_Papuans’ Love of Music—Their Concerts—A Dancing
House—Carving—Papuans as Artists—Cat’s Cradle—Village
Squabbles—The Part of the Women—Wooden and Stone
Clubs—Shell Knives and Stone Axes—Bows and Arrows—Papuan
Marksmen—Spears—A most Primitive People—Disease—Prospects
of their Civilisation._
The most pleasing characteristic of the Papuans is their love of music.
When a number of them are gathered together and when they have eaten
well, or are for any other reason happy, they have a concert. Sometimes
the concerts take place in the afternoon and continue till nightfall,
but more often they begin after dark and go on almost through the
night. The orchestra is simple and consists of two or three men who
beat drums and sit before a small fire in the middle. Round them are
grouped the chorus all sitting on the ground. The drums are hollowed
cylinders of wood, which are often elaborately carved; one end is
open, the other is closed by a piece of lizard’s or snake’s skin (see
illustration p. 142). When this skin becomes slack, as it very quickly
does, the drummer holds it towards the fire until it regains its
pitch. It is not the custom to tune up both drums, when there are more
than one, to the same pitch, usually an interval of about half a tone
is left between them. The leader of the orchestra sometimes wears a
remarkable head-dress made of plaited fibre and ornamented with bunches
of plumes of the Bird of Paradise (see illustration p. 78). The effect
of these plumes waving backwards and forwards as the man moves his head
to mark the phrases of the song is exceedingly striking, and it must
be admitted that if there is anybody, who can becomingly wear those
gorgeous plumes, it is the naked black man.
The most usual kind of song begins with a slow tapping of the drums,
then these are beaten quicker and the singer (one of the drummers)
begins a sort of recitative song, to which the chorus contributes a
low humming accompaniment. Then the drums are beaten very loudly and
rapidly, all the men in chorus sing, or rather growl, a deep guttural
note, followed by a prolonged musical note at about the middle of the
register of a normal man’s voice, and the song ends with one or more
short sharp barks, “Wah! wah! wah!” with a loud drum accompaniment. The
song, or probably different verses of it, is repeated very many times.
The final shouts of the song, which for want of a better word I have
called “barks,” are uttered by all the men in unison and recall, as was
pointed out by Mr. Goodfellow, the harsh croaking call of the Greater
Bird of Paradise, which is heard almost daily in the jungle. It is
possible that the song is in some way connected with the bird and that
there is an intentional imitation of its note.
The scheme of all these songs is the same, viz., a recitative with
drums and a humming accompaniment, but some of them have really
rollicking choruses, and we used to listen to them at night with
extreme pleasure as they came, somewhat softened by distance, over the
water to our camp at Wakatimi. The voices of the men are often rich,
and they have a true musical ear. Their intervals are very similar to
ours and not at all like those of the Malays and many other Eastern
singers, who recognize perhaps five notes where we have only two.
Beside the drum the only instrument of music they have is a straight
trumpet made from a short piece of bamboo. This produces only a single
booming note and is not used at the concerts.
[Illustration: 1. STONE AXE.
2. 3. 4. HEAD-RESTS FOR SLEEPING.
5. 6. 7. DRUMS.]
[Sidenote: A DANCING HOUSE]
As an amusement of the Papuans even more important than singing is
dancing, of which they often talked, but though we saw some of their
dancing halls (see illustration p. 48), we never had the good fortune
to witness a performance. At the coast village of Nimé, a few miles
to the East of the Mimika River, there was a very elaborate dancing
house, which must have cost an immense amount of labour to build. The
length of the house from front to back was about 100 feet, the width
about 25 feet, and it rested on poles which were about 8 feet high in
front, rising up to about 14 feet high at the back. The side walls and
the back were of “atap” as was also the roof, which sloped from a long
ridgepole running the whole length of the house. The ridgepole was
remarkable as being made from a single tree trunk (_Casuarina_) shaved
down very smoothly to a uniform thickness of about 10 inches; the ends
of it, which projected about 8 feet both at the front and back of the
house, were carved in very lifelike representations of the head of a
crocodile and were painted red. The weight of the beam must have been
immense and one wondered how it had been hoisted into position. Between
the ridge of the roof and the eaves there projected both in front and
at the back six other smaller poles grotesquely carved to represent
fish and reptiles and hideous human heads. The front of the house was
open, and when you had climbed up the supporting poles and had stepped
over a low fence you found yourself in a spacious hall with a floor
well made of sheets of bark, which sloped up gradually from front to
back. Along either side at regular intervals on the floor were sand
fireplaces and above these were wooden racks, from which it was evident
that something was hung to be cooked. Round the walls on all sides
was a strip of carved and painted wood, and exactly in the middle of
the hall, fixed to the floor and the roof were two posts about 3 feet
apart and tied between them, at about half the height of a man, was an
elaborately carved and painted board about twelve inches wide. In the
middle of this board was carved the eye, which is a familiar feature of
the ornamental carving on the canoes and drums, and it appeared that
this eye is the centre of the ceremonies which take place in the house.
