ADVENTURES IN PAPUA

New Zealand Tablet, 21 August 1913, Page 11

ADVENTURES IN PAPUA

(Reprint of A.C.T.S. Publication.) By Beatrice Grimshaw.

WITH THE CATHOLIC MISSION

(Continued.) The Mekeo Plain. A nun, in a dark-blue cotton robe, riding gallantly astride of a rough bush horse, her forget-me-not colored, veil streaming out under a huge ‘ convent ’ hat, her strong, nailed miner’s boots set firmly in the stirrup; another nun, bobbing neatly along on a side-saddled mare; an ordinary woman riding after, through the green, green dusk of the Papuan forest. That was the picture. I was seeing the Mekeo plain, and the Sisters of the ..Catholic Mission (Order of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart) were guiding me. You cannot well see the Mekeo plain without the help of the Mission, as there are practically no other whites in the district. And | one would not recommend the average tourist to see it anyhow, though the Mission folk-Fathers, Brothers, and Sisters the kindliest and the most hospitable in the world, because their gay disregard of the peculiarly unpleasant collection of fevers exhibited by Mekeo, the casual manner in which they treat pythons, wild boars, and alligators, and their total indifference to chances of shipwreck, might be trying to the unseasoned traveller. I cannot say I did not find-it trying myself, though I was well seasoned. For an amiable, gentle, pious, dare-devil commend me to a Sister of the Catholic Mission let loose in the Papuan forests. A Sister of. the Mission, when she is not praying,

or teaching, or tending native babies rescued from murderous cannibal parents, or making clothes, or cooking, or mending fences, or carpentering, or milking cows, is usually engaged in some form of athletic exercises. Only she does not call it athletics, she calls it going about her business. She may be swimming a flooded river full of alligators, she may be riding a nasty-tempered horse on a broken cross saddle, she may be covering ten or twenty miles afoot, in a sun that would fry an egg she may even be climbing a tree, rapidly and without premeditation, prayers on her lips and an infuriated wild boar or cassowary at her heels — but, in any case, she is going about her business. All the same, the flower of feminine athletes from high schools and ladies’ colleges would find it hard to rival her on her own ground. This district of Mekeo — a marshy plain some 20 miles square, lying,close to the sea, brilliant, beautiful, scorchingly hot, full of mosquitoes and alligators, in- 1 fested with malarial and black-water fever is supposed to be the easy, the safe and agreeable part of the Mission territory— or, at least, so the Fathers told me; and I was too polite to contradict them, whatever I might have thought. The mountain district,, to which I was going later, was (they told me) hard and trying. Here, in Mekeo, the elder missionaries were put because it was easier. Mekeo is thickly populated ; it has many villages and towns, some with as much as five or six hundred inhabitants. Thirty years ago, many amongst these people were cannibals. None of them are cannibals to-day, and Many of Them are Catholics. Decent family life is replacing the polygamy of the older days; infanticide has ceased to be a popular pastime, though it is mot yet wiped out. War, treacherous war, made up of midnight raids and massacres, torturings, burnings, devouring alive, used to be the sole occupation of adult manhood. It is. gone; the Mission • and the Government, working hand in hand, have freed Mekeo from that curse. The state of the district, after thirty-five years’ mission work, is as heaven compared to hell. For all that, it is not so nice a place as it looks. There is a track leading from town to town, linking up all the chief places of the plain; it was cut

through the dense primeval forests, with incredible labor aaid pains, and is, for Papua, a wonderful road. Nevertheless, it is gridironed by torrential unbridged rivers, and swamps full of alligators; it is eked out by long stretches of black sand beach, incredibly hot and tiring to walk upon; and it is supplemented only by the roughest of forest tracks. This makes transport difficult and expensive, and travel fatiguing, although the Mekeo trip is considered quite a picnic journey—for Papua. This picnic had begun somewhere in the small hours of the day, one September morning, with a boat trip across five miles or so of open sea, from Yule Island, the headquarters of the Mission,, to the Mekeo coast. Hall Sound is sometimes stormy; the boats are small. There have been quite a number of small wrecks in consequence, but, so far, no member of • the Mission has been drowned, and a miss is as good as a mile. So they think at Yule Island. It had gone on with a walk of some miles, in the hottest hours of the day, on the hottest parts of one of the hottest coasts in the world. The sand was black and soft; the sun was overhead. Pinupaka, the landing place, with its cool, swinging palms, and green flags of banana leaf, its peaked brown houses set up on longlegged piles, its painted, mop-haired men and women, lightly dressed in a bit of bark or a fringe of grass, was a long way behind. Waima, our destination, was several hours in front. It seemed like an all-day walk, but, luckily, certain very old and melancholy ’ horses were procured at a little plantation where'two of the Brothers live, and the nuns and I rode them in turns thereafter.

