Limits of the Known

by David Roberts

  Leahy fired his gun at the same moment as the Kukukuku man swung his stone club, landing a powerful blow to the head. Bleeding profusely, lapsing in and out of consciousness, Leahy crawled under the tent to hide, even as he was dimly aware of an all-out battle raging through camp. Pat Leahy caught arrows in his arm and chest, and several Waria men were also wounded. But guns prevailed over arrows and clubs. Once the Kukukuku had fled, the men counted six dead attackers in camp; how many others had been wounded but got away, the men could only guess.

  In his book, Leahy recounts the battle in mock-heroic terms, reserving the highest praise for his brother, who yanked the arrows out of his body even as he kept firing his rifle: “Paddy is in physique and temperament the traditional fighting Irishman, and except for his concern over my smashed head, I think he thoroughly enjoyed himself that morning.” But Mick Leahy was all too aware that the blow from the stone club had nearly killed him. Writing in 1937, he reckoned the toll: “I still have three distinct dents in my skull as a souvenir of that crack of the stone club, and have never since been able to hear anything with my left ear except a continual dull roaring.”

  According to Connolly and Anderson, the fight with the Kukukuku changed Leahy’s attitude for good. “From that moment onwards, a ruthless determination seems to have settled upon him never to allow such a thing to happen again. It was kill or be killed, he told himself . . .”

  The battle ended the 1931 expedition, as the Leahy brothers led a dispirited retreat to the coastal town of Lae. On subsequent journeys from 1932 to 1934, hostilities sometimes broke out over incidents no more weighty than the theft of an axe. Leahy’s self-righteousness, expurgated from his book, emerges in the lines of his unpublished diary. Of one such conflict in 1932, he drily recorded, “Wiped off a few Ogofagu nigs who pinched an axe and then got too confident and opened up on us.”

  The demonstrations Leahy orchestrated to show off the power of the team’s firearms—shooting through planks of wood set against the hillside, or executing a pig (filmed by Leahy and preserved in the Connolly and Anderson movie)—often failed to drive home the intended lesson. Half a century later, the documentarians recorded the natives’ confusion. “We thought the gun was just for shooting pigs, and that it couldn’t hurt men,” said one man. “It never occurred to us that they would use the gun to shoot us,” said another.

  Leahy blamed soft-hearted bureaucrats in colonial offices for propagating an image of the highland native as a peaceful innocent. “Perhaps the so-called experts regarding primitive man’s reactions were suffering from too much purely academic knowledge,” he wrote. “Some of these experts had apparently never encountered a primitive savage in his natural element. . . . Such ‘armchair administrators’ can be found in any of the world’s cities, sitting in their easy chairs, with a policeman on every other corner guarding their lives and property.” Leahy fully expected the “kanakas” to absorb the white man’s code of right and wrong, and to adjust their cultures accordingly. To the end of his life, he clung to his hard-won wisdom about “primitive” morality. “There is no law among these savages but the law of might, and no achievement considered more praiseworthy than a cunningly planned murder. To kill or be killed is to the wild kanaka a normal condition of his insecure life.”

  Leahy’s diary comes the closest to reflecting the man’s true beliefs and actions, and it is a loss to the history of New Guinea that it has never been published. According to Connolly and Anderson, between 1931 and 1934 those pages record the killing of no fewer than forty-one highlanders. Nor does the diary show much remorse for the victims of his incursions into their homeland. In the 1980s, Dan Leahy, the brother with whom Mick shared the most highland probes, still swore, “The only reason we had to kill people was simply, if we hadn’t killed them, they would have killed us.”

  Leahy recognized that the biggest obstacle to mining in the highlands was the backbreaking logistics of getting men and machinery to any stream he hoped to exploit—not to mention getting the gold to market. In March 1933 he hired a plane and a nervy pilot to fly over the upland valleys, so that he could reconnoiter the unmapped terrain. And only a month later, in the Wahgi valley, where he had at last made a promising strike, Leahy enlisted natives to help his team prepare a runway for a landing. Some of the footage of this extraordinary effort is preserved in the film First Contact. Paid in shells and beads, the locals use long poles to dislodge stones, or axes to cut out roots. Linked arm in arm, singing, they stamp and jump to flatten the ground. Leahy also filmed the reaction of the Wahgi people as the De Havilland Fox Moth glided to a landing on the new airstrip. Men, women, and children flee or fall to the ground.

