Beyond the Coral Sea: Travels in the Old Empires of the South-West Pacific

We were shown into a private room with intense fluorescent lighting. Geckos erupted into life on the walls like surrealistic wallpaper. Sam’s gold rings glinted on his slender fingers and the cutlery was reflected in his melancholic eyes.

Delicious coconut prawns, chilli crab and coral trout with tender asparagus appeared like magic. The conversation ranged lethargically over many topics, as if we were in an island village. They were shocked to learn of my walking alone in Moresby and even more surprised when I mentioned the young boys.

‘I’m hoping to go to the Trobriands quite soon, John.’ I briefly outlined my island itinerary.

‘You’ve made the best decision in choosing the islands. How come the Trobriands?’

‘Well, it’s a short story that’s taken a long time to complete. I bought a tabuya1 or wave-splitter from Kiriwina in an artefact shop many years ago. It’s been in my music room in London for ages, and I’ve always wanted to visit where it was made.’

‘I can tell you that the tabuya has been watching you. The design symbolises bulibwali or the eye of the sea eagle [osprey]. You had to come. His eye never sleeps, you know. In an instant he decided on you as his particular fish. That’s why you came. It’s very simple.’

‘Do you really believe this?’

‘Of course. You’re a person who possesses concentration. You plan and attend to detail. Am I right?’

‘Actually, yes. I drive people mad with it.’

‘There you are!’ John reached for more coconut prawns in an ebullient mood. He continued his arcane explanations with some seaweed poised between chopsticks in midair. I wanted to hear an account of the famous kula trading ring from the chief of a clan. I was anxious to know if the classical descriptions were still accurate.

‘Tell me something about kula, John.’

‘Well, first you must understand the mystery of Monikiniki or the Five Disciplines of Excellence.’

‘Sounds a bit complicated.’

‘Never! It’s simple! The disciplines are symbolised in the five compartments of a Trobriand mollusc shell. Each compartment represents one of the senses and is represented by a bird, plant or even a grasshopper. The eye is represented by the bulibwali or the sea eagle.’

We had moved into the realm of myth and magic for which these islands are famous, rather daunting for a European unused to the sharing of mystical experience.

‘But what is kula exactly?’ I was impatient as usual.

‘That’s not easy to answer, but basically it’s an activity of giving and receiving between people that results in them growing spiritually.’

‘But doesn’t it involve trading valuable soulava or necklaces in a clockwise direction around certain islands and mwali or arm shells in a counter-clockwise direction?’

‘Of course, but they’re only the outward manifestation of the activity, in fact the consummation of it. The objects accumulate power as they pass from hand to hand over time. Some might even kill you. But it’s the quality of this experience that’s important.’

I began to be drawn irresistibly into the rich mythological world of the Trobriand Islands, so unlike the sterility of my own empirical society where success seemed the sole criterion. I began to look forward to my trip with keen anticipation. A couple of lines of a poetic song concerning the kula came to mind.

Scented petals and coconut oil anoint our bodies We’re ready to sail with the south-east wind

John fell silent and took some more chilli crab. The mood had become serious yet our state of mind was happy and free.

‘I’ve never been to the yam festival in the Trobes. Never managed to get there. God knows why.’ Sam trailed off and adjusted his hat to a more comfortable position. He reached for some more coral trout.

‘God’s saving you, Sam, from a long period of self-abuse,’ John observed. Everyone laughed heartily. The yam festival is famous for its ecstatic expression of sexual freedom in celebration of the harvest and the end of ten months hard gardening.

Myth and magic give life meaning in the islands. We discussed the weighty word kastom. It is an essential Pidgin concept that derives from the English word ‘custom’ but with a more complex Melanesian meaning and multifarious connotations. It is normally used in reference to traditional culture that has come under threat from aggressive European development. But kastom cannot be simply translated. There are many contradictions within this multilayered concept. The idea has led to a strong cultural revival as regional identities become increasingly diluted. People are always talking about the loss of it. Closeness to nature and the traditional sense of belonging to a community are being replaced by the desire for individual consumption. European technology dominates modern life in the cities, yet a profound need remains for the unseen worlds of magic and religion. A further complication is the extreme cultural diversity of the country. Many distinct cultures have been wilfully cobbled together into the artificial political entity known as Papua New Guinea. Cultural differences are ignored, or worse, attempts are made to diffuse them.

