We were very much annoyed there, though not more in that than in other parts of the jungle, by the leeches which swarmed everywhere. These hateful little creatures sit on the leaves or twigs stretched out to their fullest length and expectant of the passer-by. It is not necessary to believe, as some people do, that they jump or even that they fall upon you as you pass beneath them; there are so many that as you brush through the jungle you must inevitably touch many outstretched heads and as soon as they are touched they attach themselves immediately to you. They are extremely rapid in their movements, and their touch is so delicate that you do not feel their presence until they have nearly gorged themselves with blood. Your legs, unless they are well protected with putties, are most liable to their attacks, but you find leeches on all parts of your body, and I have found them in my eyes and in my mouth and once just captured one as it was preparing to enter one of my nostrils. They are able to consume an astonishingly large quantity of blood, and when, as often happens, they open a small vein, the bleeding continues after they have dropped from their feeding place. It is not advisable to pull a leech from your body; it often results in the creature leaving behind a part of its clasper, which may give rise to a serious sore. Pigs do not appear to be attacked by leeches, but the soft parts of the heads of some of the cassowaries that were shot were found to be covered with them. Cassowaries are few and far between, and there must be millions of leeches that go through life without once tasting blood. Some of the leeches are prettily marked with stripes of yellow and brown, but none that we saw in the jungle were of large size; the longest were perhaps two inches in length.

Besides leeches there was not much to distract or to amuse us in passing through that stage of the march—certainly there were always plenty of the Greater Birds of Paradise to be heard calling, but they were very seldom to be seen—and we were chiefly anxious to struggle to the end of it ourselves and to push the coolies along until we heard the welcome sound of heavy water and light showed through the trees ahead. The Tuaba, at the place where we were accustomed to cross it, is a wide river flowing in about half a dozen channels, which extend over half a mile or more of ground. All of these channels are considerable torrents even in the most favourable conditions and it is by no means easy to cross them, but in the very frequent times of flood they are absolutely impassable. The camping place was made on an island across the first channel, as the river bank proper was covered with very dense jungle, and at low water the island was surrounded by a stretch of dry sand and shingle, which afforded us a pleasant drying ground after struggling through the sweltering jungle.

But it was not always a place of calm; it could be quite a dangerous place, and I had a very unpleasant experience the first time I camped there. I was on my way out to the Wataikwa river with a Gurkha, four coolies and about twenty natives of Parimau laden with tins of rice. The river was comparatively low when we pitched our camp, but it began to rain in the afternoon, and the almost continuous thunder and the black clouds in that direction showed us that it was raining heavily in the mountains. By nightfall the rising flood had completely covered the sandbank in front of the camp, and before midnight the river was flowing right through the camp. The coolies were taking refuge like birds in the trees, and the water had just covered my piece of ground, which was an inch or two higher than any other spot. The Gurkha came and helped me to secure the stores from the water, which was still rising fast. We arranged all the rice tins upright, and on them we placed my bed; on the bed we placed all the other stores and baggage, and finally I took refuge there myself. The water rose above the top of the rice tins and about half way up the framework of my bed and then happily it began to fall rapidly, and in an hour or two the camp was land again. Shoes of mine and odd garments of the coolies were washed away, but we had been in no danger of being swept away, for the current was not rapid enough over the comparatively shallow water of the island; the only risk was from the large logs and trees which came sweeping down on the flood. The Papuans, who were encamped on another island a short distance below ours, had kept up all night a constant and most melancholy wailing, which did not at all add to the humour of the situation.

For three more days we stayed on that sandbank, while the rain poured down and the river swept past us on both sides, unable either to proceed or to retreat. I made two attempts to cross the river, but found it impossible to struggle across the flood. In the meantime the natives, who were well able to swim naked across the first channel, threatened all the time to return to Parimau. A few of them did leave me, but the rest by constant cajoling and by liberal gifts of rice, for which they had acquired a great liking, I persuaded to stay with me until after four days we were able to get away.

