Food of the Papuans—Cassowaries—The Native Dog—Question of Cannibalism—Village Headman—The Social System of the Papuans—The Family—Treatment of Women—Religion—Weather Superstitions—Ceremony to avert a Flood—The Pig—A Village Festival—Wailing at Deaths—Methods of Disposal of the Dead—No Reverence for the Remains—Purchasing Skulls.

The search for food furnishes occasionally some very curious scenes. One of the most remarkable occurs when the river in flood brings down a tree-trunk in a suitable stage of decay. A canoe is sent out with men to secure it and tow it to the bank. When it has been left stranded by the falling water, the people, men, women and children come out and swarm around it like bees about a honey-pot, and you wonder what they can be doing. When you go close you find that some are splitting up the log with their stone axes and others are cutting up the fragments with sharpened shells in the same way that their ancestors—and perhaps ours too—did centuries ago. The objects of their search are the large white larvÆ of a beetle, about the size of a man’s thumb; I have seen natives eat them just as they cut them out of the wood, but usually they roast them in the fire and consider them a great delicacy.

Nothing that can by any means be considered eatable comes amiss to the Papuans; there are two kinds of water tortoises which they like to eat, and rats, lizards, frogs and snakes, and the eggs of crocodiles they devour greedily. A number of different kinds of fruits, most of them disagreeable to European tastes, are found growing in the jungle and form a welcome addition to their fare. Birds they get occasionally, but their skill with the bow and arrow is not remarkable.

Most of their meat is obtained by hunting with dogs the wild pig, the wallaby and the cassowary. The pig (Sus papuensis), though it is not really a native of New Guinea, was introduced into the island so long ago that it has become as well established as the rabbit has become in this country. In some places, particularly near the foot of the mountains, pigs are fairly numerous, and the natives kill a good many; they are very savage beasts, and I saw a native terribly gashed by a large boar, which was shortly afterwards shot by one of our Gurkhas.

The Wallaby (Dorcopsis lorentzii) is a small kangaroo, about two feet in height when it stands upright; it seems to be fairly evenly distributed all over the district. When the natives bestir themselves they seem to be able to catch the wallaby fairly easily; in four consecutive days we saw the remains of thirteen brought into the village of Parimau. The flesh is coarse and has a very strong musky flavour.

There are two kinds of Cassowary in the Mimika district, a small species new to science (Casuarius claudi), which was discovered in the mountains at an altitude of about 1500 feet, and a large species (Casuarius sclateri), which was fairly abundant everywhere. We frequently heard their curious booming cry at night and we often saw their tracks in the mud of the jungle or on the river bank, but they are very shy birds and are seldom seen.

Once I had the luck to see an old cassowary with two young birds walking about in a stony river bed, a place which they particularly affect, and it was a very pretty sight to see how the mother bird, after she had caught sight of me, drove away the chicks to a place of safety and all the time kept herself between them and me. The natives hunt and kill and eat a good many cassowaries; the feathers are used for ornamental head-dresses and belts and for decorating spears and clubs, and the claws are often used as the points of arrows.

The Papuan Dog, without whose help the native would seldom, if ever, be able to get any meat, is a sharp-nosed prick-eared creature about the size of a Welsh terrier. The colour is yellow, brown or black, and the tail, which is upstanding, is tipped with white. Usually the hair is short and smooth, but we saw one dog, brought down to Parimau by a party of pygmies, which had a thick furry coat like a chow dog, which it also resembled in the carriage of its tail. 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. Their food is generally given to them by the women and it consists of raw meat, when there is any, and lumps of sago. A remarkable peculiarity about them is that they never bark, but they make up for this defect by their extraordinary power of howling. Sometimes in broad daylight, if there was no wind, but more often on still fine nights, a party of dogs would sit together, usually on the river bank, and utter a chorus of the most piteous and blood-curdling howls. No amount of stone-throwing or beating with sticks, freely administered by their masters, had the smallest effect on them; they would only move away a few yards and begin again, apparently carried away by an ecstasy of sorrow.

