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

‘The pastor will be here in the morning. Everything will be fine.’ His voice trailed away as I climbed the bare stairs.

The air in the bedroom was hot and thick. Garish streetlamps lit the window covered by a thin curtain printed with a tropical landscape hung upside down. I switched on the fan and went for a shower. Huge cockroaches crawled up from the drain but fled as the water fell. I pulled the string that promised hot water but with no result. A blessed coolness bathed me, the effect remaining for a full two minutes. I was slightly worried about being unable to lock the door and decided to sleep with my passport and wallet under my pillow.

I had felt insecure about my personal safety and possessions ever since my arrival in Papua New Guinea. There is something in the air that combines with the menacing expression in the male Melanesian face that is unsettling to a European. The dark and brooding sensibility of the men in particular, creates an ever-present feeling of threat. I felt my presence was tolerated but deeply resented. Smiles shielded a deeper animosity; an ancient impenetrable psyche lay behind those dark eyes. I was not wanted here, the past was resented and there was jealousy of my imagined riches. Covetous glances settled on my belongings. Serious health risks could not be avoided. So came upon me the first temptation to abandon the whole enterprise and return to Sydney. This was to become a common feeling I was forced to fight. Only the idyllic beauty of the islands, the complex cultures and the occasional warm personality kept me travelling. Wallace was a truly good man, but what had it brought him? Theft, vandalism and betrayal. I lay on the bed and stared at the fly-spotted ceiling. The lonely Anglican bell marked the passage of European time. A solitary bird was singing, a species that sings after sunset for the entire night.

Whispers below my window woke me. I could see some youths had clustered around the marble obelisk and were looking up at my window and pointing. I remembered the Catholic priest at Alotau. ‘They know where you are, if you’re asleep, he hasn’t locked his door … oh yes.’ They wandered away at length and the memorial was bathed in moonlight.

The story of how this obelisk came to be erected is one of the legendary tales of this Province. It began with the cannibalistic murder in 1901 of one of the first missionaries to come to Eastern New Guinea, the Scotsman, the Reverend James Chalmers. He was a friend of Robert Louis Stevenson who described him as ‘an heroic card … a big, stout, wildish-looking man as restless as a volcano and as subject to eruptions’. He was as much an explorer and adventurer as a missionary. The title of his book Work and Adventure in New Guinea (1885) describes his attitude to missionary activity succinctly. On one occasion tracing a journey on a map in a village hut, he noticed that drops of liquid had begun to fall from a bulky package lodged in the roof. Grandmother’s remains were being dried by her grandson. In many parts of the country the corpse was not buried immediately after death but retained by the family, placed on a platform outside the hut, perhaps smoked and stored or the remains given to the children to play with. In this way the relatives clung to the spirit of the dead for some time after the passing of the body. ‘It quite spoiled our dinner,’ Chalmers laconically commented later.

His book is full of bizarre cultural descriptions. One of the most celebrated is that of the ‘man-catcher’. This was a hoop of rattan cane attached to a bamboo pole that concealed a spike. The hoop was slipped over the head or body of the fleeing victim and then suddenly jerked tight. The spike would penetrate the base of the skull or spine, neatly severing the spinal cord. Ernie had told me during our talk on the wharf that Chalmers carried a Bible under one arm and a shotgun under the other as the instruments of conversion. Certainly not your average missionary, more an aggressive soldier of Christ unwittingly preparing the ground for the arrival of the colonial service.

The charismatic Chalmers was known as ‘Tamate’ by the people of Rarotonga. He was a fine figure of a Victorian gentleman and possessed a head as noble as that of the composer Brahms. Both his formidable wives succumbed to malaria. He writes of having to exhibit his chest to the warriors on numerous occasions each day. One friendly chief offered his wife a piece of human breast at a feast, declaring it a highly-prized delicacy. Chalmers wryly observed that this was the end of his chest exhibitions in that part of the country.

In 1901 the London Missionary Society schooner Niue set sail along the coast of the Gulf of Papua from Daru. It anchored off the ironically named Risk Point on Goaribari Island near the mouth of the River Omati. This area was well known as one of the most dangerous parts of New Guinea, an area of torrid mudflats and swamp crawling with tiny crabs and fierce cannibals. Early on the morning of 8 April some warriors with faces and shaven heads painted scarlet, their eyes ringed in black, paddled out to the vessel in a fleet of canoes and persuaded a landing party to come ashore. The unarmed Chalmers and his young and inexperienced assistant Oliver Tomkins, together with ten mission students from Kiwai Island and a tribal chief, landed from the whaleboat in a creek close to the village of Dopima. Chalmers had attempted to convince Tomkins to stay on board but the intrepid youth would have none of it. The warriors trembled and giggled with excitement, their cassowary plumes and long tails of grass swishing and shivering in anticipation. The Europeans entered the enormous dubu or men’s longhouse, all six hundred feet of it, and greeted the occupants. The air of the long, gloomy tube was thick with suffocating smoke and heavy with acrid odours. Rows of enemy skulls by the hundreds were arranged on shelves and racks, some fixed to macabre carved figures hanging from the roof.