From the Tuaba to the Kamura river, a distance of about four miles, a track had been cut by Marshall and the Gurkhas. It was a curious piece of country, almost level and covered with not very dense jungle, but remarkable for the number of streams flowing through it. Between the two rivers we crossed eighteen streams of various sizes; some were rivulets, and others swift and strong so that one was glad of a supporting Papuan on either hand. The Kamura river is of less size than the Tuaba, but it is still a large river and subject to heavy and sudden floods. It flows in a bed of sand and shingle two or three hundred yards from bank to bank, though, except at times of flood, it only occupies a narrow channel. Mostly it runs swiftly over the stones, but here and there are long stretches of still water like the pool of a salmon river; unluckily there are no big fish in it, or New Guinea would be a pleasanter place than it is.

It was an agreeable change to come out on to the bank of the Kamura, for from there we had our first wide view of the mountains that we hoped to reach. The foothills, if mountains eight or nine thousand feet high may be so described, sloped down to within a few miles of us to the North, and behind them and stretching far to East and West rose range beyond range of steep and precipitous ridges, culminating in the snowy top of Mount Carstensz, thirty miles to the North-east. Our route took us for several miles along the course of the Kamura; it was certainly not comfortable walking over the big and often slippery stones and wading waist-deep across the river three or four times to cut off big bends, but it was pleasant indeed to have a wide free space about us after having been for so long hemmed in by trees, and anything was preferable to the mud and leeches of the jungle.

A few miles up the Kamura we left the main river and turned off up the bed of a smaller river, which joins it from the East. This is actually a branch of the Wataikwa connecting the two rivers, and down it comes a great volume of water when the Wataikwa is full, while at other times it becomes almost dry. The rivers of this district of New Guinea are somewhat peculiar in this respect; they are very numerous, and they flow out from the mountains in a North to South direction, with not many miles intervening between one river and the next. As soon as they emerge from the mountains they find themselves on quite low ground and with forty or more miles to run to the sea. There are no outlying hills or depressions to guide them in any particular course, thus it happens that they overflow in convenient directions, and connections are established between one river and another. As well as in the case of the Wataikwa this was observed on the Utakwa river, close to the foot of the mountains, and I believe the same thing happens on the Kapare river. Further on in their courses, when they approach the mangrove swamps near the sea, the rivers again break up into an extraordinary network of branches. Judging from the appearance of the country and from the considerable changes, which we observed in the case of the Wataikwa during a period of only a few months, it is probable that these great rivers change their courses very often.

Whilst parties of coolies, rapidly diminishing in numbers, were occupied at lengthening intervals in transporting stores from Parimau to the camp on the Wataikwa river, Rawling and Marshall had found a way of crossing that river. It is true that there were a great many days when it was quite impossible to cross it, and there was always a certain amount of risk of being swept away, not to mention the discomfort of beginning your day’s work by getting wet up to your chest; but it was absolutely necessary to continue cutting the track, wet or dry. On the other side of the river, they had tried to continue in the North-east direction and had come to broken lumpy ground covered with the densest jungle that we met with in any part of the country. The trees were not so very big, indeed most of them were quite small, but they were of a peculiarly hard wood, which quickly blunted the kukris of the Gurkhas and they grew so close together that it was quite impossible to push your way between them. Eventually a track was cut to the Iwaka River, five miles to the east of the Wataikwa.

Some idea of the difficulty of cutting this track may be learnt, when it is said that Rawling and Marshall with three Gurkhas and five natives were occupied for three weeks in cutting five thousand yards of the way, and the whole distance of five miles was cut in five weeks. Unfortunately it was labour in vain, the path when finished was too difficult for men to traverse with loads. We cut another track, which avoided the hilly ground and brought us to the Iwaka close to the point reached by the first; by the new track, which was cut in a week, we were able to reach the Iwaka in three hours’ walk from the Wataikwa.

CHAPTER XIV

The Camp at the Wataikwa River—Malay Coolies—“Amok”—A Double Murder—A View of the Snow Mountains—Felling Trees—Floods—Village washed Away—The Wettest Season—The Effects of Floods—Beri-beri—Arrival of C. Grant—Departure of W. Goodfellow.

