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.
The islands in the bay, with the low lands near the coast, seem to have been
formed by recently raised coral reef's, and are much strewn with masses of coral
but little altered. The ridge behind my house, which runs out to the point, is also
entirely coral rock, although there are signs of a stratified foundation in the