  “All the men and women held each other tightly and cried, ‘Today will be the end of us all!’ ” recalled a witness half a century later. “The people lay flat on the ground and then ran off, keeping their heads as close as possible to the earth. Once home they killed their pigs and clung onto their brothers and cried for each other. . . . But after that crying and feasting, nothing happened. And the people said, ‘That thing has instead brought us good things.’ ”

  On one flight the plane brought in a gramophone. Leahy filmed the natives’ reaction to this unfathomable device. “We heard its cry and thought it was a box full of ghosts,” recalled one informant fifty years later. “We thought our dead ancestors were inside.”

  Since airplanes could bring in trade goods by the cartload, Leahy was able to flood the Wahgi valley with items coveted by the highlanders—especially kina shells. One arresting photo shows a crowd of natives gathered around a row of more than forty kina shells laid out for display on fern leaves. Rapture and incredulity seize the faces of the onlookers. Yet inevitably, the flood of once precious rarities devalued them as currency. That his own incursion was destabilizing a culture and an economy that it had taken centuries to establish does not seem to have greatly troubled Leahy. Awing the natives with airplanes and a gramophone was a means to an end.

  A strange paradox emerges in the attitude of Mick Leahy to the “kanakas.” He took his documenting of native ceremonies seriously, subscribing to correspondence courses in photography and writing. A kind of proto-anthropological curiosity lurks beneath the man’s surface, and many passages in The Land That Time Forgot detail native customs and crafts and dress and weaponry. But that curiosity is constrained by a blind faith in the superiority of white civilization, which dictates his recurring complaints when the “savages” fail to learn the moral codes of their colonial betters. In the end, gold was what Leahy was after, and all too often the natives loom as a nuisance to be put up with on the way to yet another creek to be panned and tested. His life’s goal of striking it rich slips away month by month, year by year.

  In 1934 Mick and Dan Leahy set off from the Wahgi valley westward toward the border of Dutch territory (today’s Irian Jaya). They passed through the homeland of yet another uncontacted tribe, the Enga. As Connolly and Anderson write:

  The country was poorer, food was scarcer, and this made the people reluctant to supply the newcomers. But more importantly, the Enga people did not appear to welcome the new arrivals as returning ancestors or as powerful spirit beings to be feared. . . . The response was neither tearful welcome of the returning dead nor abject terror, but confusion.

  On June 25, the team camped in the village of Doi. Mick Leahy strolled up the hillside to photograph the roped-off cluster of tents pitched in a clearing (on sacred ground, though he did not realize that fact), surrounded by the usual throng of natives. Less than an hour later, the bloodiest encounter among all eleven of Leahy’s highland expeditions erupted. As he recounted in The Land That Time Forgot:

  I had just concluded the daily diary entry, ending with the remark that one of the men in the crowd appeared to be trying to stir up trouble, when the individual mentioned showed that my surmise had been correct. Holding in his hand the green branch of a tree, the peace takis, he took up his position on a rise of ground nearby and ma
de a vigorous harangue to the crowd, ending by casting the takis to the ground and trampling it under foot. Our interpreter afterward told me that in this harangue he had told the people we were unarmed, and had urged them to kill us and seize our shells. . . . The orator ran to the nearest house and disappeared inside. I had been sitting on the foot of Danny’s cot, and without rising, dropped my fountain pen and reached for my rifle.

  The orator ran out of the house bearing three spears, one in his right hand and two held in reserve in his left. The crowd opened a way for him as he charged straight for the tent, the spear in his right hand poised for throwing. When he was almost at the rope barrier, I fired, the impact of the high-powered bullet apparently overcoming the momentum of his rush, so that he seemed for a fraction of a second to stop dead still before toppling forward. The spear slithered from his outstretched hand almost to the entrance of the tent.

