The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Mafulu, by Robert W. Williamson

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Title: The Mafulu
Mountain People of British New Guinea

Author: Robert W. Williamson

Release Date: March 4, 2006 [EBook #17910]
Last updated: January 27, 2009

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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The Mafulu
Mountain People of British New Guinea

Robert W. Williamson

With an Introduction

by

A. C. Haddon, Sc.D., F.R.S.

With Illustrations and Map

Macmillan and Co., Limited
St. Martin's Street, London
1912

PREFACE

This book is the outcome of an expedition to British New Guinea
in 1910, in which, after a short stay among the people of some of
the western Solomon Islands, including those of that old centre
of the head hunters, the Rubiana lagoon, and a preparatory and
instructive journey in New Guinea among the large villages of the
Mekeo district, I struck across country by a little known route,
via Lapeka, to Ido-Ido and on to Dilava, and thus passed by way of
further preparation through the Kuni country, and ultimately reached
the district of the Mafulu villages, of whose people very little was
known, and which was therefore the mecca of my pilgrimage.

I endeavoured to carry out the enquiries of which the book is a record
as carefully and accurately as possible; but it must be remembered
that the Mafulu people had seen very few white men, except some
of the Fathers of the Catholic Mission of the Sacred Heart, the
visits of Government officials and once or twice of a scientific
traveller having been but few and far between, and only short; that
the mission station in Mafulu (the remotest station of the mission)
had only been established five years previously; that the people
were utterly unaccustomed to the type of questioning which systematic
e