(It was of no consequence, but we had already crossed several creeks known to be the haunt of dangerous alligators sort of alligator that grows old and cunning on one particular ‘ beat,’ and becomes the terror of all the neighboring villages. The creeks, were low enough for us to wade, to be carried over. Sometimes, when the tide is up, you have to struggle across up to your neck, or swim. It is then that the alligator adventures occur. A little while before, a Tasmanian Sister, swimming across one of these creeks, had been chased by an alligator, and just got over in time. The other Sisters told me that it was ‘ most inconvenient ’ for poor Sister A ; she was carrying her skirt on her head, and in the hurry of getting away she allowed it to become wet, which delayed her on her journey. . . . ‘ They will not trouble us, Mademoiselle; it is really not at all often that one sees them/ assured the elder of my guides.) / The description of quiet little Waima, reached in the twilight, may stand, for all the other stations of Mekeo. There are thirty-five of them, and all are much alike. A church, partly or wholly of corrugated iron, with a few rude seats, a home-made Communion rail, and an altar decorated only by the hands of the missionaries themselves - . v. • . pitiful brave _ shifts to hide the barest povertyjam I jars and-''-bottles .cunningly disguised in gilt paper and cardboard to make altar vases; ■ calico flowers; candlesticks cut out of tin. A house for the Fathers and Brothers — of wattle-sticks, with chairs, tables, and beds all carpentered roughly from the nearest bush material. A house for the Sisters, much the same. A school also built of sticks, with rude makeshifts for desks and benches. A tiny plot of garden ground, where some handfuls of carrots, half a score of aubergines, a couple of bean plants, struggle feebly in the sandy ground. These latter are the luxury of the station—these, and the milk of the station cow, and the few eggs of the very few fowls. There is No Superfluity of Anything, on these mission stations. The whole Mission, with its seventy-seven white workers, its hundreds of native children in the schools, its cattle, horses, boats, and expenses of every kind, is run on a sum little over two. thousand and a half a year, which is something very like a miracle when one comes to think it out. The. j houses in these out stations have practically no furniture. The Fathers and Brothers have barely enough 1 common shirts and trousers (of the kind worn by miners

