_Description of Wakatimi—The Papuan House—Coconut
Palms—The Sugar Palm—Drunkenness of the Natives—Drunken
Vagaries—Other Cultivation—The Native Language—No
Interpreters—The Numerals—Difficulties of
Understanding—Names of Places—Local Differences of
Pronunciation._
The native village of Wakatimi lay directly opposite to our base-camp
on the W. bank of the Mimika, which was there about 150 yards broad.
Beyond the margin of the river was a strip of grass intersected by
muddy creeks, where the natives moored their canoes, and beyond that
was Wakatimi. The village consisted of a single street about two
hundred yards long lined on one side by huts, which usually numbered
about sixty. But occasionally, as for instance when we first arrived,
and once or twice subsequently when large crowds of natives from other
villages visited the place, it happened that the street was a double
row of houses, and every available spot of dry ground was occupied.
Shifting house is a very simple affair, as most of the building
materials are carried about in the canoes, and the canoes come and
go in the most casual and unaccountable manner. Sometimes there were
perhaps a thousand people at Wakatimi, and then there would be days
when there was not a soul in the village. There were times when for
weeks together there were large villages at the mouth of the river, and
there were other times when the coast was utterly deserted and hardly
a trace of the villages remained. We were never able to learn what it
was that prompted these migrations of the natives, but it is probable
that the pursuit of food was the guiding motive. The wandering habits
of the people will certainly make it very difficult to administer the
country and civilise the people, if an attempt to do so is ever made.
[Sidenote: THEIR HOUSES]
The typical native house of the Mimika district is a simple rectangular
structure with a framework of light poles driven into the ground, the
cross-pieces and roof pole being tied to the uprights by strands of
rattan. In some houses the roof is a simple slope downwards from front
to back, but in most cases there is a central ridge pole from which
the roof slopes to the back and front, that at the back being longer
and going lower than that in front. The height of the ridge is about
eight feet; after we had been for some time in the country the people
improved their building in imitation of our houses and built their huts
ten, and even twelve feet high. The roof is made of “atap,” the thatch
described above (p. 60), and the walls are mats made from the leaves of
a Screw-pine (_Pandanus_). The area of an average hut is about 9 by 12
feet, the longer dimensions being from front to back.
[Illustration: PAPUAN HOUSES ON THE MIMIKA.]
The floor is covered with sand to a depth of several inches, which is
prevented from escaping into the street by a board placed on its edge
along the front of the hut. The sand is brought from the seashore and
must be of great value in preserving the health of the people: the huts
are frequently under water in the big floods and without the sand,
which quickly dries, it would be impossible for them to live there.
Unfortunately the sand aggravates the sores and ulcers from which too
many of them suffer, but that is perhaps a lesser evil than always
sleeping on sodden ground. Racks made of sticks, on which are stowed
bundles of arrows, spears, clubs, tobacco, sago and all the other
portable property of the family, extend from one wall to another, so
that it is almost impossible to stand upright inside a hut. The door is
an opening about two feet square in the front wall; as well as being
the means of entrance for the members of the household the door serves
as the principal means of escape for the smoke of the fire, which is
constantly kept burning inside.
It is only rarely that a house remains for long separated from others;
when a second house is built it is attached to the side of the first,
and the dividing wall is removed. In a large village the houses are
built in rows of varying length, according to the nature of the ground,
and there may be as many as fifty or sixty joined together. If you go
inside you find that it is a single long house without any dividing
walls, but each family keeps to its own particular section and use
its own private entrance. When the place is crowded with people, and
a number of fires are burning, the atmosphere inside the house may be
more readily imagined than described.
The feature that most distinguishes Wakatimi from all the other
villages that we saw is its fine grove of coconut palms. The village
street is bordered with them on the side opposite to the houses, and
there must be three or four hundred trees in all. They afford a very
pleasant shade to the village, and their graceful trunks curving this
way and that are really picturesque and conveniently relieve the
ugliness of the Papuan houses. It is rather dangerous to live so close
to coconut trees, and sometimes when the wind blew in gusts before the
rain we heard warning shouts and the heavy thud of a nut falling to the
ground; but accidents never seemed to happen. The nuts are, of course,
a source of great wealth to the Wakatimi people, who exchange them for
bananas and tobacco with the people of Obota, and while we were in the
country they brought us altogether thousands of nuts for which they
received riches undreamt of before. At one or two places near the sea,
and at several places on the Mimika River we found coconut palms, but
far up the river they did not occur, nor did we see any on the Kapare
River; and I believe all those we saw were planted by the natives, and
that none of them were self-sown.
