The Camp at the Wataikwa River—Malay Coolies—“Amok”—A Double Murder—A View of the Snow Mountains—Felling Trees—Floods—Village washed Away—The Wettest Season—The Effects of Floods—Beri-beri—Arrival of C. Grant—Departure of W. Goodfellow.

If I were to write a true and complete account of the expedition, I should fill many pages with repeated stories of rain and floods, sickness among the coolies and our consequent inaction; but that would be as wearisome to the reader as it was trying to our own patience. During July and a part of August we sent out parties of coolies to the Wataikwa camp, where a considerable depÔt of food was formed, but about the middle of the latter month the number of our coolies was reduced to twenty, of whom not more than half were capable of any hard work, and it became quite evident that any further progress in the direction of the mountains was out of the question until we should get a fresh supply of men.

As the number of coolies grew fewer we sent natives with them to carry stores out to the Wataikwa, but the supply of willing natives was very uncertain and it became a matter of some difficulty to keep up a regular communication with that camp. Two Gurkhas and two Javanese soldiers remained always at the Wataikwa and one or other of us went out there and stopped to make natural history collections or to superintend the cutting of the road on the other side of the river for a few weeks at a time, while the others were at Parimau or at Wakatimi. We managed to continue this arrangement until the end of October, when it became no longer possible to keep an European supplied out there; thenceforward until the beginning of January the camp at the Wataikwa was occupied only by the guard of Gurkhas and Javanese, who in the meantime consumed nearly all the stores that had been so laboriously accumulated there.

We often said hard things to and of our Malay coolies, but the poor wretches were not to blame for being such incompetent carriers. At their proper occupations of carrying cargo to and from the ships at Macassar, or working on the boats of the pearl-fishers, or doing odd jobs in their native places, no doubt they excelled; but at struggling through the New Guinea jungle with even the lightest of loads they were hopeless failures and the wonder was that they survived as long as they did. Taking them all round, the majority of them worked as well as they could, and some of them even became quite attached to us.

To a large number of people the name of Malay immediately suggests a savage person who runs amok, but you may live for years in a Malay country and never see a single amok. Fortunately our Malays never behaved in this dangerous fashion, though one day a man who was suffering from fever went suddenly mad and inflicted a serious knife-wound on the body of another coolie; the wounded man was successfully treated by Marshall, who was happily but seldom required in this way to exercise his vocation as surgeon. Malays are indeed rather too handy with their knives and a more serious encounter took place one day between two of Cramer’s convicts. These two men, a mandoer (head man) and another, quarrelled one morning about some trifle connected with their food, and before anybody knew what was amiss, knives were out and one was chasing the other through the camp. By a clever backward thrust the pursued man dealt the pursuer a deep wound under the heart, but he was unable to escape before the pursuer had given him too a mortal wound. One died in a few minutes and the other during the course of the day, fortunately perhaps for both of them.

But ordinarily our Malays were most quiet and peaceable fellows. Certainly they were liars and thieves when it suited their convenience to be so, but these two faults are almost universal in the East. They were enthusiastic fishermen (a sure sign of grace) and spent many hours of their leisure time in angling for small fish, which they very seldom caught. Another of their virtues, though it sometimes became a little wearisome, was their love of singing, in which they indulged on fine evenings. The Ambonese used to sing, accompanied by a soloist on a sort of penny whistle, some really pretty songs, possibly of Portuguese origin, to which one could listen with real pleasure. But the singing of the Javanese, usually in a high falsetto voice, was a burden hardly to be borne.

In dealing with people like the Malays it is essential to keep them constantly occupied in order to prevent them from brooding too much over their untoward circumstances and becoming, as they easily do, physically ill. Accordingly, during the times when for one reason or another they were not carrying out loads to the Wataikwa camp, we set them to clearing the jungle about the camp at Parimau, and in the course of time some ten or twelve acres were cleared. Apart from the object of drying and letting light into the camp, this clearing was made with the purpose of obtaining from Parimau a view of the Snow Mountains. This latter object was ultimately attained and proved of great service to the surveyors, who were enabled to fix more definitely the various points of the range seen from a place of which they had already determined the position by astronomical observations. To the non-surveyor too the view of the mountains was a boon, though rather a tantalising one, and I used to spend many hours in the mornings, before the mists had hidden them, in scanning the snows of Idenburg and Carstensz and planning routes by which they might be reached.

