone.

There is another method of fishing which was observed by the navigator, Captain Dampier, in use by the natives of this region. It is so remarkable that, although we did not see it employed by the people of the Mimika district, I shall make no excuse for repeating it here:—

“They strike Fish very ingeniously with Wooden Fiss-gigs and have a very ingenious way of making the Fish rise: For they have a piece of Wood curiously carv’d and painted much like a Dolphin (and perhaps other Figures;) these they let down into the Water by a Line with a small weight to sink it; when they think it low enough, they haul the Line into their Boats very fast, and the Fish rise up after this Figure; and they stand ready to strike them when they are near the Surface of the Water.”11

There are times when the natives get more fish than they know what to do with, and other times when no fish can be caught; but they have no idea of laying up a store for the lean times. It is true that they char some in the fire and keep them for a few days before the fish putrify, but if they learnt to smoke some of their surplus supply, they need never go hungry.

CHAPTER X

Food of the Papuans—Cassowaries—The Native Dog—Question of Cannibalism—Village Headman—The Social System of the Papuans—The Family—Treatment of Women—Religion—Weather Superstitions—Ceremony to avert a Flood—The Pig—A Village Festival—Wailing at Deaths—Methods of Disposal of the Dead—No Reverence for the Remains—Purchasing Skulls.

The search for food furnishes occasionally some very curious scenes. One of the most remarkable occurs when the river in flood brings down a tree-trunk in a suitable stage of decay. A canoe is sent out with men to secure it and tow it to the bank. When it has been left stranded by the falling water, the people, men, women and children come out and swarm around it like bees about a honey-pot, and you wonder what they can be doing. When you go close you find that some are splitting up the log with their stone axes and others are cutting up the fragments with sharpened shells in the same way that their ancestors—and perhaps ours too—did centuries ago. The objects of their search are the large white larvæ of a beetle, about the size of a man’s thumb; I have seen natives eat them just as they cut them out of the wood, but usually they roast them in the fire and consider them a great delicacy.

Nothing that can by any means be considered eatable comes amiss to the Papuans; there are two kinds of water tortoises which they like to eat, and rats, lizards, frogs and snakes, and the eggs of crocodiles they devour greedily. A number of different kinds of fruits, most of them disagreeable to European tastes, are found growing in the jungle and form a welcome addition to their fare. Birds they get occasionally, but their skill with the bow and arrow is not remarkable.

Most of their meat is obtained by hunting with dogs the wild pig, the wallaby and the cassowary. The pig (Sus papuensis), though it is not really a native of New Guinea, was introduced into the island so long ago that it has become as well established as the rabbit has become in this country. In some places, particularly near the foot of the mountains, pigs are fairly numerous, and the natives kill a good many; they are very savage beasts, and I saw a native terribly gashed by a large boar, which was shortly afterwards shot by one of our Gurkhas.

The Wallaby (Dorcopsis lorentzii) is a small kangaroo, about two feet in height when it stands upright; it seems to be fairly evenly distributed all over the district. When the natives bestir themselves they seem to be able to catch the wallaby fairly easily; in four consecutive days we saw the remains of thirteen brought into the village of Parimau. The flesh is coarse and has a very strong musky flavour.

There are two kinds of Cassowary in the Mimika district, a small species new to science (Casuarius claudi), which was discovered in the mountains at an altitude of about 1500 feet, and a large species (Casuarius sclateri), which was fairly abundant everywhere. We frequently heard their curious booming cry at night and we often saw their tracks in the mud of the jungle or on the river bank, but they are very shy birds and are seldom seen.

Once I had the luck to see an old cassowary with two young birds walking about in a stony river bed, a place which they particularly affect, and it was a very pretty sight to see how the mother bird, after she had caught sight of me, drove away the chicks to a place of safety and all the time kept herself between them and me. The natives hunt and kill and eat a good many cassowaries; the feathers are used for ornamental head-dresses and belts and for decorating spears and clubs, and the claws are often used as the points of arrows.

The Papuan Dog, without whose help the native would seldom, if ever, be able to get any meat, is a sharp-nosed prick-eared creature about the size of a Welsh terrier. The colour is yellow, brown or black, and the tail, which is upstanding, is tipped with white. Usually the hair is short and smooth, but we saw one dog, brought down to Parimau by a party of pygmies, which had a thick furry coat like a chow dog, which it also resembled in the carriage of its tail. The dogs in the village of the pygmies which we visited, were smooth-coated like those of the Papuans, so it is possible that that thick-coated animal came from some remote district where the natives live at a higher altitude.