If I were to write a true and complete account of the expedition, I should fill many pages with repeated stories of rain and floods, sickness among the coolies and our consequent inaction; but that would be as wearisome to the reader as it was trying to our own patience. During July and a part of August we sent out parties of coolies to the Wataikwa camp, where a considerable depôt of food was formed, but about the middle of the latter month the number of our coolies was reduced to twenty, of whom not more than half were capable of any hard work, and it became quite evident that any further progress in the direction of the mountains was out of the question until we should get a fresh supply of men.

As the number of coolies grew fewer we sent natives with them to carry stores out to the Wataikwa, but the supply of willing natives was very uncertain and it became a matter of some difficulty to keep up a regular communication with that camp. Two Gurkhas and two Javanese soldiers remained always at the Wataikwa and one or other of us went out there and stopped to make natural history collections or to superintend the cutting of the road on the other side of the river for a few weeks at a time, while the others were at Parimau or at Wakatimi. We managed to continue this arrangement until the end of October, when it became no longer possible to keep an European supplied out there; thenceforward until the beginning of January the camp at the Wataikwa was occupied only by the guard of Gurkhas and Javanese, who in the meantime consumed nearly all the stores that had been so laboriously accumulated there.

We often said hard things to and of our Malay coolies, but the poor wretches were not to blame for being such incompetent carriers. At their proper occupations of carrying cargo to and from the ships at Macassar, or working on the boats of the pearl-fishers, or doing odd jobs in their native places, no doubt they excelled; but at struggling through the New Guinea jungle with even the lightest of loads they were hopeless failures and the wonder was that they survived as long as they did. Taking them all round, the majority of them worked as well as they could, and some of them even became quite attached to us.

To a large number of people the name of Malay immediately suggests a savage person who runs amok, but you may live for years in a Malay country and never see a single amok. Fortunately our Malays never behaved in this dangerous fashion, though one day a man who was suffering from fever went suddenly mad and inflicted a serious knife-wound on the body of another coolie; the wounded man was successfully treated by Marshall, who was happily but seldom required in this way to exercise his vocation as surgeon. Malays are indeed rather too handy with their knives and a more serious encounter took place one day between two of Cramer’s convicts. These two men, a mandoer (head man) and another, quarrelled one morning about some trifle connected with their food, and before anybody knew what was amiss, knives were out and one was chasing the other through the camp. By a clever backward thrust the pursued man dealt the pursuer a deep wound under the heart, but he was unable to escape before the pursuer had given him too a mortal wound. One died in a few minutes and the other during the course of the day, fortunately perhaps for both of them.

But ordinarily our Malays were most quiet and peaceable fellows. Certainly they were liars and thieves when it suited their convenience to be so, but these two faults are almost universal in the East. They were enthusiastic fishermen (a sure sign of grace) and spent many hours of their leisure time in angling for small fish, which they very seldom caught. Another of their virtues, though it sometimes became a little wearisome, was their love of singing, in which they indulged on fine evenings. The Ambonese used to sing, accompanied by a soloist on a sort of penny whistle, some really pretty songs, possibly of Portuguese origin, to which one could listen with real pleasure. But the singing of the Javanese, usually in a high falsetto voice, was a burden hardly to be borne.

In dealing with people like the Malays it is essential to keep them constantly occupied in order to prevent them from brooding too much over their untoward circumstances and becoming, as they easily do, physically ill. Accordingly, during the times when for one reason or another they were not carrying out loads to the Wataikwa camp, we set them to clearing the jungle about the camp at Parimau, and in the course of time some ten or twelve acres were cleared. Apart from the object of drying and letting light into the camp, this clearing was made with the purpose of obtaining from Parimau a view of the Snow Mountains. This latter object was ultimately attained and proved of great service to the surveyors, who were enabled to fix more definitely the various points of the range seen from a place of which they had already determined the position by astronomical observations. To the non-surveyor too the view of the mountains was a boon, though rather a tantalising one, and I used to spend many hours in the mornings, before the mists had hidden them, in scanning the snows of Idenburg and Carstensz and planning routes by which they might be reached.

