GUINEA GOLD.

Oamaru Mail, Volume XXXIX, Issue 10782, 2 June 1911, Page 6

GUINEA GOLD.

(By Beatrice Grimshaw.)

WHAT THE MINER FACED. On Ela Beach, now a rapidly growing Port Moresby street, many hundreds of miners used to be camped together, waiting for boats, and living as' they could meanwhile. Sickness generally broke out, and scores at a time were dying of fever and dysentery, with scarcely anyone to help them. . . A man once lay there very sick alone in his tent. Day after day passed, and he got worse. He wanted to go into ilie town for medicines, but lie could not walk, and the store was half a mile away. At last he crept out, and began, crawling on hands and knees along the track, and could not even get hack to his tent, hut lay where he had fallen —for two days. At the end of that time, it seems to have struck someone that this man, lying at the sicle of the road was always the same man, and not a succession of "drunks;" so he was picked up and taken care of, and eventually recovered. Fever and hunger have not been the only foes of Papuan miners, nor the worst. Tiie natives were determinedly hostile; a'nd, as practically all the trilies in the neighborhood of the different fields were, and are, cannibal, , the miners ran horrible risks. The Yodda and Mambare fields, on the great northern rivers, simply reek with cannibal tales; but since a good half of these (one regrets to say) are manufactured only to "pull the leg" of the guileless

visitor, and since it is none too easy to distinguish false from true, one is obliged to leave nearlv the whole untold.

(And, in parenthesis, it may well be asked—Why does the Papuan miner so strenuously endeavor to upset the old proverb about truth being stranger than fiction ? He does not succeed, for nothing that we can imagine is half .so strange as the tilings that have really happened to him. All the same, he persists in trying, and would much'-rather relate absurd experiments he has never had than vivid and exciting true ones. Perhaps, the Australian fear of "skite" mav be at the bottom of it.)

At any rate, it is quite true that a fair number of early pioneers disappeared in the interior under circumstances that .suggested murder, and that verv manv had the narrowast of escapes. Food-stealing was nearly always at the bottom of the troubles. A miner's camp would be raided ayd his ■stores looted' in his absence. This might mean starvation —in any case, it meant a dash for the nearest food-supply, perhaps weeks away, racing foot and foot with death. The miner naturally retaliated : the natives lay in ambush to pay back, and—well. "Bob" or ".Tack" So-and-So was missing, and remained missing. The Papuan is not as dangerous an enemy as the Australian aboriginal, but his country is a formidable ally. Moving through the interior of New Guinea, at best, is like that strange moving in a dream we all know so well, when the feet seem to creep like the hands of a watch, and no exertion will enable the luckless dreamer to move fast, no matter what the danger behind Just so, in New Guinea, the pioneer must creep, a few miles a day, up and down precipices, through densely knitted bush, over tracks where each step must be caret'ullv taken, were the devil himself at your heels. .... A pleasant place in which to be stalked by an unseen crowd of painted cannibals, who know every inch of the country, and can make two miles to your one! —Little Surprises. —