The Papuan dogs are very sociable creatures, and they like to accompany the natives on their journeys. They are particularly fond of going in canoes on the river, and two or three are seen in nearly every canoe even when the people are only out fishing. Their food is generally given to them by the women and it consists of raw meat, when there is any, and lumps of sago. A remarkable peculiarity about them is that they never bark, but they make up for this defect by their extraordinary power of howling. Sometimes in broad daylight, if there was no wind, but more often on still fine nights, a party of dogs would sit together, usually on the river bank, and utter a chorus of the most piteous and blood-curdling howls. No amount of stone-throwing or beating with sticks, freely administered by their masters, had the smallest effect on them; they would only move away a few yards and begin again, apparently carried away by an ecstasy of sorrow.

The natives value their dogs highly, as they well may do, for they provide the whole of their meat supply, and they use them to exchange for articles of which they have great need. The people at Parimau have a small piece of iron about the size of a chisel, used for carving their canoes and paddles, for which the enormous price of three dogs had been paid, so they informed us, to the people of the Wakatimi. One day one of our “boys” shot a dog, which had been in the habit of stealing food from our camp. When the natives knew that it was dead, all the people of the village began to wail in the same manner as they do when a person dies, and the owner of the dog smeared himself with mud and mourned bitterly. No doubt the display was somewhat exaggerated in the hope of getting a compensation from us, but at the back of it there was genuine emotion.

Before leaving the subject of the food of the Papuans and their means of obtaining it, a word must be said on the question of cannibalism. It is popularly supposed that all the natives of New Guinea are cannibals, and fears were expressed by many of our friends that some, if not all, of us would end in a Papuan feast. But we saw no signs of cannibalism, and we have no reason to suppose that it is practised by the people of the Mimika district. Men whom we questioned about it denied it and showed expressions of disgust at the suggestion; but that is not a complete proof of their innocence, for I have known people elsewhere, who were undoubtedly cannibals, deny it in the same manner. The question of cannibalism is always difficult to decide without direct evidence, and in the case of these Papuans the verdict must be one of “Not proven.”

The account given in a preceding chapter of the difficulties we experienced in learning the language of the Papuans will serve to explain how it was that we learnt so little about the nature of their social system. The people of Wakatimi were called Wakatimi-wé (people of Wakatimi), the people of Obota were Obota-wé, and the people of other villages in like manner, but we never heard one word that included them all, nor indeed do we know whether or not they consider themselves all to belong to the same tribe.

In every village that we visited there were one or two or even more men who called themselves natoo, a word signifying “chief.” But in no case did the natoo appear to have any authority over the other people; their houses were no bigger than the rest, and (except in one instance) they had no more personal property than the other members of the community.

The exceptional case was a man of unusual intelligence who became our intimate friend and gave us much information for which he was always well rewarded, so that before we left the country his house was filled with tins and bottles, and he was the possessor of axes and knives, yards of cloth and countless beads. In all the ordinary affairs of life the “chiefs” and their families have to work like everybody else, but it is possible that in their wars, of which we saw nothing at all, they may be persons of more consequence.

Generally speaking, one would say that the society of the Mimika Papuans is a group of small families. It cannot by any means be described as a socialistic community; with one exception there is no sign of community of property, but it is rather a case of every man for himself, or (more accurately) of every family for itself. A canoe belongs to the family of the man who made it; the coconut trees, which grow here and there along the lower Mimika, do not belong to the community but to individuals, presumably the men or some of the men who planted them. Sometimes the trees are protected by a fence, a very flimsy structure of three or four sticks, placed across the track which leads to the trees; in other cases a few palm leaves or some pierced shells threaded on a string are tied round the tree itself; both of these devices appear to be enough to ensure the security of the trees. The exception mentioned is seen when game is brought in by the hunters; the meat, as I observed on several occasions, is distributed to every house in the village.

As I have described above (p. 97) the houses in a village are joined together under a common roof, but each family enters by its own doorway, and, except for the publicity resulting from the lack of dividing walls or partitions, it finds itself in its own private house. It is difficult to say exactly of what the “family-group” consists. There are the man and his wife and the children, and sometimes an extra man or two, and, rarely, an extra woman, who is, I believe, always a second wife of the man of the house; but the position of the extra men and their relationship to the rest of the family I cannot define. At the village of Obota a detached house, rather larger than the rest, was said to be occupied by young men only; we did not see any other instance of this elsewhere.

