I Myself Had At First
Been Inclined To Sneer At These Reports, But Monckton, The Resident
Magistrate, With His Superior
Knowledge of the Papuans, as the natives
of New Guinea are called, was sure that there was some truth in
The
reports, as the Papuan who has not come much in contact with the
white man is singularly truthful though guilty of exaggeration.
I knew this, but I had in mind the case of the Doriri tribe, who
lived in the interior a little to the south of us. These Doriri (who
had had the kindly forethought to send us word that they were coming
down to pay us a visit to eat us, for the Papuan, though a savage,
is often most suave and courteous and by no means lacking in humour),
were reported to us as having many tails, but needless to say when
we made some prisoners, we were scarcely disappointed to find that
the said tails protruded from the back of the head (in much the same
fashion as the Chinaman's pigtail); in this case each man had many
tails, which were fashioned by rolling layers of bark from a certain
tree - closely allied, I believe to the "paper tree" of Australia -
round long strands of hair.
We three white men had many a long talk as to whether these
swamp-dwellers were worth going in search of, but I soon came round to
Monckton's way of thinking. Acland, alone, however, maintained to the
last that the whole thing was a myth, and jokingly said to Monckton:
"When you find these duck-footed people, you had better see that Walker
does not take them for birds, and shoot and skin a couple of specimens
of each sex and add them to his collection." (For my chief hobby in
this and many other countries all over the world consisted in adding
to my fine collections of birds and butterflies in the old country.)
As we three, with our twenty-five native police and four servant
boys, rowed up the Barigi River in our large government whaleboat,
on our way to search for these "duck-footed" people, I could not help
being struck with the very great beauty of the scene.
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