Cruelty among the Papuans 25 violent and cruel," says Alfred Russell Wallace,1 and an example of their idea of kindness may be gathered from the following description of the "ornamentation" of a young Papuan: "The faces of both men and women are frequently ornamented all over with cicatrices either circular or chevron-shaped. The operation is a painful and costly one, as the professional tattooer has to be highly paid for his trouble, and not every child's friends can afford the fee demanded. The instrument used is the claw of the flying-fox. The unfortunate patient is not allowed to sleep for two or three nights before the operation is performed, and then, when he is ready to drop from weariness, the tattooer begins his work, and completes it at one sitting. I never saw the actual process, but a child was brought for my inspection whose face had just been finished off. It was in a painful state of nervous irritation, and the face swelled to an enormous size."2 Of the condition of these people no one is better able to speak than Lieutenant Governor J. H. P. Murray, who describes tribes where the savages have only weapons of wood, know nothing of the bow and arrow, and are noted for their immorality. "It is very often the case that the best of the Wallace, The Malay Archipelago, vol. ii., p. 447. Charles Morris Woodford, A Naturalist among the HeadHunters, p. 31. 3 Report to the Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia on Papua, for 1909, Appendix D, p. 107. young girls are sold by their parents as courtesans, the native name being Jelibo. I came across men married, and possessing, in addition, these women. Young fellows, not having reached puberty, had clubbed together in parties of three and four, and bought young girls from the parents to make courtesans. At feasts, these girls are used for the purpose of enriching themselves and their owners." I As to the attitude of the children, we gain some idea of the aboriginal point of view by this statement: "There are some villages in which children absolutely swarm, but there are few large families; practically every one is married, but there are many couples who have no children, or only one or two. In many parts of the territory it is considered a disgrace for a woman to have a child until she has been married at least two years; infanticide and abortion, though rarely proved, are said to be common, and a medical expert would probably discover the existence of other checks to population. The result of all this is that in some districts the population is increasing while in others it is not; such investigations as we have been able to make lead, in the absence of definite statistics, to the conclusion that the population in that part of the territory which is under control is certainly not diminishing, though the increase, if any, is probably very small. The reason why 'J. H. P. Murray, Papua or British New Guinea, 1912. Burying Children Alive 27 the population does not increase as one would expect now that village warfare has ceased is, as far as I can see, simply that neither men nor women want children, which I take to be the chief cause that limits population elsewhere. The reason why they do not want them is, I think, partly because they find them a nuisance (which is a consideration that was probably effective even before the white man came) and partly that, in their present state of transition from one stage of development to another, they do not exactly see what there will be for their children to do." Another custom of these people is to bury children alive, when the parents or some person of importance dies; the excuse given for this practice is that the child will be needed to wait on the parent in the other world, a practice that lasted long among the civilized Egyptians. Cannibalism is rife among these people. Mr. Murray reports that on one occasion a young man was brought before him for having murdered a man in order to please a married woman with whom he was in love a lover who has not "killed his man" being considered lukewarm. "On my remonstrating with him on the impropriety of paying attention to a married woman he informed me that there were no girls in the village, as they had all been killed and eaten in a recent raid. The position of a young man who found himself in a village where all the women were either married or eaten was no doubt a difficult one, and I hope that I took it into consideration in passing sentence.”1 How little is the feeling among these people over the murder of children, is shown from the fact that murder is the only outlet for their feelings! "I have known cases where a man, grieving over the loss of a relative or over some slight that has been put upon him, has set fire to his house, quite regardless of whether any one was inside, with the result, occasionally, that a child is burnt to death, and I recently tried a case of murder which was the direct outcome of grief over the death of a pig. The prisoners were brothers, and their pig bore the pretty name of Mehboma; but Mehboma died, and the brothers in their unquenchable grief went forth and killed the first man they saw. The victim had nothing to do with Mehboma's death, but the mourning brothers did not care for that-somebody had got to be killed over it. The prisoners told me that it was the custom of the village to show their grief in this way, so that their neighbours must occasionally have suffered rather severely."2 As the Australians are closely allied to the Papuans and represent about the same period of culture, we may postulate their attitude toward woman and a marriage from the description of an early Victorian tribe-marriage given by Brough Smith and quoted by A. H. Keane, the latter au I Murray, Papua or British New Guinea, p. 211. |