Families are small, as might be expected from the severity of their conditions of life and the long period of suckling by the mothers, and we did not know definitely of any couple who had more than three living children. Though the women do a large amount of the work of the community they are not mere drudges; they do a great deal of talking, and the men appear to pay considerable respect to their opinion. This was frequently noticeable when we wanted to buy something, such as canoes, from a native; he would say that he must first of all go and consult his wife, and when he returned it often happened that, prompted by his wife, he insisted on a higher payment than he had asked before.

On one occasion only did we see a woman ill-treated, and the performance was a particularly brutal one. Two men and a woman walked down from the village of Wakatimi to the river bank, dragging another woman, who shrieked and struggled violently. After throwing her into the mud they dragged her into the shallow water and tried to drown her by holding her down under a fishing-net. We shouted at them, and were just going with some soldiers in a canoe across the river to rescue the woman, when they desisted and allowed the poor creature to crawl out on to the bank, where she lay for some time exhausted. Some natives who came over to us shortly afterwards laughed about it and treated the whole affair as a joke.

With regard to the superstitions and beliefs of the Papuans, owing to our unfortunate difficulties with the language we learnt nothing whatever. Religion, in the accepted sense of that term, I am sure they have not. It is true that they make curious carved effigies, but these are not idols, and there is no evidence to show that they ever consult or worship them; on the contrary, they treat them with contempt and often point to them with laughter. These images are ingeniously and skilfully carved out of wood, and they represent a human figure always grotesque and sometimes grossly indecent. They vary in size from a few inches to twelve or fourteen feet, and when they are not neglected they are ornamented with red and white paint.

We had opportunities of observing the outward signs of what were probably superstitions in connection with certain phenomena of the weather. For instance, the first peal of thunder that was heard in the day—it occurred almost every day—was greeted by the men with a long-drawn tremulous shout. On the occasion of a particularly alarming thunderstorm, when the lightning flashes were almost unceasing, the men came out of doors and with long sticks beat the ground in front of their huts; then they waved the sticks in the air, shouting loudly meanwhile. Curiously enough the rare whistle of a certain bird, which we never identified, was always greeted by the men of Parimau with a shout precisely similar to that with which they greet the thunder.

The first sight of the new moon was signalised by a short sharp bark rather than a shout. Several times on the day following the first sight of the new moon I noticed a spear decorated with white feathers exposed conspicuously in the village, but whether it had any connection with the kalendar I cannot say.

When the first drops of rain of the day began to fall, the men were sometimes seen to snap their fingers four times towards the four quarters of the compass.

A curious ceremony was twice observed at a time of heavy rain, when the Mimika was rising rapidly and threatening to sweep away the village of Parimau. A party of men walked down to the edge of the river, and one of them with a long spear threshed the water, while the others at each stroke shouted, “Mbu” (water, flood). Then they went up to the village, and in front of each door they dug a hole, into which they poured a coconut-full of water; again they shouted “Mbu,” and then filled up the hole with sand.

That they have some belief in the supernatural is certain. We learnt a word niniki, which undoubtedly means ghosts; they described niniki as things which you could not see but were here and there in the air about you. When they were asked where a dead man had gone to, they talked of niniki, and pointed vaguely to the horizon, saying the word which means “far.”

If there is one thing in heaven or earth to which it may be said that the Papuans pay some sort of respect it is the pig. They hunt and kill a good many wild pigs in the jungle and eat their flesh, but the lower jaw of each animal is carefully cleaned and hung up on a sort of rack in front of the houses; on one of these racks I counted no fewer than thirty-two pigs’ jaws. The grass and leaves in which the animal is wrapped and the ropes used for tying it up when it is carried home from the jungle, are not thrown away but are hung up on a similar sort of rack in a conspicuous place in the village.