So far as I could understand from the description of the natives who
accompanied me in my visit to the house, the people, both men and
women, who take part in the ceremony, dance slowly upwards from the
front of the house singing as they go, and when they reach the carved
board each one in turn touches the eye, while all the people shout
together. But what the object of the whole performance is and what the
people cook and eat, are questions to which I was unable to find an
answer.
[Illustration: 1-7. BAMBOO PENIS-CASES. 8-12. CARVED BLADES OF PADDLES.]
[Sidenote: PAPUAN ARTISTS]
I have had occasion above to mention the artistic carvings on the
canoes and drums. Their paddles too show a very good idea of design,
as will be seen from the illustration p. 144. Nothing amused them more
than to be provided with a pencil and pieces of paper and to attempt
to draw figures. Their efforts were not always very successful, and
some of the drawings which I have kept would be quite unrecognisable
for what they are, if I had not labelled them at the time. Like the
young of civilised races they always preferred to draw the figures of
men and women, and some of these are remarkable for having the mouth
near the top of the head above the level of the eyes. The method of
drawing is very simple; the pencil is held almost upright on the paper
and the outline of the figure, begun at an arm or leg or anywhere
indifferently, is drawn in one continuous stroke without removing the
pencil from the paper. The end is always rather exciting, like the feat
of drawing a pig when you are blindfolded, for the artist is never
quite certain of finishing at the point whence he started. Besides
human figures they liked drawing dogs, pigs, birds and fishes. Two
pictures of a dog and a bird both done by the same man are peculiarly
interesting, because they were both drawn upside down. I watched the
man making the drawings, and when they were finished I saw that the
legs of the creatures were uppermost; so I turned the papers the right
way round and handed them back to him, but he inverted them again and
admired them in that position. Curiously enough the same man drew human
figures in the correct attitude, head uppermost, so that the state of
his mental vision offers rather a puzzling problem.
[Illustration: _a._ Cockatoo. _a_{1} b_. Designs for scarification.
_b._ Hornbill. _c._ Pig. _d._ Dog. _e._ Bird. _f._ Man. _g._ Woman.]
Most of them had a keen appreciation of pictures and they were
surprisingly quick in identifying photographs of themselves; in this
respect they showed a good deal more intelligence than some of our
Gurkhas, who held a photograph sideways or upside down and gazed at it
blankly, as if they had not the faintest idea of what it portrayed.
The illustrated papers were a source of endless delight to them, and
the portraits of beautiful ladies, who they felt sure were our wives,
were greatly admired. Horses, sheep, cattle and all other animals were
declared to be dogs.
[Sidenote: CAT’S CRADLE]
Another amusement—it can hardly be called an art—of the Papuans is
the game of cat’s cradle, at which many of them are extraordinarily
proficient. It is not, as with us, a game played by two persons; with
them the part of the second person is performed by the player’s teeth,
and he contrives to produce some wonderfully intricate figures, none of
which, I regret to say, we had patience or skill enough to learn. The
most elaborate figure I saw was supposed to represent a bird, and when
the features of it had been pointed out some resemblance was certainly
apparent.
But it must be admitted that their amusements are not always so
innocent as drawing pictures and playing cat’s cradle. I have referred
above to the gang of drunkards, who used to create such turmoil
at Wakatimi. The people of Parimau, who had no means of getting
intoxicated, were just as quarrelsome as the Wakatimi people, and
fights were of frequent, almost daily occurrence. Some one does
something, it matters not what, to offend some other person, and
in an instant the village is in an uproar. Spears fly through the
air—we never saw anybody touched by one—and stone clubs are brandished
furiously, the combatants all shout horrible threats at the tops of
their voices, while a few people look on stolidly or hardly take any
notice at all. There seems to be a certain etiquette about the use of
clubs, for the person about to be hit generally presents a soft part of
his person, the back or shoulders, to the clubber, and we never saw a
man intentionally hit another on the head, a blow which might easily be
fatal; but blood flowed in plenty from the flesh wounds.
