Читать книгу Isles of Adventure: From Java to New Caledonia but principally Papua - Beatrice Grimshaw - Страница 4

Table of Contents

It was the dining-room of a set of rooms in Number 6, Fitzgibbon Street, Dublin. It was in the nineties, and a summer day.

From the back window you could see (perhaps you still can) a bit of high white wall, outlined against a sky that occasionally was blue. On that summer day a dream, from the white wall and the blue sky, took birth; a dream of things longed for, never seen. One could almost see those things. One could almost fancy, behind that un-European-looking scrap of shining wall, against the blue that might have been Mediterranean, or Pacific, the trembling of tall palms....

That was the beginning.

There are white walls about me. White cool pillars, grey cool floor. On all four sides of the forty-foot room, palms, pawpaws, sea look in, for the shutters and windows are only closed in storm. There is a sky of dry pale blue beyond the palms. This is my home at the end of the world, and the end of the dream, thirty years after.

Has it been good? It has been very good.

In the nineties, one had a Career. Careers have died; they need explaining. One began, as a rule, by leaving a perfectly good home, where the manners and the food were better than one found anywhere else, but where life was infested by givers and takers of loathsome parties, and nobody was really Serious.

Some careerists learned typing and shorthand, and wrote letters in men’s offices; a daring thing to do, but when the daring began to pall, not very profitable. Some became lecturers in ladies’ colleges; upon these, about the thirties, a strange blight seemed to fall, so that they became desiccated, nervous, and inclined to giggle miserably in the presence of pupils’ fathers. Afterwards they got religion, or became cultured atheists.

Some took up journalism, and told the listening world, with variations, that a pretty BUT quiet wedding had taken place, and that Mrs. Willibald received her guests in a chaudron velvet double skirt.... One pictured her doing it—fielding, as it were....

As for me, being very young and rather brazen and full of the ‘beans’ that go with a good muscular system, I started to teach other and older people their jobs. Life being so short (one argued), why waste it in learning? One had had enough of that at the ‘London.’ One would carefully refrain from ever learning again. But as for teaching—teaching that had nothing to do with colleges and universities—that was fun.

I don’t know how one got away with it; but somehow one did. A sporting paper kindly endured me as sub-editor; there were reporters whom, with awful impudence, I instructed in their duties. There was afterwards a society journal, which I edited mostly by main force, once locking the door against rivals. Over the way they were dynamiting each other on daily-paper staffs, so locking the door seemed an absolute gesture of courtesy, by comparison. The staff of the society paper did not tear me in pieces, but that was not for want of good will towards the task. The proprietors sat back, saw their bank account fatten, and laughed.

Sometimes I edited both papers, taking both editorial rooms, and feeling quite seven feet high. The absent editor of the sporting journal, a fine athlete and fighter (he needed to be), had once left the paper to me just after the appearance of a stinging article about football amateur-professionals, written by himself. I was sitting at his desk, full of glory, with my Sunday frock on (we had Sunday frocks then), and my hair painstakingly done in the latest fashion, when a noise as of some one, strangely, throwing sacks of coal upstairs instead of down, finally resolved itself into a scuffle in the outer office, and the violent entrance of a huge young man armed with a blackthorn club. The back of the desk was high, and he did not see me.

‘I want,’ he shouted, ‘to see the villain who edits this paper! I want to talk to him!’ He gave the blackthorn a whirl. ‘Where is the hound?’ he added.

I came out, spreading my six yards of skirt. ‘I am the editor,’ I told him proudly. ‘What can I have the pleasure of doing for you?’

‘I—I——’ he answered helplessly. ‘You—you—please—I——’

He backed himself out. Female editors! Was the sky going to fall? Who had ever heard——

I thought the outer office would never stop laughing.

Journalism in Dublin, in those days, was a gay scramble, with little of the seriousness that informed the papers across the Irish Sea. One knew plenty of celebrities, and found them, as a rule, less interesting than the irresponsible folk who were not celebrated, and never would be. One dipped into society and, lest it should stick to one’s skirts and hold one fast, fled quickly. The bicycle had not long been discovered; every careerist had one, and some few even ventured to ride in bloomers, more or less camouflaged as skirts.

‘No wonder the decent poor is wanting for bread,’ said a beggarwoman, strangely, as she saw me pass thus daringly dressed. I have wondered ever since just what she meant. It may have been merely a way of saying with more or less politeness that I was enough, in my audacity and wickedness, to call down a curse on the whole country.

