At Suloga Bay I found Graham still waiting, in charge of a small cutter
owned by a local resident, which he had undertaken to take to Samarai
for repairs and a new crew, the original boys having deserted to the
mines. Graham had a couple of natives as crew, but, as the cutter was
leaking badly, had been afraid to put to sea weak-handed. My arrival
with my two boys, however, relieved him of this difficulty, and away we
went for Samarai.
Never since then have I known such a wholly beastly trip as that one
was. We were all rotten with malaria, the cutter’s decks were warped
and leaking everywhere from lying in the sun, consequently day and
night we had to pump the wretched boat out, or she half filled. The
North-West Monsoon was on; and the weather principally consisted of
flat calms, during which we grilled under a burning sun, or fierce
squalls accompanied by torrential rains, in which our rotten sails
burst, and beneath decks was more like a combination of Turkish and
shower baths than anything else. Pumping ship, patching sails, drying
our clothes, and belting our sick boys into performing their necessary
duties, formed our occupation; cursing freely, and betting on our
temperatures taken with a clinical thermometer, our diversion; mouldy
rice, stringy, oily, ever-warm tinned beef, pumpkin and stodgy taro,
our diet. Vile tea and dirty-looking sugar we abandoned for a more
healthful beverage, consisting of five grains of quinine and one drop
of carbolic acid to a pannikin of water, always of course luke-warm.
Dysentery beginning amongst the boys added to our woes; but fortunately
for us, we crawled through the China Straits into Samarai on the day
following their being taken ill, and gladly handed over our rotten tub
to the boat-builders.
Here, Graham and I separated; he, after a week’s rest, going to see
to his wreck, and I remaining to recuperate as the only guest in the
“Golden Fleece Hotel,” which had recently been instituted by Tommy
Rous upon a capital of ten pounds. The hotel consisted of one large
room with a verandah all round it, a small room used as a cook-house
detached from the other, and a bar-room next to Tommy’s bedroom. All
the buildings were made of palms laced together and thatched with the
leaf of the sago palm; with the exception of Tommy’s bedroom and the
bar-room the whole place was innocent of doors and windows, other than
square holes in the walls to admit light and air. The guests were
expected to provide their own blankets, plates, knives, forks, and
pannikins, and to sleep on the palm floor. A long wooden table ran down
the verandah, at which meals were eaten. Meals never varied; Tommy’s
cook, a New Guinea boy, had but two dishes: “situ,” which consisted of
tinned meat, yams, sweet potatoes and pumpkins all stewed together;
and “kari,” the same meat mixed with curry powder and served with
rice. Anything else, fish or fresh game for instance, the guests were
supposed to provide for themselves.
Tommy was the son of a New Zealand doctor and had gone to sea as a
supercargo on one of Burns, Philp and Co.’s vessels. Falling down the
hold at sea he had crushed in three ribs and otherwise hurt himself,
and at his own request had been put ashore at Samarai, where Armit
had patched him up as well as he could. Charles Arbouine, the manager
for Burns, Philp and Co. at Samarai, suggested to Tommy that, as he
was now incapacitated for any other work, he should start a hotel and
relieve the firm of the retail liquor trade, he, Arbouine, being tired
of traders and diggers clamouring to be served with drinks at all
times. Tommy accordingly expended his capital in the building before
mentioned, and with a staff of one native boy began business. Graham
and I were his first regular guests. Nightly to the pub came Armit,
Arbouine, one of the Whittens, or any wandering trader, to play whist
or to gossip; if five or six were present we varied whist by loo or
poker, in which quinine tabloids were used to represent counters of
sixpence, and pistol cartridges shillings or half-crowns according to
their calibre.
A fortnight or so after my return to Samarai, Moreton came back from
a cruise in the _Siai_, and our monotony was further relieved by the
arrival of a number of lucky diggers proceeding to that island. The
result was that the “Golden Fleece” became most unpleasantly crowded,
and I prepared to flit.
Tommy Rous, however, developed a nasty attack of malaria accompanied
by hæmorrhage of the lungs due to his accident, and begged me to stay
with him until his visitors had departed. He said, “It will be no
trouble to you; just look after the pub until I am well again or this
lot have cleared out. All you have to do, is to order the stores and
collect the cash.” I protested that I knew nothing about running pubs
and didn’t want to learn, also that I was certain that Tommy was going
to be very ill and I should have to look after the show. Privately,
Armit, Moreton and I were certain he was going to die. He cut short my
protests by saying, “he knew nothing and I could not know less,” and
followed it by becoming so ill that it would have been sheer cruelty to
remove him from his room or trouble him with anything. The result was
that I suddenly found myself in the position of unpaid hotel-keeper.
Tommy’s boy, the cook, began complications by striking cook’s duties to
go and attend to him, and I had to turn on my own two boys as cooks.
They were zealous and willing, but I feel convinced that their efforts
in the culinary art seriously increased the flow of profanity in the
hotel’s digger guests and impaired their faint hope of Heaven. I then
made it a fixed rule that everything supplied was for cash, as I was
not going to be bothered keeping accounts; this rule also caused a lot
of profanity, as the supply of silver in the island was limited, and
the diggers frequently had to wait for drinks until I had paid the
takings into Burns, Philp and Co., and they again had bought it out
for gold dust. At ten o’clock I closed the bar, in order that the row
should not disturb Rous; whereupon some of our lodgers would go to
bed on the floor of the big room, others would take bottles and visit
various vessels or yarn on the beach, whilst another lot would adjourn
to Whitten’s store. I then paid a visit to Tommy, fixed him up for the
night, and told him the result of the day’s takings. After which my
boys made me up a bed in the bar, and we turned in for the night.
