The Papuans of Wakatimi—Colour—Hair—Eyes—Nose—Tattooing—Height—Dress—Widows’ Bonnets—Growth of Children—Preponderance of Men—Number of Wives—Childhood—Swimming and other Games—Imitativeness of Children—The Search for Food—Women as Workers—Fishing Nets—Other Methods of Fishing—An Extract from Dampier.

The Papuans of the Mimika district may be divided into two classes or tribes: those who live in the villages on the lower waters of the river and make periodical migrations to the sea; and those who live on the upper waters of the river near the foot of the mountains and who never go down to the coast. There is a wide interval of uninhabitable country between the regions occupied by these two tribes, and communication between them, if it takes place at all, is very rare; but they resemble each other so closely, both in physical characters and in their manners and customs, that a single description will suffice for both.9 The other native race of the district, the pygmy people who live in the mountains, will be described in a later chapter.

The skin of the Mimika native is a very dark brown, almost rusty black, but a dark colour without any of the gloss seen in the skin of the African negro. Not infrequently we saw men of a lighter, nearly yellow, colour, and in the Wakatimi district there were three pure albinos, a man, a woman and a child. The man and woman were covered with blotches of a pinkish pigment and were peculiarly disagreeable to look at, the child, a sucking infant, and the offspring of black parents, was as white as any European baby, and was called, out of compliment to us, “Tuana.”10

The hair is black and thick and frizzly; it never, or seldom grows long, so you do not see the ornamental coiffures characteristic of the natives of some other parts of the island; but they are skilful in plaiting what there is of it and take some pride in the result. Three- or four-pronged combs are worn in the hair more as a means of carrying a useful article than as ornaments. The hair of young children is often quite fair, but it becomes dark as they grow up; some of the adults have the custom, common in other places, of dyeing the hair yellow with lime.

The eye of the Papuan child is the eye of any bright dark-eyed child here or elsewhere; the white of the eye is white and the iris dark and clear. But very soon the white becomes bloodshot and yellow, and the iris blurred. The expression in the eyes is a thing that haunts one by its forlornness and hopelessness; it cannot be described, but you may see it in the eyes of certain animals. They show a strong disinclination to look you straight in the eyes, and when you rarely make them do so you seem to be looking into an unlighted and empty space.

The teeth are strong, but not conspicuously white and perfect like those of some other black races. A good many men file or chip the upper incisors to a point, but this has not, so far as we know, any particular significance.

The nose is almost bridgeless and is of a somewhat hooked and fleshy type with wide nostrils. The septum of the nose is pierced when the boys are young, and the hole is kept open by a rolled-up leaf thrust through it; in this way it is gradually dilated until the man is able to wear a carved ornament of a piece of the bill of a hornbill or a curved boar’s tusk, with which he decorates himself on festal occasions. The nose-piercing is attended with a good deal of ceremony, but we were never fortunate enough to see it; it is done when the child is about five years old, and the operation is made (according to native accounts) with a piece of sharpened bone heated in the fire. Small ornaments are sometimes worn in holes in the alae nasi which are pierced in all the children, both boys and girls, when they are small infants.

Many of the people pierce the lobes of the ear, but the custom is not universal. The ornaments worn in the ear are strings of two or three beads, or small rings of plaited fibres or rattan, or the claw of a cassowary. We took with us a large number of Jew’s harps as trade goods, but the natives did not care for them, and two (the only two, I believe) that we did succeed in making the people accept, were worn by them as ear-rings. Another man, a constant smoker, in default of a better cigar case always carried a cigar in the lobe of his ear.

Tattooing, in the proper sense of the term, is unknown to the Mimika Papuans, but a great number of them practise cicatrisation or scarring. The usual places for these markings are the buttocks and the outer side of the upper (usually the left) arm. On the buttocks the marks are almost always the same, a cross, about two inches square, on the left buttock, and a cross surrounded by a circle on the right. The mark on the arm is about four inches long and sometimes represents a snake and sometimes a scorpion or a crayfish, but the meaning of it, and whether or not it had some totemistic significance we were unable to learn. Some of the women affect a scar between the breasts, which makes a very unsightly contraction, and we occasionally saw people with irregular scars all over the upper part of the breast and back, but it is probable that most of them were the signs rather of former quarrels than due to a spirit of coquetry.

