GUINEA GOLD.

Oamaru Mail, Volume XXXIX, Issue 10778, 29 May 1911, Page 2

GUINEA GOLD.

(By Beatrice Grimshaw.)

VI. The history of gold-seeking in New Guinea (lifters almost altogether from that of gold-seeking in Australia. It is sensational enough, in all conscience, but the sensation lies much more in the seeking than in the gold. In Australia the finding of gold has alwavs been a story of more or less interest and incident, but when the find was once made interest centred at once on wonderful . nuggets, astonishing pockets, fortunes made in a day and lost in a week, scraps of waste ground sold for a glass of whisky, and afterwards making the fortunes of half-a-dozen companies—in a word, all the manv-times-told romance of sudden

gain. There is not over-much romance of sudden gain about the New Guinea goldfields. They have never been rich, as goldfields go. The official returns from all the goldfields ever proclaimed in the country, from 1889 till 1908, totals less than a million and a-quarter —which sounds like a good round sum, but is, after all, not very much for the total output of seven goldfields during 19 years. One must, of course, add a large sum on to this, in view of the fact that the official returns are almost altogether guesswork, and that the miners always do their best to conceal the exact amount. of their takings. Still, even if one doubled the sum (and that is not an entirely unreasonable guess) two millions loot poor enough by the side of Australian returns, correct or incorrect, since 1889. No, it is not among the wonders of sudden fortune that we must look for the romance of New Guinea gold. From the first, of course, there has always been payable gold somewhere, and a few nch patches in places, else no miners would be at the trouble and ex-

pense of coming to the country, or of staying in it. Also, some men —not- a great many—have accumulated a few thousands, by industry and luck com'bined, and some others have had "finds" that enabled them to cover all their expenses, and put by a few hundreds as well, in a week or two. There has never been a big nugget found, however; never a patch that turned a poor man into a rich one between Monday morning and Saturday night—nothing worth -romancing about in all the alluvial fields, and in the one place where the reef has been worked of late, Woodlark or Murua- Island—nothing at all likely to cause excitement on the share markets. For all that, it has been good enough to attract men from "every part of the world, and to keep many of tiiem five, ten, and even twenty years in one of the most uncomfortable countries on earth, living beyond call.of civilisation, and undergoing dangers and hardships, by the side of which the adventures of Australian pioneers look into the tale of a Sunday-school picnic. It has been good enough, when men fell under the invisible bullets of fever, exhaustion, and want, more thickly than ever they feil on South African fields to keep the survivors in the firing line, and to bring up shiploads of new lives from the safe, sane, comfortable south, ready to take up the picks and prospecting dishes of those who fell. It has been good enough to inspire the exploration and gradual opening up of a country which has no equal for intricacy and difficulty in all the world. It is good enough to-day to bring more money into Papua, directly and indirectly, than, all the plantations put together. And one must add, most important of all, that the best days of New Guinea gold are not, as in Australia, past, but still to come. The opinion of all mining men who really know the country is the same —only the fringe of the gold has been touched. There is no reason, furthermore, why the huge gold-bearing areas still unexploitecl should not produce_ fields as rich as any known in Australia. The history of "Guinea Gold" is an old one —so old that no one knows when it begins. More or less always, since the discovery of the country, there had been vague rumors of gold-bearing rivers; the sort of rumors that no one pays very much attention to until some one man goes and tests it; after which, if the result is favorable, everyone (of course) has "always known" about it. The one man in British New Guinea was Dr Lawes, the missionary, who had probably read certain remarks in the "Voyage of the. Rattlesnake" (published 1852), and who, no doubt, had also heard many rumors about the royal metal in the course of his wanderings through little known parts of the country. He, with Mr Goldie, actiially fo'und "colors" in the Central.Division, and as a result of this find a party of Australian miners came up to Papua and prospected two or three rivers. They did not find payable gold, but they heard rumors and suggestions that, later on, bore fruit in the discovery of the first of the goldfields. that of the Louisiade Archipelago. The islands of_St. Aignan and Sud Est were the scene of the first "rush" in 1889. Mania or Woodlark, in 1895, the Gira River in 1898, Milne Bay in 1899, the Yodda irr 1900, Keveri in 1904, the Waria River in 1906, the Lakekamu in 1909, followed. Of all these, the Woodlark fields have proved the most paying. From 1895 up to the middle of 1909, the returns from this field are given as £425,048; and the output has very largely increased since then. It must also be remembered that the Government have no method of estimating . returns except that of plain .guesswork, supplemented by a rough statement as to the amount of gold which passes through the 6tores. That they guess wrong, both as to Woodlark and other fields, is plain to anyone who divides the total number of miners at work in 1908-9—lo2—into the total amount of cold supposed to be won — £51,108. This gives only about £5Ol to each miner—an amount that would not even cover expenses, in some instances, and would leave very little over in others; for it must be remembered that the Papuan miner works with large teams of native labor, and is at very heavy expense to feed them. Practically all the miners cover expenses, and many of them have a few hundreds over at the end of the year; some, indeed, are more fortunate still. It is clear, then, that the Papuan goldfields produce an annual return that, if not sensational, is by no means despicable. I shall have more to say about this subject later on. Nothing in all the history of exploration is more interesting than the many tales of gold discovery in New Guinea. It is a silent story for the most part, written only on the face of the country, in the lives of hard-faced, lonely men grown early old, in scores and hundreds of unmarked, unnoted graves. By those graves, little wind-blown heaps without even a name; in the unknown bush of the far interior; on the goldlicaring sand of the Gira, the Yodda, the fever-haunted Mambare, the Kumusi River; close by mountain tracks I where a man must climb with feet and | hands, and where a fever-shattered, hunger-worn body may well give up the fight; all through the inner valleys, all over the unknown ranges—God alone knows where, for men forget, and the lost mate has not so much, as two crossed boughs above his bed to recall his name to those who pass that way, through the warm, living days that are dead, cold night to him. Round every goldfield store, there are little green mounds in the bush; there are graves beneath miners' roughbuilt houses, and on the edge of black, steaming mangrove swamps. Every one has its history; but of them all, perhaps the tale of the graves on Buna Beach is the saddest. For it was here, at the point where the Mambare River . joins the sea, and where the little steamer from Samarai creeps up at long, long intervals, that many men who had escaped the dangers of _ fever, hostile tribes, and sheer starvation, in the inland places, laid their bones at last on this inhospitable shore, while waiting for the ship that was to take them homewards with their hard - won gold. ...