About midnight, the first contingent of stray guests would return, more
or less drunk, fall over those already occupying spaces on the floor
and, after torrents of blasphemy and recriminations, turn in. After
this, at intervals ranging until daylight, they returned in two’s and
three’s, some singing, some arguing, some swearing, some quarrelling,
but nearly all signalizing their arrival by also falling over the
sleepers on the floor and again causing fresh floods of blasphemy and
bad temper, which, in nine cases out of ten, ended in a free fight.
Among our guests at the “Golden Fleece” were two who, when all else
was peaceful, were almost certain to start a row, being just about as
adaptable to one another as oil to water. The one was named Farquhar, a
man as comfortable in the surroundings he was in, as a turtle would be
on a tight rope; the other was O’Regan the Rager, a digger.
Farquhar had been a bank manager in Australia, and was a man
particularly precise in his speech and neat in his personal appearance,
however worn or darned his clothes might be, and the untidyness and
lurid language of one type of digger were abhorrent to him. O’Regan
was one of this type; he was never sober when he had an opportunity
of being drunk, never washed, slept in his clothes, and at all times
diffused an odour of stale drink and fermenting humanity. Farquhar’s
expression during the day time when O’Regan was in the vicinity would
assume that of a spinster aunt suspicious of a defect in the drainage,
and with turned shoulders and averted face he would endeavour not to
see O’Regan. The latter would glare at him and mutter things about
“---- broken down, white-livered swells.” Night would come, Farquhar
would go to bed, the rows and riots would subside into peaceful snores,
when last of all O’Regan would return with about two bottles of the
most potent rum inside him. Screams and yells would herald his arrival.
“Phwere is that ---- Farker? I’m the blankety blank best man in the
blanky camp, wid me hands will I thare the blanky crimson guts from his
insoide.” Then O’Regan, climbing upon the verandah, would make night
hideous with his yells, the while he banged the table with his stick,
and hurled defiance at mankind at large and threats at Farquhar’s
viscera in particular. Sometimes a storm of oaths and missiles from the
annoyed and sleepy inmates of the room would quench O’Regan’s thirst
for blood, and he would peacefully drop down on the verandah to sleep;
at other times he would stumble into the crowded room and trample with
hob-nailed boots on the forms recumbent on the floor, as he searched
for Farquhar and thrashed wildly with his stick. Then for a few minutes
pandemonium reigned; until some one would seize O’Regan by the heels
and jerk him to the floor, where a sharp tap on the head with a pistol
butt or a boot heel would either render him unconscious or induce a
more lamb-like frame of mind.
Graham now appeared in Samarai again, and I asked about the wreck
he had intended buying and his trading venture. After making sundry
highly slanderous and sulphuric remarks concerning missionaries in
general, and one in particular, he unfolded his woes--which were that
a missionary had forestalled him in the purchase of the wreck, which
by the way was called the _Eboa_, and after stripping her of wheel,
gear, etc., now wanted double the original purchase-money paid by
him. I accompanied Graham to the Mission Station on the island, where
we found that low commercial transactions were beneath the notice of
the Mission; but that through an Italian naturalist staying with the
missionary, the _Eboa_ could be purchased at exactly double what she
had cost the Mission. Graham bought her at the price; the while I made
a mental note to the effect that, if the Mission put the same ability
into their soul saving as they did into their business operations,
there would soon be precious few heathen left in New Guinea.
It is not my intention or wish that the foregoing paragraph should
appear to depreciate the value of missionaries, or Mission work, in
the islands of New Guinea as a whole; for no one could admire the
unselfish and self-sacrificing work performed by many of the members
of the various Mission bodies than myself, and in especial the work of
the Anglican Mission, the Mission of the Sacred Heart, and the Wesleyan
Methodist Mission. It was my good fate during the period I spent in New
Guinea to come into intimate personal relations with the Archbishop
of Navarre and Bishop de Boismenu of the Sacred Heart Mission, the
Right Rev. Dr. Stone-Wigg, the Anglican Bishop of New Guinea, and the
Reverend William Bromilow of the Wesleyan Methodist Mission, and I
never parted from these gentlemen without thinking what a particularly
wise choice their respective churches had made when they were selected
to control the work of their denominations in New Guinea.
The other Societies there made the mistake of having no direct control
vested in the older and more experienced members over the younger
recruits to their ranks. This system always appeared to me to be
absolutely rotten. Time after time I have seen junior and inexperienced
members of the Sacred Heart, the Anglican, and the Wesleyan Missions
get at loggerheads with the native, the trader, or the Government
officials in their districts; and time after time have I seen all
friction smoothed away by the tactful action of the experienced
heads of these Missions, in exercising a wise restraint over their
subordinates. And time after time, as a magistrate, have I had to
curse the troubles arising from the action of some member of the other
Missionary Societies--as a rule due to the ignorance and conceit of
youth--and to regret that there was no wise head exercising control to
whom I could appeal.