Limits of the Known

by David Roberts

  The European discovery of New Guinea was made by Spanish and Portuguese sailors in the early sixteenth century. It is the second largest island in the world, after Greenland—though the distinction between an island and a continent such as Australia is ultimately an arbitrary one. By the turn of the twentieth century, the coast of New Guinea had long been settled, its native peoples pacified and indentured, as the Netherlands, Germany, and Great Britain fought over ownership of the island. Inland from the coast, dense jungles thwarted exploration, though entrepreneurs and missionaries had pushed their way up navigable rivers such as the Sepik and the Fly in search of resources to exploit and natives to convert. From vantage points on all sides, a towering, rugged mountain range could be seen in the distance, giving rise to the universal notion that the vast upland interior of New Guinea must be uninhabited.

  By the 1920s, airplanes regularly serviced such coastal outposts as Port Moresby, Lae, and Rabaul on the nearby island of New Britain. Those Junkers and De Havillands were fully capable of flying across the interior of New Guinea, but so pervasive was the notion of an uninhabited highlands that no pilot bothered to make the reconnaissance. In 1926, prospectors found gold in copious quantities at Edie Creek, a small stream toward the eastern edge of New Guinea. So rough was the terrain that although the creek lay a mere 35 miles inland from the coastal town of Salamaua, the trek with porters took eight days via a roundabout circuit of faint trails in the rain forest. Undaunted by such hardships, scores of miners, mostly Australian, stampeded toward Edie Creek to stake their claims.

  Among them was a tough, adventurous Aussie named Michael (“Mick”) Leahy (pronounced “Lay”). Twenty-five years old when the gold rush began, a timber cutter from Queensland, Leahy was fit, ambitious, and a skilled outdoorsman. When he heard about Edie Creek, he dropped his axe and booked the first steamer from Queensland to New Guinea.

  Although he pushed himself to the limit to beat all kinds of crazed rivals to the gold field, Leahy just missed out on the bonanza. His chances were not helped when he developed appendicitis and had to dash back to Australia for an operation. But the fever was in his veins. There must be other Edie Creeks farther inland, Leahy told himself, and all it should take to find them was pluck and endurance. So in May 1930, with another Aussie prospector, Michael Dwyer, and fifteen native porters, Leahy headed inland near the headwaters of the Ramu, a river that flows into the Bismarck Sea on New Guinea’s north coast. Promising strikes had already been made on stretches of the Ramu, but the high massif of the Bismarck Range blocked access to the interior.

  In the foothills of the Bismarcks, the trails blazed by natives living downstream petered out. Leahy, Dwyer, and their trusted lieutenant Ewunga, from the Waria tribe, forced a route through tangled forest up to a crest at 9,000 feet. Expecting only more timbered mountain slopes beyond, Leahy was surprised to see grassy valleys stretching into the distance. And that night in camp, the party was further startled and alarmed to spot a far-off pinprick of light. In the memoir he would write with American journalist Maurice Crain in 1937, The Land That Time Forgot, Leahy dramatized that moment of discovery:

  “Take a look at that!” I called to Dwyer. As we watched, another dim point of light appeared, then another and another.

  “It’s a village, all right,” said Dwyer. “The kanakas* must have seen our fire by this time, and you can bet they are just as uneasy as we are. They’re probably planning right now to pay us a surprise visit just before daylight. I’ve heard that is the fashionable hour for massacres in these parts.”

  After an uncomfortable night in camp, Leahy and Dwyer watched as the natives approached at dawn.

  We waved to them to come on, which they did cautiously, stopping every few yards to look us over. When a few of them finally got up courage to approach, we could see that they were utterly thunderstruck by our appearance.

  When I took off my hat, those nearest me backed away in terror. One old chap came forward gingerly, with open mouth, and touched me to see if I were real. Then he knelt down and rubbed his hands over my bare legs, possibly to find if they were painted, and grabbed me around the knees and hugged them, rubbing his bushy head against me. His hair was done in dozens of little plaits and stank terribly of rancid pig grease.