There is n hill loading up to a store on an mland field, where for months, perhaps years, yon could see a raffle of white bones gleaming out from the scrub at the side of the just- on the last rise before the summit, while at the very foot of the hill, rotting and turning grey, lay the skull that had rolled away' from the fallen vertebrae above. A man dying of fever had stumbled and crawled for miles to reach the nearest human aid. and had reached it—all but that last hill. . • -

There are otheje. relics, worn round the necks of natives, and hung in cannibal temples, that'tell of fates yet worse. And there are bones among the coral of the fringing reefs of Papua, that are not bones of sailors. Landing from tiny, overloaded boats, dangerous river-

beaches has taken its full toll of the miners' fields —of the Mambare and the Yodda. in especial—is like the tale of a campaign. The death-rate among the pioneers of the 'nineties was higher than that of the Boer War. Men came

up from Australia, utterly unprepared to face the conditions of Papuan life, hardy pioneers who thought a' blanket and a billy-can outfit enough for any "rush" oii the surface of the earth. They found out their mistake only too sooii. The drenching rains of Papua were not to. be kept out by a yard of calico stretched on a bush. The steamv heat of the inland valleys soaked the strength out of hardy limbs; the hideous nights, spent amid swarms of blood-sucking mosquitos and leeches, on soaking-ground, were bad preparation for hungry days passed in climbing over all but impassable precipices and ranges, and crossing torrential rivers. Men who had always gone prospecting with an outfit of packhorses, carrying food for weeks, found themselves, m Papua, obliged to live on the scanty stores that could be conveyed by a few mountain boys;, and these very stores were in many cases of the worst possible kind. On the Yodda, in the early days, miners used to welcome the sight of weevils in their small supplies of mouldy flour, for when the weevils deserted the stuff it had no nourishment left in it. Perhaps more men died of ptomaine poisoning than of feverfwhen "*a tin of meat was not to be J procured by less than a fortnights journey; and tins at best were few, a man would njake a pound of dog last much longer than any preserved food should last in tropical climates—often with disastrous results. Fifteen or twenty years ago, the term ptomaine poisoning" was not public property, and people merely "died of bad food/' but they died none the less certainly. , Poisonous meat, rotten flour, and very scant supplies, at that; small knowledge of the uses of quinine, or of the need of avoiding sudden chills; a rainy, steamy climate; fatigue carried daily to the point of exhaustion —there is little wonder that New Guinea was, for the early miners, the- White Mans Grave. Many died m Cooktown, __.on their way back from Papua—the little North Queensland town has its tale or miners' graves, as well as Buna Bay. Many died in Port Moresby and Samarai, waiting their turn for a place on the overcrowded boats that ran to the various fields—for, in Papua, not even the hardiest bushman can make for his. -destination; the dense tropic forests, huge ranges, and numberless rivers are an insuperable barrier, for all but slowmoving exploration trips, and the man who wishes to arrive anywhere within six months, must go by sea.