ADVENTURES IN PAPUA

New Zealand Tablet, 4 September 1913, Page 9

ADVENTURES IN PAPUA

By Beatrice Grimshaw.

WITH THE CATHOLIC MISSION (Reprint of A.C.T.S. Publication.)

_'_ (Continued) It was at Beipaa than saw one of the most curious things I have ever seen in Papua—the cemetery town. There was something about Beipaa itself that was difficult to understand, at first sight— alleged number of inhabitants. Six hundred was the figure as given to me; but even in the late afternoon, when all the hunting and fishing parties were home, and the women had come back from the yam gardens, the big main street seemed rather thinly filled—considering the six hundred. Where could the rest of them be? The Answer was Simplein the Graveyards. > The town had not been suffering from any epidemic ; on the contrary, it was in a very healthy state; but none the less, a good proportion of its inhabitants were among the tombs, and likely to 'remain there for an indefinite time. I went to see. The place has three cemeteries, each very large, and all carefully fenced in with pig fences of wattled sticks, furnished here and there with stiles. Following the Sister who was my guide, I climbed over the stile of the cemetery nearest to Beipaa itself, and there, apparently,- was another town, low, straggling, ill-built, but a town all the same, with people eating and carrying food, men and women moving about, numbers of little, roughly-built houses, some of them mere roofs set on the ground. . . 'Look,' said the Sister, beckoning me under a roof so low that I had to stoop down to the earth. . Inside was brown dusk, with the sunset light sifting in through the rustling Leaves of the thatch. A formless heap, covered with bark cloth lay upon the ground. It stirred as we came in and a woman raised her head. She was yellow-pale; her eyes were like deep wells with a spark of smoky fire somewhere at the bottom; her body was a crate of bones. 'That is a widow,' the Sister said. 'They make the widows lie on their husband's graves like this,' just sheltered by a roof, all the time of mourning. They must never be seen out in daylight, and they have to live on what is brought to them by relatives; this poor 'creatures cries nearly all the time.' The woman was moaning, and clinging to the Sister's dark blue habit. I never saw a face more wretched. ' How long must she stay here?' : Until she takes black—puts on the black soot paint you have seen them wear. That may be as much as a year. Poor things, they are very unhappy, shut up so long,' said the Sister, caressing the pitiful, dirty skeleton in the bark wrapper. 'Are there many widows?' Oh, very many. I will show you some more.' The next widow was certainly a change. She was young, fat, and well-looking; she was not lying on her husband's grave, with her head hidden under a mat, but peeping coyly out from under the grave-house roof; and may I never see a widow again, if she was not looking and laughing towards the lodge that sheltered a more or less disconsolate young widower, also doing his time in the cemetery. When a widow is young and pretty, she is not expected to mourn so long as the older and uglier relicts. There would not be much use in expecting, to judge by some of those I saw. Though conventionally in the depths of grief, and unable to tear themselves away from the loved one's tomb, they were obviously getting bored, and ready to take interest in anything that might happen to divert the dulness of graveyard duty. It goes without saying that disconsolate young widowers offer the easiest and most effectual diversion. Not far away, in. another cemetery, were a father and mother seated on a stage that % overlooked the grave of their only child. They were thin and worn

