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Updated: June 22, 2025
Some years ago, in fact, a clever hoax took the world by surprise for a moment, under the audacious title of 'Captain Lawson's Adventures in New Guinea. The gallant captain, or his unknown creator in some London lodging, pretended to have explored the Papuan jungles, and there to have met with marvellous escapes from terrible beasts of the common tropical Asiatic pattern rhinoceroses, tigers, monkeys, and leopards.
Pronouncing these words in an extremely sharp tone, Captain Nemo gave me a curt bow. This was my dismissal, and I reentered my stateroom. There I found Conseil, who wanted to know the upshot of my interview with the captain. "My boy," I replied, "when I expressed the belief that these Papuan natives were a threat to his Nautilus, the captain answered me with great irony.
"One was a chief, who notwithstanding worked as willingly, or more so, than any of the rest, and seemed more anxious than they were to get away." This description made me hope that it was my father of whom the Papuan spoke, but I was bitterly disappointed to hear that he had been carried to a distance, as it might still be long before we could find him. Uncle Jack felt as I did.
The junction between the two races, or the Papuan from the north and the Australian from the south, is effected at Cape York by the Kowraregas, whom I believe to be a Papuanized colony of Australians, as will elsewhere be shown. In fact, one might hesitate whether to consider the Kowraregas* as Papuans or Australians, so complete is the fusion of the two races.
Needless to remark, the request was refused, but they had the pluck to ask again before the expedition was over. My boy Arigita had often eaten human meat, and as he expressed it in his quaint pidgin English, "Pig no good, man he very good." It can be imagined it must be really good, as the Papuan thinks a great deal of pig.
Of course there has been intermixture, and there occur occasionally individuals which it is difficult to classify; but in most cases the large, somewhat aquiline nose, with elongated apex, the tall stature, the waved hair, the bearded face, and hairy body, as well as the less reserved manner and louder voice, unmistakeably proclaim the Papuan type.
Latham also inclines to the belief that Australia was peopled from Timor and not from New Guinea, judging, in the absence of positive proof, from the probability that "occupancy had begun in Australia before migration across Torres Strait had commenced in New Guinea," inferred "from the physical differences between the Australian and the Papuan, taken with the fact that it is scarcely likely that the Papuans of Torres Strait would have failed in extending themselves in Australia had that island been unoccupied."
The population of Dutch New Guinea is estimated at a quarter of a million, but the predilection of its puff-ball-headed inhabitants for human flesh has discouraged the Dutch census-takers from making an accurate enumeration, as the Papuan cannibal does not hesitate to sacrifice the needs of science to those of the cooking-pot.
Daughtry told his seventeen-years- old brown-skinned Papuan with the withered ancient face of a centenarian, the legs of a living skeleton, and the huge-stomached torso of an elderly Japanese wrestler. "Eh, Kwaque! What you fella think?" And Kwaque, too awed by the spaciousness to speak, eloquently rolled his eyes in agreement.
Now, turning to the eastern parts of the Archipelago, I find, by comparing my own observations with those of the most trustworthy travellers and missionaries, that a race identical in all its chief features with the Papuan, is found in all the islands as far east as the Fijis; beyond this the brown Polynesian race, or some intermediate type, is spread everywhere over the Pacific.
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