Pygmies visit Parimau—Description of Tapiro Pygmies—Colour—Hair—Clothing—Ornaments—Netted Bags—Flint Knives—Bone Daggers—Sleeping Mats—Fire Stick—Method of making Fire—Cultivation of Tobacco—Manner of Smoking—Bows and Arrows—Village of the Pygmies—Terraced Ground—Houses on Piles—Village Headman—Our Efforts to see the Women—Language and Voices—Their Intelligence—Counting—Their Geographical Distribution.

The Pygmy people—or Tapiro as they are called by the Papuans—whom we saw in March, visited us occasionally in small parties of three or four at Parimau and later we went to one of their villages in the hills, to which they were reluctantly persuaded to show us the way. When they come down to Parimau they were warmly welcomed by the Papuans, with whom they seemed to be on very friendly terms, and stayed in their houses for two or three days. They appeared to be particularly attractive to the women, one of whom we saw affectionately embrace a Tapiro on his arrival; it was said that she kissed him, but if that was so it was the only occasion on which that form of endearment was seen practised by the Papuans. It was noticeable that when they arrived at Parimau they had not their bows and arrows, which they always carry elsewhere; probably they had left them hidden in the jungle before they came to the village. Similarly, when we went up to visit the Tapiro, the Papuans who were with us left their spears behind them at the last camp before we reached their village.

Their visits were always very welcome because they brought with them from the hills quantities of tobacco to exchange with the natives of Parimau, who grow none themselves. At first they were very shy of crossing the river, but by the offer of gifts we persuaded them to come into our camp, where we had better opportunities of observing them than in the crowded village.

At one time or another we took measurements of 40 adult men, most of them men in the prime of life, and their average height was found to be 144·9 cm. (4 ft. 9 in.). It is possible that one or two rather tall men of 150 cm. and upwards, whose appearance led us to suspect that they were Tapiro-Papuan half-breeds, may have been included among those measured, but the correction of that error will not appreciably reduce the true average height. The height of the smallest man measured was 132·6 cm. By contrast with the Papuans they looked extremely small and, what was rather a curious thing, though many of our Malay coolies were no taller than they, the coolies looked merely under-sized and somewhat stunted men, while the Tapiro looked emphatically little men. They are cleanly-built, active-looking little fellows, rather big in the buttocks as mountain people are apt to be, and their well-made calves are noticeable in contrast with the long, straight legs of the Papuans. They walk with an easy swinging gait, the knees a little bent and the body slightly leaning forwards.

The colour of their skin is paler than that of the Papuans—some of them indeed are almost yellow—but they are so indescribably dirty that it is not easy to know what is their true colour; they have also an ugly habit of smearing their faces with a black oily mixture. Neither tattooing nor cicatrization appears to be practised by them. The septum of the nose is always pierced and in it they occasionally wear a curved boar’s tusk planed down to a thin slip, or a short piece of straight bone; the alae nasi are not pierced. The nose is straight and very wide at the nostrils. The upper lip of many of the men is long and curiously convex.

The hair is short and woolly and black; many of the men give a lighter shade to the hair with lime or mud, and in two or three cases it seemed to be of a brown colour without any artificial treatment. They appear to begin to grow bald at a comparatively early age. The younger men grow whiskers and the older have short bushy black beards. There is a good deal of short downy black hair scattered about the body. Their eyes are noticeably larger and rounder than those of the Papuans, and there is in them something sleepy and dog-like which gives a pathetic expression to their faces.16

When we first saw them one or two men wore curious helmet-like caps of plaited fibres and another had a strip of fur round his head; otherwise they are completely naked except for the remarkable gourd case described above (p. 161). Strangely enough they are extremely modest and unwilling to expose themselves; when with some difficulty we had persuaded a man to part with his case, he would not remove it then and there, but always disappeared into the jungle and returned after an interval decently covered with leaves.