  That violent outburst immediately triggered a fusillade of rifle fire from the porters in Leahy’s team. The Enga people fled into the bush. “For a horrible moment I thought the boys had lost their heads and were firing into the packed mass of unarmed natives in front of our tent, but saw immediately that none of the shots were taking effect,” Leahy wrote in 1937.

  This sanitized account records the killing of only a single Enga man, the rabble-rouser who ran down the slope brandishing his spear. Leahy devotes several paragraphs to his men’s efforts to find the wounded hiding in the bush, to bring them back into camp, and to treat their injuries. He insists that “The kanakas then became quite friendly, assuring us, through the interpreter, that the orator who had made the speech had been entirely to blame for the attack.”

  Yet the “battle,” which Leahy insists lasted “no more than half a minute,” so disturbed him that he spent a sleepless night “debating whether the exploration of this cruel country was worth the cost.” In the end his, soul-searching resolved itself in a reaffirmation of the colonial credo.

  I could not blame myself for the shooting that had occurred, knowing well that if we had not been able to defend ourselves, all of us would have been wiped out. . . . Such clashes could be avoided only if white men stayed out of the country altogether—in which case the natives would go right ahead killing each other off anyhow. Death by violence for ages had been the main natural check on population among these people. I decided finally that exploration and the establishment of white authority were worth whatever they might cost; only the strong hand of the white man’s government could eventually bring peace.

  Leahy’s diary tells quite a different story. As he sat in his tent, he noted, “There are a few loud-mouthed bastards among the thousand or more at present around the roped off area who badly want a lesson.” As the “orator” charged, Leahy emerged from his tent, raised his rifle and “put a soft-nosed bullet through his guts.” The firing that immediately broke out among Leahy’s “boys” was far from harmless. “A second shot had torn out the brains of the big mouth and splattered the ground in the vicinity with blood. And the utterly unexpected turning of the tables, completely demoralised them, and instead of what . . . was going to be an easy murder and looting, they carted away at least ten to fifteen corpses and assisted as many more who were wounded to their houses. This morning all quiet, all savvy firearms.”

  Half a century later, Connolly and Anderson visited Wabag, the town that now occupies the site of the Enga village of Doi, and interviewed the son of the man whose charge Leahy had stopped with the “soft-nosed bullet through his guts.” The orator’s name was Pingeta, and his son, Petro Pisine, reenacted the battle as if it had taken place the previous week. In the film First Contact, he points around him as he narrates the slaughter, his voice straining in anger and indignation. “Pingeta—my father—had his head blown to pieces. And then they shot people there—and over there . . . back there . . . and all around. When he shot that way Teatakan was killed. Ambon was killed over there and also Nambon. . . . It was Lo’s mother who was killed over there. In this direction Kalakoa was killed. . . . This is not counting the many who were wounded.”

  Once more, the unfathomably complex collision between explorers and natives during first contact had wrought tragedy that reverberated through the generations to come. Yet the clash between Mick Leahy’s parties and the highlanders of New Guinea ended up far short of genocide, or even of true conquest. By the 1930s, some of the Australian officials in charge of the government of this island colony actually had the natives’ welfare at heart. Doctrines that curtailed the exploitation by the “labor recruiters” Leahy himself envisaged ameliorated the miseries that befell, for example, the Aztecs under Cortés or the Inca under Pizarro. The virtual enslavement of coastal New Guinea peoples from the nineteenth century onward never took hold in the highlands.

  One aspect of the encounter between the gold miners and the natives that escaped the pages of The Land That Time Forgot was the sexual relations that slowly developed between the intruders and the highlanders. It began with the Waria men, who were charmed by the beauty of bare-breasted innocents among the tribes they visited, and it was lubricated by the relatively casual attitude toward sex of the highland tribes. What today could well be regarded as bribery, coercion, and even rape sometimes resulted in lasting marriages, such as that of Ewunga, Leahy’s trusted Waria assistant.

