Papuans’ Love of Music—Their Concerts—A Dancing House—Carving—Papuans as Artists—Cat’s Cradle—Village Squabbles—The Part of the Women—Wooden and Stone Clubs—Shell Knives and Stone Axes—Bows and Arrows—Papuan Marksmen—Spears—A most Primitive People—Disease—Prospects of their Civilisation.

The most pleasing characteristic of the Papuans is their love of music. When a number of them are gathered together and when they have eaten well, or are for any other reason happy, they have a concert. Sometimes the concerts take place in the afternoon and continue till nightfall, but more often they begin after dark and go on almost through the night. The orchestra is simple and consists of two or three men who beat drums and sit before a small fire in the middle. Round them are grouped the chorus all sitting on the ground. The drums are hollowed cylinders of wood, which are often elaborately carved; one end is open, the other is closed by a piece of lizard’s or snake’s skin (see illustration p. 142). When this skin becomes slack, as it very quickly does, the drummer holds it towards the fire until it regains its pitch. It is not the custom to tune up both drums, when there are more than one, to the same pitch, usually an interval of about half a tone is left between them. The leader of the orchestra sometimes wears a remarkable head-dress made of plaited fibre and ornamented with bunches of plumes of the Bird of Paradise (see illustration p. 78). The effect of these plumes waving backwards and forwards as the man moves his head to mark the phrases of the song is exceedingly striking, and it must be admitted that if there is anybody, who can becomingly wear those gorgeous plumes, it is the naked black man.

The most usual kind of song begins with a slow tapping of the drums, then these are beaten quicker and the singer (one of the drummers) begins a sort of recitative song, to which the chorus contributes a low humming accompaniment. Then the drums are beaten very loudly and rapidly, all the men in chorus sing, or rather growl, a deep guttural note, followed by a prolonged musical note at about the middle of the register of a normal man’s voice, and the song ends with one or more short sharp barks, “Wah! wah! wah!” with a loud drum accompaniment. The song, or probably different verses of it, is repeated very many times. The final shouts of the song, which for want of a better word I have called “barks,” are uttered by all the men in unison and recall, as was pointed out by Mr. Goodfellow, the harsh croaking call of the Greater Bird of Paradise, which is heard almost daily in the jungle. It is possible that the song is in some way connected with the bird and that there is an intentional imitation of its note.

The scheme of all these songs is the same, viz., a recitative with drums and a humming accompaniment, but some of them have really rollicking choruses, and we used to listen to them at night with extreme pleasure as they came, somewhat softened by distance, over the water to our camp at Wakatimi. The voices of the men are often rich, and they have a true musical ear. Their intervals are very similar to ours and not at all like those of the Malays and many other Eastern singers, who recognize perhaps five notes where we have only two. Beside the drum the only instrument of music they have is a straight trumpet made from a short piece of bamboo. This produces only a single booming note and is not used at the concerts.

As an amusement of the Papuans even more important than singing is dancing, of which they often talked, but though we saw some of their dancing halls (see illustration p. 48), we never had the good fortune to witness a performance. At the coast village of NimÉ, a few miles to the East of the Mimika River, there was a very elaborate dancing house, which must have cost an immense amount of labour to build. The length of the house from front to back was about 100 feet, the width about 25 feet, and it rested on poles which were about 8 feet high in front, rising up to about 14 feet high at the back. The side walls and the back were of “atap” as was also the roof, which sloped from a long ridgepole running the whole length of the house. The ridgepole was remarkable as being made from a single tree trunk (Casuarina) shaved down very smoothly to a uniform thickness of about 10 inches; the ends of it, which projected about 8 feet both at the front and back of the house, were carved in very lifelike representations of the head of a crocodile and were painted red. The weight of the beam must have been immense and one wondered how it had been hoisted into position. Between the ridge of the roof and the eaves there projected both in front and at the back six other smaller poles grotesquely carved to represent fish and reptiles and hideous human heads. The front of the house was open, and when you had climbed up the supporting poles and had stepped over a low fence you found yourself in a spacious hall with a floor well made of sheets of bark, which sloped up gradually from front to back. Along either side at regular intervals on the floor were sand fireplaces and above these were wooden racks, from which it was evident that something was hung to be cooked. Round the walls on all sides was a strip of carved and painted wood, and exactly in the middle of the hall, fixed to the floor and the roof were two posts about 3 feet apart and tied between them, at about half the height of a man, was an elaborately carved and painted board about twelve inches wide. In the middle of this board was carved the eye, which is a familiar feature of the ornamental carving on the canoes and drums, and it appeared that this eye is the centre of the ceremonies which take place in the house.