The part of the women in these village squabbles is always to scream
loudly and generally to begin by banging the houses with sticks or
spears and to end with pulling them to pieces. In a fight at Wakatimi
we saw a party of infuriated women absolutely demolish three or four
houses. The fights end almost as suddenly as they begin and in a short
time the village settles down to its usual tranquillity. Neither the
sight nor the sound of these village quarrels is very agreeable, but
they have no regularly organised games and, at the worst, not a very
great amount of damage is done.
The clubs used in these village fights and doubtless also in their
tribal wars—but of those we know nothing—are of two kinds, wooden and
stone-headed. The wooden clubs are about four feet long and consist of
a plain shaft, of which the last foot or rather more is carved into
a saw-like cutting edge; some of these are made of a very heavy wood
and they are exceedingly formidable weapons. A more simple type of
wooden club is a plain wooden shaft rather thinner at the handle end
than at the other, round which is fixed a piece of shark’s skin or
the prickly skin from the back of the Sting Ray and often with it is
tied the saw of a small Saw fish; such a club appears to be capable of
inflicting a very nasty wound.
[Illustration: SPLITTING WOOD WITH A STONE AXE.]
[Sidenote: STONE CLUBS]
There is a great variety of stone-headed clubs, but they are all alike
in being furnished with a wooden shaft, which is usually a plain piece
of wood, but occasionally carved near the club end. The stone head
is pierced in the middle by a round hole about an inch in diameter,
through which the shaft is passed and fixed firmly by wedges. Most of
the heads are made of a rather soft limestone, but where the people
obtain it we do not know, for there is no stone of any kind near the
coast. The simplest type is merely a round water-worn pebble with a
hole bored through it. More commonly they are worked and the labour of
producing them must have been considerable. Some are flat discs with
sharp cutting edges or blunt and roughly milled edges, and some are
cut into the form of five or six or more pointed stars; rarely they
are triangular. Others again are round or oval and are cut into more
or less deep teeth, or they have small bosses left projecting here and
there, but no two of them are exactly alike. The weight of the club
head is usually two or three pounds. The most savage-looking club we
saw was simply a rough lump of coral, not trimmed in any way. It was
pierced and mounted on a finely carved shaft of extremely heavy wood,
and the whole thing must have weighed fifteen or twenty pounds.
Not a little credit is due to the Papuans for their industry in
making these elaborate weapons, for it must be remembered that until
we visited the country they had no metal tools whatever, with the
exception of two or three scraps of soft iron, and all their work was
done with shell knives and stone axes. The knives are simply the shells
of a common freshwater bivalve (_Cyrena_ sp.); when these are rubbed
down on a stone, they take on an exceedingly sharp edge and are used
by the natives for carving the canoes and drums and sharpening their
spears and arrows.
The stone axes used in the Mimika district are all of the same type,
though they vary greatly in size from about four inches to large ones
of nearly twelve inches in length. The stone of which they are made is
always the same, a quartzite. The shaft is about two feet long and is
invariably made of the butt end of a bamboo. A hole is bored and burnt
in the lower end of the bamboo, that is to say in the solid part of
the wood below the first joint, and the pointed end of the stone is
jammed into the hole. The stone is always fixed axe-fashion, _i.e._
with its broad surface and cutting edge in the same plane with the long
axis of the handle, and not adze-fashion, as is the custom in some
other parts of New Guinea (see illustration p. 142). The axes quickly
become blunt with use and they are sharpened by being rubbed upon
another stone. At Wakatimi stones are very rare and one man appeared
to be the stone-smith of the village. I remember seeing him one day
sitting outside his hut sharpening an axe, with three or four others
lying beside him waiting to be done, while a few yards away a woman was
splitting a log of wood with a stone axe. It struck me as being one
of the most primitive scenes I had ever witnessed, really a glimpse of
the Stone Age.
[Illustration:
1. BOW.
2, 7. WOODEN FISH SPEARS.
3. PLAIN WOOD-POINTED ARROW.
4. NOTCHED WOOD-POINTED ARROW.
5. ARROW TIPPED WITH CASSOWARY CLAW.
6. BAMBOO-POINTED ARROW.
8. HUNTING SPEAR, POINTED WITH SHARP BONE.
9, 10. WOODEN SPEAR USED AT CEREMONIES.]
[Sidenote: BOWS AND ARROWS]
The bows of the Mimika natives are about five feet long and are made
of a simple straight piece of a very hard wood (usually a species of
_pandanus_), tapering towards the ends, which are sometimes ornamented
with the claw of a cassowary or a tuft of feathers and shells or the
claw of a crab. The “string” is a piece of rattan and it requires
a strong arm to bend the bow. The arrows are of various types (see
illustration p. 150); they are all made of reed stems, and none are
ever feathered nor have they nocks. They vary only in their points,
which are sometimes merely the sharpened end of the reeds themselves
and sometimes a plain sharpened tip of hard wood or bamboo. Some are
tipped with the sharpened claw of a cassowary or with the spine that
lies along the back of the Sting Ray, and the arrows used for shooting
fish have often three points of sharp bamboo.
