About this time I received a message that Sir Francis Winter had
departed, and that Mr. Musgrave had assumed the administratorship,
pending the appointment of a successor to that official, or the return
of Sir George Le Hunte. Likewise I received orders at once to prepare
to accompany the Acting Administrator on a journey of exploration, for
the purpose of discovering a practicable road from Oro Bay to the Yodda
Gold-field, together with instructions to collect carriers for the said
expedition.
I therefore hastily departed for Cape Nelson; and on my arrival at
that point, at once hoisted about sixteen feet of turkey-red at
the flagstaff--the signal that I wanted carriers for an important
expedition, and also that all village constables and chiefs were to
come to me immediately. Within a few hours the men began pouring into
the Station, generally accompanied by their wives and relations, who
were prepared to camp there until they knew what was in the wind, or
until their husbands and relatives had departed with me.
A few hours after my arrival the _Merrie England_ came in, and when
I went on board I was informed that the Acting Administrator did not
intend to make the proposed journey in person, but that he had decided
that I should act for him and that I should be accompanied by Mr.
Tooth, a Government surveyor, whom he had brought with him for that
purpose. The _Merrie England_ was swarming with extra Central Division
police, who were landed to camp for the night in my barracks. His
Excellency also informed me that, as he suffered from nausea on board,
he wished to sleep at the Residency; upon which I sent for my house
boys and told them to prepare my bedroom for the Acting Governor and
to make up a bed for me in my private office, which they did. Upon my
landing from the _Merrie England_, Oia, my orderly, remarked, “What
are we to do with the bones of the white man in your room?” “Oh, shove
them under my bed until this trip is over, and I have time to attend to
them,” I said. For a short time before Oiogoba had brought me the bones
of a man, which he informed me he suspected from the decayed state of
the teeth in the jaw to be those of a white man: he, or rather his
sorcerer, had roughly articulated them, after the manner in which they
had previously seen me prepare the skeletons of the smaller mammals.
Night came, the whole station was plunged in the most profound sleep,
with the exception of the sentries and myself. I was sitting in a bath,
and was taking advantage of my first spare moments in order to read my
private mail brought by the _Merrie England_, when suddenly a shriek
rent the air from the Acting Governor’s room, followed by a scamper
of feet across the verandah, a loud yell, and then a shot. Hastily I
jumped from my tub, donned my pyjamas and arms, and bolted for the
Governor’s room, while the noise of an alarmed Station became louder
and yet louder.
When I reached His Excellency’s room I found the mosquito nets
surrounding the bed in a blaze, whilst he was capering up and down the
room, jibbering something to which I had no time to listen. I hurriedly
tore down the burning nets and trampled them underfoot; the need for
haste is evident, when I mention that thousands of rounds of cordite
cartridges and several hundred-weight of gelignite and dynamite were
stored in cells beneath my room. Just as I finished trampling out
the flames, a rush of feet came; Sergeant Barigi on the one side and
Corporal Bia on the other, with their respective squads, swarmed into
the house, mother naked, except for bandoliers, bayonets and rifles,
and prepared to kill at sight. Before I had time to question his
Excellency as to what was the reason of the alarm, the sentry dumped
up upon the verandah the stunned body of the Governor’s boy, with the
remark, “I’ve got him, sir!” Then came screams, shrieks, and howls
from the women and children in the married quarters, coupled with the
yells of the non-commissioned officers of the respective detachments
falling-in their men on the parade ground, and the shrill call of a
bugle from the gaol compound, a quarter of a mile away, calling for
the night guard; mix with that the beating of the drums of the native
chiefs in charge of the carriers assembled for the expedition, crown it
all with the bellowing of the _Merrie England’s_ foghorn hysterically
calling for her boats, and it may be imagined that a fair state of
pandemonium reigned!
