Beyond the Coral Sea: Travels in the Old Empires of the South-West Pacific. Michael Moran
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with excitement, their cassowary plumes and long tails of grass swishing and shivering in anticipation. The Europeans entered the enormous dubu or men’s longhouse, all six hundred feet of it, and greeted the occupants. The air of the long, gloomy tube was thick with suffocating smoke and heavy with acrid odours. Rows of enemy skulls by the hundreds were arranged on shelves and racks, some fixed to macabre carved figures hanging from the roof.
The visitors were immediately struck from behind with stone clubs, and fell senseless to the floor. Tomkins managed to escape as far as the beach but was brought down with spears. This was the signal for a general massacre. Chalmers was stabbed with a cassowary dagger and his head was immediately cut off. Tomkins and the rest of the party of young mission boys suffered the same fate. The bodies were cut up and the pieces given to the women to cook. The flesh was mixed with sago to produce a monstrous stew and eaten the same day. The heads were divided among various individuals and quickly concealed from view. Ironically, the party who had expected to return to the schooner for breakfast had unexpectedly become breakfast. The Niue meanwhile had been boarded by a canoe raiding party and looted. The Captain managed to get under way and brought the grisly news of the slaughter to the wretched settlement of Daru.
After twenty-five years working among the ‘skull-hunters’, it is surprising that Chalmers allowed himself to be fooled. He was famous for possessing an infallible instinct for reading primitive moods and knowing when to leave. The precise reason for the butchery is unknown but there is speculation that he insisted on visiting in the middle of a ceremony that was forbidden to outsiders.
That this was an unprovoked cannibal murder rather than a revenge killing was clear. A punitive expedition was mounted three weeks later from Port Moresby. When the Government steam-yacht Merrie England (a most versatile vessel that reportedly could ‘go anywhere and do anything’) finally left Goaribari, some twenty-four warriors lay dead, many wounded and all the sacred men’s longhouses on fire. But the heads of Chalmers and Oliver had not yet been recovered.
A year or so later, a young lawyer, Christopher Robinson, was appointed Chief Justice and was acting as Governor of the Possession. He decided to go to Goaribari in one of the pretty gilded cabins of the steamer, retrieve the heads and capture the murderers for trial. He had learned that in the matter of identification of skulls, those that had artificial noses attached were from people who had died from natural causes; those skulls without noses had been killed, the noses bitten off by the killers. As fate had it, the party he assembled were chronically inexperienced in dealing with villagers or had only recently arrived in New Guinea.
In April 1903 the Merrie England once more anchored off the cannibal shores of Goaribari. Some of the highly excitable local people were enticed aboard from their canoes with trinkets and trade goods. The murderers were known to be among them. The ‘grand plan’ was that the constabulary would grab them upon a given signal. The plan went horribly wrong. Wild fights erupted all over the deck. The red-painted warriors remaining in the canoes attacked the ship with arrows which drew rifle fire from anyone on board who could lift a weapon. Nearly all lost control in the ensuing panic and blazed away at everything that moved on the water. One, a letter copyist, collapsed in a fit of shrieking hysterics at the sight of a man being shot. An unknown number of the inhabitants of Goaribari were killed.
The facts of the case were instantly sensationalised and exaggerated by an Australian press starved for scandal. The missionary from Kwato, Charles Abel, demanded a Royal Commission to investigate the circumstances of the reprisal raid. Robinson was vilified with sulphuric slander and offered up for immolation. The innocent steamer Merrie England was absurdly compared to the infamous Australian ‘black-birder’,1 the slaving brig Karl, owned by the Irish physician, Dr James Murray. Robinson was summoned to Sydney and a junior magistrate appointed in his place as Governor. Like Timon of Athens he was now abandoned by all his false friends. He took the only course open to a gentleman of honour in those days. While the occupants of Government House in Port Moresby were peacefully sleeping, he wrote his account of the incident, accepting full responsibility for the actions at Goaribari. He then took his revolver, walked out to the base of the flagstaff in the moonlight and blew out his brains over the withered grass. He was thirty-two.
The marble obelisk, ghostly in the silver moonlight below my window at Samarai, commemorates this sad saga. Part of the inscription reads:
His aim was to make New Guinea a good country for white men. This stone was set up by the men of New Guinea in recognition of the services of a man, who was as well meaning as he was unfortunate, and as kindly as he was courageous.
The monument is now considered to be politically incorrect and the plan is to tear it down.
1Pidgin for ‘launch’.
1‘Good afternoon!’
1‘There you are!’
1This Latin phrase means ‘Under the Emperor’s Seal’. It was the highest academic honour in the Hapsburg Empire and only one or two were awarded in any one year. The recipient was given a jewelled gold ring carrying the Emperor’s seal which was conferred at a grand ceremony by a representative of the Emperor. Malinowski lost his ring.
1On the inside front cover of the black notebook he inscribed in blue-grey ink: ‘A diary in the strict sense of the term,’ and immediately beneath: ‘Day by day without exception I shall record the events of my life in chronological order. Every day an account of the preceding: a mirror of the events, a moral evaluation, location of the mainsprings of my life, a plan for the next day.’ And beneath that: ‘The overall plan depends above all on my state of health. At present, if I am strong enough, I must devote myself to my work, to being faithful to my fiancée, and to the goal of adding depth to my life as well as to my work.’ The first entry, on page one, is ‘Samarai 10.11.17’ (quoted from Michael W. Young’s as yet unpublished biography of Malinowski).
2Italics written in English and taken from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
1The currency in use in Papua New Guinea. At current rates (2002), 1 kina equals about 25 pence.
1The garamut is a type of slit drum commonly used in the islands. The carrying power of this simple instrument is extraordinary in the still air of tropical nights.
1A ‘black-birder’ was a slave ship or the captain of one that forcibly abducted men from island villages for labour on the Queensland or Melanesian plantations. Dr Murray and his brig, the Karl, were notorious in South Pacific waters for sensational cruelty and murder in their pursuit of profit through slavery.
6. ‘Mr Hallows Plays No Cricket. He’s Leaving on the Next Boat.’
CHARLES ABEL
Letter from Kwato Mission to
his sons studying at Cambridge
My early morning walk around Samarai unveiled the islands of China Strait floating on glass, filtered through magenta gauze. Perfect silence reigned apart from the occasional fish breaking through the mirrored surface of the sea. The air was still and almost cool,