The
Crocodile Fled In One Direction And The Dynamite Went Off In Another,
But Owen And The Natives Only Just Avoided The Explosion.
Owen told me that there were about fifty miners in the goldfields
of the Yodda Valley, but that most of them were beginning to leave,
although there is plenty of gold to be got.
The climate is a bad one,
and provisions, etc., are very dear, and so gold has to be got in
very large quantities to pay. As the miners decrease, there is bound
to be trouble with the natives, who are very treacherous. The miners,
who are nearly all Australians or New Zealanders, have generally to
work in strong bands with their rifles close at hand.
Only a short time ago the two miners, Campion and King (whom I
have elsewhere mentioned), while working in the bed of a creek,
had just traded with some apparently friendly natives for a pig and
some yams, and sat down for a smoke and a rest, thinking that the
natives had left, but these cunning cannibals were awaiting just
such an opportunity, and were lying hid amidst the thick foliage
clothing the steep banks of the creek. Suddenly, making a rush, they
got between the miners and their rifles, and speared both in the
legs, taking care not to kill them, as the cannibals in this part
of New Guinea consider that meat tastes better, be it pig or man,
when cooked alive. They then tied them with ropes of rattan to long
poles and carried them off to their village, where they were both
roasted alive over a slow fire.
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