Among the Headhunters

by Robert Lyman

  Although the next day was spent in Chongtore and was designed to be a rest day for the porters, who were bearing the brunt of the expedition’s physical challenge, the day was wet, bitingly cold, and miserable. The expedition was being conducted outside the monsoon period, which runs from April until October, as travel in the hills was much more difficult during the rainy season. Yet here was weather that was unusually unseasonable. Mills and Fürer-Haimendorf managed to visit both Chongtore and a neighboring village, Liresu, but concluded that these communities were rather poor and miserable. That night a storm blew wildly through the hills, blowing the flimsy roofs off the porter’s shelters and soaking them before the day’s march to Helipong, which Mills knew from experience would be a hard one. Yet it would also be a high point of the journey, as Helipong sat majestically at the highest point between Mokokchung and the Patkois. From its peak one could see all the way back to the Brahmaputra, glistening in the far distance to the west, and the long blue stain in the lower sky of the Patkoi Hills to the east.

  On Tuesday, November 17, the entire caravan packed itself up and, in good heart despite the rain, begin the inevitable descent far into the valley below. The river crossings in this valley—four in a row—were made over logs, which Mills hated because he had very poor balance. Then began the steep ascent to Helipong, some 7,280 feet above sea level. The forest ran out at about 7,000 feet, and the men climbed slowly upward into the cold clouds. As they reached the summit of Mount Helipong, they emerged from the mist into bright sunshine and the welcome of the tiny Chang village of some twenty houses, an outpost of the Yimsungr tribe. The view in every direction was magnificent, making up for the poverty of the hamlet. Mills was always astonished at the view from Helipong: “You can see from the Burma boundary to the Plains. . . . I loved every minute of the view, for I saw for the first time villages I had heard of for years. I could see from the Konyak country I visited in the north, to the Sangtams I have been to in the south.” Fürer-Haimendorf was equally astonished at the view:

  We overlooked the land of the Lhotas and Aos and beyond the distant hills of the Konyaks. The country of the Changs and Sangtams lay at our feet and in the east the unexplored mountains of the Kalyo Kengyus and the Patkoi Range, with the 12,622 feet peak of Mount Saramati, were clearly visible. Here in Helipong we were on the watershed between the Brahmaputra and the Irrawaddy. The rivers to the east belong to the basin of the Chindwin; following them, if you were lucky enough not to lose your head en route, you would arrive in Burma. All these high ridges, running almost at right angles to our proposed route, were not a very encouraging sight, and yet the glimpse we had caught of the distant Patkoi Range only sharpened the wish to set foot in that distant, unknown land.

  This was a location from which the sun allowed the Assam Rifles’ heliograph to send messages in Morse code back to the rear party at Mokokchung, confirming the status of the column. The next time they would be able to communicate with Mokokchung would be on the return journey—if they got back, and if the sun allowed the heliograph apparatus to function.

  Camp was set up, and for the first time security drills were practiced by both the sepoys and porters. Local gaonburas were entertained in traditional fashion as they came to discuss the affairs of their villages with Mills while Williams busied himself with ensuring that his sepoys and Smith’s eager porters were prepared for any alarm now that they were entering territory that harbored uncertain sensibilities. As quietness fell over the camp that night, the rain began to drum against the canvas of the Europeans’ tents, thudding heavily against the flimsy banana-leaf roofs of the shelters and saturating the blankets of those unfortunate enough to be huddled around the dying embers of the fires. No threat emerged during the night, as indeed none was expected, but it was best to be prepared.