The method of cultivation is extremely simple. A ripe nut is left out
on the roof of a hut and allowed to sprout; when the shoot is about a
foot or more in length, a small patch of ground is cleared, preferably
in a sandy place on the river bank or near the sea shore, a hole is dug
and the sprouting nut is planted. From time to time, if he remembers to
do so, the native will clear away the strangling vegetation from the
young plant, and in about five years, under favourable conditions, the
palm begins to bear fruit.
[Sidenote: DRUNKENNESS]
Growing commonly near Wakatimi is another species of palm, which,
though it has not the value of the coconut palm, is yet more prized
by the natives. This is the Sugar palm (_Arenga saccharifera_), and
from it is made a very potent and intoxicating liquor. When the palm is
in fruit—it bears a heavy bunch of dark green fruit—a cut is made in
the stem below the stalk of the fruit, and the juice trickles out and
is collected in the shell of a coconut. Apparently the juice ferments
very rapidly without the addition of any other substance, for it is
drunk almost as soon as it is collected and the native becomes horribly
intoxicated.
During the first few weeks of our stay in the country the people were
on their good behaviour, or else they found sufficient amusement in
coming to see us and our works, but they soon tired of that and went
back to their normal habits. Many of them went to the drinking places
by day, and we often saw them lying or sitting at the foot of the
tree, while one of their party stood at the top of a bamboo ladder
collecting the palm wine. But the worst was a small gang of about a
dozen men, the laziest in the village, whose custom it was to start off
towards evening in canoes to their favourite drinking tree, where they
spent the night drinking and making night hideous with their songs and
shouts. In the morning they returned raving to the village and as often
as not they started quarrelling and fighting and knocking the houses to
pieces (a favourite occupation of the angry Papuan) before they settled
down to sleep off the effects of their potations.
As a rule, the men were the worst offenders, and the women drank but
seldom, but I well remember one day seeing a man and his wife both
hopelessly drunk come over to our camp. It was pouring with rain and
their canoe was several inches deep in water, but they danced up and
down in it and sang a drunken ditty; it was a ludicrous and at the same
time heart-rending exhibition. The man, when we first knew him, was
a fine fellow who one day climbed up a palm tree to get us coconuts,
a feat which no man out of condition can perform; a few months later
he was hardly ever seen sober, and in January he died. A smiling
round-faced youth called Ukuma, who was one of our particular friends
at first and was privileged to wander where he liked about the camp,
attached himself to the drinking party, and before we left the country
he looked an old man, and I had difficulty in recognising him.
[Illustration: A PAPUAN OF THE MIMIKA.]
[Illustration: A PAPUAN OF THE MIMIKA.]
Though the drunken vagaries of the natives were usually food for tears,
they sometimes provided us with amusement. One afternoon one of the
principal men of Wakatimi came down to the river bank quite intoxicated
and took a canoe, which he paddled out into mid-stream and there moored
it. From there he proceeded to shoot arrows vaguely and promiscuously
at the village, raving and shouting what sounded to be horrible curses.
Some of the arrows fell into the village and some sailed over the palm
trees, and now and again he turned round and shot harmlessly into our
camp, but nobody took the slightest notice of him except his wife, who
went down to the river bank and told him in plain language her opinion
of him. This caused him to turn his attention to her, but his aim
was wild and the arrows missed their mark, so he desisted and went
back to the shore, where the woman broke across her knee the remainder
of his bundle of arrows, while he cooled his fevered brow in the river.
Then, while she delivered a further lecture, he followed her back to
their hut looking like a whipped and ashamed dog. It can hardly be
doubted that palm wine shortens the lives of many of the Papuans, but
one must hesitate before condemning an absolutely untaught and savage
race for excessive indulgence in one of the pleasures that vary their
monotonous lives.
[Sidenote: FRUITS]
As well as coconuts the Mimika people have also bananas, papayas
(_Carica papaya_), water-melons and pumpkins, all of them of a very
inferior kind. It cannot be said that they cultivate these fruits;
they occasionally get a banana shoot and plant it in the ground by the
riverside, where it may or may not grow and produce fruit, but they
make no clearings and take very little trouble to ensure the life of
the plant. The papayas and the melons and pumpkins are sometimes seen
growing about the native dwellings; but they, too, seem to be there
more by accident than by any design on the part of the people. At Obota
we found a few pineapples, which were probably the descendants of some
that were brought to the Mimika by M. Dumas a few years earlier.