with grieving their faces were hopelessly sad. -'- They had been there for many months, sitting all day on the staging, and at night watching the' tires that are' built at head and foot of the newer graves, to keep the gliosis away. This seemed a smaller and i quieter graveyard than the first there were fewer young men and women in it, and less of the hurried scuffling in and out of gravehouses, as stranger footsteps drew near. Ashes of fires lay beside the newer graves; the older ones had Worn down to mere unmarked heaps of sand, where no one mourned, or slept, or lighted watch-fires any more. ' ' A strange sight, even' in the full blaze of noon, are these cities of the living and the dead. They must be stranger still at night, for then custom, which confines the mourners more or less strictly during the day, allows them to come forth from the tombs, and wander about like ghosts. Some of them, still new to loss, run up and down « beneath the moon, wailing and crying, and calling out on the lost one's name. Some feast, some tend the fires, some make love to other . mourners. When dawn breaks, the shadowy creatures flit back again to the graves, and hide from the light of the day. After a period, longer or shorter according to age and sex, the mourner takes black puts on a suit of black paint, made of cocc-anut oil and ashes—and joins in the life of the village again. .The black is allowed to wear away gradually; when it is gone, the time of mourning is considered to be over. This Custom of Living in the Cemeteries .' is at its worst in Beipaa;, but all over Mekeo it is one of the greatest troubles that the missionaries have to contend with. Morally, physically, and psychically, it is bad, and the Mission fights it steadily,; with considerable success in many cases. The Papuan native is of all savages the most conservative, and the most deeply attached to his national customs; it takes generations of work to uproot his habits, and the Fathers have had much hard labor over this same matter of living among the tombs. They preach. against it, they talk against it, they try to bring individuals out of the cemetery back into the village life, or to prevent them from going there at all. Their own converts, of course, are taught from the first not to practise the custom; and there can be no doubt that, in time, it will die out. But with the Papuan change comes slowly, and for the most part through, the children, who have grown up under Mission influence and teaching. With the older savages, not very much" can be done. > Prom Beipaa station I went on through the forest to Rarai with a couple of Sisters, who (of course) rode like lancers. One station in Mekeo is much like another.; the houses put up by the coadjutor Brothers with a little native assistance are all the same—split slab and thatch, with ' bush' furnitureeach school with its bright-eyed, naked children,, learning English arithmetic and reading and writing from the Sisters, carpentering, boat-building, and other useful work from Fathers and Brothers, is like every other school. That matter "of English teaching is worth ' special notice. Papua is a tangle of different languages; the curse of Babel lies heavy on the land, and natives from one valley or mountain peak often cannot understand a word of the tongue spoken by those of the next. There is no language so suitable for general use among Papuans as English ; they take to it like ducks to water, and one may often hear the police, or native servants of the Government, talking to each other in English, since, recruited from all parts of the territory they have no other means of communication. Some of the Protestant Missions choose a native, language and teach it to all their converts from different places. This gives the converts a measure of communication among themselves, but locks them up from intercourse with the whites. The Catholic Mission thinks it best for the interests of their charges ■ « ' \ That English Should be the Language Taught, and it is. (Most of the teachers being foreigners, a certain accent creeps into the strange tongue, and it is a comical thing to hear a naked, painted Papuan savage addressing you in schoolroom English flavored with the

intonation of Paris, Brussels, Geneva, or Strasbourg but, all the same, they have got the language.) ' '.' v., f There, was a leper in one of fcn*=> villages near Rarai; we went to see him. He and many other sick people are regularly visited and cared for by the Mission. The man was terribly disfigured, but did not seen to suffer much. He was kept in a little tree-house approached by a short ladder, and so boxed up that'; it would have been difficult for him, in his maimed \- state, to get out.. The Mekeo people seem to have some, idea of the danger of leprosy, and do } not allow the lepers to. mingle freely with the rest of the population. At Inawaia, where I went a day or two later, there was a very interesting sorcerer. When we chanced on 'him, walking through the village, he : was not only feathered and painted, but all caked over with a mixture of mud and oil. This last adornment, it seemed, signified that he wanted to kill someone; probably some inhabitant of the village, who had been unlucky enough to annoy him. He had a deadly snake in his house, the Sister told me; it was kept in a saucepan, and trained to various tricks by its owner. Deaths by snakebite occurring in the village were generally put down to the sorcerer's pet, especially if they happened at night. When he went away he carried it about with him in a bamboo. .= '..; -,.. :, Nearly all the sorcerers have these snakes, I was told. You have probably met them often enough in , the bush, but you would not know; you would only think that the man was carrying a stick in his hand. It occurred to me that I would look narrowly at . any walking-sticks carried by any innocent-looking native whom I happened to meet in the forest ? after that. A tiger snake, black snake, or death-adder, carefully trained, and carried about by a gentleman ■ who. ! was likely to take violent offence over, comparatively small causes, seemed to be the sort of thing one would want to avoid.* There was an interesting alligator, too. He lived at the crossing point of the St. Joseph River, a deep, wide, stream of a beautiful grey-green-blue, within a few minutes' walk of Inawaia station. He had killed four grown-up people and one. baby in two years; the baby was snatched from its mother's arms as she was bending down to take some water. . . . The canoe we crossed in was low and heavily loaded. I took care not to cool my hands in the stream, though the heat of the day made it tempting. The Father at Inawaia had tried to get this alligator more than once, but it is a cunning brute, and seems to know by instinct when danger is about. Like all man-eaters who haunt crossings and fords, it is very big and old, and full of craft.; Mekeo Was Finished. I had seen all the stations, crossed all the famous fords (with an extraordinary luck in the matter of low water and absent alligators), ridden most of the horses, .' and, remembering that they were gift-horses, kept silent about their mouths, also about their heels, their backs and their tempers. I had stayed at all the Sisters' little houses, seen and talked to all the Fathers, heard Mass in all the poor tin churches, and watched the brown naked scholars at work in the sheds that passed for schools. I had been shown the little, fenced-in heaps of sand beneath the swinging palms, where those who had fallen by the way. (Only too many of these there are in fever-smitten Mekeo, and some of them are but a few months old.) I had eaten, worn, occupied,