The careerist of that day, in Dublin, was daring—but within iron limits. Much was made and much said of latchkeys. But one lived with respectable widows, and the chaperon was never absent, even from the bicycle clubs famous for hard riding. Sometimes a racing husband mounted his wife on a tandem bicycle, to run down offenders more certainly. ‘Fast’ was a word at which every one trembled, unless it applied to the speed of your wheels.

‘You should not belong to that dreadful club,’ fumed one of the old ladies who took a single paying guest. ‘I hear they have a clubhouse miles out in the country, and come home from it in the middle of the night.’

‘That’s quite true,’ I told her eagerly, ‘but you haven’t heard it all——’

‘No?’ she said, licking her lips.

‘Certainly not. You don’t understand. It’s true about the club, and the fourteen miles out, but we never come home alone—never!’

‘So I——’

‘When the evening’s over, and we’ve all danced enough, it’s often quite late, perhaps nearly eleven. The captain of the club calls us all out onto the avenue, and starts us, and he sees that EVERY girl has a man to see her ALL the way home, no matter how out of the way it may be. And the men are dears, they NEVER leave you till they see you right to your door, and they just love to do it. They couldn’t leave you because we all go different ways, and the roads are very lonely at that time of night, and very, very dark. So each stays with his girl all the time, and so we are perfectly safe.’

The old lady looked at me. I thought she stared oddly; once or twice she opened and shut her mouth like a frog. She seemed to be about to say something. But all that came out was, ‘Well, well, my dear! Well, well!’—which was at least not unsatisfactory. And she never remonstrated again.

Dear Irish boys, so elderly now, so young and hot-blooded then—how few of us, your girl companions, realized your true fineness and chivalry! Could it all have happened in any other land in the world, one wonders? Could it ever happen anywhere now? Thirty or forty youths and girls, many of them more or less in love with one another—black-dark and deserted roads, and fourteen miles to cover late at night, in widely separated twos and twos—and ‘they never left us, so we were quite safe...’

The wanderer’s ‘Salue’ to you—those of you who live. Some elderly doctor, some tired Indian Civilian, some parson growing old, some engineer getting a little past his bridge-making at the back of beyond, may read, and remember. I will wager that your sons are different, in this different day.

There never was a scandal in that club. There certainly were some miracles, not labelled as such.

Propriety took strange forms. Being more than ever ‘full of beans,’ and wanting to enjoy what the present day would call a real thrill, I went out after a world’s cycling record, the women’s twenty-four hours road, and got it, by five miles. But before that came about, a difficulty arose. The previous holder had been a married woman; her husband, naturally, ‘paced’ and accompanied her throughout, which gave her a considerable advantage. But I was single. It was seven times impossible for me to ride through the proper twelve hours and the improper twelve hours alike, of a twenty-four, accompanied by any man. Every one knew that, of course. I had to try, unpaced.

I left my rooms at eleven o’clock at night; rode through the dark alone, with provisions packed on the bicycle, and an ankle-length skirt encumbering my limbs. Checks were necessary for world records. I got my first on leaving; my next, far out on the central plains of Ireland, at 5 A.M., from a police barracks. From eight o’clock on through the ‘proper’ hours I was paced from time to time by various enthusiastic friends. The newspapers of the day ‘featured’ the performance, and maintained discreet silence as to pacers, except where they ventured to say that I had been paced ‘through the latter part.’

The old ladies, who suffered much in those days, were pained by the idea of the solitary ride from eleven till five, but not shocked. It was considered that a difficult question had been ingeniously solved....

‘Instead of which, they go about,’ to-day, from England to America, Australia and India, in flying-machines, with what would once have been called ‘male escort.’... The old ladies would have died, in congealed heaps!

In the midst of wild journalism, varied by wanderings through most parts of Ireland, and punctuated, for the good of one’s manners and soul, by excursions back into the ordered world one had left, the dream persisted. I wanted to go to the South Sea Islands.

Many people have, and have had, the same desire. Not many, one thinks, have been able to realize it so fully, and enjoy the realization so completely, as I have.

This is why I am telling the tale, including details that (for some reason hard to understand) seem always to be omitted from other accounts.

