About this time I received a message that Sir Francis Winter had departed, and that Mr. Musgrave had assumed the administratorship, pending the appointment of a successor to that official, or the return of Sir George Le Hunte. Likewise I received orders at once to prepare to accompany the Acting Administrator on a journey of exploration, for the purpose of discovering a practicable road from Oro Bay to the Yodda Gold-field, together with instructions to collect carriers for the said expedition.

I therefore hastily departed for Cape Nelson; and on my arrival at that point, at once hoisted about sixteen feet of turkey-red at the flagstaff—the signal that I wanted carriers for an important expedition, and also that all village constables and chiefs were to come to me immediately. Within a few hours the men began pouring into the Station, generally accompanied by their wives and relations, who were prepared to camp there until they knew what was in the wind, or until their husbands and relatives had departed with me.

A few hours after my arrival the Merrie England came in, and when I went on board I was informed that the Acting Administrator did not intend to make the proposed journey in person, but that he had decided that I should act for him and that I should be accompanied by Mr. Tooth, a Government surveyor, whom he had brought with him for that purpose. The Merrie England was swarming with extra Central Division police, who were landed to camp for the night in my barracks. His Excellency also informed me that, as he suffered from nausea on board, he wished to sleep at the Residency; upon which I sent for my house boys and told them to prepare my bedroom for the Acting Governor and to make up a bed for me in my private office, which they did. Upon my landing from the Merrie England, Oia, my orderly, remarked, “What are we to do with the bones of the white man in your room?” “Oh, shove them under my bed until this trip is over, and I have time to attend to them,” I said. For a short time before Oiogoba had brought me the bones of a man, which he informed me he suspected from the decayed state of the teeth in the jaw to be those of a white man: he, or rather his sorcerer, had roughly articulated them, after the manner in which they had previously seen me prepare the skeletons of the smaller mammals.

Night came, the whole station was plunged in the most profound sleep, with the exception of the sentries and myself. I was sitting in a bath, and was taking advantage of my first spare moments in order to read my private mail brought by the Merrie England, when suddenly a shriek rent the air from the Acting Governor’s room, followed by a scamper of feet across the verandah, a loud yell, and then a shot. Hastily I jumped from my tub, donned my pyjamas and arms, and bolted for the Governor’s room, while the noise of an alarmed Station became louder and yet louder.

When I reached His Excellency’s room I found the mosquito nets surrounding the bed in a blaze, whilst he was capering up and down the room, jibbering something to which I had no time to listen. I hurriedly tore down the burning nets and trampled them underfoot; the need for haste is evident, when I mention that thousands of rounds of cordite cartridges and several hundred-weight of gelignite and dynamite were stored in cells beneath my room. Just as I finished trampling out the flames, a rush of feet came; Sergeant Barigi on the one side and Corporal Bia on the other, with their respective squads, swarmed into the house, mother naked, except for bandoliers, bayonets and rifles, and prepared to kill at sight. Before I had time to question his Excellency as to what was the reason of the alarm, the sentry dumped up upon the verandah the stunned body of the Governor’s boy, with the remark, “I’ve got him, sir!” Then came screams, shrieks, and howls from the women and children in the married quarters, coupled with the yells of the non-commissioned officers of the respective detachments falling-in their men on the parade ground, and the shrill call of a bugle from the gaol compound, a quarter of a mile away, calling for the night guard; mix with that the beating of the drums of the native chiefs in charge of the carriers assembled for the expedition, crown it all with the bellowing of the Merrie England’s foghorn hysterically calling for her boats, and it may be imagined that a fair state of pandemonium reigned!

And all about nothing! His Excellency had gone to bed; then, in the dark had got up and felt for an object under his bed, and had inserted his fingers into the eye-holes of my skeleton’s skull, and being rather puzzled, had called for his Motuan boy to bring a candle. The boy groped under the bed, grabbed the skeleton, and, being a superstitious Motuan, had given a yell and promptly dropped the candle, which fired the mosquito nets; he had then bolted over the verandah, where he had instantly been flattened out by the sentry, who immediately afterwards fired his rifle to alarm the guard.

The prisoners in the gaol, most of whom were runaway carriers from the Mambare, had heard the riot and imagined that the Station was attacked or taken; they accordingly had made frantic efforts to break out and escape, for fear of being murdered—efforts which the ordinary warders were powerless to restrain; hence the wild bugling for assistance. In twenty minutes, however, peace reigned once more; some one yelled to the Merrie England that it was not battle, murder, or sudden death, but merely a compound of funk and imbecility. Sergeant Barigi’s squad went and quietened the agitated prisoners, while Corporal Oia and his men explained to the rest of the Station that the trouble was only due to a fool of a Motuan having been scared of my skeleton!