And all about nothing! His Excellency had gone to bed; then, in the
dark had got up and felt for an object under his bed, and had inserted
his fingers into the eye-holes of my skeleton’s skull, and being rather
puzzled, had called for his Motuan boy to bring a candle. The boy
groped under the bed, grabbed the skeleton, and, being a superstitious
Motuan, had given a yell and promptly dropped the candle, which fired
the mosquito nets; he had then bolted over the verandah, where he had
instantly been flattened out by the sentry, who immediately afterwards
fired his rifle to alarm the guard.
The prisoners in the gaol, most of whom were runaway carriers from the
Mambare, had heard the riot and imagined that the Station was attacked
or taken; they accordingly had made frantic efforts to break out and
escape, for fear of being murdered--efforts which the ordinary warders
were powerless to restrain; hence the wild bugling for assistance. In
twenty minutes, however, peace reigned once more; some one yelled to
the _Merrie England_ that it was not battle, murder, or sudden death,
but merely a compound of funk and imbecility. Sergeant Barigi’s squad
went and quietened the agitated prisoners, while Corporal Oia and his
men explained to the rest of the Station that the trouble was only due
to a fool of a Motuan having been scared of my skeleton!
Tooth, the surveyor the Governor had brought with him, was a most
peculiar individual; he had spent most of his life surveying in the
arid wastes of Northern Australia, and had there lost every ounce
of superfluous flesh, as well as acquiring two delusions; one of
which was, that his frame and constitution were like cast-iron and
not susceptible to fatigue, and the other, that an extraordinary
Calvinistic brand of religion that he had invented was the only true
means of grace. He had only made one convert, so far as I could
understand, namely, his wife.
I discovered Tooth’s idiosyncracies during the first ten minutes we
were alone together, while we were discussing the arrangements for our
expedition. I noticed two large S’s embroidered on his collar. “Mr.
Tooth,” I asked, “what do those S’s mean? Surveyor?” “No,” he replied,
“Salvation.” “Are you a member of the Salvation Army, Mr. Tooth?” “I
was,” he said, “but I differ with them,” and then began to explain
his own particular brand of dogma. “Oh, Lord!” I thought, “what am
I in for?” Then I cut in hurriedly to the discourse, as a dreadful
thought struck me. “Mr. Tooth, are you a teetotaller as well?” “No,”
said Tooth, “that is one of my differences with the----” I hastily
interrupted him by yelling for a boy and telling him to bring drinks;
then, before Tooth could get going again, I struck in, “This expedition
of ours will in no way resemble a Methodist picnic. We shall first
have to penetrate a coastal belt full of swamps and rotten with fever
of the most malignant type; there, forced marches will be the order
of the day, and sometimes it will be necessary to use other than
Kindergarten methods to persuade carriers of the type I shall have with
me, that such marches are for their own benefit; next, we shall skirt
Mt. Lamington, and that mountain is the haunt of some particularly
venomous tribes, who are perpetually fighting, and who regard every
stranger as an enemy to be slain at sight; we shan’t have a chance to
get into anything like friendly relations with them, for Walker and
De Molynes have had one scrap with them, Elliott another, and they
chased Walsh clean out of their district. Now, what I want to know is
this, have you any conscientious scruples about shedding blood? You
can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, and you can’t take an
expedition past Mt. Lamington without some one being killed on one side
or the other. Personally I have a strong aversion to being coarsely
speared in the midriff or rudely clubbed on the head, or having similar
things done to my constabulary or carriers, and should prefer the
casualties to be on the other side.” “If the heathen in his wickedness
rageth,” said Tooth, “the heathen in his wickedness must die, also I
have a wife to think of; but it is sad to contemplate that his soul
will be damned.” “That’s right, Mr. Tooth,” I said, “when the heathen
rageth, you think of Mrs. Tooth and be hanged to the heathens’ souls.”
He then got up and groped in his bag, producing therefrom an antiquated
ivory-handled revolver of Brobdingnagian proportions; a thing throwing
a ball about the size of a Snider bullet. “What do you think of that?”
remarked the proud owner. “I’ve had it twenty-five years!” “The Lord
help the heathen you shoot with that thing; you’ll disembowel him,”
I said, as I gazed in awe at the ponderous piece of artillery and
shoved a finger into its cavernous muzzle; “also the ammunition will
be the devil’s own weight for you to carry. Let me lend you a service
revolver; it will be quite as effective and half the weight.” He,
however, declined to be parted from his beloved piece of ironmongery,
explaining to me that weight did not matter to his iron constitution;
he, however, consented to take a service rifle, instead of an enormous
American repeating fowling-piece he had as his second armament.
