There is a great variety of stone-headed clubs, but they are all alike in being furnished with a wooden shaft, which is usually a plain piece of wood, but occasionally carved near the club end. The stone head is pierced in the middle by a round hole about an inch in diameter, through which the shaft is passed and fixed firmly by wedges. Most of the heads are made of a rather soft limestone, but where the people obtain it we do not know, for there is no stone of any kind near the coast. The simplest type is merely a round water-worn pebble with a hole bored through it. More commonly they are worked and the labour of producing them must have been considerable. Some are flat discs with sharp cutting edges or blunt and roughly milled edges, and some are cut into the form of five or six or more pointed stars; rarely they are triangular. Others again are round or oval and are cut into more or less deep teeth, or they have small bosses left projecting here and there, but no two of them are exactly alike. The weight of the club head is usually two or three pounds. The most savage-looking club we saw was simply a rough lump of coral, not trimmed in any way. It was pierced and mounted on a finely carved shaft of extremely heavy wood, and the whole thing must have weighed fifteen or twenty pounds.

Not a little credit is due to the Papuans for their industry in making these elaborate weapons, for it must be remembered that until we visited the country they had no metal tools whatever, with the exception of two or three scraps of soft iron, and all their work was done with shell knives and stone axes. The knives are simply the shells of a common freshwater bivalve (Cyrena sp.); when these are rubbed down on a stone, they take on an exceedingly sharp edge and are used by the natives for carving the canoes and drums and sharpening their spears and arrows.

The stone axes used in the Mimika district are all of the same type, though they vary greatly in size from about four inches to large ones of nearly twelve inches in length. The stone of which they are made is always the same, a quartzite. The shaft is about two feet long and is invariably made of the butt end of a bamboo. A hole is bored and burnt in the lower end of the bamboo, that is to say in the solid part of the wood below the first joint, and the pointed end of the stone is jammed into the hole. The stone is always fixed axe-fashion, i.e. with its broad surface and cutting edge in the same plane with the long axis of the handle, and not adze-fashion, as is the custom in some other parts of New Guinea (see illustration p. 142). The axes quickly become blunt with use and they are sharpened by being rubbed upon another stone. At Wakatimi stones are very rare and one man appeared to be the stone-smith of the village. I remember seeing him one day sitting outside his hut sharpening an axe, with three or four others lying beside him waiting to be done, while a few yards away a woman was splitting a log of wood with a stone axe. It struck me as being one of the most primitive scenes I had ever witnessed, really a glimpse of the Stone Age.

The bows of the Mimika natives are about five feet long and are made of a simple straight piece of a very hard wood (usually a species of pandanus), tapering towards the ends, which are sometimes ornamented with the claw of a cassowary or a tuft of feathers and shells or the claw of a crab. The “string” is a piece of rattan and it requires a strong arm to bend the bow. The arrows are of various types (see illustration p. 150); they are all made of reed stems, and none are ever feathered nor have they nocks. They vary only in their points, which are sometimes merely the sharpened end of the reeds themselves and sometimes a plain sharpened tip of hard wood or bamboo. Some are tipped with the sharpened claw of a cassowary or with the spine that lies along the back of the Sting Ray, and the arrows used for shooting fish have often three points of sharp bamboo.

Most people have the idea that the savage man performs prodigies of skill with his bow and arrows, but whenever I saw the Papuans shooting, they made astonishingly bad practice. I remember seeing two Papuans trying to kill an iguana in a tree not more than twenty feet above the ground; they shot arrow after arrow at it, but the creature, which was as long and almost as thick as a man’s arm, climbed slowly up from branch to branch until it was lost to view.

The hunting spears are of two kinds, a plain straight shaft of heavy wood, very sharp and hardened by fire at the tip; and a straight shaft of a lighter wood, to the end of which is fixed part of a straight bone (generally the tibia) of a pig, sharpened to a fine point. There is another kind of spear made of a soft wood, finely pointed and with a wide blade carved in a sort of open-work fashion (see illustration p. 150); the blade and the point are painted red with clay and the shaft is generally decorated with feathers or plaited fibre. Spears of this sort are of no use in hunting but are employed at dances and other ceremonial functions.