‘More chilli crab?’ Sam spun the lazy susan.

‘Do you know there is a ruined temple on the top of Egum Atoll?’ John said, secretively.

‘Yes, and flat stones with magical properties on Woodlark Island,’ his wife whispered.

It was getting late. We emerged from the restaurant into the glare of security searchlights. The massive gates swung open and we drove out of the compound. Uncle Sam began to sing the praises of Port Moresby as we drove back into town. Mansions surrounded by high fences topped with glistening razor wire, signs painted with cartoon-like dogs and guards posturing with guns, spun through the headlights. Dark hills sprinkled with twinkling lights reared on either side of the highway.

‘Nothing is as beautiful as this in the world!’ Sam suddenly exclaimed with great feeling.

I spent a restless night poring over maps, anxious to leave the place. Papua New Guinea can be broadly divided into the mountainous interior, the coastal regions, great rivers and the island provinces. My decision to explore the islands had come from their extreme isolation, their reputation for beauty, tranquillity and the preservation of their ancient cultures. Near Moresby, the start of the Kokoda trail had been closed by tribal fighting. There were reports of a white, female bushwalker who had been raped even though she was with a local guide. This constant threat of violence in the capital had begun to depress me. I was tired of being holed up for safety in a luxury hotel with paranoid expatriate businessmen planning the disintegration of a culture for profit. My jumping-off point for the islands would be Alotau, the capital of Milne Bay Province at the eastern extremity of the mainland. From there I could leap aboard a banana boat1 to Samarai, the traditional gate to the old empires.

1‘Somebody shot at me. Everything around here’s pretty bad. It’s completely buggered up!’

2‘Port Moresby’s a good place.’

3Public Motor Vehicle – these minibuses are considered to be dangerous for visitors, but in my experience they were a source of all my best conversations and friendships with local people.

1‘Good morning, boys. How’re you?’

2‘Fine thanks, Sir.’

1‘We can’t afford university.’

1‘Thanks very much for talking to us, Sir.’

1Sir Michael Somare was born in 1936 in Rabaul, East New Britain. He led the Pangu Pati (Party), the largest and most influential political party in the move towards independence in 1975. He became the first Prime Minister of independent Papua New Guinea from 1975–80 and again from 1982–5. His membership of the Pangu Pati ended in 1997 and he formed the National Alliance Party which won a comfortable majority in the violent 2002 elections. After seventeen years, Sir Michael Somare, ‘the father of the nation’, was elected Prime Minister for a remarkable third term.

1Mefloquine or Lariam (the trade name) is the most powerful of the anti-malarial prophylactics. Unlike other drugs, it protects against the fatal strain of cerebral malaria. It can have disturbing psychological side-effects.

1A tabuya is the prowboard of a Trobriand canoe.

1The term ‘banana boat’ has nothing to do with bananas or their transport. It refers to the shape of the innumerable fibreglass dinghies fitted with forty-horsepower outboard motors that ply the islands and coast of PNG like noisy water insects. They have taken the place of the elegant sailing canoes of the past, which have almost completely disappeared. They sometimes carry suicidal numbers of passengers, often travel enormous distances across open ocean, and never take a single life jacket. Many simply disappear, the occupants lost to drowning or sharks.

3. ‘No More ’Um Kaiser, God Save ’Um King’

Australian Military Proclamation 1914

East of Java and West of Tahiti a bird of dazzling plumage stalks the Pacific over the Cape York Peninsula of Australia, her head almost touching the equator, tail looping above. In her wake she spills clusters of emeralds on the surface of the sea. These are the unknown paradise islands of the Coral, Solomon and Bismarck Seas, the islands lying off the east coast of Papua New Guinea.

As a child I had been captivated by the monolithic Moai statues of Easter Island. Painstakingly, I built a balsa replica of the Kon-Tiki raft on which Thor Heyerdahl tested his theories of the migration of the Incas and their sun-kings across the Pacific to Polynesia two thousand years ago. As I carved, lashed and rigged my diminutive vessel, I dreamed the boyhood dreams of distant voyages to the South Seas with only a green parrot for company. My seafaring uncle, Major Theodore Svensen,1 a former naval draughtsman born in Heyerdahl’s own Norwegian coastal town of Larvik, was a veteran of the Boer War and the Gallipoli Campaign in 1915. He stoked my imagination with tales of the sea and foreign campaigns, his budgie chirruping on his shoulder, a large tropical butterfly tugging against the thread that tethered it to a palm trunk in his garden.

