Cannibal Caravan

This book was a great find, despite its slightly sensationalist title, it delivers in spades.

Charles Millar had a unique childhood, raised in the Dutch East Indies and Dutch New Guinea, his father a solider there. According to the introduction, his mother was the first white woman to visit Dutch New Guinea and he established the Dutch military post in Merauke. Dutch New Guinea is now known as Indonesian Papua, he west half of Papua New Guinea.

In this book Charles returns to Papua, with a new American bride on his arm and a selection of cameras to record the headhunting tribes living deep in the jungle. He selected his men from a chain gang of murderers sent there to serve out their sentences, and fifty large natives, and towed their canoes behind his steam launch heading up river.

To describe all the action, even all the tribes that Miller and his his wife Leona encounter would be too difficult, and I didn't take notes while I read. The writing if very good, there is always something happening and it all catches the eye of the author. There were plenty of times of tension, where a false move would have made his head an ornament for the natives, but lighters, matches, fireworks and highly flammable cine tape all made his a powerful witch doctor to be respected - and of course his guns.

To say that the tribes were headhunters goes with out saying, but the raid which Miller was obliged to accompany one tribe on was described in great detail and was one of the most gruesome and fearful things I have read in some time. Perhaps this book wasn't received to the acclaim it deserved may be down to the violence and bloodlust of the raid and some of the ceremonies he describes. But there was also much described of the way of life of these tribes which makes Miller somewhat of a anthropologist. Certainly he had a knack for language, picking up several to add to those he already knew from his childhood.

As he moved from village to village and tribe to tribe he changed his guides to take him on to the next, but he retained his Malays and some of the original men from Merauke; the Malays loyal, the rest ‘mostly' loyal. The below quote one I noted down.

p83/84

... I arranged my caravan so that every third or fourth man was either a Malay or a trusted murderer from the Merauke chain gang. These men I armed with rifles. Their pride in my confidence in them was the best insurance I could have. Any native developing an overwhelming attachment for his burden had no opportunity to run off with it as long as my Malays and Javanese killers were on the job. I want to emphasise again that the natives are not to be trusted any further than you can broad-jump in a bag. They don't steal in our meaning of the word. They just walk off with the stuff and never come back. They have about the same sense of right and wrong as a magpie. They mean no particular harm, they are just following the only law they know; take what you can get while you can get it, and beat it while the beating is good.