Two more pieces of furniture, the head-rest and the sago bowl, complete the list of articles made by the Papuans. The head-rests, which were seen only in the villages of Obota and Nimé, are made of a strip of elaborately carved wood four or five inches wide and between two and three feet in length, and are supported at each end by a stout wooden prop, which raises the head-rest about four inches above the ground. The longer head-rests are supposed to support the heads of two sleeping persons.

Fire is nearly always taken by the Papuans wherever they go; in almost every canoe a fire is kept burning, and when they travel through the jungle the men carry a smouldering stick. There must be occasions when all these fires are extinguished, but how they produce them we were unable to learn; the Papuans of Parimau could not make fire with the friction stick and rattan used by their neighbours, the Tapiro Pygmies.

From the description of them which has been given in this and the two preceding chapters it will be seen that the conditions of life of the Papuans are as primitive as those of any people now living in the world. There are very few other places, where you can find a people who neither make nor possess any metal and who have no knowledge of pottery. The only vessels that they have for holding water are scraped-out coconuts and simple pieces of bamboo. Water boiling they had never seen before we came among them. Their implements and weapons are, as I have shown, of the most primitive kind, and their ornaments are of the rudest possible description.

Cultivation of the soil is only practised by the people of one or two villages, and even then it produces but a very small proportion of their food, so it follows that most of their time and energies are devoted to procuring the necessaries of life.

The struggle for existence is keen enough, the birth-rate is low and the rate of infant mortality is, I believe, very high. Nor do diseases spare them; syphilis is exceedingly prevalent, and was probably introduced by Chinese and Malay traders to the West end of the island, whence it has spread along the coast. Tuberculosis is happily absent, but two natives of Wakatimi were suffering from what appeared to be certainly leprosy. Skin diseases, notably tinea imbricata, are very common; and almost every person appears to suffer occasionally from fever of one sort or another.

But in spite of all these drawbacks the Papuans of the Mimika are not such a very miserable people. They are strong, those of them that survive the ordeals of infancy and sickness; they have food in plenty to eat, if they choose to exert themselves sufficiently to obtain it; they have their amusements, songs and dances; and the manner of their lives is suited to the conditions of the country in which they live. It is this last consideration which ought ultimately to determine their fate: they live in a wretchedly poor country which is constantly liable to devastating floods, and their habit of wandering from one place to another, where food may be obtained, is the only way of life suitable to the physical and climatic conditions of the country.

Any attempt to “civilise” them must inevitably destroy their primitive independence, and if it succeeded in establishing the people in settled communities it would reduce them at many seasons to absolute starvation. We were visited once by the Director of the Sacred Heart Mission at Toeal, which has done admirable work amongst the natives of the Ké Islands and at one or two places in New Guinea itself. When he had seen the people and the nature of the country and had been told something of their habits, he decided that the Mimika was not, at present at all events, a proper field for missionary enterprise. Setting aside all other considerations, one dares to hope that such an interesting people may for a long time be left undisturbed; they do no harm to their neighbours and the effects on them of civilising influences would be at the best uncertain.

CHAPTER XII

The Camp at Parimau—A Plague of Beetles—First Discovery of the Tapiro Pygmies—Papuans as Carriers—We visit the Clearing of the Tapiro—Remarkable Clothing of Tapiro—Our Relations with the Natives—System of Payment—Their Confidence in Us—Occasional Thefts—A Customary Peace-offering—Papuans as Naturalists.

While it was the business of some of us during the early months of the expedition to stop at the base-camp and despatch canoes laden with stores up the river, others remained at Parimau to establish there a second permanent camp and to find, if possible, a way of approaching the higher mountains. It should be said that Parimau is some distance from the mountains—the high point nearest to it. Mount Tapiro (7660 ft.) is some twelve miles to the North, but it was no longer possible to travel in the direction of the mountains by way of the Mimika River, which had dwindled to a very small size at Parimau, therefore it was necessary to find a new route from there onward.