Cutting down trees in the New Guinea jungle differs from cutting down trees here in that the tree does not always fall, even when the trunk is cut completely through. Amongst the tops of the trees grows an extraordinary network of rattans and other creepers of sufficient strength to support a tree, even if it is inclined to fall. We spent some time one day in firing shots with a rifle at a single creeper, thicker than a man’s arm, which was holding up a tree without any other support; though I believe we sometimes pierced the creeper with bullets, it held on and only gave way some hours later. As a rule we did not take the trouble to cut the creepers, but if a tree did not fall we cut down those about it until they all fell together in one splendid crash. On sloping ground the best method of felling trees is to cut their trunks only half way through and leave them, and then to cut completely through a big tree above them in such a way that it will fall down hill and complete the felling of those below it.

Some of the trees that we cut down in our clearing fell in the most unexpected directions, but though there were some narrow escapes, there were no accidents. The most unpleasant was a tree which fell midway between two houses, one full of coolies and the other full of stores, and shaved off the projecting roof of both; it might easily have killed half-a-dozen sleeping men, but the only harm it did was to fill the camp with a swarm of large and furiously biting ants, which had had a nest in its topmost branches. The natives, who never tired of using our steel axes, helped a good deal in felling the trees and in this way some of them earned large quantities of coloured beads.

Another occupation for the coolies in their idle moments, and at the same time a very necessary work, was the business of keeping the camp in a state of repair. When the high river bank opposite the village of Parimau was chosen for a camping ground, it was thought that floods at all events could do no harm. The houses nearest to the river were built five or six yards back from the edge of the bank, which was there about fifteen feet above the usual level of the water, and it seemed quite out of the question that the river could ever invade the camp. It was necessary, in order to prevent it from becoming the dumping ground of camp-refuse, to clear away the rank vegetation that grew on the bank down to the water’s edge, and this was the beginning of what almost ended in our downfall. After the tangle of creepers had been removed, the first rains began to wash the bank away, and when the river rose three or four feet, as it speedily did after a few hours’ downpour, it undermined the lower part of the bank and large landslips took place from above.

In the course of a few weeks several yards of land disappeared, and the safety of our houses, which had come to be almost overhanging the river, was seriously imperilled. To save them we erected a strong palisade of long poles thrust deeply into the bottom of the bank and secured them by rattan ropes, which passed through our house and were attached to posts at the back. The interval between the palisade and the bank was laboriously filled up with shingle from the river bed, and this provided a never-ending occupation, because the stones were always trickling through the palisade and required to be renewed. The natives were of great assistance to us in this work, and on one occasion—it was the only time that we ever persuaded them to come into our camp, although we lived within a few yards of their village—the women and children came and helped in the work and thoroughly enjoyed themselves.

It was well that we took these precautions, for as the weather grew steadily wetter and wetter (though that seemed hardly possible) through July and August, so the river rose higher and higher and each succeeding flood was greater than the last. The night of the 18-19th of August was one that I shall never forget: it had been raining steadily for some days and the river was fairly full, but about sunset on the 18th the rain really began to come down solidly, as it does in the Tropics. About midnight a terrific thunderstorm began, which continued with almost incessant thunder and lightning until dawn, but long before this the river had risen many feet and was already threatening the village. As soon as the waters began to rise the natives appeared at the edge of the river with blazing torches, while canoes were baled out and brought nearer to the shore. When the flood, rising visibly by that time, reached the lowest house, a most extraordinary Bedlam broke loose and it sounded as if all the people in the village were being drowned. The men all shouted at once, the women and children screamed and the dogs whined and howled. By the light of the flashes of lightning we could see them scurrying hither and thither, bundling all their belongings into the canoes and trying to save the roofs and matting walls of their huts by throwing them among the branches of the trees at the back of the village. In a very short time all the houses were swamped and the people were in their canoes, about twenty in all, moored to the branches of the trees along the edge of the jungle, where they kept up an unceasing turmoil until daylight.

In the meantime our own position was not very secure. The river was swirling down at ten or twelve miles an hour and bringing with it huge tree-trunks, which carried away our fleet of canoes and threatened to destroy our protecting palisade. If that had gone nothing could have prevented our houses from falling into the river, but happily it held well. The whole of the jungle on our side of the river was under water and all sorts of creatures sought the shelter of our houses, which occupied the highest position. When even these were flooded, armies of ants and beetles and other insects climbed up our beds and other furniture to escape from drowning, moths washed out of their resting places fluttered aimlessly about, and a family of rats, which inhabited my hut, ran about squeaking in terror.

