Communication with Amboina and Merauke—Sail in the “Valk” to the Utakwa River—Removal of the Dutch Expedition—View of Mount Carstensz—Dugongs—Crowded Ship—Dayaks and Live Stock—Sea-Snakes—Excitable Convicts—The Island River—Its Great Size—Another Dutch Expedition—Their Achievements—Houses in the Trees—Large Village—Barn-like Houses—Naked People—Shooting Lime—Their Skill in Paddling—Through the Marianne Straits—An Extract from Carstensz—Merauke—Trade in Copra—Botanic Station—The Mission—The KÉ Island Boat-builders—The Natives of Merauke described—Arrival of our Third Batch of Coolies—The Feast of St. Nicholas—Return to Mimika.

It has been mentioned in the preceding chapters that after the expedition landed in New Guinea, a more or less regular communication was kept up between the Mimika and Amboina. The South-west coast of New Guinea as far East as the Utanata River is in the administrative district of Amboina, and beyond that, as far as the boundary of British New Guinea, the country is nominally under the control of the station of Merauke. Thus the Mimika is actually within the Merauke district, but it was for many reasons found more convenient for the Government to communicate with the expedition directly from Amboina rather than by way of Merauke; accordingly the soldiers forming our escort were attached as an outpost to the garrison of Amboina and communications were established with that place.

For several months a steamer came from Amboina to the Mimika, bringing men and stores and letters and taking away invalids; usually it came every six or eight weeks, and the longest interval that occurred was twelve weeks, during which for one reason or another it was found impossible to send a ship to the Mimika. In October an alteration was made, and it was decided that the Merauke steamer, which was in regular communication with the Dutch expeditions on the Utakwa and Island rivers, should visit the Mimika also. It was in consequence of this new arrangement on the part of the Government that I was enabled to make the journey described below, and although these places do not fall strictly within the sphere of our expedition, yet they are so little known that I shall make no apology for giving a short description of them here.

Towards the end of November, the Government steamer Valk called at the Mimika on its way to the Utakwa and Island rivers to take away our sick men, who had accumulated in some numbers during the last two months. Our work was practically at a standstill, and nothing more could be done until our next batch of coolies arrived, so it was agreed that I should go down to Merauke in company with Shortridge, who was going home an invalid, and bring back our new coolies who were due to arrive there by the next boat early in December.

A few hours’ steaming from the Mimika brought us to the mouth of the Utakwa, where we lay outside the bar all night waiting for daylight to find our way into the channel. When we had entered the river it was evident that the Utakwa was something very different from the Mimika, which is a mere ditch in comparison with it; it is indeed to the Mimika as the Severn is to the Wye. It was tantalising to remember that this was the river by which we had originally intended to enter the country, and one could not help regretfully wondering what would have been the result if we had followed out that plan; but it was at the best an unprofitable speculation, and one had to rest content (or as content as possible) with the course we had taken. In any case it was certain that even if we had taken the Utakwa as our point of entering into the country, we could not possibly have reached any considerable height in the Snow Mountains with the means, i.e. the men, at our disposal.

Near its mouth and for some miles inland the Utakwa is about half a mile wide and bounded by low banks of Mangrove and Nipa-palm. The Valk was a ship of about five hundred tons drawing twelve feet of water. We steamed up the river for about seventeen miles and there anchored, not from lack of water, but on account of the risk of turning the ship round against a strong current in the somewhat narrowing channel. From the anchorage a steam launch and boats were sent on to the base camp of the Government expedition, which had been established rather more than thirty miles further up the river.

We waited for three days while that expedition was being brought away, and after the first day the Valk went down to the mouth of the river on account of the mosquitoes at the anchorage; they were a small black species, and they came out of the swamps by day as well as by night in swarms, and attacked everybody on board so furiously that life became quite intolerable. Before we left the anchorage up the river we saw a magnificent view of the snows of Mount Carstensz towering up over the morning mists. From there the Snow Mountains, making as it were a steep wall across the view to the North, appear far more imposing than they do in the rather sidelong view from the Mimika; and the different aspect of the precipices as seen from the Utakwa was most instructive.

