ADVENTURES IN PAPUA

New Zealand Tablet, 11 September 1913, Page 9

ADVENTURES IN PAPUA

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

WITH THE CATHOLIC MISSION

(Continued.) On the third day from Bioto, the carriers and my* self cam© up tp Dilava, The First of the Mountain Stations. All the way we had seen human beings twice — at ' the horse paddock of Kubuna, close to Bioto, once when we had met a hunting party a few hours from Dilava. A great part of the three days' journey was through country devoid of inhabitants. This was remarkable, since the inhabited Kuni and Mafulu districts, where the Mission carries on its work, are much wilder, steeper, and. more difficult to get about than the great uninhabited tracts we crossed on the way. But the mind of the Papuan, who can fathom ? , As for this Kuni country, in which Dilava is situated, there are no words to describe it. One might say it consisted of ridges; that it seemed entirely perpendicular; that it was a mass of mountains—without conveying any clear impression. Such statements, I know, would have left me cold a week before.' I should have thought them figurative, and that, in any case, the country could not be all set on edge. But it was. The mountain sides were so sharply inclined that you could only have kept your footing on them by hanging on to the trees that covered them, thick as moss on a stone. Here and there and everywhere they sliced off into sheer precipices, with clouds floating through. One had to walk the greater part of the last morning, for the track ran like the roof of a house, and was simply a nick out in the shoulder of appalling heights, and it was, moreover, slippery as butter with the rain, so that the horse could scarcely keep his feet. The Mission folk all go with nails in their boots; fortunately I knew enough to have had my boots heavily nailed before starting, for it is impossible to keep one’s footing among these precipices without such preparation. And if you lose your footing, on an edgeless shelf, with a sheer drop of a thousand feet below. . . Late in the morning, at the summit of a long, long pull, we came upon Dilava, a tiny station perched like a swallow’s nest on the top of a sharp-toothed peak that stood out high among the clouds, with blue .saw-edged mountains, and purple pyramid mountains, and black humped mountains like crouching beasts, and green mountains furry with dense bush, shouldering in and nudging it all round. To build the tiny station it had been necessary to cut the top off the peak of its especial mountain— could not build a house anywhere in the Kuni country without that preliminary. On the Top of the Peak were crowded together several small stick buildings Fathers’ house, kitchen, school, Sisters’ house. There was also a church surprisingly built out of sawn boards. These boards had come out of the forest, and had been sawn by Fathers and Brothers in a sawmill, which they had made out of woodwith the exception of the saw —and put up over one of the mountain torrents. There is another sawmill in the districtthat at Mafulu, also made and put up by the Brothers and Fathers. One naturally asks, were the Brothers, who did the chief part of the work, engineers before they joined the Mission? Not at all; one was a watchmaker, another one a maker of .wooden shoes! Two Sisters live at Dilava, and three Fathers make it their headquarters, wherefrom they visit and minister to over sixty villages, spending most of their time travelling through the wild country ■ that lies round about. A great part of it is still unexplored; on almost every trip the Fathers find new villages, new rivers or mountain peaks, now and then whole new tracts of country, never before seen by white men’s eyes. Last year, a Father chanced upon a valley in the high ranges with a population of several thousand

