Return to Paradise

by James A. Michener

  Mrs. Angelo conducts her discussions in pidgin, that astonishing language. The bane of scientists, it has been called “the wonderful confusion.” Jack London termed it the language with no grammar and no dictionary. It flourishes in New Guinea and is disarmingly suited to blasphemous exchanges between impatient planters and illiterate natives. I tried vainly to tell a native boy that my tea was too strong. Finally, in exasperation, a tough old geezer shouted, “Monkey! Mastuh i no likim dirink. Dirink bilong mastuh sitarong tumas. Orait. Yupela kesim dirink hap tea hap water hot tumas. Mastuh no bloody Australian.” (Boy! Man he no like his drink. Drink belong master strong too much. All right. You fellow catch him drink half tea half hot water.) The closing insult meant that the American was a boy, not a real man.

  The pidgin words I like most are tasol (that’s all); gudpela (good guy); inogat (he doesn’t have); tupela kirisimas (two Christmasses = two years); sapos (suppose = if); palanti (plenty); and liklik (little).

  The vocabulary is painfully meager, but the range of possible ideas large, if you have endless time. I heard a planter sending for a book: “All right. You know house belong woman with dog? All right. Suppose you know house next door belong man he got no leg. All right. That man he good fellow too much. That man he got pass—anything printed or written is a pass—belong me. All right. Suppose you fellow run long man good fellow too much. Catch him pass belong me. That’s all.”

  “And,” concluded the planter, “I’d have saved time by getting it myself.”

  The Administration frowns on pidgin as humiliating to the native. Especially condemned are the words mary (any woman), boy (any man), and monkey (any boy). The last is not derogatory but a corruption of the German for little man, mannki.

  Like many Pacific islands, New Guinea is a Babel. One estimate says there may be as many as sixty distinct languages and more than a hundred dialects. Natives from villages ten miles apart are often unable to converse, except through pidgin. This has led to the classic expression of brotherhood: “He me we wuntok.” (He and I are one talk = speak the same language = come from the same village ∴ are good buddies.)

  Ability to get along with natives is almost essential if you want to make money in New Guinea. Bob Day, owner of the Dauntless mine, is an example. He’s a lean, good-looking Australian of about fifty. In 1936 he had a mining lease and some money.

  His first problem was water, since his claim was a natural for hydraulic sluicing. Because he had a good reputation among the natives, he was able to get 135 boys to go with him more than two miles back in the hills. They built a water race which would deliver 54 cubic feet a second to an impound 180 feet above the workings. They tunneled 800 feet through rock and built many aqueducts. To prevent the water from running too fast and destroying the banks, Day built the course so perfectly that the fall was only two inches in a hundred feet.

  Getting water took two and a half years. Then war came and Day went bankrupt. His boys went back to the jungle. After the war he assembled new funds and, while others screamed about no boys, he quietly picked up his old hands. They rebuilt the race, learned to sluice gravel for gold. In 1948—twelve years after he and the boys started—he washed his first bullion.

  He hires 110 natives, some of whom have worked with him for twenty-three years. He pays them $2.41 a month plus bonuses for length of stay and ability. They get free food, clothing, shelter, medicine and tobacco. Their wage totals about $20 a month. One skilled mechanic earns $60 plus extra food for his family.

  Day is one of six independent men left on the gold fields. Before the war there were 400. He describes himself as “a pigheaded fool, but I hate to work for a boss.” Last year his boys won $30,000 worth of gold but his expenses were $36,000. He hopes to break even soon, but the cost of supplies may lick him. He used to pay $32 a ton for Indo-China rice; Australian rice now costs $189. South American beef was 11¢ a tin; Australian beef is 32¢.

  Bob Day’s life is that of the fossicker. His wife and three children prefer to live in Australia, where he visits every five or six years. He has a fine jungle house, kept clean by house boys, but it may fall down. Termites got in during the war. He eats well, enjoys what beer he can get, reads a lot, goes up to Wau—ten miles away—every two or three months. He’s a citizen of New Guinea and as such has never had a vote in his life. His proudest boast is that “my boys sometimes walk 70 miles to work for me rather than work for someone else right at hand. I give them no contracts, don’t baby them. But they know they can trust me.”