  As the dawn struggled to appear the following morning—Wednesday, November 18—the camp emerged quickly from its sodden slumbers and the column made haste to climb down from Helipong’s heights. The objective that day was to move from the territory of the Chang to that of the Yimsungr, resting at the end of the day at the village of Kuthurr. There the column found that although outward appearances were civil, an underlying hostility sat like a heavy blanket over the village. Despite the customary gift of pigs and chickens, considered Fürer-Haimendorf, had “we arrived singly, or even in a small number, there can be no doubt that their joy at such unusual guests would have taken other forms, and our chances of ever leaving Kuthurr would have been slight, for our skulls would have certainly occupied places of honor in the men’s house.” That night, for the first time, Williams supervised the construction of a strong bamboo palisade and practiced the call to arms several times before he was satisfied that his men, and the porters, who formed a second line of defense inside the perimeter, were satisfactorily prepared for the possibility of an attack. None came, however. Indeed, Nagas tended not to attack at night, which was a boon for the exhausted column, giving it a chance to recover each night from its daily exertions up hill and down dale. But the palisade was an insurance policy, and an attitude of alertness generated by the practice alarms and nightly picket duty ensured that all the men knew the expedition was a military and not an anthropological one, with the ever-present prospect of danger.

  Kuthurr’s reluctant duty was followed the next day by a march to the village of Chentang. Although some villages beyond—most notably Chingmei—would be overwhelmingly friendly, the affections of the rest of the region were uncertain. This was a traditionally troubled area, the ethnic nexus of three often-warring tribes: Changs, Yimsungrs, and Kalyo Kengyus. While the expedition was encamped outside Chentang on November 19, the last message came by runner from Pangsha, laughing at Mills’s diplomatic overtures and suggesting that the villagers would not give up their legitimately acquired slaves and that the members of the expedition “were probably all women, and the sooner they came to attack them the better.”

  News of the progress of the 500 or so imperial troops, the bayonets of the 150 sepoys fixed to the ends of their rifles so that the sun—when it shone in these unusually cold and overcast days—could glint off the highly polished steel and resemble the long Naga spears of their enemies, was being reported nervously through the hills. Mills’s hope was that this threat of force would persuade the Pangsha leaders to parley rather than commit their menfolk to what must inevitably be a one-sided battle given the difference in armaments. Early indications, however, were that Pangsha refused to be intimidated. Would Pangsha fight? If so, it represented a fearsome proposition: over a thousand warriors desperate both to demonstrate resistance to the demands of the distant Raj and to protect their village, massive by Naga standards and the center of all power in the mid–Patkoi Range. It would be a mistake for anyone, even armed with the dead-accurate Lee-Enfield rifle, to take this threat lightly. A wrong move in unknown terrain or an ambush by Nagas, for whom this country was their well-known backyard, could quickly upset the balance between the two sides that in terms of firepower clearly favored the Assam Rifles but in terms of local knowledge vastly favored Pangsha. Not only were the Nagas adept at close-quarters fighting in this terrain but they were armed with weapons that favored fighting in the close scrub, high grass, and thick vegetation of the hillsides and valleys. The traditional Naga spear—deadly at twenty paces in the hands of a trained warrior—was accompanied by poisoned arrows (with fearsome iron-barbed heads) fired from crossbows of the sort they had seen at Chare, with an effective range of seventy-five yards. In addition, the many paths and tracks leading into the village would be thickly covered with panji.

  Nagas rarely attacked at night, preferring ambush. Because Naga villages were perched precariously on the tops of mountains and were well protected, pitched battles were unusual. Heads tended to be taken in one-to-one combat or when lone individuals or groups of unprotected villagers—such as women and children fetching water—were caught by their enemies and slaughtered. Ambush was perfected. Panji were one threat,
but there were others. Pits dug deep into the ground on paths, in which sharp spikes were hammered into the bottom to impale their victim, were another, as were rope tripwires stretched across jungle paths to release a poisoned bolt from a hidden crossbow into the chest of the unwary victim. But at no stage were Mills and Williams concerned that they might come off worse in an encounter with the rebel Nagas, even though the possibility that they might receive a bloody nose was a very real one. On November 22 Philip Mills wrote to Pamela in far-distant Kohima with instructions should he not return, noting, presumably for her comfort, that if he were to die, the “effect of the local poison is pleasingly instantaneous.”