people, who had never been seen or heard of before. The work of the Mission was commenced among them, and is going on i successfully. The valley has been dedicated to the Blessed Joan of Arc. The Sisters visit the surrounding villageshard work for ; any woman, since they must climb and scramble wherever they go—■ They Rescue and Tend Deserted Children, keep school, cook, wash, sew, instruct the native women, and look after the few cattle and fowls of the station. There is ,a Brother here, and one at Mafulu; they help the Fathers in all the heavy building "work. All, Fathers, Sisters, and J Coadjutor-Brothers, have given up their whole lives to the Mission and its labors. The rest of their existence lies here, in New Guinea, carrying on the work of the Mission, until (far too early in many cases) they fall by the way. In the afternoon the carriers were paid in beads, knives, fish-hooks, and salt for their work in bringing up my goods from the coast; the horse was fed, and the men started back in charge of it. Beyond Dilava, the track is not fit for horses; I had now to depend on a pair of stout hob-nailed boots to carry me through. .But first came a day or two of rest at the little station of —properly entitled St. Anne of ObaOba. Dejeuner was served after my arrival (it was yam and tinned meat, and the 'refectory' was walled with sticks and roofed with grass). My room was got ready small compartment walled off with the inevitable sticks, and furnished with meat-boxes, a picture or two, and a (very) home-made bed. But it was fresh and clean; the rough sheets were white as milk, and from the window one looked right into the boughs of an orange tree laden with fruit and flower. Beyond the orange tree rose up a perfectly impossible hill-top, which had come right out of a willow-pattern plate; it even had the incredible sprawling tree of the willow pattern, stuck on the needle-point of the peak, like a feather in a fool's hat. On either side of the house, at this hour of the afternoon, were rolling mists, that dimly veiled appalling back chasms and gorges; out of the mists like islands rose pyramids, wedges, battlements, scarps of rock—the world chopped up and thrown about at random. There was not a yard of level ground in sight; yet there were villages here and there, a good way off, looking exactly like clusters of brown toadstools, and—like —growing on the extremest slopes, and hanging over the verge of precipices. Martha (her name was not Martha, but I called the two Sisters Martha and Mary at once in my mind, from certain resemblances), bustling swift-footed in and out with clean towels, blankets, buckets of water for a bath They are born up here, and can climb like goats—but now and then we have an accident with them'.' It seemed almost incredible that any four-footed beast .could move about at all—but I had yet to meet the Mafulu bullocks. The story of this mountain herd must not be passed over. A few years ago, when the track of Dilava had not yet been made, and the Fathers (this was before the coming of the Sisters) had to climb and scramble all the long way from the coast by means of native ' pads,' it was decided to try the cattle in the mountain country, beginning with Mafulu, two days beyond Dilava, since there is fine grassy country there. Now the way was bad enough up to Dilava, but between Dilava and Mafulu there was an obstacle that seemed to bar the way irrevocably to anything four-footed—-a precipice two thousand feet high, up which the Fathers themselves had to climb with hands and feet, holding on to anything they could get. The ordinary layman who should have proposed to start a herd in the grass country beyond this formidable wall would certainly have been called a lunatic. But the Mission has a trick of doing impossible somehow or otherand they knew that the firm establishment of their work in the mountains depended upon their cattle, since no man can live and work in the interior of New Guinea without decent food. So they brought the cattle up. A few little calves were chosen from the herd

down at ' Yule Island"; were partly driven and partly, lifted up the broken country to the precipice, and when arrived there, were strapped to some natives and a couple of missionaries, who climbed the precipice with the kicking, bellowing brutes on their shoulders! Only one, let loose at the top of the precipice, fell down and killed itself. From these few calves the herd was eventually started.

Soon after my arrival at Dilava, the New Guinea telegraph was hard at work among the surrounding peaks, spreading the news of a newcomer. Marconi would be at a discount among the mountain peaks of Papua; the natives have long .known how to send messages without wires, faster than the fastest bird could fly. They have very strong and penetrating voices, these mountain folk, and they can shout a message from peak to peak- oyer hundreds of miles of . country, when they will, by the simple plan of man after man taking up the call. Perhaps the first man who hears it is at work in his garden, down at the bottom of , a gorge.. He climbs to the summit of the nearest high peak (there is always one within an arrow shot) and half shouts, half sings the call to the surrounding world. By and by another voice, thin with distance as a mouse’s squeak, takes up the cry, and the gardener goes back to his work. From peak to peak the message: flies, always taken up and repeated in the right direction ; and if you have sent a message in this way from one station to another, twenty miles or more away, you may get the answer in an hour. The day after I arrived, his Lordship , Bishop de Boismenu appeared somewhat unexpectedly, and sent on to Mafulu for one of the Fathers at work there. His Lordship was in a hurry to complete his pastoral round, and catch the mailboat for Thursday Island, so the message sent was urgent. . . Mafulu is five-and-twenty very hard miles away but the Father was at Dilava early in the morning of the . day following that on which the message had been sent off. A very few hours after the call had gone out from Dilava about . .

The, t Strange White Woman-

the first they had seen there except the Sisters—mountaineers began coming in to have a look at the curiosity. They arrived in troops, queer little pigmy people, mostly under five feet in height; walking up the face of perpendicular precipices in a way that made :me doubt my own eyes, or gliding lightly down upstanding walls of rocks,, as if they possessed invisible wings. On the levelled ground of the Mission site, they went slowly, and with steps unnecessarily high; for the mountain people do not like flat surfaces, and find themselves ill at ease thereon.' For the most part, they do not even use _ the track the Mission has made, preferring the native ways, which cross the actual road in all directions, disdain mere loops and grades, and are quite undistinguishable by the casual eye from the traces left by landslips and waterfalls. Indeed, I think the Kuni native often chooses a landslip or a waterfall as a nice suitable road. They were gaily decorated, these little men and women of the mountains. They wore beads, red, white, and blue, in their ears, round their necks, braided into their armlets; they had earrings made of twisted lizards' tails, or pigs' tails cured, with the tuft of hair still on themj they had slender, belts of red and yellow native cloth, and white shell lockets, and flowers and gay leaves; and they carried bows and arrows and spearsnot to attack anyone with, but just for style. With all these ornaments, they had practically no clothing at all; and the prophecy of the Sisters down in Mekeo was fulfilled,, for even the womenin spite of the handfuls of dangling dogs' teeth braided into their short woolly hair, and their necklaces and bracelets and ankletsdid not dress themselves otherwise than with a narrow ornamental girdle of bark ;cloth made into tape. .;..,.; "*., r . Arrived at the station, they spent a very happy afternoon, asking to be shown my clothes, my hair, my shoes, my teeth, making the freest comment on f£y personal appearance, and wanting to know what kind of a nun this was, why it did not look like the others',