Cutting down trees in the New Guinea jungle differs from cutting down trees here in that the tree does not always fall, even when the trunk is cut completely through. Amongst the tops of the trees grows an extraordinary network of rattans and other creepers of sufficient strength to support a tree, even if it is inclined to fall. We spent some time one day in firing shots with a rifle at a single creeper, thicker than a man’s arm, which was holding up a tree without any other support; though I believe we sometimes pierced the creeper with bullets, it held on and only gave way some hours later. As a rule we did not take the trouble to cut the creepers, but if a tree did not fall we cut down those about it until they all fell together in one splendid crash. On sloping ground the best method of felling trees is to cut their trunks only half way through and leave them, and then to cut completely through a big tree above them in such a way that it will fall down hill and complete the felling of those below it.

Some of the trees that we cut down in our clearing fell in the most unexpected directions, but though there were some narrow escapes, there were no accidents. The most unpleasant was a tree which fell midway between two houses, one full of coolies and the other full of stores, and shaved off the projecting roof of both; it might easily have killed half-a-dozen sleeping men, but the only harm it did was to fill the camp with a swarm of large and furiously biting ants, which had had a nest in its topmost branches. The natives, who never tired of using our steel axes, helped a good deal in felling the trees and in this way some of them earned large quantities of coloured beads.

Another occupation for the coolies in their idle moments, and at the same time a very necessary work, was the business of keeping the camp in a state of repair. When the high river bank opposite the village of Parimau was chosen for a camping ground, it was thought that floods at all events could do no harm. The houses nearest to the river were built five or six yards back from the edge of the bank, which was there about fifteen feet above the usual level of the water, and it seemed quite out of the question that the river could ever invade the camp. It was necessary, in order to prevent it from becoming the dumping ground of camp-refuse, to clear away the rank vegetation that grew on the bank down to the water’s edge, and this was the beginning of what almost ended in our downfall. After the tangle of creepers had been removed, the first rains began to wash the bank away, and when the river rose three or four feet, as it speedily did after a few hours’ downpour, it undermined the lower part of the bank and large landslips took place from above.

In the course of a few weeks several yards of land disappeared, and the safety of our houses, which had come to be almost overhanging the river, was seriously imperilled. To save them we erected a strong palisade of long poles thrust deeply into the bottom of the bank and secured them by rattan ropes, which passed through our house and were attached to posts at the back. The interval between the palisade and the bank was laboriously filled up with shingle from the river bed, and this provided a never-ending occupation, because the stones were always trickling through the palisade and required to be renewed. The natives were of great assistance to us in this work, and on one occasion—it was the only time that we ever persuaded them to come into our camp, although we lived within a few yards of their village—the women and children came and helped in the work and thoroughly enjoyed themselves.

It was well that we took these precautions, for as the weather grew steadily wetter and wetter (though that seemed hardly possible) through July and August, so the river rose higher and higher and each succeeding flood was greater than the last. The night of the 18-19th of August was one that I shall never forget: it had been raining steadily for some days and the river was fairly full, but about sunset on the 18th the rain really began to come down solidly, as it does in the Tropics. About midnight a terrific thunderstorm began, which continued with almost incessant thunder and lightning until dawn, but long before this the river had risen many feet and was already threatening the village. As soon as the waters began to rise the natives appeared at the edge of the river with blazing torches, while canoes were baled out and brought nearer to the shore. When the flood, rising visibly by that time, reached the lowest house, a most extraordinary Bedlam broke loose and it sounded as if all the people in the village were being drowned. The men all shouted at once, the women and children screamed and the dogs whined and howled. By the light of the flashes of lightning we could see them scurrying hither and thither, bundling all their belongings into the canoes and trying to save the roofs and matting walls of their huts by throwing them among the branches of the trees at the back of the village. In a very short time all the houses were swamped and the people were in their canoes, about twenty in all, moored to the branches of the trees along the edge of the jungle, where they kept up an unceasing turmoil until daylight.

In the meantime our own position was not very secure. The river was swirling down at ten or twelve miles an hour and bringing with it huge tree-trunks, which carried away our fleet of canoes and threatened to destroy our protecting palisade. If that had gone nothing could have prevented our houses from falling into the river, but happily it held well. The whole of the jungle on our side of the river was under water and all sorts of creatures sought the shelter of our houses, which occupied the highest position. When even these were flooded, armies of ants and beetles and other insects climbed up our beds and other furniture to escape from drowning, moths washed out of their resting places fluttered aimlessly about, and a family of rats, which inhabited my hut, ran about squeaking in terror.

