CANNIBAL PAPUA.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXI, Issue 9070, 22 April 1908, Page 7

CANNIBAL PAPUA.

Some of "The Truth About Papua," which Misa Beatrice Grimshaw has been telling per medium of the Sydney Morning Herald, is distinctly unpleasant. Her last contribution is mostly about cannibalism. Among the places she visited in the Goven - ment vessel was Gaoribari, where the famous missionary Chalmers was killed in 1902, and where no white man has ever ventured to settle. Cannibalisin there is naked and unashamed. A ma'n who passed the party with an odd looking lump of meat in his hand, picked a piece off, held it up to Miss Grimshaw's face and laughed an ugly laugh. For the moment it made her a little sick. The vast interior must hide an appalling amount of savagery. Kerema, •an isolated station on the edge of the •great unknown, is troubled by raids by the Kukukukus, one of the fiercest and most cunning o? savage tribes. From Kerema ore can see far away on the mcu.itain slopes the gardens of the. Kukukukus, where" the vegetables are grown for the hideous cannibal feasts. All the cannibal tribes eat vegetables with their meat No one has ever been to these gardens, few, indeed, have ever seen a Kukukuku. Yet he bears a terrible reputation among the Coast tribes, as the Danes did among the Saxons. He sneaks down to the coast villages and carries off women and children for his cooking pots, and stalks solitary people. The beach at Kerema, where the fat little children play, is one of his favourite sourcea of supply. He darts from the bush, snacches up a child, and is beyond reach before the villagers know of the kidnapping. "You can no more see a Kukukuku, when he does not want you to, than you can see an alligator who is intent on pretending to be a log. The Red Indians of early Victorian boys' books was not in it witn him as Tegards "woodcraft." But the Kukukukus have been beaten at their own game. Immediately en hearing of the last outrage the local magistrate led his police to a point by which the Kukukukus would have to pass on their return to their hills. The cannibals, not fearing pursuit, came along carelessly, with torches, and the police poured in a volley. They dispersed in a flash, but left behind them a good deal of blood and parcels containing the cut-up bodies ■of two children.