ON THE GENUS PITTA. 323 



although they forbid it, the practice goes on. Those slaughtered were to be 

 avenged; and the Papuans announced openly that they would begin 

 hostilities in case we landed. 



"It was nay task now to conciliate them; and this can always be 

 done by presents. I spread before those who acted as leading men 

 glass, pearls, knives, red cloth, and such things ; but the more they saw, the 

 more they asked for, like children. We could not agree, and, the night 

 coming on, I demanded that they should leave my vessel ; but they would 

 not. It was a frantic scramble ; and I ordered my best men to prepare 

 their weapons. Fortunately I preserved a philosophical indifference, and 

 looked quietly at all their screaming and swinging of bows and arrows, con- 

 sidering it a better plan to add something more to the presents offered than 

 to fight ; and at last away they went. 



" The Papuans appear to be very much afraid at night, and do not like 

 to be out of their huts in the dark ; this was one reason for their running 

 ashore. But the following morning they came back, not yet satisfied with the 

 presents carried home at night, and asking for more, not permitting us to go 

 ashore. The tabu was still on the river; and I had no more water. Not 

 till I prepared to leave outright with my vessel, and till they understood that 

 they would lose more by my sailing, did they comply, and allow us to land. 



" I afterwards made the sketch of the village which is reproduced in 

 the woodcut, and which show^s that Kordo is a real ' Pfahldorf,' analogous to 

 the old European lake-dw^ellings ; but it also shows that the picture of such 

 a lake- dwelling, facing the titlepage of Sir Charles Lyell's ^Antiquity of 

 Man," gives no adequate idea of Papuan ' sea-dwellings ' at least. 



" The hunting-ground near the village was a very bad one, not only on 

 account of its swampy character, but chiefly in consequence of small 

 bamboo-sticks, from half a foot to one foot long, and pointed at both ends, 

 which had been dug into the ground for miles round the village, as palisades 

 against the mountaineers. The Papuans going barefoot (like all the inhabitants 

 of the Eastern archipelago), are effectually kept off thereby, the pointed 



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