So far as I could understand from the description of the natives who accompanied me in my visit to the house, the people, both men and women, who take part in the ceremony, dance slowly upwards from the front of the house singing as they go, and when they reach the carved board each one in turn touches the eye, while all the people shout together. But what the object of the whole performance is and what the people cook and eat, are questions to which I was unable to find an answer.

I have had occasion above to mention the artistic carvings on the canoes and drums. Their paddles too show a very good idea of design, as will be seen from the illustration p. 144. Nothing amused them more than to be provided with a pencil and pieces of paper and to attempt to draw figures. Their efforts were not always very successful, and some of the drawings which I have kept would be quite unrecognisable for what they are, if I had not labelled them at the time. Like the young of civilised races they always preferred to draw the figures of men and women, and some of these are remarkable for having the mouth near the top of the head above the level of the eyes. The method of drawing is very simple; the pencil is held almost upright on the paper and the outline of the figure, begun at an arm or leg or anywhere indifferently, is drawn in one continuous stroke without removing the pencil from the paper. The end is always rather exciting, like the feat of drawing a pig when you are blindfolded, for the artist is never quite certain of finishing at the point whence he started. Besides human figures they liked drawing dogs, pigs, birds and fishes. Two pictures of a dog and a bird both done by the same man are peculiarly interesting, because they were both drawn upside down. I watched the man making the drawings, and when they were finished I saw that the legs of the creatures were uppermost; so I turned the papers the right way round and handed them back to him, but he inverted them again and admired them in that position. Curiously enough the same man drew human figures in the correct attitude, head uppermost, so that the state of his mental vision offers rather a puzzling problem.

Most of them had a keen appreciation of pictures and they were surprisingly quick in identifying photographs of themselves; in this respect they showed a good deal more intelligence than some of our Gurkhas, who held a photograph sideways or upside down and gazed at it blankly, as if they had not the faintest idea of what it portrayed. The illustrated papers were a source of endless delight to them, and the portraits of beautiful ladies, who they felt sure were our wives, were greatly admired. Horses, sheep, cattle and all other animals were declared to be dogs.

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 most elaborate figure I saw was supposed to represent a bird, and when the features of it had been pointed out some resemblance was certainly apparent.

But it must be admitted that their amusements are not always so innocent as drawing pictures and playing cat’s cradle. I have referred above to the gang of drunkards, who used to create such turmoil at Wakatimi. 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 instant 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. There seems to be a certain etiquette about the use of clubs, for the person about to be hit generally presents a soft part of his person, the back or shoulders, to the clubber, and we never saw a man intentionally hit another on the head, a blow which might easily be fatal; but blood flowed in plenty from the flesh wounds.

The part of the women in these village squabbles is always to scream loudly and generally to begin by banging the houses with sticks or spears and to end with pulling them to pieces. In a fight at Wakatimi we saw a party of infuriated women absolutely demolish three or four houses. The fights end almost as suddenly as they begin and in a short time the village settles down to its usual tranquillity. Neither the sight nor the sound of these village quarrels is very agreeable, but they have no regularly organised games and, at the worst, not a very great amount of damage is done.