[Sidenote: LANGUAGE DIFFICULTIES]
It has been stated in the previous chapters that the natives told us
this or that, and that we asked them for information about one thing or
another. From this the reader must not conclude that we acquired a very
complete knowledge of the native language, for that, unfortunately,
was not the case, and even at the end of the fifteen months that
we spent in their country we were not able to converse with them.
Lieutenant Cramer and I compiled a vocabulary of nearly three hundred
words,[8] and we talked a good deal with the people, but we never
reached the position of being able to exchange ideas on any single
subject.
In the Eastern and Northern parts of New Guinea it has always been
found possible to communicate with the natives through the medium of
some known language; even if there were many differences noticed in the
language of a new district, there were always some common words which
formed the foundation of a more complete understanding. The Western end
of New Guinea has been for centuries visited by traders speaking Malay
dialects, some of whom have settled in the country; or Papuans from
those parts have travelled to Malay-speaking islands and have returned
with a sufficient knowledge of the language to act as interpreters to
people visiting those districts.
But the long stretch of the South-west coast from the MacCluer Gulf
as far as the Fly River has been quite neglected by Malay-speaking
traders, partly on account of the poverty of the country and partly by
reason of the shallow sea and the frequent storms which make navigation
difficult and dangerous, so that the Malay language was of no use to us
as a means of talking with the natives. It is true that two men from
the Mimika district had been taken a few years previously to Fak-fak,
the Dutch Government post on the South side of the MacCluer Gulf, but
though they spent two years there and attempts were made to teach them
Malay, in 1910 the extent of their knowledge of the language was the
two words _Tida, tuan_ (No, master).
It is unfortunate that there is no common language along the S. coast,
nor even a language with words common to all the dialects in use. We
were visited on one occasion by the Dutch Assistant Resident from
Fak-fak; the native interpreter who came with him, and who knew all the
native dialects of the Fak-fak district, could not understand one word
of the Mimika language. On another occasion some natives from Mimika
were taken down by steamer to Merauke, the Government post in S.W. New
Guinea, not far from the boundary of British Papua, and there they
found the language of the natives quite unintelligible to them.
So we found ourselves confronted with the task of learning a language
with neither grammar, dictionary nor interpreter. This may not seem to
be an insuperable difficulty, nor is it perhaps where Europeans and
educated people are concerned, but with Papuans it is a very different
problem. The first thing to do—and very few of them would even grasp
the idea—is to make them understand that you wish to learn their
words. You may point at an object and look intelligent and expectant,
but they are slow to take your meaning, and they soon tire of giving
information. The facial expression, which amongst us conveys even to a
deaf man an interrogation, means nothing to them, nor has the sideways
shake of the head a negative meaning to Papuans.
In trying to learn a new language of this kind most people (I imagine)
would begin, as we did, with the numerals. But our researches in
this direction did not take us very far, for we made the interesting
discovery that they have words for one and two only; _ínakwa_ (one),
_jamaní_ (two). This is not to say that they cannot reckon beyond two,
for they can, by using the fingers and thumbs, and beginning always
with the thumb of the right hand, reckon with tolerable accuracy up
to ten. For numbers above ten they use the toes, never, so far as
we observed, two or three toes, but always all the toes together to
indicate a large but uncertain number. Sometimes they opened and closed
the fingers of both hands two or three times and uttered the word
_takirí_, which appeared to mean “many.” They did not, as some people
do, use the word which means “hand” to indicate five or a quantity of
about that number.
With patience we learnt a great number of substantives, the names of
animals, the parts of the body, the various possessions of the natives
and so forth, and with more difficulty we learnt some of the active
verbs. But when we came to abstract ideas, our researches ceased
abruptly for lack of the question words, who, how, where, when, etc.;
these we were never able to learn, and it is impossible to act them.
Thus we were never able to find out what they thought of various
things; we could point to the moon and be told its name, but we were
never able to say, “What is the moon?” We learnt the names of lightning
and thunder, but we never knew who they thought produced them. We
could not find out where their stone axes came from, nor how old they
were, nor who made them; and a hundred other questions, which we should
have liked to put, remained unanswered.
[Sidenote: OBTAINING INFORMATION]
These limitations of our knowledge of the language were particularly
annoying when we tried to find out the simplest ties of relationship.
It may be thought very unintelligent of us that we never learnt the
word for father, in spite of many attempts to do so. If you pointed to
a child and asked a man, knowing him to be the father, what the child
was, he would slap himself on the chest and answer, “_Dorota kamare_”
(my penis); then if you pointed to himself he would tell you his own
name, but never any word that could possibly be construed as father. If
you tried the same thing with the mother she would point to the child
and say, “_Dorota auwë_” (my breast). The child on being questioned
pointed to the father and always said his name, the mother it would
call _Aína_ (woman), but perhaps this word also means mother.
