A. F. R. Wollaston

“ THE AMBONESE
The harbour of Amboina is a wide deep channel, which nearly divides the island into two, and in it are the wonderful sea-gardens, which aroused the enthusiasm of Mr. Wallace.2 They are not perhaps so wonderful as the sea-gardens at Banda and elsewhere, but to those who have never seen such things before the many coloured sea-weeds and corals and shells and shoals of fantastic fishes seen through crystal water are a source of unfailing interest. The sea is crowded with fish of every size and form and colour. ”

“ It is now nearly ten years since the Dutch settled at Merauke, but in all that time, apart from curbing somewhat their head-hunting propensities, they have made very little impression on the natives, who still cling (if one may use somewhat of an Irishism) to their scanty costume of nothing at all, and refuse absolutely the beads and cloth and other “trade-goods” of the invading white man. They stroll about the place in a most lordly manner, and they like to visit the houses of the Europeans, where they spend hours disdainfully watching other people at their work. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ So we found ourselves confronted with the task of learning a language with neither grammar, dictionary nor interpreter. This may not seem to be an insuperable difficulty, nor is it perhaps where Europeans and educated people are concerned, but with Papuans it is a very different problem. The first thing to do—and very few of them would even grasp the idea—is to make them understand that you wish to learn their words. You may point at an object and look intelligent and expectant, but they are slow to take your meaning, and they soon tire of giving information. ”

“ THE DREARY JUNGLE
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 ”

“ 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. ”

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

“ The body is bent forward from the hips, the hands rest on the knees or on the hips, and then with a shuffling movement of the feet the woman swings herself from side to side or up and down, always presenting her back and the narrow strip of barkcloth, which usually hangs down like a tail behind, to the astonished gaze of the spectator. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ When the tide is high the bushes along the river bank and many of the drooping branches of the trees are submerged; the natives approach quietly in their canoes, cautiously push the net under the submerged vegetation, and then with a sudden jerk lift it up out of the water, in this way capturing numbers of small fish which had been sheltering or looking for food among the leaves. ”

“ Proceeding for two or three miles up the Mimika, which had become above the junction a comparatively insignificant stream forty or fifty yards across and very tortuous, the exploring party in the steam launch arrived at the village of Wakatimi situated on the right bank of the river. The village was crowded with natives, numbering perhaps one thousand people, who gave the visitors a most remarkable reception. As soon as the boat appeared in sight the natives crowded down to the bank and shouted shrilly, men, women and children. ”

“ Another amusement—it can hardly be called an art—of the Papuans is the game of cat’s cradle, at which many of them are extraordinarily proficient. It is not, as with us, a game played by two persons; with them the part of the second person is performed by the player’s teeth, and he contrives to produce some wonderfully intricate figures, none of which, I regret to say, we had patience or skill enough to learn. ”

“ The palace of the Governor General, formerly the house of Sir Stamford Raffles, stands at the edge of the Botanic Garden, which alone, even if you saw nothing else, would justify a visit to Java. Plants from all the Tropics grow there in the best possible conditions, and you see them to advantage as you never can in their natural forest surroundings, where the trunks of the trees are obscured by a tangle of undergrowth. ”

“ So fertile is the land that in many places the steepest slopes of the hills have been brought under cultivation by an ingenious system of terracing and irrigation in such a way that the higher valleys present the appearance of great amphitheatres rising tier above tier of brilliantly green young rice plants or of drooping yellow heads of ripening grain. The tea plantations and the fields of sugar-cane in Central Java not less than the rice-growing districts impress one with the unceasing industry of the people and the inexhaustible wealth of the island. ”

“ When the natives knew that it was dead, all the people of the village began to wail in the same manner as they do when a person dies, and the owner of the dog smeared himself with mud and mourned bitterly. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is impossible to land here with boats or pinnaces owing to the clayey and muddy bottom into which a man will sink up to the waist, the depth of the water being no more than three or four fathoms at three or four miles distant from the land. The land is low-lying and half submerged, being quite under water at high tide; it is covered with wild trees, those on the beach resembling the fir-trees of our country, and seemingly bear no fruit. The natives are coal black like the Kaffirs and they go about stark naked. ”

“ The natives of New Guinea are Papuans and the island is indeed the centre of that race, which is found more or less mixed with other races from the island of Flores as far as Fiji. Though the Papuans in New Guinea itself have been in many places altered by immigrant races, for instance by Malays in the extreme West, and by Polynesian and Melanesian influences in the South and East, there yet remain large regions,25 particularly in the Western half of the country, including the district visited by this expedition, where the true Papuan stock holds its own. ”