  New Guinea, with its million natives, is a prodigious place. Many areas of arable land have yet to be touched. Vast reaches of pasture land await cattle. Engineers predict that soon countless waterfalls will be harnessed for transmission of electric power across Torres Straits to Australia. There’s more gold than has been found. Oil has already been hit in Dutch New Guinea, and if Australians locate some in their end of the island, the most acute raw-material shortage in Australia and New Zealand will have been solved. Fisheries, agriculture, local manufacturing and transportation have not yet been scratched. Whereas much of Australia may never prove habitable, the white population of New Guinea could expand a hundredfold.

  A start has been made at Bulolo. There’s only fifteen more years of dredging there. After that the vast establishment will have to turn to something else. It may be lumber. Already the company is cutting superb timber and prefabricating houses. They erect a four-room house, all conveniences, furniture, fixtures, even utensils—everything except linen—for less than $2,000. Some have been flown down to Lae and assembled for $2,600. There’s talk of flying them right on to Sydney!

  Several leads are being explored by agriculturists. Coffee and cotton are thriving, but the most spectacular venture is taking place at Nondugl, in the great highland plains toward the Dutch border. A rich Australian, E. J. Hallstrom, who invented kerosene refrigerators, has flown in large flocks of sheep. He hopes to prove that natives can herd sheep, clip them, weave their own clothes and live on mutton. If he can do this, and the ewes have been through one successful lambing, he may revolutionize New Guinea.

  To accomplish any of these things will cost money—and men. For the present, Australia seems to have neither. Even the operation of the solitary and murderous Road is an economic drain difficult to justify. To build additional roads across rivers that destroy them in an afternoon is impracticable without additional revenue.

  As a result, certain influential residents have suggested that Australia release the Mandated Territory to the United States. Such a request is silly. At any cost, Australia must retain New Guinea. The island is a noose about Australia’s throat, and in unfriendly hands could be used to strangle the underpopulated continent.

  In 1919 Woodrow Wilson recommended that Japs be allowed to settle New Guinea. He was opposed to the death—no American name is more reviled in Australia than Wilson’s—by a brilliant politician, W. M. Hughes. Wilson was terribly in the wrong. Had Japs controlled New Guinea in 1941, Australia would have been subdued within two months. And America would have been denied an essential base. It must become an unwritten principle of American foreign policy never to let New Guinea fall into unfriendly hands, for when it does, our ally Australia is doomed.

  Sensible and unsensational men in New Guinea say: “We can probably hold our half of the island another twenty years—at most. By then either China or Indonesia, working in through Dutch New Guinea, will have absorbed it.” I asked, “Is there nothing that can be done?” They replied,

  “Probably not.” I persisted, “You know that the loss of New Guinea dooms Australia?” They said, “Yes, we know.” I asked coldly, “But still you think the loss is inevitable?” The Australians looked me right in the eye and said, “It’s inevitable.”

  Part of this fatalism grew out of what happened at Manus. No New Guinea man can possibly comprehend that action of his Government! At Manus Americans had assembled one of the greatest naval establishments in history. It was a city l
arger than Sacramento. It had naval stores worth a half billion dollars. I was at Manus when MacArthur was preparing the invasion of Leyte, and in the endless roadstead I saw twenty-six carriers, dozens of battleships, and actually hundreds of lesser craft. Yet the great anchorage—absolutely protected by coral reef—looked empty.

  America requested permission to maintain this base, at her expense. Australia refused. Why, nobody knows. Manus was of only minor importance to us; it was absolutely vital to Australian defense. The vast naval stores, the incredible wealth of Manus was sold lock and barrel to Chinese wholesalers and carted off to make Hong Kong fortunes.

  Now the once-great base is a shambles, an echo of the protecting bastion it might have been. I have heard men in New Guinea stutter with rage when speaking of this folly. There is only one saving grace: “If we ever get into trouble again, your blokes’ll be able to use the anchorage—if somebody else don’t grab it first.”

