Two days’ scrambling up the valley brought us to the rest of the party at the depôt camp, and there we learnt the very unwelcome news of a discovery, which seemed likely to put an immediate end to our explorations. The advanced party had climbed up a spur to the west of the river and had seen that the Iwaka, instead of flowing (as we imagined) from the North-east by an apparently wide valley, actually flowed from the North through a deep, and in some places precipitous gorge, which we could not possibly attempt to traverse with our feeble coolies in the short time that remained to us.

If we were to advance at all, it was necessary for us to go in a North-easterly direction, but there we seemed to be completely cut off by the torrent of the Iwaka River. Attempts were made both upstream and downstream to wade across, but nobody succeeded in doing it, and no better luck attended those who tried to make a bridge by felling a tree across the river, the bridge was at once swept away. As a last expedient a large reward of money was offered to the first man who should find a way across the river, and again they all set out full of hope and armed with axes. The luck fell to two of the Gurkhas, who cleverly felled a large tree straight across the river. Had it fallen a few feet to one side or the other it would not have been long enough to reach the other bank, and if it had bent a little more in the middle, the water would have snatched it up like a straw and carried it away in a moment. But it kept just clear above the water and made a safe temporary bridge by which they could cross, and before nightfall a single rope of rattan was securely tied across the narrowest part of the river.

During the night the river rose and carried away the tree, and it seemed that with only one strand of rattan across the river the prospect of our reaching the other side was not very good. Nobody seemed inclined to risk the passage, even with the promise of a large reward, until one of the Gurkhas, Jangbir by name, said he would go. “There was only one way to go over—hand over hand, with a rattan round his waist held by us in case the bridge strand broke, a very likely thing, for it was extremely flimsy. Again the rope to hold him had to be very thin, or the weight would tear him from his hold. He got across finely, being dragged out straight by the torrent, until nearly over, when he could make no more headway. The rope tied to his waist was paid out fast, but was caught by the current, and then it was touch and go. Thus he hung for half a minute, dragged out in a horizontal position. If both rattans gave, it meant certain death; if he let go, the great strain would snap the rope round him with a like result. The rope was pulled in as quickly as possible, and then the lucky thing occurred. The strain was too great, and the rope we were pulling on snapped. This freed him, and he pulled himself up further and gained the bank.”24

When once a man was on the other side, it was simple to throw over another rattan, and so to pull over many more which he tied to the trees on his bank. On our side of the river was a large boulder with a hole conveniently bored through it, into which stout posts were jammed Y-fashion, and over them the rattans were strained and fastened to the trees behind. When more men were able to cross the river, a similar structure was erected on the other bank.

The plan of the bridge was very simple, two hand-rails made of a number of twisted rattans, and a foot piece made of a long thin tree, which was secured to the hand-rails by loops of rattan. The span of the bridge was about one hundred feet, and there must have been several hundred yards of rattan used in its construction. The credit of the idea and of most of the work in making the bridge is due to the Gurkhas, without whose help we should never have crossed the Iwaka.

But all this work had occupied valuable time, and when the bridge was finished we found that we had provisions left for only eight days longer. On February 8th Rawling, Marshall and I, with three Gurkhas and nineteen coolies, and Cramer with a small party of convicts, crossed the Iwaka and made a way Eastwards. After crossing a moderately steep ridge we came down to a stream of marvellously clear water, which brought us in a short time to another large river flowing out of the mountains in a Southerly direction.

So many rivers are there in this region that this was in some places separated by less than two miles from the Iwaka; it was eventually found that this was a branch of the Wania, a large river which enters the sea in a common mouth with the Kamura, of which the Iwaka is a tributary. It was evident that this river came from the slopes of Mount Godman (9,500 ft.) a huge mass immediately to the North of us, and it was our intention to climb up on to the ridge of that mountain in the hopes of obtaining a view of the country to the North of it, and of the Snow Mountains.