Whilst we were waiting at the mouth of the river we were visited by several parties of natives in canoes, who came, they informed us, from a large village on the Kupera Pukwa, the next river to the west of the Utakwa. They appeared to use the same, or almost the same, language as the people of Mimika, and they were very anxious that we should go and visit their village, but unfortunately we had no means of doing so.

An interesting sight at the mouth of the Utakwa were the Dugongs (Halicore australis), which were seen feeding on the weeds in the shallow water and occasionally rose up and stared at us in a curiously human manner. They are about eight feet long and are perfectly inoffensive creatures, but they have been “fished” for with nets and almost exterminated in many places on account of their valuable oil.

The Dutch expedition came down to us in detachments during the three days that we waited at the mouth of the river. There were Captain Van der Bie, in command; Mr. J. M. Dumas, surveyor and naturalist; three white sergeants, about fifty native soldiers and convicts, and twenty Dayaks of Dutch Borneo, who came down the river in the long canoes they had built themselves. There was also an Australian collector, Mr. Meek and two assistants, who had been attached to the Dutch expedition to make collections of birds and butterflies for a private museum in England. With Mr. Meek were ten natives of Port Moresby in British New Guinea, little brown, fuzzy-headed fellows full of life and merriment; they were in every way so different from the sombre and unemotional Papuans that it was difficult to realise that they were both natives of the same island.

The Utakwa expedition had been in the country for seven months and had traversed a considerable extent of country, but those months coincided with the period of the worst weather—one cannot talk of wet and dry seasons in that region—and like us they had suffered from the shortcomings of their coolies; the Dayaks had reached them too late to be of much service to the expedition. From their base camp at the head of steam-launch navigation they had gone two days further up the river in canoes, and then had gone a distance of seven marches towards Mount Carstensz. The furthest point they reached was at an altitude of about 3000 feet, and was less than twenty miles distant from the snow, but the views of the country that they saw were not sufficient to show whether that was the best route to the highest mountains. One of the principal objects of the Government in despatching that expedition to the Utakwa was to discover a convenient way of crossing New Guinea, and when it was found that the Utakwa led apparently to the highest mountain in the island, it was decided to withdraw the expedition, and to concentrate all the exploring energies on the Island River, which seemed to offer a better prospect of accomplishing that purpose.

When all these people had been taken on board the Valk, the decks of the little ship were crowded to overflowing with gear and men and wild animals. They had brought some young wild pigs, a number of crowned and other kinds of pigeons, and several young cassowaries. Mr. Dumas brought on board three eggs, from which were hatched pretty little cassowary chicks during the next few days. We were particularly struck by the appearance of the Dayaks, any one of whom looked more than a match for three of our Malay coolies. Apart from their apparent strength, they differed noticeably from the Malays, who like to spend their days in sleeping between meals, in their unceasing industry; they had brought on board quantities of bamboo, from which they at once started making bird cages, and pieces of hard wood, out of which they carved handles for their knives and other ornamental objects.

The ship was so heavily laden that it was impossible to take on board all the boats that had been used by the Utakwa expedition, and three or four were towed in a long string astern. Fortunately the sea was exceptionally smooth, but even so one of these, an almost new “long-boat,” broke adrift, and we lost a day in searching for it unsuccessfully.

Whilst we were cruising about looking for the lost boat, one of our passengers, a fever-stricken soldier from the Mimika, caused some excitement by stabbing with his knife another man and then jumping hastily into the sea. The sudden plunge cooled his fever and the appearance of a sea-snake swimming not far from him made him as anxious to return to the ship as he had been to leave it.

During the voyage down the coast we saw a number of sea-snakes, sometimes as far as thirty or forty miles from land, but there was no opportunity of catching one; they appeared to be yellowish with dark markings and were about three or four feet in length. I was told that they sometimes travel in large numbers together and will climb up the sides of ships at anchor, but I cannot vouch for the correctness of this statement.