Their ornaments are few and simple; a number of men wear arm-bands and leg-bands of plaited fibre similar to those worn by the Papuans, and several of them wear necklaces of seeds, short pieces of bamboo, scraps of broken shell, teeth of wallabies and (in one instance) the bones of a small mammal. The lobes of both ears are pierced and a few men wear in one ear an ornament made of a small piece of gourd to which are attached seeds, scraps of fur, claws of birds and other ornamental odds and ends. One young man, with more originality than the rest, thrust through his front hair a piece of sharpened bone, which projected downwards over his face and gave him a most distinguished appearance (see Frontispiece).

The most elaborate and ornamental of their possessions are the bags, which every man carries. Most of them carry two, a large bag like a haversack slung across the shoulders and usually hanging down the back, and a small bag only a few inches square slung round his neck and hanging down on the chest. They are made of fine fibres of different colours, cleverly netted17 in ornamental patterns, and they show the best attempt at decorative art that we saw in the country. In these bags the Pygmy man keeps all his portable property. The small wallet round the neck contains his bone and shell ornaments when they are not in use, and his knives; these latter are sharp flakes of a flint-like stone shaped exactly like the flint-knives and scrapers that are found in this country; they are used for scraping down the wood of their bows and for pointing and ornamenting their arrows as well as for other cutting purposes, and it is profoundly interesting in these days of steel to see people still using the implements of prehistoric man. One or two men also carried in their wallets a short dagger made of a pointed cassowary’s bone, and they explained to us by graphic gestures how they were accustomed to shoot a cassowary with their arrows and then after a long chase to stab it with the dagger.

The contents of the larger bag usually are the sleeping mat, the fire-stick and rattan, and tobacco. The sleeping mat is a fabric of pandanus leaves, which can be used either as a mat to lie upon or as a shelter from the rain; it measures usually about six by three feet and is neatly folded to be carried in the bag. The manufacture of these mats is always the work of the women and is a very ingenious process. The long ribbon-like leaves of the pandanus are split horizontally into two strips; the shiny upper one alone is used and the lower is thrown away. Strips of two leaves are placed with their split surfaces together and their shiny surfaces outwards, and then numbers of these pairs of split leaves are sown together, edge to edge, until the mat is of the required size. Thus the mat is made entirely of the outer surfaces of the leaves; it is very strong and is quite impervious to rain.

By far the most interesting of the possessions of these people is the apparatus for making fire, which consists of three different parts, the split stick, the rattan, and the tinder. The split stick is a short stick of wood an inch or so in diameter, which is split at one end and is held open by a small pebble placed between the split halves. The rattan is a long piece of split rattan wound upon itself into a neatly coiled ring (see illustration p. 202), and the tinder is usually a lump of the fibrous sheath of a palm shoot and sometimes a piece of dried moss.

The method of making fire is as follows: In the split of the stick, between the stone which holds the split ends apart and the solid stick, is placed a small fragment of tinder. The operator—if one may use so modern a word in describing so ancient a practice—places the stick upon the ground and secures the solid, i.e. the unsplit end with his foot. Then, having unwound about a yard of the rattan, he holds the coil in one hand and the free end in the other and looping the middle of it underneath the stick at the point where the tinder is placed he proceeds to saw it backwards and forwards with extreme rapidity. In a short space of time, varying from ten to thirty seconds, the rattan snaps and he picks up the stick with the tinder, which has probably by this time begun to smoulder, and blows it into flame. At the point where the rattan rubs on the stick a deep cut is made on the stick, and at each successive use the stick is split a little further down and the rattan is rubbed a little further back, so that a well-used fire-stick is marked with a number of dark burnt rings. It was only with the greatest difficulty and after many attempts that we succeeded in producing fire in this manner, but the Tapiro do it with the utmost ease and they scorned our boxes of matches, which we offered them in exchange for their apparatus, and showed no signs of surprise at a suddenly kindled match.18

The most frequent use of the fire-stick is in lighting the tobacco, of which nearly every man carries a supply in his larger bag. These people cultivate tobacco in sufficient quantities to be able to supply the Papuans of the low country. The leaves are dried and neatly rolled up into long bundles weighing three or four pounds; the flavour is strong and rather bitter, but it is not unpleasant to smoke. The Tapiro smoke tobacco chiefly as cigarettes, using for the wrapper a thin slip of dry pandanus leaf. When, as is often the case, the wrapper is very narrow and the tobacco is inclined to escape, the man smokes his cigarette in a peculiar manner; he holds the unlighted end in his fingers and with his mouth draws out the smoke from between the edges of the wrapper in the middle of the cigarette, this he continues to do until the cigarette is about half consumed when he puts the end in his mouth in the ordinary way.