They are fond of painting their faces with a bright red earth, lumps of which they sometimes find and prize very highly, and not infrequently we saw men with their faces smeared black with a mixture of fat and charcoal, or whitened with powdered sago, but the reason, if there were any but vanity, for this adornment we did not discover.

The average height of men measured at Wakatimi and Parimau is 5 feet 6 inches. No women were measured, but it would probably be found that the average height of the women was about two inches less than that of the men. Such a height is small compared with that of many races, but the first impression you get of the Papuans is that they are tall, for they hold themselves well, and all naked people look taller than those who go clothed. Their legs are thin and rather meagre, due in a great measure to the large proportion of their lives that is spent in canoes, but they walk with a good swinging gait and cover the ground easily.

It is a curious thing that a black man never looks naked; a white man undressed looks a naked man, so too does a yellow man, but a Papuan—and nobody could wear much less in the way of clothes than he does—always seems to be sufficiently clad. The dress of the Papuan men, as has been suggested above, is scanty in the extreme. They have, or had before we visited them, no cloth except a very inferior bark cloth made from the bark of a species of fig tree. Some of the men wear a narrow strip of this bark cloth, which hangs down in front from a string round the loins and keeps up an ineffectual pretence of decency.

The more usual covering is the bamboo penis-case, which is kept in position by pulling the preputium through a hole in the lower end of the case. There are three or four different patterns of penis-cases, and they are always ornamented with carved designs. Another equally common fashion of covering is the shell; this is an oval or roughly squared segment of a large white sea shell, sometimes as much as six inches in diameter. It is worn on a string which passes through two holes bored in it, and is tied tightly round the loins. The convex surface of the shell faces forwards, and the preputium is pulled upwards and clipped under the lower margin of the shell. Both the bamboo case and the shell are useful as a protection against the leeches and thorns of the jungle.

Small boys go quite naked until they reach the time of puberty, when for a short period they wear a sort of skirt made from the shredded leaves of the pandanus. Though the men like very much to wear round their heads strips of our coloured cloth, they do not normally use any kind of head-gear except on ceremonial occasions, when the men who beat the drums wear elaborate hats ornamented with the plumes of birds of paradise. Many of the men wear arm-bands above the elbow and leg-bands below the knee, made of tightly woven fibre or of fine strips of rattan.

The women are rather more clothed than the men, but it cannot be said that they are at all overdressed. The usual garment consists of a narrow belt of bark cloth or grass round the waist, from which there hang a narrow strip of bark cloth in front, reaching about half way down the thigh, and a wider strip, somewhat after the fashion of the tail of an Englishman’s evening coat, extending as far as the knee behind. In addition to this, many of the women wear a sort of short waistcoat or sleeveless bodice made of plaited grass or fibre with tags or tassels hanging down in a sort of fringe from its lower edge. Newly-married women wear a sort of apron, or rather a long fringe of shredded leaves, which hangs down from the waist.

The best dressed, or in any case the most dressed, members of the community are the widows, who wear, in addition to the other articles of female attire, what can only be described as a poke bonnet. In some cases the bonnet projects so far in front of the face as to obscure the features, in some it is of a conical design, and in others it resembles in shape nothing so much as the morion of a mediaeval man-at-arms.

Like the waistcoats worn by the women, the bonnets are made of ingeniously plaited fibre, and both of these look well when they are newly made, but they very quickly become hideous with damp and dirt, and the wearer is a person to be shunned. The small girls, unlike the boys, wear a narrow strip of bark cloth tucked between the legs almost as soon as they can walk. It is perhaps worth mentioning that these people have the art of sewing; they make eyed needles out of sharp fish bones, and with strands of fibre they contrive to sew pieces of bark cloth very neatly together.

