_The Camp at the Wataikwa River—Malay Coolies—“Amok”—A
Double Murder—A View of the Snow Mountains—Felling
Trees—Floods—Village washed Away—The Wettest Season—The
Effects of Floods—Beri-beri—Arrival of C. Grant—Departure
of W. Goodfellow._
If I were to write a true and complete account of the expedition,
I should fill many pages with repeated stories of rain and floods,
sickness among the coolies and our consequent inaction; but that would
be as wearisome to the reader as it was trying to our own patience.
During July and a part of August we sent out parties of coolies to the
Wataikwa camp, where a considerable depôt of food was formed, but about
the middle of the latter month the number of our coolies was reduced
to twenty, of whom not more than half were capable of any hard work,
and it became quite evident that any further progress in the direction
of the mountains was out of the question until we should get a fresh
supply of men.
As the number of coolies grew fewer we sent natives with them to
carry stores out to the Wataikwa, but the supply of willing natives
was very uncertain and it became a matter of some difficulty to
keep up a regular communication with that camp. Two Gurkhas and two
Javanese soldiers remained always at the Wataikwa and one or other of
us went out there and stopped to make natural history collections or
to superintend the cutting of the road on the other side of the
river for a few weeks at a time, while the others were at Parimau or
at Wakatimi. We managed to continue this arrangement until the end of
October, when it became no longer possible to keep an European supplied
out there; thenceforward until the beginning of January the camp at
the Wataikwa was occupied only by the guard of Gurkhas and Javanese,
who in the meantime consumed nearly all the stores that had been so
laboriously accumulated there.
[Illustration: CAMP OF THE EXPEDITION AT PARIMAU.]
[Sidenote: MALAY COOLIES]
We often said hard things to and of our Malay coolies, but the poor
wretches were not to blame for being such incompetent carriers. At
their proper occupations of carrying cargo to and from the ships at
Macassar, or working on the boats of the pearl-fishers, or doing odd
jobs in their native places, no doubt they excelled; but at struggling
through the New Guinea jungle with even the lightest of loads they were
hopeless failures and the wonder was that they survived as long as they
did. Taking them all round, the majority of them worked as well as they
could, and some of them even became quite attached to us.
To a large number of people the name of Malay immediately suggests
a savage person who runs _amok_, but you may live for years in a
Malay country and never see a single _amok_. Fortunately our Malays
never behaved in this dangerous fashion, though one day a man who
was suffering from fever went suddenly mad and inflicted a serious
knife-wound on the body of another coolie; the wounded man was
successfully treated by Marshall, who was happily but seldom required
in this way to exercise his vocation as surgeon. Malays are indeed
rather too handy with their knives and a more serious encounter took
place one day between two of Cramer’s convicts. These two men, a
_mandoer_ (head man) and another, quarrelled one morning about some
trifle connected with their food, and before anybody knew what was
amiss, knives were out and one was chasing the other through the camp.
By a clever backward thrust the pursued man dealt the pursuer a deep
wound under the heart, but he was unable to escape before the pursuer
had given him too a mortal wound. One died in a few minutes and the
other during the course of the day, fortunately perhaps for both of
them.
But ordinarily our Malays were most quiet and peaceable fellows.
Certainly they were liars and thieves when it suited their convenience
to be so, but these two faults are almost universal in the East. They
were enthusiastic fishermen (a sure sign of grace) and spent many hours
of their leisure time in angling for small fish, which they very seldom
caught. Another of their virtues, though it sometimes became a little
wearisome, was their love of singing, in which they indulged on fine
evenings. The Ambonese used to sing, accompanied by a soloist on a sort
of penny whistle, some really pretty songs, possibly of Portuguese
origin, to which one could listen with real pleasure. But the singing
of the Javanese, usually in a high falsetto voice, was a burden hardly
to be borne.
In dealing with people like the Malays it is essential to keep them
constantly occupied in order to prevent them from brooding too much
over their untoward circumstances and becoming, as they easily do,
physically ill. Accordingly, during the times when for one reason or
another they were not carrying out loads to the Wataikwa camp, we set
them to clearing the jungle about the camp at Parimau, and in the
course of time some ten or twelve acres were cleared. Apart from the
object of drying and letting light into the camp, this clearing was
made with the purpose of obtaining from Parimau a view of the Snow
Mountains. This latter object was ultimately attained and proved of
great service to the surveyors, who were enabled to fix more definitely
the various points of the range seen from a place of which they had
already determined the position by astronomical observations. To the
non-surveyor too the view of the mountains was a boon, though rather
a tantalising one, and I used to spend many hours in the mornings,
before the mists had hidden them, in scanning the snows of Idenburg and
Carstensz and planning routes by which they might be reached.