how, old it was, was it going to live there,, and so on. Some ; of the older people were so uplifted with pleasure and" excitement that they hopped about, crowing and slapping their stomachs, it was, I gathered, as good as a circus to them; or, rather, as good as a circus would be to any little buried country town at the back of beyond. The Work that the Mission has Done among these tribes, during the twelve years that it has been established, is little short of marvellous, for the Kuni and Oba-Oba people were, until lately, among the very worst of the New Guinea cannibal tribes.' They did not kill and eat only for revenge or in battle, they did it for the pleasure of enjoying human flesh, and they even killed in their own villages, which is a thing that cannibals very seldom do. They were fierce, intractable, murderous, in the very last degree, and the Fathers and Brothers who took up their abode among them had so many narrow escapes for their lives that they grew quite callous over the matter, and can hardly remember one adventure from another enough to tell you about it. In appearance, the tribes have altered not at all; a wilder-looking set of little savages I never saw. Small as a ten years' child, with hair not dense and bushy like the lowland people, but short, though woolly; with queer little monkey-paws that gripped and held, and great toes turned far out to clutch with when climbing; oddest of all, with bodies that seemed to be permanently bent back from the waist upwards, so that the chest and stomach almost described a semicircle —the mountaineers assuredly suggested by their appearance the strange abnormal life they led. Some of the young women were pretty, and a few of the fighting-men were comely enough in their small way, but the old folks were unspeakably hideous, mere tatters of humanity, their naked bodies covered with bags of drooping skin, their faces like those of aged, weary, unhappy monkeys. Yet, despite appearances, These Folk are Largely Civilised in all that matters. The Catholic Mission has acted with great wisdom in confining its efforts simply to the moral and religious life of the people, and in letting alone their native dress, customs, dances—everything, in fact, that is not absolutely wrong or wicked in their lives. The missionised pigmy is not the useless, immoral hybrid that one knows only too well about the Pacific generally—a creature that, in ceasing to be a savage, has not become a -white man, but halts between the vices and bad points of both. About this district of Oba-Oba, the Catholic Mission has succeeded, at peril of life, in putting down, to a large extent, cannibalism, tribal war, and murder; it has almost done away with the custom of throwing unwanted children away in the bush to be eaten by wild pigs; it has wiped out polygamy in part, and made many Christian marriages, which are, as a rule, notably successful. It has placed the women on a somewhat higher plane than before, and ensured them decent and kindly treatment; it has taught the natives to care for and feed their sick people, and to be good to animals. It has baptised many, and hopes to baptise many more; but, in this matter, it goes slowly, and demands long probation. .Strangest of all, among these wild mountaineers, it has found a good many who are eager to lead the actual Christian life— make frequent Communion, attend often at Mass, keep up kindly and helpful relations with all their fellow tribes folk. But it has let them free. The mountaineer remains a Papuan pure and simple. There is no attempt to drag him forcibly across a gulf of many thousand years; to make him leap at one bound from the stone age to the age of the aeroplane; teach him things for which he will have no use, and uproot customs that do him no harm, and keep him out of mischief. In the little schools, the children are taught catechism (in native), prayers, reading, writing, arithmetic, and some English —the 'lingua franca' of Papua, among whites and natives alike. Road-making, carpentering, the proper care of pigs and fowls, gardening, house-building, they learn from their work for the —which, be it especially noted, is always paid for; no free labor is demanded from the natives, and no collections are taken up. Tools, salt,

