CASTAWAYS ON EMIRAU

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 85, Issue 11, 14 January 1941, Page 3

CASTAWAYS ON EMIRAU

ISLAND OF STRANGE CUSTOMS

FISH CAUGHT BY COBWEBS

Fish caught by cobwebs, a few wiry Zebu cattle and pigs, hundreds of thousands of coconuts, native fruit, flying foxes, and brackish well water would have been the only sustenance (apart from any food left by the raider) available to the 500 castaways on Emirau Island, according to a New Guinea official who is on leave in Sydney. He is Mr. H. R. Niall, Assistant District Officer of Kavieng, New Ireland, who said that the Nazi raider’s prisoners were exposed to the risks of exposure, dysentery, malaria. However, the Germans could have chosen many worse places. “The 260 natives on Emirau have never seen more than five or six white people at once,” he said. “They must have been astonished by the arrival of 500. But their sympathies would be with the British; they still remember their German overlords of the last war, who seized most of their land and left them without sufficient ‘lebensrav.m.’ “Luckily, the castaways escaped the wet season, which usually breaks between Christmas and New Year. “A hundred native boys could build shelters for 200 people in a day. if they could be induced to work; but even that would have scarcely provided more than the rudest accommodation. The contract natives from the copra plantation—mostly Sepiks from New Guinea — live in weatherboard shacks; but the rest of the population lives in tiny dwellings of thatched palm fronds. “The food problem must have been a difficult one. The island is barely self-supporting; the temporary trebling of its population must have caused non-stop hunting in the jungle and non-stop fishing on the shores. "The natives fish with cob-webs and spears. They hang a cobweb on a kite, and the cobweb trails across the water, entangling the small fish which snap at it. A spear does the rest. "There are fruit called toms, which look like nuts, and are like tasteless jelly, a few banana, sweet potato, and watermelon crops, and tons of coconuts.

Few Animals. “But most of the natives are devout Seventh Day Adventists, so herds and flocks are not kept for slaughter. “The cattle there are merely to keep Ihe grass down on the copra plantations; their meat is atrocious. There are a fair number of domestic and

wild pigs, opossums, and wild pigeons.” A stock of rice and canned meat was kept in store for the 70 plantation natives, but this was usually only enough to last six weeks. Water on the island was obtainable from a spring, from wells, and from tanks, Mr. Niall said, but the castways might have drunk coconut milk, rather than run the risk of dysentery caused by the water. However difficult the questions of food and shelter might have been, the white people were in no danger from the natives—“a fairly moral, docile lot, who have great faith in the administration.” The island, which is about 10 square miles in area, lies only two degrees from the equator. Only four white people are living there at present. The three native villages each has a chief called a luluai, and a medicine man or tultul, who are specially trained for nursing work. Mr. Niall said that their training would have been invaluable for the 500 castaways. Large medicinal supplies were kept at the plantation, which belongs to W. R. Carpenter and Company, Ltd. There was no radio on the island, the only communication with the rest of the world being by cutler to Kavieng, 84 miles away.