Chapter III

HOTEL AT HERBERTSHÖHE--PLANTERS’ MEETINGS--DOCMAN AND
“COLLARS”--DR THURNWALD--TRACES OF GREAT VOLCANIC ACTIVITY--
THE BAININGS AND THE SULKAS--FACIAL ORNAMENTATION OF GAZELLE
KANAKAS

Late in the afternoon of the day following, having installed myself in the hotel at Herbertshöhe, and unpacked what was necessary, I stood at 5 p.m. at the top of the steps leading from the steep cliff to the hotel-landing below, from whence I waved farewell to my shipboard acquaintances.

It was a glorious evening, and as the steamer passed from sight, my feelings at seeing the only link between myself and the outside world disappear may be imagined. Turning back I crossed the road, mentally determining to make the best I could out of the next four weeks, and returned to the hotel, or rather to that building known as the Schlafhaus, comprising three rooms on the ground floor and three exactly above, all opening out into wide verandahs which run round the house. I had engaged the one with a south-east aspect upstairs, and OH! the blessing and comfort of those great covered verandahs, where one could adjust the blinds, and in the intense heat lie at full length in a thin wrapper on a deck-chair, for no one in this torrid climate, if they can help it, takes outdoor exercise at mid-day. Here I was wont to breakfast, but unless accepting the hospitality of the residents, I usually took my meals in the building opposite, which, as restaurant, completed the hotel. From the long dining-room a few steps led up to a portion dedicated to the cult of lager beer and other thirst-assuaging beverages. On the wide verandah of this Bacchanalian haunt, the planters and officials congregated of a Saturday evening. During these convivial meetings the exiled sons of Germania seriously disturbed my slumbers. Lengthy orations, interspersed with songs of patriotic fervour, impassioned verses to their best girls, others in favour of the noble drinks of the Fatherland, generally ending with thumping choruses, sometimes excessively musical, at others, ear-rending, boomed through the stillness of the hot night. When music’s golden tongue ceased, the sable goddess had generally descended from her ebon throne, and cheerful morn peeped in upon me, to find my mood inharmonious, my language imprecatory! From this verandah, which served the purpose of the well-known beergarden, many amusing things reached me. One day as I was writing notes in the corner of the opposite Schlafhaus, screened from view by the sun-blinds which were adjusted as a sort of protection, not only from the afternoon sun but from chance visitors below, I heard myself discussed with that attention to detail which characterises the Teuton as the best thinker in the world. Theories as to my possible age were brought forward, then contemptuously snubbed by one wiser than the rest till at last the speakers were content to leave it not only as an unknown quantity, but as beyond their speculative capacity.

The manager of this hotel was a young Bavarian of about thirty years of age. I found him polite, desirous to make me comfortable so far as lay in his power. He gave me an outline of his somewhat adventurous career. At the age of sixteen, he and another boy found themselves as apprentices on a sailing-ship bound for South America. On landing, they ran away, and actually walked from Santos to Pernambuco, taking four months over the performance! The hotel was the property of the New Guinea Company. It may be worth mentioning that my lot has been cast in more luxurious quarters, but for such as it was, I was inclined to be thankful--it might have been worse! There were no European servants at all, and the manager did not live in the hotel. A Chinese cook, who had scalded his foot, limped about an outhouse which served as kitchen. A native, named Docman, waited upon me. He swept the room and the verandah, trimmed the lamps, and performed many small offices; he was rather a taciturn, though not an ugly savage. He would come up the steps with his pipe in his mouth; if he caught sight of me would surreptitiously take it out, and stick it through his armlet of woven ratang. When in full dress, about to enjoy himself with his fellows at a feast or dance, he adorned his neatly-cropped hair with a bunch of double hibiscus planted in the middle of his head, on either side two white cassowary’s feathers waved in the breeze, the erection being adroitly fastened to the mop with a long-toothed bamboo comb. His lava-lava was of brilliant colours and clean.