[Sidenote: FELLING TREES]
Cutting down trees in the New Guinea jungle differs from cutting
down trees here in that the tree does not always fall, even when the
trunk is cut completely through. Amongst the tops of the trees grows
an extraordinary network of rattans and other creepers of sufficient
strength to support a tree, even if it is inclined to fall. We spent
some time one day in firing shots with a rifle at a single creeper,
thicker than a man’s arm, which was holding up a tree without any
other support; though I believe we sometimes pierced the creeper with
bullets, it held on and only gave way some hours later. As a rule we
did not take the trouble to cut the creepers, but if a tree did not
fall we cut down those about it until they all fell together in one
splendid crash. On sloping ground the best method of felling trees is
to cut their trunks only half way through and leave them, and then to
cut completely through a big tree above them in such a way that it will
fall down hill and complete the felling of those below it.
Some of the trees that we cut down in our clearing fell in the most
unexpected directions, but though there were some narrow escapes, there
were no accidents. The most unpleasant was a tree which fell midway
between two houses, one full of coolies and the other full of stores,
and shaved off the projecting roof of both; it might easily have killed
half-a-dozen sleeping men, but the only harm it did was to fill the
camp with a swarm of large and furiously biting ants, which had had a
nest in its topmost branches. The natives, who never tired of using our
steel axes, helped a good deal in felling the trees and in this way
some of them earned large quantities of coloured beads.
Another occupation for the coolies in their idle moments, and at the
same time a very necessary work, was the business of keeping the camp
in a state of repair. When the high river bank opposite the village of
Parimau was chosen for a camping ground, it was thought that floods at
all events could do no harm. The houses nearest to the river were built
five or six yards back from the edge of the bank, which was there about
fifteen feet above the usual level of the water, and it seemed quite
out of the question that the river could ever invade the camp. It was
necessary, in order to prevent it from becoming the dumping ground
of camp-refuse, to clear away the rank vegetation that grew on the bank
down to the water’s edge, and this was the beginning of what almost
ended in our downfall. After the tangle of creepers had been removed,
the first rains began to wash the bank away, and when the river rose
three or four feet, as it speedily did after a few hours’ downpour, it
undermined the lower part of the bank and large landslips took place
from above.
[Illustration: THE CAMP AT PARIMAU. A PRECAUTION AGAINST FLOODS.]
[Sidenote: SECURING THE CAMP]
In the course of a few weeks several yards of land disappeared, and
the safety of our houses, which had come to be almost overhanging the
river, was seriously imperilled. To save them we erected a strong
palisade of long poles thrust deeply into the bottom of the bank and
secured them by rattan ropes, which passed through our house and were
attached to posts at the back. The interval between the palisade and
the bank was laboriously filled up with shingle from the river bed, and
this provided a never-ending occupation, because the stones were always
trickling through the palisade and required to be renewed. The natives
were of great assistance to us in this work, and on one occasion—it
was the only time that we ever persuaded them to come into our camp,
although we lived within a few yards of their village—the women and
children came and helped in the work and thoroughly enjoyed themselves.
[Sidenote: FLOODS]
It was well that we took these precautions, for as the weather grew
steadily wetter and wetter (though that seemed hardly possible)
through July and August, so the river rose higher and higher and
each succeeding flood was greater than the last. The night of the
18-19th of August was one that I shall never forget: it had been
raining steadily for some days and the river was fairly full, but
about sunset on the 18th the rain really began to come down solidly,
as it does in the Tropics. About midnight a terrific thunderstorm
began, which continued with almost incessant thunder and lightning
until dawn, but long before this the river had risen many feet and was
already threatening the village. As soon as the waters began to rise
the natives appeared at the edge of the river with blazing torches,
while canoes were baled out and brought nearer to the shore. When the
flood, rising visibly by that time, reached the lowest house, a most
extraordinary Bedlam broke loose and it sounded as if all the people in
the village were being drowned. The men all shouted at once, the women
and children screamed and the dogs whined and howled. By the light
of the flashes of lightning we could see them scurrying hither and
thither, bundling all their belongings into the canoes and trying to
save the roofs and matting walls of their huts by throwing them among
the branches of the trees at the back of the village. In a very short
time all the houses were swamped and the people were in their canoes,
about twenty in all, moored to the branches of the trees along the edge
of the jungle, where they kept up an unceasing turmoil until daylight.
[Illustration: THE MIMIKA AT PARIMAU. LOW WATER.]
[Illustration: THE SAME IN FLOOD. THE VILLAGE HAS DISAPPEARED AND THE
PEOPLE ARE IN CANOES.]
In the meantime our own position was not very secure. The river was
swirling down at ten or twelve miles an hour and bringing with it huge
tree-trunks, which carried away our fleet of canoes and threatened to
destroy our protecting palisade. If that had gone nothing could have
prevented our houses from falling into the river, but happily it
held well. The whole of the jungle on our side of the river was under
water and all sorts of creatures sought the shelter of our houses,
which occupied the highest position. When even these were flooded,
armies of ants and beetles and other insects climbed up our beds and
other furniture to escape from drowning, moths washed out of their
resting places fluttered aimlessly about, and a family of rats, which
inhabited my hut, ran about squeaking in terror.