To be a traveller, an ‘explorer,’ either in the old or the modern sense, is the vague ambition of quite a number of youths and girls. It is not until one is confronted with the towering cost of long-distance steamer fares, the big incidental expenses, that the question arises—how is it to be paid for?

I was in the plight of a good many others, whose people were just discovering in that nineteenth-century-end, that the ‘top drawers’ would not, and did not, hold them any longer, and that it mattered not the least bit in the world during how many or how few centuries they had inhabited those top drawers, now that harder conditions and a changing world had shaken them out. It was no question of wish and have any longer. What you wanted, beyond the ordinary necessaries of life, you must get for yourself.

I was in London by this time, having rather a good time on the whole among the newspapers, though I do not know, and I am sure they did not know, any particular reason why I should, except natural greed allied to North of Ireland persistence. But no newspaper offered, or consented, to pay my passage round the world. When I inquired about prices on my own account, the companies’ answers were staggering.

I thought for a while, and then had some neat cards engraved—not printed—with my name, and the intriguing (at that time) addition ‘Advertising Expert.’ (Incidentally, I have never respected the word ‘expert’ since.) With these and my very best frock, quite unsuitable to business, but very suitable for bluff, I penetrated the shipping offices, and suggested that my way round the world should be paid, provided I guaranteed plenty of newspaper advertisement. I did not adopt shock tactics, but tried to remember that the heads of big businesses were gentlemen, and should be approached as such.

It seems impossible, but it is true that the very biggest and proudest shipping companies agreeably consented to frank a totally unknown young woman all over the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans, with the Mediterranean and the Channel thrown in, if I could assure them of certain newspaper commissions.

I procured the latter by the simple expedient of showing work, not very different from any one else’s work, and offering to pay my own way round the world if they could come to terms. They did, and, provided with their letters, I collected my free passes, took as many introductions as I could get, and started, the newspaper payments furnishing expense money.

A CORNER OF THE LOUNGE IN THE AUTHOR’S HOUSE AT PORT MORESBY

I do not think for a minute that this sort of thing could be done in 1929; the world, before the War—long before—was simpler. But I hope that none of the newspapers had reason to regret their kindness.

It would, of course, have been possible to travel, somehow or other, third-class, working one’s way as stewardess, or taking the most thankless and tiresome job in the world, that of companion. That, however, would not have been fun, and what is a trip round the world if it cannot be fun all through?—especially when you are young, and hungry for all the delights of all the earth.

As things were, I travelled like what I certainly was not, a millionaire, in the best cabins of the best liners, with kindness and consideration everywhere. And I enjoyed every minute of it from beginning to end. And that six months round the world expanded, like the magic tent in the Arabian Nights, until in the end it covered all my life.

So the dream came true. Incidentally, I wrote eighteen books about it.

I wonder now sometimes who inhabits the ground floor at 6, Fitzgibbon Street, and if he, or she, ever looks out at the bit of white wall against the bit of blue sky that changed a life for some one else—thirty years ago.

There are people—an increasing number in these days—whom the tropics call; to whom life within sight of palm trees, among blue seas, is the only life worth living. It used to be supposed, quite as a matter of course, that these were born wastrels. The natural place for all industrious, sensible, and consequently successful, people was at home. Certain exceptions were allowed. You might, without loss of character, go ‘ranching’ in various colonies. You might follow the mode of the year that prescribed from time to time such adventures as orange-growing in Florida, lemon-growing in California, gentleman-farming in Calgary or thereabouts. There is always a fashion in these things, and it has seldom much relation to solid facts. The orange-growers of Rhodesia, in recent years, could dot those i’s and cross those t’s.

You might, of course, enter the Indian Civil, with glory and approval. But you were not expected to like it too much. It was correct to rule the ‘natives’ from a height, treat them justly but firmly, do the right things socially, and go Home as much and as often as you could. To say that you liked India because it was India, and would prefer to spend your entire life there instead of a grudged few years, was to start instant speculation as to how many ‘annas in the rupee’ you had, and set your neighbours at a dinner party furtively scrutinizing your nails...

As for the Pacific Islands, they were, and still are, to most people, a section of the world inhabited by beachcombers, blackbirders, bad lots, missionaries who are equally sanctimonious and depraved, and native beauties invariably and delightfully immoral.

That there is, in the South Seas, a big world of perfectly respectable residents—officials, planters, business folk, much like their counterparts elsewhere, missionaries who are no more hypocritical and depraved than your own homely parson—seems incredible to stay-at-home people. It is, however, true, and it is also true that a great many of these live in the Islands, even the groups subject to fever and not innocent of cannibals—because they like the life.