After viewing Tooth’s provision of what he considered suitable arms
for a difficult expedition, curiosity compelled me to ask him what
instruments he proposed taking. He thereupon departed for the _Merrie
England_, and returned followed by about a dozen carriers, bringing one
six-inch theodolite, one five-inch ditto, one three-inch ditto, one
sextant, one artificial horizon, two hypsometers, two chronometers, two
aneroid barometers, a circumferenter and two prismatic compasses, one
Gunter’s chain, one six-chain tape, one table, one chair, a complete
set of mathematical instruments, three large bottles of different
coloured inks, a paint box, a large stand telescope, an enormous roll
of plan paper, together with at least six flat field-books and several
tomes of logarithmical tables, astronomy, bridge building, etc.
“Thunder and sealing-wax!” I exclaimed, “have you plundered the entire
Survey Office? Or do you think we have an elephant transport?” “Oh no.
The Hon. A. Musgrave and I compiled the list, and he gave me an order
to draw the things from the Survey Department,” said Tooth. “It’s
damned hard luck,” I remarked, “that whenever Muzzy tries his hand at
an inland expedition, I should invariably be dragged into it; it is
about up to him to light on some other unfortunate for a change. It
seems to me that there is little to choose between the command of one
of Muzzy’s expeditions, and that hell you have in store for the souls
of the heathen!” I then carefully selected from the stock a three-inch
theodolite, a prismatic compass, an aneroid, and a hypsometer; and
from the library, a Trautwine’s Pocket Book and a Nautical Almanack.
“There you are, Mr. Tooth,” I told him; “that is all I can transport,
and it is ample. We are not making an exact survey of the German
frontier, or laying out a Roman road, but are looking for the easiest
and most practicable route from a point on the coast to another in
the interior; a meridian altitude by day, and a star by night, are
all the observations we require. You have what we need for that in my
selection, the rest is but lumber.”
Before continuing the tale of our expedition, a little story about
Tooth will fit in here. We had long since found the route for the road,
and Tooth, Elliott, Walsh, and myself, with several hundred Kaili Kaili
and Binandere, were engaged in cutting it through an immensely high
forest. Elliott and Walsh were both assistant officers of mine, and
were, as a rule, stationed with small detachments of constabulary at
different posts amongst difficult tribes; they differed one from the
other in every respect save one, but were close friends. Walsh was a
public-school boy and the son of an Irish baronet; Elliott, a working
miner of little education, who had received a temporary appointment
at Tamata Station to fill a vacancy caused by the rapid deaths of the
officers previously stationed at that salubrious spot; he had proved
himself to be so useful at police patrol work and work among the
miners, as to be permanently retained. The respect in which the two
men were alike was, that both possessed happy mercurial temperaments,
and neither feared anything on earth except me--it being my business
to stand between them and the hot water they were perpetually getting
into at Port Moresby, also to chasten them at frequent intervals (too
frequently I fear they thought), for the good of the district and their
own welfare. Take them either apart or together, neither could be taken
for promising members of the Young Men’s Christian Association, but
Tooth chose to consider them as possible brands to be plucked from the
burning; if he had raked New Guinea through, he could hardly have
found a brace of more unlikely converts than were that bright pair.