and railway men) to keep them clad. The habits of the Sisters are patched and darned and faded; their veils are a wonder of stitchery. Boots and shoes are freely lent from one to another, patched, re-made, worked out ..to the last shred of leather. A yard of cotton is a treasure that can be turned to twenty different uses a tin of meat is stretched to cover several meals for several people, and ‘ to do up ’ afterwards. In the pleasant evening we came to the tall green palms of Waima, and the white sandy walks near the sea, and the small brown houses of the Mission. Grey shirts and blue robes came out to meet us and welcome us with the gay hospitality so well known to " guests of religious houses. A Father in the costume of a navvy (belied by his dignified beard, and refined, intellectual face) took the horses to unsaddle them. Sisters took possession of us, and swept us into their small stick house. The visiting nuns were received with delight, and given all the news. Our hostess went to fetch a bath, and carried away all my clothes to wash them herself, in spite of protests; one gave me her room and bed (she had to sleep on a sack of leaves in the schoolhouse, but she said she enjoyed it) —another went off to kill a plump young fowl that ought to have been kept to lay eggs. There was Benediction later, in the small tin church, with a surprising number of mophaired Papuans, jingling with dogs’ teeth and beads, taking reverent part in the service. There was supper on the verandah, lit by a hurricane lamp, the great green towers of the mangoes, newly-flowered, smelling sweet above our heads. None of the Sisters liked eggs; at least they did not like them that night. They insisted that I did. They insisted next day that I liked the major part of a fowl for dinner, and that they collectively preferred the scaly tips of the drumsticks and pinions of the wing—when they did not prefer a soapy piece of boiled yam to either. (I wish I were a station-owner in Australia, with a huge yard full of prize fowls running in hundreds. I wish I were a managing director in a gigantic store, crammed with groceries to feed an army or a fleet. What savory smells there would be among the stations of Mekeo! What shelves they would have to put up in their poor little pantries and larders!) On the next morning we went out to see the villages. There are twenty-two of them round about Waima. ■ Needless to say, I did not visit them all. The Mission does; has made up the quarrels of their inhabitants, saved many children from death, baptised and married not a few; taught hundreds a little reading, writing, and arithmetic, a little English, and a good deal of carpentering and other useful work. , In Port Moresby, and About Samarai, female fashion (native) prescribes the wearing of many petticoats or eight, at a guessmade of fine grasses neatly strung -into a fringe. These petticoats extend from waist to knee, and are carried with a swinging motion that suggests the style of a Highland regiment at a quick march. At Pinupaka, the skirts were shorter and scantier; the crinoline effect was wanting. And at a village further down the coast there was a woman, a visitor who came farther inland. She wore her own tribal dress, which consisted of one fringe of grass, scarcely a hand’s breadth in depth nothing else at all. She was a handsome young woman, with flowers in her mop of hair, and a great many shells and dogs’ teeth round her neck; she was quiet in her manner, and was (I understood) what the newspaper reports describe as ‘ a respectable married woman.’ ‘Wait till you get to the mountains, Mademoiselle,’ said the Sister. ‘Do they wear less there?’ I asked. ‘ But, certainly, Mademoiselle; they do not wear anything at all,’ replied one Sister calmly. ‘ They wear many things in their hair,’ added the o|mer Sister in an explanatory tone. ‘ But clothes no, they do not wear them; it is not their custom.* I thought the Sister was surely speaking after a figurative manner. But later on ■. The second day at Waima was given up to seeing Tou Ovia, two or three miles along the burning coast. Tou Ovia is a boarding-school; also a Mission station,

and a cocoanut plantation. Two Sisters accompanied me, and beguiled the tedium of the beach road by teaching me to ride cross-saddle on the horse we had brought with us, which was a good deal more'spirited than most of the Mekeo steeds, and by . relating anecdotes about the adventures they had had on the same beach track; only they did not call them adventures. When you live in a place when strange things are happening all the time, nothing is an adventure; there are incidents, pleasing and displeasing always, in the Mission, a miss is as good as a mile. ‘ There was Sister X- , for example, who was riding a horse that bolted. It bolted one day along the beach at high tide. Now, that did not matter much, for there was plenty of room, but the horse had been brought up on Yule Island, and did not like Mekeo, and once before it had swum the strait, so it wished to do so again. And it bolted into the sea, and began to swim, with its head for Yule Island, several miles away. And the Sister, who could not swim herself, tried to slip off, but she fell head downward,, and the horse dragged her through the water. Without doubt, Mademoiselle, she would have been drowned, but Father happened to be passing, and immediately he went into the water, and swam to her rescue, and freed her from the horse. After which,-the nun dried her clothes at the nearest station, and continued on her journey as though nothing had happened.’ ‘ there was that day that four of the listers were crossing one of the rivers in a small dug-out canoe, and the river was in flood, and the canoe upset. They hung on in the midst of the roaring torrent until the canoe drifted into the boughs of an overhanging tree, by which they were enabled to save themselves.’ ‘Were they frightened?’ one asks. ‘ As to frightened, they did not have time for that, for they all were making their final Act of Contrition as quick as they could, and offering up their lives for the Mission. But this is Tou' Ovia, Mademoiselle; now you will see ‘ A Beautiful Plantation.’ It was beautiful — thousand trees set in symmetrical rows, tall, green, and plumy, close to the foam-laced blue of the warm Pacific breakers. About a hundred and twenty acres was the entire extent of the little place; it was wonderfully well kept, trees weeded, rubbish burned, copra drying in an iron shed on many-layered trays. There was only one thing missingthe laborers. Did the plantation work itself ? It did, very nearly; or, rather, system and close personal care worked it with a handful of labor that would not have been enough to weed a quarter of the space in any other part of Papua. Thirteen small boys, dressed coolly in beads and a rag apiece, were studying in the tiny schoolhouse when we arrived. They were put through their paces for mereading and writing in English and Roro; arithmetic, catechism, prayers. They also learn carpentering, the use of saucepans, soap, and common medicines; how to be kind to animals; how to look after the sick. They spend a good deal of time fishing a good deal wandering in the forests. They are fat, and cheerful, and happy; they are being educated—as far as a Papuan native needs or can use education—and they will in time go home to their villages to act as centres of civilisation. In the meantime, these small children work a little on the plantation, with casual help from the village, hired at the rate of one puppy a month (the Mission breed of dog is greatly valued in Mekeo). They weed, burn, gather nuts, and so far as anyone can see are not at all overworked. The Father in charge of the station, and the Brother who lives with him, work with their own hands as hard as any of the boys, which may have something to do with it. Here, again, .was the brown stick Mission house, with the bush furniture, and the tiny, sandy garden, that produced next to nothing at all, and the lean, gay, kindly, shabby Father whom one meets all over Mekeo. Here was the feast prepared with generous hands for the visitor —the feast that would send in its bill across a dozen meals to come, when the visitor was