* Every sorcerer is, in fact, in possession of a snake '(generally a black snake or a death-adder) charmed according to the Indian fashion, and trained to bite the designed, victim. The way, very simple, in which the snake is skilled to do its deadly business has been recently discovered by one of the Fathers. In a raid made by a Government officer on a sorcerer's premises, a black snake was detected in an earthen kettle, carefully hidden in a corner of the house. And on several occasions the snake was found in the bamboo stick carried by the sorcerer, and once, under the turban of the man, coiled up into the tangles of his bushy hair.— A. B.

and used the lion's share of everything in the way of : worldly goods that the Fathers and the Bisters possessed. I had seen the wedge of the Catholic Mission work driving slowly home through the dense''mass of heathendom, splitting, penetrating, changing, making a decent, peaceful land of what had been a very hell upon earth. And now I was to see the new, pioneering work among the r mountains of the interior, where you were surrounded by tribes still in the true savage state, and where even the Mission people allowed that ' it was a little difficult.'; Before leaving these plains, I made out a list of the gifts that might be Useful.to the Different Stations, . if anyone possessing more than they require of such things cares to send them. - • First.—Money copper, silver, gold, notes, cheques; any amount at any time. ■':•*, Secondly. Calico and print, cotton singlets in gay colors, belts, sheath knives, tomahawks, clearing knives, axes. As there are no stores in Mekeo, it is necessary to use these things in buying food for the natives, or paying them for small pieces of work. I might add here that the Mission pays every native a- fair price for all work done for the Mission, even in building churches and. making roads that will be as l much use to the natives as to anyone. They ask nothing whatever from the Papuans; no money, goods, or labor, or lands. The collecting plate is unknown. The Mission comes to Papua to give, not to take. -.-. -: There are many things to be found in superfluity I in most well-furnished houses which would be invaluable to the hard-working Fathers and Sisters, and never missed by those who sent them away. Every drawing-room has more vases and ornaments than it really'wants. The churches of,.the, Mission 'have only jam tins and cut-down bottles; disguised with paper, to serve for altar vases. No housewife would allow that she has not a few knives and forks and spoons, a dozen or so of cups and plates, above her actual needs store of table napkins and tablecloths, sheets and pillow-slips, put by on tidy shelves. . . . Half a dozen matrons, consulting together, could fill' a box with household goods that they would never miss. And the stations would rejoice. Nuns are women and ladies still, and holy poverty does not extinguish a desire to have ■ things clean. I ask the tidy matron, is it easy to be dainty when you have hardly anything of anything at all The most accomplished cook among the Sisters has much trouble with a worn-out stove, and other stoves..• are giving out, after years of wear. There are stoves in many basements and lumber sheds quite good, only superseded by something newer that has been recently put in. These, if wood-burning, would-be very greatly valued. . .-, What has become of the side-saddles given up by ; the girls,' now that they are taking to cross-saddle? There are Sisters who cannot ride on anything else, and who would be very glad of a saddle or two. •; ' " Ordinary men's saddles often lie about a house for years, unused. The Mission could use fifty, if it had 'them; its saddlery is falling to bits, and I did not see a single decent bridle. , : ; That bicycle, drop-frame or diamond, that the boys and girls once used for riding to —now that the children have ridden away for ever, why not take it out of the back kitchen, and send .it up to Papua for the Fathers and Sisters to ride about Mekeo in the dry season. Eggs, and an occasional fowl, are the only fresh food obtainable on most of the Mission stations. The breed of fowls is mixedvery-and would not please the eye of. a fancier. One heed not be an experienced hen-wife to see that a crate or two of fowls 'from the country house where they are proud of, their poultry yard would mean more eggs and better chickens. ; ., And it is fresh food that keeps off fever in New Guinea. ,; There is. a colt running about in the paddocks-—-a colt with a good family treebut there are plenty of others, also with good family trees, on the station. > The. 'Brother who looks after the small stud farm would

