2022-05-31 - Head Hunting in the Solomon Islands by Caroline ============================================================ Mytinger ======== Acknowledgments =============== [An Irish Ferryman got the idea that the authors needed money.] So on the far side of the lake he dug down into his pocket and brought up three shillings which he offered to us, apologizing for the amount by saying that at least it would buy us a spot of tea some time when we needed it. And if we felt indebted we should just pass it on some time to someone else who needed a few shillings. The knowledge that such human goodness is abroad carried us along almost as much as the less abstract help we received. And it still keeps us from coming unstuck in a world of hates between nations and peoples and individuals. Chapter 1 ========= We were a staff of two rather young women: myself, the portrait painter [the author, Caroline Mytinger, is also the portrait painter], and Margaret Warner, the bedeviled handyman, who was expected to cope with situations like God--if machinery was lacking, then by levitation. Her expedition equipment was a ukulele. The purpose was to make a pictoral record of... headhunting cannibals, called Melanesians, who inhabit the islands bordering the Coral Sea northeast of Australia. Their territory begins on the mainland of New Guinea in the north and extends through the Solomon Islands clear to New Caledonia in the south. [The very simplicity of our plan and purpose] shows, perhaps, just how mature we were when we set off on our project. Scope is the one thing we had plenty of. But possibly, too, those disbelieving friends had a case when they said no female outfit such as ours could go alone to paint headhunters and come back with their own heads. No man had done it. No man had yet tried, we replied. [They planned to pay their way as they went by earning money through portrait commissions.] All this time we were reading anthropology, everything written about human beings that was available for borrowing from public and university libraries. It was not a highbrow choice; reliable accounts of peoples are actually the most exciting literature there is, stranger than fiction. ... it took us over a year to earn our way with portrait commissions to the heart of Melanesia [from San Francisco]. ... being on an expedition that was earning its own way was much more like being on a Winnie-the-Pooh "Expotition." Anything could happen. Chapter 2 ========= [On a steamer ship with about 50 passengers.] The technique was simple. Margaret would ask someone to pose for me "just for fun," then everyone else, seeing what a remarkable likeness came out of the cigarette tin [of art supplies], would scramble for a sitting. Toward the end of the trip if there were any laggards they would be rounded in if only by shipboard ennui. Margaret is the only player I have ever known who could make a ukulele sound like a musical instrument, and her repertoire ranged from everything to keep dear old ladies awake to the sort of thing that made a captain's foot wag. [To keep them entertained and sitting still while their portrait was being drawn.] With so many opinions [about taking quinine as a preventative measure for malaria, or waiting until you got malaria before taking quinine] we had to settle the matter for ourselves, and we thereupon decided to settle it for all expeditions to come by becoming experimental guinea pigs. Margaret would continue her daily doses, and I would drop them. Chapter 3 ========= All the elements present on the [steamer ship] Mataram which should have combined to make the journey a profitable one for us... were reduced to exactly zero... by the shock of the Malaita affair. A week before [the author's passage] Malaitamen in the mountain village of Sinarango had murdered an entire government party! ... the usual conservative press referred to it as a "massacre" and an "uprising"... There was a curious atmosphere on board the Mataram, rather hard to describe because those who expressed it were British and not American. Where Americans would have been yapping and speculating endlessly, these Britishers clamped down their long upper lips over false teeth, and waited. They hung over the radio bulletins... ....they conveyed something extra by staring in silence at one another after each remark. Without ever having met a Malaitaman we could see that they had no love for their employers. We now heard that the planters and missionaries of Malaita had evacuated the island; women even from other islands were coming into Tulagi for safety. Chapter 4 ========= The planters as they appeared in Tulagi full of revenge were set to drilling eight hours a day under the hot sun with the intention of sweating out of them the idea of being a volunteer army. They had stuck it out and in the end got regular military status with army pay, rations, and a [commanding] officer. But one of the irregular rations they had demanded and obtained was a quart of good whiskey per week per man to be taken as a MEDICINE for malaria. Everyone took it as a preventative, naturally... [The steamer Mataram was destined to continue on the Malaita. The author and her assistant chose to go on to Malaita with it.] Chapter 5 ========= My fingers were swollen, banana-sized, by the exercise and heat of last night's gaiety [at a dance]. We had heard a lot about the laziness of these "black swine" [the dark-skinned laborers] on the trip up, but I had never seen men of any color work so fast. These first Melanesians were surely unlike any other aggregate of men in the world. Chapter 6 ========= [At Su-u] The missionaries and planter's wife were refugees in Guvutu and Tulagi, and the planter himself, the remaining white man, was staying on his launch [at] nights for safety. From what? Business was going on as usual this day. Chapter 7 ========= The natives scattered from the villages and the white avengers burned those villages, destroyed gardens, and left the entire mountain district "greatly chastened." ... to destroy the food of even an enemy was inconceivable... in this port country. Seven of the prisoners died in jail while still awaiting their trial... Of the remaining captives [about 100], six were found to be the actual instigators of the murders, and these were hanged... Of the remainder... several were given lengthy jail sentences... and the rest were returned to their mountains properly subdued. A suddenly paternal government provided them with enough rice to keep them from starving... What was the cause behind this wholesale murder? The government party that was wiped out had been on duty attempting to collect taxes from the Sinarangoans. ... the natives have no voice in the administration of their affairs. "Taxation without representation" is what we called it. On the other hand, the mothers of large families were given a bonus... Unless the lagging birth rate is thus stimulated, the naive population decreases and the source of plantation labor dwindles in proportion. And without cheap native labor it would be unprofitable for any nation to hold these islands. They also "encourage" the natives to work on plantations where they are personally exempt [from taxes if they work.] Looking at it from the native viewpoint--as if there should be any other!