Going up the valley we found ourselves in the midst of really beautiful scenery. The mountains soon closed in about us, and the river, though not running through an actual gorge, was walled by precipices of white limestone rock, now on one side and now on the other. This necessitated our frequently crossing the river, a task by no means easy even when the water is low, as it happened to be at that time. The best way of crossing those rapid rivers is not to fight your way upwards and across the stream, but to go rather with the stream in a sloping direction towards the other bank, and to go as quickly as may be. The bottom is made of very slippery stones, and a false step means disaster, as we all found at different times, but in that way you cross with far less exertion than by breasting the stream.

In this valley, for the first time since we came to New Guinea, we found several flowering plants; among the rocks by the river grew clumps of a large pink Balsam, and on the moss at the foot of the tree trunks was a beautiful scarlet Begonia with a remarkably hairy leaf.

There was a curious green-flowered aroid with a large blotched leaf, and growing everywhere over the cliffs and the tree trunks were Pitcher plants (Nepenthes) of two species.

On the second day we camped on a sort of shelf on the hillside, two or three hundred feet above the river, and as our progress up the valley had been so slow, it was certain that we should not be able to reach the summit ridge before we were obliged to turn back by lack of food. So it was decided to go straight up the spur on which we then were in the hope that from the top we might see a view of the surrounding country. On the following day we climbed up about two thousand feet; the hillside was exceedingly steep, and the men had to haul themselves up by the roots of the trees above them.

At our camp on the hillside—there was not a square yard of level ground—we were troubled for the first time in New Guinea by a lack of water. No rain had fallen for two days, and the ground was so steep that all the water had run off, and it was a long time before the Gurkhas found a trickle of water in a gully some distance away, whence a supply was laboriously fetched to the camp.

On the fourth day we climbed up about two thousand feet further, but with a great deal more difficulty. The trees became smaller as we went up, but infinitely denser, and for a great part of the way we scrambled up, not along the ground, but over a fantastic network of roots and trunks of dead and living trees, all of them covered with mosses and festooned with a wonderful variety of creepers. In some places we were clambering over the topmost branches of the tangle of vegetation, and in others we were burrowing into mossy caves and grottoes among the roots. It was a weird and rather uncanny place and, except that it lacked the beauty of colour that is found there, it recalled the forest at ten thousand feet in Ruwenzori more than any other place I have seen.

At 5,000 feet we found ourselves on the ridge, a narrow knife-edged spur of Mount Godman, and there we camped. It was a most unlikely looking spot for a camp, but the ridge beyond was a great deal worse—it took the Gurkhas many hours to cut the narrowest track along it for half a mile—so we had to make the best of the place that we had reached. A number of trees were cut down and the irregularities of the ground were more or less filled up with the branches, and there we pitched our tents and spread our beds. There was a small shrub (a species of Erica, I think), which, when burnt, filled the air with a delicious smell of incense, strangely out of keeping with our surroundings.

Though we had been surrounded by dense clouds since we reached the ridge, it obstinately refused to rain for the third day in succession, a thing quite unprecedented in our experience of the country. Happily the mosses, which clothed everything, were full of moisture and we had only to squeeze them like sponges to get water in plenty; the coolies of course complained of the dirty colour of their rice when it was cooked in mossy water, but we found that it gave to ours an unfamiliar and not unpleasant taste.

The greater part of the next day was spent in cutting a way along the ridge to a point (5800 ft.) from which it was hoped that a view of the country might be seen. Long before the track was cut the clouds were down upon us, and no view could be seen, so we decided to stay for another day, although we had only one day’s food remaining. But the view that we saw on the following day was more than compensation for our rather scanty fare.

Due North of us, and rising from the spur on which we stood, was the great mass of Mount Godman, and to the West of that the even more imposing peak of Wataikwa Mountain (9923 ft.). Between the two could be seen a part of the tremendous cliffs of Mount Leonard Darwin (13,882), the southern face of which appears to show an almost vertical precipice of upwards of ten thousand feet. To the West ridge beyond ridge of forest-covered heights stretched away to the ranges of the Charles Louis Mountains in the far distance. To the East rose the beautiful three-topped mountain called the Cock’s Comb (10,050 ft.), behind and to the North of which heavy banks of clouds showed where the snows of Mount Carstensz lay hidden. Five thousand feet below us the mountains ended almost abruptly, and the southern half of the circuit of our view was occupied by the hideous plain of dull green jungle to a hazy line of the sea forty miles away. Here and there the sunlight caught the waters of innumerable rivers, and we could distinctly see those that we had crossed, the Tuaba, Kamura, Wataikwa, and the Iwaka. Further to the East was a still bigger river, the Wania, which we could trace down to its lagoon-like estuary, and beyond it was the Aiika, and a very distant river, possibly the Newerip.

