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Updated: July 20, 2025
The native Papuans much resemble the bushrangers of Australia; they are Negritos, with black skins and woolly hair. There are a few tribes of natives that much resemble the peoples of Samoa and Hawaii; there are also other tribes that resemble the Malays of southeastern Asia. The Papuan tribes of the coast are about as degraded as the bushrangers of Australia.
The native Timorese preponderate, and a very little examination serves to show that they have nothing in common with Malays, but are much more closely allied to the true Papuans of the Aru Islands and New Guinea. They are tall, have pronounced features, large somewhat aquiline noses, and frizzly hair, and are generally of a dusky brown colour.
When some Europeans, in frolic or ignorance, cut down part of the grove, the spirit was most indignant and threatened the perpetrators of the deed, according to the king, with all manner of evil. Some of the Papuans unite the life of a new-born babe sympathetically with that of a tree by driving a pebble into the bark of the tree.
For the first three days after our arrival I was fully occupied from morning to night building a house, with the assistance of a dozen Papuans and my own men.
These traders are all of the Malay race, or a mixture of which Malay is the chef ingredient, with the exception of a few Chinese. The natives of Aru, on the other hand, are, Papuans, with black or sooty brown skims, woolly or frizzly hair, thick-ridged prominent noses, and rather slender limbs.
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.
For a like reason the Papuans of Tumleo, an island off New Guinea, are careful to throw into the sea the bloody bandages with which their wounds have been dressed, for they fear that if these rags fell into the hands of an enemy he might injure them magically thereby.
I believe, therefore, that all the peoples of the various islands can be grouped either with the Malays or the Papuans; and that these two have no traceable affinity to each other.
Indeed, so friendly did our intercourse become that parties of our divers often went ashore and joined the Papuans in their sports and games. On one of these occasions I came across a curious animal that bore a striking resemblance to a kangaroo, and yet was not more than two feet high. It could climb trees like an opossum and was of the marsupial family.
It took some little time to launch the canoe, which was somewhat heavy and drawn up at a distance from the water. Tom seated himself aft to steer. Desmond and Billy sat next to him, Casey and Peter next, and the two Papuans in the bows to use the two foremost paddles.
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