Beyond the loss of our canoes, some of which were afterwards recovered, no great damage was done, and the flood fell almost as quickly as it had risen. Soon after daybreak the ground, on which the village had been, began to appear above the falling water, and it was seen that not one stick of the huts was standing. But the natives were anxious to get out of their canoes, and by mid-day half the huts in the village were re-built with the fragments that they had crammed into the canoes or had put up into the trees. During the next two or three days they brought back quantities of housing materials, which had been carried for miles down the river, and very soon the village resumed its normal appearance.

On two subsequent occasions in the following month the village was completely swept away by floods, and it was a matter of surprise to us that they did not adopt the custom of their neighbours the Tapiro pygmies and build their houses on piles. The third great flood swept away the sandbank on which the village stood, and they were accordingly compelled to build their houses on the top of a high bank further down the river. Such a place as that necessitated cutting down a number of big trees, but now that a great many of them have the steel axes, which we gave them, it is to be hoped that they have learnt to place their dwellings in safer positions, even though it costs them a little extra labour.

The wet season, which we hoped had reached its maximum of wetness in July, when sometimes for days together the rain hardly ceased, continued in a series of greater or less floods through the months of August and September. Often it was impossible to move a yard from the camp, and without books life would have been almost insupportable. On one of the wettest of those days I came across the following passage, which seemed to describe the situation exactly:—

It need hardly be said that this very disagreeable season produced ill effects on all the members of the expedition. The Europeans became depressed, and if we were not sick of life itself, we were certainly sick of New Guinea, while in the case of the coolies and soldiers, who were accustomed to sunnier climates, and who had no interest or goal to look forward to in the country, the results were disastrous indeed. Hardly a man escaped fever of greater or less severity and chills brought on by the unceasing rain and the consequent impossibility of securing a change of dry clothing. Several men suffered too from dysentery of a very intractable type, which completely incapacitated them from any further service.

But worse than either fever or dysentery was the beri-beri, which made its appearance after we had been in the country for a few months. This is not the place to give a scientific account of beri-beri; it will suffice to say that it is a disease, of which the most important feature is a degeneration of the nervous system. The results of this are seen in the curious and characteristic walk, loss of sensation in various parts of the body, interference with the circulation and swelling of the body and particularly of the face and limbs, and in very many cases sudden heart failure. It is almost conclusively proved now that the cause of the disease is an error of diet, and it appears to be certain that the fine milling and polishing of the rice, which forms the staple food of the natives of so many countries in the East, deprives the rice of a very necessary constituent as a food. Those people, who grind their own rice and do not mill or polish it finely, but leave a small portion of the husk still adhering to the grain, are free from beri-beri. The disease varies in severity from time to time and from place to place, but at its best it is a very deadly scourge and it causes a very large number of deaths. Occasionally it occurs in an epidemic form, but fortunately that did not happen to our expedition.

In the six months from the beginning of June to the end of November, thirty-nine men shewed definite symptoms of beri-beri, and seven deaths were directly attributable to this cause. Our coolies, who came from the Eastern islands of the Archipelago, were much less susceptible to the disease than were the convicts and soldiers, most of whom came from Java and Sumatra; these latter contracted the disease in a much more serious form and most of the fatal cases took place among them. It was a curious circumstance that at Parimau, which was in most respects by far the healthier place, many more cases of beri-beri occurred than at Wakatimi, where it is doubtful if any cases originated.

Still more remarkable was the case of the camp on the Wataikwa River, which ought to have been the healthiest place we occupied anywhere in the country. For several months a guard of two Javanese and two Gurkhas was kept there to look after the store of food, and though they were very frequently changed and replaced by others, several of the Javanese developed beri-beri and two of them died. The Gurkhas, perhaps because they led more active lives than the Javanese, remained free of the disease until one of them, Havildar Mahesur, a most useful man, had the misfortune to damage one of his eyes; it was necessary for him to remain in the darkness of his tent for some days and within a fortnight he developed all the signs of beri-beri so that he had to be sent away from the country.

A welcome interruption in those dreary months was caused by the arrival at Parimau on August 26 of canoes bringing Mr. C. H. B. Grant, who had come out from England as naturalist to the expedition in the place of W. Stalker. He brought with him two Dayak collectors15 and a quantity of various and excellent stores, and a large mail, the first we had received since the end of May. Shortridge had arrived in the country by the same ship on his return from Australia, but his change of air had not completely cured him and he was compelled to leave the country at the end of November. Goodfellow, whose fever continued almost without interruption, became so weak that he also was obliged to leave the country early in October. From that time we had only a dozen men and no forward movement was possible until the arrival of our third batch of coolies on the 22nd December. By the same boat that brought the new coolies in December came instructions to Captain Rawling to take over the command of the expedition.