Beyond the loss of our canoes, some of which were afterwards recovered, no great damage was done, and the flood fell almost as quickly as it had risen. Soon after daybreak the ground, on which the village had been, began to appear above the falling water, and it was seen that not one stick of the huts was standing. But the natives were anxious to get out of their canoes, and by mid-day half the huts in the village were re-built with the fragments that they had crammed into the canoes or had put up into the trees. During the next two or three days they brought back quantities of housing materials, which had been carried for miles down the river, and very soon the village resumed its normal appearance.

On two subsequent occasions in the following month the village was completely swept away by floods, and it was a matter of surprise to us that they did not adopt the custom of their neighbours the Tapiro pygmies and build their houses on piles. The third great flood swept away the sandbank on which the village stood, and they were accordingly compelled to build their houses on the top of a high bank further down the river. Such a place as that necessitated cutting down a number of big trees, but now that a great many of them have the steel axes, which we gave them, it is to be hoped that they have learnt to place their dwellings in safer positions, even though it costs them a little extra labour.

The wet season, which we hoped had reached its maximum of wetness in July, when sometimes for days together the rain hardly ceased, continued in a series of greater or less floods through the months of August and September. Often it was impossible to move a yard from the camp, and without books life would have been almost insupportable. On one of the wettest of those days I came across the following passage, which seemed to describe the situation exactly:—

It need hardly be said that this very disagreeable season produced ill effects on all the members of the expedition. The Europeans became depressed, and if we were not sick of life itself, we were certainly sick of New Guinea, while in the case of the coolies and soldiers, who were accustomed to sunnier climates, and who had no interest or goal to look forward to in the country, the results were disastrous indeed. Hardly a man escaped fever of greater or less severity and chills brought on by the unceasing rain and the consequent impossibility of securing a change of dry clothing. Several men suffered too from dysentery of a very intractable type, which completely incapacitated them from any further service.

But worse than either fever or dysentery was the beri-beri, which made its appearance after we had been in the country for a few months. This is not the place to give a scientific account of beri-beri; it will suffice to say that it is a disease, of which the most important feature is a degeneration of the nervous system. The results of this are seen in the curious and characteristic walk, loss of sensation in various parts of the body, interference with the circulation and swelling of the body and particularly of the face and limbs, and in very many cases sudden heart failure. It is almost conclusively proved now that the cause of the disease is an error of diet, and it appears to be certain that the fine milling and polishing of the rice, which forms the staple food of the natives of so many countries in the East, deprives the rice of a very necessary constituent as a food. Those people, who grind their own rice and do not mill or polish it finely, but leave a small portion of the husk still adhering to the grain, are free from beri-beri. The disease varies in severity from time to time and from place to place, but at its best it is a very deadly scourge and it causes a very large number of deaths. Occasionally it occurs in an epidemic form, but fortunately that did not happen to our expedition.

In the six months from the beginning of June to the end of November, thirty-nine men shewed definite symptoms of beri-beri, and seven deaths were directly attributable to this cause. Our coolies, who came from the Eastern islands of the Archipelago, were much less susceptible to the disease than were the convicts and soldiers, most of whom came from Java and Sumatra; these latter contracted the disease in a much more serious form and most of the fatal cases took place among them. It was a curious circumstance that at Parimau, which was in most respects by far the healthier place, many more cases of beri-beri occurred than at Wakatimi, where it is doubtful if any cases originated.

Still more remarkable was the case of the camp on the Wataikwa River, which ought to have been the healthiest place we occupied anywhere in the country. For several months a guard of two Javanese and two Gurkhas was kept there to look after the store of food, and though they were very frequently changed and replaced by others, several of the Javanese developed beri-beri and two of them died. The Gurkhas, perhaps because they led more active lives than the Javanese, remained free of the disease until one of them, Havildar Mahesur, a most useful man, had the misfortune to damage one of his eyes; it was necessary for him to remain in the darkness of his tent for some days and within a fortnight he developed all the signs of beri-beri so that he had to be sent away from the country.

