Explorations into Highland New Guinea, 1930-1935
272
Explorations into Highland New Guinea, 1930-1935
272eBook
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Overview
In the 1920s and 1930s there were adventures to be lived and fortunes to be made by strong young men in the outback of Australia and the gold fields of New Guinea. This is the diary of five years spent in hot pursuit—not of honor and glory, but of excitement and riches—by one such adventurer, Michael "Mick" Leahy, his brothers Jim and Pat, and friends Mick Dwyer and Jim Taylor. Leahy and his associates explored the unknown interior of New Guinea, seeking gold and making contact for the first time with the aborigines of the interior mountains and valleys.
White man was unknown to these often cannibalistic, always dangerous, aborigines who thought the seekers of yellow in the streams slightly mad, and thus easy prey. The chronicles of their explorations and their hundreds of photographs brought news of these native peoples to the outside world. In doing so, they changed forever our understanding of the human landscape of New Guinea, and carved a place in history for these explorers who, braving the environment in search of gold, found people.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780817383152 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alabama Press |
| Publication date: | 05/06/2011 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| File size: | 22 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Michael J. Leahy (1901-1979) finally settled in Zenag, New Guinea, and, with his brothers, became a prosperous rancher and respected settler. Douglas E. Jones is Director of the Alabama State Museum of Natural History, which houses an extensive collection of aboriginal artifacts donated by Leahy following his explorations. Jane C. Goodale is Professor of Anthropology at Bryn Mawr College and a specialist on aboriginal New Guinea.
Read an Excerpt
Explorations into Highland New Guinea 1930â"1935
By Michael J. Leahy, Douglas E. Jones
The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 1991 The University of Alabama PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-8315-2
CHAPTER 1
THE YEAR 1930
Until the early 1930s, the interior of New Guinea was considered to be a jumbled mass of unpopulated, timber-covered mountain ranges. Some of the mountains on the Bismarck Range were visible from the north coast around Madang. Their peaks were estimated to stand just over 15,000 feet above sea level. Snow was occasionally visible on the top of Mt. Wilhelm.
In 1930 I had been living in New Guinea for four years, having arrived with the 1926 gold rush to Edie Creek, which was an eight-day walk inland from the port of Salamaua. Although good gold was being won in that area, I thought it unlikely that Edie Creek was the only goldfield in this unexplored country. When the miners on Edie Creek asked me to go ahead and find "another Edie Creek," I asked a friend, Mick Dwyer, to accompany me. Natives were selected from our gold mining operations—some Warias, the best fighters in New Guinea; Markhams for crossing or rafting down fast-flowing rivers; and some coastal natives who knew all about canoes. All of them were good strong young men, good walkers and carriers.
A prospector named Ned Rowland had reported finding gold in the headwaters of the Ramu River, which heads on the south fall of the Bismarcks, runs southeast, and then turns and drops into the Markham-Ramu-Sepik rift and reaches the sea north of Madang. I figured on crossing the Bismarcks and dropping down into the headwater tributaries of the Ramu, where I hoped to find another Edie Creek at the source of Rowland's gold. Each of the boys packed thirty pounds of gear. We walked from Lae on the coast up the heat-scorched Markham Valley to Kaigulen village on the Ramu, a distance of 120 miles.
We left Kaigulen village on May 24, 1930, and, after crossing the fast-running, armpit-deep Ramu River, climbed about 3,000 feet up grass ridges to the small village of Lehuna, where we camped to check our supplies and gear. Leaving some of our stores there, we started off on May 26 to cross the Bismarck Range. We experienced great difficulty in finding a guide who would show us the track. All of the natives appeared terrified of the mountain and the people beyond. They pantomimed sudden death for us all from arrows and clubs!
