ARROW ATTACK

Evening Post, Volume CXVI, Issue 112, 8 November 1933, Page 3

ARROW ATTACK

NATIVES' GREAT SKILL

Recently the "Daily Mail" reported the killing of Mr. Lan Mack, an assistant district officer in New Guinea, by natives armed with bows and arrows, says a writer in the "Daily Mail." The story of the episode recreated in my mind a terrifying South Sea experience that befell me.

Chiefly because of the silence with which it can be launched, a bow-and-arrow offensive is the most-feared form of native attack throughout those parts of the world. Such an attack can be the most surprising thing imaginable.

With an escort of friendly natives, I was travelling by canoe one quiet afternoon along a creek in a remote part of the Ply Eivcr region of -Western New Guinea when some hostile natives in canoes in a creek parallel with ours, but hidden by the massed nipa-palms of the bank, sent over a* big flight of arrows.

There was no sound —the "twang" of a fighting-bow as the arrow is released is so slight as to be inaudible a foot or two away —and the high angle at.which the bowmen had been compelled to aim in order to get the arrows over the tops of the nipa-palms was such that the arrows seemed to rain down on us from the sky.

I grabbed my rifle, but by the time [ had determined the direction from which the arrows had come the attackers had swiftly paddled away. The result of the encounter was that one of my boys ,was pierced fatally in tho back, another was badly wounded, while I myself got an arrow clean through my foot. .?■ For long afterwards in that region I was extremely nervous of being in nipa-f ringed creeks. The speed of these bow-sped arrows is something to be seriously reckoned with. Many bows, particularly in the Splomon Islands, are great, . heavy things, much taller than a man, and capable of sending an arrow so fast that the eye often cannot follow it. To pull 9110 of these bows to its full extent oftrn means that the bowman's right elbow is touching the ground. At a reasonable distance n bone-tipped arrow from such a bow will pierce firsh with tho ease of a nickel bullet.

The skill of the bowmen is very great. I have seen a Papuan put an .arrow into a bounding wallaby at a distance that would have been quite good shooting with a rifle, and Solomon Islanders often bring down small birds from high tree-tops.

In many parts the use of the bow and arrow is part of the training of early childhood. In the Gulf of Papua, for example, one will always see numbers of children shooting small arrows from small bows at moving targets—usually coconuts rolled down the slope of tho beach, the little marksmen pretending that they are human heads.