The clubs used in these village fights and doubtless also in their tribal wars—but of those we know nothing—are of two kinds, wooden and stone-headed. The wooden clubs are about four feet long and consist of a plain shaft, of which the last foot or rather more is carved into a saw-like cutting edge; some of these are made of a very heavy wood and they are exceedingly formidable weapons. A more simple type of wooden club is a plain wooden shaft rather thinner at the handle end than at the other, round which is fixed a piece of shark’s skin or the prickly skin from the back of the Sting Ray and often with it is tied the saw of a small Saw fish; such a club appears to be capable of inflicting a very nasty wound.

There is a great variety of stone-headed clubs, but they are all alike in being furnished with a wooden shaft, which is usually a plain piece of wood, but occasionally carved near the club end. The stone head is pierced in the middle by a round hole about an inch in diameter, through which the shaft is passed and fixed firmly by wedges. Most of the heads are made of a rather soft limestone, but where the people obtain it we do not know, for there is no stone of any kind near the coast. The simplest type is merely a round water-worn pebble with a hole bored through it. More commonly they are worked and the labour of producing them must have been considerable. Some are flat discs with sharp cutting edges or blunt and roughly milled edges, and some are cut into the form of five or six or more pointed stars; rarely they are triangular. Others again are round or oval and are cut into more or less deep teeth, or they have small bosses left projecting here and there, but no two of them are exactly alike. The weight of the club head is usually two or three pounds. The most savage-looking club we saw was simply a rough lump of coral, not trimmed in any way. It was pierced and mounted on a finely carved shaft of extremely heavy wood, and the whole thing must have weighed fifteen or twenty pounds.

Not a little credit is due to the Papuans for their industry in making these elaborate weapons, for it must be remembered that until we visited the country they had no metal tools whatever, with the exception of two or three scraps of soft iron, and all their work was done with shell knives and stone axes. The knives are simply the shells of a common freshwater bivalve (Cyrena sp.); when these are rubbed down on a stone, they take on an exceedingly sharp edge and are used by the natives for carving the canoes and drums and sharpening their spears and arrows.

The stone axes used in the Mimika district are all of the same type, though they vary greatly in size from about four inches to large ones of nearly twelve inches in length. The stone of which they are made is always the same, a quartzite. The shaft is about two feet long and is invariably made of the butt end of a bamboo. A hole is bored and burnt in the lower end of the bamboo, that is to say in the solid part of the wood below the first joint, and the pointed end of the stone is jammed into the hole. The stone is always fixed axe-fashion, i.e. with its broad surface and cutting edge in the same plane with the long axis of the handle, and not adze-fashion, as is the custom in some other parts of New Guinea (see illustration p. 142). The axes quickly become blunt with use and they are sharpened by being rubbed upon another stone. At Wakatimi stones are very rare and one man appeared to be the stone-smith of the village. I remember seeing him one day sitting outside his hut sharpening an axe, with three or four others lying beside him waiting to be done, while a few yards away a woman was splitting a log of wood with a stone axe. It struck me as being one of the most primitive scenes I had ever witnessed, really a glimpse of the Stone Age.

The bows of the Mimika natives are about five feet long and are made of a simple straight piece of a very hard wood (usually a species of pandanus), tapering towards the ends, which are sometimes ornamented with the claw of a cassowary or a tuft of feathers and shells or the claw of a crab. The “string” is a piece of rattan and it requires a strong arm to bend the bow. The arrows are of various types (see illustration p. 150); they are all made of reed stems, and none are ever feathered nor have they nocks. They vary only in their points, which are sometimes merely the sharpened end of the reeds themselves and sometimes a plain sharpened tip of hard wood or bamboo. Some are tipped with the sharpened claw of a cassowary or with the spine that lies along the back of the Sting Ray, and the arrows used for shooting fish have often three points of sharp bamboo.