  In that encounter in the Bismarck Range on May 26, 1930, Leahy and Dwyer discovered the near edge of a vast highland population of tribes with no knowledge that any other people but themselves existed in the world. Their numbers approximated one million men, women, and children. There is some evidence that German Lutheran missionaries had made contact with other highlanders even earlier, but if so, that event was kept a secret.

  Neither Ewunga nor any of the team’s porters could understand a word spoken by the tribe they had stumbled upon. Ewunga tried pidgin, the lingua franca of the coast, to no avail. In the normal course of human affairs, the impasse between the prospectors and the highlanders would have gone down to posterity in terms no more enlightened than the passage quoted above. But Mick Leahy carried a camera—a Leica—and that made all the difference.

  Between 1930 and 1935, Leahy led no fewer than eleven expeditions into the interior, always in quest of gold. He enlisted three of his brothers, Pat, Jim, and Dan, to share his prospecting adventures. Taking photos, which began as a hobby, became a more and more serious pursuit for Mick, and after the first trip he added a movie camera to his documentary arsenal. Leahy had a real curiosity about the natives he encountered on his wanderings, and he gradually came to recognize New Guinea’s immensely complex pattern of warring tribes separated by mountain ridges only a few miles apart. That understanding was inevitably shaped, however, by the colonial assumptions of the day, which posited that the “kanakas” needed to be taught the white man’s standards of right and wrong. If these lessons could be instilled, “savages” might reap the benefits of civilization.

  Leahy also kept a diary on all his trips. A perfunctory log at the start, the record of his daily doings gradually became more thoughtful and introspective. Curated in the National Library of Australia in Canberra, the diaries have never been published.

  Mick Leahy died in 1979, a cranky and embittered man who never found the bonanza he had chased all his life. He left behind some five thousand photographs and many reels of 16mm film from his expeditions. These documents, of which the man was justly proud, might well have vanished with his passing but for the intercession of Rob Connolly and Robin Anderson, photojournalists who first explored the New Guinea highlands in 1980. The pair befriended Leahy’s surviving brothers Jim and Dan, and they were stunned to discover Mick’s photographic record.

  It occurred to Connolly and Anderson that there must be many natives still alive who had witnessed Leahy’s entrada into the highland valleys in the 1930s. As they would modestly claim in 1987: “There is no great difficulty today in finding highlanders who participated in these events of fifty years ago. It is simply a matter of following Michael ­Leahy’s line of march and talking to people along the way.” So began a project lasting three years, as Connolly and Anderson tracked down elders all over the highlands who vividly recalled their tribes’ first contact with the gold miners in the 1930s, compiling one hundred hours of interviews conducted in eight languages. In addition, the journalists showed the natives the photos of themselves that Mick Leahy had taken, and even managed to project some of the film footage in impromptu outdoor theaters in the locals’ villages.

  The film that Connolly and Anderson put together, titled simply First Contact, was nominated for an Academy Award. It remains, thirty-five years after I first viewed it, the most powerful documentary I have ever seen. Connolly and Anderson’s book, First Contact, published in 1987, profoundly deepens the story.

  In Leahy’s photos, the “utterly thunderstruck” countenances of natives in village after village are preserved at the moment of discovery. Handicapped by the huge linguistic gulf and by his own cultural baggage, Leahy could only guess what the “kanakas” though
t. Thanks to Connolly and Anderson, we have at last as deep an understanding of first contact from the victims’ point of view as we are ever likely to get. We glimpse, as it were, what the Aztecs thought and feared when they first laid eyes on the conquistadors.

  More than fifty years after Leahy and Dwyer saw those pinpoints of light from their campsite on the south side of the high mountain ridge, Connolly and Anderson recorded the reaction of Kirupana Eza’e, a young boy at the time, to the sudden advent of strange creatures in his valley:

  “I was terrified. I couldn’t think properly, and I cried uncontrollably. My father pulled me along by the hand and we hid behind some tall kunai grass. Then he stood up and peeped out at the white men.