  In all other respects the two men were confident of success. They had enough friendly Nagas around them in the region from villages that had long borne the brunt of Pangsha’s slaving and head-hunting aggression; their force of 150 Lee-Enfields was strong; most of the sepoys, although now members of Assam’s paramilitary police regiment—the five-battalion-strong Assam Rifles—were former long-service regular Gurkha soldiers who would be staunch in a fight, and they were commanded by a professional Gurkha officer, Major Williams. Mills and Williams also knew from personal experience the truth of Hilaire Belloc’s dictum in this kind of imperial encounter, expressed powerfully only a few short decades before in the ditty “Whatever happens, we have got / The Maxim gun, and they have not.”c It wasn’t Maxim guns with which the force was armed but drum-fed Lewis guns and bolt-action .303-inch Lee-Enfields that, well deployed by disciplined troops, would be more than a match for even the fiercest Kalyo Kengyu army. The expedition was now deep in hostile territory, and Mills and Williams went to some lengths to drill their baggage train—the 360 Naga porters (“coolies,” as Mills described them) carrying the expedition’s supplies—in erecting, patrolling, and defending the bamboo stockades they now had to build around their encampment at the end of each day’s march.

  Belloc, The Modern Traveller.

  Mills observed that the village of Chentang was overlooked by the huge enemy village of Sangpurr, which belonged to the Yimsungr tribe, and was shown the location outside the village where recently a Sangpurr raiding party had caught a Chentang villager unawares, first spearing him and then lopping off his head. Chentang was a miserable, muddy assortment of ill-made houses, the dilapidation the result of repeated Sangpurr attacks that placed its unfortunate villagers in a perpetual state of insecurity and anxiety, not to mention homelessness. There was in effect a continuous, if somewhat spluttering, state of war between these villages, and it is no surprise that the hard-put-upon people of Chentang were delighted to see Mills arrive in such force, the neatly accoutered sepoys impressive in their uniforms and canvas webbing. Allegiance to the Raj would deliver substantial security benefits for those villages on the side of the (British) law from far-distant Mokokchung, but it took a brave gaonbura to ally his village wholeheartedly with a far-distant power when this was its first armed foray into territory not in either the Administered or Control Areas, and there was no guarantee of return visits anytime soon. But the “stout hearts” of Chentang, as Mills described the villagers, seemed to be doing well enough on their own account.

  One of Mills’s ambitions was to persuade, by his version of armed diplomacy, any villages in the region that might otherwise side with Pangsha. His intent quite simply was to divide and rule, and while at Chentang he invited emissaries from the local villages to parley. He succeeded in persuading elders from Sangpurr to meet him, and they were offered gifts of food and clothes, all the while eyeing the impressive parade of heavily armed sepoys. Likewise, too, the village of Panso, which Mills described as “big and truculent,” sent representatives. They received gifts of rum and red cloth (prized by Nagas because the color red denoted high social status: gaonburas in the Administered Area received red blankets from the British as a sign of their exalted status as village leaders) but accepted them with impassive faces, undoubtedly nevertheless drinking in with their eyes, as Mills intended them to, the large size, purposeful demeanor, and disciplined authority of his small army. He had every intention of ensuring that the authority of the Raj and of the king-emperor, Edward VIII, was respected throughout these fractured lands. And he was pleased with the effects of his overtures at Chentang. “I could not help admiring the pluck of the Sangpurr and Panso headmen,” he recalled. “There they were, in our camp, disarmed and surrounded by Sepoys, yet they showed no emotion. I told Panso I would visit their village and that if they did us no harm we would do them none.”