‘Useless to read books m’boy! Head for the front line! Go to the islands – that’s the last virgin land. Sail before it’s too late!’ he would thunder as he waxed his magnificent moustache, jabbing with a finger at yellowing maps. Many years were to pass before I could attempt such a voyage to Melanesia, and in many ways it turned out to be sadly too late.

The geographical term ‘Melanesia’ originates from the Greek melas meaning ‘black’ and nesos meaning ‘island’. The region was known up to the late nineteenth century as the ‘Black Islands’, a reference to the strikingly dark skin colour of the indigenous population and their former formidable reputation for cannibalism and savagery. Melanesia is situated in the South-West Pacific, south of Micronesia and west of Polynesia, occupying an area about the size of Europe and containing mainland Papua New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, New Caledonia, Fiji and the innumerable intervening islands. The extreme cultural diversity of the region evades neat categorisation and facile generalisations remain suspect. It can be observed, however, that Melanesian society is more egalitarian and the qualities of leadership more achievement-oriented than in Polynesia and Micronesia, where power is largely based on inheritance.

Melanesian marsupials have been more deeply studied than the origins of ‘Melanesian Man’. The Australian Aborigines and the Negrito populations of South-East Asia are distant relatives from the Pleistocene era some 50,000 years ago. There were two main migratory waves, the ancient Papuan (from the Malay papuwah meaning ‘frizzy-haired’) extending over many thousands of years, and the more recent Austronesian.1 The intervening millennia have witnessed enormous cultural intermixing. These movements have given rise to the two main cultural traditions in evidence in Melanesia today, the Papuans being the most numerous.

Geographically, New Guinea provided some of the greatest natural obstacles to exploration encountered in any country, with little prospect of gold or cargoes of spices as reward for the sacrifices of the voyage. Nature runs riot in the hot, humid and wet climate. Superlatives abound – over 700 species of birds, 800 distinct languages, the largest butterflies and beetles in the world, five times the species of fish in the Caribbean. Thomas Carlyle idly observed, ‘History, distillation of rumour.’ He could scarcely have known how appropriate his comment would be regarding expeditions to this fabled land.

The earliest surviving sketches of Pacific peoples were four rather crude drawings of warriors observed off the southern shores of New Guinea made in 1606 by the Spaniard Diego Prado de Touar. My destination, the coast and islands of what was to become German New Guinea, were mapped almost lethargically by a procession of European voyages of discovery. The Spanish and Portuguese were followed by the Dutch, who were succeeded by the English and the French. In 1700, that colourful buccaneer-explorer William Dampier aboard HMS Roebuck (a true exotic who mentions in his journal consuming ‘a dish of flamingoes tongues fit for a prince’s table’) found a strait between New Britain and New Guinea. He navigated the coasts of New Ireland and named the larger island Nova Britannia. He was the first European to be recorded as discovering and anchoring in the Bismarck Archipelago, formerly regarded as an integral part of New Guinea.

The French, too, have a distinguished history of New Guinea exploration. In 1768 the French Comte de Bougainville charted New Ireland, the Admiralty Islands, Buka and Bougainville. Louis XVI was an enthusiast for exploration and helped to plan and support the ill-fated expedition of Jean-François Galaup, Comte de Lapérouse. Although an aristocrat, the Comte had remained a darling of the revolution as he had married beneath him for love. For the time, this enlightened navigator held radical views on exploration. He observed in his journal:

What right have Europeans to lands their inhabitants have worked with the sweat of their brows and which for centuries have been the burial place of their ancestors? The real task of explorers was to complete the survey of the globe, not add to the possessions of their own rulers.

He disappeared in the Pacific after leaving Botany Bay in 1788. Louis despatched a search party under the command of Antoine Joseph Bruny d’Entrecasteaux. Part of this voyage of the Recherche and the Espérance in 1792 contributed to the accurate mapping of the Solomon Sea and the Trobriand Islands. This expedition remained the last significant exploration of the Bismarck Archipelago.