  It is strange, but on distant New Guinea I thought more deeply about America than I ever had at home. I wondered if we would be able to hold this island and Australia and New Zealand. I wondered if some day Americans would be back in the jungles of the South Pacific. But about one thing I did not wonder, for I was completely certain on that point: these islands are our concern. When they are lost, the Pacific is lost, and when that mighty ocean is lost, much of our way of life is gone.

  I shivered in the intense heat and asked the Australians one more question: “Is there no way you could hold New Guinea?”

  They thought a moment and replied, “With help, we might.”

  The Fossickers

  Men in New Guinea say: “We can probably hold onto our end of the island another twenty years … at most.”

  All the way from Honolulu to Sydney I heard about The Queen Emma. In Tahiti an Australian said, “I guess I named it.”

  “How do you mean?” I asked.

  “I was serving with the Yanks. Told them about Queen Emma. She was half Yank herself. Half Samoan. She became queen of New Guinea. Big, tough woman. They say she murdered her fourth or fifth husband. In Monte Carlo.”

  “What’s this got to do with the hotel?”

  “I was coming to that,” the Aussie said. “This Queen Emma did the New Guinea Germans out of half a million quid. Oh, she was quite a girl.” There was a long pause, the kind that occurs in tropic bars. Finally he said, “I told this Yank about her and right away he painted a big sign for his hut: The Queen Emma. ‘It’s me Broadway hotel,’ he says, and he gives a coon ten bob to fix it up nice.”

  “So that’s how The Queen Emma got its name?”

  The Australian ignored my question. “Why you goin’ to New Guinea?” he asked abruptly.

  “Taking some pictures. I heard about a tribe. Up at the headwaters of the Sepik. But tell me. Is The Queen Emma as bad as they say?”

  “Well,” he said thoughtfully, “during the war it was a good place after a long patrol. In peace time …” He returned to his spirits and would say no more.

  I didn’t mind The Queen Emma. Reminded me of the Hotel De Gink at Guadal. Big sprawling lot of quonsets. I didn’t mind the beetles or the snakes. And I was fascinated by those immense bumblebees that bore holes the size of dimes right through a wooden beam.

  I could lie in my bunk and see the towering white clouds hanging on the Owen Stanley Range, and I enjoyed being back in New Guinea. You know what I mean. That great hot blast. The heavy smell of jungle. And over west—the Sepik.

  I’d seen it from the air many times during the war, and I always said, “Some day I’m going up that river!” Have you ever seen it? One of the world’s greatest. A huge brown mass of ugly water spewing itself out into the Pacific. Logs, brush, crocodiles, dead natives. Out they go, as if their brutal land could stomach them no more. The Sepik was my river, and when I read in a British magazine about a race of savage pygmies at the headwaters … Well, sometimes you get to do what you’ve sworn to do. Breaks, I guess.

  On my first afternoon at The Queen Emma the old hands asked, “What you doin’ out here, Yank?” I said I was trying to hire a boat for the Sepik and they said, “You must be nuts.” But one old codger added, “The man you want is Shark Eye,” and that night I met him.

  He was more than seventy, a gnarled, skinny, hard-drinking Australian with no lower teeth. He was sitting alone at a corner table in the rusted quonset bar. “Name’s Shannon,” he said. “Folks call me Shark Eye.” He ran his right forefinger down a gash in his face. “They say you want to go up the Sepik.”

  “That’s right.”

  He rose to his full six-feet-four, pushed back his white hair and held out his hand. “I’m your man,” he said. We sat down for the first time at that small table and Shark Eye shouted, “Hey, Monkey!”

  A small native boy—couldn’t have been more than ten—appeared with a huge oval tray. Shark Eye leaned back and studied the lad’s blue-black shoulders. Then he snarled, “You’re messy. Fix up your belt.” The monkey became greatly embarrassed and tried to adjust the belt that held up his lap-lap. The tray began to slip and as it hit the floor Shark Eye gave it a kick so that it spun across the room. The monkey looked as if he might cry, but the old man raised his boot and shoved the boy after the tray. “Keep your belt fixed,” Shark Eye growled. “And bring us some beer.”