The natives value their dogs highly, as they well may do, for they provide the whole of their meat supply, and they use them to exchange for articles of which they have great need. The people at Parimau have a small piece of iron about the size of a chisel, used for carving their canoes and paddles, for which the enormous price of three dogs had been paid, so they informed us, to the people of the Wakatimi. One day one of our “boys” shot a dog, which had been in the habit of stealing food from our camp. 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. No doubt the display was somewhat exaggerated in the hope of getting a compensation from us, but at the back of it there was genuine emotion.

Before leaving the subject of the food of the Papuans and their means of obtaining it, a word must be said on the question of cannibalism. It is popularly supposed that all the natives of New Guinea are cannibals, and fears were expressed by many of our friends that some, if not all, of us would end in a Papuan feast. But we saw no signs of cannibalism, and we have no reason to suppose that it is practised by the people of the Mimika district. Men whom we questioned about it denied it and showed expressions of disgust at the suggestion; but that is not a complete proof of their innocence, for I have known people elsewhere, who were undoubtedly cannibals, deny it in the same manner. The question of cannibalism is always difficult to decide without direct evidence, and in the case of these Papuans the verdict must be one of “Not proven.”

The account given in a preceding chapter of the difficulties we experienced in learning the language of the Papuans will serve to explain how it was that we learnt so little about the nature of their social system. The people of Wakatimi were called Wakatimi-wÉ (people of Wakatimi), the people of Obota were Obota-wÉ, and the people of other villages in like manner, but we never heard one word that included them all, nor indeed do we know whether or not they consider themselves all to belong to the same tribe.

In every village that we visited there were one or two or even more men who called themselves natoo, a word signifying “chief.” But in no case did the natoo appear to have any authority over the other people; their houses were no bigger than the rest, and (except in one instance) they had no more personal property than the other members of the community.

The exceptional case was a man of unusual intelligence who became our intimate friend and gave us much information for which he was always well rewarded, so that before we left the country his house was filled with tins and bottles, and he was the possessor of axes and knives, yards of cloth and countless beads. In all the ordinary affairs of life the “chiefs” and their families have to work like everybody else, but it is possible that in their wars, of which we saw nothing at all, they may be persons of more consequence.

Generally speaking, one would say that the society of the Mimika Papuans is a group of small families. It cannot by any means be described as a socialistic community; with one exception there is no sign of community of property, but it is rather a case of every man for himself, or (more accurately) of every family for itself. A canoe belongs to the family of the man who made it; the coconut trees, which grow here and there along the lower Mimika, do not belong to the community but to individuals, presumably the men or some of the men who planted them. Sometimes the trees are protected by a fence, a very flimsy structure of three or four sticks, placed across the track which leads to the trees; in other cases a few palm leaves or some pierced shells threaded on a string are tied round the tree itself; both of these devices appear to be enough to ensure the security of the trees. The exception mentioned is seen when game is brought in by the hunters; the meat, as I observed on several occasions, is distributed to every house in the village.

As I have described above (p. 97) the houses in a village are joined together under a common roof, but each family enters by its own doorway, and, except for the publicity resulting from the lack of dividing walls or partitions, it finds itself in its own private house. It is difficult to say exactly of what the “family-group” consists. There are the man and his wife and the children, and sometimes an extra man or two, and, rarely, an extra woman, who is, I believe, always a second wife of the man of the house; but the position of the extra men and their relationship to the rest of the family I cannot define. At the village of Obota a detached house, rather larger than the rest, was said to be occupied by young men only; we did not see any other instance of this elsewhere.

Families are small, as might be expected from the severity of their conditions of life and the long period of suckling by the mothers, and we did not know definitely of any couple who had more than three living children. Though the women do a large amount of the work of the community they are not mere drudges; they do a great deal of talking, and the men appear to pay considerable respect to their opinion. This was frequently noticeable when we wanted to buy something, such as canoes, from a native; he would say that he must first of all go and consult his wife, and when he returned it often happened that, prompted by his wife, he insisted on a higher payment than he had asked before.