The Tapiro also smoke tobacco in a pipe in a fashion of their own. The pipe is a simple cylinder of bamboo about an inch in diameter and a few inches in length. A small plug of tobacco is rolled up and pushed down to about the middle of the pipe, and the smoker holding it upright between his lips draws out the smoke from below. The Tapiro never make large cigars like those of the Papuans of the Mimika, and the Papuans never smoke pipes, nor did they take readily to those that we gave them.

Besides the bone daggers mentioned above the only weapon of the Tapiro are the bow and arrows, which they always carry. The bows are a very little shorter than those of the Papuans, but otherwise they are very similar, viz.: straight tapered strips of hard wood “strung” with a slip of rattan. The arrows are shorter and lighter and of finer workmanship than those of the Mimika Papuans, but like those they have neither feathers nor nocks. The best, which they were not at all anxious to sell to us, are ornamented with simple carvings and are tipped with a very sharp point of black wood. An arrow which ended in a curious blunt lump of wood was used, so we understood, for shooting birds.

The Tapiro have no spears and neither they nor the Mimika Papuans know the use of the sling. They set quantities of little nooses for small animals, and we once found a rattan noose fixed to a root of a tree and evidently set with the purpose of catching a pig.

Many of them carry in their bags a small Jew’s harp, made of a thin piece of bamboo, from which they extract faint music that is pleasing to their ears. Two men possessed instruments of a more original design: these were made of pieces of polished bone fitting together in such a way that when one was turned round over the other it produced peculiarly discordant squeaks, which were highly appreciated by the player.

Wamberi Merbiri or Wamberimi, the village of the Tapiro which was visited by different members of our party on three separate occasions, is situated on the lower slopes of Mount Tapiro, the mountain nearest to Parimau, at about 1800 feet above the sea. It is in fact within a stone’s throw of that large clearing which Rawling and I had reached with so much difficulty, but when approached by the track used by the people themselves it is an easy walk of two or three hours from the Kapare River.

The track climbs by a steep almost knife-edged ridge densely covered with forest to the rounded shoulder of the hill where the village lies. The first sign of the village is a flimsy fence of tall poles, which bars the track and extends for a short distance on either side of it. Passing through a narrow opening in the fence you come to a cleared space occupied by three or four houses. A couple of hundred yards beyond these and separated from them by a small gully, which is bridged by an enormous fallen tree, is a second group of six houses, constituting the village of Wamberi Merbiri.

The houses are scattered about over three or four acres of steeply sloping ground, from which most of the trees have been cleared. Between the houses the ground has been levelled in three places to form almost level terraces, measuring about fifteen by five yards, completely cleared of vegetation and covered with small stones. These terraces are held up on the lower side by logs and stumps of trees, and the labour of making them by people whose only tools are stone axes and pieces of wood is difficult to imagine; they are used, so far as we could understand, for dances and other ceremonies.

The houses are greatly superior to those of the Mimika Papuans, from which they differ in every respect. They are built on piles, which raise the floor of the house from four to ten feet above the ground according to the steepness of the slope underneath. The walls are made of long laths of split wood with big sheets of bark fastened on to the outside. The roof is a fairly steep pitched angular structure of split wood covered with over-lapping leaves of the Fan-palm. The floor is made like the walls and covered with large sheets of bark; in the middle of the floor is a square sunken box filled with sand or earth in which a fire is kept burning, and over the fire hanging from the roof is a simple rack, on which wood is placed to dry. The house consists of one nearly square compartment, measuring about ten feet in each direction. The way of entering is by a steep ladder made of two posts tied closely together, which leads to a narrow platform or balcony in front of the front wall of the house. There are no notches on the posts, but the lashings of rattan, which tie them together, answer the purpose of steps or rungs for the feet. As well as in the excellence of their houses, the Tapiro show another point of superiority over the neighbouring Papuans in their habit of using a common retiring place at the edge of a small stream.

