Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
quets, a grackle (Gracula dumonti), a king-hunter (Dacelo gaudichaudi), a racquet-tailed
kingfisher (Tanysiptera galatea), and two or three other birds of less beauty. I went myself to
visit the native village on the hill behind Dorey, and took with me a small present of cloth,
knives, and beads, to secure the good-will of the chief, and get him to send some men to
catch or shoot birds for me. The houses were scattered about among rudely cultivated clear-
ings. Two which I visited consisted of a central passage, on each side of which opened short
passages, admitting to two rooms, each of which was a house accommodating a separate
family. They were elevated at least fifteen feet above the ground, on a complete forest of
poles, and were so rude and dilapidated that some of the small passages had openings in the
floor of loose sticks, through which a child might fall. The inhabitants seemed rather uglier
than those at Dorey village. They are, no doubt, the true indigenes of this part of New
Guinea, living in the interior, and subsisting by cultivation and hunting. The Dorey men, on
the other hand, are shore-dwellers, fishers and traders in a small way, and have thus the
character of a colony who have migrated from another district. These hillmen or 'Arfaks'
differed much in physical features. They were generally black, but some were brown like
Malays. Their hair, though always more or less frizzly, was sometimes short and matted, in-
stead of being long, loose, and woolly; and this seemed to be a constitutional difference, not
the effect of care and cultivation. Nearly half of them were afflicted with the scurfy skin-dis-
ease. The old chief seemed much pleased with his present, and promised (through an inter-
preter I brought with me) to protect my men when they came there shooting, and also to
procure me some birds and animals. While conversing, they smoked tobacco of their own
growing, in pipes cut from a single piece of wood with a long upright handle.
We had arrived at Dorey about the end of the wet season, when the whole country was
soaked with moisture. The native paths were so neglected as to be often mere tunnels closed
over with vegetation, and in such places there was always a fearful accumulation of mud. To
the naked Papuan this is no obstruction. He wades through it, and the next watercourse
makes him clean again; but to myself, wearing boots and trousers, it was a most disagree-
able thing to have to go up to my knees in a mud-hole every morning. The man I brought
with me to cut wood fell ill soon after we arrived, or I would have set him to clear fresh
paths in the worst places. For the first ten days it generally rained every afternoon and all
night; but by going out every hour of fine weather, I managed to get on tolerably with my
collections of birds and insects, finding most of those collected by Lesson
*
during his visit
in the
Coquille
, as well as many new ones. It appears, however, that Dorey is not the place
for Birds of Paradise, none of the natives being accustomed to preserve them. Those sold