On one occasion only did we see a woman ill-treated, and the performance was a particularly brutal one. Two men and a woman walked down from the village of Wakatimi to the river bank, dragging another woman, who shrieked and struggled violently. After throwing her into the mud they dragged her into the shallow water and tried to drown her by holding her down under a fishing-net. We shouted at them, and were just going with some soldiers in a canoe across the river to rescue the woman, when they desisted and allowed the poor creature to crawl out on to the bank, where she lay for some time exhausted. Some natives who came over to us shortly afterwards laughed about it and treated the whole affair as a joke.

With regard to the superstitions and beliefs of the Papuans, owing to our unfortunate difficulties with the language we learnt nothing whatever. Religion, in the accepted sense of that term, I am sure they have not. It is true that they make curious carved effigies, but these are not idols, and there is no evidence to show that they ever consult or worship them; on the contrary, they treat them with contempt and often point to them with laughter. These images are ingeniously and skilfully carved out of wood, and they represent a human figure always grotesque and sometimes grossly indecent. They vary in size from a few inches to twelve or fourteen feet, and when they are not neglected they are ornamented with red and white paint.

We had opportunities of observing the outward signs of what were probably superstitions in connection with certain phenomena of the weather. For instance, the first peal of thunder that was heard in the day—it occurred almost every day—was greeted by the men with a long-drawn tremulous shout. On the occasion of a particularly alarming thunderstorm, when the lightning flashes were almost unceasing, the men came out of doors and with long sticks beat the ground in front of their huts; then they waved the sticks in the air, shouting loudly meanwhile. Curiously enough the rare whistle of a certain bird, which we never identified, was always greeted by the men of Parimau with a shout precisely similar to that with which they greet the thunder.

The first sight of the new moon was signalised by a short sharp bark rather than a shout. Several times on the day following the first sight of the new moon I noticed a spear decorated with white feathers exposed conspicuously in the village, but whether it had any connection with the kalendar I cannot say.

When the first drops of rain of the day began to fall, the men were sometimes seen to snap their fingers four times towards the four quarters of the compass.

A curious ceremony was twice observed at a time of heavy rain, when the Mimika was rising rapidly and threatening to sweep away the village of Parimau. A party of men walked down to the edge of the river, and one of them with a long spear threshed the water, while the others at each stroke shouted, “Mbu” (water, flood). Then they went up to the village, and in front of each door they dug a hole, into which they poured a coconut-full of water; again they shouted “Mbu,” and then filled up the hole with sand.

That they have some belief in the supernatural is certain. We learnt a word niniki, which undoubtedly means ghosts; they described niniki as things which you could not see but were here and there in the air about you. When they were asked where a dead man had gone to, they talked of niniki, and pointed vaguely to the horizon, saying the word which means “far.”

If there is one thing in heaven or earth to which it may be said that the Papuans pay some sort of respect it is the pig. They hunt and kill a good many wild pigs in the jungle and eat their flesh, but the lower jaw of each animal is carefully cleaned and hung up on a sort of rack in front of the houses; on one of these racks I counted no fewer than thirty-two pigs’ jaws. The grass and leaves in which the animal is wrapped and the ropes used for tying it up when it is carried home from the jungle, are not thrown away but are hung up on a similar sort of rack in a conspicuous place in the village.

In every village there may generally be seen two or three pigs running about freely; they are probably not bred in the village, but are caught in the jungle, when they are young. They very soon become quite tame and accompany the people on their migrations from one place to another until they are full grown, when they provide food for a festival. The only elaborate popular ceremony that took place while we were in the country happened early in May at Parimau, and the principal feature of it was the slaughter of pigs. Unfortunately for me I was at the base-camp at the time and did not see the festival, so I will make extracts from Marshall’s graphic account.12