•welcome that colt T with open arms, and Burns Philp •would drop it "at the veryV front door, on Yule Island. Burns Philp are useful people; they run boats that can take on anything, from a dozen of pocket handkerchiefs to a prize bull, in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, or Cairns, and see it right to the head station of the Mission. -.-*" .-,"•.; The great stores of Australian big cites are usually '-— : Brothers Limited,' or " and Co.,' which means that they are companies managed for the benefit of a number of shareholders. If a shareholder sends an order to the firm to select and ship to Yule Island so many dozen cotton and flannelette shirts, so many khaki drill trousers, so many dozen socks, so many pairs of stout walking boots for men and women (fives, sixes, sevens for the latter) so many cases of groceries, meats, flour, kerosene, he pockets* certain portion of the profit himself. . . . And, after all, those shares pay so well—one can afford it. And there are Fathers, gently reared, who are trying to learn to do without socks, though walking the greater part of the day—because socks wear out so quickly, and the supply is far too small. Other things wanted are simple colored pictures of sacred subjects, with only one or two figures in each, for use in the schools; all sorts of school stationery; first-aid pocket medical cases, for the Fathers to carry on their long rounds among the native towns; fieldglasses (much wanted among the mountains), drugs of all ordinary kinds, especially quinine and cordials. There is a Father who wants a gramaphone, with records of band music, laughing songs, recitations, to aid him in his apostolic work. It brings in the natives from the outlying districts— once there, you may leave the rest of it to him. 111. And now about the mountains. Few people have any idea of the difficulty of •moving about in Papua. There is, perhaps, no country in the world of such an extraordinary conformation. It is a continent rather than an island. The Australianowned portion is twice as large as England. German New Guinea is nearly as large, and Dutch New Guinea Very much larger. Practically the whole of this great country is mountain. There is a small belt of level, close about some portion of the coasts, and in the upper parts of the ranges you may strike a mile or so of tableland. But take it all in all, New Guinea is simply a jumble of precipices, peaks, and torrents, the mountains running to thirteen thousand feet (in Australian Papua), the rivers most unnavigable by reason of their rapid fall. Of roads into the interior .there are absolutely none, with the exception of forty miles of horse track through the plantation country behind Port Moresby, the capital, and of the Catholic Mission horse and bullock track, that leads right away from the coast into the heart of the unknown and unexplored country lying among the colossal summits of the great main range. It was this latter road that I was to take. Few travellers have been along this route; one might count them every —a handful of prospectors, looking for gold; a few Government officers, patrolling after murderers, two collectors of birds and insects, one literary man. Of white women, none But the Sisters of the Mission had passed through, until I went. The road is a marvel; it was made by years of appalling labor, through engineering difficulties that would have daunted most professional road engineers. The Fathers and three or four coadjutor Brothers carried it through, jaided by the paid labor of a small number of natives, lit traverses country that else must have remained eternally closed to white influence. For all its wonderful construction, however, it is trying, and the missionaries •who practically live on it, going up and down about their work, have not an easy time. Bioto station is the ' jumping-off place.' Here a Brother lives, and takes charge of the forwarding arrangements for the interior, besides working among the natives of the surrounding country.