--these taxes seem to pay only for the privilege of being deprived of liberties. Then how is it that a people reputedly so tough and so far outnumbering the whites can have been induced, without wholesale bloodshed, to relinquish their freedom? The process is known as "peaceful penetration"--a most exquisite piece of machinery such as could have been devised only by God-sent Empire Builders. Inoffensive missionaries are the real trail blazers, sometimes preceding even the Empire Builders. Encouraged by the island administrations they make their honestly peaceable calls on villages which have never before had any contact with white men--then later comes the patrol officer. The guv'men man is a nice fellow, lavish with presents of tobacco, calico lap-lap, and the much-needed axes, and if some chief seems to think he smells badly, the patrol officer simply flatters a rival sorcerer by appointing him headman (with a pretty cap and belt) over the head of the one who won't play. This cap and belt do the work. It is then the duty of the new headman to see that the natives have ready the tax coconuts for the patrol officer when he returns the following year to collect them. The officer departs, doling out a little more tobacco to any noisy grumblers, and the next year he returns, collects the taxes, lays down a few primary taboos [legal restrictions], and adds a threat of jail to any delinquents if they fail to pay up the next year. It takes time but good Empire Builders are patient. The following year a few truculent villagers have to be made an "example" of by being taken down to jail at the coast government station. And from then on "control" is complete, and the operations of "peaceful penetration" proceed up higher into the mountains. ... in the interior of Malaita, newly visited villages often told a government patrol officer to go to hell; if he poked his offensive head in the clearing the following year, or any year after, it would be promptly bludgeoned. This is what the Sinarangoans told the government man on his first call there, and when he turned up the following year--the year of [our] Expotition--that is what they did. Chapter 9 ========= We sail close in shore before a fine following wind, with the ocean head a gently danging expanse of diamonds--no color to it, no blue anywhere, with the sun on top. The jib boom... soars up and up as the boat lifts on a swell, straight up past the shimmering horizon into the sky, then ever so slowly pokes down into the glittering sea. And up again. Flying fish spray out with the foam before the prow, their iridescent wings motionless, tails flipping violently as they hit the water to take off again. There is the sweet creaking of the main sale boom tugging at the mast and these little tunes taut ropes sing; and all the while the gentle gushing sound that water makes when it is running with the boat. The wind is blood temperature and in this flawless moment we feel as if we love and are loved very deeply. [In a storm, the engine stalled and the author's supply case with all her tools and work went into the sea. They recovered the supply case later, but it had been submerged in the ocean.] Chapter 10 ========== For the first week at Ruavatu we did nothing but try to salvage drawing materials and nurse our other supplies back to health. The supply trunk must have stayed in the ocean for some time because even after the contents were taken out there was about a foot of water in the bottom of it. Those hundreds of crayon pencils, being waterproof wax, should not have been damaged, but the wood of pencils is made of two sections glued together, and these all came unglued. When the full extent of the damage had been realized we tightened our belts, held out heads, and wrote out a long, expensive radiogram to an art supply firm in Sydney requesting a waterproof oil painting outfit, no matter how heavy it was to carry. But sending a radiogram in the Solomon Islands is not a simple matter even if you have the gold it costs. The wireless station was at Tulagi and Tulagi was thirty miles away. Also Ruavatu had no launch. ... on account of the Malaita war... the radio talk-talk therefore had to be given to a runner who theoretically tore off with it for Berande. The Mastah there would then take it two Tulagi on his next trip and when the Mataram returned in six weeks the art supplies would be on it. But these were not ordinary times. The very vibrations of the Expotition's approach always seemed to create an extraordinary time. Chapter 12 ========== It was a secret yearning of many Americans in this driven span; the wish to relax, to be beautifully ambitionless and amount to nothing--but with an excuse that the Puritans would approve of. And here we were on a tropical island forced to live the dream life. [Due to a measles epidemic.] From the United States to eastern Europe the natives swear by grain alcohol as a means of forgetting reality. From the west coast of the Americas to about the date line in the Pacific escape is achieved by means of the raw juices of a variety of pepper root, called Kava. The betel-nut area extends from Melanesia to India and identifies these users as one big cultural unit distinct from the Oceanic kava sots. And the [Asians] distinguish themselves by going for narcotics. [The author and her assistant tried betel nut and didn't like it.] ... and if the experiment decided anything it is that the habitual betel-nut chewers of the world must be almost a desperate and hardy as we were during Prohibition. The rows of [coconut] trees must be precisely thirty feet apart, so that the same amount of sun reaches the ground everywhere through the tract. All this orderliness