CROSS-COUNTRY JOURNEYS 231 



at Parimau with supplies sufficient for three months. 

 On the 14th January Marshall and Grant with two 

 Dayak collectors, forty-six coolies, thirty-one Papuans, 

 and about forty soldiers and convicts, by far the largest 

 number of men we had ever sent off at one time, set out 

 for the Wataikwa river. A few of them went on with 

 the Europeans to the Iwaka, where a track was cut 

 for two marches up the valley of that river, while the 

 rest, after leaving their loads at the Wataikwa depot, 

 returned to Parimau to fetch more loads of stores. 

 From the Wataikwa the coolies carried on the stores 

 to the upper camp on the Iwaka river, a three days' 

 march, and at the beginning of February Cramer and 

 I went up there with the last party. About a hundred 

 and fifty loads of one kind or another had been carried 

 up from Parimau in these various excursions, but un- 

 happily the coolies ate up a good many of the loads 

 on the way, and still more unhappily many of the 

 coolies fell sick, so that if we had wished to send back 

 to Parimau for yet another transport of stores, it would 

 probably have ended in our having no coolies to carry 

 them any further. 



The nett result of all this carrying was that when 

 we arrived with the last loads at the Iwaka depot we 

 found that we had only twelve days' provisions for 

 our party of three Europeans, two Dayaks and the 

 twenty-two coolies who survived from the forty-eight 

 of a month earlier. Cramer had food for about the 

 same number of days for his party of soldiers and 

 convicts. Such a meagre supply of provisions as that 

 obviously made it out of the question for us to 