Then a native girl, quite the smartest I saw in the colony, rampaged about my quarters continually. She and Docman had many consultations as to the curious cut of my garments. She demanded of me “Collars!” in season and out of season. I had to call the manager, who came to my rescue, for she laid violent hands on a cashmere dress, a silk petticoat, and other quite unwashable articles, and I could not imagine what she wanted with them. He explained she was to be my laundress, and at the same time in forcible language made her understand that her presence at every hour of the day was undesirable, with a few other needful instructions. Miss “Collars,” as I henceforth dubbed her, was a terrible nuisance, her washing during those four weeks was a great trial, for she had not the most elementary notion of starching or ironing. It was too hot for me to teach her, so I endured and learnt patience! I picked up a few necessary phrases of Pidgin-English, and learnt to shout to Docman from my verandah in this wise when I required him to bring my lunch upstairs: “Docman, fetch kaikai belong missus on top!” An American lady who with her Swedish husband had occupied the same room before my coming to Herbertshöhe, and whom I subsequently met in Japan, told me she had been curious as to “Miss Collars’” marital relations, or otherwise, and had asked the dusky beauty whether she “belonged Docman?” “Me?” Miss Collars ejaculated, “Me belong all boys!” After that the lady said she had not made further inquiries.

The first evening at dinner there were several Germans at the table who courteously spoke very fair English for my benefit. It was, however, most entertaining to find that a late comer proved to be a scientist sent out from Berlin by Herr von Lüschan of the Anthropological Society, whom I had met some years before on the occasion of the visit of the British Association to South Africa. This gentleman, Dr Thurnwald by name, was studying the different languages, and the anthropological conditions generally, of the colony. I found him somewhat despondently grappling with the multitudinous linguistic diversities which characterise the Melanesian languages, but I was indebted to him for much enlightenment in our frequent conversations at meal-times. He was fair in his references to my nation. In fact he spoke highly of our successful dealings with coloured races, and regretted that things went forward so slowly in the Protectorate.

“We have learnt by long and sometimes painful experience,” I said more than once. “We have been colonising for centuries. You have but just begun!”

“Yes, we came late into the field,” returned he; “all the best parts of the world were taken long ago. Look at these miserable Gazelle kanakas. What can one do with so lazy, so low a race?”

It was interesting to hear from one, or another, of the interests which had kept, or which had brought them to this remote spot. To grow copra, to sell it at top price, seemed to be the end and aim of the planter’s ambition. I learnt that there were six trading firms, with over fifty stations in the Protectorate; that at the different harbours, such as Wilhelmshafen in Kaiser Wilhelm’s Land, there were post-offices, and an official with subordinates to collect the revenue, for the latter procured from taxes, dues, and licences, averages yearly £5000, but the fact which struck me as significant, when taken into consideration with the mental attitude of one or two whom I met, and which I may describe as the reverse of sanguine, was that in the whole Archipelago there are to-day only, and never have been more than three hundred white men, and out of that number a large proportion are officials. When I speak of the planters I refer to the managers of plantations belonging to the various firms, whose business naturally brought them often to the centre of administration.

Half a dozen natives wearing red caps and red lava-lavas waited at table. Sometimes two or three were sufficient for that purpose, the others meanwhile would squat out in the sun operating upon each other’s shoulders. I watched the process a little way off. At regular distances the skin was cut by an obsidian splinter, burning sand was then rubbed into the aperture and the skin drawn over it. The raised scars, the consequence of this treatment, represent tattooing in a primitive phase, and in this scarifying process the _dark-skinned_ Melanesians differ radically from the tattooing of Polynesian races.