The first camp at Parimau was made on the shallow sandy side of the river close to the native village; the Papuans generally place their villages on gently sloping rather than on steep banks for convenience in hauling up their canoes. The coolies, such as there were of them, were occupied on the river, the natives for the first few months were of little or no assistance in building, and the work was done almost entirely by half a dozen of the Gurkhas. Their greatest achievement was the construction of a log-house in the best Himalayan style, probably by far the solidest building that was ever put up in Dutch New Guinea. The floor was raised about three feet above the ground and it was well that the workmanship was good, for it had not been finished many weeks before a flood swept over the camp and everyone took refuge in the house, the floor of which was just awash. Afterwards the camp was moved to the high bank across the river and the subsequent floods swamped the house and carried it away piecemeal, but two of the uprights survived and were still standing a year later.

We were a good deal annoyed at Parimau by the larvæ of a small red and black beetle, which infested the wood of which the frames of our huts were made. These larvæ, which look like small hairy caterpillars, were continually dropping from the roof and when they were killed, or even touched, they emitted the most disagreeable musky smell. They sometimes dropped upon you during the night and the smell of them would wake you from your sleep. The beetle itself too, if crushed or irritated, has the same disgusting peculiarity.

It has been mentioned above (Chapter V.) that Captain Rawling in exploring to the N.W. of Parimau came to the big river Kapare, which we unsuccessfully tried to navigate in canoes from below to the point where he had met it. While he was walking up the river bed one day, the Papuans who were with him caught after an exciting chase two small men, whose build and dress and appearance proclaimed them to belong to another race than the Papuan. A day or two later two more were captured, while they were crossing the river; they were kindly treated and presents were given to them, but they showed no inclination to conduct strangers to their home, a large clearing in the jungle on the hill side, which could be plainly seen from the Kapare River. We learnt from the Papuans that these little people were called Tapiro.13

At the beginning of March I accompanied one of the food-transports up the Mimika and went with Rawling out to the Kapare, where he had made a camp and was occupied with some of the Gurkhas in cutting a track through the jungle. By that time we had no coolies available for land transport; in six weeks our fifty coolies had diminished to ten, who were all wanted for the canoes, so we were entirely dependent on native assistance for land journeys. There was not much difficulty in persuading people to carry loads for us from Parimau to the nearest point of the Kapare River, for they were accustomed to go over there to fish. But it was a different business on the second day, when we wanted to push the camp a few miles further up the river so as to be in a better position for reaching the clearing of the Tapiro. At first they resolutely refused to start at all and retired to the shelters they had made at a little distance from the camp. From there they had to be led back by the hand one by one and then be severally introduced to their loads, but even so a number of them ran away again, and it was hours before we moved from the camp.

When once they were started they went steadily enough for about a mile and then they all put down their loads and refused to go on, but as they had stopped in the middle of the bed of the river it was impossible to remain there, so with promises of cloth and beads we urged them on a little further. The same performance was repeated a dozen times at intervals, which became shorter and shorter until our coaxing and cajoling availed no longer and there was nothing for it but to stop and make a camp. It had taken us more than four hours to cover less than three miles, most of which was easy going over sand and stones in the bed of the river. We should have been awkwardly situated if they had all gone away and left us to carry the loads, as they did a few weeks later to Marshall, who was deserted by them and forced to leave some of his baggage behind him. Needless to say, these misfortunes would not have occurred if our Malay coolies had been suited to their work. As it was, there were considerable periods when we had either to make use of what help the natives consented to give us, or else be content to do nothing at all.

When it suits them to do so, the Mimika Papuans can carry very heavy loads and they manage to cover the ground at a very respectable pace. They wrap up the load in the mat made of pandanus leaves, which every man always carries with him to serve both as a sleeping mat and as a shelter from the rain. The mat is securely tied by ropes of rattan or any of the other innumerable creepers of the jungle, and two strong loops are made to pass over the shoulders so that the load may be carried on the back, ruck-sack fashion. The women carry loads as well as the men and sometimes also the children, when the whole family is making a journey.

From our upper camp on the Kapare River Rawling and I made two attempts to reach the forest clearing of the Tapiro, which could be easily seen from the camp at a distance of about three miles in a straight line; but though careful bearings of its direction were taken, it turned out to be a most puzzling place to reach. Not more than a mile above the camp the Kapare emerges from a deep and narrow gorge in the foot hills—or rather the spurs of the mountains, they are too steep to call foot hills—which descend very abruptly to the almost level country below. Just after it emerges from the gorge, the river is joined by a stream of the clearest water I have ever seen, which we afterwards came to call the White Water (see illustration opposite).

