Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Under similar circumstances Malays
could
not behave as these Papuans did. If they came
on board a vessel (after asking permission), not a word would be at first spoken, except a
few compliments, and only after some time, and very cautiously, would any approach be
made to business. One would speak at a time, with a low voice and great deliberation, and
the mode of making a bargain would be by quietly refusing all your offers, or even going
away without saying another word about the matter, unless you advanced your price to what
they were willing to accept. Our crew, many of whom had not made the voyage before,
seemed quite scandalized at such unprecedented bad manners, and only very gradually made
any approach to fraternization with the black fellows. They reminded me of a party of de-
mure and well-behaved children suddenly broken in upon by a lot of wild romping, riotous
boys, whose conduct seems most extraordinary and very naughty!
These moral features are more striking and more conclusive of absolute diversity than
even the physical contrast presented by the two races, though that is sufficiently remarkable.
The sooty blackness of the skin, the mop-like head of frizzly hair, and, most important of
all, the marked form of countenance of quite a different type from that of the Malay, are
what we cannot believe to result from mere climatal or other modifying influences on one
and the same race. The Malay face is of the Mongolian type, broad and somewhat flat. The
brows are depressed, the mouth wide, but not projecting, and the nose small and well
formed but for the great dilatation of the nostrils. The face is smooth, and rarely develops
the trace of a beard; the hair black, coarse, and perfectly straight. The Papuan, on the other
hand, has a face which we may say is compressed and projecting. The brows are protuberant
and overhanging, the mouth large and prominent, while the nose is very large, the apex
elongated downwards, the ridge thick, and the nostrils large. It is an obtrusive and remark-
able feature in the countenance, the very reverse of what obtains in the Malay face. The
twisted beard and frizzly hair complete this remarkable contrast. Here then I had reached a
new world, inhabited by a strange people. Between the Malayan tribes, among whom I had
for some years been living, and the Papuan races, whose country I had now entered, we may
fairly say that there is as much difference, both moral and physical, as between the red Indi-
ans of South America and the negroes of Guinea on the opposite side of the Atlantic.
Jan
. 1
st
, 1857.—This has been a day of thorough enjoyment. I have wandered in the
forests of an island rarely seen by Europeans. Before daybreak we left our anchorage, and in
an hour reached the village of Har, where we were to stay three or four days. The range of
hills here receded so as to form a small bay, and they were broken up into peaks and hum-
mocks with intervening flats and hollows. A broad beach of the whitest sand lined the inner
part of the bay, backed by a mass of cocoa-nut palms, among which the huts were con-