Another episode, which enlivened the voyage down to Merauke, was caused by the strange behaviour of one of the convicts, who was being taken away from the Mimika. This man had suffered from the common form of delusion that everybody was against him, and after he had run away from the camp at Wakatimi and had spent thirty-six hours in the jungle without food I certified that he was of unsound mind and recommended that he should be sent back to Java. He was found prowling about the ship with an exceedingly sharp knife, with which (so he said) he intended to murder me, so he was promptly secured in chains. We made friends in a day or two and he was set at liberty again before we reached Merauke, but I confess I was not sorry when we were no longer together in the same ship.

On the second day after leaving the Utakwa we entered the Island River by one of its many mouths, and after we had gone up it a few miles we realised that in the matter of size it is to the Utakwa as that river is to the Mimika. The banks are low and swampy and mostly covered with mangroves for several miles from the coast. Further on the banks are a few feet above the level of high water and we saw many trees that looked like good timber trees and others of considerable beauty, notably a wide-spreading acacia-like tree (Albizia moluccana), and a very graceful palm (Oncosperma filamentosum) like a Betel-nut palm growing in clumps by the waterside. We noticed also a number of Bread-fruit trees (Artocarpus sp.) bigger than any I have seen elsewhere, but none of them appeared to bear fruit.

We steamed up the river for one hundred and twelve nautical miles to the Swallow, the depÔt ship and base camp of the Dutch exploring expedition. The river at that point is about three hundred yards wide, but the current is swift and there are many shallow sand banks, which make further navigation impossible for a ship as large as the Valk.

The Dutch expedition had been established for several months in the country and had made very considerable progress towards the North. From the Swallow they had proceeded up the river two days’ journey by steam launch and six days beyond that by canoes as far as the river was navigable, a distance of more than one hundred miles. Thence they had gone North, and in nine marches they had reached a height of ten thousand feet at a point which appeared to be on the watershed of the main mountain range of the island. One of the principal objects of the expedition was to cross New Guinea from South to North, and it was hoped that from the furthest point they had reached they would soon arrive at one of the upper tributaries of the Kaiserin Augusta, the large river which enters the sea in German territory. They were at that time busily occupied in transporting supplies up to their furthest camp with a view to continuing the journey, but shortly afterwards the expedition was crippled by sickness and the project was abandoned. We spent two days alongside of the Swallow transferring to her the stores and many of the men that we had brought from the Utakwa and taking away the sick and time-expired members of the Island River expedition, amongst them being Lieut. Van der Wenn of the Netherlands Navy, who was attached to the expedition as surveyor.

On our way down the Island River we saw many things which we had missed on the way up, because we had entered the river and steamed up through several hours of darkness. First we came to isolated houses by the river bank of the same type as the Mimika houses, but larger and better built; near them we saw a few natives, who appeared to be very shy and retreated hastily into the jungle when the steamer approached.

Lower down, when we were within about thirty miles of the sea, we came to a large village of fifty or sixty houses, some of which were raised on piles near the edge of the river and the others were built in the trees, where they presented a most astonishing appearance. They are square and apparently well-made houses with ridgepole roof and walls of “atap,” the entrance is by a hole in the floor which is reached by a vertical ladder of bamboo from the ground. One house was at a height of certainly not less than sixty feet above the ground in a very slender tree, and the position of the inhabitants, when the wind blew, must have been far from enviable. Unfortunately the sun was low and directly behind the village so that I was unable to obtain photographs of the tree-dwellings. The people there showed no fear of us, but stood on the bank and shouted and waved their spears.

A few miles further down the river we came to another large village of yet a different character. The houses there were all built on piles, but while a few of them were of the usual small size, the majority were quite unlike anything else we had seen in that part of New Guinea. They were huge barn-like structures raised on piles ten or more feet above the ground, and the length of some of them must have been from one hundred and fifty to two hundred feet. It was quite evident that these were communal dwellings, indicating a social system entirely different from that of the surrounding districts, and it was very tantalising to pass them within a few yards and not to be able to visit them. The village extended for about a mile along the East bank and the natives that we saw must have numbered at least a thousand. The men were all entirely naked and the women were only dressed in the scantiest strip of bark-cloth. In other respects they appeared, as far as one could tell from such a rapid survey of them, to be very similar to the Mimika Papuans in their features and their short hair and their absence of adornments.