would seem to delete any beauty, but it is that very orderliness that makes the plantation so beautiful. The impression inside the stand is that of a vast cathedral. There are acres and acres; great columns of cool, gray trunks, ringed to a rich texture where the old fronds have fallen off, all towering evenly to fifty or sixty feet from the ground. The ropelike roots above the earth form an ornamental base to each pillar, and at the top is a rich capital of clustered taupe-colored nuts with flags of henna-brown fiber. From there the great strong arms of the fronds sweep out to meet those of neighboring trees, forming a groined vault ceiling with interstices of criss-crossed leaflets. With the white sky piercing through, the effect is of intricately designed leaded glass. Then there is the soft footfall of holy places, for the entire temple is carpeted evenly with clover or sensitive plant (which helps keep down tall weeds). The sensitive plant unrolls a gray rug ahead of one, for even the vibrations of one's approach are enough to wilt these hypersensitive leaves. The spiny shadows of the palm fronds are violet at the gray pillars, deeply blue on the green carpet. There is perspective not to be seen in full sunlight; there is loftiness and distance, yet one feels sheltered--which is the comfort of churches. At night there are even the lamps of the faithful. Fallen palm fronds are gathered into piles and burned, and these pyres are everywhere down the long avenues, lighting the surrounding pillars and ceiling in an eerie orange glow and filling the roof with smoke. When the moon is full, sending down its white shafts of light through the fronds and smoke, the rays look like those coming from heaven in the old church pictures of the Nativity. The late-afternoon sun illumines the whole cathedral with sharp fingers of light which beam out from the shafts so that even the shadows gleam. Those X-rat planes of superimposed patterns make a "modern" masterpiece, but even so, the picture is one easier to describe than paint. But it is not until one rides out through the plantation just after sunrise that one sees the handiwork of the hidden insect life. The spiders, which must have worked all night, have stretched gigantic webs from one pillar to the next, catching the points on low-hanging fronds. The night's dew is still on them and, fanning out in the dawn's breeze, they glitter in the oblique rays of the morning sun. Curtain after curtain of these strung diamonds turns the cathedral into a fantastic fairyland. Chapter 13 ========== For every plantation has either a store or a stock of trade goods. The planter doles out the weekly shilling wage, then figuratively, or even literally, hops over his counter and takes back the shillings for everything on God's green earth from defunct peroxide (to bleach the hair) to alarm clocks... There is government price regulation, but it cannot be enforced unless there are complaints of violation. [IOW, company-store style exploitation] Lime, made from powdered coral rock, is the time-honored delouser, but applied to the scalp it also bleaches the hair. Chapter 14 [The author received an invitation from a stranger to visit Tanakombo, a plantation at the west end of the island.] The real war of these islands, the most persistent and everlasting and vicious, is not the one between white invaders and the dark people who own the land, nor the feuds between the natives themselves, nor yet the one between all humans and the bacteria and insects and heat. It is the fight of men, both black and white, to get and keep foothold on the land. For without unceasing vigilance the vegetation would push the puny human beings right off the islands. The plantations keep herds of cattle, not for meat or milk but to graze down any sprouting undergrowth. ... stray banana trees with their huge purple seed hanging toward the earth--something so "artistic," and frankly biological-looking that Georgia O'Keefe should always be posed with a propagating banana tree. Even while I was shaking with cold my nose was hot. Something had happened to the back of my neck; it felt as if it had been hit with a club. My eyeballs must be on rubber bands hitched to sore places in my brain, for every time I moved my eyes I could feel the stretch clear to the back of my skull. And my spine hurt and all my muscles and joints, and my skin felt raw and dry even while it was cold and wet. And I felt very tired and dizzy and hot and cold--and utterly miserable. I had "it"--malaria. Only the colt and Margaret, who had been taking preventative quinine, escaped. My malaria turned out to be the favorite kind: intermittent. It was intermittent in forty-eight-hour attacks for about a week and then quiescent until I caught another chill. But after the attacks were definitely over, there was a period of curious elation and energy during which i got more work done than in any normal time. Chapter 15 ========== It was her voice that best prepared us for our new misses. In the dark of the beach as we landed over the surf, and above the road of this, had come a cultured English voice exclaiming with un-English enthusiasm, "Oh, I'm SO glad you could come right away." ... Then hastily, "I get so lonely here by myself." The first appeal toward endearing one human to another: that one is needed by the other. ... after dinner we were sitting in a row along the south veranda, our legs in pyjamas as mosquito protection, and those legs comfortable up on the veranda railing. Margaret and I had our "wha-whas" (ukulele and guitar) and we were all singing those find old English madrigals which sounded magnificent under the huge roof. The sky to the south and east was changing tones like one of those color organs. There was something special about eh evening; perhaps it was relief from the storm of the afternoon. The Misses suddenly pulled her legs up like a little girl, "Oh, I don't know when I've felt so jolly!" Chapter 16 ========== The wharf strike was still on in Sydney and no one was getting any freight... there were no paints for us. He [the captain] thought he was being funny, cheering us up, and he HAD struck something. Sail canvas? What was the matter with it? And boat paint? It was not permanent, but what of it? Our studies would all have to be copied anyway. It was pigment and we could mix colors with it. The Voy turned us loose with the ship carpenter and the first thing we got was ten pounds of white-lead paste. It was poisonous and