“ Dutch people in the East Indies have modified their habits, especially in the matter of clothing, to suit the requirements of the climate, and while they have to some extent sacrificed elegance to comfort, their costume is at all events more rational than that of many Englishmen in the East, who cling too affectionately to the fashions of Europe and often wear too much clothing. The men, who do the greater part of the day’s work between seven in the morning and one o’clock, wear a plain white suit of cotton or linen. ”

“ The people of Parimau, who had no means of getting intoxicated, were just as quarrelsome as the Wakatimi people, and fights were of frequent, almost daily occurrence. Some one does something, it matters not what, to offend some other person, and in an instant148 the village is in an uproar. Spears fly through the air—we never saw anybody touched by one—and stone clubs are brandished furiously, the combatants all shout horrible threats at the tops of their voices, while a few people look on stolidly or hardly take any notice at all. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Their working day begins fairly early, and by about eight o’clock the village is almost deserted by the women, who have all gone off in canoes to fish or collect sago. As a rule, two or three women go in each canoe, taking with them a few children, a dog or two, several fishing nets, rolls of matting, some spears and arrows, a little food, a bamboo filled with fresh water, if they are going down to the river mouth, and always a fire burning in the stern of the boat. The usual destination of the women is the muddy creeks among the mangrove swamps not far from the sea ”

“ 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. ”

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

“ The dogs in the village of the pygmies which we visited, were smooth-coated like those of the Papuans, so it is possible that that thick-coated animal came from some remote district where the natives live at a higher altitude.
The Papuan dogs are very sociable creatures, and they like to accompany the natives on their journeys. They are particularly fond of going in canoes on the river, and two or three are seen in nearly every canoe even when the people are only out fishing. ”

“ Many acres of ground on both sides of the river were cleared of bush and planted with bananas and sweet potatoes; we never succeeded in obtaining any of the latter, but bananas were brought for us to buy and in the circumstances they seemed to us to be excellent. The most extensive crop cultivated at Obota is tobacco; they plant out the seedlings and shelter them with a low roof of bent sticks covered with leaves, until the young plants are strong enough to bear the full force of the sun and rain. Almost every native smokes, men and women, and very often the children. ”

“ We were interested to find that the great bulk of the stuff from which clothes are made in Amboina is imported from England, and we were assured by a merchant who was interested in the trade that a man can dress himself in so-called European fashion as cheaply in Amboina as he can in this country.
An agreeable feature of life at Amboina, as at other places in the Netherlands Indies, is the hospitality of the Dutch people. A stranger of at all respectable social position is expected to introduce himself to the club, and the residents in the place feel genuinely hurt if he fails to do so. ”

“ The distribution of tobacco in New Guinea is rather a puzzling question. There are many places on the coast where its use was unknown until quite recently, while at the same time the mountain people, for example, in the Arfak Mountains and on the upper reaches of the Fly and Kaiserin Augusta Rivers, have been accustomed to cultivate it and to barter it with their neighbours in the lowlands. The Tapiro pygmy people, who live in the mountains, cultivate tobacco and exchange it with the Papuans of the upper Mimika who grow none themselves. ”

“ It is difficult enough in New Guinea to make a way up a river valley, but you always have the comforting reflection that the river itself leads you back to your base, when stores are exhausted and it is time to return. But when you attempt to make a cross-country journey, not only is the trouble of cutting a track much greater than it is in a river bed, but there is the difficult and often somewhat dangerous business of crossing the rivers ”

“ Most of the trees in the jungle do not attain a very great girth, but they grow up very rapidly to reach the light and in their upper branches there is soon accumulated a dense mass of climbers and parasitic plants, which in the course of time become too heavy for the tree and cause it to collapse. The floor of the jungle is strewn with the limbs and trunks of fallen trees and the smell of rotting wood is everywhere. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ They have no military bearing and no alertness, and one ceases to wonder that when the Netherlands East Indian native army is almost exclusively composed of Javanese, the war-like people of Atjeh have kept the field for so many years. It is a matter for surprise that the Dutch do not enlist more of the warlike Bugis of Celebes, and natives of the Moluccas, and even the Achinese prisoners themselves; ten thousand of such men would surely be of more worth than the 30,000 Javanese who fill the ranks of their native army. ”

“ Considering the enormous number of fish that there are—at the mouth of the river the water is sometimes seen to be seething with large fish—it cannot be said that the men are very clever with their spears.
They also shoot fish, using single- or three-pointed arrows; you may see a man standing quietly in a pool of water like a heron waiting for the fish to come up to him, or stalking a shoal of fish stealthily from the bank; in either case he will probably shoot arrow after arrow without effect, for they are absurdly indifferent marksmen with the bow. ”

“ When we were trying to persuade the headman to allow the women to be produced, it was a strange experience to be using the Papuans, of whose language we knew only the rudiments, as interpreters to an even less known people. ”