Well, we had got a strip of tall trees chopped off at the butts, of
about a quarter of a mile in length and twenty-two yards in width, and
the infernal things were so tangled up at the tops with a network of
vines and creepers, as to refuse to come down. Natives crawled about
the trunks chopping, others climbed neighbouring trees and hacked at
the vines; the work was frightfully dangerous, as the men swarmed
underneath everywhere, and one never knew the moment when the whole
mass of timber would come crashing down on top of them. Suddenly the
expected happened, down came the lot, the workers scuttling like
rabbits into the adjoining forest; all but one escaped, but a huge
pandanus top fell upon him and flattened him out. The crashing, tearing
and rending of that avalanche of falling timber then ceased, and from
under the pandanus trees came the screams of a man apparently in mortal
agony. “Cut him out!” I yelled. “Who the devil is it?” “Komburua,” was
the reply, as fifty naked natives flew with their axes to the spot, and
almost immediately turned tail and fled howling into the surrounding
forest, while the howls of Komburua continued, containing if anything
a still keener note of agony. “Curse it! Have the choppers gone mad?”
I howled. “Forward the Bogi and Papangi detachments! Cut that man
out at once!” Walsh and Elliott seized axes and, followed by their
respective squads, attacked the tree under which lay the screaming
Komburua. Then we found trouble thick and plenty; about a dozen nests
of hornets, as big as bumble bees, had come down with the timber and
got busily to work; they had routed the naked choppers in one act, but
the constabulary, under the storm of blasphemy and threats showered
by Walsh, Elliott and myself, stuck to the work, in spite of hornet
stings, until the man was released. I then examined Komburua, who kept
up a constant moaning, but could find nothing broken or any sign of
internal injuries. “Damn you,” I said, as I cuffed his head, “there
is nothing the matter with you, and you have got us all badly stung
by beasts with stings like red-hot fish-hooks!” “Nothing the matter!”
wailed Komburua. “Nothing the matter! First the whole forest falls on
top of me, and then all the red and green ants in the country begin to
eat me!” It was quite true; that pandanus top had contained several
nests of savagely biting red and green ants, which had shaken out on
top of the pinned Komburua; when I looked again closely at his skin, I
found he was bitten all over. He afterwards said that the ants had been
so thick that they had to take turns in biting him, as there was not
enough room on his skin for them all at once. But I think this was an
exaggeration.
Tooth didn’t get stung, he had been some distance away when the
accident occurred, and only arrived in time to hear the language used
in the culminating stage of the extrication of Komburua; and at that
language Tooth was greatly grieved. He saw three souls bound for one
of the worst lodgings in that particularly vivid hell of his creation,
souls, too, of men with whom Tooth was on terms of cordial friendship;
it therefore behoved him to do something to save those friends. Now,
a New Guinea Resident Magistrate’s relations with his officers in my
day were very much the same as those of a captain of a man-of-war with
his; they might be on most cordial terms of friendship, but they lived
apart and fed apart; or if, as usually happened, these rules were
relaxed when we were engaged on work such as the present, still no
comment would be caused by the R.M. having his dinner in his own tent
or absenting himself from the nightly conclave, and it would be a gross
breach of etiquette to intrude upon him then.
That night I dined in my own tent, and afterwards I neither visited
the general mess-tent, nor sent and invited any officer to mine. Tooth
felt the fervour of his creed working in him; some one must be saved.
Elliott had used the worst language; he would begin with him. He waited
until Elliott had turned into his hammock, then wended his way thereto.
Walsh, whose tent was alongside, overheard the conversation, and told
it to me some time afterwards. Tooth began in this wise: “Alec, I
want something from you.” “It’s no good, Tooth, I haven’t a blanky
bob; if I had, you would be welcome to it,” replied Elliott. “It’s
not that,” said Tooth, in sepulchral tones, “neither a lender nor a
borrower be. It is something more precious than gold.” “Osmiridium,”
hazarded Elliott, “I had some that I got on the Yodda, but I gave it
to a barmaid in Sydney.” Tooth changed his tactics, “Alec, I want to
probe into your being,” he said. “After those blasted hornet stings,
I suppose; I’ll see you damned first. Ade has dug them out with a
needle already, and anyhow I would not have a bull-fisted blunderer
like you digging at me.” “No,” said Tooth, “it is your immortal soul I
wish to cleanse and save.” “Hell’s flames!” said Elliott, sitting up
in surprise, “are you mad?” “No,” replied Tooth, “I am not mad, and
hell’s flames consume souls, they do not cleanse; I wish to save you
from them. The language that you and Walsh and the R.M. used to-day was
enough to damn you to all eternity, and you all constantly use it and
worse.” “If you have ever heard the R.M. or Walsh use worse language
than they used to-day under the hornets, you are a lucky man; it must
have been something quite out of the common, and an education to any
ordinary man. Why, a college of parsons could not have improved upon
it, or you, Tooth, could not have equalled it.”