dangerous for a painter to use... The read lead... was a fine vermilion. Then there was a quart of black paint and some spar varnish. That was all the pigment we could get. From a large bucket of brushes we chose some well-made varnish brushes which we proposed cutting down into smaller brushes. We could have all the turpentine and linseed oil we wanted, and we took it. While the Mataram was still loading... we had broadcast our need of pigments to the planters on board, and all week long tins of paint were coming in by runner. We got the most awesome collection of boat and housepaint that ever came through the bush. Most of it was half-used and dried to a paste--which could not have been better for our use, because we wanted paste pigment. But the colors! Everything from liquid yellows to sour greens; almost everything that is known to be impermanent to the color chemist. [The book contains many details about making their own brushes, easel, frames, etc.] These were native women doing what Melanesian Maries have done for centuries: bringing in the harvest from the gardens. And behind the line, about ten yards to the rear, was a Melanesian man doing what men have been doing for centuries. Rather, he was the vestigial remains of a traditional masculine inactivity. The man was not exactly young but he was not so old and weak that he could not have been carrying something when even the children were seriously burdened. Yet all he had in his hand was a dainty cupid-sized bow and some arrows. He was simply a tradition, a male "protection" to the pack-mule females. Today, in the government-controlled villages along the coast, there is naturally no danger of raids, but the custom of sending a male escort with the women persists. ["Maries" was the old missionary name for women.] Chapter 17 ========== Painting at last! And this was the fun end of the picture; the first unafraid hour when one slaps on the big color patterns. You feel like God making things grow on a blank canvas. Then follows the shaping up when objects are given bulk, and lines greater meaning. But as the detail grew on my canvas I began to forget my admiration for my own godliness in wonder at the artistry of the [natives] who had built those huts. ... these were no shacks. The hut nearest me was architecturally as well proportioned as the Parthenon; the deep thatching of the roof was just the right "weight" to balance the area of the front wall; the width of the whole was right for the height, and the construction throughout was beautiful. There was not a slipshod piece of workmanship anywhere. Those little... bungalows, made with only an axe and knife (modern), were as trim and sturdy and altogether all right as the houses one would see in any civilized self-respecting community. But the true artistry of these structures, which was almost marked enough to have been sophistication, lay in the total absence of any unnecessary material. And no material had been tortured into an unnatural form to make it look like something else. ... everything that had been done as a necessity had been done so painstakingly that it had become ornamental. This was functionalism of a high order, and it did the heart good. It was some time before we saw the interiors of these huts and we found them just as satisfactory as the exteriors. This construction of the bed with bamboo slats also had another virtue which we learned about later. Heat is one of the time-honored remedies for bad spirits that lodge in the body and hurt a fellow. So, if [someone] aches, a mound of hot rocks is put under the bed, and the heat comes up between the slats of the bead and bakes out the spirit. (After we heard about this we began treating our island sores with dry heat... and got much more rapid healings.) Chapter 18 ========== However, it was impossible to do anything without these men because the women could not understand much pidgin English. And evidently the women could be reached, both lingually and ethnically, only through their husbands. Anything we gave a woman for posing, her husband would naturally take, because he owned her; she was only a pack mule. [The native women] do not work half so hard and long as the average American farm-wife, partly, of course, because all of living is so simple and there are no artificial standards of what is decent. The average birth receives as much delicate attention as and a whole lot more privacy than it does in our society. ... the men do all the muscle work; the felling of trees for house timber and the building of the houses, clearing for the gardens, as well as enough liter work like hunting and fishing to keep them equally busy with the women. The care of the children is shared, for after the nursing and toddling period little boys accompany their fathers through the day and little girls their mothers, each learning as play the jobs they will have as adults. Thus by the time the villager is adolescent he [or she] is bearing his [or her] share of the community work, unconscious of its being work as he [or she] is of breathing. Somehow, whatever there is about a female is simply poison to a man's industry. Fishing canoes sink, papaya trees wither and die, and pigs fail to reproduce if we pollute them by touch or even by being present at the wrong time. Chapter 20 ========== She never thanked us, because no formal expression of gratitude is known to Melanesians; the return gift is the form. The reason the babies never cried, we discovered, was that they were never denied anything they asked for. If a whimper did start up it was plugged by the breast being shoved into the baby's mouth. There was the most surprising indifference toward Art here; not even the models appeared to be interested in their own likenesses. They had to be ASKED to look at them, and if the other women were asked for an opinion they just cackled. ... this was one of the villages where the youngsters began experimenting with the urge as soon as they were old enough to feel it. The parents were so very indulgent that they just thought it amusing. And as the young girls never became pregnant until after they were married--for some reason even scientists do not understand fully--no one had a substantial reason for being prudish. Chapter 21 ========== When the New Year came around we were in the west islands on a plantation in the "largest land-locked lagoon in the world." There was a superb vista of Marovo Lagoon from the backhouse at Segi. The view was a different from that of