In every village there may generally be seen two or three pigs running about freely; they are probably not bred in the village, but are caught in the jungle, when they are young. They very soon become quite tame and accompany the people on their migrations from one place to another until they are full grown, when they provide food for a festival. The only elaborate popular ceremony that took place while we were in the country happened early in May at Parimau, and the principal feature of it was the slaughter of pigs. Unfortunately for me I was at the base-camp at the time and did not see the festival, so I will make extracts from Marshall’s graphic account.12

“Yesterday the natives gave us an excellent show. For some days previously natives had been arriving from distant parts until the small village of 40 huts contained 400 people, and it was evident from the tomtomming and other signs that something of importance was about to take place. On the night of the 3rd inst. they lit a big bonfire, and all night long they were howling and yelling as if to drive away evil spirits. Soon after daybreak they came over to fetch us, and, expecting something unusual, I slipped a film into my cinematograph camera and went over. They gave me every opportunity of obtaining a good picture, keeping an open space for me in the best positions. First of all the women, draped in leaves, slowly walked down the beach, driving two full-grown boars in front of them, and then disappeared in the jungle. About 150 men with faces painted and heads and spears decorated with feathers, formed up in three sides of a square, one end of which was occupied by a band of tomtoms. A slow advance on the village then commenced, the men shouting in chorus and the women dancing on the outskirts. The centre of the square was occupied by single individuals, who, following each other in quick succession, gave a warlike display, finally shooting arrows far over the trees.

“The next scene took place around a large sloping erection which we soon found was an altar, on which the two boars were about to be sacrificed. The women and boars who had disappeared into the forest now marched from the jungle at the far end of the village. The boars were seized, and a struggle with the animals ensued, but the two huge brutes were bound up with rattan, chalk meanwhile being rubbed into their eyes, apparently in order to blind them. The women set up a tremendous wailing, and appeared on the scene plastered in wet mud from head to foot. The two boars, on each of which a man sat astride, were now hoisted up and carried to the altar, on which the animals were tightly lashed. Then amid much shouting, tomtomming, and fanatical displays, the boars were clubbed to death. As soon as life was extinct, the women cut the carcases free, and, pulling them to the ground, threw themselves on the dead bodies, wailing loudly, and plastering themselves with wet mud in ecstasies of grief. This continued for some ten minutes, when the men, many of whom were covered with mud and uttered strange dirges, picked up the bodies, and the whole assembly following suit marched into the river, where a much-needed washing took place. Just previous to this a three-year-old child, painted red and crying loudly, had been roughly seized and dragged towards the dais, and for a moment we thought something more serious than a boar sacrifice was about to take place. But we were much relieved to see that it was only having its ears pierced. The whole performance lasted about an hour and a half.

“The afternoon was given over to innocent play, the women and girls—many of them quite pretty—chasing the men up to the river side and into the water. This is one of the few ceremonies when the women are allowed to beat the men, the latter not being permitted to retaliate. The damsels finally became so bold that they stormed the camp.”

Of ceremonies connected with birth, if any take place, we saw nothing at all. The only marriage ceremony that took place during our stay in the country has been referred to on a preceding page.

Deaths were unfortunately more frequent, and if they were not accompanied by any elaborate ceremonial they were, at all events, widely advertised, sometimes indeed even before the event itself. A wretched man became very ill at Parimau in August, and it was soon evident that his days were numbered. Members of his family carried him out of the house and laid him in the sunlight for a time, and then took him back into the house again at least half a dozen times a day. Now and again, when he dozed, they set up the dreadful wail that is customary when a person dies, and he had to wake up and assure them of his continued life. At night his hut was crowded with sympathetic watchers, and with the smoke of the fire and much tobacco the atmosphere must have been nearly insupportable. As our own house was distant only about forty yards across the river we could plainly hear his laboured breathing, and when it grew softer they wailed again until the wonder was that he did not die. On the third day they dug a grave for him, but still he lingered on, and it was not until the fifth night, when a tremendous flood came down and swept away the village so that all the people had to take refuge in their canoes, that he died.

When a death occurs the people in the hut at once begin to wail, then the people in the neighbouring huts join in and soon the whole village is wailing. It is a very peculiar and very striking chorus. Each individual wails on one note, and as there are perhaps five notes ranging from a very high pitch to a deep murmured bass being sung at once, the effect is most mournful. The occasional beat of a drum adds not a little to the general effect of lamentation. It must be admitted, however, that the wailing is not always a musical performance. Sometimes the mourning man behaves in the way that a child does when it is described as “roaring”; he puckers up his face in the most extraordinary contortions, “roars” at the top of his voice with occasional heart-breaking sobs, while the tears course down his face, and the complete picture is ludicrous in the extreme.