It is not—a hundred times not—only the waster who appreciates the South Seas. He does not appreciate them as a rule. He is there because his people have thrown him out, and he drinks too much ever to have a chance of making his way home again or keeping a decent job. He has little eye for the beauty and wonder of earth’s loveliest region—he is, in himself, the worst blot upon it; and, if it please you, we will now forget all about him, since he has already had much more than his share of literary notice.

What is the fascination of the South Seas, which all men know and most long to taste?

It is a heady brew compounded of different ingredients. One is the vivid and striking scenery, coloured like the gems on the gates of the Heavenly City, never touched by winter or by cold, seldom dimmed by storm. Forever it is warm, green, flowery in the Islands; almost forever seas and skies are blue. There is an illusion of eternity about this age-long summer; in a world of death and change it seems to offer one thing at least that does not change and does not die.

Another ingredient is the exquisite remoteness of it all, even in these days of swift steamers and swiftest flying-machines. Without doubt, the aeroplane, one day, will rob it of this charm. But that day has not yet come; the plane means little to the Island world, which is still far removed from ‘the fever and the fret,’ from the places where ‘men sit and hear each other moan.’ There is leisure in the Islands; time, between hours of work, to think and dream. There, as almost nowhere else in the world, the lost art of conversation survives. Friends, as their ancestors did, can spend long evenings or afternoons happily talking, and satisfied with the entertainment of their own tongues....

I know an island where the trading community, when it feels the need of rest, agrees to shut up shop and holiday together for days at a time. Nobody loses and every one is the gainer by a little bit more enjoyment, another slice of happiness, filched from the grudging hands of Time.

From Tahiti to the Dampiers, and from the Kermadecs to Diamond Head, the natives of the Pacific interest and charm all those who know them. Enough has been written, over and over, about the men and women of Fiji, Samoa, Tahiti, Tonga, and other Eastern and Mid-Pacific groups. But the Solomons, New Hebrides, above all New Guinea, have their own fierce attractions, and not the least of these are the natives—stronger, ruder, more primitive than the Eastern folk; far more mysterious, deeply more intriguing. I shall have more to say of that later on.

Above and beyond all, there is a certain holiday feeling in the world of the Islands; a spirit of light-heartedness, that has died out from the harsher and more crowded lands. This is not to say that we are a world of idlers. As much sheer hard work is done in the Pacific as anywhere else. But hours are more elastic, pressure of time less unyielding. Our world moves to the slow beat of the monthly, weekly, or six-weekly steamer, rather than to the unbroken rush of a speeded-up, motorized day. There are curious discrepancies. The cook in my own home comes from a district so recently cannibal that one may be quite sure he has, at all events, roasted human flesh in his time; the ‘parlour-maid,’ a huge Western warrior, firmly believes that ‘God bites him’ when he sleeps (i.e., he is attacked by unfriendly spirits). Both handle electric house-fittings with the utmost nonchalance, and another, of much the same type, drives and can repair a motor car.

Even though the Stone Age and the Aeroplane Age jostle each other after this fashion, leisure and peace, those precious things, remain. And there is always the open door into ‘outback,’ that wonderland of which I have written much, and have yet more to write.

Last, and perhaps most important, is the chance that the Island world gives to individuality, and to the man or woman who enjoys handling the primitive things of life. There is room to spare in the vast Pacific world for those who find the civilized places too narrow, who like to blaze their own trails, make their own roads, find their own way, both literally and metaphorically. The outdoor life is the typical life; to use an Irishism, it extends to indoor life as well, since houses are built with the view of admitting as much air as possible, rather than excluding it.

This statement must not go without its due word of warning. The Islands are not for the weakling, for the lazy, the intemperate, the sensual. They are not for the man who dislikes civilization because it asks too much of him. The Islands will ask more; they will demand that he stand on his own feet, keep himself up without leaning on the shoulders of his neighbours, make his own code and stick to it without being forced to do so by any one else. A man who cannot get on well in cities or settled countries will not get on in the Pacific world, unless his failure was due to his being too big, not too small for his surroundings.

There are plenty of weaklings in the Island world. They go where they belong, and that is to the devil, rather quicker than they would anywhere else.