Nobody who has not spent a year and more in a dreary jungle country, where you are seldom more than a yard or two from the nearest tree, and where the limit of your view is the opposite bank of a stagnant river, can realise the rest, to the mind and to the eye alike, that a wide horizon gives. Although there were points of interest to be seen by the cartographical eye, there was nothing, excepting the outlines of some of the nearer mountains, of beauty in that view; there were no striking features of the land and no gorgeous effects of colour, but one will always treasure a recollection of the physical delight of seeing far and wide to the horizon, and of the feeling of satisfaction in looking down godlike on the world that we had so painfully traversed.

But views, like all other good things, have their ends, and ours was all too soon interrupted by the daily thick blanket of white cloud, which rolled up and enveloped us until nightfall. We groped our way back to the camp where we found our coolies very miserable and shivering with cold—poor wretches, they had never before endured, nor even imagined, a temperature so low as 50° F. To us the coolness was very pleasant, and it provoked a hunger to which we had long been strangers; very small quantities of boiled rice, and chupatties made by the Gurkhas of mildewed and weevilly flour, only served to stimulate our appetites for more.

On the following day we retreated hastily downhill by the way we had come, and by forced marches, perhaps a little accelerated by our lack of food, in two days we arrived at the Iwaka camp. In the meantime Grant had been camped with the two Dayak collectors on a hill about three thousand feet high above the Iwaka, where they had made a very fine collection of birds. Among them was a new dwarf species of Cassowary (Casuarius claudi) and specimens of the rare Six-plumed Bird of Paradise (Parotia meeki). Another bird very characteristic of the Iwaka and neighbouring valleys is the Moustached Swift (Macropteryx mystacea), which measures more than two feet across the wings, and is remarkable for its long pointed tail and its tapering white moustache. This bird seldom appears until late in the afternoon, when it is seen sailing majestically with outstretched wings at a height over the river.

Near the Iwaka on a hillside laid bare by a landslip we found two seams of coal a few inches in thickness; it was poor stuff and only burnt with difficulty when put into a fire. Mr. Lorentz found combustible coal in the hills near Mount Wilhelmina, and it is probable that a careful search would reveal the existence of better coal in this region too. Near the same place, as well as in one or two other localities, we found indications of petroleum, but all our searches for gold and other precious metals resulted in nothing except occasional traces of copper.

During the following days, while we were stumbling back to Parimau along the now familiar track, we wondered whether we should be the last as well as being the first Europeans to penetrate into that forsaken region. It has been mapped now, and our wanderings have shown that it is not the way by which any sane person would go who wished to explore the Snow Mountains. It is a region absolutely without inhabitants, and the Papuans, who live on the upper waters of the Mimika and Kamura rivers, shun it even as a hunting ground. There are no precious metals or other products of the soil to be won, and not until all the other forests in the world are cut down will its timber be of value. So it may safely be supposed that it will long be left untouched; the Birds of Paradise will call by day, the cassowaries will boom by night, and the leeches will stretch themselves anxiously on their leaves, but it will be a long time before another white man comes to disturb them.

Many people have the idea that a tropical forest is full of gorgeous flowers, about which brilliant butterflies are constantly flitting and birds of splendid plumage flash from tree to tree. This idea is no doubt due in a great measure to the habit of gathering together in hothouses the flowering plants of all the Tropics, though they may have come from Central America, from Africa and from Borneo or Java. It is true that there are many splendid birds, but the vegetation is so dense that you seldom, if ever, see them; the brilliant butterflies are mostly out of sight near the topmost branches of the trees; and you may travel for days together without seeing a single flowering plant. Many of the trees are covered with orchids on all their branches, but they very seldom flower, and the flowers of most of them are so insignificant that they do not attract your attention.