beads, knives, looking glasses, and other things of inestimable value ito the inland native they get from the Mission, in payment for work, or as tiie price of vegetables, pigs, fowls, and so on. There the civilisation stops, and there it is likely to stop. They do not wear clothes—true, the Sisters provide decent wrappers for the women to wear when they receive Holy Communion, but at no other time do they depart from their ordinary custom of -going practically naked. It is no kindness to savages to teach them clothes-wearing, as medical and scientific men have long since learned. They are learning now that too much cheap civilisation is not good for the brown man either. There, the Catholic Mission has been ahead of them this many a year. Before the tribes dispersed to their homes again, I distributed largess among them in the form of salt, of which they are passionately fond. . -■', ..* • Salt is the Current Coin of the mountains, if anything is; the natives want beads, tools, or looking glasses at times, but salt ' goes all the time, and everywhere. , If you give a mountain child a handful of sugar, it will probably spit the stuff out as soon as it discovers that it has not got salt. They will eat it by itself as eagerly as a white child takes chocolates. What I gave the tribe was carefully wrapped up in leaves and taken home, to joy with the evening meal of sweet potatoes; the children, however, devoured what they could get on the spot, and afterwards licked each other's fingers and faces of the last remaining grains. Next day I went to see the nearest of the villages. It looked to be almost within touch, but took the best part of an hour to reach; so is the way of things among the mountains. Once off the Mission track, we reverted, the Father and I, to the alleged arboreal ancestor of whom one has heard so much —crawling and climbing along, and using our hands almost as much as our feet, for that was the way of the native ' road.' Some of it at first I took for a landslip, some for the track of a torrent, and the rest I could not see at all, until the Father showed me certain depressions in the foliage of thick low bushes hanging right out over a cloudy precipice of unknown depth, and told me that this was the road now, and that one had to hold on tight! It seemed impossible, but it was true; we had to walk for quite a good way in the tops of the bushes, hanging on for support to those immediately above. The light showed through the foliage on which we took our bird-like way; the angle of the slope scarce seemed to be an angle at all, being almost perpendicular. One false step would have sent us crashing down through the foolish little leaves and twigs to the very bottom of the peak. . . . This was the main road to the village, used by thirty odd inhabitants. One ceased to wonder at the prehensile great toe of the mountaineer, and the hand-like appearanoe of his foot. One would have been glad to be prehensile-toed oneself. We did not find the people at home; they had nearly all gone to work in their gardens, leaving only one or two very old people and a few children behind. To see the way those little toddlers ran about on the extreme edge of nothing at all — the village was built on the needle-like summit of a spiring peak, and most of its houses projected like brackets out over the clouds below—was enough To Make the Unseasoned Traveller Giddy. How children are ever brought up in such places remains a mystery; one might as well (or so it seems) attempt to raise a dozen families on the scaffolding about some new public building, and expect them to reach the years of discretion uninjured. Yet, somehow, they do bring up children in these birds' nest places, and without accident, too. The houses were very poor indeed, mere roofs of grass laid almost on the ground, and all supported on rickety piles that overhung the giddy depth below. You could see the clouds boiling beneath your bootsoles, when you climbed inside one of these precarious little shelters, and walked across its sagging floors of interlaced twigs and saplings. There were bows and arrows and spears inside, for hunting pig-jaws for ornaments; little stages of bamboo to sleep on; nothing

more. The roofs let in rain, the walls and floor were a cage for wandering winds. 1 It is cold in the mountain nights, here at three thousand feet high; the people suffer from chest troubles of many kinds, and often die of pleurisy and. pneumonia, but they never think of migrating into the empty lands lower down, where they could built comfortable houses, and enjoy good hunting grounds, and get out of the eternal mist and rain. The Papuan is of all savages the most conservative. We gave the children some tobacco (they all smoke, at any age) and handed out a little also to the few old people who had been squatting monkey fashion on the ground, stupidly watching us, their simian small faces resting on their tiny wrinkled knees. They addressed a few grunts and snarls of the Oba-Oba tongue to the Father, and then seemed to go to sleep again. Little can be done with the old folk in the way of actual mission work, but they owe much to the Fathers in the way of comfort and kind treatment. The lot of the worn-out savage is not a happy one, away from Mission influence; he is fortunate if his. poor condition saves Trim from the cooking oven, when he is too old to work or to hunt any more. But the grandmothers and grand-

fathers of Oba-Oba are fed and housed, and get their share of "salt and tobacco and what' can a native want more, at fifty or so, which is equivalent to eighty among the whites? Strange and far-away and isolated is The Mission Life at Dilava, almost, one thinks, like life in a . lighthouse set upon some lonely ocean rock. Above the world, above the rolling clouds, barred off by torrents, shut in by mountain walls, the little station hangs upon its peak "between earth and heaven, with the long, long road of the famous and perilous „• ; track, and the uncharted Coral Sea, and the wide stretches of the equatorial Pacific, one upon another, between itself and all the interests, possessions, pleasures of civilisation. Of the work done in these lonely and' dangerous places-by the Catholic Mission, one may speak freely. Of the lives led by its members the outside, visitor must say but little. There are things too sacred for the cold light of print, even if those into whose hands the record may stray could always and everywhere understand. Yet in these far-away mountain fastnesses of Dilava and Mafulu, the light shines very clear, from a heaven that seems close at hand. (To be continued.)