'■■•"■ V : " '. v '. .". ■•■■-■. . "■'■ . ' ■ ... ... ■" y The Sisters escorted me to ; Bioto from Inawaia, •with the carriers that had been engaged at the latter town. In the afternoon, all packing and loading done, my seven New Guinea men took up the painted canvas swags that, held my clothes and ; food and cooking pots and tent, i said good-bye to-the Sisters, and started* off. the carriers and I, for the mountains. We had three hours to go to the first rest-house, where we were to pass the night. It was quite in consonance with Mekeo custom that four of my men, with a tiring walk before them, should refuse to touch the rice I had served out, while the others ate heartily. The trouble, as usual, was girls. There were two or three young women from the nearest village seated before the Mission house verandah, watching the party set out, and in consequence, none of the unmarried men, of whom there were four among my carriers, could eat a morsel — would have been most improper for them to do so. So the four unlucky ones took a reef in their beltsthey were already tight-laced, one would have thought almost beyond endurance their food 'in packets of banana leaf, and started off in the heat, 'dinnerless. As for the girls, they went on chewing betel-nut, and took no notice of the bachelors at all. Some miles out, we were coming into uninhabited 'country, so the bachelors begged a halt, devoured their food ravenously, and let out their belts a little. After this, day by day, as we ascended from the plains into the mountains, a steep bit of track nearly always resulted in the temporary disappearance of a bachelor carrier, to let out his waist a little more. By the time we had reached the Kuni country, where the real pinch of steepness begins, the bachelors' waists rivalled the comfortable figures of the married men. One may ' suffer to be beautiful but not on a Papua mountain track. And now for three days the carriers and I travelled on, starting as soon as there was light enough to see, journeying through the endless morning under a blaze of equatorial sun, and halting towards one o'clock at the rest house that generally appeared alongside the track about that hour. , :> . . Near the plains we lunched, rested, and then travelled on; but once in the mountains, it was a race every day with the rain, which begins regularly soon after noon, and comes down like a waterspout till sunset —so, when the rest-house was reached we stopped. These houses have been built by the Mission for the use of the Fathers when travelling up and down. They are about thirteen miles apart as a rule; mere huts of Sticks and thatch,' set up on piles, and containing nothing more than an iron cooking pot, a billy-can and a tin pannikin or two, and some sort of a rude camp bed. When the Fathers travel, their carriers sleep inside at one end of the hut. Mine had the loan of my tent, and Were very comfortable underneath the house each night, sheltered from the keen mountain winds that are so trying to the native, once the sun is down. After the first day, the easy level of the plains was left behind; and now one began to understand . The Wonder of the Mission Track be it repeated, the only road in all New Guinea that penetrates into the far interior. Along the edges of formidable scarps and gorges it crept, knitted in long; zig-zags up the sides of hills as steep as a house-roof, round ugly corners where one's feet dangled over floating cloudscreeping and wriggling and getting along Somehow through a landscape that was literally set on edge. Here for the first time one saw the extraordinary formation of the mountain country, every hillside running into every other, without a yard of level, and almost every hill ending, as it touched the . next, in a stream or a waterfall. Down the cliffs and gorges they came, those innumerable streams, foaming among huge green varnished leaves as big as hearth-rugs, and stately- croziers of giant ferns, taller than the tallest —scattering cool spray over the rich red clusters of the wild begonia, cutting formidable gullies across the path, as they rushed out from the dark recesses of clefts and caves filled with orchid, jasmine, and maidenhair. A country vet and green as a salad; a country wild,

beautiful, uninhabited, . trackless save for ; J the ' little thread that wound like a magic clue of*safety,through the mi'dst of * indescribable chaos. Forest on forest, huge arid dark and knitted inextricably together with creeping liana and lawyer gorge after gorge, precipice shouldering precipice, all in the shadow of the never-ending trees, all veiled with constant rain—was the way. Steeper and steeper the track grew, as we eared. the big ranges. It was admirably engineered, but, even so, one had to walk a good deal here and there, and the carriers halted often, streaming with sweat, to lay down their loads and take breath. As for the views, wonderful though one knew them to be, one ' saw very little of them, save at the rest houses, where clearings had been made. In Papua, if you want to see where you are, you must (usually) climb to the top of a hill, and cut a big break in the trees, to clear a view. But when one did get a look, from the rest house, at sunset, and saw half the world stretched out below, far and thin and clear, down to the small blue thread of the St. Joseph winding across the plains, and the Coral Sea, lying on the horizon, like a golden shield well, it was worth every step of the way. -In the

mountains of New Guinea, one gets surfeited with beauty of scenery after a while, the eyes look coldly, even though the mind perceives the loveliness of all these blue and violet and hyacinth peaks, shaped like the wildest fancies of a goblin dream, and piled upon one another unto the very arch of the sky. And one. is usually wet, and often hungry, and generally tired so that much of one's admiration comes afterwards, when one has finished the journey, and got back to civilisation. Still, the great ranges of New Guinea are undoubtedly among the finest sights that the round world has to show her wandering children. ;. (To be continued.)