A welcome interruption in those dreary months was caused by the arrival at Parimau on August 26 of canoes bringing Mr. C. H. B. Grant, who had come out from England as naturalist to the expedition in the place of W. Stalker. He brought with him two Dayak collectors15 and a quantity of various and excellent stores, and a large mail, the first we had received since the end of May. Shortridge had arrived in the country by the same ship on his return from Australia, but his change of air had not completely cured him and he was compelled to leave the country at the end of November. Goodfellow, whose fever continued almost without interruption, became so weak that he also was obliged to leave the country early in October. From that time we had only a dozen men and no forward movement was possible until the arrival of our third batch of coolies on the 22nd December. By the same boat that brought the new coolies in December came instructions to Captain Rawling to take over the command of the expedition.

CHAPTER XV

Pygmies visit Parimau—Description of Tapiro Pygmies—Colour—Hair—Clothing—Ornaments—Netted Bags—Flint Knives—Bone Daggers—Sleeping Mats—Fire Stick—Method of making Fire—Cultivation of Tobacco—Manner of Smoking—Bows and Arrows—Village of the Pygmies—Terraced Ground—Houses on Piles—Village Headman—Our Efforts to see the Women—Language and Voices—Their Intelligence—Counting—Their Geographical Distribution.

The Pygmy people—or Tapiro as they are called by the Papuans—whom we saw in March, visited us occasionally in small parties of three or four at Parimau and later we went to one of their villages in the hills, to which they were reluctantly persuaded to show us the way. When they come down to Parimau they were warmly welcomed by the Papuans, with whom they seemed to be on very friendly terms, and stayed in their houses for two or three days. They appeared to be particularly attractive to the women, one of whom we saw affectionately embrace a Tapiro on his arrival; it was said that she kissed him, but if that was so it was the only occasion on which that form of endearment was seen practised by the Papuans. It was noticeable that when they arrived at Parimau they had not their bows and arrows, which they always carry elsewhere; probably they had left them hidden in the jungle before they came to the village. Similarly, when we went up to visit the Tapiro, the Papuans who were with us left their spears behind them at the last camp before we reached their village.

Their visits were always very welcome because they brought with them from the hills quantities of tobacco to exchange with the natives of Parimau, who grow none themselves. At first they were very shy of crossing the river, but by the offer of gifts we persuaded them to come into our camp, where we had better opportunities of observing them than in the crowded village.

At one time or another we took measurements of 40 adult men, most of them men in the prime of life, and their average height was found to be 144·9 cm. (4 ft. 9 in.). It is possible that one or two rather tall men of 150 cm. and upwards, whose appearance led us to suspect that they were Tapiro-Papuan half-breeds, may have been included among those measured, but the correction of that error will not appreciably reduce the true average height. The height of the smallest man measured was 132·6 cm. By contrast with the Papuans they looked extremely small and, what was rather a curious thing, though many of our Malay coolies were no taller than they, the coolies looked merely under-sized and somewhat stunted men, while the Tapiro looked emphatically little men. They are cleanly-built, active-looking little fellows, rather big in the buttocks as mountain people are apt to be, and their well-made calves are noticeable in contrast with the long, straight legs of the Papuans. They walk with an easy swinging gait, the knees a little bent and the body slightly leaning forwards.

The colour of their skin is paler than that of the Papuans—some of them indeed are almost yellow—but they are so indescribably dirty that it is not easy to know what is their true colour; they have also an ugly habit of smearing their faces with a black oily mixture. Neither tattooing nor cicatrization appears to be practised by them. The septum of the nose is always pierced and in it they occasionally wear a curved boar’s tusk planed down to a thin slip, or a short piece of straight bone; the alae nasi are not pierced. The nose is straight and very wide at the nostrils. The upper lip of many of the men is long and curiously convex.