Occasionally you may see high above your head the white flower of a Dendrobium or the long spike of the gigantic Grammatophyllum, but I have only once (in a small island on the North coast of New Guinea) seen such a mass of flowering orchids as to make a splash of colour in the view. In the Tropics there is nothing comparable in colour with the blue hyacinths, the fields of buttercups, or the gorse and hawthorns of this country.

But if there is little that is beautiful in the jungle vegetation, there is a great deal that is curious and interesting. The ubiquitous Rattans, climbing Palms, are a constant source of wonder for their snake-like meanderings through the jungle until they climb to the top of some tree where they end in a bunch of leaves. We found three species of Screw Pines (Pandanus), fantastic trees on stilts, and branching like irregular candelabra. The wood of the Pandanus is very tough, and is used by the natives for making bows and spears; the long ribbon-like leaves are used for mats and the walls of their huts, and the fruits of some are eatable, but exceedingly hard. One species bears a cluster of small red fruit about the size of a banana; and another bears a huge melon-shaped fruit of a brilliant scarlet colour and weighing as much as thirty pounds and upwards.

Equally remarkable are the trees which stand propped on a number of aerial roots and seem, as Mr. Wallace noted,25 to have started growing in mid air; where several of these trees grow together, it is difficult to say where one ends and another begins. Too rarely you come across a magnificent forest tree (usually, I believe, a species of Dammara) supported on huge buttresses, which begin twenty or more feet above the ground and spread out for many yards from the foot of the tree. We had occasion to cut down some of these trees, and found the wood intensely hard; if there were seven or eight buttresses a single one would still hold up the tree after all the rest had been cut. When the tree had been felled, the stump looked like a great starfish sprawling over the ground with a centre not more than a foot across, while the trunk a few feet up had been a yard or more in thickness.

It has happened to me to walk through many hundreds of miles of forest in different parts of the world, but I have never seen any so dreary as that New Guinea jungle with its mud, its leeches, its almost unbroken stillness, and its universal air of death. Happily the mind of man is of a curiously selective habit, and it chooses to retain only the more pleasant things; you forget the long wet weeks of rain and mud, the hunger and the nasty food, and remember rather those glorious moments when you came out of the twilit jungle into an open river bed and saw the distant mountains, or those rare sunny afternoons when the “implacable cicala” creaked in the treetops above your tent.

There are indeed a thousand things to interest one in the jungle, however blank and monotonous it may seem to be. The trouble is that so much of your attention in these places must be devoted to the trivial duties of the day, the eternal question of food, the care of the sick, the precautions against floods, and so on, that but little time is left over for studying the hidden wonders of the world about you. The geographers and the naturalists of the future will live in comfortable ships on the coast, whence they will fly daily into the heart of New Guinea where they will find things undreamt of now. But the time for that is not yet, and in the meantime those who plod on foot do the best they can.

CHAPTER XVIII

Departure from Parimau—Parting Gifts—Mock Lamentation—Rawling explores Kamura River—Start for the Wania—Lose the Propeller—A Perilous Anchorage—Unpleasant Night—Leave the Motor Boat—Village of Nimé—Arrival of “Zwaan” with Dayaks—Their Departure—Waiting for the Ship—Taking Leave of the People of Wakatimi—Sail from New Guinea—Ké Islands—Banda—Hospitality of the Netherlands Government—Lieutenant Cramer—Sumbawa—Bali—Return to Singapore and England—One or Two Reflexions.

After our return to Parimau in February, Rawling and Grant went down to Wakatimi, while Marshall and I spent a week in visiting the village of the Tapiro in a last but vain attempt to see the pygmy women. The first few days of March were occupied in packing up the accumulated odds and ends of our year’s occupation and on the 9th of March we were ready to depart. We had told the natives that we were going away and for days before we went they pestered us with questions as to whether we were coming back and what we would give them when we went, and they quickly decided which of our houses they intended to occupy.