a coast plantation as if we were in another part of the world. It was intimate, cozy; the sort of thing one reads about as an "island paradise." All up and down the lagoon, which we could see from the throne on the hill, was a labyrinth of little coral-made islands and waterways that had a varying depth and a snow-white coral sea-bottom. That made the clues of the water every shade from deep purplish ultramarine to peacock and robin's-egg blue. And there were streaks of tender green and yellow where the coral castles reached near the surface. There was a strong tide current through the lagoon but somehow the water never got rough, and in between spring tides the surfaces were so glassy that all the cozy little islands and sunset clouds were reflected in it like a mirror. Gone was the constant roar of the surf, the churning of it, and the sight of squalls passing out to sea. Here at Segi the silence and stillness of everything was the kind that let you hear your own heart bumping. Sartorially we had gone native. Night and day, at the plantations and painting in villages, we lived in men's shapeless pyjamas because they were the coolest protection from insects... But our guilt was that we did not seem to CARE--not until these holidays came to remind us of another life we had once lived. Also, something we had not seen on women elsewhere, these three had long hair which stood up in a great round ball around their faces. It had the surprising effect of making them look feminine in a normal human way. Chapter 23 ========== So far as models went it was a holiday painting in Marovo Lagoon. The ex-headhunters were handsome, intelligent, unsuspicious, pleased to earn a few sticks of tobacco (though they preferred shillings), and one and all thought the pictures we painted were miracles. They were subjects which portraitists dream about but never meet in civilization. Chapter 24 ========== We never could understand for a long time why Europeans ate expensive tinned fish when there were oceans of fresh ones all around them; and we continued eating fresh fish whenever we were on our own until one day we broke out with what we called "fish mouth." [The author writes more about this in chapter 32.] The attitude toward professional artists in Melanesia was naturally very interesting to us. The professional artists are the canoe carvers and mask carvers and they are hired to make things just as are our commercial artists. Their products are respected, but neither the villagers nor the artists themselves regard artists as personages deserving special privileges, as we do. They are still obliged to carry on their traditional work in the village, helping others to build their houses, clearing the bush for gardens, and hunting and fishing, exactly as are the other men who lack talent. All villagers, both men and women, make all their own decorations for everyday use, such as carved food bowls and lime containers. Objects for ceremonial or communal use, however, are made entirely by professionals; and as all such property is endowed with metaphysical significance there are taboos against the making of it. [A local carver used a pencil to draw the author and her assistant. He drew them in the same style that he carved canoes with. The illustration can be seen at the link below. ] Referring to Maike's portrait of the Expotition again, it will be noticed that he gave me a highwayman's mask. [This represented the author's countenance while dealing with struggles] ... of the lowest ebb in our spirits of the entire painting venture so far. [The author began to go blind as a result of tropical sun glare while painting. She speculated that while scientists thought the anatomy of their eyes was no different, there must be some reason why the native people never went blind from sun glare.] The instant i put [diving] goggles on I had the solution to painting in the tropics without going blind. They made my eyes like a native's. Where the native's eyes are deeply set with a projecting awning of prominent brow ridges and bushy eyebrows, small eye openings, and high cheekbones to shut off some of the glare from the ground, the diving goggles (with the glass knocked out) sheltered my eyes all around in the same way. The goggles proved to be a godsend, for I never afterward had trouble with my eyes when I wore them. Chapter 25 ========== We [Americans] are the carnivores of the human species, dreadfully scented according to the [Asians], while the Melanesians, like the Chinese, are almost vegetarians and so only mildly fragrant. Chapter 26 ========== A few years ago--anyone who turned his [or her] radio on then will remember very well--there wailed through our air, night and day, a song by that name. Those who like good tunes will remember "Night and Day" as a very good tune indeed, and that is all it will mean to most. But for your Expotition it is a melody both horrible and wonderful, a kind of past-delirium... Many a meal had we sung for, and many a model both white and brown, had Margaret held enchanted with her music while I lopped his [or her] head onto canvas... In Ongong Java it is the custom, one a year, for the young marriageable girls, stripped entirely naked, to walk in procession with their clan chaperons around the village clearing. Betrothals are arranged in infancy, but the girl appearing in the procession is a sign to her fiancé that she is ready for marriage. The dark bodies shone with coconut oil which they dressed themselves for this important debut... They were rounded about the thigh, the torsos were long and elegant with smooth shoulders and high breasts. One did not look at their faces even in the photographs. Chances are the young patrol officer didn't either even in the flesh, nor care much that the girl he saw in the procession was already "taken." Chapter 28 ========== The usual charge for transportation anywhere in the islands is by the day; $5 a person whether the vessel is a Sydney steamer or a put-put launch. And there is no guarantee of getting you there. No matter how long the trip takes, com fair weather or foul, whether the engine lisps or the skipper would rather go on a reef than use his [or her] anchor or sail, a passenger can only set his [or her] teeth and keep on paying a pound a day till some sweet providence sees him [or her] in his [or her] home port. The toilet proper was a round hole in the wide shelf of the taffrail, in front of which a blanket was hung from the awning roof. [It had a pleasant