Our
Crew, Many Of Whom Had Not Made The Voyage Before, Seemed Quite
Scandalized At Such Unprecedented Bad Manners, And Only Very
Gradually Made Any Approach To Fraternization With The Black
Fellows.
They reminded me of a party of demure and well-behaved
children suddenly broken in upon by a lot of wild romping,
riotous boys, whose conduct seems most extraordinary and very
naughty.
These moral features are more striking and more
conclusive of absolute diversity than oven the physical contrast
presented by the two races, though that is sufficiently
remarkable. The sooty blackness of the skin, the mop-like head of
frizzly hair, and, most important of all, the marked form of
countenance of quite a different type from that of the Malay, are
what we cannot believe to result from mere climatal or other
modifying influences on one and the same race. The Malay face is
of the Mongolian type, broad and somewhat flat. The brows are
depressed, the mouth wide, but not projecting, and the nose small
and well formed but for the great dilatation of the nostrils. The
face is smooth, and rarely develops the trace of a beard; the
hair black, coarse, and perfectly straight. The Papuan, on the
other hand, has a face which we may say is compressed and
projecting. The brows are protuberant and overhanging, the mouth
large and prominent, while the nose is very large, the apex
elongated downwards, the ridge thick, and the nostrils large. It
is an obtrusive and remarkable feature in the countenance, the
very reverse of what obtains in the Malay face. The twisted beard
and frizzly hair complete this remarkable contrast. Hero then I
had reached a new world, inhabited by a strange people. Between
the Malayan tribes, among whom I had for some years been living,
and the Papuan races, whose country I had now entered, we may
fairly say that there is as much difference, both moral and
physical, as between the red Indians of South America and the
negroes of Guinea on the opposite side of the Atlantic.
Jan. 1st, 1857.-This has been a day of thorough enjoyment. I have
wandered in the forests of an island rarely seen by Europeans.
Before daybreak we left our anchorage, and in an hour reached the
village of Har, where we were to stay three or four days. The
range of hills here receded so as to form a small bay, and they
were broken up into peaks and hummocks with intervening flats and
hollows. A broad beach of the whitest sand lined the inner part
of the bay, backed by a mass of cocoa-nut palms, among which the
huts were concealed, and surmounted by a dense and varied growth
of timber. Canoes and boats of various sizes were drawn up on the
beach and one or two idlers, with a few children and a dog, gazed
at our prau as we came to an anchor.
When we went on shore the first thing that attracted us was a
large and well-constructed shed, under which a long boat was
being built, while others in various stages of completion were
placed at intervals along the beach.
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