gone. And after the feast, and the school inspection, and' the hot walk over the plantation, came an interesting talk on the verandah where the sea breezes were beginning to blow up fresh and cool. . . What these Fathers and Brothers do not know about the heart of the Papuan, no one knows. It must be remembered that the Catholic Mission, as a rule ‘ Does Not Delegate Its Work to Native Teachers. There are very few of these, and what work they do is strictly under direction. The Catholic priest asks nothing of the black man that he will not do himself he takes for his own portion the terrible risks of the new, untamed cannibal country, as well as. the slow, monotonous, year-by-year grinding on at the districts already reclaimed, far from civilisation, out of the way of steamers,. towns, luxuries, and conveniences of every kind. Alone in New Guinea, the Catholic missionaries have dared to penetrate into the far unexplored interior; have set up their stations in inaccessible, dreary spots where news from the outer world can scarcely penetrate. It is in these places that mission work is most of all needed about the easy and accessible coast' districts, where other missions congregate, there are many civilising influences, and the native is under Government control. 11. For the Priest, the Brother, the Sister, Papuan missionary life means hard work, hard living, danger, sickness, poverty; the giving up of all things that men and women hold most dear, the laying down of every personal . ambition, of every thought of selffor ever. The hidden life is theirs, as it was of Jesus and Mary; the life of sacrifice and service. Each body and each mind in the Mission gives all it can. Each coin that the Mission owns does the utmost work that a coin can do. Nothing is spent in splendor, nothing in luxury, nothing on anything at all but the barest needs. So it is that the Catholic mission does wonders, on an income that is painfully and pitifully small. They are not good beggars; they are good at almost everything in the world save that, but there they fail. They would dearly like to have more money to spread their work; to have another sixpence or two, so that they can harness it skilfully, and make it do the work of half a sovereign by miracles of contrivance.and care; to see cases of goods and groceries and shirts and trousers and boots and cotton stuffs coming up to Yule Island by the Sydney steamers, so that they can give the missionaries a little larger allowance of food, a few more clothes; to have the price of a lady’s new spring dress, in order to build a house with it; or the cost of a box of cigars, so that they may keep a deserted orphan child a year. . . But they are so busy teaching and preaching, and making peace and nursing the sick, and helping the dying, and travelling about, that they have no time at all for begging; nor do they know how to set about it, if they did. So they praythey have always time for thatand confidently expect Sydney and Melbourne, and all the rich towns of Australia, will feel the effect of their prayers sooner or later, and send them just a little of the superfluity of ’those luxurious —just a drop or two of the golden river that runs down Pitt and George and Collins streets, ©very day and all day long. Are they right in so expecting? There is no one who reads this book but can say for himself or herself whether they are. If the hand goes to the purse, these praying souls are justified. It is their prayers that have sent your hand there, fingering your cheque book or your coin. But in any case they pray, and they believe. Sorcery. Back to Tou Oviaa long way back. It was sorcery that I was hearing about that afternoon, among the many strange customs of the Mekeo country. , The Father was a specialist in his subject, and the Brother was one of the original founders of the Mission ; he had been in Mekeo no less than twenty-seven years. Between the two, they could open the whole mind of the Papuan before your eyes—had there been time that day.

