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By what seems to us the most whimsical of political arrangements, the Papuan islander, the Calabrian peasant, the Amsterdam merchant, the semi- civilized Aztec, the Moor of Barbary, the Castilian grandee, the roving Camanche, the Guinea negro, the Indian Brahmin, found themselves could they but have known it fellow-citizens of one commonwealth.
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 disagreeable 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.
Sir William Macgreggor, ex-Governor of Queensland, has described the Papuan art of fishing by means of kites, the lure being a tassel of the web of a spider of the Nephila species. No doubt the blacks here made an independent and original discovery, and in their simplicity applied it in a different, but none the less effective, style from that of the advanced Papuan.
To quote from the Revue des Deux Mondes of Paris: In the same district are found Indians, Negritos, Manthras, Malays, Bicols, half-breed Indians and Spaniards, Tagalas, Visayas, Sulus, and other tribes. They are very diminutive, rarely attaining four feet nine inches in height, and with small, retreating skulls. This race forms a branch equal in importance to the Papuan.
The English immigrant lives in the same climate as the Australian or Tasmanian, but he has not become like those races; nor will a thousand years, in most respects, make him like them. The Papuan and the Malay, as Mr. Wallace finds, live now, and have lived for ages, side by side in the same tropical regions, with every sort of diversity.
The peoples with the oval-axe culture are the so-called Papuan peoples in Melanesia; they, too, migrated from southern China, probably before the others. Both groups influenced the ancient Japanese culture.
The chief object of his attachment was a Papuan child; and he would sit with one of his long arms round her neck, share his biscuit with her, run from or after her in play, roll on the deck, entwining his arms around her, pretend to bite, swing himself away by means of a rope, and then drop suddenly upon her, with many other frolics of a childish character.
One of the three great Papuan rivers, the river now called the Amberno, was discovered and was named the S. Augustino, and formal possession was taken in the name of the King of Spain.
To be sure, among all the Indios it is black, but it shows not the slightest approach to the frizzled condition which is such a prominent feature in the external appearance of the Negritos and of all the Papuan tribes of the East.
I found no trace of any other tribes inhabiting the interior of New Guinea, but the coast people are in some places mixed with the browner races of the Moluccas. The same Papuan race seems to extend over the islands east of New Guinea as far as the Fijis.
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