In our first attempt to reach the clearing we wandered in the jungle for ten hours and came nowhere near to it. But the day was not altogether wasted, for we climbed up the hillside to about fifteen hundred feet and by cutting down some trees we obtained a wonderful view across the plain of the jungle to the distant sea. The air of the jungle was heavy with the scent of the wild Vanilla, and all around us were calling (but we could not see them) Greater Birds of Paradise; sometimes we were within sound of as many as six at one time. On that day too I first saw the Rifle Bird (Ptilorhis intercedens), one of the most beautiful though the least gaudy of the birds of Paradise, whose long-drawn whistle can never be mistaken or forgotten.

In our second attempt we profited by some of the mistakes made on the former, but even so the irregularity of the ground and the complexity of the watercourses nearly succeeded in baffling us. “Rawling and I left camp early with two Gurkhas. A mile and a half up the left bank of the river we struck off N.E. from the path we followed the other day. Cut a new path through the jungle for about a mile until we came to a faint native track, which we followed for another mile or so, chiefly along fallen tree trunks overhung by a network of rattan and other creepers, a fearful struggle to get through. Then for a mile or more up the bed of a stony stream encumbered with the same obstructions, dead trees and rattans, until we came to a deep gorge with a torrent about three hundred feet below us and on the opposite side the steep slope of another great spur of the mountain, on which the clearing presumably lay. We slithered and scrambled down to the river, which was full of water and only just fordable. Then up the other slope, not knowing at all accurately the direction of the clearing. Very steep and the jungle very dense with rattan and tree-ferns, so the leading Gurkha was kept busily occupied in cutting with his kukrí and progress was slow.

“About one o’clock, when we had been going for nearly six hours, the clouds came down and it began to rain and we were ready to turn back. Luckily the Gurkhas were convinced that the clearing was not far ahead and when we found a pig-trap, a noose of rattan set in a faint track, it seemed that they might perhaps be right. So we went on and in a few minutes we came out of the forest into the clearing. About thirty yards from us was a hut with three men standing outside it. We called out to them and they waited until we came up. A minute or two later two more men came out from the forest behind us, no doubt they had been following us unseen. The hut was a most primitive structure of sticks roofed with leaves, leaning up against the hillside. There was a fire in the hut and beside it was sitting an old man covered with most horrible sores. We went on up the hill for a couple of hundred yards to a place (about 1900 feet above the sea) where we had a fine view. Rawling put up the plane-table and got angles on to several points for the map.

“During the hour or more that we stayed there, eight men came to see us. Excepting one rather masterful little man, who had no fear of us, they were too shy to approach us closely and remained about ten yards distant, but even so it was plainly evident from their small stature alone, that they were of a different race from the people of the low country.

“The most remarkable thing about them is the case that each man wears, his only article of clothing; it is made of a long yellow gourd, about two inches in diameter at the base and tapering to about half an inch at the pointed end. It is worn with the pointed end upwards and is kept in position by a string round the waist. As the length of the case—some of them measure more than fifteen inches—is more than a quarter of the height of the man himself, it gives him a most extraordinary appearance. Every man carries a bow and arrows in his hand and a plaited fibre bag of quite elaborate design slung on his back. Two men wore necklaces of very rough scraps of shell and one had a strip of fur round his head. Two others wore on their heads curious helmet-like hats of grass ornamented with feathers.

“One man had a diminutive axe made of a piece of soft iron about three inches long, set in a handle like those of the stone axes. They must have some bigger axes, as they have cut down some very large trees and the marks on the stumps look as if they had been made with fairly sharp instruments. The clearing altogether is very considerable, probably fifty acres or more. The ground is covered with the sweet-potato plant, and in many places ‘taro’ has been carefully picked out. They have a few coarse-looking bananas, some of which they offered to us.

“Their voices are rather high-pitched and one of them, who met us first and called several of the others to come and see us, ended his calls with a very curious shrill jodelling note. When we came away we offered them cloth and beads to come with us and show us a better way, but they were either too frightened or too lazy to do so. We got back to camp after ten hours’ hard going, drenched with rain and covered with leeches, but well-pleased with the success of the day.”14

That was the last that we saw for a long time of the Tapiro pygmies, for it was evident that the Kapare River was useless as a means of approach to the Snow Mountains and we had to turn our attention to the country to the N.E. of the Mimika. Moreover, it was impossible to keep the camp there supplied with provisions, as we were at that time entirely dependent for transport on the goodwill of the Papuans.