There are no milk-producing domesticated animals in the country, so the women suckle their infants for a very long time, and you may occasionally see children of (apparently) three or four years old at their mothers’ breasts; but whether young or old, it is very difficult to estimate the age of these people. In the course of a year we saw little children grow into active boys and we saw young men become middle-aged. I should say—but this is pure speculation—that a man is old at forty years and a woman at an even earlier age; it seems probable, too, that the life of a woman is shorter than that of a man.

Partly on account of the migratory habits of the natives, and partly owing to the fact that at no hour of the day until nightfall are all the people in or about the houses, it was never found possible to take a census of a village, but from our observations we arrived at the conclusion that the number of men was decidedly greater than that of women.

The number of a man’s wives was a favourite subject for boasting and they often assured us that they had two or even three wives, but we only knew two men who certainly had two wives; on the other hand we knew a considerable number of men who had no wives at all. It appears that a man may take a wife from his own village or from a village in the same district; thus a Wakatimi man may take a wife from Obota or Periepia, and a Parimau man from Kamura. There were two women at Parimau who were said to come from Wakatimi, but whether they had been voluntarily exchanged or were the spoils of war we were not told.

It was unfortunate that we learnt nothing about the customs and ceremonies connected with marriage. A wedding took place at Wakatimi when we all happened to be absent, and the only definite description that we were able to get of it was that the bride, who arrived from another village by canoe, crawled on her hands and knees from the water’s edge to the village, a distance of about a hundred yards, and most of it through mud.

Beyond question, the happiest time in the lives of the Papuans is their childhood, when they are free to play from morning to night and need not take part in the ceaseless search for food, which occupies so much of the time of their elders. As infants they are carried on the backs of their mothers and very often of their fathers, secured by a wide strap of bark cloth, the ends of which are tied across the carrier’s chest. It is very seldom that you hear them cry and they appear to give very little trouble; their mothers are very careful of the cleanliness of the infants. Very early in life they begin to walk and almost as soon they learn to swim. In fine weather they often spend the greater part of the day in the river and it is a very pretty sight to see a crowd of little Papuans playing together in the water. Sometimes they are joined by the women, who seem to enjoy the fun quite as much as the children. One of their favourite games is to pretend to be a school of porpoises, whose rolling headers they imitate admirably. They very soon become powerful swimmers, and I remember one day seeing a small boy, who cannot have been more than eight years old, swim across a river in tremendous flood, while the party of men who were with him had to seek a place where they could safely swim across half a mile lower down.

There are a number of games too that they play on dry land: they play the universal game of lying in wait for your enemy and suddenly pouncing out on him; they have great battles in which they are armed with miniature bows and arrows, and reed stems take the place of spears, and shrill yells make up for the lack of bloodshed. There is another game which I saw played three or four times in exactly the same manner, and which, by reason of it somewhat resembling a children’s game called “Nuts in May,” is perhaps worth describing. Eight little boys, each one carrying a long flowering grass, stood in two parties of four facing each other a few yards apart. At first they waved their grasses and then danced towards each other, crossed and took the places that had been opposite to them; this they repeated twice. Then they ran round and round in a circle about five yards wide waving their grasses and shouting until they stopped suddenly and sat down in a bunch together. After a rest of about half a minute, they jumped up and ran round again in the same circle, now shouting and grabbing as they ran handsful of sand, which they threw over their heads into the air or between their legs into the face of the one behind; then a sudden stop and again they all sat down in a bunch. After this they jumped up, ran all together for a few yards shouting loudly, hurled all their grasses as high into the air as they could, and the game was ended.

Like the children of more civilised races, the young Papuans are fond of imitating their elders. The boys like to be seen walking about with men, to copy their swaggering walk, and to sit about smoking idly and watch the women at work. The little girls sometimes contrive to make grass garments like those worn by the women; they make small dolls’ houses in which they themselves, or infants still smaller than they, are the dolls, and they like to be seen baling out the canoes or carrying sand for the houses. But in their case pretence is soon changed to reality, and when they are quite young they are made to accompany their mothers in the serious business of life, while the boys are still leading a gay life with no responsibilities. Both boys and girls very early become proficient in the management of canoes, and a child of tender years will confidently steer a canoe through rough water which would end in certain shipwreck for one of us.

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.