“Yesterday the natives gave us an excellent show. For some days previously natives had been arriving from distant parts until the small village of 40 huts contained 400 people, and it was evident from the tomtomming and other signs that something of importance was about to take place. On the night of the 3rd inst. they lit a big bonfire, and all night long they were howling and yelling as if to drive away evil spirits. Soon after daybreak they came over to fetch us, and, expecting something unusual, I slipped a film into my cinematograph camera and went over. They gave me every opportunity of obtaining a good picture, keeping an open space for me in the best positions. First of all the women, draped in leaves, slowly walked down the beach, driving two full-grown boars in front of them, and then disappeared in the jungle. About 150 men with faces painted and heads and spears decorated with feathers, formed up in three sides of a square, one end of which was occupied by a band of tomtoms. A slow advance on the village then commenced, the men shouting in chorus and the women dancing on the outskirts. The centre of the square was occupied by single individuals, who, following each other in quick succession, gave a warlike display, finally shooting arrows far over the trees.

“The next scene took place around a large sloping erection which we soon found was an altar, on which the two boars were about to be sacrificed. The women and boars who had disappeared into the forest now marched from the jungle at the far end of the village. The boars were seized, and a struggle with the animals ensued, but the two huge brutes were bound up with rattan, chalk meanwhile being rubbed into their eyes, apparently in order to blind them. The women set up a tremendous wailing, and appeared on the scene plastered in wet mud from head to foot. The two boars, on each of which a man sat astride, were now hoisted up and carried to the altar, on which the animals were tightly lashed. Then amid much shouting, tomtomming, and fanatical displays, the boars were clubbed to death. As soon as life was extinct, the women cut the carcases free, and, pulling them to the ground, threw themselves on the dead bodies, wailing loudly, and plastering themselves with wet mud in ecstasies of grief. This continued for some ten minutes, when the men, many of whom were covered with mud and uttered strange dirges, picked up the bodies, and the whole assembly following suit marched into the river, where a much-needed washing took place. Just previous to this a three-year-old child, painted red and crying loudly, had been roughly seized and dragged towards the dais, and for a moment we thought something more serious than a boar sacrifice was about to take place. But we were much relieved to see that it was only having its ears pierced. The whole performance lasted about an hour and a half.

“The afternoon was given over to innocent play, the women and girls—many of them quite pretty—chasing the men up to the river side and into the water. This is one of the few ceremonies when the women are allowed to beat the men, the latter not being permitted to retaliate. The damsels finally became so bold that they stormed the camp.”

Of ceremonies connected with birth, if any take place, we saw nothing at all. The only marriage ceremony that took place during our stay in the country has been referred to on a preceding page.

Deaths were unfortunately more frequent, and if they were not accompanied by any elaborate ceremonial they were, at all events, widely advertised, sometimes indeed even before the event itself. A wretched man became very ill at Parimau in August, and it was soon evident that his days were numbered. Members of his family carried him out of the house and laid him in the sunlight for a time, and then took him back into the house again at least half a dozen times a day. Now and again, when he dozed, they set up the dreadful wail that is customary when a person dies, and he had to wake up and assure them of his continued life. At night his hut was crowded with sympathetic watchers, and with the smoke of the fire and much tobacco the atmosphere must have been nearly insupportable. As our own house was distant only about forty yards across the river we could plainly hear his laboured breathing, and when it grew softer they wailed again until the wonder was that he did not die. On the third day they dug a grave for him, but still he lingered on, and it was not until the fifth night, when a tremendous flood came down and swept away the village so that all the people had to take refuge in their canoes, that he died.

When a death occurs the people in the hut at once begin to wail, then the people in the neighbouring huts join in and soon the whole village is wailing. It is a very peculiar and very striking chorus. Each individual wails on one note, and as there are perhaps five notes ranging from a very high pitch to a deep murmured bass being sung at once, the effect is most mournful. The occasional beat of a drum adds not a little to the general effect of lamentation. It must be admitted, however, that the wailing is not always a musical performance. Sometimes the mourning man behaves in the way that a child does when it is described as “roaring”; he puckers up his face in the most extraordinary contortions, “roars” at the top of his voice with occasional heart-breaking sobs, while the tears course down his face, and the complete picture is ludicrous in the extreme.