There was an old man in the village, bald and white-bearded, and horribly disfigured by disease,19 who appeared to be unquestionably the headman of the place. He sat in one of the huts all day and shouted shrilly to the other men who were constantly going in and out to speak to him, and I think it was due to him that we were never allowed to see the women. We were particularly anxious to see some of the women of the tribe, and we offered them large rewards of knives and axes merely for the sight of them. The other men were willing enough to produce the women, and several times they were on the point of fetching them, but were always prevented by the old man. Finally we had a personal interview with him, and held out three bright axes, which made his one eye glisten with greed, but he still remained obdurate.

Though we never saw the women I have no doubt that they saw us; at night we saw their camp fires up on the hillside opposite the village, and when we departed we heard their shrill voices quite close to us before we had gone a quarter of a mile from the place. They had no reason to distrust us when we assured them that our only wish was to see their women, and I think the reason for their keeping them hidden was the presence of the Papuans who accompanied us from Parimau. The supply of Papuan women is very scanty, and it is likely enough that the men would seize any chance of abducting a Tapiro woman, as indeed they boasted of having done.

The language of these Tapiro pygmy people is certainly different from that of the Papuans, but I regret to say that we were unable to make even the smallest vocabulary of it. Their voices are rather high-pitched and nasal, and many of their words contain curious throat sounds, which I was not able to spell much less to imitate. In talking they have a curious habit of protruding the lips, which recalls in a striking manner a familiar grimace of the anthropoid apes.

They appeared to understand a good deal that the Papuans said to them, but I doubt if the latter understood them when they were talking amongst themselves. When we were trying to persuade the headman to allow the women to be produced, it was a strange experience to be using the Papuans, of whose language we knew only the rudiments, as interpreters to an even less known people.

In consequence of our entire lack of knowledge of their language we were not able to form a very reasonable estimate of their intelligence. When they were seen in company with the Papuans, the latter, who usually looked dull and expressionless, appeared by contrast to be full of life and animation. The Tapiro, as a rule, looks blank and rather sad, and when a smile does appear upon his face, it dawns slowly and reluctantly.

A rough test of an uncivilised man’s intelligence is the extent to which he is able to count, but in the case of the Tapiro there is an unfortunate difference of evidence in this respect. Capt. Rawling (Geograph. Journal, Vol. xxxviii., page 246) affirms that they are able to count up to ten. If this is so, it is a very interesting and remarkable fact. On several occasions I tried to make these people count, with a view to learning their numeral words, and I found that like the Papuans they only had words for one and two, and that those two words were the same as the Papuan words; but it appeared that, unlike the Papuans, they had not the custom of using their fingers and toes for the higher numbers.

On the credit side of their intelligence must be placed their admirably constructed houses, their decorated arrows and ingeniously woven bags, and their cultivation.

As well as the village and clearing of Wambiri Merbiri we saw other small patches of cleared ground on the spurs of Mount Tapiro, and on the slopes of Mount Tuaba we saw from a distance another large clearing which we were never able to reach. Further to the East we saw no sign of them and we were informed by the Papuans that there were no more in that direction. That is probably true, for the mountains are so excessively steep to the East of Mount Tuaba that there appears to be no country suitable for them. It seems likely that we were fortunate enough to meet these people at the Eastern limit of their range and that more of them would be found living in the hills N.W. from the Kapare River towards the Charles Louis Mountains, where the slopes are less steep than in the Nassau Range. The thick-coated dog, which was brought down to Parimau by the Tapiro (see p. 126), might suggest that they have dealings with other natives living high up in the mountains, but so far we have no definite knowledge of the existence of such a people.

This account of our observations, which were necessarily very superficial, will suffice to show that there is a most promising field for some future investigator, who has opportunity and time to spend among these most interesting people.