Of the influence exerted by the Island women, black, brown, or merely coloured, this is perhaps the best place to speak, briefly and plainly.

All that can be said has been said already about the woman of the Eastern Pacific, the more or less beautiful, more or less mixed blood, Tahitian, Samoan, Tongan, or Fijian. In the Western Pacific, things are somewhat different. Melanesian and Papuasian girls are sometimes pretty in early youth; more often they are plain, according to white ideas. They have their own attraction, however, and it would be absurd to say that white men in the Solomons, New Hebrides, New Guinea, do not live with, occasionally marry, native women. But the general feeling towards native women is different from that which obtains farther east. The wandering sensualist, on the lookout for new amusements, who influences public ideas in other islands, is absent from the wilder and more dangerous Western groups. While human nature is human nature, and men dependent on the society of women, the single man (whether married or not) will turn, more or less, to coloured women, in the absence of white.

But—it is a large but, and should obtain full emphasis—in Papua, at all events, the coloured housekeeper is by no means the rule; she is an exception; as time goes on, more and more of an exception. Single men in Papua, as ‘in barricks,’ ‘don’t grow into plaster saints.’ Nevertheless, the white inhabitant here would rather be decently married than not; does his best to find and keep a wife as soon as possible, treats her well when found.

One of the troubles of life in the Pacific—a trouble that is diminishing but not dead—is the semi-detached marriage. All over the Island world are men whose part in marriage is chiefly confined to paying for it; who live, anyhow, on the disgusting meals provided by unsupervised native cooks, who enjoy no home comforts, and suffer constantly from the dreariness of life that besets the married bachelor. Withal, they have none of the luxuries they enjoyed as real bachelors; drinks, smokes, and cards are cut down, newspapers have to be borrowed, trips ‘South’ are not to be heard of.

In the mean time, the wives, fortified by the advice of complaisant doctors, or by their own simple opinion that ‘the Islands are no place for a lady,’ make themselves into happy colonies in Sydney or Melbourne, enjoy life, have good food, live in cool houses and in the midst of pleasant weather. They go to theatres and picture shows. They have the society of their friends. Once in a year or two, for the sake of appearances, they come up to spend a Southeast season at home. The sword of criticism is readily turned aside by one of two well-tried parries—health and the children. Children must be educated, and they ought to have the care of their mothers. No boarding-school can—etc., etc. As for health——

Well, there are hard cases, and sad cases. But, apart from these, one cannot but realize, after more than twenty years of Island life, that there is only one thing that keeps husband and wife together in the far-off places; only one lack that separates them—love, and the want of it.

After a year or two it becomes plain as day, in an Island community, which marriages were made for the best of reasons and which for the poorest. One sees the woman who ‘sticks it out,’ through fever and bad food, loneliness, heat, mosquitoes, and all the other drawbacks of tropical life, contrasted glaringly with the other who is a living complaint, who cannot bear a crumpled roseleaf. One knows, with certainty, which of them married because her man was more to her, and remains more to her, than all the world; which, to use an expressive piece of slang, merely wanted, and got, a ‘meal-ticket for life.’

This without disparagement of the many splendid women who, in Papua and elsewhere, make of themselves civilization’s very foundation stones. All the more credit is theirs, in that the relative positions of men and women are, to some extent, reversed. In the Islands it is the man who is tied, and the woman who is free. The bread-winner must stick to his task; the house-mistress may leave hers. There are far more of the plucky, stick-to-it kind than of the complainers who revert to city life, but, in the nature of things, the latter are more conspicuous.

There are two other aspects of social life in the Western Pacific that must be touched on—the ‘Black Peril,’ and the ‘Eternal Triangle.’

It may be said at once that the Black Peril, in Papua, is not serious. Twenty years ago it scarcely existed. Civilization, however, generally brings some trouble of this kind in its train. Brown men, violent and unrestrained of feeling, like all savages, are separated, sometimes for years, from their homes and families, and go to work in the houses of white people, where the women are constantly left alone for the greater part of the day, sometimes for weeks, in the absence of husbands and fathers. Tropical houses lack privacy; the heat makes people who would otherwise be careful somewhat careless in dress and demeanour. There is gunpowder here, and at times it has been known to explode.