Crowds of people lined the river bank and some of them, holding short bamboos in their hands, jerked them in our direction and from the end came out a white cloud of powdered lime, which looked like smoke. This custom was noticed by Rawling when he first visited the village of NimÉ, and it was recorded by some of the early voyagers,20 but the meaning of it has not yet been explained. The suggestion that it is a means of imitating the appearance of fire-arms is ingenious, but it can hardly be seriously considered.

While most of the people stood on the bank to see us pass, a number of men jumped into their canoes and came racing after us. The current of the river was about two, and the speed of the Valk was seven knots, so they had to move quickly, but they easily overtook us and followed us for some distance down the river. Their canoes are simple “dug-outs,” but they differ from those of the Mimika in coming to a fine point at both ends. The bow is roughly notched on the upper side, which gives it somewhat the appearance of a bird’s beak. They seem also to be considerably lighter than the Mimika craft, and so narrow that a man could hardly sit down in them. The usual number of a crew is nine or ten men, who all stand up and all paddle on the same side of the canoe. The regular swing of their bodies and the perfect precision of the paddling was a sight prettier than any “eight” I have ever seen. They called to us and waved bundles of arrows, evidently anxious to trade with us, but the captain of the Valk was unable to stop, so we threw overboard for them empty tins and bottles, and it was marvellous to see how they raced up to these things, and with a sudden backward stroke of their paddles brought the canoes to a standstill, while they recovered the prize, and then raced on again.

From the mouth of the Island River, as we went out to sea, we saw through a break in the clouds to the far North the snow on Mount Wilhelmina, which was reached by Mr. H. A. Lorentz in November, 1909. Steaming in a south-easterly direction we kept some way out from the land, which is so low as to be invisible at a distance of a few miles. When we were opposite the Digoel, the greatest (excepting the Fly) of all the South New Guinea rivers, we found the sea strewn with logs and trees, in some places so many together as to form floating islands, on which crowds of gulls and terns were seen to settle at nightfall.

The tide favouring us, we chose the Marianne Strait between the mainland and Prince Frederick Henry Island. Sometimes, when the south-east monsoon has been blowing regularly for a few days, it is quite impossible for a ship of only moderate power to steam through it against the current. The Strait is a winding channel about ninety miles long and has an average width of about two miles, and it is not surprising that early voyagers, even as late as Kolff, in the Dutch brig-of-war, Dourga, in 1826, mistook it for a river. The banks are low and forest-covered, and we only saw two small clusters of houses. From one of these some men put off in a canoe to intercept us and followed us for some distance, calling “Kaya-Kaya” (friend).21 They were tall and powerful-looking men, entirely naked except for a small shell attached to a string about the middle, and their great mats of hair extending down to the shoulders and beyond showed most clearly that we had come to yet another tribe quite distinct from the people of the Island River.

Jan Carstensz, who visited this coast in 1623, gives a good description of the land and the people:22 “It is impossible to land here with boats or pinnaces owing to the clayey and muddy bottom into which a man will sink up to the waist, the depth of the water being no more than three or four fathoms at three or four miles distant from the land. The land is low-lying and half submerged, being quite under water at high tide; it is covered with wild trees, those on the beach resembling the fir-trees of our country, and seemingly bear no fruit. The natives are coal black like the Kaffirs and they go about stark naked. They have two holes in the midst of the nose, with fangs of hogs or sword-fishes through them, protruding at least three fingers’ breadth on either side, so that in appearance they are more like monsters than human beings, they seem to be evil-natured and malignant. The lands which we have up to now skirted and touched at not only are barren and inhabited by savages, but also the sea in these parts yields no other fish than sharks, sword-fishes, and the like unnatural monsters, while the birds too are as wild and shy as the men.” Further to the East he found the people “cunning and suspicious, and no stratagem on our part availed to draw them near enough to us to enable us to catch one or two with nooses which we had prepared for the purpose.” Suspicion of the unknown is in the nature of savage people, and when we read that “in order to frighten them the corporal fired a musket, which hit them both, so that they died on the spot,” we no longer wonder that they appeared to Jan Carstensz to be “evil-natured and malignant.” But times have changed and the Dutch navigator of to-day is not less humane than any other.