Tooth then preached Elliott a fearsome sermon, according to Walsh;
which was interrupted by Elliott in this way. “Look here, Tooth, I’m
damned if I see what my soul has got to do with you, or why you should
take on a parson’s job; but, anyhow, the best thing that you can do is
to save the soul of the R.M.! Then you will get the lot of us, Walsh
and Griffin, Bellamy, the two Higginsons and fat Oelrichs; if you
convert the ‘Old Man,’ he’ll make things so hot that we’ll have to get
saved or clear out! In fact, I think you would get all the police as
well. Now, get out of my tent!”
The following evening, as we all sat round a camp fire after having
messed together, I noticed that Tooth seemed to be labouring with some
deep thought, while Elliott and Walsh kept exchanging meaning glances.
At last the latter pair got up and went off to their tents, telling
me that they had their journals to write up, a palpable lie, as the
sole report they had to make was a line to the effect that they were
upon duty with me. Then, after a little beating about the bush, Tooth
brought the conversation round to religion, and suddenly it dawned
upon me that he was endeavouring to convert me; anger was my first
feeling, then I smiled to myself and broke in on his discourse. “My
dear chap, to prevent misunderstanding we had better come to some
agreement at once. Like you, I also have a peculiar religion, I am an
esoteric High Churchman, and it is one of the tenets of my faith that
laymen belonging to that creed do not discuss it with any other than a
fellow esoteric High Churchman or a Lady of the Order of St. John of
Jerusalem. Our conversions are all made by retired celibate bishops of
not less than sixty years of age. You may have noticed that I never eat
butter or fat, or touch milk in any form, these are rules of esoteric
High Churchism, imposed as a penance to mortify the flesh. Please do
not say any more.” (As a matter of fact I hate milk, butter, or grease
in any form.) Tooth gasped with surprise, then simply remarking, “that
to each man his own belief, but he did not see how I reconciled mine
with the language of yesterday,” went off to bed. “Very good, Mr.
Tooth,” I thought, “I’ll teach you before long not to go soul hunting
among the New Guinea R.M.’s,” and lay low for him accordingly.
I eventually squared accounts with Tooth in this way. He, like many
other strong healthy men, had a great horror of illness; he also was
strangely ignorant of all disease other than malaria. Now, Tooth got a
boil on his stern, he also got scrub-itch on the back of his neck and
scratched it until it was raw, then he cut his arm and came to me for
treatment; I put some iodoform dusting powder on the cut and bandaged
it up. Next day his arm was worse, and I discovered that he was one of
those people whom iodoform poisons, instead of healing; accordingly I
washed it off and dressed his arm with boracic acid. Tooth was now very
alarmed. “Do you think there is any danger?” he asked. “I don’t like
your symptoms,” I answered, “now we will just detail them, in order to
see whether my suspicions are correct. Firstly, you have a big boil on
your sit-upon.” “Yes,” quaked Tooth. “Secondly, you have an irritant
eruption on the back of your neck.” “Yes.” “Then your blood is in
such a bad state that a strong drug like iodoform won’t heal a simple
cut.” “Yes.” “Now, look here, Tooth, be very careful how you answer
this: have you got a rash on your body?” I knew he must have one,
for we were all covered with prickly heat. “Yes,” said Tooth, “look
at it.” I looked at it, and then pulled a face that I flatter myself
would have been worth something to an undertaker as a stock-in-trade.