  As the night progressed, that wonderful, quiet, heavy night, Shark Eye gave me a running account of his qualifications. “Been in these parts more’n sixty years. Used to live at Rabaul before there was even a volcano in the bay. I saw the eruptions, the floods, the native uprisings. Watched the Germans come and go.” He stopped and eyed me suspiciously, then added softly, “Did a bit of fossicking, too.”

  “What?” I asked.

  He would tell me no more. “Monkey!” he shouted. The little boy appeared and stood at attention, his immense tray under his left arm. “More beer!” The boy brought them, but I couldn’t drink like these Australians. Shark Eye tossed the bottles down and reeled off to bed.

  As the bar was closing I asked a stranger, “What’s fossicking?”

  “You Yanks call it prospecting,” he said. “Shark Eye been bashing your ear? He’s got a right to. One of the greatest. Made and lost three fortunes.”

  “Women?” I asked.

  “There’s always women,” the stranger said, and he too stumbled off.

  Next evening, after a fruitless day spent arguing with Government officials, I was on my way to dinner when Shark Eye stuck his head out of the bar and called me in. “Sit down!” he said imperiously. He was quite excited and huddled with me in the corner. “I’ve got me eye on a wonderful craft for this trip,” he whispered. “We can coast it right into the Sepik.”

  “Do you know the river?” I asked.

  He stopped cold, deeply insulted. “Monkey!” he screamed. The little boy ran up. “More beer!” We missed dinner that night, and several nights thereafter. We sat in the corner, this old man and I, and he’d tell me about his fossicking days in New Guinea. He’d been everywhere. Could almost smell gold.

  “Then why are you broke?” I asked.

  “Me? Broke?” He shouted for the monkey and spoke in rapid pidgin, after which he tossed a key onto the big tray. The little boy disappeared into the night and returned with a large box. The old man fumbled with another key for some moments, then hid the box below the table and began to produce papers. There was a bank book, showing some ten thousand pounds in Brisbane, news clippings about a fossicking trip into the heart of Australia, and a parchment citation for his work in rescuing citizens during the volcanic terror at Rabaul.

  He fortified these records with verbal accounts of his adventures and I was beginning to be impressed when I recalled his cruel manner toward the monkey. I spoke of this and he guffawed. “Monkey!” he bellowed. “Come ’ere, damn you.”

  The near-naked little fellow stood before us, his belt straight, his lap-lap tucked in the way Shark Eye had directed. “Who’s the best damn man in New
Guinea?” the old Australian roared.

  A tremendous grin spread over the monkey’s face and he said, “You are, mastuh!” Shark Eye looked pleased and dug into his sweaty pocket for five marks.

  “Get some bleach for your hair,” he said. But he tossed the coins viciously onto the floor, so that the frantic child had to crawl among the table legs to get them.

  The bleach had quite an effect on our monkey. He dressed his hair into a ridge, like a rooster’s comb, and the top half was bleached a bright red. Shark Eye said the boy looked disgraceful, even for The Queen Emma, and was about to belt him when he stopped and stared at the bar entrance.

  There stood a remarkable woman. She was about fifty, sawed off, dumpy, red faced and scraggly haired. She wore men’s army shoes and a rucksack. She looked straight at Shark Eye and said, “You still alive?” Several men at the bar stood to say reserved hellos. She ignored them and crossed to our table. Shark Eye remained in his seat and kicked back a chair. Then he said to me, in great disgust, “Meet an anthropologist.”

  She held out her hand, and I thought: “Here’s a capable mitt.” In a deep voice she said, “I’m Sheila Bancroft.”

  At this Shannon burst into laughter and said, “In Australia we call our whoors sheila. This here’s my sheila.”

  I paid no attention to him because now I recognized this woman. It was her writing that had brought me to the Sepik. “Aren’t you Dame Sheila?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said, sitting down and reaching for a glass.

  “I studied your report on the Danduras,” I said. She was pleased, but as the evening wore on I had the strange feeling that both she and Shark Eye were maneuvering so that the other would have to leave first. I broke the impasse by going to bed, but before I got to sleep the gaunt figure of Shannon loomed in the darkness beside my head. “Don’t have anything to do with that crazy woman,” he whispered.