On the morning of our departure from Parimau we allowed no natives to come into the camp until all the canoes were loaded up and ready for a start. Then we called out to them to come over and about forty men and boys splashed across the river and came swarming into the camp. We had kept for them a number of axe-heads, knives and other pieces of steel and iron, and when the people saw what they were going to be given they became a crowd of madmen. I distributed the things, while Marshall stood by with a big piece of wood and kept them from rushing into the place and seizing everything at once. They shouted and raved and screamed and grew almost pale with excitement, and the various expressions of greed and cunning and anger and delight in their faces were most interesting to watch.

After we had given them their presents we walked towards the canoes, and then they began to set up their horrible wail. A few of them picked up pieces of cloth and matting, through the middle of which they thrust their heads and then began to howl with their hands over their eyes. I took a last look round the houses to see that nothing of value had been left behind and on going to the store-house I met a man, one of our best friends, coming out of it with a tin of rice under his arm. He immediately put down the tin, tore off from a climbing bean that grew by the house a trail of leaves a yard or two long, and wound them about his head and body. Then he burst into tears and the most heartrending sobs, which changed in a moment, when he caught my eye, into a shout of laughter.

When we finally got into the canoes all the men came down to the water’s edge and wailed, while some of them sat down in the water and smeared themselves with mud. In the meantime we could see their women going off into the jungle carrying tins full of their possessions to hide there, and it is probable that after we left there was a good deal of quarrelling and fighting over the spoil. The wailing is a purely perfunctory politeness, but I think there were a few men who were genuinely sorry to lose us. On the following day a strong ebb-tide bore us quickly down to Wakatimi and our navigations of the upper Mimika river were at an end.

In the meantime Rawling had made an interesting exploration of the coast and of the river mouths to the East of the Mimika. The motor boat, which had been badly damaged some months earlier, had been repaired by two Dutch pioneer soldiers and was more or less sea-worthy. In a four days’ trip he had entered the Atuka river, or rather the Atuka mouth of the Kamura river, a few miles up which he came to Atuka, a large village of about six hundred huts surrounded by coconut palms and tobacco plantations. Proceeding up the river into the main Kamura river he went on almost to the junction with the Wataikwa river, thus filling in a large gap of unknown river. On his way back he chose the left (East) branch and after passing the village of Kamura, where the inhabitants showed an inclination to plunder the boat, he came to the lake-like estuary of the Kamura and Wania rivers and entered the sea by a deep channel. It is worth noting that the inhabitants of Atuka and Kamura villages, many of whom visited us two or three times at Wakatimi, are of a decidedly lower type (in appearance) than the people of the Mimika district, though the distance that separates them is only a few miles. They have a fiercer and more brutal aspect and many of them, both men and women go completely naked, a habit which is never practised by the people of Wakatimi. Scarcity of petrol and an irregularly sparking plug brought that excursion to an untimely end, before the lower waters of the Wania had been investigated.

From our hill-top (see p. 239) the Wania was evidently by far the most considerable of all the rivers of the district, and apart from our desire to see the people of the Wania, of whom the Mimika natives always spoke with great respect, we felt bound to explore that river as far as possible. Accordingly on March 14, Rawling, Marshall and I, with a Dutch pioneer, two Gurkhas and three coolies, set off in the motor boat towing the yawl, a ship’s boat about twenty feet long, laden with tents and provisions for a week. In a few hours we arrived at the mouth of the Wania river and found that owing to the low tide there was no way of crossing the sand-bar that lay across the entrance. This circumstance was the more remarkable, because only a few days earlier Rawling had come through this bar by a very deep channel. The frequent changes in the banks make the navigation of this coast and particularly of the river mouths exceedingly difficult.

On this occasion the sea was already rather rough, so that we could not anchor and wait until the tide rose, and as the wind was increasing in force there was nothing for it but to turn back and try to take shelter in one of the rivers between the Wania and the Mimika, if not in the Mimika itself. All went well for a few miles and then, as happened frequently, the leather band jumped off the driving wheel and the engine was stopped. When it was replaced and the engine was started again, there was no churning of water in the stern and we realized with some consternation that we had lost our propeller. We were about twelve miles from the mouth of the Mimika, in a shallow sea of less than three fathoms, with a strong wind blowing towards the shore where the waves began to break within a few hundred yards of us, and we were ten men with a heavy motor boat and a heavily-laden yawl to get along somehow. We put four men into the yawl to row and they tried to tow, but the current was so strong against them that they made no headway at all, so we had to anchor where we were and hoped for better things. We pitched and rolled and bumped about most horribly and soon most of the party were deadly sea-sick, perhaps luckily for them, because in that condition one cares nothing for the prospect of shipwreck.