The disposal of the dead nearly always takes place just before dawn, but the method of it is not always the same. The most common practice is to bury the body in a shallow grave dug in the nearest convenient spot, sometimes within a few yards of the huts. The body is wrapped in mats and laid flat in the grave, which is then filled up, and its place is perhaps marked by a stick, but in a day or two it is forgotten and people trample on it without heed.

We observed one instance of a more elaborate kind of burial. The corpse, wrapped in leaves and mats, was taken out into the jungle and placed on a platform about four feet high, which had been put up for the purpose. After placing the body on the platform the men who had carried it walked down to the river, shouted once in unison, and then, having received an answering shout from the men in the village, one of them threw a small triangular piece of wood out into the stream. In the meantime the family of the dead man disappeared into the jungle, from which they soon emerged quite naked, plastered all over with mud and decorated with wisps of climbing plants. The next two days were spent in digging a grave and making a coffin shaped like a small canoe; this however was found to be too small and was not used. On the third day the body was placed in the grave, and an ornamental post placed in the ground at each end, but contrary to our hopes (for the state of that man was becoming very offensive) they did not fill in the grave. They merely covered the body with leaves and turned it over every day. At intervals the widow, quite naked, save for a plastering of mud, crawled on hands and knees from her hut, which was less than five yards distant, and visited the grave. In a few days a providential flood came and filled up the grave and put an end to what had become for us an almost intolerable nuisance.

Both at Wakatimi and at Parimau our camp commanded a good view of the native village, and a death always provided us with the mild excitement of wondering in what new way they would celebrate the event. On one occasion when a woman died, the bereaved husband and another man walked slowly down to the river and waded out into about three feet of water. There the widower submitted to being washed all over by the other man and finally to being held under water by him for half a minute or more, after which they walked solemnly back to the village.

Early in the morning of the day after the death of the natoo of Wakatimi all the women and girls of the village, to the number of sixty or seventy, came down to the river, all of them without a vestige of clothing, and in the shallow water a foot or two deep they swam and crawled and wriggled up the river for a hundred yards or more, wailing loudly all the time. Sometimes they came out on to the bank and rolled in the mud, and finally they all went out of the water and stood wailing in front of the dead man’s house.

Another method of disposing of the dead, which is very frequently adopted, is to place the body wrapped in mats in a rude coffin, which is usually constructed from pieces of broken canoes. The coffin containing the body is supported on a trestle of crossed sticks about four feet from the ground (see illustration opposite), and there it remains until decomposition is complete. As these coffins are often placed within a yard or two of the houses, it can be imagined that a Papuan village is not always a pleasant place to visit.

At the village of Nimé we saw two or three pathetic little bundles containing the remains of infants exposed on racks within a few feet of the houses, from which they doubtless came.

When decomposition is complete no account is taken of the bones, excepting the skull, which is taken and preserved in the house. Sometimes it is buried in the sand of the floor of the house, and sometimes it is tied up in a sort of open basket-work of rattan and hung up in the roof, where it becomes brown with smoke and polished by frequent handling.

Though the people take the trouble to bring the skulls into their houses, they show no real respect for them, and they are eager enough to part with them if a chance occurs. Two of us went one day to Obota, a village a few miles from Wakatimi, in the hopes of buying some bananas. In one of the huts we saw a skull and offered to buy it, not at all expecting that the owner would be willing to sell, but the offer of (I think) a piece of cloth was gladly accepted and the skull was ours. In a few minutes, when it became known that we had given good cloth for a common skull, everybody was anxious to sell his family remains, and outside every doorway were placed one or two or even three grinning skulls. They do not treat the skulls very carefully, and a good many were damaged, so we only bought about half a dozen that were perfect.

One day a man walked into our camp at Wakatimi carrying a skull under his arm. He stood outside our house for some time, grinning and saying nothing, then he gave us unmistakably to understand that it was the skull of his wife, who, as we knew for a fact, had only died a short time previously. The skull was indeed so fresh that we declined the offer.

CHAPTER XI

Papuans’ Love of Music—Their Concerts—A Dancing House—Carving—Papuans as Artists—Cat’s Cradle—Village Squabbles—The Part of the Women—Wooden and Stone Clubs—Shell Knives and Stone Axes—Bows and Arrows—Papuan Marksmen—Spears—A most Primitive People—Disease—Prospects of their Civilisation.