After coming out of the Marianne Straits we noticed a change in the appearance of the land; the smoke of villages appeared at frequent intervals and the shore was seen to be fringed by a continuous belt of coco-palms in place of the mangrove to which we had become accustomed. In a few hours from the Marianne Straits we came to the mouth of the Merau River and after steaming up it for about four miles we dropped anchor opposite the Dutch station of Merauke, where we left the ship and went ashore.

The Dutch people have an inborn preference for low-lying land on which to place their stations, but not the most enthusiastic fenman would have voluntarily chosen Merauke as a place for a settlement. The reason of its existence is a political one. Formerly the natives of the district, the Tugeri, a very fierce and warlike people, used to have the habit of making raids to the Eastward into British territory, whence they brought slaves and the heads of their fallen enemies. This became such a nuisance that the Australian Government addressed protests to the Dutch about the lawless behaviour of their subjects, and in 1902 the Dutch made the station of Merauke, and established there a small garrison of about one hundred men. The place was chosen partly because it was in the centre of the district of the Tugeri, and partly because on that shallow coast the Merau River alone offered a safe harbour for ships. It is a dreary enough place on the muddy bank of the river and surrounded on the other sides by swamps, but the Dutch have made the best of a bad job, and by laborious ditching and dyking they have made the place fairly secure from floods; in spite of all their draining, however, there are more mosquitoes there than in any other inhabited place I have ever visited.

Like other Dutch settlements Merauke is laid out on a regular and spacious plan, plenty of room being left between the houses of the officials and the quarter occupied by the shops of the Chinese, of which there are about a dozen. There are (or were in 1910) sixteen Europeans23 in the place, all of them in the employment of the Government except two, the representatives of an European trading firm. The principal trade of the place is in copra obtained from the hundreds of thousands of coco-palms, which line the neighbouring sea-shore. These palms are the property of the natives, who are too lazy to take advantage of the wealth that lies (or rather hangs) at their doors, and they do not encourage other people to come and make use of it.

There is a small force of native police under a Dutch officer, and a few convicts are employed in keeping the station in order. It may not be out of place to remark here that the nearest Dutch settlement is at Fak-fak on the S.W. corner of the MacCluer Gulf, seven hundred miles in a straight line from Merauke. Besides these two places the only other Dutch garrison is at Manokwari (Dorei Bay) on the north coast, where there has been a mission station for more than fifty years. Apart from civilian and military officials, missionaries and two or three agents of a commercial firm there are no settlers in the huge territory of Dutch New Guinea.

A former Resident of Merauke, who had somewhat inflated ideas of the future of the country, established an experimental botanic garden on the only patch of dry ground near Merauke. Attached to the garden is a large building containing rooms for three Europeans, laboratories, a dark room and so on, which (it was hoped) would attract scientific agriculturists and botanists from other countries to come and study the local flora. But no sane person wishes to study the flora of New Guinea in the middle of a swamp, and already the scanty soil was showing signs of exhaustion at the roots of the experimental bananas, and the practically-minded Resident was considering the removal of the house to Dobo or elsewhere as a dwelling for himself, when the contemplated abandonment of Merauke as a “Residency” should take place.

Another interesting building at Merauke is the house of the Mission of the Sacred Heart, an offshoot from the mission at Toeal. It must, I am afraid, be admitted that Merauke is not a favourable field for missionary enterprise, and the most notable achievements of the good fathers there are the admirable house they have built, and the herd of cattle which they contrive to keep. They teach a very small class of the native children, but nearly all of them relapse again very soon into savagery, and the adults, who have remained faithful to the mission, are very few, and they are not the best specimens of their race.