Generally speaking we always remained on excellent terms with the natives and very rarely had any trouble with them. Except that we bought from them the “atap” for our houses, we got little or no help from the people of Wakatimi, but the people of Parimau assisted us in a number of ways. At first, as I have shewn, we had considerable difficulty in persuading them to work for us as carriers; but when they found that they really did receive the payment they were promised, they were willing and sometimes even anxious to carry loads for us, though we often had to wait a few days until it suited their convenience to start. It was a pity that they were never willing to travel further than about three days’ march from their village, but as there were long periods when we were entirely dependent on them for land transport, we counted ourselves lucky in their agreeing to work at all.

Chiefly owing to the help of the natives we were able to make and keep supplied for several months another camp on the Wataikwa River, three days’ march north-east from Parimau. When they went out there first, they were accustomed to receive their pay, cloth and beads or a small knife at the end of the journey; but later, when wages rose, as they inevitably did with every successive journey, it seemed to be absurd to waste perhaps half a load by carrying axes and knives to be given in payment at the end of the march. So a plan was adopted of giving them at the Wataikwa camp a paper authorising them to demand payment on their return to Parimau, and it was a gratifying tribute to the confidence that they had in us that they readily fell in with the scheme. Before starting they were shewn the knife or axe or whatever it was that they would receive for their labour, and at the end they raced back with their scraps of paper to Parimau, covering in a few hours the distance that had taken them three days on the outward journey. Some of the less energetic people in the village, when they saw that their friends received a knife or an axe by merely presenting a small piece of paper to the man in charge of the camp at Parimau, thought that they might easily earn the same reward, and they were rather astonished to find that the small scraps of paper, which they handed in, produced nothing at all or only a serious physical rebuff. But they were so childlike in their misdemeanours that one could not be seriously angry with them.

They shewed their confidence in our honesty in another very flattering way. During the period of the most frequent floods at Parimau, when they were liable to be washed away at any moment, the people took most of their movable possessions out of their houses and hid them in safe places in the jungle. But many of them merely brought their goods across to our side of the river and deposited them without any attempt at concealment within a few yards of our camp, apparently knowing that there they would be perfectly secure from theft.

They are by nature unconscionable thieves and a chance of stealing is to them merely a chance of acquiring property in the easiest way. On one occasion, when a party of our coolies were returning alone from Parimau to Wakatimi, they were waylaid at a narrow place in the river by some Papuans, who relieved them of their baggage and disappeared into the jungle; most of the stolen goods were subsequently returned, when the natives were threatened with punishment. The same thing happened another time when the coolies were accompanied by armed Javanese soldiers, who apparently forgot the use of their rifles until the thieves had got away. But they had a proper respect for a white man and whenever one of us, armed or not, was with the canoes, the natives never tried to molest us. They occasionally stole from the camps a knife or an axe, but though they were constantly about our houses and often inside them for hours at a time, we never lost anything of value.

A temptation, which often proved too strong for them, was our fleet of canoes. At Wakatimi the canoes were moored in front of the camp at the place where the natives, who came to visit us, were accustomed to land. They came mostly in the late afternoon and stayed till sunset, and it happened several times that when they went away they contrived to put two or three men into one of our canoes and slip away with it unnoticed in the dusk. But when on the following day we made a fuss, the canoe was generally brought back with a long story of its having been found floating down the river towards the sea.

An opportunity of looting, which was not to be resisted, occurred one day when a party of discharged coolies were leaving the country. The boat, in which they were being taken off to the ship, capsized as it came alongside the steamer and thirty coolies and all their belongings were upset into the sea. The captain of the ship was only anxious to save his boat and the coolies hastened to escape from the sharks. In the meantime a crowd of natives, who had come down in their canoes to visit the ship, lost no time in picking up the floating boxes and bundles of clothing, and before anybody was aware of their action they were fast paddling away to their villages.

On such occasions and at other times when we had reason to be angry with them, the people of Wakatimi observed a curious custom. There was in the village a coloured china plate and a piece of bent silver wire, which was sometimes used by the owner as an ear-ring. On the morning following their misdemeanour two men came over from the village bringing the ear-ring on the plate, which they gave to us, shook hands and departed. Later in the day they returned and we gave them back their gifts; this happened several times.