view,] even though like a French pissoir it gave the occupant the illusion of privacy while declaring to the world, by the feet extending below the blanket, that it was engaged. But WHY were we going south? He was going on a recruiting trip! Recruits for the New Guinea gold fields were then bringing in a hundred dollars a head in Rabaul, they were hard to get because the news had got around the islands that carriers to the fields died of cold and exhaustion in the high mountains. No doubt the Skipper was being only an opportunist in going recruiting when he found himself at the remote end of the Territory; but also he could profit by the venture even if he did not get recruits, because we were paying him ten dollars a day while he found out if men were available. But that was not what was making us savage; it was the low fellow's attempt to slip off without us. The one full-length sentence the Skipper had honored us with in the last eight hours was a warning not to get nosy in this village. Any violation of taboo would ruin his business. But in the end it was our quite unintentional nosiness which indirectly promoted it--as far as his business went. At first we wandered about, innocently trying to look up into the closed houses through the cracks in the floors--for the huts were on piles like the plantation houses. We were at the far end of the village taking a photograph of an architectural detail (which happened to be an ingenious vine-rope hinge of a door) when that door opened--ever so little; just about an inch and a half. A glittering eye looked out of the blackness at about head height. So it was an adult--but male or female? We took a chance. Calmly we lifted our pyjama shirts and exhibited proof of our right to female society. There was a long wait; then the crack of the door slowly widened and was finally jerked back and a woman pushed out. Another woman was behind her, and another, and two more. Their general good nature led us to believe that we were the first white women these Maries had ever seen. But there was nothing we could paint of that. We photographed it instead, and it was at this point the luluai [leader] came sprinting up. He couldn't speak any pidgin English that we could understand, but he LOVED cameras and he did not have to say it. ... we had accomplished in half an hour with the camera what the Skipper had not been able to do in several hours. The whole business of recruiting is nothing more complex than making a friend of the chief or luluai of the village, who then persuades village men to join the recruiter. The maximum value of a gift to a headman is set by law, because the chiefs bribed beyond resistance could be persuaded to turn over to the recruiter men who were not willing to be recruited. In this village it happened that the chief's weakness was having a camera pointed at him; and we had the camera. If there is anything less delightful than walking up mountains on blisters, it is having a rest and then walking down on the same blisters. Chapter 29 ========== Kieta, as a settlement, was not particularly noteworthy. But Kieta to us looked like a beautiful metropolis after our seeing only one house at a time for so many months. [The author and her assistant got foot infections as a result of the damage done during the Skipper's "death march" into the mountains on the recruiting trip.] This settlement never had any more than 25 residents, yet there were as many rungs on the social ladder as there were residents. The untouchables were the Chinese, the missionaries, and Americans, whenever present. [Suffice it to say, the author and her assistant were treated with outright aggression. [They had trouble finding anywhere to stay. Nobody wanted to rent them a room. The radio operator had an enormous house with rows of bedrooms, none of them occupied but his own.] But obviously nothing short of outright seduction could get this young man to make questionable women of us [by letting them stay in one of his empty rooms.] [Finally, a couple from Rabaul made a special trip down to the wharf to ask the author and her assistant to be their guests.] Chapter 30 ========== For Rabaul was that island metropolis, the one big settlement in all Melanesia where we had long expected to replenish our bleeding store of gold. An acute reminder of the emergency was that the Nakapo did not choose to sail. For two more days the vessel lay off that hateful little settlement of Kieta, during which time we dared not move far from the deck or beach because the Skipper said every next minute was the one in which we were leaving. He was waiting for business... On the second night we went ashore for dinner. The wireless operator sent a message that he wanted us to meet some friends... They were three young men, all in government service, and before the evening was over they had got together a splendid scheme for Expotitions-in-distress. They would provide us with a complete field outfit--camp stretchers, mosquito nets, cooking gear... and we could set up camp in the government rest house of the nearest village to Kieta. ... but our hosts were "gamin." It couldn't be done [because of various patriarchal social customs.] Well, it COULD be done--unless the mute district officer did refuse us permission to use a rest house; all we had to do was obtain camp gear, and we could but that. It would be fairly inexpensive living, we should be independent, and by living right in the village we should become quickly acquainted with our subjects and have less trouble getting models. There was just one hitch of convincing the district officer that we were not fragile ladies but tough headhunters. [They did not accomplish this and they ended up getting back on the Nakapo for Rabaul.] Chapter 31 ========== The hook of land on the inner shore of which Rabaul is situated is called Crater Peninsula, the bar formed by the crook being the gigantic crater of an old volcano. In the middle of the bar there are some little "beehive" islands which appear and disappear at whim, indicating that something is still going on down there in the water, and to the south, still in Blanche Bay, is another island called Vulcan. The first thing the nose of a sensitive visitor sniffs as he [or she] enters the bay, if the wind is right, is the stench of sulphur and brimstone which rises in steam from these safety valves of the volcanic region. The government reports show about twenty healthy earthquakes a year, disturbances violent enough to receive