The hair is short and woolly and black; many of the men give a lighter shade to the hair with lime or mud, and in two or three cases it seemed to be of a brown colour without any artificial treatment. They appear to begin to grow bald at a comparatively early age. The younger men grow whiskers and the older have short bushy black beards. There is a good deal of short downy black hair scattered about the body. Their eyes are noticeably larger and rounder than those of the Papuans, and there is in them something sleepy and dog-like which gives a pathetic expression to their faces.16

When we first saw them one or two men wore curious helmet-like caps of plaited fibres and another had a strip of fur round his head; otherwise they are completely naked except for the remarkable gourd case described above (p. 161). Strangely enough they are extremely modest and unwilling to expose themselves; when with some difficulty we had persuaded a man to part with his case, he would not remove it then and there, but always disappeared into the jungle and returned after an interval decently covered with leaves.

Their ornaments are few and simple; a number of men wear arm-bands and leg-bands of plaited fibre similar to those worn by the Papuans, and several of them wear necklaces of seeds, short pieces of bamboo, scraps of broken shell, teeth of wallabies and (in one instance) the bones of a small mammal. The lobes of both ears are pierced and a few men wear in one ear an ornament made of a small piece of gourd to which are attached seeds, scraps of fur, claws of birds and other ornamental odds and ends. One young man, with more originality than the rest, thrust through his front hair a piece of sharpened bone, which projected downwards over his face and gave him a most distinguished appearance (see Frontispiece).

The most elaborate and ornamental of their possessions are the bags, which every man carries. Most of them carry two, a large bag like a haversack slung across the shoulders and usually hanging down the back, and a small bag only a few inches square slung round his neck and hanging down on the chest. They are made of fine fibres of different colours, cleverly netted17 in ornamental patterns, and they show the best attempt at decorative art that we saw in the country. In these bags the Pygmy man keeps all his portable property. The small wallet round the neck contains his bone and shell ornaments when they are not in use, and his knives; these latter are sharp flakes of a flint-like stone shaped exactly like the flint-knives and scrapers that are found in this country; they are used for scraping down the wood of their bows and for pointing and ornamenting their arrows as well as for other cutting purposes, and it is profoundly interesting in these days of steel to see people still using the implements of prehistoric man. One or two men also carried in their wallets a short dagger made of a pointed cassowary’s bone, and they explained to us by graphic gestures how they were accustomed to shoot a cassowary with their arrows and then after a long chase to stab it with the dagger.

The contents of the larger bag usually are the sleeping mat, the fire-stick and rattan, and tobacco. The sleeping mat is a fabric of pandanus leaves, which can be used either as a mat to lie upon or as a shelter from the rain; it measures usually about six by three feet and is neatly folded to be carried in the bag. The manufacture of these mats is always the work of the women and is a very ingenious process. The long ribbon-like leaves of the pandanus are split horizontally into two strips; the shiny upper one alone is used and the lower is thrown away. Strips of two leaves are placed with their split surfaces together and their shiny surfaces outwards, and then numbers of these pairs of split leaves are sown together, edge to edge, until the mat is of the required size. Thus the mat is made entirely of the outer surfaces of the leaves; it is very strong and is quite impervious to rain.

By far the most interesting of the possessions of these people is the apparatus for making fire, which consists of three different parts, the split stick, the rattan, and the tinder. The split stick is a short stick of wood an inch or so in diameter, which is split at one end and is held open by a small pebble placed between the split halves. The rattan is a long piece of split rattan wound upon itself into a neatly coiled ring (see illustration p. 202), and the tinder is usually a lump of the fibrous sheath of a palm shoot and sometimes a piece of dried moss.

The method of making fire is as follows: In the split of the stick, between the stone which holds the split ends apart and the solid stick, is placed a small fragment of tinder. The operator—if one may use so modern a word in describing so ancient a practice—places the stick upon the ground and secures the solid, i.e. the unsplit end with his foot. Then, having unwound about a yard of the rattan, he holds the coil in one hand and the free end in the other and looping the middle of it underneath the stick at the point where the tinder is placed he proceeds to saw it backwards and forwards with extreme rapidity. In a short space of time, varying from ten to thirty seconds, the rattan snaps and he picks up the stick with the tinder, which has probably by this time begun to smoulder, and blows it into flame. At the point where the rattan rubs on the stick a deep cut is made on the stick, and at each successive use the stick is split a little further down and the rattan is rubbed a little further back, so that a well-used fire-stick is marked with a number of dark burnt rings. It was only with the greatest difficulty and after many attempts that we succeeded in producing fire in this manner, but the Tapiro do it with the utmost ease and they scorned our boxes of matches, which we offered them in exchange for their apparatus, and showed no signs of surprise at a suddenly kindled match.18

