614 STRAY NOTES ON PAPUAN ETHNOLOGY, 



In July, 1890, I was visiting the village of Polatona, in 

 Bentley Bay, near the eastern extremity of New Guinea. Outside 

 the travellers' house where I lodged, there was planted in the 

 sand of the beach a post about six feet high, carved and painted 

 in red, white and black. It so attracted my attention that I 

 made on the spot a pencil sketch, re-drawn on Plate Iviii. My 

 enquiries elicited that it was a canoe stem or figure-head, yero7na, 

 and that it had once belonged to one of the Chads Bay natives, 

 hanged for the murder of Capt. Ansell."^ It had probably formed 

 a portion of one of the large native sailing vessels, whose hulls 

 are built of several enormous planks sewn together. 



An artistically executed bird's head surmounted the pillar. 

 My colleague Mr. North, Ornithologist to the Australian Museum, 

 kindly examined the original drawing, and in discussing it gave 

 me the benefit of his expert knowledge. We agree that the ball 

 placed under the beak and the buttress behind the neck are to 

 be regarded as decorations additional to the original scheme; that 

 the graceful and boldly modelled neck, the general shape of the 

 head, and especially the crest, identify the bird as a kind of 

 cassowary; further, that the line down the neck is an allusion to 

 the brightly coloured space bare of feathers so conspicuous on 

 that bird. 



It was not to be expected of the savage artist that his work 

 should afford exact specific recognition of the cassowary he 

 portrayed. The only species recorded from this locality, Casua- 

 rius picticollis, Sclater, differs markedly by its flattened crest, 

 and no known species, so Mr. North says, has a beak so pro- 

 nouncedly decurved. But it is possible that a bird still unknown 

 to science was copied by the Papuan craftsman. 



The bird's neck issues from the gaping and toothed jaws of the 

 conventionalised crocodile, the angle of whose mouth is carried 

 up in a scroll to form a large eye. In Prof. Haddon's illustrations 

 the usual attitude of the bird seems vertical to the plane of the 

 crocodile; here, on the contrary, it is horizontal. Below, the post 



* Thomson; British New Guinea, p. 34. 



