MALAY COOLIES 185 



of the road on the other side of the river for a few weeks 

 at a time, while the others were at Parimau or at Waka- 

 timi. We managed to continue this arrangement until 

 the end of October, when it became no longer possible to 

 keep an European supplied out there ; thenceforward 

 until the beginning of January the camp at the Watai- 

 kwa was occupied only by the guard of Gurkhas and 

 Javanese, who in the meantime consumed nearly all the 

 stores that had been so laboriously accumulated there. 



We often said hard things to and of our Malay coolies, 

 but the poor wretches were not to blame for being such 

 incompetent carriers. At their proper occupations of 

 carrying cargo to and from the ships at Macassar, or 

 working on the boats of the pearl-fishers, or doing odd 

 jobs in their native places, no doubt they excelled ; but 

 at struggling through the New Guinea jungle with even 

 the Hghtest of loads they were hopeless failures and the 

 wonder was that they survived as long as they did. 

 Taking them all round, the majority of them worked as 

 well as they could, and some of them even became quite 

 attached to us. 



To a large number of people the name of Malay 

 immediately suggests a savage person who runs amok, 

 but you may live for years in a Malay country and never 

 see a single amok. Fortunately our Malays never be- 

 haved in this dangerous fashion, though one day a man 

 who was suffering from fever went suddenly mad and 

 inflicted a serious knife-wound on the body of another 

 coolie; the wounded man was successfully treated by 

 Marshall, who was happily but seldom required in this 

 way to exercise his vocation as surgeon. Malays are 