Tooth, the surveyor the Governor had brought with him, was a most peculiar individual; he had spent most of his life surveying in the arid wastes of Northern Australia, and had there lost every ounce of superfluous flesh, as well as acquiring two delusions; one of which was, that his frame and constitution were like cast-iron and not susceptible to fatigue, and the other, that an extraordinary Calvinistic brand of religion that he had invented was the only true means of grace. He had only made one convert, so far as I could understand, namely, his wife.

I discovered Tooth’s idiosyncracies during the first ten minutes we were alone together, while we were discussing the arrangements for our expedition. I noticed two large S’s embroidered on his collar. “Mr. Tooth,” I asked, “what do those S’s mean? Surveyor?” “No,” he replied, “Salvation.” “Are you a member of the Salvation Army, Mr. Tooth?” “I was,” he said, “but I differ with them,” and then began to explain his own particular brand of dogma. “Oh, Lord!” I thought, “what am I in for?” Then I cut in hurriedly to the discourse, as a dreadful thought struck me. “Mr. Tooth, are you a teetotaller as well?” “No,” said Tooth, “that is one of my differences with the——” I hastily interrupted him by yelling for a boy and telling him to bring drinks; then, before Tooth could get going again, I struck in, “This expedition of ours will in no way resemble a Methodist picnic. We shall first have to penetrate a coastal belt full of swamps and rotten with fever of the most malignant type; there, forced marches will be the order of the day, and sometimes it will be necessary to use other than Kindergarten methods to persuade carriers of the type I shall have with me, that such marches are for their own benefit; next, we shall skirt Mt. Lamington, and that mountain is the haunt of some particularly venomous tribes, who are perpetually fighting, and who regard every stranger as an enemy to be slain at sight; we shan’t have a chance to get into anything like friendly relations with them, for Walker and De Molynes have had one scrap with them, Elliott another, and they chased Walsh clean out of their district. Now, what I want to know is this, have you any conscientious scruples about shedding blood? You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, and you can’t take an expedition past Mt. Lamington without some one being killed on one side or the other. Personally I have a strong aversion to being coarsely speared in the midriff or rudely clubbed on the head, or having similar things done to my constabulary or carriers, and should prefer the casualties to be on the other side.” “If the heathen in his wickedness rageth,” said Tooth, “the heathen in his wickedness must die, also I have a wife to think of; but it is sad to contemplate that his soul will be damned.” “That’s right, Mr. Tooth,” I said, “when the heathen rageth, you think of Mrs. Tooth and be hanged to the heathens’ souls.” He then got up and groped in his bag, producing therefrom an antiquated ivory-handled revolver of Brobdingnagian proportions; a thing throwing a ball about the size of a Snider bullet. “What do you think of that?” remarked the proud owner. “I’ve had it twenty-five years!” “The Lord help the heathen you shoot with that thing; you’ll disembowel him,” I said, as I gazed in awe at the ponderous piece of artillery and shoved a finger into its cavernous muzzle; “also the ammunition will be the devil’s own weight for you to carry. Let me lend you a service revolver; it will be quite as effective and half the weight.” He, however, declined to be parted from his beloved piece of ironmongery, explaining to me that weight did not matter to his iron constitution; he, however, consented to take a service rifle, instead of an enormous American repeating fowling-piece he had as his second armament.

After viewing Tooth’s provision of what he considered suitable arms for a difficult expedition, curiosity compelled me to ask him what instruments he proposed taking. He thereupon departed for the Merrie England, and returned followed by about a dozen carriers, bringing one six-inch theodolite, one five-inch ditto, one three-inch ditto, one sextant, one artificial horizon, two hypsometers, two chronometers, two aneroid barometers, a circumferenter and two prismatic compasses, one Gunter’s chain, one six-chain tape, one table, one chair, a complete set of mathematical instruments, three large bottles of different coloured inks, a paint box, a large stand telescope, an enormous roll of plan paper, together with at least six flat field-books and several tomes of logarithmical tables, astronomy, bridge building, etc. “Thunder and sealing-wax!” I exclaimed, “have you plundered the entire Survey Office? Or do you think we have an elephant transport?” “Oh no. The Hon. A. Musgrave and I compiled the list, and he gave me an order to draw the things from the Survey Department,” said Tooth. “It’s damned hard luck,” I remarked, “that whenever Muzzy tries his hand at an inland expedition, I should invariably be dragged into it; it is about up to him to light on some other unfortunate for a change. It seems to me that there is little to choose between the command of one of Muzzy’s expeditions, and that hell you have in store for the souls of the heathen!” I then carefully selected from the stock a three-inch theodolite, a prismatic compass, an aneroid, and a hypsometer; and from the library, a Trautwine’s Pocket Book and a Nautical Almanack. “There you are, Mr. Tooth,” I told him; “that is all I can transport, and it is ample. We are not making an exact survey of the German frontier, or laying out a Roman road, but are looking for the easiest and most practicable route from a point on the coast to another in the interior; a meridian altitude by day, and a star by night, are all the observations we require. You have what we need for that in my selection, the rest is but lumber.”