At one time there was a serious epidemic of drunkenness among the people of Wakatimi and they shewed their ill-manners by shooting arrows into the camp. This was of no consequence when only one person misbehaved himself. But when one day a number of men waded half-way across the river and began to send arrows into the camp, it had to be stopped. The Dutch sergeant, who was alone in charge of the place at the time, held up his rifle, a weapon the use of which they very well understood, and signalled to them that unless they went away he would fire. As they took no notice of his warning he fired, aiming at the legs of the ringleader, but unfortunately he hit him in the groin. Shortly afterwards, so little animosity did they show and so complete was their confidence in us, they brought the wretched man over to our camp, but nothing could be done for him and in a few hours he died.

They were very appreciative of medical treatment and at different times we were able to do a good deal for them. One man actually went so far as to pay a fee of half a dozen coconuts for the saving of his little daughter’s ulcerated foot, which was rapidly going from bad to worse under native treatment. They often cut themselves severely with our axes and knives before they learnt their sharpness, and their wounds healed astonishingly quickly with ordinary clean methods; the only trouble was that they liked to take off the bandages and use them for personal adornment.

As well as acting as carriers for us, the people at Parimau did a considerable amount of work for us about the camp in cutting down trees, an occupation which they always enjoyed, and in helping to build some of the houses. They were even more useful to us as naturalists and, thanks mainly to them, we made a very complete collection of the reptiles of the district. They were particularly adept at catching snakes and often five or six men in a day would stroll into the camp carrying a deadly poisonous snake wrapped up in leaves. One day Goodfellow was walking through the jungle with some natives and the man in front of him stooped down and picked up a poisonous viper without even pausing in his stride.

We always encouraged the natives to bring us snakes in the hope of getting new species, and when we did not want those that they brought, they were quite content to take them away and eat them. They seemed to have a peculiar knack of catching poisonous things, for besides snakes they often brought scorpions and centipedes in their parcels of leaves. With the more delicate creatures such as lizards they were less successful and among the hundreds that they brought us there were very few which they had not damaged. They always assumed an air of importance and somewhat of mystery, when they brought some animal for sale, and you always knew that when you had bought, or refused, as the case might be, the creature that was offered, the man would instantly produce something else, but the puzzle was always to know whence he produced it, for his scanty costume does not admit of pockets.

CHAPTER XIII

Visit of Mr. Lorentz—Arrival of Steam Launch—A Sailor Drowned—Our Second Batch of Coolies—Health of the Gurkhas—Dayaks the best Coolies—Sickness—Arrival of Motor Boat—Camp under Water—Expedition moves to Parimau—Explorations beyond the Mimika—Leeches—Floods on the Tuaba River—Overflowing Rivers—The Wataikwa—Cutting a Track.

A pleasant interlude in the monotony of the early part of the expedition occurred one day towards the end of March, when the natives of Wakatimi signalled in the usual way the approach of a boat and presently a steam launch appeared with Europeans on board. They turned out to be the Dutch explorer, Mr. H. A. Lorentz, who was on his way back from his second and successful expedition to Mount Wilhelmina by way of the Noord River, with his companions Captain J. W. van Nouhuys and Lieutenant Habbema, and the Captain of the Government steamer Java, which had anchored off the mouth of the Mimika. Mr. Lorentz looked like a man hardly returned from the dead, as indeed he well might, for after climbing to the snows of Mount Wilhelmina he had fallen down a cliff on his return, with a result of two broken ribs and serious concussion of the brain, and he had endured untold sufferings on his way back to the foot of the mountain. But he had achieved the principal object of his expedition, and his spirits were in better condition than his body. They stayed for the night with us and at dinner, though I was in a minority of one to six, with characteristic courtesy they all spoke English; the entertainment, assisted by luxuries brought from the Java, lasted until the small hours, and it was the pleasantest evening I spent in New Guinea.