We tried to follow the overgrown track, but communication over the range had evidently ceased many months before, and we concluded that there might be trouble for anyone approaching from our direction. We wandered about for an hour or so without making much headway, until an old native dashed forward and indicated that he would show us the track. He was probably a member of some of the many earlier parties heading over the range on a feuding raid. He took us to the top of the range. There, from a small clearing, we gazed into a vast area of steep, timber-topped, grass-covered ranges and high mountain peaks. Fenced gardens in straight rows and smoke curling up from barricaded villages gave promise of food and direction and—and, almost inevitably, trouble!
We made camp late in the bed of the small stream down which we had paddled, starting from the source on the mountainside. We spent a rather restless night concealed by a thick fog. In the morning our campfires attracted attention, and a heavily armed party came to investigate. We made contact without incident. Once the natives had identified us as the strange people of whom they had presumably heard on excursions over the ranges, they became quite friendly. When there was a lull in their almost constant tribal fighting, they brought along plenty of native foods—sweet potatoes, sugarcane, bananas, and even pigs—establishing the importance of the meeting and giving promise of food and direction farther on.
We pushed on downstream from our creek camp, passing near the villages of Tinofy, Hofrona, and Karuna, and camped near a large village called Badanofera, where a tall, fine-looking old native was evidently in charge. In response to signs from our tired and hungry boys, he spoke with authority, and food arrived in great abundance. We found that the first contact with whites was always quite a shock to the natives. They gave no thought to food until they saw us picking up pieces of sugarcane and sweet potato skins, when they seem to have realized that, although we were spirits of some of their dead relatives, we were also very hungry spirits!
The men were naked except for a narrow fringe of bark string or butterfly-shaped wooden shields that protected their pubic parts and which were suspended from a very greasy, and probably (to judge from the scratching) louse-inhabited string belt. A few leaves were tucked under the belt at the back and often nothing at all. A heavy string bag suspended from the neck was all that covered their rear. This heavy string bag was thrown over one arm when its owner was fighting, so that it served as a foil to deaden the speed of an enemy arrow. There was no chewing of betel nuts and rarely any smoking. We concluded that there was no contact between these people and the slightly more sophisticated natives over the mountains.
The men had their noses pierced in up to five places to hold pieces of pig tusk, bone, and quartz. The weight suspended from the septum caused a continual snuffling. They wore head ornaments consisting of strings of tambu shell, a small seashell, cowrie shells, and green iridescent beetles, arranged in wide bands. Skins of opossums' tails and bits of fur, cane, or bamboo were suspended from their ears. All wore bark string wrist gauntlets to protect their skin from the cutting backlash of the bow strings. All carried bows and bundles of spare arrows in bamboo quivers on their backs, and they fed arrows to their bows with incredible speed. Their stone axes were mostly poor things and nothing like the greenstone working axes we later found farther west.
The women, like the men, were short and squat, but all were very active and agile; their lives depended on their agility in their continual intertribal wars. They wore a wide bark-string covering in the front and rear that was suspended from a string belt. The girls wore the shell ornaments until marriage. All carried sharp garden sticks and the usual string bags suspended from the head. These bags held native foods, babies, pigs, and often the skull and bone or two of a dead relative. Both men and women had fingers cut off, and some had all of one hand missing. We found such amputations to be a mourning custom, and we learned that the funnybone at the elbow was deadened by a blow before the finger was chopped off.
The natives' gardens were very well laid out in long straight rows, whereas a straight line is practically unknown in lower parts of New Guinea. The gardens were fenced with swamp canes, which were tied together with a vine resembling kudzu. The villages were barricaded with thick walls of swamp canes, with bays to protect the walls from their blunt stone axes.
For days we followed the stream down which we had paddled, which the local natives called the Dunantina, never going less than 5,000 feet above sea level. It ran through steep grass-covered ranges and past a prominent rock outcrop on the end of a low range which the natives called Sunubia. The country gradually opened out into wide grass-covered valleys populated by thousands of Stone Age natives living in barricaded villages with compact garden areas nearby. We passed on from group to group. Our appearance often caused such consternation that we were able to bring warring tribes together and so to find guides and food for the next day.
