The Ghost Mountain Boys: Their Epic March and the Terrifying Battle for New Guinea--The Forgotten War of the South Pacific by James Campbell
Authors: James Campbell
Ads: Link
to grassland openings, mountain-fed rivers, and a lowland hill forest of garamut, nutmeg and fig trees, magnificent Araucarias, rosewoods, mahoganies, walnuts, and Pandanus pines adorned with vines and creepers. Between eight thousand and ten thousand feet lies an eerie forest of oak, beech, bamboo, red cedar, and pine, covered in mosses, lichens, and luminous fungi, surrounded by swirling clouds of ice and rain. Higher yet, the trees disappear and are replaced by fields of alpine flowers, shrubs, and staghorn ferns.
Shaped like a large prehistoric bird, New Guinea sits perched atop Australia with its head jutting to the northwest into the Maluku Sea and almost touching the equator near the Indonesian island of Halmahera. The attenuated tail dangles in a southeasterly direction into the Coral Sea just above Australia. One of the wettest places on earth, New Guinea is affected for half the year by unstable air masses, moving down from the north on the monsoon. For the other half, it is subjected to the stray airflows of the southeast trade winds. The monsoon and trade winds bring constant rain—in some areas over two hundred inches a year—carving a tangle of trackless ravines into the great volcanic ridges.
The rain also brings abundance. New Guinea is home to an unparalleled diversity of butterflies, birds, plants, strange marsupials, crocodiles, ninety species of snakes—including the taipan, death adder, Papuan black, and python—and over three thousand varieties of orchids. Although botanists have discovered around 1.5 million species on the planet, some speculate that there may be three times that many “undiscovered” plants on the island of New Guinea alone. The island also contains over eight hundred of the world’s languages, esoteric tongues of largely unknown origins, which evolved among people living in isolated universes of ravine and swamp and mountaintop.
The first European to encounter New Guinea was Jorge de Meneses, a Portuguese governor from the Spice Islands, whose ship was caught in a monsoon on a voyage from the Malay Peninsula. In 1526 he landed on the island of New Guinea and christened it “Ilhas dos Papuas” from the Malay term “orang papuwah,” meaning “fuzzy-haired man.” In 1545, Ynigo Ortiz de Retes, returning from the Moluccas to Mexico, sailed by the island and named it Nueva Guinea either because he thought its natives resembled those of African Guinea, or because the island was exactly opposite Guinea. Centuries later, New Guinea still remained largely untouched by outsiders.
The obstacles of terrain, climate, and disease successfully repelled the world’s colonial powers and their appointed adventurers. Those undaunted by the endless swamps, by the island’s impenetrable mountains and cloud forests, by the threat of malaria, scrub and murine typhus, filariasis, and leishmaniasis, were deterred by something else—New Guinea’s reputation for being inhabited by cannibals who ate the bodies of their dead parents as a gesture of love and headhunters who punctured their enemies’ skulls and sucked out the brains.
Headhunting and cannibalism were vital customs in New Guinea. Although the Australian territorial government outlawed the practice of headhunting as early as 1920, it was impossible to enforce. Cannibalism was also discouraged, though with little success. Along the Fly River, for instance, west of Port Moresby and the Gulf of Papua, if an enemy was killed in battle, warriors would often cut up the dead body and pack the flesh into bamboo logs for easy transport. Back at the village, the flesh would be cooked with sago. Some speculate that the people ate human flesh out of necessity because of the paucity of protein, a lack that was particularly acute in the Highlands. Among certain tribes, human flesh was eaten in the belief that the strength of the deceased would be transmitted to the living. Headhunting also served a variety of purposes. Heads taken in battle
Shaped like a large prehistoric bird, New Guinea sits perched atop Australia with its head jutting to the northwest into the Maluku Sea and almost touching the equator near the Indonesian island of Halmahera. The attenuated tail dangles in a southeasterly direction into the Coral Sea just above Australia. One of the wettest places on earth, New Guinea is affected for half the year by unstable air masses, moving down from the north on the monsoon. For the other half, it is subjected to the stray airflows of the southeast trade winds. The monsoon and trade winds bring constant rain—in some areas over two hundred inches a year—carving a tangle of trackless ravines into the great volcanic ridges.
The rain also brings abundance. New Guinea is home to an unparalleled diversity of butterflies, birds, plants, strange marsupials, crocodiles, ninety species of snakes—including the taipan, death adder, Papuan black, and python—and over three thousand varieties of orchids. Although botanists have discovered around 1.5 million species on the planet, some speculate that there may be three times that many “undiscovered” plants on the island of New Guinea alone. The island also contains over eight hundred of the world’s languages, esoteric tongues of largely unknown origins, which evolved among people living in isolated universes of ravine and swamp and mountaintop.
The first European to encounter New Guinea was Jorge de Meneses, a Portuguese governor from the Spice Islands, whose ship was caught in a monsoon on a voyage from the Malay Peninsula. In 1526 he landed on the island of New Guinea and christened it “Ilhas dos Papuas” from the Malay term “orang papuwah,” meaning “fuzzy-haired man.” In 1545, Ynigo Ortiz de Retes, returning from the Moluccas to Mexico, sailed by the island and named it Nueva Guinea either because he thought its natives resembled those of African Guinea, or because the island was exactly opposite Guinea. Centuries later, New Guinea still remained largely untouched by outsiders.
The obstacles of terrain, climate, and disease successfully repelled the world’s colonial powers and their appointed adventurers. Those undaunted by the endless swamps, by the island’s impenetrable mountains and cloud forests, by the threat of malaria, scrub and murine typhus, filariasis, and leishmaniasis, were deterred by something else—New Guinea’s reputation for being inhabited by cannibals who ate the bodies of their dead parents as a gesture of love and headhunters who punctured their enemies’ skulls and sucked out the brains.
Headhunting and cannibalism were vital customs in New Guinea. Although the Australian territorial government outlawed the practice of headhunting as early as 1920, it was impossible to enforce. Cannibalism was also discouraged, though with little success. Along the Fly River, for instance, west of Port Moresby and the Gulf of Papua, if an enemy was killed in battle, warriors would often cut up the dead body and pack the flesh into bamboo logs for easy transport. Back at the village, the flesh would be cooked with sago. Some speculate that the people ate human flesh out of necessity because of the paucity of protein, a lack that was particularly acute in the Highlands. Among certain tribes, human flesh was eaten in the belief that the strength of the deceased would be transmitted to the living. Headhunting also served a variety of purposes. Heads taken in battle
Similar Books