Most people have the idea that the savage man performs prodigies of skill with his bow and arrows, but whenever I saw the Papuans shooting, they made astonishingly bad practice. I remember seeing two Papuans trying to kill an iguana in a tree not more than twenty feet above the ground; they shot arrow after arrow at it, but the creature, which was as long and almost as thick as a man’s arm, climbed slowly up from branch to branch until it was lost to view.

The hunting spears are of two kinds, a plain straight shaft of heavy wood, very sharp and hardened by fire at the tip; and a straight shaft of a lighter wood, to the end of which is fixed part of a straight bone (generally the tibia) of a pig, sharpened to a fine point. There is another kind of spear made of a soft wood, finely pointed and with a wide blade carved in a sort of open-work fashion (see illustration p. 150); the blade and the point are painted red with clay and the shaft is generally decorated with feathers or plaited fibre. Spears of this sort are of no use in hunting but are employed at dances and other ceremonial functions.

Two more pieces of furniture, the head-rest and the sago bowl, complete the list of articles made by the Papuans. The head-rests, which were seen only in the villages of Obota and NimÉ, are made of a strip of elaborately carved wood four or five inches wide and between two and three feet in length, and are supported at each end by a stout wooden prop, which raises the head-rest about four inches above the ground. The longer head-rests are supposed to support the heads of two sleeping persons.

Fire is nearly always taken by the Papuans wherever they go; in almost every canoe a fire is kept burning, and when they travel through the jungle the men carry a smouldering stick. There must be occasions when all these fires are extinguished, but how they produce them we were unable to learn; the Papuans of Parimau could not make fire with the friction stick and rattan used by their neighbours, the Tapiro Pygmies.

From the description of them which has been given in this and the two preceding chapters it will be seen that the conditions of life of the Papuans are as primitive as those of any people now living in the world. There are very few other places, where you can find a people who neither make nor possess any metal and who have no knowledge of pottery. The only vessels that they have for holding water are scraped-out coconuts and simple pieces of bamboo. Water boiling they had never seen before we came among them. Their implements and weapons are, as I have shown, of the most primitive kind, and their ornaments are of the rudest possible description.

Cultivation of the soil is only practised by the people of one or two villages, and even then it produces but a very small proportion of their food, so it follows that most of their time and energies are devoted to procuring the necessaries of life.

The struggle for existence is keen enough, the birth-rate is low and the rate of infant mortality is, I believe, very high. Nor do diseases spare them; syphilis is exceedingly prevalent, and was probably introduced by Chinese and Malay traders to the West end of the island, whence it has spread along the coast. Tuberculosis is happily absent, but two natives of Wakatimi were suffering from what appeared to be certainly leprosy. Skin diseases, notably tinea imbricata, are very common; and almost every person appears to suffer occasionally from fever of one sort or another.

But in spite of all these drawbacks the Papuans of the Mimika are not such a very miserable people. They are strong, those of them that survive the ordeals of infancy and sickness; they have food in plenty to eat, if they choose to exert themselves sufficiently to obtain it; they have their amusements, songs and dances; and the manner of their lives is suited to the conditions of the country in which they live. It is this last consideration which ought ultimately to determine their fate: they live in a wretchedly poor country which is constantly liable to devastating floods, and their habit of wandering from one place to another, where food may be obtained, is the only way of life suitable to the physical and climatic conditions of the country.

Any attempt to “civilise” them must inevitably destroy their primitive independence, and if it succeeded in establishing the people in settled communities it would reduce them at many seasons to absolute starvation. We were visited once by the Director of the Sacred Heart Mission at Toeal, which has done admirable work amongst the natives of the KÉ Islands and at one or two places in New Guinea itself. When he had seen the people and the nature of the country and had been told something of their habits, he decided that the Mimika was not, at present at all events, a proper field for missionary enterprise. Setting aside all other considerations, one dares to hope that such an interesting people may for a long time be left undisturbed; they do no harm to their neighbours and the effects on them of civilising influences would be at the best uncertain.