To the west we could see the large, flat, grass-covered valley known today as the Goroka Valley. Although we were tempted, we kept to the main river. We expected it to turn south and east and take us to Rowland's gold find. We had stocked supplies for a limited trip only. After more than two weeks of travel downstream, we found that the river had grown to a large, wildly rushing torrent thundering through an almost endless gorge. We realized then that it was not the Ramu and that we had discovered a totally new country. This land was populated by tens of thousands of Stone Age natives, whose village fires at night extended in the distance as far as the eye could see across the grass valleys and ranges. Thus far we had escaped unpleasant incidents with the natives because of their initial astonishment at seeing whites for the first time. The natives endowed us with supernatural powers and associations. We had no illusions about the probable nature of their reactions once they recovered from the first shock and understood the value of the shell and other treasures we carried. Furthermore, as far as they could see, we were defenseless; guns and rifles meant nothing whatever to them.
To retrace our steps was out of the question. Our weapons consisted of two .12-gauge shotguns, two .22-caliber rifles, two .45-caliber revolvers, and two .32-caliber rifles, with a relatively small amount of ammunition for any of them. Should any trouble start, we would face almost certain death, and the natives would regard our murder as just incidental to the looting of our gear. We decided to continue down the river, prospecting the streams coming in on the eastern side. The river was now too fast and wide for us to cross and test streams entering from the west. We consoled ourselves with the thought that water must run downhill and that it must sometime, somewhere, run into the sea. We managed to arrange for guides from one village to the next. The people were rather skeptical of us and anxious to see us leave their particular village. Still, we were always able to find an adventurous soul who would take us to within shouting distance of the next village. After exchanging what appeared to be the local greeting or peace words, we were handed over, and the guide quietly disappeared into the bush.
From a village named Knoo we looked down into a large river coming in from the west, which the natives called the Marki but which we now know was a distortion of the word "Wahgi." This river affords the main drainage from as far west as Mt. Hagen and runs through the most thickly populated part of the New Guinea Highlands. The grass ranges gave way to heavily timbered ranges from the junction of the Marki. The population thinned considerably, and the river racing through its narrow gorge became at times impossible to follow. We always left the river with some misgivings, as we depended on it to take us ultimately to the sea somewhere on the south coast of New Guinea. Our detours around the precipitous gorges always brought us back within sight of the river again. From some of our camps and in small clearings that overlooked the gorge, we imagined we could see the sea, a blue sky in the distance beneath the clouds that always surround New Guinea's mountains. Our belief led us on, and we continued downriver toward the blue sky. My boss boy, a Waria named Ewunga, was less sure than we about our chances of getting out. When I asked him his opinion, he made the gloomy prediction in Pidgin English, "Bye-m-bye, bone belong you-me stink along bush!"
Below the Marki junction our track sometimes ran right alongside the comparatively slow-running reaches of the main river, now called the Tua. At such times we saw the bloated bodies of natives floating aimlessly by in the current. In some bends of the river, where it had thrown up an acre or so of sand together with the river's flotsam and jetsam, giant iguanas could be seen picking the bones of numerous bodies thrown up on the beaches. From the innumerable skulls and bones littering the sands, we concluded that there must be an even larger valley or valleys drained by the Marki we saw coming in from the west and that the native population must be huge. We were now reaching the leech country. Our shoes, which were almost worn out, gave us a bad time and slowed the party down. Bluey, the dog, picked up a leech on the tip of his nose and amused us in his efforts to blow or rub it off.
We managed to persuade two or three men from each camping place to show us the track leading in the general direction in which the Tua was running. Each evening we camped near a small group of natives living in bush clearings. From them we were able to buy sweet potatoes, sugarcane, and sometimes a small pig. Sacsac, native sage, began to appear as we descended to about 2,000 feet above sea level. We shot down large blue pigeons and numerous smaller pigeons with a .22-caliber rifle, to the astonishment of any local natives who happened to be with us. Those birds augmented our scanty food supply.
