47° 



The National Geographic Magazine 



PAPUANS AMONG THE LITTLE COLONY OP TRADERS 



They are grouped about the Dutch Resident's house and the barracks for the half com- 

 pany of Javanese soldiers. The man dressed is our interpreter; he belongs to a different tribe. 

 Dorey, New Guinea. 



est, for, of course, the only white women 

 who had ever been on this coast before 

 were the wives of the little band of Dutch 

 missionaries who have settled near 

 Dorey, and these women had only been 

 seen by the Papuans of that immediate 

 vicinity. To attempt to give a nominal 

 list of the stations where collecting was 

 carried on would be as uninteresting as 

 futile, for the names of many villages do 

 not even occur on the Dutch Admiralty 

 charts. 



No words, however, can begin to do 

 justice to the splendid scenery of parts 

 of the coast. In the Pitt Passage, be- 

 tween the islands of Salwatty and Ba- 

 tanta, steep wooded hills rise from the 

 sea on each side of the ship. A white 

 coral sand beach and an occasional house 

 perched on stilts in the water complete 

 this scene, while over the bow the coast 

 of Papua shows as a dim, low bank, as if 

 a forest were growing from the sea. 

 The vegetation is rank in this alluvial 



land, high timber, matted with creeping 

 vines, covered with masses of orchids and 

 rising from a bed of ferns being the fea- 

 ture which one encounters as soon as 

 shore is reached. We must not forget 

 the birds, splendid lorys, parrots of red 

 and blue and green, white cockatoos, and 

 gorgeous pigeons greet one's first ramble 

 ashore. 



MAGNIFICENT P.l/TTERELIES 



It was the writer's good luck on his 

 first stroll to find a tree flowering high in 

 air which was being visited by a host of 

 the splendid bird-winged butterflies, 

 Omithoptera poseidon. The feelings of 

 one who has hitherto only known these 

 visions in black and green and gold as 

 they lay pinned in a cabinet were never 

 better expressed than by Wallace, who 

 wrote in his Malay Archipelago the fol- 

 lowing, after he had taken this species 

 in the Aru Islands : "I had the good for- 

 tune to capture one of the most magnifi- 