official attention, which means the [unreported] tremors one feels every few days are just normal. There is no doubt that living in Rabaul is something like living in a reducing vibrator. There is something in this "uncanny quiet," an electric charge that is not the invigorating kind but rather the tenseness that sometimes makes small boys suddenly take a crack at a glass window with a rock, as much to their [own] surprise as anybody's. When we said we wished we had been at the party [in a cheap hotel] instead of having been merely shaken by it, the little man was so pleased that he made us an additional present of some small gold-ore nuggets fresh from the mountains of New Guinea. And it was this man, learning my name, who brought about quite an unusual encounter. That night at dinner he brought to our table another old prospector who shyly asked how I spelled my name. He had once prospected in Alaska and had known a Lewis Mytinger who had come to Juneau with a gold washer, and the two had known one another intimately before the latter was drowned. Lewis Mytinger was my father, whom I had never known. He had invented a gold washer and taken it to Juneau to interest investors. And from this miner here in far-away New Guinea I learned things about the last few months of my father's life and the details of the way he met his death that even my mother did not know. "You look just like your father," the miner said. "I think I would have known you were Lew's daughter even if I had not yet heard your name--especially meeting you here, at another gold field." And probably in the same kind of hotel. It was the American recruiters who, in our ninth hour of despair, steered us to the Ambassador. The name, Ambassador, was entirely humorous for the place was a huge frame building, as spacious as a hangar and looking very much like one, which had been built by the government as the expropriation department to handle the land tangle when the Australians took over during the last war. Offices were partitioned off on both sides of a long hall, and at one end was a big open space, the size of Roseland, which was not the one restaurant in town... The rooms were so much the size of largish stalls that some humorist had lettered the names of famous race horses on a few doors. There was, of course, no furniture, no running water; the toilet was off the restaurant (through the kitchen), and the wash-wash houses were in the read on a court. But the rent was only twenty dollars a month and we expected to furnish our stall with a camp outfit. We could eat one meal a day in the restaurant and lift our hands to help ourselves in private without the aid of a [servant], or endangering white prestige [the sensibilities of other white people in the community]. The way for a woman to is a stranger to tackle the social ladder in any British colonial settlement is a cut-and-dried system. She starts at the top simply by leaving her card at the Residency. This is merely paying one's formal respects, and the card leaver must, under no circumstances, be seen in the flesh by anyone but a servant. Literally it means, "I have arrived and am ready for recognition." Presumably there are spies who then track one down and report whether one is eligible for (a) dinner, (b) luncheon, (c) tea, or (d) total eclipse. There must be some way of finding out about the newcomer other than by a mere name on a card. The Expotition had no card and it had sore feet and Namanula Hill was an alp which no bicycle we could pedal would go up. And it was also very hot and we had no calling clothes which were fit to be seen even by a servant. The whole business seemed a little strained to an American anyway--to hire a car to climb an alp to deliver a card which we did not have, in order to be followed by spies who would report that we were living in a horse stall. However, we had to do it if we expected to get any portrait orders. [Later, New Guinea's first lady invited them to dinner without any card calling. She had already heard about them through the grapevine. She also ordered their first portrait job.] Chapter 32 ========== With no portrait orders coming in yet we neither dared afford nor wanted to eat more than one meal at day at Popeye's, the restaurant in the building, for the food there was useless from the point of view of both taste and nourishment. [Eventually their servant, "borrowed" from a friend, volunteered to shop for groceries and cook their meals.] ... the trays were neat and the fruit mountainous, and we never again got dysentery while Tombat fed us. Instead, we got... "fis' mouth" [fish mouth]--from eating too much fish or else the wrong kind. The curse came in the form of little white bubbles that broke out, not only around the mouth but around the eyes. It was a maddening itch much like poison ivy infection, though luckily it lasted only a few days at siege. [I wonder whether "fish mouth" is the same thing as Scombroid Fish Poisoning.] Chapter 35 ========== I had found a retreat in the Chinese cemetery behind town to which I went occasionally for the sweet stillness that was nowhere else in Rabaul. One could visualize the long-dead [Asians] beneath those big green mounds, and one was reminded of the precious life still ours--and what to do with it. And I needed stimulus these days. Frankly I was weary. It is all great fun to travel sight-seeing through the tropics, but to work is another matter--when the heat makes one feel drugged, unable to think, and when each siege of malaria leaves one a little more slowly. Then there was the eternal bucking of unexpected obstacles. [Nobody was ordering portraits, because her first commission had gone badly.] And if this stalemate continued we were doomed as an Expotition. Our limit was the moment when our funds got down to the price of a ticket home, and that was within sight. But I always came away from the cemetery with my fur smoothed down; the one thing we possessed which was not in that quiet green terminal was breath. And that was something positive. That we could not understand their kind of intellect did not prove that it did not exist ant was not equal to our own in its own way. Our models had sores and flies, but we had them too, and ants in our pants as well--ourselves having pants, which the natives had probably tried as a garment themselves and discarded generations ago as being ant traps. Chapter 36 ========== Our artistic swan song of the Territory was an attempt to paint a sing-sing [a