The most pleasing characteristic of the Papuans is their love of music. When a number of them are gathered together and when they have eaten well, or are for any other reason happy, they have a concert. Sometimes the concerts take place in the afternoon and continue till nightfall, but more often they begin after dark and go on almost through the night. The orchestra is simple and consists of two or three men who beat drums and sit before a small fire in the middle. Round them are grouped the chorus all sitting on the ground. The drums are hollowed cylinders of wood, which are often elaborately carved; one end is open, the other is closed by a piece of lizard’s or snake’s skin (see illustration p. 142). When this skin becomes slack, as it very quickly does, the drummer holds it towards the fire until it regains its pitch. It is not the custom to tune up both drums, when there are more than one, to the same pitch, usually an interval of about half a tone is left between them. The leader of the orchestra sometimes wears a remarkable head-dress made of plaited fibre and ornamented with bunches of plumes of the Bird of Paradise (see illustration p. 78). The effect of these plumes waving backwards and forwards as the man moves his head to mark the phrases of the song is exceedingly striking, and it must be admitted that if there is anybody, who can becomingly wear those gorgeous plumes, it is the naked black man.

The most usual kind of song begins with a slow tapping of the drums, then these are beaten quicker and the singer (one of the drummers) begins a sort of recitative song, to which the chorus contributes a low humming accompaniment. Then the drums are beaten very loudly and rapidly, all the men in chorus sing, or rather growl, a deep guttural note, followed by a prolonged musical note at about the middle of the register of a normal man’s voice, and the song ends with one or more short sharp barks, “Wah! wah! wah!” with a loud drum accompaniment. The song, or probably different verses of it, is repeated very many times. The final shouts of the song, which for want of a better word I have called “barks,” are uttered by all the men in unison and recall, as was pointed out by Mr. Goodfellow, the harsh croaking call of the Greater Bird of Paradise, which is heard almost daily in the jungle. It is possible that the song is in some way connected with the bird and that there is an intentional imitation of its note.

The scheme of all these songs is the same, viz., a recitative with drums and a humming accompaniment, but some of them have really rollicking choruses, and we used to listen to them at night with extreme pleasure as they came, somewhat softened by distance, over the water to our camp at Wakatimi. The voices of the men are often rich, and they have a true musical ear. Their intervals are very similar to ours and not at all like those of the Malays and many other Eastern singers, who recognize perhaps five notes where we have only two. Beside the drum the only instrument of music they have is a straight trumpet made from a short piece of bamboo. This produces only a single booming note and is not used at the concerts.

As an amusement of the Papuans even more important than singing is dancing, of which they often talked, but though we saw some of their dancing halls (see illustration p. 48), we never had the good fortune to witness a performance. At the coast village of Nimé, a few miles to the East of the Mimika River, there was a very elaborate dancing house, which must have cost an immense amount of labour to build. The length of the house from front to back was about 100 feet, the width about 25 feet, and it rested on poles which were about 8 feet high in front, rising up to about 14 feet high at the back. The side walls and the back were of “atap” as was also the roof, which sloped from a long ridgepole running the whole length of the house. The ridgepole was remarkable as being made from a single tree trunk (Casuarina) shaved down very smoothly to a uniform thickness of about 10 inches; the ends of it, which projected about 8 feet both at the front and back of the house, were carved in very lifelike representations of the head of a crocodile and were painted red. The weight of the beam must have been immense and one wondered how it had been hoisted into position. Between the ridge of the roof and the eaves there projected both in front and at the back six other smaller poles grotesquely carved to represent fish and reptiles and hideous human heads. The front of the house was open, and when you had climbed up the supporting poles and had stepped over a low fence you found yourself in a spacious hall with a floor well made of sheets of bark, which sloped up gradually from front to back. Along either side at regular intervals on the floor were sand fireplaces and above these were wooden racks, from which it was evident that something was hung to be cooked. Round the walls on all sides was a strip of carved and painted wood, and exactly in the middle of the hall, fixed to the floor and the roof were two posts about 3 feet apart and tied between them, at about half the height of a man, was an elaborately carved and painted board about twelve inches wide. In the middle of this board was carved the eye, which is a familiar feature of the ornamental carving on the canoes and drums, and it appeared that this eye is the centre of the ceremonies which take place in the house.