“My God!” said he, “what is it?” “One more question, Tooth, before my
worst suspicions are confirmed. Do you feel devilish hungry half an
hour before meals?” (His appetite, I may remark, was proverbial in the
camp.) “Yes,” he groaned, “sometimes so hungry that I have a sinking
feeling. Oh, what is it?” “Tooth,” I said, “I hardly like to tell you.”
“Tell me the worst; anything is better than this suspense.” “Phytosis,
poor old chap. It is a horrible disease, and passes on in a family for
generations when once it is acquired; it is mentioned in the Bible,
King Solomon suffered from it.” Tooth’s groans would now have melted a
heart of stone, but I remembered his attempted conversion of me, and
hardened mine.
“I have never heard of it in my family,” he said. “No,” I replied,
“the symptoms point to your having acquired it off your own bat.” “How
do you catch it?” he asked in despair. “Usually from evil living,”
I replied. Tooth fairly howled, “But I have never lived evilly.”
“Perhaps not, Tooth; but you can catch it by sitting on a seat that a
person suffering from it has sat upon, or drinking from a vessel from
which that person has drunk.” Tooth’s groans now were heart-rending;
then a glimmer of hope came to him. “But,” said he, “there is no one
in this camp suffering from it.” “No,” was my reply, “that is very
true; but this disease takes exactly two months and seven days to
develop, and that takes us back to the _Merrie England_, where I have
grave suspicions of one of the stewards, the one who looked after
your cabin.” I regret to say that at this point Tooth used language
concerning that unjustly slandered steward that was nearly as strong as
that used by my team in the affair of the hornets. “What is the course
of the disease?” then wailed Tooth. “If my diagnosis be correct,” I
answered, “you now have the first symptoms, the second will be that
your hair and teeth will fall out, the third your nose will drop off,
and after that you will smell so badly that small hoses, charged
with disinfectants, will have to be played upon you until you die.”
“Can you do anything for me, until I can consult a doctor?” he asked
despairingly. “Oh yes,” I answered, “the lugger _Peupiuli_ will be at
Buna Bay in a fortnight, and she can take you to Samarai; but in the
meantime my treatment must be a drastic one.” “Anything, anything,”
said the persecuted man. “All right, Tooth; one packet of Epsom’s
salts, hot, before breakfast every morning, and every Saturday night I
will mix you a bolus.”
Poor Tooth began the treatment; at the end of a week he was a very
limp man indeed, but his boil had gone and his cut was healed. Then
he complained that my treatment was too drastic, and that he was
getting as weak as a schoolgirl and being starved to death, for his
food could not benefit him. I asked him whether he expected me to
be able to cure a dreadful disease like his with babies’ soothing
powders, and then explained that his hunger and weakness were due to a
failing circulation, which I hoped it would not be necessary for me to
stimulate with blisters on his stomach and back.
Tooth continued my treatment until the _Peupiuli_ arrived, when he
departed hastily in her to Samarai; and there, to his rage and relief,
he was of course told by the doctor that there was nothing the matter
with him. Oelrichs told me afterwards that he had sworn he would report
me for misusing Government drugs, but Oelrichs then told him, that
if he did, the R.M. would probably reply, “that he might have been
mistaken in the nature of the surveyor’s disease, but the latter must
have had a bad conscience to cause him to submit to the treatment.”
Poor Tooth choked with rage; but he was not a man that bore grudges or
carried a bitterness long, and we were soon the best of friends again.
“What was the matter with Tooth?” asked Walsh, as he, Elliott, and
I sat round the camp fire on the night of the victim’s departure.
“Nothing,” I replied. “Good Lord! Then what did you scour him to the
bone for?” “Excess of religious fervour!” I answered. “By the way,
which of you two ornaments to the Service had the cheek to set him on
to your chief? I think that requires looking into!” Both looked uneasy.
“Is it Pax?” asked Walsh. I nodded. Then I heard about Tooth and
Elliott.
I have decided not to continue the tale of this expedition. It has
been published in official reports, and is simply a story of swamps,
mountains, fever, and fights, a common sort of tale lacking all
interest, hence I go on to Robinson’s more important Hydrographer’s
Expedition.