Carelessness and contempt on the part of white women are answerable for a good deal. In very rare cases, there may have been direct encouragement. But it may be said on the whole that the white woman in the Western Pacific is about as likely to be attracted by a native man as to commit murder. There are women who murder, and there are women who insult their race in the deepest possible manner. Neither need be reckoned with in considering ordinary, decent folk who make up the world.

All allowance made, however, it would be idle to deny that the Papuan has been known, though rarely, to assault white women. The remedy is simple. If white women made a habit of learning how to use firearms and kept them in the house, nothing more would be heard of these troubles. Everything is known among the native servants, and the fact that a certain ‘sinabada’ (lady) keeps a revolver in her bedroom is sufficient to secure her from annoyance at any and all times.

A quarter of a century of Island life teaches one many things about the native that hysterical scaremongers do not seem to suspect. One is that he is extremely susceptible to the claims of etiquette, good manners, conventions of all sorts. A wild head-hunter from the main range will learn in a very few days what is and is not ‘done,’ in the way of entering people’s rooms at odd hours, knocking or not knocking on doors, keeping out of the way when he is supposed to be out of it—all matters that must be considered in houses open to every breath of air. His own village has imposed upon him elaborate social codes of all kinds, to which he has unquestioningly submitted, no matter what inconvenience or even suffering may result. Our conventions, if utterly different, are conventions still, and, as such, he is ready enough to learn them.

To dot the i’s and cross the t’s, the brown man is decent and modest enough, given a fair chance.

That is not to say that he is to be regarded as a firework that cannot possibly go off. The old motto of trusting God and keeping your powder dry may very fairly be applied in respect to him.

If one judged by the work of certain brilliant and able writers, as well as that of a good many who have no claim to brilliance or ability, one would naturally suppose that the Eternal Triangle of fiction and films is a constant part of Island life. It is, on the contrary, a rarer feature than in the life of cities. Divorce figures are extraordinarily low, which fact is as good a proof as any. Apart from divorce, however, there are in most communities a number of more or less doubtful cases, about which scandal clings like slime; regarding which interested neighbours are continually and excitedly ‘kept guessing.’

Of these there are no doubt a few in Papua, which is to say that the inhabitants, like the inhabitants of Clapham, Paris, and Timbuctoo, are not made of stained glass. Life would certainly be duller than it is, between steamers, if this substitute for the theatre were not provided by a handful of public benefactors. But the Triangle, as such, shows up poorly among the many unbroken circles; which is to say that, semi-detached couples and triangular troubles fully allowed for, Western Pacific folk, with Papua fairly in the lead, are conventionally and generally happy. It is the strange habit of Port Moresby married couples to go out walking frequently in each other’s company, to sit pleasantly and lazily talking with one another, through many unoccupied hours, to be absurdly proud of one another, and inclined to one another, and to think each other’s faces, somewhat yellowed and fever-worn, just as handsome as they were on the day when the confetti was thrown.

This is horribly uninteresting. If one could have said that the people of the Western groups, especially Papua, live in a sort of amazing community of husbands and wives; that they murder each other now and then, keep brown partners ‘on the side,’ and generally, like the monkey people in Ann Veronica’s dream, ‘go on quite dreadfully,’ there would be something to interest the most casual reader, something for the most bored and inattentive reviewer to quote. I have to apologize, and to hope that any appetite for sensations and horrors will be more fully appeased later on, when I come to the ‘bluggy’ parts of Papuan life.

To us who live in the Territory of Papua (constantly and hopelessly confounded with that part which was once German New Guinea, and is now the Mandated Territory of New Guinea) things are exciting and interesting which would bore the outsider to tears; things are dull and ten-times-told that set the visitor screaming.

Our electric service, light and power, our telephones, motor cars (we have only a twenty-four-mile stretch of road to run them on, but who would not be in the mode?); our steamship service, four-weekly, poor in quality and high in price, our tea-parties and bridge-parties and dances and launch picnics, interest us passionately, in the little capital of some four hundred white souls. Outside, a step or two away, the Stone Age walls us round. Most of us forget it. When somebody comes in from outback with a tale of hairbreadth adventures, not imagined—like the tales of the passing journalist, who is usually the prince or princess of liars—but true, we, like Queen Victoria, ‘are not amused.’ We have heard it all before.... Who cares if the men of a village at the back of back of beyond asked the men of another to a dinner-party, and made the guests the chief dishes? What if a couple of explorers, scarcely more than boys, sent out by the Government to map new districts and discover things unheard of, have come back with all their carriers safe and all their work done? Tell us something about the price of rubber....