  The following day the expedition said its farewells to Chentang and marched to Chingmei, which would be the advanced base for the final move to Pangsha. The village and the nearby camp were at 6,000 feet, although the men had to climb a saddle at over 7,000 feet to reach their destination. Chingmei, forewarned, send an advance party to guide the long single file (it stretched for over a mile) to safety, as the region was notorious for ambushes and the sepoys, who marched together, could not protect every one of the porters when they were strung out on the march. In his report Mills recorded, “On November 20th we reached our advanced base at Chingmei where the loyalty of my old friend Chingmak was of inestimable value. There we found that Pangsha had handed over to him all their slaves but one; they still defied us to visit them, and I found they had terrorised the whole neighbourhood, threatening to destroy any village which helped us.” Chingmak had already prepared eleven large bamboo huts in the midst of the camp area. Chingmei lived in a perpetual state of war with its neighbors, and Chingmak proudly displayed the head of a notorious Panso rogue who himself had had fifty heads to his credit. Chingmei gained some consolation from the sight of this withered specimen being stuck ignominiously on the “head tree” at the outskirts of the village, where it would be seen with a shiver (hopefully) of fear and concern by any Panso native approaching the village with nefarious intent. The biggest surprise was the news that Pangsha had voluntarily given up three of the four slaves it had taken and had left them with Chingmei as a sign of its good intentions. The fourth slave had already been sold into Burma and was, by all accounts, unrecoverable. By now five surrendered slaves had been collected. Mills looked at them with interest: “A girl about 17 or 18, a boy about 12, two little boys and a little girl. All except the little boy are in a pretty bad way, and seem stupid with all they have been through. . . . A very pathetic sight. I am having them fed on the best in the land and they are being treated with every kindness. Language is a real difficulty, as four of them are from up north and can’t understand more than a word or two of Chang.”

  It was imperative that the stockade be secure and the discipline of the porters exemplary if they were not to be picked off individually by Pangsha raiders, or if by their inattention they inadvertently made the entire camp vulnerable to attack. And yet Mills fumed at the ineptitude of the men. It had been many years since the last punitive expedition, and the skills and drills of setting up such a large camp in the midst of enemy territory had clearly been lost. The retreat was sounded repeatedly by the bugles of the Assam Rifles as a practice to rehearse the camp for any attack, the bamboo gates of the stockade being closed and barred at each time. Slowly the performance of the porters improved, and Williams, Mills, and Smith were gradually satisfied that a disciplined routine was being adopted and that the Naga porters understood what to do in an emergency. Despite the drills, as darkness fell a foolish sentry opened the gate to allow a number of men to wander out and collect water, strictly against orders. They managed to return, however, with their heads still attached to their bodies in time for a severe admonishment from an angry Williams.

  Mills continued his policy of armed diplomacy in the area of Chingmei, although the following day, November 21, was unseasonably wet, with heavy rain all day. But on November 22 he set out to visit the village of Yimpang. It was a slave-raiding village, and although Mills expected it to be relatively friendly, he took with him fifty sepoys and a piper. It was to be a day of firsts for the
people of Yimpang. None had ever before seen a white man, and none had ever enjoyed the pleasure until then of hearing the skirl of the great Highland bagpipe.

  To say we got a hearty welcome would be an exaggeration. The people were pretty frightened for no white man has ever been there before. It is over 7,000 feet up, and the first thing we did was to look at the view. It was rather thrilling, looking down on to unsurveyed country, and we were busy for some time taking bearings and putting on the map villages which were mere names before. . . .

  The sight of the Sepoys with rifles and fixed bayonets must have been rather shaking to Yimpang’s nerves, but we had a piper with us and after [a Scottish air] the people began to look more cheerful.

  One needed to look no further than the prominent head tree in the village to see the grisly fruits of the villagers’ recent labors. Five heads from the village of Saochu were impaled on it. The villagers’ pride in taking these heads, Mills determined, needed to be tempered, and he decided to insist on their confiscation. But he would not do so while inside Yimpang, where he and his men were at a disadvantage. He bided his time until safely outside the village’s fortifications and was able to observe carefully that these comprised a “double fence with a ditch in the middle [that] was simply bristling with poisoned bamboo spikes.” Once outside, he successfully demanded the heads, which he told his wife he would send to his friend Henry Balfour at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. Yimpang at least was trying to be friendly and was determined to make peace, which Mills hoped would also have a positive effect on Pangsha.

  The next and last village that the expedition would reach before Pangsha was Noklak. Mills likewise wanted peace there, but so far no emissaries had been received from the village, which was an ominous sign. After the twelve-mile march to Yimpang was concluded, however, Mills was told that a Noklak war party had been keeping track of his progress on a parallel ridge. Would Noklak fight? Mills could not be sure, although as each day passed the certainty of a fight with Pangsha became surer.