  “Once they had gone the people sat down and developed stories. They knew nothing of white-skinned men. We had not seen far places. We knew only this side of the mountains. And we thought we were the only living people. We believed that when a person died, his skin changed to white and he went over the boundary to ‘that place’—the place of the dead. So when the strangers came we said: ‘Ah, these men do not belong to the earth. Let’s not kill them—they are our own relatives. Those who have died before have turned white and come back.’ ”

  Because they were prospectors rather than anthropologists, the two Aussies were anxious to move on quickly from the first group of natives they encountered in the highlands. But once the “kanakas” encouraged them to visit their village, Leahy and Dwyer realized that the well-tended gardens and the domesticated pigs that the highlanders kept promised a golden opportunity for resupply. So began a pattern of trade that would persist through the next five years. In exchange for yams, bananas, cucumbers, sugar cane, and the occasional pig, the gold miners offered glass beads. The natives seemed overjoyed at the parley.

  There was no ignoring the frenzy of wonderment that Leahy and Dwyer’s party sparked as they passed from one village to the next. Ever wary of attack by the natives, who greatly outnumbered them, the explorers decided to make a show of force. Camped in a clearing, they apprehensively watched as an ever-growing throng of staring highlanders surrounded them. As Leahy would write in 1937:

  To their way of thinking, our guns were no more than sticks and we were otherwise unarmed. Dwyer thought it would be a good idea to show them how our rifles worked.

  “Come on, you baboons!” he shouted. “Pipe down and give attention.”

  The chatter stopped immediately.

  “That’s right, folks, gather round,” he continued. “Now I want you to get this. It’s going to scare the life out of you, but it’s for your own good. My young friend here,” he waved to me, “is going to show you something that has your lousy bows and arrows beat all hollow. Hey—you over there—you big-mouthed ape with the shield—this is mainly for your benefit.”

  Leahy set up three wooden slabs against a nearby hillside, one in front of another, then loaded his rifle.

  Dwyer herded the natives out of range and I blazed away, the high-powered bullet tearing through the slabs as if they hadn’t been there. At the report of the gun, the kanakas simply fell over backward. Some of them ran away, others groveled on their bellies. I got them calmed down finally by taking the empty cartridge hull out of the gun and blowing across the end of it so it whistled.

  For Leahy and Dwyer, the discovery of natives in an upland assumed to be uninhabited amounted to a serious threat to their prospecting. To add to the Aussies’ frustration, stream after stream tested negative for gold. As the men moved southward, the string of villages left behind loomed as a nuisance, complicating the return journey. At first Leahy and Dwyer were perplexed to find how uneasy each batch of natives grew when they ventured only a few miles from home. It was the men’s first inkling that the highlanders, far from comprising a uniform culture, were partitioned into a complex patchwork of tribes that spoke mutually unintelligible languages, cleaved to different myths and cosmologies, and warred upon one another.

  The photographs Leahy took of these encounters strip the native people of the smug colonial assumptions that the Aussies carried from camp to camp. Their faces are screwed into agonies of terror and disbelief. In one memorable shot, a porter from the lowlands mugs for the camera in front of a row of women whose eyes are closed, their mouths agape with wails. Those faces seem to betoken grief, but thanks to the research of Connolly and Anderson, a more nuanced gloss explicates the moment: “The crying women are convinced Porte is their relative returned from the dead. They clutch onto him in tearful elation and try to prevent him from leaving.”

  Likewise, the direct testimony of the elders interviewed in the 1980s by the documentarians unravels the shock those men and women had undergone as children, as they lived through the most profound event of their lives. In the film First Contact, they speak directly (via subtitles) to the camera:

  “The whiteman came from over there. We’d never seen such a thing. Did he come from the ground? Did he come from the sky? The water? We were confused.”

  “We heard a strange story that the lightning had come. We thought these whitemen were lightning from the sky.”