Most people have the idea that the savage man performs prodigies of
skill with his bow and arrows, but whenever I saw the Papuans shooting,
they made astonishingly bad practice. I remember seeing two Papuans
trying to kill an iguana in a tree not more than twenty feet above the
ground; they shot arrow after arrow at it, but the creature, which was
as long and almost as thick as a man’s arm, climbed slowly up from
branch to branch until it was lost to view.
The hunting spears are of two kinds, a plain straight shaft of heavy
wood, very sharp and hardened by fire at the tip; and a straight shaft
of a lighter wood, to the end of which is fixed part of a straight bone
(generally the _tibia_) of a pig, sharpened to a fine point. There is
another kind of spear made of a soft wood, finely pointed and with a
wide blade carved in a sort of open-work fashion (see illustration p.
150); the blade and the point are painted red with clay and the shaft
is generally decorated with feathers or plaited fibre. Spears of this
sort are of no use in hunting but are employed at dances and other
ceremonial functions.
Two more pieces of furniture, the head-rest and the sago bowl, complete
the list of articles made by the Papuans. The head-rests, which were
seen only in the villages of Obota and Nimé, are made of a strip of
elaborately carved wood four or five inches wide and between two and
three feet in length, and are supported at each end by a stout wooden
prop, which raises the head-rest about four inches above the ground.
The longer head-rests are supposed to support the heads of two sleeping
persons.
Fire is nearly always taken by the Papuans wherever they go; in almost
every canoe a fire is kept burning, and when they travel through the
jungle the men carry a smouldering stick. There must be occasions when
all these fires are extinguished, but how they produce them we were
unable to learn; the Papuans of Parimau could not make fire with the
friction stick and rattan used by their neighbours, the Tapiro Pygmies.
From the description of them which has been given in this and the two
preceding chapters it will be seen that the conditions of life of the
Papuans are as primitive as those of any people now living in the
world. There are very few other places, where you can find a people
who neither make nor possess any metal and who have no knowledge
of pottery. The only vessels that they have for holding water are
scraped-out coconuts and simple pieces of bamboo. Water boiling they
had never seen before we came among them. Their implements and weapons
are, as I have shown, of the most primitive kind, and their ornaments
are of the rudest possible description.
Cultivation of the soil is only practised by the people of one or two
villages, and even then it produces but a very small proportion of
their food, so it follows that most of their time and energies are
devoted to procuring the necessaries of life.
[Sidenote: STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE]
The struggle for existence is keen enough, the birth-rate is low and
the rate of infant mortality is, I believe, very high. Nor do diseases
spare them; syphilis is exceedingly prevalent, and was probably
introduced by Chinese and Malay traders to the West end of the island,
whence it has spread along the coast. Tuberculosis is happily absent,
but two natives of Wakatimi were suffering from what appeared to be
certainly leprosy. Skin diseases, notably _tinea imbricata_, are very
common; and almost every person appears to suffer occasionally from
fever of one sort or another.
But in spite of all these drawbacks the Papuans of the Mimika are not
such a very miserable people. They are strong, those of them that
survive the ordeals of infancy and sickness; they have food in plenty
to eat, if they choose to exert themselves sufficiently to obtain it;
they have their amusements, songs and dances; and the manner of their
lives is suited to the conditions of the country in which they live.
It is this last consideration which ought ultimately to determine their
fate: they live in a wretchedly poor country which is constantly liable
to devastating floods, and their habit of wandering from one place to
another, where food may be obtained, is the only way of life suitable
to the physical and climatic conditions of the country.
Any attempt to “civilise” them must inevitably destroy their primitive
independence, and if it succeeded in establishing the people in
settled communities it would reduce them at many seasons to absolute
starvation. We were visited once by the Director of the Sacred Heart
Mission at Toeal, which has done admirable work amongst the natives
of the Ké Islands and at one or two places in New Guinea itself. When
he had seen the people and the nature of the country and had been
told something of their habits, he decided that the Mimika was not,
at present at all events, a proper field for missionary enterprise.
Setting aside all other considerations, one dares to hope that such
an interesting people may for a long time be left undisturbed; they
do no harm to their neighbours and the effects on them of civilising
influences would be at the best uncertain.