The belief is general that these kanakas at one time or another migrated from the neighbouring island of New Ireland (Tombara), and brought with them this type of ornamentation of the body. Whether these scarified marks on the shoulders and chest have any totemic signification, or any magical meaning, is not clearly known. In the Gazelle Peninsula the kanakas belong to one of two divisions, and must marry out of their own. In my daily conversations with Dr Thurnwald, it dawned upon me how little was actually known of the peoples who inhabit the Bismarck Archipelago. With deep interest I learnt that a race whose existence was unknown twelve years ago, called the Bainings, live in the mountainous region to the west of the peninsula, and the curious thing about them is that their language and customs are dissimilar to those of all other islanders in the Archipelago. In a subsequent chapter they are described. The ethnological conditions of this end of New Britain seem so bound up with geological changes, that to shed some light on the somewhat extraordinary fact of two races living within a few miles of each other, one having retained in its pristine purity its language and distinct customs, it may be well to refer to Mr Parkinson’s explanation of the phenomenon. He describes the peninsula as practically divided into two parts: a mountainous region known as the Baining Mountains in the north-west, and a plateau formation of volcanic origin built up with lava, pumice, obsidian and ashes, the result of successive convulsions of nature in the north-east. But prior to this volcanic outburst, a race who may be called the aborigines of the island dwelt round the shores of Blanche Bay. Those who survived the catastrophe sought refuge in the mountainous west, out of the zone of danger. Their descendants are, he declares, the Bainings, whose existence has lately come to light. Cut off from intercourse with later immigrants in the fastnesses of their mountains, they have retained their language and customs intact. If this be a correct inference, it seems that all agree in the belief that the bush and coast kanakas of the German settled territory, so soon as the devastated area reclothed itself once more with vegetation, migrated from New Ireland by way of the stepping-stones afforded by the Duke of York’s Islands lying midway in St George’s Channel. Finding no resistance offered them, the new-comers apparently penetrated further along the uninhabited coasts, pushing slowly inland. Long before the advent of the European, the natives on the west coast in the neighbourhood of the three volcanoes, the Father and two Sons, held friendly intercourse with natives on the north coast of the peninsula, to whom they brought a special kind of shell, much prized by the Gazelle kanakas.

The only other race as yet known possessing outstanding features are the Sulkas, living in the neighbourhood of Cape Orford. A native at Simpsonhafen, with a curiously-shaped head, had been pointed out to me; the occiput had protruded in a remarkable manner. When mentioning the fact, I suggested it was perhaps the result of an accident? This was considered a capital joke by those present. They were kind enough to enlighten my ignorance. The man, it seemed, was a Sulka. The last few years had brought some of them to Herbertshöhe as labour “boys.” In earliest infancy the child’s temples are tightly bound, as this protrusion is considered a great beauty. The Sulkas, I was told, amid laughter, understood women’s rights, for the girls choose their husbands, and in so doing they “lay their hearts upon the men of their choice,” according to the native saying.

Very different indeed, I was emphatically given to understand, were the miserable kanakas of the Gazelle Peninsula. Living in communities apart from each other, their _gunans_, or clans, scarcely ever numbered more than nine or ten huts, which were always encircled with a split bamboo fence from four to five feet high. The matriarchate system of inheritance prevails amongst them: thus a chief is succeeded in his honours by his nephew, the son of his wife’s brother. Tamboo, (strings of shell money), is here as in most parts of the Archipelago the medium of exchange. Fear of unseen evil, wrought by the magic of persons antagonistic to them, is the dominating influence in their lives, the mainspring of all action. Everything they wear, all the face ornamentation, consisting of painted circles and lines, have their special signification. For instance, three marks, painted respectively black, white and red from the eyes downwards on to the cheek, denote the shedding of tears. Three long scars in the same direction have the same meaning. Lines from the root of the nose semicircling the eyes represent a butterfly, a red spot on each cheek means spotted. Sometimes the whole forehead is painted white; an artistic finish is a line drawn straight down the nose! Coloured circles round the eyes mean that the person so ornamented imitates the eyes of the owl. Then certain very superior patterns descend in families as heirlooms, and they figure as monopolies, for if anyone covets the design, he must pay a sum of shell-money for the privilege of being permitted to adopt it. Near the Vunakokor Mountain there are natives of such artistic taste that they paint half the body black and red, the other half yellow.

Nowadays when European paint can be procured from the trader, vermilion seems the rage, but the native still makes colouring matter out of clay, red and yellow ochres, or charred nuts mixed with oil. Betel-nut chewing is greatly practised.