Our anchor rope was short and none too strong, and the rope between us and the yawl was thoroughly rotten—it had snapped once earlier in the day—and we expected that every sudden jerk of the lumpy sea would break it again. Had that happened, there might have been a nasty accident, as the men were too sick to row, even if they had known the art, and their chances of swimming ashore through a sea swarming with sharks were not very bright. Our own predicament in the helpless motor boat would have been unpleasant too, if the yawl had gone adrift, but happily the ropes held. Another drawback was that the motor boat leaked like a sieve, so that a man was kept constantly at work baling her out, and we did not know that the strain might not open her old timbers even more. There was a glorious full moon which one would have enjoyed seeing from the smooth deck of a steamer, but there we could only think how uncomfortable it was lying (without having had dinner) on boxes and tins and gear of all sorts huddled in the bottom of the boat.

The wind continued all through the night and the sea did not moderate, so at daylight, after having been for sixteen hours at anchor, we decided to leave the motor boat hoping that it would not be swamped before we were able to come back and fetch it. We all got into the yawl, which we pulled through quite a nasty sea for about three miles to a sand-bank in the estuary of the Timura river, where we camped until the rising tide enabled us to reach the mainland about midnight. On the following day, the sea having become calmer, we rescued the motor boat, which was by that time half full of water, and towed it slowly to the Timura.

But it was a most arduous business and without the help of a party of natives, who fortunately came along the coast in canoes and were prevailed upon to assist us in paddling, we should never have been able to bring back both of the boats. The arrival of the motor boat at the Mimika on the fifth day, propelled by native paddles instead of by its own power, was not a very dignified affair—it resembled rather the formerly familiar sight of the motor-car in tow of a horse from the plough —but it was a piece of good fortune that it and we returned at all.

We stopped for a night on the way at Nimé, a village at the mouth of the Keaukwa River. This is a very large village—I counted four hundred and thirty huts—but there were hardly a dozen people in the place, the whole population having gone off on one of their periodical migrations to a vegetable diet up the river. It was evident from the immense piles of fishbones and empty shells about the houses that the inhabitants must live largely by fishing, when they are there. The houses are better made than those at Wakatimi, and they are arranged in terraces and crescents along the water’s edge. It was there that we saw the elaborate dancing-houses described above (p. 143).

Just as we paddled laboriously into the Mimika estuary we saw far down on the horizon the smoke of a steamer, and in an hour or two a white painted vessel, which turned out to be the Dutch Government ship Zwaan, drew inshore and anchored outside the bar. We naturally supposed that this was a ship that had come to take away the expedition, as we had informed the Government some months earlier that we hoped to be ready to leave the country by the end of March. But that communication had taken a long time, as everything does in those regions, in reaching its destination, and the Zwaan had come, not to take away the expedition, but to bring the means of prolonging the expedition still further.

It appeared that in the previous December the Committee of the Expedition at home, hearing of our scarcity of coolies some months earlier, had decided that a further supply of coolies should be sent to us without delay. Though cables work quickly enough between London and Singapore, communications beyond that are matters of days and weeks, and it was not until the 18th of March that the party of Dayak coolies, who had been engaged in Sarawak by the kind permission of H.H. the Raja, arrived at the Mimika. They were in the charge of Mr. C. B. Kloss, Curator of the Government Museum at Kuala Lumpor, who had brought with him six months’ provision for himself and the men. Almost at the same time that the Committee in England had taken this step, we in New Guinea had decided that three months more was as long as we were prepared to stay in the country, and a request had been sent to the Dutch Government to take us away at the end of that time.