Captain John Moresby in HMS Basilisk discovered Port Moresby harbour in April 1873 naming it after his father, Sir Fairfax Moresby, Admiral of the Fleet. In a theatrical gesture he gave ‘some little éclat to the ceremony’ by using a capped coconut palm as a flagstaff to raise the Union Jack and claim possession. Lieutenant Francis Hayter wrote a rare account of this ceremony.

On John emerging from the Bush which he did in a way creditable to any Provincial Stage, we presented arms and the Bugler (who we had to conceal behind a bush as he was one of the digging party and all covered with mud) sounded the salute … spoiled by the Marines who, I believe, fired at the wrong time on purpose, because they didn’t like being put on the left of the line.

Moments of high comedy never failed to pepper this procession of explorations. On one occasion a Lieutenant Yule escaped murder by dancing along the beach nearly naked, dressed only in his shirt. The warriors were so convulsed with laughter at the sight, he managed to reach the safety of the ship’s boat.

The stimulus to explore remained strong among adventurers and geographers, naturalists and ethnologists, not neglecting the joyful and sometimes misguided missionaries who attempted to wrest the islands from the clutches of the Devil. Malaria, earthquakes and cannibalism took a fearful toll of their lives. In the north-west of the country, twenty-five years of evangelism had resulted in more missionary deaths than villagers baptised. The profiteers of the East India Company found little to attract their purses. Their settlement at Restoration Bay in 1793 was soon abandoned. The fabulous plumage of the birds of paradise, pearls and pearl shell, bêche-de-mer and sandalwood became the most important items of trade wherever a European settlement became successful. The British, the Dutch, the French and the Germans, a thousand Hungarians and even a Russian, perhaps the greatest scientific adventurer of them all, Nikolai Miklouho-Maclay, attempted settlements with varying degrees of success.

Colonial flags rose over New Guinea like a flock of doves. The British Imperial Government proclaimed their Protectorate on 6 November 1884 by raising the Union Jack on HMS Nelson, one of five men-of-war present in the harbour at Port Moresby. The local people squatting on the deck heard in Motu the ambiguous words that were to cause much future suffering and discontent – ‘your lands will be secured to you’. German New Guinea had been annexed three days earlier on the island of Matupit in Neu Pommern (New Britain). On 4 November, Kapitan Schering, Kommandant of the Korvette Elizabeth, took possession of the Bismarck Archipelago by raising the German flag on the island of Mioko in Neu Lauenburg (the Duke of York Islands). Another fluttered in the fetid heat of Finschhafen on 12 November, claiming the north-east mainland of New Guinea (Kaiser Wilhelmsland).

Many eccentric and extraordinary individuals were attracted, and still are, to this destination of the imagination. The formidably inhospitable terrain was explored by a bizarre collection of colonial adventurers, a veritable New Guinean comédie humaine. Some exploits were not believed when first reported, but most turned out to be true despite their outrageous detail.

The melodramatic Italian explorer Count Luigi Maria D’Albertis was obsessed with the power of explosives, an authentic pyromaniac, and used every opportunity to set off landmines, petrol, fireworks, rockets with or without dynamite attachments, even Bengal lights which emitted a vivid blue radiance – all to intimidate the warriors in the most flamboyant style. Accordingly, on a May morning in 1876, this theatrical explorer assembled his crew – two Englishmen, two West Indian negroes, a Fijian named Bob, a Chinese cook, a Filipino, a resident of the Sandwich Islands, a New Caledonian, a head-hunter boasting thirty-five prizes to date, and his son acting as a navigator. To defend themselves and pacify the local people, they loaded nine shotguns, one rifle, four six-chambered revolvers, 2000 small shot cartridges and other ammunition, the usual dynamite, rockets and fireworks, a live sheep, a setter named Dash (later taken by a crocodile) and a seven-foot python to discourage pilfering from the luggage.