That is how it looks to some of us. Others—quite a good many on the whole—love the outback better than the towns, are far more interested in it; visit it as often as we can. It is not easy to visit. The nature of the country is such that roads are almost impossible to make, except at prohibitive expense, which the numbers of the white population, scarce twelve hundred, do not justify. It follows that, unless you want to fit out and conduct a serious exploring expedition (and that will take months of time, and thousands of money), the rivers are your only road. Here again, difficulty is met with. Distances are big; the Territory of Papua has over two thousand miles of coastline, and some hundreds of miles may lie between you and the river you wish to visit. There may be a little local boat going that way, and there may not. If there is such a boat, it will almost certainly not run beyond the river-mouth; no Papuan river is settled, and, in consequence, the only people who ascend the rivers are Government officials and, once in a long while, a recruiter or so.

You can charter if a boat is available, and you can wait and hope for luck if it is not. I have been lucky several times. The Sepik and the Fly, both unvisited by any white woman before myself, and by few white men at any time, are among the most interesting rivers in New Guinea. The first I saw in the beginning of 1923, the latter three years later. A somewhat rough and hurried account of these visits, written for the most part right upon the spot, makes the next chapter. There is little to be gained by touching up one’s first impressions, so I have altered nothing and added little.

I have written as a traveller, a wanderer, to whom new and strange things are the chief happiness of life; a dreamer who has had near twenty-five years of realized dream, and is not yet satisfied. As I said elsewhere, at the beginning of that quarter-century, I say again to-day—my writings, such as they are, are dedicated to the Man-who-could-not-go. I know that he (and she) finds pleasure in them.

It is needless to apologize for the absence of any scientific observations. No country in the world has been more constantly written about and discussed, from an anthropological point of view, than New Guinea, and that, too, by thoroughly qualified people. As for statistics, those who want them, can easily find them in their appropriate place, which is not, one thinks, the pages of a gipsy tale. But there are other grave deficiencies in the tale which must not pass unnoticed.

I have never been captured by cannibals. I have never been present at a cannibal orgy. Feasts in my honour have been unaccountably neglected by the chiefs of the country; perhaps because there are practically no chiefs. Worst of all, nobody has ever attempted to make me queen of any place whatever, or worshipped me as a goddess, or tried to sacrifice me to idols.

This certainly suggests stupidity on my part, and negligence on that of the Papuan in general, because such things seem to happen to every one else. A film-acting party cannot land upon a coral beach without experiencing most, or all, of the adventures above set down, within forty-eight hours. A press photographer on holiday, or a traveller tired of sheiks on their native sands, and looking for new thrills, will be captured, rescued, made sovereign of wild tribes, carried about in triumph, tied up for slaughter—all in a week, and all between the Sogeri plantations and Tim Ryan’s corner pub. An explorer will discover some spot ‘on which the white man’s foot has never trod’ within a mile of the automatic selenium beacons of Port Moresby Harbour, photograph it in triumph, and become a hero on the strength of it. The queen of a cannibal tribe will be found smoking a pipe among the palms at the back of Government House, and interviewed for publication, with sensational results....

These things do not happen to the people who live in the country. If they go outback, they do have adventures, but the adventures run on different lines. Only to the round-trip tourist, and to the newspaper man qualifying for the title of explorer by a run in a coastal boat, do these strangely standardized adventures happen....

Something in the monotony of the tales, the vague megalomania that produces them, reminds one irresistibly of what is said about a certain temple wall in Egypt. It seems that this piece of masonry is in danger of serious damage at the hands of an unceasing stream of women tourists, who have all come to see the authentic portrait of Cleopatra carved upon it, and are all determined to secure a souvenir, because every last one of them knows that she WAS Cleopatra—in a ‘former life.’ ...

Remembering the magnificent exploring work done recently by those amazing youths, Champion, Healy, and Karius, and somewhat earlier, by Humphreys (all young Government officers, travelling in the course of their ordinary duties), one is almost ashamed to mention ordinary travels. Still, the business of these young men is to map new districts and pacify wild, strange peoples, while mine is to observe, enjoy, and describe for those who are less fortunate. Seeing and doing much less, one may, therefore, have more to say.

The sum of recent serious explorations in Papua and the Mandated Territory will be found in the last chapter. The tale of a few of my own pleasure journeys follows this.