When the Zwaan arrived we were all ready to depart, and Cramer’s party, numbering more than a hundred men, were chafing with impatience to get away; it would have been impossible for the Government to keep them there yet another six months. Even if there had been a possibility of our staying on in the country, the number of Dayaks, thirty-eight, was quite insufficient for a long journey into the interior and the prospect of reaching the moderately high ground of Tapiro Mountain, the best that could be hoped for, was not sufficient inducement to tempt any one to paddle again up the Mimika river. Added to this was the further consideration that in a week or two the more rainy season would begin and that for five or six months very little progress would be possible even with an unlimited supply of the best coolies.

So there was nothing for it but for Mr. Kloss and the Dayaks to go back in the Zwaan, which sailed for Amboina on the following day, taking also Marshall, as many sick and useless coolies and soldiers as could be crammed on board, and an urgent request to the authorities to remove us as soon as might be. The Dayak episode was altogether an unfortunate one; had the men reached us six months earlier, we should have made a very good use of them, few though they were; but coming as they did when we were on the point of leaving the country they merely illustrated the uselessness of attempting to conduct an expedition from the other side of the world.

During the next three weeks we waited for the ship with what patience we could. By that time we were all somewhat stale and disinclined for any exertion, and those days of waiting at Wakatimi seemed interminably long. The only pleasant moments were when on fine evenings we could sit outside and watch the sun go down behind the palm trees across the river and hope each time that that would be the last. There were times when for two or three days a strong wind blew and we could hear the surf thundering on the beach, and we knew that even if the ship came it could not approach the shore. Then there were false alarms of whistles having been heard, or of boats seen coming up the river, but our suspense at last came to an end on April 5th, when a steam-launch towing a string of empty boats came puffing up to the camp, where they were received with immense enthusiasm. They came from the Dutch gunboat Mataram, which had been despatched to take away the native escort, and the next day came boats from the Zwaan, which had come to transport us and our men and the remaining stores of the expedition to Amboina. There followed two days of busy loading and coming and going of boats, during which our impatience to be off was a little allayed by the forethought of one of the officers of the Mataram, who stayed ashore with us and had brought with him that rare luxury, bread, and one or two other welcome delicacies.

Before sunset on April 7th the last boat was loaded and ready to go, and we had an amusing leave-taking with the people of Wakatimi. It was known that we were going to depart and for some days people from other villages had been crowding into Wakatimi. A large number of men were waiting outside the fence of the camp, but when we invited them to come inside they became unaccountably shy and would not venture. So I went outside and took one bolder fellow, a man whom we knew well, and led him by the arm to a hut, where there were a quantity of old mosquito nets; he seized one and bolted as fast as he could run, apparently thinking that there was something suspicious in this unwonted generosity. Then a few more came very warily after him and then fifty or sixty men dashed into the house and out again as soon as they had snatched up something, it mattered not what. Most of them were armed with spears or bows and arrows, and as there were men fighting to get into and out of the house at the same time it was wonderful that nobody was damaged.

When the people in Wakatimi saw what was going on in the camp they began to yell with excitement, and in a few seconds twenty or more canoes packed with men came paddling madly across the river; they were so excited that some of them upset the canoes, a thing they very seldom do, and they had to swim to the shore. For ten minutes or so the camp was a pandemonium. About two hundred raving lunatics were dashing madly from one house to another and carrying off boxes, sacks, mosquito nets, cases of empty bottles, bits of iron, tables, beds, mats and everything they could possibly move. They howled and raved and fought like wild beasts in a manner horrible to see.

Several women came over and danced and sang in a canoe just in front of the camp, while the crowd of people who had not been able to find a place in the canoes shrieked from the opposite bank. When they could carry no more, they loaded their canoes to the brim with miscellaneous cargoes and went back across the river to the village. There they at once began to squabble over the spoils, and the last we heard of Wakatimi, as darkness came down, were the shrill shrieks of quarrelsome women and the angry shouts of men.

New Guinea treated us kindly in farewell, and we steamed down the river in a glorious starlight, the kind of night which many people think is usual in the tropics, but is in fact most lamentably rare. We left Cramer on board the Mataram and went on to the Zwaan, where we soon were lulled to sleep by the pleasant music of the screw. Early the next morning a dull cloud on the northern horizon was our last view of New Guinea, and before night we had reached civilisation again in the anchorage of Dobo.