The most frequent use of the fire-stick is in lighting the tobacco, of which nearly every man carries a supply in his larger bag. These people cultivate tobacco in sufficient quantities to be able to supply the Papuans of the low country. The leaves are dried and neatly rolled up into long bundles weighing three or four pounds; the flavour is strong and rather bitter, but it is not unpleasant to smoke. The Tapiro smoke tobacco chiefly as cigarettes, using for the wrapper a thin slip of dry pandanus leaf. When, as is often the case, the wrapper is very narrow and the tobacco is inclined to escape, the man smokes his cigarette in a peculiar manner; he holds the unlighted end in his fingers and with his mouth draws out the smoke from between the edges of the wrapper in the middle of the cigarette, this he continues to do until the cigarette is about half consumed when he puts the end in his mouth in the ordinary way.

The Tapiro also smoke tobacco in a pipe in a fashion of their own. The pipe is a simple cylinder of bamboo about an inch in diameter and a few inches in length. A small plug of tobacco is rolled up and pushed down to about the middle of the pipe, and the smoker holding it upright between his lips draws out the smoke from below. The Tapiro never make large cigars like those of the Papuans of the Mimika, and the Papuans never smoke pipes, nor did they take readily to those that we gave them.

Besides the bone daggers mentioned above the only weapon of the Tapiro are the bow and arrows, which they always carry. The bows are a very little shorter than those of the Papuans, but otherwise they are very similar, viz.: straight tapered strips of hard wood “strung” with a slip of rattan. The arrows are shorter and lighter and of finer workmanship than those of the Mimika Papuans, but like those they have neither feathers nor nocks. The best, which they were not at all anxious to sell to us, are ornamented with simple carvings and are tipped with a very sharp point of black wood. An arrow which ended in a curious blunt lump of wood was used, so we understood, for shooting birds.

The Tapiro have no spears and neither they nor the Mimika Papuans know the use of the sling. They set quantities of little nooses for small animals, and we once found a rattan noose fixed to a root of a tree and evidently set with the purpose of catching a pig.

Many of them carry in their bags a small Jew’s harp, made of a thin piece of bamboo, from which they extract faint music that is pleasing to their ears. Two men possessed instruments of a more original design: these were made of pieces of polished bone fitting together in such a way that when one was turned round over the other it produced peculiarly discordant squeaks, which were highly appreciated by the player.

Wamberi Merbiri or Wamberimi, the village of the Tapiro which was visited by different members of our party on three separate occasions, is situated on the lower slopes of Mount Tapiro, the mountain nearest to Parimau, at about 1800 feet above the sea. It is in fact within a stone’s throw of that large clearing which Rawling and I had reached with so much difficulty, but when approached by the track used by the people themselves it is an easy walk of two or three hours from the Kapare River.

The track climbs by a steep almost knife-edged ridge densely covered with forest to the rounded shoulder of the hill where the village lies. The first sign of the village is a flimsy fence of tall poles, which bars the track and extends for a short distance on either side of it. Passing through a narrow opening in the fence you come to a cleared space occupied by three or four houses. A couple of hundred yards beyond these and separated from them by a small gully, which is bridged by an enormous fallen tree, is a second group of six houses, constituting the village of Wamberi Merbiri.

The houses are scattered about over three or four acres of steeply sloping ground, from which most of the trees have been cleared. Between the houses the ground has been levelled in three places to form almost level terraces, measuring about fifteen by five yards, completely cleared of vegetation and covered with small stones. These terraces are held up on the lower side by logs and stumps of trees, and the labour of making them by people whose only tools are stone axes and pieces of wood is difficult to imagine; they are used, so far as we could understand, for dances and other ceremonies.