Here are some of the little surprises prepared by Papuan tribes for obnoxious strangers; they show, at least, :ui amazing fund of ingenuity. You are walking along a narrow track, and you come to a tangle of thorny lawyer vine that stretches right across. Conveniently, the track widens here; it is a good level path for once, and, stepping smartly out as you go along, you swing aside out of the way of the vine. Your swing takes you into an innocent tussock of high grass- — where there are half a dozen sharp spear-points, set at just such an angle that on© or the other is likely to get you in a vital part. . . . The vuje had been tied —so that you would make that swing. You find a village; it is deserted by the people, and you walk about looking at things in general. You have heard of traps being set for strangers, so you take good care to keep to the beaten paths, worn hard by -hundreds of feet, and do not go off into the bush. There is an.armful of loose palm leaves lying on one of these tracks; you put your foot down on it, and a.re immediately plunged into, a hidden spear-pit, in wlucn you may or may not be spitted through like a pig. You see, that track wasn't track, after all —it was a trap, carefully kept in order by being walked on every now and then. If you had had a guide who knew the place, you would nave turned off the track at a certain point, walked along a log for a bit, and then joined another path quite out of sight from here —the rightpath. Sometimes you walk in heavy nailed boots, and sometimes,, when the track is passable, in sand-shoes. To-day you are wearing boots. So, when you find a pig-fence blocking the way, with a stile to cross it by, and when you climb the stile and jump down on the other side, and when you jump right on to a thinly-hidden chevaus-de-frise in the earth as you land"—well, you jar a nail or two out of your boots, and a strong expression out of jour mouth. That is all. Hut if you had had the sand-shoes on, or if your naked carriers had gone first, the spikes would have done just what they were meant to do for anyone who was not made free of the place, and so did not know that over that particular stile you have to jump very long or very short.

Not'much of all this need be placed in the past tense even now. It is true that malarial fevers, being better understood. are less frequent and fatal, and that the available fowl supplies are good of their kind. Hut the prospector in all cases, and the miner often enough, runs a good deal of risk from native attack; the country is as hard to traverse as ever it was, and the insect, animal, and reptile annoyances are just what they were 20 years ago. The prospector of 1911. breaking unknown ground, with his "mate" and his boys, runs a fair chance of getting an arrow into his lungs, or a spear through his heart. He will assuredly have to face the risk of crossing many flooded torrents without a boat, of falling from dangerous heights while traversing rapids on a •single, slippery log. He will have black snakes in his blankets and death-adders in his boots. He will be tormented by "scrub itch," and his blood will be sucked by hordes of hungry leeches, dropping on him from the trees as he passes. He will cross and recross a dozen times a day the same winding .stream, knowing it to )>e full of alligators, and caring extremely little, because he "reckons they'll let him alone." He will live in the depths of the primeval forest for months, or even years, companioned only by his native boys. He will do amazing walks when it happens to be necessary —30 or even 40 miles in a day, over rough logs, river beds, and precipices impossible to describe. He' will be down with fever a good proportion of his time, and will have to doctor himself when he is. In short, he will live a life of extreme hardship and danger, and will get in return —what?

As I have said in a previous article, his expenses and an indefinite "bit over' —a big bit sometimes, a small bit at other times. Not a fortune, in any. case. ' The two-ounce-a-dav men are not numerous, and those who get more are few and lucky.

—The River Sources. — One of the most notable characteristics of New Guinea mining is the fact that it is inextricably bound up with exploring. The prospector is an explorer of necessity. More has been done by miners to open up Papua than by ail the professed exploration trips that ever went there., It is always in the unknown that the old hand looks for new gold-bearing country; the town has been prospected before —and there is undiscovered land in plenty lying within the reach of everyone who can scrape together £BO or £IOO. get 20 carriers, and start out prepared for a month or two of roughing it. This it is that gives the New Guinea miner's life its chief interest, at least to the eyes of an outsider. Mile by mile the rivers are being marked out by miners. Every year they come nearer, to the 'unknown sources of Papua's tremendous r'ver system. No one—explorer, miner, or Government official—has yet seen the actual rise .of anv one of the great streams running through British terri-