The disposal of the dead nearly always takes place just before dawn, but the method of it is not always the same. The most common practice is to bury the body in a shallow grave dug in the nearest convenient spot, sometimes within a few yards of the huts. The body is wrapped in mats and laid flat in the grave, which is then filled up, and its place is perhaps marked by a stick, but in a day or two it is forgotten and people trample on it without heed.

We observed one instance of a more elaborate kind of burial. The corpse, wrapped in leaves and mats, was taken out into the jungle and placed on a platform about four feet high, which had been put up for the purpose. After placing the body on the platform the men who had carried it walked down to the river, shouted once in unison, and then, having received an answering shout from the men in the village, one of them threw a small triangular piece of wood out into the stream. In the meantime the family of the dead man disappeared into the jungle, from which they soon emerged quite naked, plastered all over with mud and decorated with wisps of climbing plants. The next two days were spent in digging a grave and making a coffin shaped like a small canoe; this however was found to be too small and was not used. On the third day the body was placed in the grave, and an ornamental post placed in the ground at each end, but contrary to our hopes (for the state of that man was becoming very offensive) they did not fill in the grave. They merely covered the body with leaves and turned it over every day. At intervals the widow, quite naked, save for a plastering of mud, crawled on hands and knees from her hut, which was less than five yards distant, and visited the grave. In a few days a providential flood came and filled up the grave and put an end to what had become for us an almost intolerable nuisance.

Both at Wakatimi and at Parimau our camp commanded a good view of the native village, and a death always provided us with the mild excitement of wondering in what new way they would celebrate the event. On one occasion when a woman died, the bereaved husband and another man walked slowly down to the river and waded out into about three feet of water. There the widower submitted to being washed all over by the other man and finally to being held under water by him for half a minute or more, after which they walked solemnly back to the village.

Early in the morning of the day after the death of the natoo of Wakatimi all the women and girls of the village, to the number of sixty or seventy, came down to the river, all of them without a vestige of clothing, and in the shallow water a foot or two deep they swam and crawled and wriggled up the river for a hundred yards or more, wailing loudly all the time. Sometimes they came out on to the bank and rolled in the mud, and finally they all went out of the water and stood wailing in front of the dead man’s house.

Another method of disposing of the dead, which is very frequently adopted, is to place the body wrapped in mats in a rude coffin, which is usually constructed from pieces of broken canoes. The coffin containing the body is supported on a trestle of crossed sticks about four feet from the ground (see illustration opposite), and there it remains until decomposition is complete. As these coffins are often placed within a yard or two of the houses, it can be imagined that a Papuan village is not always a pleasant place to visit.

At the village of NimÉ we saw two or three pathetic little bundles containing the remains of infants exposed on racks within a few feet of the houses, from which they doubtless came.

When decomposition is complete no account is taken of the bones, excepting the skull, which is taken and preserved in the house. Sometimes it is buried in the sand of the floor of the house, and sometimes it is tied up in a sort of open basket-work of rattan and hung up in the roof, where it becomes brown with smoke and polished by frequent handling.

Though the people take the trouble to bring the skulls into their houses, they show no real respect for them, and they are eager enough to part with them if a chance occurs. Two of us went one day to Obota, a village a few miles from Wakatimi, in the hopes of buying some bananas. In one of the huts we saw a skull and offered to buy it, not at all expecting that the owner would be willing to sell, but the offer of (I think) a piece of cloth was gladly accepted and the skull was ours. In a few minutes, when it became known that we had given good cloth for a common skull, everybody was anxious to sell his family remains, and outside every doorway were placed one or two or even three grinning skulls. They do not treat the skulls very carefully, and a good many were damaged, so we only bought about half a dozen that were perfect.

One day a man walked into our camp at Wakatimi carrying a skull under his arm. He stood outside our house for some time, grinning and saying nothing, then he gave us unmistakably to understand that it was the skull of his wife, who, as we knew for a fact, had only died a short time previously. The skull was indeed so fresh that we declined the offer.