Recently the ubiquitous Chinese have discovered that the sea in the neighbourhood of Merauke is a most profitable fishing ground, and the results of their labours are spread abroad to dry in the sun, so that there are times when the air is almost too strong to be breathed. The fishery has attracted some men from the KÉ Islands, who are the best boat builders in the Eastern Archipelago, and I spent many hours watching them at their work. Their tools consist only of an axe, an adze and an auger, and no nails or metal are used in the construction of a boat. The planks are about three inches thick and are made each from a single tree hewn to the required shape. Holes are bored at intervals along the edge of the plank, and into these are fixed pegs of wood which fit into corresponding holes in the edge of the succeeding plank. When the shell of the boat is completed, the ribs, each made from a single piece of bent wood, are fitted to the inside. The fitting of the planks is so accurate that the boats require little or no caulking, and they are ready to take the water as soon as they are built.

But by far the most interesting feature of Merauke are the natives of the place, whose independent mien and conservative customs fill the observer with admiration if not with approval. It is now nearly ten years since the Dutch settled at Merauke, but in all that time, apart from curbing somewhat their head-hunting propensities, they have made very little impression on the natives, who still cling (if one may use somewhat of an Irishism) to their scanty costume of nothing at all, and refuse absolutely the beads and cloth and other “trade-goods” of the invading white man. They stroll about the place in a most lordly manner, and they like to visit the houses of the Europeans, where they spend hours disdainfully watching other people at their work.

In appearance they differ from the Papuans of the Mimika in their somewhat paler skin and in their features, which are markedly of the (so-called) “Semitic” type with prominent eyes and long, curving, fleshy nose. They are very fond of personal adornment and paint their faces with white, red, and yellow colours; a fashionable but very unsightly decoration is to paint the eyelids and eyelashes white. Through the septum of the nose is thrust a long piece of white bone or shell, and in the alae nasi, which are also pierced, are often worn the claws of a large eagle which project forwards, and give the man a most ferocious aspect (see illustration opposite).

Some of the more dandyfied individuals are loaded with necklaces of shells or teeth of dogs, sharks and crocodiles, and bands or belts of the same things are crossed on the chest. Rings of boars’ tusks and plaited fibres almost cover the upper arms, and in the ears are worn bunches of large rings of tortoiseshell and bamboo. The hair is long and is plaited with a mixture of mud and grass and feathers into a solid bunch, which hangs down beyond the level of the shoulders. In some of these head-dresses I saw plumes of the Greater, the Red and the King birds of Paradise; it appears that when once they are made these head-dresses may be added to, but they can never be undone, and they are accordingly indescribably dirty. These people are characterised by a pungent and most disagreeable odour, quite different from the sickly sweet smell of the sago-eating Mimika people.

Another curious custom of the Merauke natives is their habit of wearing round the waist a belt of pigskin, which cannot be removed, and is so tight that it constricts the man to an (apparently) most painful degree; the women of the tribe do not indulge in this practice.

Two days after our arrival the monthly mail-steamer came bringing our forty-eight new coolies from Macassar, and on the following day it sailed again, taking Shortridge on his way back to England. For a week longer I received the most kind hospitality from the Resident, Mr. E. Kalff, until we returned to the Mimika. During that week of waiting our new coolies, who had heard terrible stories of the Mimika, declared that they would never go there, and they attacked with knives the guards who were placed to keep them in order. When I told them that if they had no liking for the Mimika they were perfectly at liberty to go and live near Merauke, the stories they heard of the habits of the Tugeri put an immediate end to the strike, and they came contentedly enough to the Mimika. They were more fortunate than some of their predecessors, and all returned to their homes at the end of the expedition.

The Dutch have a pleasant sentiment with regard to the customs of their native land, and at Merauke, the most remote outpost of Holland, the feast of S. Nicholas was celebrated with due ceremony. All the Europeans in the place, as well as the Javanese sergeants and clerks and their children, assembled to meet the Saint, a huge Dutchman disguised out of all recognition, and all of us, brown and white alike, received at his hands a present or a mock flogging according to our deserts.

After spending ten very agreeable days at Merauke we sailed on December 18th and going by way of the Island River, where we landed fresh men for that expedition, we arrived again at the Mimika on the 22nd December.