Our guides eventually escorted us to a large, fast-running river which could not be forded. Thereafter we were on our own. This was the Pio, coming in from the east and running fast and deep; a few hundred yards below, it cascaded over rocky outcrops through a gorge. Our Markhams could cross by swimming across the current and getting swept downstream a couple of hundred yards, but the only way to get the boys and cargo across was to make a canoe. It took us a few days to hack out a dugout canoe. We used plane blades, which we carried as trade, and tomahawks. We erected an outrigger on the canoe and used a piece of bark in a cleft stick as a paddle. In this way all our gear and boys were ferried across. As a precaution a long length of lawyer cane was fastened to both ends of the canoe so that it could not be carried down the rapids. We pulled our boat well up above the water level and hid it under bushes, just in case we had to retrace our steps upriver—a dreadful thought to us at this stage!
We picked up a pad (path) through the thick undergrowth and towering trees. After following the bent-over branches of small shrubs, which exposed the contrasting underside of the leaves, we eventually walked onto a well-worn pad. In a small clearing we found a large double-story native house about thirty feet wide and ninety feet long, built onto tall straight trees from which the tops had been lopped about forty feet off the ground. The approach to the top floor was a long ladder of springy saplings with crosspieces notched and attached by lawyer cane at intervals of about every foot. It was an ideal defense position against attack! The top story was divided into stalls, and a passage four to five feet wide ran through the whole length of the house to a sheer drop at the other end. The ashes were still warm in the fireplaces. We posted a boy at the top of the steps to give the alarm when the owners returned. We were very anxious to contact them and resume our travels from village to village. In the house we also found a piece of bottle glass and a coconut shell which must have been traded in from the coast; but how far away that coast might be we could only guess.
Here there was somewhat more security than we had had for a long time, and the chance to rest came as a relief. Dwyer and I selected the stall nearest the door. We took off our heavy revolvers and put our rifles down to enjoy a cup of tea. Suddenly Dwyer, who was facing the door, stopped talking and began to stare in the direction of the door. There was a very surprised expression on his face. Looking around, I was horrified to see one, two, three, four young warriors, complete with bows and arrows and decorations, bound off the springy ladder into the room. Pandemonium broke loose! Our boys tried to grab for the natives, but they were well greased and were much more surprised and terrified than we were. Three of them broke loose, rushed the full length of the house, jumped onto a tree trunk, and slid down to the ground to disappear into the bush. Grabbing my revolver, I took a hasty look out the door. Finding no more warriors charging up the ladder, I tried to quiet the captive, whom the boys were holding down. "Aboo" was the last peace word we had heard, so we abooed the fellow but to no avail. He was terrified. We gave him a few beads, a piece of red laplap (cloth), a handful of food, and his bows and arrows, which he had lost in the struggle. Then we escorted him to the top of the ladder. We were sorry to see him go in such haste, but were afraid that, if we tried to hold him, his friends might stage a rescue. In retrospect I think that the four must have been very hungry hunters. Seeing the smoke coming from the house they had bounded out of the bush and up the ladder, expecting to find their supper ready and their people at home.
We moved on to the river next morning and followed it down through loose stone gorges. We had to shoot one of our dogs after it was almost cut in half when a loosened rock rolled down in a landslide. The country began to flatten out. The river was now running wide and deep and almost slow enough for us to risk rafting. As soon as we found enough sago palms to supply a week's food, we decided we would build a raft and go wherever the river took us. We felt like our boots, clothes, and boys—worn out; badly in need of a rest from the blood-sucking leeches, lawyer vines, and stinging trees; and weary from restless nights in improvised shelters that let rain in through all the cracks. We had reached the canoe country. The natives, traveling mostly in dugout canoes, had a system of tracks not parallel with the river but only at right angles to it. Consequently we had to cut a track through the thick tropical jungle alongside the river.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Explorations into Highland New Guinea 1930â"1935 by Michael J. Leahy, Douglas E. Jones. Copyright © 1991 The University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
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