This extraordinary group entered the estuary of the Fly River in the Gulf of Papua on the south coast aboard the diminutive steam launch Neva, to sail into the interior of New Guinea for the first time. In order to divert himself from the difficulties he encountered, D’Albertis captured specimens of Paradisaea raggiana (Count Raggi’s Bird of Paradise) and examined phosphorescent centipedes. When under attack from villagers, he forced them into terrified submission by igniting cascades of fireworks and rockets. With enviable detachment he wrote in his book New Guinea: What I Did and What I Saw that he admired the beautiful reflections on the water the explosions made between the banks of dark forest. After some 580 miles from the mouth of the river he was forced to turn back, his legs paralysed by the onset of a mysterious illness. Nine war canoes of warriors blocked his path near Kiwai Island. He charged through them with the engine at full steam throttle, Bengal lights ascending into the sky, funnel pouring black smoke whilst he bellowed out an aria from Don Giovanni. He died in Rome of mouth cancer in 1901 after amusing himself in a hunting lodge of Papuan design built on stilts in the Pontine Marshes.

German traders had begun to move into the Pacific during the race for colonies and the first trading stations were set up in Apia in Samoa in 1856. The history of exploration in the Bismarck Archipelago, my destination, is less well known. By the 1870s, business was being done in ‘savage’ New Britain. The German hegemony over the Bismarck Archipelago and Kaiser Wilhelmsland lasted from 1884 to the outbreak of the Great War in 1914. This was a classically ill-fated German colonial adventure, first under the disastrous and punitive Neu Guinea Compagnie and later ruled by the Imperial Government itself despite the fact that Prince Otto von Bismarck was not an enthusiast of colonial adventures.

German New Guinea also attracted its share of fearless explorers. The Austrian Wilhelm Dammköhler spent thirty years travelling through German, Dutch and British New Guinea. He worked on pearling luggers, prospected for gold, and explored the mainland. He was a man with a literary bent as well as a person of some sartorial distinction. In 1898 he had a close shave with a Tugeri head-hunting party. The ferocious Tugeri were among the most feared of all the tribes. They took heads to provide their children with names. They would cover themselves with chalk, set out in their canoes to attack a village and then after grabbing a victim would demand or cajole his name from him. They would then remove the screaming head with a bamboo beheading knife, memorise the name and bequeath it to their newly born.

On this occasion Wilhelm was collecting fresh water, having anchored his cutter, the Eden, at the mouth of the Morehead river. As he rowed upstream he carried, in addition to the water containers in the dinghy, a copy of Byron’s poetry, two silk shirts, a pair of Russian calf boots and a pair of white duck trousers. After some thirty miles he encountered the Tugeri. They calmed themselves when they mistook him for a missionary. Dammköhler played along with the deception:

On the following morning, the chief signed to me to read prayers, whereupon I opened my Byron and read some stanzas out of that … I remained with these friendly natives a fortnight, mixing freely with them, hunting with them etc.; and I kept up my missionary character all the time, reading to them out of my Byron morning and evening during my stay.

How Lord Byron would have loved such an incident. Poor Wilhelm finally bled to death after being attacked on a tributary of the Watut river near the present city of Lae. He was skewered like Saint Sebastian with a dozen fiendishly-barbed arrows in the arms, legs and chest. One severed an artery.

For those romantics and eccentrics, missionaries and mercenaries, desperate speculators, searchers after extremes, explorers, adventurers, swindlers, prospectors and a thousand other misfits who fled from so-called ‘civilisation’, the Black Islands had become a source of mystical and fictional descriptions, ultimately a magnet. New Guinea has always offered the possibility of self-transformation to depressed though imaginative underachievers and individualists. Outsiders unable to accept the prosaic nature of life in the bourgeois society of Europe have always been seduced by New Guinea and its promise of unspeakable adventures.

In the circulating libraries of the time, the public could read of a phantasmagorical world of fabulous creatures like Captain Lawson’s deer, endowed with long manes of silken hair, birds that sounded like locomotives, striped cats larger than the Indian tiger, mountains thousands of feet taller than Mount Everest. They read of men with vestigial tails who sat in their huts allowing the tails to protrude through special holes cut in the floor. There were reports of native cavalry that rode striped ponies and women who ate their children as a form of birth control. They read of the web-footed Agaiambu people, who lived in the marshes and swam through the reed beds, had flaring nostrils like a horse, small legs and buttocks, strange muscular protuberances on their scaly inner calves, walked with the ‘hoppity gait’ of a cockatoo on flaccid, straggling toes and whose feet bled when they walked on dry land. They kept pet crocodiles tethered with vines and raised pigs in slings. New Guinea was a domain of impenetrable tropical jungle and gothic phantasms that might well have been imagined by the French naive painter Le Douanier Rousseau on a particularly creative day.