Before continuing the tale of our expedition, a little story about Tooth will fit in here. We had long since found the route for the road, and Tooth, Elliott, Walsh, and myself, with several hundred Kaili Kaili and Binandere, were engaged in cutting it through an immensely high forest. Elliott and Walsh were both assistant officers of mine, and were, as a rule, stationed with small detachments of constabulary at different posts amongst difficult tribes; they differed one from the other in every respect save one, but were close friends. Walsh was a public-school boy and the son of an Irish baronet; Elliott, a working miner of little education, who had received a temporary appointment at Tamata Station to fill a vacancy caused by the rapid deaths of the officers previously stationed at that salubrious spot; he had proved himself to be so useful at police patrol work and work among the miners, as to be permanently retained. The respect in which the two men were alike was, that both possessed happy mercurial temperaments, and neither feared anything on earth except me—it being my business to stand between them and the hot water they were perpetually getting into at Port Moresby, also to chasten them at frequent intervals (too frequently I fear they thought), for the good of the district and their own welfare. Take them either apart or together, neither could be taken for promising members of the Young Men’s Christian Association, but Tooth chose to consider them as possible brands to be plucked from the burning; if he had raked New Guinea through, he could hardly have found a brace of more unlikely converts than were that bright pair.

Well, we had got a strip of tall trees chopped off at the butts, of about a quarter of a mile in length and twenty-two yards in width, and the infernal things were so tangled up at the tops with a network of vines and creepers, as to refuse to come down. Natives crawled about the trunks chopping, others climbed neighbouring trees and hacked at the vines; the work was frightfully dangerous, as the men swarmed underneath everywhere, and one never knew the moment when the whole mass of timber would come crashing down on top of them. Suddenly the expected happened, down came the lot, the workers scuttling like rabbits into the adjoining forest; all but one escaped, but a huge pandanus top fell upon him and flattened him out. The crashing, tearing and rending of that avalanche of falling timber then ceased, and from under the pandanus trees came the screams of a man apparently in mortal agony. “Cut him out!” I yelled. “Who the devil is it?” “Komburua,” was the reply, as fifty naked natives flew with their axes to the spot, and almost immediately turned tail and fled howling into the surrounding forest, while the howls of Komburua continued, containing if anything a still keener note of agony. “Curse it! Have the choppers gone mad?” I howled. “Forward the Bogi and Papangi detachments! Cut that man out at once!” Walsh and Elliott seized axes and, followed by their respective squads, attacked the tree under which lay the screaming Komburua. Then we found trouble thick and plenty; about a dozen nests of hornets, as big as bumble bees, had come down with the timber and got busily to work; they had routed the naked choppers in one act, but the constabulary, under the storm of blasphemy and threats showered by Walsh, Elliott and myself, stuck to the work, in spite of hornet stings, until the man was released. I then examined Komburua, who kept up a constant moaning, but could find nothing broken or any sign of internal injuries. “Damn you,” I said, as I cuffed his head, “there is nothing the matter with you, and you have got us all badly stung by beasts with stings like red-hot fish-hooks!” “Nothing the matter!” wailed Komburua. “Nothing the matter! First the whole forest falls on top of me, and then all the red and green ants in the country begin to eat me!” It was quite true; that pandanus top had contained several nests of savagely biting red and green ants, which had shaken out on top of the pinned Komburua; when I looked again closely at his skin, I found he was bitten all over. He afterwards said that the ants had been so thick that they had to take turns in biting him, as there was not enough room on his skin for them all at once. But I think this was an exaggeration. Tooth didn’t get stung, he had been some distance away when the accident occurred, and only arrived in time to hear the language used in the culminating stage of the extrication of Komburua; and at that language Tooth was greatly grieved. He saw three souls bound for one of the worst lodgings in that particularly vivid hell of his creation, souls, too, of men with whom Tooth was on terms of cordial friendship; it therefore behoved him to do something to save those friends. Now, a New Guinea Resident Magistrate’s relations with his officers in my day were very much the same as those of a captain of a man-of-war with his; they might be on most cordial terms of friendship, but they lived apart and fed apart; or if, as usually happened, these rules were relaxed when we were engaged on work such as the present, still no comment would be caused by the R.M. having his dinner in his own tent or absenting himself from the nightly conclave, and it would be a gross breach of etiquette to intrude upon him then.