The visitors were immediately struck from behind with stone clubs, and fell senseless to the floor. Tomkins managed to escape as far as the beach but was brought down with spears. This was the signal for a general massacre. Chalmers was stabbed with a cassowary dagger and his head was immediately cut off. Tomkins and the rest of the party of young mission boys suffered the same fate. The bodies were cut up and the pieces given to the women to cook. The flesh was mixed with sago to produce a monstrous stew and eaten the same day. The heads were divided among various individuals and quickly concealed from view. Ironically, the party who had expected to return to the schooner for breakfast had unexpectedly become breakfast. The Niue meanwhile had been boarded by a canoe raiding party and looted. The Captain managed to get under way and brought the grisly news of the slaughter to the wretched settlement of Daru.

After twenty-five years working among the ‘skull-hunters’, it is surprising that Chalmers allowed himself to be fooled. He was famous for possessing an infallible instinct for reading primitive moods and knowing when to leave. The precise reason for the butchery is unknown but there is speculation that he insisted on visiting in the middle of a ceremony that was forbidden to outsiders.

That this was an unprovoked cannibal murder rather than a revenge killing was clear. A punitive expedition was mounted three weeks later from Port Moresby. When the Government steam-yacht Merrie England (a most versatile vessel that reportedly could ‘go anywhere and do anything’) finally left Goaribari, some twenty-four warriors lay dead, many wounded and all the sacred men’s longhouses on fire. But the heads of Chalmers and Oliver had not yet been recovered.

A year or so later, a young lawyer, Christopher Robinson, was appointed Chief Justice and was acting as Governor of the Possession. He decided to go to Goaribari in one of the pretty gilded cabins of the steamer, retrieve the heads and capture the murderers for trial. He had learned that in the matter of identification of skulls, those that had artificial noses attached were from people who had died from natural causes; those skulls without noses had been killed, the noses bitten off by the killers. As fate had it, the party he assembled were chronically inexperienced in dealing with villagers or had only recently arrived in New Guinea.

In April 1903 the Merrie England once more anchored off the cannibal shores of Goaribari. Some of the highly excitable local people were enticed aboard from their canoes with trinkets and trade goods. The murderers were known to be among them. The ‘grand plan’ was that the constabulary would grab them upon a given signal. The plan went horribly wrong. Wild fights erupted all over the deck. The red-painted warriors remaining in the canoes attacked the ship with arrows which drew rifle fire from anyone on board who could lift a weapon. Nearly all lost control in the ensuing panic and blazed away at everything that moved on the water. One, a letter copyist, collapsed in a fit of shrieking hysterics at the sight of a man being shot. An unknown number of the inhabitants of Goaribari were killed.

The facts of the case were instantly sensationalised and exaggerated by an Australian press starved for scandal. The missionary from Kwato, Charles Abel, demanded a Royal Commission to investigate the circumstances of the reprisal raid. Robinson was vilified with sulphuric slander and offered up for immolation. The innocent steamer Merrie England was absurdly compared to the infamous Australian ‘black-birder’,1 the slaving brig Karl, owned by the Irish physician, Dr James Murray. Robinson was summoned to Sydney and a junior magistrate appointed in his place as Governor. Like Timon of Athens he was now abandoned by all his false friends. He took the only course open to a gentleman of honour in those days. While the occupants of Government House in Port Moresby were peacefully sleeping, he wrote his account of the incident, accepting full responsibility for the actions at Goaribari. He then took his revolver, walked out to the base of the flagstaff in the moonlight and blew out his brains over the withered grass. He was thirty-two.

The marble obelisk, ghostly in the silver moonlight below my window at Samarai, commemorates this sad saga. Part of the inscription reads:

His aim was to make New Guinea a good country for white men. This stone was set up by the men of New Guinea in recognition of the services of a man, who was as well meaning as he was unfortunate, and as kindly as he was courageous.

The monument is now considered to be politically incorrect and the plan is to tear it down.

1Pidgin for ‘launch’.

1‘Good afternoon!’

1‘There you are!’

1This Latin phrase means ‘Under the Emperor’s Seal’. It was the highest academic honour in the Hapsburg Empire and only one or two were awarded in any one year. The recipient was given a jewelled gold ring carrying the Emperor’s seal which was conferred at a grand ceremony by a representative of the Emperor. Malinowski lost his ring.

1On the inside front cover of the black notebook he inscribed in blue-grey ink: ‘A diary in the strict sense of the term,’ and immediately beneath: ‘Day by day without exception I shall record the events of my life in chronological order. Every day an account of the preceding: a mirror of the events, a moral evaluation, location of the mainsprings of my life, a plan for the next day.’ And beneath that: ‘The overall plan depends above all on my state of health. At present, if I am strong enough, I must devote myself to my work, to being faithful to my fiancée, and to the goal of adding depth to my life as well as to my work.’ The first entry, on page one, is ‘Samarai 10.11.17’ (quoted from Michael W. Young’s as yet unpublished biography of Malinowski).