Two days later we came to the Ké Islands and went ashore to visit the Catholic Mission at Toeal. There is nothing of great interest to see there except the magnificent “iron wood” timber, which is cut in the forests of the larger island, and is used for boat-building; it is obtained in larger pieces than teak, and it is said to be equally good. The fathers occupy themselves with carpentry and boat-building and with teaching a class of small children. The few people whom we saw appeared to be of a mixed Malay-Papuan race and were dressed in unspeakably dirty clothes.

From Toeal we went on to Banda, where we spent a day of pouring rain, a great pity, for a walk through the nutmeg woods of Banda is one of the pleasantest excursions in the islands, and a day later we dropped anchor in the harbour of Amboina.

It will be fitting to remark here that on the outward journey from Java to New Guinea and on our return from the Mimika to Amboina, the members of the expedition were the guests of the Netherlands Government. The thanks of the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs have been conveyed to the captains of the ships and to the other officials, who helped the expedition in a hundred different ways.

At Amboina, where we waited a few days for the arrival of a steamer to Singapore, we parted with Cramer, who was prevented by a sharp attack of fever from coming with us. He was the one other man, beside Rawling, Marshall and myself, who remained with the expedition from the beginning to the end, and it is not paying him an empty compliment to say that few other people would have managed more successfully than he did to live with a party of foreigners in circumstances, which were often exceedingly difficult.

We sailed from Amboina on April 17th in the mail steamer Van Riebeeck, and amongst our fellow-passengers we found Captain Van der Bie and Lieut. Van der Wenn (Netherlands Navy), both of whom were returning to Java invalided from the expedition to the Island River in New Guinea. The expedition had penetrated a long way into the interior of the country, but all the Europeans fell ill and the expedition was withdrawn a few months later.

After calling at Macassar we went South past the Postilion Islands to the little known island of Sumbawa, where we went ashore for a few hours at Sumbawa Pesar. It looked a pretty country with well-wooded hills and level cultivated plains. We were much struck by the appearance of the natives, who have a longer type of face and a much fairer skin than any other of the Malay races I have seen. The men all go armed with a kris, and they smoke cigars of an incredible length.

From Sumbawa we steamed along the Northern shore of Lombok, from whose Peak (12,000 feet), the clouds rolled off magnificently at sunset, and early the next morning we came into the harbour of Buleling in the island of Bali. There we took a native carriage (sado), and drove a few miles out into the country to see a very interesting Hindu temple, where there are some remarkable good stone carvings, which shew signs of being carefully tended. The Hindu religion still survives, though it cannot be said to flourish, both in this island and in Lombok. The native villages that we saw have quite characteristic features of their own; they are surrounded by a high mud wall with a brick coping and are guarded by a swarm of fiercely barking dogs. Inside the wall, if you are bold enough to enter, you find a neatly swept compound, round the sides of which are well-made dwelling-houses, and in the middle are granaries of rice; both the houses and the granaries are raised on posts several feet above the ground and all are neatly thatched with rice straw. In the corner of the compound is a place set apart for a number of little stone shrines, some of them very elaborately carved, in which votive offerings of flowers and fruit are placed.

The Balinese seem to be a sturdy and industrious people; they have a free and independent appearance, very different from that of their somewhat grovelling neighbours, the Javanese. The roads are picturesquely lined with shady trees, and a very pleasant feature of them is the number of little mouse-coloured ponies, which carry panniers on a high-peaked saddle and are the coolies of Bali; most of them have an elaborate leather harness and many carry a large number of little bells, which make a pretty music along the roads. They appear to be hungry little animals, and they have the rare and valuable faculty of being able to eat out of a basket tied round their necks as they walk along. The country, what little we saw of it, looks extremely prosperous, and the beauty of the cultivated lands, interrupted here and there by groves of trees and backed by mountains, is beyond dispute.

From Bali to Java is only a few hours’ steaming, and from Batavia another ship brought us to Singapore, where we arrived on May 2nd. A month later we landed in England and the English Expedition to Dutch New Guinea, 1910-11, was a thing of the past.