OUR RELATIONS WITH THE NATIVES 165 



They are by nature unconscionable thi eves an d a 

 chance of steahng is to them merely a chance of acquiring 

 property in the easiest way. On one occasion, when a 

 party of our coolies were returning alone from Parimau 

 to Wakatimi, they were waylaid at a narrow place in 

 the river by some Papuans, who reheved them of their 

 baggage and disappeared into the jungle ; most of the 

 stolen goods were subsequently returned, when the 

 natives were threatened with punishment. The same 

 thing happened another time when the coolies were 

 accompanied by armed Javanese soldiers, who ap- 

 parently forgot the use of their rifles until the thieves 

 had got away. But they had a proper respect for a 

 white man and whenever one of us, armed or not, was 

 with the canoes, the natives never tried to molest us. 

 They occasionally stole from the camps a knife or an 

 axe, but though they were constantly about our houses 

 and often inside them for hours at a time, we never lost 

 anything of value. 



A temptation, which often proved too strong for 

 them, was our fleet of canoes. At Wakatimi the canoes 

 were moored in front of the camp at the place where the 

 natives, who came to visit us, were accustomed to land. 

 They came mostly in the late afternoon and stayed till 

 sunset, and it happened several times that when they 

 went away they contrived to put two or three men into 

 one of our canoes and slip away with it unnoticed in the 

 dusk. But when on the following day we made a fuss, 

 the canoe was generally brought back with a long story 

 of its having been found floating down the river towards 

 the sea. 