There are great sorcerers in Mekeo; it is, indeed, the chief interest of native life, and the influence. against which the Mission has to fight most strongly. Every village has its sorcerer, usually working hard against the Mission teaching, and claiming for himself the right to order the ways of all the people. At Mou there is actually a school of sorcery. Here the enterprising youth who desires to become a magician puts himself under the care of older sorcerers, and studies the mysteries of the black art as known to Papua. At times the whole school goes off into the depths of the forest, and hides itself there-for many weeks. What they do, not even the priests can tell you; it is the most jealously guarded secret of native life. But when the youths com© back and start their career as sorcerers, the results are plain enough. Tyranny, oppression, blackmail, magic ceremonies of the most degrading kind, superstitions of the grossest and most mischievous sort, all shot through with a black shadow of midnight terror, and a red web of secret murder—that is Papuan sorcery in its essence. Whole villages tremble under it; tribes are oppressed by other tribes; Mission converts are terrorised. A brave fight is made against the sorcerer, and bis power is weakening year by year; but he still remains the greatest obstacle in the path of Mission work, and also of civilisation. Charms are the great sorcerer’s stand-by; he is learned (after a native fashion) in geology and botany, and uses both sciences to favor his art. He knows the names and properties of every plant, flower, fruit, and herb in the teeming life of the Papuan forest, and he has a magical use for most of them. Some plants, he says, will make the yam crop grow, if planted at the right time, and with the right ceremonies. Some will bring down rain. Some will make a woman fall in love with you; others will bring misfortune to your enemies. There are plants that will keep the spirits of your ancestors from biting you as you sleep (but none apparently to keep the local flea or universal mosquito from biting you when you are awake, which seems like a serious omission). One, if you tie it to your hunting ; bow, will give you an infallible aim; one will make your dog run fast after wallaby or pig. Quit© a number, if suitably used, will rid you of your enemies. In geology (Papuan variety) they are equally skilled. According to the sorcerer-scientist, there are stones that will do almost anything you want, if you choose the right kind and use the right way. I saw a sorcerer’s charm-bag in one of the villages; it was filled with stones for the most part, things of curious shape and strange color — water-worn pebbles and bits of coral, quartz crystals, b'ke ends broken from chandeliers. With these the sorcerer says that he can make war or peace, can cause - a snake to bite any person who has incurred his enmity, or even incite an alligator to catch him .by . the leg as he swims, across a stream. Some, he says, -he can charm into his enemy’s body, to cause a fatal disease. ' Others, like the ring of the genii in Eastern fable, will bring to heels all sorts of devils, ready to undertake any kind of devilish work that may be suggested to them by anyone able to pay a good price for it; for sorcery is a regular trade and a most lucrative one. In addition to all this, the elder sorcerers of Mekeo are nearly all competent anatomists, knowing as much about the mysteries of the human body as any medical student who has been made free of the dissection room —and for the same reason. When they were young, there were interesting things you could do with pieces of human bodies, in the way of really high sorcery there are still, in districts that lie just round the corner, in Papua. But here in Mekeo civilisation has progressed so far that the murders of sorcery must be secret, and not clearly labelled as murder. <• The Government has a nasty way of hanging people by the neck till they are dead, without consideration for their social position as sorcerers and the Mission discourages even the most interesting forms of killing, persistently and effectively. I saw and heard more, later on, of this mighty guild of sorcerers. There is no ©scaping the subject in Mekeo. (To be continued.)