Beyond the loss of our canoes, some of which were afterwards recovered,
no great damage was done, and the flood fell almost as quickly as it
had risen. Soon after daybreak the ground, on which the village had
been, began to appear above the falling water, and it was seen that not
one stick of the huts was standing. But the natives were anxious to
get out of their canoes, and by mid-day half the huts in the village
were re-built with the fragments that they had crammed into the canoes
or had put up into the trees. During the next two or three days they
brought back quantities of housing materials, which had been carried
for miles down the river, and very soon the village resumed its normal
appearance.
On two subsequent occasions in the following month the village was
completely swept away by floods, and it was a matter of surprise to
us that they did not adopt the custom of their neighbours the Tapiro
pygmies and build their houses on piles. The third great flood swept
away the sandbank on which the village stood, and they were accordingly
compelled to build their houses on the top of a high bank further down
the river. Such a place as that necessitated cutting down a number of
big trees, but now that a great many of them have the steel axes, which
we gave them, it is to be hoped that they have learnt to place their
dwellings in safer positions, even though it costs them a little extra
labour.
The wet season, which we hoped had reached its maximum of wetness
in July, when sometimes for days together the rain hardly ceased,
continued in a series of greater or less floods through the months of
August and September. Often it was impossible to move a yard from the
camp, and without books life would have been almost insupportable. On
one of the wettest of those days I came across the following passage,
which seemed to describe the situation exactly:—
“With five ... what we call qualities of bad,
Worse, worst, and yet worse still, and still worse yet.”
It need hardly be said that this very disagreeable season produced ill
effects on all the members of the expedition. The Europeans became
depressed, and if we were not sick of life itself, we were certainly
sick of New Guinea, while in the case of the coolies and soldiers, who
were accustomed to sunnier climates, and who had no interest or goal
to look forward to in the country, the results were disastrous indeed.
Hardly a man escaped fever of greater or less severity and chills
brought on by the unceasing rain and the consequent impossibility
of securing a change of dry clothing. Several men suffered too from
dysentery of a very intractable type, which completely incapacitated
them from any further service.
[Sidenote: BERI-BERI]
But worse than either fever or dysentery was the beri-beri, which
made its appearance after we had been in the country for a few months.
This is not the place to give a scientific account of beri-beri; it
will suffice to say that it is a disease, of which the most important
feature is a degeneration of the nervous system. The results of this
are seen in the curious and characteristic walk, loss of sensation
in various parts of the body, interference with the circulation and
swelling of the body and particularly of the face and limbs, and in
very many cases sudden heart failure. It is almost conclusively proved
now that the cause of the disease is an error of diet, and it appears
to be certain that the fine milling and polishing of the rice, which
forms the staple food of the natives of so many countries in the East,
deprives the rice of a very necessary constituent as a food. Those
people, who grind their own rice and do not mill or polish it finely,
but leave a small portion of the husk still adhering to the grain, are
free from beri-beri. The disease varies in severity from time to time
and from place to place, but at its best it is a very deadly scourge
and it causes a very large number of deaths. Occasionally it occurs in
an epidemic form, but fortunately that did not happen to our expedition.
In the six months from the beginning of June to the end of November,
thirty-nine men shewed definite symptoms of beri-beri, and seven deaths
were directly attributable to this cause. Our coolies, who came from
the Eastern islands of the Archipelago, were much less susceptible to
the disease than were the convicts and soldiers, most of whom came from
Java and Sumatra; these latter contracted the disease in a much more
serious form and most of the fatal cases took place among them. It was
a curious circumstance that at Parimau, which was in most respects by
far the healthier place, many more cases of beri-beri occurred than at
Wakatimi, where it is doubtful if any cases originated.
[Sidenote: SICKNESS]
Still more remarkable was the case of the camp on the Wataikwa River,
which ought to have been the healthiest place we occupied anywhere in
the country. For several months a guard of two Javanese and two Gurkhas
was kept there to look after the store of food, and though they were
very frequently changed and replaced by others, several of the Javanese
developed beri-beri and two of them died. The Gurkhas, perhaps because
they led more active lives than the Javanese, remained free of the
disease until one of them, Havildar Mahesur, a most useful man, had
the misfortune to damage one of his eyes; it was necessary for him to
remain in the darkness of his tent for some days and within a fortnight
he developed all the signs of beri-beri so that he had to be sent away
from the country.
A welcome interruption in those dreary months was caused by the arrival
at Parimau on August 26 of canoes bringing Mr. C. H. B. Grant, who had
come out from England as naturalist to the expedition in the place of
W. Stalker. He brought with him two Dayak collectors[15] and a quantity
of various and excellent stores, and a large mail, the first we had
received since the end of May. Shortridge had arrived in the country by
the same ship on his return from Australia, but his change of air had
not completely cured him and he was compelled to leave the country at
the end of November. Goodfellow, whose fever continued almost without
interruption, became so weak that he also was obliged to leave the
country early in October. From that time we had only a dozen men and
no forward movement was possible until the arrival of our third batch
of coolies on the 22nd December. By the same boat that brought the new
coolies in December came instructions to Captain Rawling to take over
the command of the expedition.