first spoken, except a few compliments, and only after some time, and very
cautiously, world any approach be made to business. One would speak at a time,
with a low voice and great deliberation, and the mode of making a bargain
would be by quietly refusing all your offers, or even going away without saying
another word about the matter, unless advanced your price to what they were
willing to accept. Our crew, many of whom had not made the voyage before,
seemed quite scandalized at such unprecedented bad manners, and only very
gradually made any approach to fraternization with the black fellows. They
reminded me of a party of demure and well-behaved children suddenly broken in
upon by a lot of wild romping, riotous boys, whose conduct seems most
extraordinary and very naughty. These moral features are more striking and
more conclusive of absolute diversity than oven the physical contrast presented
by the two races, though that is sufficiently remarkable. The sooty blackness of
the skin, the mop-like head of frizzly hair, and, most important of all, the marked
form of countenance of quite a different type from that of the Malay, are what
we cannot believe to result from mere climatal or other modifying influences on
one and the same race. The Malay face is of the Mongolian type, broad and
somewhat flat. The brows are depressed, the mouth wide, but not projecting, and
the nose small and well formed but for the great dilatation of the nostrils. The
face is smooth, and rarely develops the trace of a beard; the hair black, coarse,
and perfectly straight. The Papuan, on the other hand, has a face which we may
say is compressed and projecting. The brows are protuberant and overhanging,
the mouth large and prominent, while the nose is very large, the apex elongated
downwards, the ridge thick, and the nostrils large. It is an obtrusive and
remarkable feature in the countenance, the very reverse of what obtains in the
Malay face. The twisted beard and frizzly hair complete this remarkable
contrast. Hero then I had reached a new world, inhabited by a strange people.
Between the Malayan tribes, among whom I had for some years been living, and
the Papuan races, whose country I had now entered, we may fairly say that there
is as much difference, both moral and physical, as between the red Indians of
South America and the negroes of Guinea on the opposite side of the Atlantic.
Jan. 1st, 1857.-This has been a day of thorough enjoyment. I have wandered
in the forests of an island rarely seen by Europeans. Before daybreak we left our
anchorage, and in an hour reached the village of Har, where we were to stay
three or four days. The range of hills here receded so as to form a small bay, and
they were broken up into peaks and hummocks with intervening flats and
hollows. A broad beach of the whitest sand lined the inner part of the bay,
backed by a mass of cocoa-nut palms, among which the huts were concealed,