That night I dined in my own tent, and afterwards I neither visited the general mess-tent, nor sent and invited any officer to mine. Tooth felt the fervour of his creed working in him; some one must be saved. Elliott had used the worst language; he would begin with him. He waited until Elliott had turned into his hammock, then wended his way thereto. Walsh, whose tent was alongside, overheard the conversation, and told it to me some time afterwards. Tooth began in this wise: “Alec, I want something from you.” “It’s no good, Tooth, I haven’t a blanky bob; if I had, you would be welcome to it,” replied Elliott. “It’s not that,” said Tooth, in sepulchral tones, “neither a lender nor a borrower be. It is something more precious than gold.” “Osmiridium,” hazarded Elliott, “I had some that I got on the Yodda, but I gave it to a barmaid in Sydney.” Tooth changed his tactics, “Alec, I want to probe into your being,” he said. “After those blasted hornet stings, I suppose; I’ll see you damned first. Ade has dug them out with a needle already, and anyhow I would not have a bull-fisted blunderer like you digging at me.” “No,” said Tooth, “it is your immortal soul I wish to cleanse and save.” “Hell’s flames!” said Elliott, sitting up in surprise, “are you mad?” “No,” replied Tooth, “I am not mad, and hell’s flames consume souls, they do not cleanse; I wish to save you from them. The language that you and Walsh and the R.M. used to-day was enough to damn you to all eternity, and you all constantly use it and worse.” “If you have ever heard the R.M. or Walsh use worse language than they used to-day under the hornets, you are a lucky man; it must have been something quite out of the common, and an education to any ordinary man. Why, a college of parsons could not have improved upon it, or you, Tooth, could not have equalled it.” Tooth then preached Elliott a fearsome sermon, according to Walsh; which was interrupted by Elliott in this way. “Look here, Tooth, I’m damned if I see what my soul has got to do with you, or why you should take on a parson’s job; but, anyhow, the best thing that you can do is to save the soul of the R.M.! Then you will get the lot of us, Walsh and Griffin, Bellamy, the two Higginsons and fat Oelrichs; if you convert the ‘Old Man,’ he’ll make things so hot that we’ll have to get saved or clear out! In fact, I think you would get all the police as well. Now, get out of my tent!”

The following evening, as we all sat round a camp fire after having messed together, I noticed that Tooth seemed to be labouring with some deep thought, while Elliott and Walsh kept exchanging meaning glances. At last the latter pair got up and went off to their tents, telling me that they had their journals to write up, a palpable lie, as the sole report they had to make was a line to the effect that they were upon duty with me. Then, after a little beating about the bush, Tooth brought the conversation round to religion, and suddenly it dawned upon me that he was endeavouring to convert me; anger was my first feeling, then I smiled to myself and broke in on his discourse. “My dear chap, to prevent misunderstanding we had better come to some agreement at once. Like you, I also have a peculiar religion, I am an esoteric High Churchman, and it is one of the tenets of my faith that laymen belonging to that creed do not discuss it with any other than a fellow esoteric High Churchman or a Lady of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem. Our conversions are all made by retired celibate bishops of not less than sixty years of age. You may have noticed that I never eat butter or fat, or touch milk in any form, these are rules of esoteric High Churchism, imposed as a penance to mortify the flesh. Please do not say any more.” (As a matter of fact I hate milk, butter, or grease in any form.) Tooth gasped with surprise, then simply remarking, “that to each man his own belief, but he did not see how I reconciled mine with the language of yesterday,” went off to bed. “Very good, Mr. Tooth,” I thought, “I’ll teach you before long not to go soul hunting among the New Guinea R.M.’s,” and lay low for him accordingly.

