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According to Galvano, the Portuguese historian, Saavedra's discoveries in 1529 were more extensive than in 1528. He says the Spaniards coasted along the country of the Papuas for five hundred leagues, and found the coast clean and of good anchorage.
Many of the islands situated on the west and north-west coast of New Guinea became known to the Portuguese at an early date, and were named collectively OS PAPUAS. The name was subsequently given to the western parts of New Guinea.
Most of them are witches, and eat human flesh; and are so much given to wickedness, that the devils walk among them as companions. Yet when these wicked spirits find any of the Papuas alone, they kill him with cruel blows, or smother him; for which reason they always go out in companies of two or three together.
They come under the name of OS PAPUAS, and the islands where Menezes is said to have sojourned hic hibernavit Georg de Menezes in the year 1526. The three nameless large islands, between Os Papuas and Nova Guinea represent, no doubt, the Misory Islands and Jobi of modern charts.
The clan consists of two hundred individuals, divided into four classes of men and four of women; marriage being only permitted within the usual classes, and never within the gens." For the Papuas, closely akin to the above, we have the testimony of G.L. Bink, who stayed in New Guinea, chiefly in Geelwink Bay, from 1871 to 1883. Here is the essence of his answers to the same questioner:
Such are the Eskimos and their congeners in Greenland, Arctic America, and Northern Siberia; and, in the Southern hemisphere, the Australians, the Papuas, the Fuegians, and, partly, the Bushmen; while within the civilized area, like primitive folk are only found in the Himalayas, the highlands of Australasia, and the plateaus of Brazil.
These very same words have been applied to the Ostyaks, the Samoyedes, the Eskimos, the Dayaks, the Aleoutes, the Papuas, and so on, by the highest authorities. I also remember having read them applied to the Tunguses, the Tchuktchis, the Sioux, and several others. The very frequency of that high commendation already speaks volumes in itself.
Pintados, or Bisayas, according to a native word denoting the same, must be the inhabitants of the islands between Luzon and Mindanao, and must have been so named by the Spaniards from their practice of tattooing themselves. From this they appear to have tattooed themselves in the manner of the Papuas, by burning in spots and stripes into the skin.
Turning one degree to the north, they came to anchor at an island named Coroa, whence they came to another under the line named Memousum, and thence to Busu, still holding on the same course . The people of all these islands are black, with frizzled hair, whom the people of the Moluccas call Papuas.
It was inhabited by Papuas or blacks, whose ridiculous mode of dress, and their own natural deformity, made them appear little short of a kind of monsters. Hardly any of them but had something odd and strange, either in the bigness or position of their limbs.
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