  “This is what the people said. They are not of the living. They must be our ancestors from the land of the dead. . . . We thought we were the only living people. We believed our dead went over there, turned white and came back as spirits. Our own dead had returned.”

  Although Mick Leahy does not quite admit the fact in The Land That Time Forgot, by some point in June 1930 he and Mick Dwyer were effectively lost. As they followed a large river they assumed must flow into the Ramu (near whose headwaters they had climbed into the “blank on the map” in late May), they realized the topography was all wrong. Rather than try to retrace the bewildering path of their outward trek, they resolved to follow this new river downstream, reckoning that sooner or later it must reach the sea on some coast of New Guinea.

  That decision could well have spelled disaster, but Leahy and Dwyer were tough, resourceful outdoorsmen, and despite the anxieties of their predicament, they welcomed the challenge. Passed on from one village to the next, repeating over and over again the drama of first contact, they wandered south on faint native trails or used machetes to cut their own through the forest. Before long they had eaten nearly all the food they had packed in from the upper Ramu, and they ran desperately short of trade goods. They had no choice but to march on.

  As it turned out, the major river the party followed was the Tua–Purari—the same torrent whose first descent our Sobek team would attempt in 1983. So tangled and impenetrable were the hills and valleys through which the men forced their way that often they had to veer far away from the river, sometimes losing sight of it for days at a time. Guides from one village after another led the men on what seemed like profitless zigzags. Leahy carried a compass, but he could not figure out the lay of the land. He and Dwyer began to wonder if their guides were deliberately leading them into an ambush, or simply prolonging a wild goose chase to wear them into exhaustion. With no means of communication except sign language, mutual incomprehension ruled the day.

  Then, in the middle of nowhere, the bedraggled team stumbled into what might well have been a fatal geographic trap. Blocking their path was a substantial tributary of the main river, flowing into it from the east, far too deep and swift to ford. The natives called the new river the Piu. By now Leahy and Dwyer were both afflicted with malaria, and the whole party was beginning to starve. Only the odd sago palm, which could be cut down, cored, and cooked, gave them a modicum of starchy food.

  A steady rain soaked everything. That evening Leahy asked Ewunga, the foreman of the team of porters, what he thought about their chances. Ewunga answered in pidgin, “Bimeby bone belong me stink along bush.” (“Soon my bones will be rotting in the forest.”)

  For days the men camped in the fork between the two uncrossable rivers. As the rain continued unabated, the rivers topped their banks, forcing a relocation of camp. Leahy and Dwyer decided they would try to build a dugo
ut canoe to ferry the team and gear across the tributary. It took three days to build, and when launched, the canoe came close to swamping. But by ferrying three or four men at a time, the team succeeded in crossing the Piu.

  By now the party had left the highlands and were deep in the densely jungled highland fringe. It was impossible to hike along the banks of the river, so the men resumed their endless zigzags up and down the steep ridges that cut across their southward march. The supply of food was almost gone. “A couple of spoonfuls of sago for breakfast,” Leahy observed one morning, “and no immediate prospect of more.”

  Out of desperation, Leahy concocted a plan to build a raft to float the whole party down the river. Before the men could resort to that last-ditch expedient, Leahy set out on foot from camp to investigate a dull roar he heard in the distance.

  A half-hour’s travel brought us to the source of it. The stream had become much narrower and deeper, running between two steep mountains, and all at once the whole immense volume of it plunged down into a deep gorge, through a long series of rapids. If we had trusted ourselves to a raft, none of us could possibly have come out alive.

  The occasional natives the men encountered during these grim days in the jungle were far more frightened by the intruders than the highlanders had been. But one day Leahy spotted a “kanaka” wearing a lap-lap, the wraparound loincloth adopted by the coastal natives but unknown in the interior. It promised the nearness of the coast. Dwyer had developed a sore leg that threatened to incapacitate him—a “tropical ulcer, the most pernicious of the ills with which New Guinea is cursed,” Leahy wrote.