The Java brought for us the long-expected steam launch, and its career began, as it ended, with disaster. Before dawn one of the men of the boat wished to fetch something that he had left on the launch, which was moored in the river about fifteen yards from the bank. The sentry on duty did his best to prevent him, because it was a rule of the camp that no man was allowed to bathe before sunrise, but he insisted on swimming out to the launch. In a few yards he found that the current was stronger than he had expected, he called for help, and in a few moments a canoe set out in the gloom to look for him, but no more was seen of him until his body was recovered by the natives at the mouth of the Mimika a few days later. Shortly after the accident happened our guests left us on their way back to Europe, and we watched their departure with somewhat envious eyes.

The history of the middle period of the expedition, that is to say, from April to December, is chiefly a history of floods and sickness and disappointment. In the middle of April Goodfellow, who had gone away early in March, returned with a fresh batch of forty-eight coolies, whom he had recruited in Banda and Amboina. About a half of these men were natives of the island of Buton, and the rest were Ambonese, and though they were the best men that could be found at such short notice, and were greatly superior to our first batch of coolies, they were really not fit for the work they had to do, and the majority of them soon became useless to us.

The steam launch towed the canoes for a short distance up the river once or twice, but it very soon broke down and thenceforward until the middle of June all the transport between Wakatimi and Parimau was done by the coolies themselves. For them it was literally a killing work; in the first few weeks two men died, one of pneumonia, the other of dysentery, both causes resulting from the circumstances of their work, while several others developed the first signs of beri-beri and had to be sent away at the earliest opportunity.

About the same time one of the Gurkhas died; he was from the beginning a very unhealthy man, who ought not to have been engaged for the expedition. Of the other nine Gurkhas three were invalided home before the end of the year and the remaining six stayed with us until we left the country. Although they came from the highlands of Darjeeling—or perhaps for that very reason—our Gurkhas, who were by no means a carefully selected lot, withstood the trials and the climate of the country better than any of the other “native” people in the expedition and, if expense were no drawback, it is probable that an expedition to New Guinea would have the best chance of success if coolies were taken from Northern India.

That is, however, rather a counsel of perfection, and an expedition to New Guinea must make use of natives of the Malay Archipelago. The Ambonese and the Butonese have been tried and have been found wanting, so also have the Ké Islanders and the Sundanese from the mountains of central Java. Possibly the wild hillmen of Timor, if enough of them could be engaged, would work well, but the only people who have hitherto worked successfully as coolies in Dutch New Guinea are the hill-Dayaks of Borneo. Mr. Lorentz, who took with him eighty Dayaks, most of them from the Mendalen River, on his expedition to Mount Wilhelmina, spoke with enthusiasm of the admirable behaviour of his men, and if Indian or other Asiatic coolies are not available, it may be said that an expedition to the mountainous districts of Dutch New Guinea can only be properly conducted with Dayaks.

Our coolies were not the only people in the expedition who began to feel the ill effects of the climate; the Javanese soldiers and convicts quickly filled the hospital which had been put up at Wakatimi, and in May and June there were many mornings when I saw more than forty sick men. Most of them suffered from fever and a more or less severe form of dysentery, and a good many cases of beri-beri occurred. Unfortunately sickness was not confined to our native followers only; the Europeans began also to suffer from the very adverse conditions in which they found themselves. One or two of the Dutch non-commissioned officers became seriously ill; Goodfellow, who returned with the second batch of coolies from Banda about the middle of April, was never free from fever for more than a few days from that time until he left the country in October; and Shortridge became such a wreck from almost continuous fever, which began about the beginning of March, that by the end of May he had to be sent away for three months’ change of air to Australia. Soon after his return in August he succumbed again to the evil climate, and though he pluckily pretended that there was nothing the matter with him, he went from bad to worse, and I am fully persuaded that his almost forcible deportation at the end of November saved his life.

At the end of May, Goodfellow and Rawling went over to Dobo, and after about eight days returned with the motor boat, which had been bought from the pearl-fishers. Like most things of which a great deal is expected the motor boat turned out to be a disappointment, and it eventually led us into serious difficulty, but for a short time it did good service in towing boats up the river, and it considerably shortened the voyage from Wakatimi to Parimau.

The day of the arrival of the motor boat was memorable for being the occasion of the first of the really serious floods that beset us. Late in the evening a party of our coolies on their way back from Parimau, who were not due to arrive until the following day, reached the camp at Wakatimi, most of which was by that time under water. The journey down the river usually occupied two days, but they had found all the usual camping places, some of which were high above the ordinary river bed, under water, and they had been unable to find any safe resting-place.

