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Visiting Arfak Tribe on the Hill Behind Dorey by Alfred Russel Wallace I went myself to visit the native village on the hill behind Dorey, and took with me a small present of cloth, knives, and beads, to secure the good-will of the chief, and get him to send some men to catch or shoot birds for me. The houses were scattered about among rudely cultivated clearings. Two which I visited consisted of a central passage, on each side of which opened short passages, admitting to two rooms, each of which was a house accommodating a separate family. They were elevated at least fifteen feet above the ground, on a complete forest of poles, and were so rude and dilapidated that some of the small passages had openings in the floor of loose sticks, through which a child might fall. The inhabitants seemed rather uglier than those at Dorey village. They are, no doubt, the true indigenes of this part of New Guinea, living in the interior, and subsisting by cultivation and hunting. The Dorey men, on the other hand, are shore-dwellers, fishers and traders in a small way, and have thus the character of a colony who have migrated from another district. These hillmen or "Arfaks "differed much in physical features. They were generally black, but some were brown like Malays. Their hair, though always more or less frizzly, was sometimes short and matted, instead of being long, loose, and woolly; and this seemed to be a constitutional difference, not the effect of care and cultivation. Nearly half of them were afflicted with the scurfy skin-disease. The old chief seemed much pleased with his present, and promised (through an interpreter I brought with me) to protect my men when they came there shooting, and also to procure me some birds and animals. While conversing, they smoked tobacco of their own growing, in pipes cut from a single piece of wood with a long upright handle.
We had arrived at Dorey about the end of the wet
season, when the whole country was soaked with moisture The native paths
were so neglected as to be often mere tunnels closed over with
vegetation, and in such places there was always a fearful accumulation
of mud. To the naked Papuan this is no obstruction. He wades through it,
and the next watercourse makes him clean again; but to myself, wearing
boots and trousers, it was a most disagreeable thing to have to go up to
my knees in a mud-hole every morning. The man I brought with me to cut
wood fell ill soon after we arrived, or I would have set him to clear
fresh paths in the worst places. For the first ten days it generally
rained every afternoon and all night r but by going out every hour of
fine weather, I managed to get on tolerably with my collections of birds
and insects, finding most of those collected by Lesson during his visit
in the Coquille, as well as many new ones. It appears, however, that
Dorey is not the place for Birds of Paradise, none of the natives being
accustomed to preserve them. Those sold here are all brought from
Amberbaki, about a hundred miles west, where the Doreyans go to trade. |
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Expedition in New Guinea
In 1858 a great British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace conducted an expedition to Dorey bay (now Manokwari town of West Papua) in New Guinea in search of paradise birds. The following stories were translated into Bahasa Indonesia from Chapter XXXIV of his book entitled The Malay Archipelago
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