dance], and for even attempting that we deserve some credit. There are generally two kinds of sing-sing: the dance and feat and chanting that attend the coming of age ceremonies of girls, and betrothals, marriages, and births, which are witnessed by all the villagers; and those other secret dances which have to do with men's clubs and are not always initiation ceremonies, but may be the whooping up for a raid, or celebration of a successful one. These latter, the native women and outsiders never see. Another kind of sing-sing has an innocent origin purely social, and may be witnessed by anyone. The theme is some current event. When we left a plantation in the Solomon Islands, the native wife of a planter, accompanied by all her female relatives, collected on the veranda to watch us pack. For hours they sat without a word, fascinated by the wealth that went into the trunks. Margaret brought things while I fitted them into their places that I knew so well by this time. There was probably a certain rhythm to the endless business. Finally we came to the clothes trunk and after half-a-dozen garments had been folded down into it one of the women began to hum with her lips closed. The women stopped to laugh hysterically with the others and then started humming again, hanging on to the sixth note each time she came to it. Presently, another woman joined in, starting on the fourth note, repeating the same melody. Another woman came in and then all were humming. It was a kind of protracted round, like "Three Blind Mice." They hummed for a long time, good straight missionary harmony, and then suddenly the first woman broke into a solo, still using only harmonics of the six notes. "My word," she improvised, "the Missus are going away. They are going... going. They put into the box the white dress, the white dress, the white dress. [Three dresses.] They are going away on a launch. They are going away on the steamer. The tall one who makes pictures, the small one who sings with her teeth [that is, whistles]. My word, they go tomorrow." The music did not come to an end there. The humming continued as an interval and by and by, ever so casually, another woman began her story of our going, going. And so on through the whole afternoon until the lock of the last trunk was snapped. There was one deviation; the woman who started the sing got up on one occasion and shyly went through an awkward pantomime of bringing things and placing them in a box, her walking back and forth being a business of standing in the same place and coming down on the veranda hard with her heels, which seems to be the universal Melanesian dance step. Chapter 37 ========== But on account of the earthquake we made a discovery that was serious. When we moved into the Ambassador we had unrolled and hung the pictures face to the wall, around the walls of the storeroom so that they would be straight while they finished drying out. And now, as a result of last night's shaking, they were all lying crumpled on the floor. But it was not the wrinkling that had done the damage. It was in picking them up that we saw what Rabaul had done, what the weeks of exposure to the sulphuric atmosphere can do to paint. Every portion that had been painted with lead colors had been affected. White areas had turned golden yellow, but all colors mixed with white had dulled and in most cases turned darker. Some greens had turned black even where the paint had been used pure and, of course, the madder red, which I had not expected to hold up anyway (for the madders are merely a glaze), had faded out of existence. The chance in our pictures and our dismay were about equal. Ordinary sulphur discoloration on paintings happens... right here in our own country, where sulphur dioxide in the air is created in the cities by coal-burning house and factory furnaces. To clean it off, picture restorers charge a great deal of money to run over the paintings with a lump of fresh rye bread, a slice of raw potato, or onion. Only don't start cleaning your paintings with any of these vegetables, because if the discoloration has penetrated the varnish to the pigment beneath, the varnish has to be removed, and this is a delicate job for which restorers deserve a great deal of money. [Nothing they tried helped, until they tried soap and water. It brightened the paintings somewhat.] The paintings were dried, not only on the paint side, but more thoroughly on the back, and then they were given several coats of good old deck spar varnish. And as an extra precaution against mold-rot, after several coats of varnish with their seasoning of insects, the canvases were put out in the sun again face down to bake the back. ... we had to decide between retracing our steps (the Solomon Islands) under the ideal conditions of being able to work wherever the expedition schooner anchored, and having it as a permanent base; going on to the unknown in Papua and the Dutch Indies; or going home via the Philippines, with the work unfinished. We made one of those heroic decisions that happen only in fiction. We decided to take a chance--go west. [to Papua] [They planned to ship the paintings back home. But the natives went on strike for higher wages one morning shortly after the author departed. The paintings were forgotten and left in a storeroom for months. The Judge and the newspaper Editor got into a dispute. The Editor used the paintings as an instrument for spite. Ultimately, he hid them before he himself disappeared. An eruption destroyed Vulcan island.] The explosion of Matapi was a hundred times more violent than that of Vulcan the day before, and it rose a mile in the air at the speed of a torpedo. The geyser was solid black mud, a fountain of mud that rained down on the peninsula. All vegetation looked as if it had been struck by poison gas. In the harbor all light craft had been sunk, including the precious Nakapo, and everything remaining above water was under four feet of mud and pumice. The two major eruptions continued through Monday, but the wind was offshore and the mud and pumice were being carried away from Rabaul. Our Melanesian paintings escaped the mud bath on the peninsula. They had long since been located by the loyal Judge and were safely in our possession when this district fulfilled its promise of "becoming the theatre of some horrible catastrophe." author: Mytinger, Caroline, 1897-1980 detail: LOC: DU850 .M9 source: tags: ebook,travel title: Headhunting in the Solomon Islands Tags ==== ebook travel