Tory: but the secrets are being unravelled thread by thread. Of the more recent attempts, Little and Mackav, in 1908-9, traced the Purari River to the two parallel streams that form its head waters; Crowe and Pryke, in 1909, traced the Tauri and Lakekamu far up towards the main range; and at the moment of writing there are miners out on the upper reaches of the Vailala, who will certainly not come back without more knowledge of that stream than anyone has yet attained. What knowledge wo possess of the main range itself has been very largely obtained by" miners. In trnth ; there is not an old hand in New Guinea to-day, who has not been into very much more new country than the average celebrated "explorer" possessed of a scientific reputation and a degree. —The, Weird Kukukuku. — To take the Papuan fields in order, I will now return to the last discovered, and consequently most interesting, the Lakehamu where, after many delays, I arrived on the Bth of Marc-h. This field was discovered as the result of a prospecting expedition financed by the Papuan Government in 1909. The expedition consisted of three miners, Messrs .M. Crowe, Pryke, and F. Pryke, who had had long experience of the country; one of them had previously discovered the well-known Yodda. field, in 1900. The Papuan Government gave £BOO for expedition, of which only £GOO was used. After about six months' prospecting along the Tauri and Lakekamu rivers, the party found payable gold, and the Lakekamu field was proclaimed towards the end of 1909. Such are the official details. Now follow some of a more human nature.

The prospectors were in unknown country the greater part of the time; they traced the Lakekamu up to the German boundary, and quite inciclentalIy and casually found a great deal of valuable agricultural land. The Kukukuku tribe, who had been in the habit of ravaging this region unchecked, took the white incursion very ill indeed, and made themselves as unpleasant as they could. These Kukukukus deserve a word to themselves, for they are among the most fascinating of the many fascinating mysteries of-New Guinea. They inhabit a big stretch of hill country in the west, and are of a gipsy nature, seldom or never making a permanent settlement- anywhere. They are unsocial enough ill their habits, and recall Dn Manner's Cimabue Browns, who were "so exclusive that they put out their tongues at you if you only looked at them." Indeed, the Kukukukus go farther, for they put out arrows and spears at you if they even suspect you of wanting to look. And everybody does want to look ; the Kukukukus, by this simple plan of withdrawing themselves from all possible contact with the white, have made themselves the most eagerly sought-after tribe of all Papua. No one, so far, has succeeded in visiting them. Time and again, parties of miners or of Government officials, wild with the excitement of the chase, have burst into a Kukukuku village, and found it as empty as a shelled peascod, though not ten minutes before they had been certain that the bush ahead of them was full of the mysterious people. Often and often, presents of incalculable value to a native —red cloth, axes, looking glasses, beads—have been left in the deserted villages, in the, hope of making friends; but weeks afterwards, when the white men came again, they would find the ashes of fires still warm, skins of fruit scattered about, fresh footmarks —and the "gifts of the Greeks," nevertheless, left untouched. . The other native tribes go in fear of their lives where the unseen Kukukukus are concerned. They never get a good look at the mysterious tribe any more than the whites; but a man snaring birds alone in the bush disappears, and a child playing oii the beach, is snatched into a mangrove stems by an unseen, hand, and a family sleeping peacefully in""its high pile-built house is stabbed to death by a dozen spears springing up through the flimsy floor. . . . This is how the coast native- knows the Kukukuku. _ _ _ . Yet he trades with him; he bring? his salt and his clay pots and his dried fish, and places them on a stone in a certain spot, and, warned by far-oft cries, goes a mile or two away wlnle the invisible people come down, inspect the goods, and lay an equivalent in skins or feathers, or some other mountain product, beside them. The coast native ventures back when he is sure the way is clear, and if satisfied, leaves his own goods, arid takes the others. If not, he retires again, and waits for a higher bid. . ~ One would think the subject tribe would give good bargains, and be easily satisfied; but, m the Papuan character, truly "nothing arrives but the unexpected." The prospecting party, although they did not succeed in seeing a Kukukuku, received several marks of attention from tliem. These marks would come singing through the air at supper-time, when the prospectors were drying ott the wet of the invariable afternoon thunderstorm round their camp fire, and waiting for their boys to turn out the lieated-up "dog" from the bill-cqn. Or else they would suddenly fly across the track from.a mass of forest so impenetrably grown together that you could have cut it in slices with a knife. One of the native carriers was shot dead hy an arrow through the heart and one of the prospectors also had several arrows shot into him; but fortunately none of the wounds were severe.