I eventually squared accounts with Tooth in this way. He, like many other strong healthy men, had a great horror of illness; he also was strangely ignorant of all disease other than malaria. Now, Tooth got a boil on his stern, he also got scrub-itch on the back of his neck and scratched it until it was raw, then he cut his arm and came to me for treatment; I put some iodoform dusting powder on the cut and bandaged it up. Next day his arm was worse, and I discovered that he was one of those people whom iodoform poisons, instead of healing; accordingly I washed it off and dressed his arm with boracic acid. Tooth was now very alarmed. “Do you think there is any danger?” he asked. “I don’t like your symptoms,” I answered, “now we will just detail them, in order to see whether my suspicions are correct. Firstly, you have a big boil on your sit-upon.” “Yes,” quaked Tooth. “Secondly, you have an irritant eruption on the back of your neck.” “Yes.” “Then your blood is in such a bad state that a strong drug like iodoform won’t heal a simple cut.” “Yes.” “Now, look here, Tooth, be very careful how you answer this: have you got a rash on your body?” I knew he must have one, for we were all covered with prickly heat. “Yes,” said Tooth, “look at it.” I looked at it, and then pulled a face that I flatter myself would have been worth something to an undertaker as a stock-in-trade. “My God!” said he, “what is it?” “One more question, Tooth, before my worst suspicions are confirmed. Do you feel devilish hungry half an hour before meals?” (His appetite, I may remark, was proverbial in the camp.) “Yes,” he groaned, “sometimes so hungry that I have a sinking feeling. Oh, what is it?” “Tooth,” I said, “I hardly like to tell you.” “Tell me the worst; anything is better than this suspense.” “Phytosis, poor old chap. It is a horrible disease, and passes on in a family for generations when once it is acquired; it is mentioned in the Bible, King Solomon suffered from it.” Tooth’s groans would now have melted a heart of stone, but I remembered his attempted conversion of me, and hardened mine.

“I have never heard of it in my family,” he said. “No,” I replied, “the symptoms point to your having acquired it off your own bat.” “How do you catch it?” he asked in despair. “Usually from evil living,” I replied. Tooth fairly howled, “But I have never lived evilly.” “Perhaps not, Tooth; but you can catch it by sitting on a seat that a person suffering from it has sat upon, or drinking from a vessel from which that person has drunk.” Tooth’s groans now were heart-rending; then a glimmer of hope came to him. “But,” said he, “there is no one in this camp suffering from it.” “No,” was my reply, “that is very true; but this disease takes exactly two months and seven days to develop, and that takes us back to the Merrie England, where I have grave suspicions of one of the stewards, the one who looked after your cabin.” I regret to say that at this point Tooth used language concerning that unjustly slandered steward that was nearly as strong as that used by my team in the affair of the hornets. “What is the course of the disease?” then wailed Tooth. “If my diagnosis be correct,” I answered, “you now have the first symptoms, the second will be that your hair and teeth will fall out, the third your nose will drop off, and after that you will smell so badly that small hoses, charged with disinfectants, will have to be played upon you until you die.” “Can you do anything for me, until I can consult a doctor?” he asked despairingly. “Oh yes,” I answered, “the lugger Peupiuli will be at Buna Bay in a fortnight, and she can take you to Samarai; but in the meantime my treatment must be a drastic one.” “Anything, anything,” said the persecuted man. “All right, Tooth; one packet of Epsom’s salts, hot, before breakfast every morning, and every Saturday night I will mix you a bolus.”

Poor Tooth began the treatment; at the end of a week he was a very limp man indeed, but his boil had gone and his cut was healed. Then he complained that my treatment was too drastic, and that he was getting as weak as a schoolgirl and being starved to death, for his food could not benefit him. I asked him whether he expected me to be able to cure a dreadful disease like his with babies’ soothing powders, and then explained that his hunger and weakness were due to a failing circulation, which I hoped it would not be necessary for me to stimulate with blisters on his stomach and back.

Tooth continued my treatment until the Peupiuli arrived, when he departed hastily in her to Samarai; and there, to his rage and relief, he was of course told by the doctor that there was nothing the matter with him. Oelrichs told me afterwards that he had sworn he would report me for misusing Government drugs, but Oelrichs then told him, that if he did, the R.M. would probably reply, “that he might have been mistaken in the nature of the surveyor’s disease, but the latter must have had a bad conscience to cause him to submit to the treatment.” Poor Tooth choked with rage; but he was not a man that bore grudges or carried a bitterness long, and we were soon the best of friends again.

“What was the matter with Tooth?” asked Walsh, as he, Elliott, and I sat round the camp fire on the night of the victim’s departure. “Nothing,” I replied. “Good Lord! Then what did you scour him to the bone for?” “Excess of religious fervour!” I answered. “By the way, which of you two ornaments to the Service had the cheek to set him on to your chief? I think that requires looking into!” Both looked uneasy. “Is it Pax?” asked Walsh. I nodded. Then I heard about Tooth and Elliott.

I have decided not to continue the tale of this expedition. It has been published in official reports, and is simply a story of swamps, mountains, fever, and fights, a common sort of tale lacking all interest, hence I go on to Robinson’s more important Hydrographer’s Expedition.