Pygmies & Papuans: The Stone Age To-day in Dutch New Guinea. A. F. R. Wollaston
position is expected to introduce himself to the club, and the residents in the place feel genuinely hurt if he fails to do so. The Societat, or “Soce,” as it is everywhere called, is more of a café than a club according to English ideas, and it exists for conviviality and gossiping rather than for newspaper reading and card playing. It is not even a restaurant in the sense that many English clubs are; the members meet there in the evening but they invariably dine, as they lunch, at home. On the verandah in front of the club is a round table, at which sit after dark large men in white clothes smoking cigars and drinking various drinks. The foreigner approaches with what courage he may and introduces himself by name to the party severally. They make a place for him in the circle and thereafter, with a courtesy which a group of Englishmen would find difficulty in imitating, they continue the conversation in the language of the foreigner. An Englishman is at first a little staggered by the number of pait (i.e. bitter, the name for gin and bitters) and other drinks that his hosts consume, and which he is expected to consume also, but, as I remember noticing in the case of their neighbours the Belgians in the Congo, it appears to do them little if any harm.
THE ARAFURA SEA
In the larger places there is a concert at the club once or twice a week—at Bandoeng in Java I heard a remarkably good string quartette—and in almost every place there is a ladies’ night at the club once a week, when the children come to dance to the music of a piano or gramophone, as the case may be. It is a pretty sight and one to make one ponder on the possible harmony of nations—“Harmonie” is commonly a name for the clubs in the Netherlands Indies—to see small Dutch children dancing with little half-castes and, as I have more than once seen, with little Celestials and Japanese.
We left Amboina on New Year’s Day in a deluge of rain, and all that day we were in sight of the forest-covered heights of Ceram to the North. On January 2nd we passed Banda at dawn, and at sunset we got a view of the most South-west point of New Guinea, Cape Van de Bosch. On the morning of January 3rd we dropped anchor in the harbour of Dobo in the Aru Islands. For several miles before we arrived there we had noticed a marked difference in the appearance of the sea. Since we left Batavia we had been sailing over a deep sea of great oceanic depths, sometimes of two or three thousand fathoms, which was always clear and blue or black as deep seas are. Approaching the Aru Islands we came into the shoal waters of the Arafura Sea, which is yellowish and opaque and never exceeds one hundred fathoms in depth. We were, in fact, sailing over that scarcely submerged land, which joins the Aru Islands and New Guinea with the Continent of Australia.
Dobo has doubtless changed a good deal in appearance since Mr. Wallace visited it in 1857, the majority of the houses are now built of corrugated iron in place of the palm leaves of fifty years ago; but it cannot have increased greatly in size, for it is built on a small spit of coral sand beyond which are mangrove swamps where building is impossible. The reason of its existence has also changed since the time when it was the great market of all the neighbouring islands, for now it exists solely as the centre of a pearl-fishing industry controlled by an Australian Company, the Celebes Trading Company. Messrs. Clarke & Ross Smith, the heads of this business, rendered us assistance in very many ways, and the sincerest thanks of the expedition are due to them. The primary object of pearl-fishing is of course the collection of pearl-shell which is used for knife handles, buttons, and a hundred other things. Shell of a good quality is worth more than £200 a ton. The pearls, which are occasionally found, are merely accidentals and profitable extras of the trade. Some idea of the extent of this business may be learnt from the fact that more than one hundred boats employing about five thousand men are occupied in the various fleets.
We left Dobo, the last place of civilisation that many of us were to see for a year and more, on January 3rd; and here, as we are almost within sight as it were of our destination, it may be opportune to state briefly the geographical position of New Guinea, and to give a short account of its exploration.
DOBO. ARU ISLANDS.
CHAPTER III
New Guinea—Its Position and Extent—Territorial Divisions—Mountain Ranges—Numerous Rivers—The Papuans—The Discovery of New Guinea—Early Voyagers—Spanish and Dutch—Jan Carstensz—First Discovery of the Snow Mountains—William Dampier in the “Roebuck”—Captain Cook in the “Endeavour”—Naturalists and later Explorers.
The island of New Guinea or Papua lies to the East of all the great islands of the Malay Archipelago and forms a barrier between them and the Pacific Ocean. To the South of it lies the Continent of Australia separated from it by the Arafura Sea and Torres Strait, which at its narrowest point is less than a hundred miles wide. To the East is the great group of the Solomon Islands, while on the North there are no important masses of land between New Guinea and Japan. The island lies wholly to the South of the Equator, its most Northern point, the Cape of Good Hope in the Arfak Peninsula, being 19´ S. latitude.
The extreme length of the island from E. to W. is 1490 miles, and its greatest breadth from N. to S. is rather more than 400 miles. New Guinea is the largest of the islands of the globe, having an area of 308,000 square miles (Borneo has about 290,000 square miles), and it is divided amongst three countries roughly as follows: Holland 150,000, Great Britain 90,000, and Germany 70,000 square miles. The large territory of the Dutch was acquired by them with the kingdom of the Sultan of Ternate, who was accustomed to claim Western New Guinea as a part of his dominions: it is bounded on the East by the 141st parallel of East longitude and partly by the Fly River and thus it comprises nearly a half of the island.
The Eastern half of the island is divided into a Northern, German, and a Southern, British, part. The German territory is called Kaiser Wilhelm Land, and the islands adjacent to it, which have received German substitutes for their old names of New Britain, New Ireland, etc., are known as the Bismarck Archipelago. British New Guinea, which is now administered by the Federal Government of Australia, has been officially renamed the Territory of Papua, and with it are included the numerous islands at its Eastern extremity, the D’Entrecasteaux and Louisiade Archipelagoes.
Only in the British territory has a serious attempt been made at settling and administering the country; the headquarters of the Government are at Port Moresby, and the country is divided into six magisterial districts.
The German possessions are governed from Herbertshöhe in Neu Pommern (New Britain), which is the centre of a small amount of island trade, but the settlements on the New Guinea mainland are few and far between, and it cannot be pretended that the country is German except in name.
The Dutch territory has been even less brought under control than the German. For more than half a century there has been a mission station at Dorei in the N.W. but until 1899 when the Dutch assumed the direct control of the country, which was till that time nominally governed by the Sultan of Tidor (Ternate), there was no sign of Dutch rule in New Guinea. Now there are Government stations with small bodies of native soldiers at Manokware, an island in Dorei Bay, and at Fak-fak on the shore of MacCluer Gulf; more recently a third post has been established at Merauke on the South coast near the boundary of British New Guinea, with the object of subjugating the fierce Tugere tribe of that region.
MOUNTAIN RANGES
The most important physical feature of New Guinea is the great system of mountain ranges, which run from West to East and form the back-bone of the island. The Arfak Peninsula in the N.W. is made entirely by mountains which reach an altitude of more than 9000 feet. In the great central mass of the island the mountains begin near the S.W. coast with the Charles Louis Mountains, which vary in height from 4000 to 9000 feet. Following these to the East they are found to be continuous with the Snowy Mountains (now called the Nassau Range, the objective of this expedition) which culminate in the glacier-covered tops of Mount Idenberg (15,379 feet), and Mount Carstensz (15,964 feet), and to the East of these is the snow-capped Mount Wilhelmina (15,420 feet), and Mount Juliana (about 14,764 feet).
Leaving