There were two men at Parimau so much alike as to be unmistakably
brothers; we learnt their names and that they were _Inakwa kamare_ (one
penis), but we never found out the name of their relationship.
Seeing that some of the people have a very good idea of drawing on
the ground a map of the country, I tried one day a graphic method of
obtaining the relationships of a man whose name and whose wife’s name
and son’s name I knew. I put sticks on the ground to represent him and
his wife and son, and then in a tentative sort of way put in a stick to
represent his father, whose name he mentioned, but the game did not
interest him and my researches came to an end.
Even the apparently simple matter of enquiring the names of places
is not so easy as one would think. When the first party went up the
Mimika to Parimau they pointed to the huts and asked what the village
was called; the answer given was “Tupué,” meaning I believe, the name
of the family who lived in the huts pointed at. For several months we
called the place Tupué, and the name appeared in various disguises in
the English newspapers. When I was at Parimau in July, it occurred to
me to doubt the name of Tupué, which we never heard the natives use, so
I questioned a man elaborately. Pointing in the direction of Wakatimi,
I said in his language: “Many houses, Wakatimi,” and he nodded assent;
then pointing in the direction of another village that we had visited
I said: “Many houses, Imah,” to which he agreed; then I said. “Many
houses,” and pointed towards Parimau. This performance was repeated
three times before he understood my intention and supplied the word
“Parimau,” and then he shouted the whole story across the river to the
people in the village who received it with shouts of laughter, and
well they might. It was as if a foreigner, who had been living for six
months in a place which he was accustomed to call Smith, enquired again
one day what its name was and found that it was London.
[Illustration: A PAPUAN MOTHER AND CHILD.
(_On the right is seen a fishing net._)]
[Sidenote: LANGUAGE OF MIMIKA]
The language spoken by the people of Mimika is by no means unpleasant
to listen to, and with the customary sing-song intonation it would be
almost musical, if it were not for the harsh voices of the natives,
both men and women. There are many agreeably soft gutterals, and there
is no hissing sound in the language, as they are unable to pronounce
the letter “s.” Many of their words are really very pleasing, notably
some of their names, such as “Oonabë,” “Inamë,” “Tébo,” “Magena,”
“Awariao,” “Idoriaota,” “Poandio,” and “Mareru,” to mention only a few;
some of the names were so long that I never succeeded in writing them
correctly.
The people who lived near the upper waters of the Mimika appeared
to speak the same dialect as those living near the coast, with one
noticeable difference. Those words containing a “k” in the language
of the people at the coast lose the “k” in the mouths of the up-river
natives, thus: _Ké_ (rain) in the Wakatimi language becomes _’é_ at
Parimau; _Kie_ (a leech) becomes _’ie_, _Pokanë_ (an axe) becomes
_Po’anë_.
The only rule of grammar that we learnt was the simple method of
constructing the possessive case by adding the suffix _ta_. Thus from
_doro_ (I) you have _dorota_ (mine); from _oro_ (you), _orota_ (your),
and in the same way _Tebota_ (Tebo’s); _Mareruta_ (Mareru’s), and so on.
They were curious to know our names and liked to address us by them;
Goodfellow’s and Rawling’s names baffled them completely; Marshall’s
became “Martë”; they made a good attempt at mine in “Wollatona,” and
Cramer’s they pronounced perfectly.
So far as I know, they never finish a word with a consonant, and when
they adopted a Malay or Dutch word which ended in a consonant, they
always added a vowel; for instance, _tuana_ (master), _Kapítana_
(Captain), _maíora_ (Major).
Some of their newly-constructed words will puzzle future philologists
who go there; for instance, the Malay word _písau_ (a knife) they
called _pítau_, substituting “t” for the “s” which they cannot
pronounce; _petau_ was found easier to say than _pítau_, and eventually
it became changed to _pauti_, which was the finally accepted version.
Probably the best means of learning the local dialect would be to
encourage an intelligent child to visit your camp daily, where it would
learn Malay and in course of time might be able to act as interpreter;
but the process of education would be a slow one, and it would be
constantly interrupted by the wandering habits of the natives. The time
that we spent in the country was too short for any such attempt to be
made, and indeed it was not until we had been there for several months
that the children came fearlessly into our camp. But now that the
natives have full confidence in Europeans a patient scholar might make
a complete study of a quite unknown language.