ARRIVAL IN NEW GUINEA 37 



inlet, so they hailed a canoe which ventured within 

 speaking distance, and by repeating several times 

 " Mimika," the only word of their language that we 

 knew at that time, learnt that we had overshot our 

 destination by a few miles. That canoe, it should be 

 noted, was remarkable on account of two of its crew. 

 One of them held aloft an ancient Union Jack; the 

 other was conspicuously different from the scores of 

 men in the canoes about us, who were all frankly in a 

 bare undress, by wearing an old white cotton jacket 

 fastened by a brass button which was ornamented with 

 the head of Queen Victoria. How the flag and the 

 coat and the button came to that outlandish place will 

 never be known, but it is certain that they must have 

 passed through very many hands before they came there, 

 for certainly no Englishman had ever been there before. 



When the launch returned to the ship a crowd of 

 natives, fifty or sixty at the least, came clambering on 

 board leaving only one or two men in each canoe to paddle 

 after the steamer as we slowly returned towards the 

 Mimika. Two men were recognised by Capt. Van 

 Herwerden as having belonged to a party of natives 

 from this coast, who had been taken some years earlier 

 to Merauke, the Dutch settlement near the southern- 

 most point of New Guinea. At Merauke they had 

 got into mischief and had been put in prison from which 

 nine of them escaped, and these two men, probably 

 the only survivors of the party, had contrived to find 

 their way along four hundred miles of coast, peopled 

 by hostile tribes, back to their own country. 



The behaviour of our new fellow passengers was very 