They have no cultivation in the Mimika villages, and even at those places such as Obota (see p. 88) where there is some cultivation, the crops that they raise are not nearly sufficient for the whole population, so it can easily be imagined that an improvident people living in a country constantly liable to sudden floods, which swamp the land for weeks at a time, is frequently faced with a prospect of complete starvation. At first you are inclined to think that the whole of the business of collecting food falls on the shoulders of the women, while the men sit at home and do nothing. This is certainly true of a great many days in the year, but certain tasks can only be performed by the men, such as hunting for game in the jungle, and felling trees to make the canoes, without which the people must inevitably starve.

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; there where the water is brackish and the tide rises and falls several feet they find in the mud banks large mussels (Cyrena sp.), which contain a good deal of food, and the shells of which are useful as knives and scrapers. Hopping all over the mud are seen hundreds of curious little fish (Periophthalmus sp.), whose eyes seem to be starting out of their heads; these little creatures climb up the steepest mud banks, and even up the stumps of trees.

The commonest type of fishing net is made in an oval framework of wood, or strips of rattan, about 5 feet long by 2 feet wide; the net is a close mesh of native string stretched tightly across the frame, except at the middle, where it sags a little. The usual method of using this kind of net is to grasp it at both ends and by wading through the shallow water to scoop up small fish much in the same way as shrimps are caught. There is another more ingenious method of using it, which sometimes results in large capture of little fish. 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.

Another form of fishing net—though there is no netting in its construction—is made of long, thin strips of bamboo tied parallel to each other at intervals of about half an inch, forming a sort of screen or trellis-work, which can be rolled up if necessary. Strong wooden stakes are driven into the mud at the mouth of the creeks which join the river in many places, and at high water the screens are fastened to the stakes in such a way as to touch the bottom and close the entrance of the creek; the water can run back when the tide falls, but not the fish which are sometimes caught in considerable numbers.

The larger fish are all obtained by the men, who either catch them with a hook and line, or spear them in the shallow water near the river mouth, or along the sea shore. We saw very few hooks; one or two were made of rough metal, the others were neatly fashioned from fish bones, and all of them were plain without barbs. Now they have a large number of steel fishhooks, which they greatly value.

The commonest types of fish-spear are made of thin bamboo or a light wood about ten feet long, and they end in three or four sharp prongs of bamboo or hardened wood. They also use a barbed spear of which the head becomes detached from the shaft, when it becomes fixed in a fish; a light line connecting the shaft with the head causes the shaft to act as a drag on the movements of the fish, which can easily be followed up and killed; this kind of spear is only used for the larger fish, saw-fish and the like, but I never saw it in use. 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.

The most primitive methods of all of catching fish I saw practised one day coming down from Obota. A native paddling in the bow of my canoe saw a large fish near the bank, towards which he steered the canoe. When he judged that he was near enough to it, he hurled himself flat on to the water with a resounding splash that drenched everything in the boat, and a thud that would have stunned the fish at once had it not darted off an instant earlier.

The sight of a fish, however small it is, always rouses a Papuan to action. When we were travelling with natives, we sometimes came to pools where small fish had been left by some receding flood. Instantly their loads were thrown down and everyone darted into the water with sticks and stones and shouts and as much enthusiasm as if the fish had been salmon and a full meal for everyone.

There is another method of fishing which was observed by the navigator, Captain Dampier, in use by the natives of this region. It is so remarkable that, although we did not see it employed by the people of the Mimika district, I shall make no excuse for repeating it here:—

“They strike Fish very ingeniously with Wooden Fiss-gigs and have a very ingenious way of making the Fish rise: For they have a piece of Wood curiously carv’d and painted much like a Dolphin (and perhaps other Figures;) these they let down into the Water by a Line with a small weight to sink it; when they think it low enough, they haul the Line into their Boats very fast, and the Fish rise up after this Figure; and they stand ready to strike them when they are near the Surface of the Water.”11

There are times when the natives get more fish than they know what to do with, and other times when no fish can be caught; but they have no idea of laying up a store for the lean times. It is true that they char some in the fire and keep them for a few days before the fish putrify, but if they learnt to smoke some of their surplus supply, they need never go hungry.