  Mick Leahy himself indulged in couplings with highland women. In the 1980s, Connolly and Anderson interviewed several of these “paramours” in their old age. They speak in the film First Contact. “My people gave me to the strangers to get their wealth [shells]. I was just a young girl. My breasts were still small. . . . I was the first. . . . We were terrified. We cried mother! father! We thought they’d eat us. In fact they were kind to us. We had sex together, then we knew they were men. . . . Not spirits, just men.”

  Quite a few offspring resulted from these pairings. Mick Leahy fathered three sons who, despite the stigma of being branded as “half-breeds,” ended up as wealthy coffee planters and plantation owners in their home valleys. According to Connolly and Anderson, their parentage was an open secret in the highlands, but Leahy, despite living the rest of his life in New Guinea, never acknowledged them. Disillusioned and reactionary, he spent his declining years venting his fury against the colonial government for its leniency and liberal reforms. Though he lived well enough in his old age, Leahy never got over the failure of his lifelong quest for the ultimate bonanza in gold.

  Connolly and Anderson interviewed a man named Bob Fraser, who witnessed the accidental meeting of Mick Leahy and his mixed-race son in the coastal town of Lae. “Mick was very polite to him, but made no sign of recognition,” said Fraser. “He knew who he was. Well, my respect for Mick fell through my boots. He had come down from his pedestal. He was just a bloke. I said to him afterward, ‘Jesus Christ, Mick . . . !’ and he said, ‘Well, Christ! What can I do?’ ”

  * “Kanaka” was slang, with derogatory overtones, for natives living in what Aussies deemed to be a primitive state.

  SIX

  THE UNDISCOVERED EARTH

  “What have you learned from all your travels?” It’s a standard question that talk show hosts and Q & A journalists throw out, usually near the end of the session, to wrap up an interview with some grizzled veteran who has rambled across the globe. It’s a lazy question, too, as it asks the subject to distill decades of conflicting experiences down to a fortune-cookie answer.

  But all too often the beleaguered traveler comes back with a lazy answer: “That people all over the world are basically the same. They’re just like us.”

  That pat reply, I suspect, stems from an egalitarian impulse. The Maasai in East Africa, the Bedouins in the Near East, the Sami in Scandinavia may seem strange and look different, but beneath the skin they’re all human. Yet how insultingly reductionist that formula inevitably is.

  Mick Leahy was blinkered in his dealings with the highlanders of New Guinea because he failed to recognize how diametrically opposed his own Aussie/co
lonial take on the world was from that of the Enga or the Chimbu. To the end of his life, he believed that if only the “kanakas” could be taught the white man’s moral code, peace and justice would prevail.

  What I’ve learned in my scattershot travels during the last fifty years is how profoundly different cultures are from one another, and what violence it does to a subjugated people to force them to live in the ways of their conquerors. Throughout history, tribes have embodied the sense of their own differentness in the very words they choose to name themselves. Inuit, Diné, San, and scores of other appellations translate as “the People” or “the True People.” It is their enemies who call them “Eskimos,” “Navajos,” or “Bushmen.” Some cultures build the sense of their separateness into their own languages, as they label all others “the Un-People.”

  “People all over the world are just the same” is a feeble-minded but kind-hearted stab at defusing the tensions that have fueled millennia of war, slavery, and oppression. When the Romans branded all the tribes that roamed the outskirts of their great empire “barbarians,” they assigned themselves the righteous mandate of conquest. Inextricably bound up through the ages with the recognition of cultural differences are the dismal pageants of racism and xenophobia—currents that are alive and well in the United States of America in 2017.

  To my mind, the only tenable stance to take in the face of a world teeming with “otherness” is an inflexible cultural relativism. That dictates that I part ways with my friend Judi Wineland on the issue of female genital mutilation among the Maasai. As barbaric as the practice seems to me, I believe that it is not our right to “educate” the Maasai (or any other people) to purge their culture of the practice of clitoridectomy.