So far as I could understand from the description of the natives who accompanied me in my visit to the house, the people, both men and women, who take part in the ceremony, dance slowly upwards from the front of the house singing as they go, and when they reach the carved board each one in turn touches the eye, while all the people shout together. But what the object of the whole performance is and what the people cook and eat, are questions to which I was unable to find an answer.

I have had occasion above to mention the artistic carvings on the canoes and drums. Their paddles too show a very good idea of design, as will be seen from the illustration p. 144. Nothing amused them more than to be provided with a pencil and pieces of paper and to attempt to draw figures. Their efforts were not always very successful, and some of the drawings which I have kept would be quite unrecognisable for what they are, if I had not labelled them at the time. Like the young of civilised races they always preferred to draw the figures of men and women, and some of these are remarkable for having the mouth near the top of the head above the level of the eyes. The method of drawing is very simple; the pencil is held almost upright on the paper and the outline of the figure, begun at an arm or leg or anywhere indifferently, is drawn in one continuous stroke without removing the pencil from the paper. The end is always rather exciting, like the feat of drawing a pig when you are blindfolded, for the artist is never quite certain of finishing at the point whence he started. Besides human figures they liked drawing dogs, pigs, birds and fishes. Two pictures of a dog and a bird both done by the same man are peculiarly interesting, because they were both drawn upside down. I watched the man making the drawings, and when they were finished I saw that the legs of the creatures were uppermost; so I turned the papers the right way round and handed them back to him, but he inverted them again and admired them in that position. Curiously enough the same man drew human figures in the correct attitude, head uppermost, so that the state of his mental vision offers rather a puzzling problem.

Most of them had a keen appreciation of pictures and they were surprisingly quick in identifying photographs of themselves; in this respect they showed a good deal more intelligence than some of our Gurkhas, who held a photograph sideways or upside down and gazed at it blankly, as if they had not the faintest idea of what it portrayed. The illustrated papers were a source of endless delight to them, and the portraits of beautiful ladies, who they felt sure were our wives, were greatly admired. Horses, sheep, cattle and all other animals were declared to be dogs.

Another amusement—it can hardly be called an art—of the Papuans is the game of cat’s cradle, at which many of them are extraordinarily proficient. It is not, as with us, a game played by two persons; with them the part of the second person is performed by the player’s teeth, and he contrives to produce some wonderfully intricate figures, none of which, I regret to say, we had patience or skill enough to learn. The most elaborate figure I saw was supposed to represent a bird, and when the features of it had been pointed out some resemblance was certainly apparent.

But it must be admitted that their amusements are not always so innocent as drawing pictures and playing cat’s cradle. I have referred above to the gang of drunkards, who used to create such turmoil at Wakatimi. The people of Parimau, who had no means of getting intoxicated, were just as quarrelsome as the Wakatimi people, and fights were of frequent, almost daily occurrence. Some one does something, it matters not what, to offend some other person, and in an instant the village is in an uproar. Spears fly through the air—we never saw anybody touched by one—and stone clubs are brandished furiously, the combatants all shout horrible threats at the tops of their voices, while a few people look on stolidly or hardly take any notice at all. There seems to be a certain etiquette about the use of clubs, for the person about to be hit generally presents a soft part of his person, the back or shoulders, to the clubber, and we never saw a man intentionally hit another on the head, a blow which might easily be fatal; but blood flowed in plenty from the flesh wounds.

The part of the women in these village squabbles is always to scream loudly and generally to begin by banging the houses with sticks or spears and to end with pulling them to pieces. In a fight at Wakatimi we saw a party of infuriated women absolutely demolish three or four houses. The fights end almost as suddenly as they begin and in a short time the village settles down to its usual tranquillity. Neither the sight nor the sound of these village quarrels is very agreeable, but they have no regularly organised games and, at the worst, not a very great amount of damage is done.

The clubs used in these village fights and doubtless also in their tribal wars—but of those we know nothing—are of two kinds, wooden and stone-headed. The wooden clubs are about four feet long and consist of a plain shaft, of which the last foot or rather more is carved into a saw-like cutting edge; some of these are made of a very heavy wood and they are exceedingly formidable weapons. A more simple type of wooden club is a plain wooden shaft rather thinner at the handle end than at the other, round which is fixed a piece of shark’s skin or the prickly skin from the back of the Sting Ray and often with it is tied the saw of a small Saw fish; such a club appears to be capable of inflicting a very nasty wound.