The three following days were among the most unpleasant that I had ever spent, though worse were to follow later. On the morning of the first day the water fell a little and we spent laborious hours in piling up our stores and movable gear on to the top of empty boxes, and when those were all used on posts driven into the ground. All through the afternoon the water rose, the coolies’ and soldiers’ houses were quickly flooded, and our own house, which was on the highest part of the camp, was nearly a foot under water. On the two succeeding days the conditions were much more serious, and we had two feet of water in our house. The river took a short cut over the neck of land formed by a wide bend of the river on which the camp was placed and flowed straight through the camp. Our beds were raised up on empty kerosene-tin boxes, and when these were submerged there was a mild excitement in guessing how far up the frame-work of the bed the water would rise. Fires were put out and cooking was impossible, so the coolies and soldiers, who depended on their boiled rice, had rather a hungry time. Our own food consisted of biscuits and cold tinned stuff, which is not very exhilarating when you have been in water all day long. An unprejudiced observer looking in upon us from the outside in the evening might well have wondered what kind of lunatics we were to come to New Guinea. Goodfellow was lying in bed very sick with fever, while Rawling and I, up to our knees in water, were making a poor pretence at having dinner. The only humour that we managed to extract from the situation was in the novel experience of being able, without moving from our seats, to wash our plates between the first course of biscuits and sardines and the second course of biscuits and marmalade; the Mimika river was flowing under our chairs and we had only to lower our plates into it to clean them.

On the fourth day the water fell, and the camp was not flooded again for several weeks, but there was left everywhere a thick deposit of mud, which kept the houses sodden for a long time afterwards. In spite of all our precautions, a quantity of stores were irreparably spoilt and, worse still, the flood left behind it an increased amount of sickness, and indeed the wonder was that the prolonged soaking had not ill effects on every one of us.

At the beginning of July Cramer and I arrived at Parimau, bringing with us the last loads of provisions to complete the store, which we had been working hard for three months with our second batch of coolies to accumulate at that place. It was hoped that that store would be sufficient to enable us to use Parimau as a second base camp for making a prolonged expedition into the mountains without wasting any more time on transports up the river; but in that we had reckoned without the vagaries of the New Guinea climate and the consequent diminution of the effective strength of our coolies, who were already too few for our purpose.

In the meantime Rawling and Marshall had been making excursions to the North-east of Parimau, in the direction of the high mountains. About five miles from Parimau they had come to the Tuaba River and about the same distance further on they had come to the Kamura River, a few miles above its junction with the Tuaba. Continuing in the same direction they came to another river, bigger than either of the others, the Wataikwa, which was so often impassable that it seemed likely to prevent any further progress. But a short excursion up the valley of the Wataikwa showed the impossibility of reaching the highest mountains by that route, and a camp was accordingly established on the Wataikwa with a view to crossing that river when an opportunity should occur.

These excursions were all made with the assistance of natives, without whose assistance no advance beyond Parimau would have been possible, so long as all the coolies were occupied in the work on the river. Very little reliance could be placed on the natives, when they were working as carriers alone without coolies, and most of us at one time or another had the disagreeable experience of being deserted by them and left unable to move either backwards or forwards. It was in circumstances such as these that the Gurkhas, some of whom always accompanied us in journeys through the jungle, shewed to the best advantage.

When the store of provisions at Parimau was completed, the next step was to establish a further depôt of provisions at the Wataikwa camp. Though the distance between the two places was less than fifteen miles in a straight line, it was a three days’ march for a loaded coolie and two camping places were made on the way, one on an island in the Tuaba River, the other on the bank of the Kamura. The first day’s march from Parimau began by crossing and recrossing the Mimika several times and here and there wading up the river itself. About three miles up the river we struck off Eastwards through the jungle along a hardly visible native track used by the people going to the village of Ibo; this was the only regular native track we used, and these few miles across from the Mimika to the Tuaba were the only place where we had not to cut our own path. The mud in that part of the jungle was quite exceptionally bad, even for New Guinea; in the comparatively dry weather it was like walking through porridge, and in the wet weather you were continually struggling through liquid slime almost up to your knees.