2Italics written in English and taken from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

1The currency in use in Papua New Guinea. At current rates (2002), 1 kina equals about 25 pence.

1The garamut is a type of slit drum commonly used in the islands. The carrying power of this simple instrument is extraordinary in the still air of tropical nights.

1A ‘black-birder’ was a slave ship or the captain of one that forcibly abducted men from island villages for labour on the Queensland or Melanesian plantations. Dr Murray and his brig, the Karl, were notorious in South Pacific waters for sensational cruelty and murder in their pursuit of profit through slavery.

6. ‘Mr Hallows Plays No Cricket. He’s Leaving on the Next Boat.’

CHARLES ABEL

Letter from Kwato Mission to

his sons studying at Cambridge

My early morning walk around Samarai unveiled the islands of China Strait floating on glass, filtered through magenta gauze. Perfect silence reigned apart from the occasional fish breaking through the mirrored surface of the sea. The air was still and almost cool, the grass streets lightly scented with frangipani blossom. Scavenging dogs held their tails between their legs and cringed away from a lone fisherman heading towards the beach. Local children were screaming with joy as they entered the school in a crocodile line. I watched until lessons began; their enthusiasm and sense of mischief was electric. Papua New Guinea is a republic of children.

Wallace did not look too happy at breakfast. ‘I don’t sleep well these days. And then there is my arthritis. You will come down to the hospital with me, won’t you?’

‘Of course, but aren’t we going to Kwato today?’

‘Yes. I asked the pastor to come before lunch. His assistant will get a dinghy for you. But I won’t be coming. I’ve got accounts and letters to settle.’

I concealed my disappointment.

‘I suppose you don’t want the flying witches to get you!’

He suddenly became grave and serious. ‘If you fear the witches they have power over you. If not, they can’t touch you. I don’t fear them, Mr Michael.’ His tone indicated I had overstepped an invisible line.

‘Strange lights appear above the water at night and witches can kaikai you. On moonlit nights on Kwato, the spirit of Charles Abel appears. Ask the pastor about it.’

I changed the subject slightly. ‘Did your grandfather ever meet the Reverend James Chalmers?’

‘I’m not sure, but I do know after Chalmers was killed and eaten they tried to cook his boots! Ha! Ha! What do you think of that? Yes, the cannibals thought they were part of his feet. They boiled them for days but never could get them tender enough!’

‘Then, he must’ve known Charles Abel.’

‘Yes, we knew all the Abels. I was born on Kwato remember. I knew his son Cecil Abel. He was a good man. At Wagawaga Charles would walk up and down the beach at night praying in the moonlight. He was in strong communion with God.’

The cards were produced and the flight from reality began again. The government ministers came down for breakfast, faces transformed by friendly smiles. They ate quickly and headed off for the final day of the seminar.

‘Don’t forget the party tonight, Michael.’

‘Certainly not.’

‘We’ll send a councillor down to guide you.’

I ate a few more slices of sweet pineapple and perfumed paw-paw. The sun was up and the room heating slowly. The torpor of the day had already begun to set in.

The early European settlement of New Guinea is the scarcely credible story of competing missionary teachers of various denominations carving up the country – Lutherans, Roman Catholics, Evangelicals of the London Missionary Society (LMS), Methodists, Barmen of the Rhenish Mission, Anglicans, Pietists, Baptists, Protestants and Seventh Day Adventists. On first contact the indigenous islanders were described by both colonisers and missionaries as indolent, mendacious, ‘intractable little cannibals’, loathsome and depraved, filthy, ‘truculent mannikins’, sensual, lazy, and, in summa, ‘hopeless little degenerates’ – to list some of the more insulting labels assembled by the Governor, Sir Hubert Murray, in his book Papua or British New Guinea. The primary objective of missionaries was to save the endangered souls of the ‘natives’ from perdition and render them European in the shortest possible time.

The first LMS station had been established in 1871 on islands in the Torres Strait by the Reverend Samuel MacFarlane. By 1877 two local missionaries from the Loyalty Islands had established a presence on Logea Island in China Strait close to Samarai. Here the vividly-painted inhabitants impaled skulls on spears at the prows of their outrigger canoes. This was a region of enthusiastic cannibals, and the missionaries commanded respect often by force of character alone. They were also respected for their powerful possessions, superior technology and items they wished to trade. The evolution of what could be called ‘Oceanic Christianity’ was a slow process.

The following year Samarai was ‘purchased’ by MacFarlane from the local people as the LMS head station for 3s 6d. Parts of the island were cleared, houses and vegetable gardens established. The LMS flag of the dove and olive branch now flew alongside the Union Jack. Mission stations inevitably became part of the colonial structure. Through education of the mind and spirit, missionaries innocently prepared local people to accept European values, oiling the wheels of understanding during the imposition of European colonial bureaucracies. But there was a terrible price to be paid in loss of life.

Cultural observations taxed the Victorian mind and weird snobberies were noted with horror by the missionaries. The cannibals in the Milne Bay region considered themselves above their neighbours in the nearby D’Entrecasteaux Group, deploring that on those islands they ate every part

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