Pwawiwi
I found myself living on a tropical island in Papua New Guinea in 1976.
My wife, Debbora, was a PhD student in Anthropology at Cambridge University in England and her field work ultimately involved a study of magic and ritual practices of the people of Sabarl Island, although we didn’t know specifically where we’d end up until we arrived and began investigating. Sabarl is a tiny coral atoll in the Calvados Chain of islands, in the Louisiade Archipelago, Milne Bay Province, Papua New Guinea. It’s as remote a place as anywhere in the world.
It took months of preparation and organization to get there. Debbora was granted a visa as an anthropological researcher. I was given status as an affiliate of the Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies and was tasked with recording songs, poems and stories, and taking photographs of various processes for the Institute, which I did.
The route from England to our final destination began with a flight from London to New Delhi on British Airways. There we changed planes (and airlines---to Cathay Pacific) and flew on to Manila in the Philippines for an overnight in the five star Hotel Manila (five star in an earlier decade anyway), and stayed in a room that reeked of dampness, mildew and pesticides, and also was home to the biggest cockroaches I’d ever seen. The next day we flew to Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea, on Air New Guinea.
We then stayed a week at the University of Papua New Guinea in student housing, collecting supplies, etc., before flying to Gurney airfield on the east coast of the country in an aging DC3 aircraft. I remember being impressed at the size of the upholstered seats---real cloth, not plastic---probably original and from the 1940’s.
Then there was another overnight at a Catholic mission in Gurney, sleeping under mosquito nets on beds with the legs placed in coffee cans half full of a turpentine/water mix to keep insects off the beds and away from any occupants. At “lights out” time---maybe around 10:00 PM---the generator shut down and the bare light bulbs in each room flickered and went out. Within an hour I began to hear what sounded like tennis balls bouncing on the floor---not many, maybe four in total over a few minutes. But since I had to use the bathroom I turned on my flashlight and shone it around the floor. There I saw two tarantulas slowly moving along. Then another one dropped from the woven ceiling and bounced on the floor. I stayed in bed until the light of dawn provided enough illumination for me to make it to the bathroom without any surprises. What a night.
The next leg of the journey involved a twin-engined Cessna that flew us to the island of Misima. I sat next to the pilot, a burley Australian, who was assured by the mechanic on the ground at Gurney that “she be right, mate”, referring to one of the engines which had streaks of oil running down the cowling. En route I watched the temperature gauge on that engine climb as the oil pressure dropped. We landed at Misima on a dirt runway, the wind sock blowing in one direction at one end of the runway and the one at the other end blowing the opposite way.
We stayed a few nights with an Australian patrol officer on Misima before boarding a small supply ship, a wooden vessel maybe 70 feet long, and headed for the eastern-most Catholic mission station in Milne Bay, on the island of Nimowa. It took us two days to get there.
The mission at Nimowa was a kind of Disneyland-like paradise---manicured gardens, rock-lined paths and clapboard Cape Cod-style buildings. In charge, and assisted by three nuns, was Father Anthony “Tony” Young, in many ways the most remarkable person I’ve ever met in my life. An Australian who originally planned on becoming a doctor, his calling to help others was remodeled at med school and he instead became a Jesuit priest. He was kind, resourceful, creative---a spiritual, intellectual adventurer who performed his job as a priest while accommodating the great variety of different people who lived on the many islands in that part of Milne Bay. He could perform Mass in the morning and in the evening sit with elders around a campfire telling bawdy stories and chewing beetle nut. When he was due to be transferred to another mission station one of the chiefs from a nearby island told the visiting archbishop if Father Young was transferred the chief would take another wife. And so he stayed. In fact at the time of this writing I know that he is still there, four decades later.
It was Father Young who assisted us in finding the right island community for research into magic and ritual. It took three visits to three different islands but in the end Sabarl Island, with its roughly 490 inhabitants, all of whom spoke the unique Sabarl language, was chosen.
The island itself had no fresh water. Fresh water was obtained by sailing to an uninhabited island where the Sabarl people tended their gardens every so often during daylight hours. That island had fresh water marshes and a small river. It also had crocodiles and anepholes mosquitos, which transmit malaria. The malaria mosquitos came out at night and could not fly the distance to Sabarl. That fact and the lack of fresh water on Sabarl meant malaria was not a serious problem for residents of Sabarl. Should people be stuck on the “garden island” due to rough weather and/or high seas, they had conveniently built overnight huts on stilts in the shallows far enough from land that the mosquitos could not reach them there either.
Time spent on Sabarl with the indigenous people was wonderful. I never felt so safe. Three of the village elders, including Sote’, the chief, spoke English and we got on very well. I helped build a house for us to use while we were there, and “for Father Young to visit after that”. I cut trees for the frame, cut and split some kind of bamboo-like plants for the floor and walls, and harvested pandanus leaves that the women wove into roofing material. House building was a community effort and something that everyone seemed to enjoy. And when a house was complete it signaled the time for a village-wide feast hosted by the new home owners.
I explored the island with teenage boys who one day took me to a series of caves with skulls set back into the walls, all from an earlier era I was told. I sailed with the men in outrigger canoes, the hulls hollowed from logs made of teak or “kivi”, a kind of bastard teak, the sails made from pandanus leaves, flour sacks and bits of old cloth. Although they looked fragile they were anything but. The outriggers could go where no other vessels could travel, banging over the shallow coral reefs and hurling along in the deep water between islands. When the Sabarl people sailed out of sight of land they would steer their canoes based on the temperature of the water, assessed by dipping a hand in as they sailed along, and the currents that they seemed to have been programmed to know.
I was always looking for ways to improve things, or “help”. Of my many attempts perhaps the craziest was one I came up with to help feed the community, particularly the elderly.
Now, no one on that island was overweight. Their favorite topic of conversation involved food---“kai-kai” they called it. They weren’t very successful at fishing really, the gardens where yams grew were on another island and the yams themselves were tasteless, grainy tubers that likely had very little nutritional value. They had some pigs but they were mostly kept in reserve to be consumed at feasts---rituals that were linked to deaths, marriages, etc. They harvested beche de merle---sea slugs---but wouldn’t eat them. They only would sell them to the government trade vessels whose owners then sold them for consumption in Asia for use as medicines to cure everything from cancer to impotence. For much of the year the main subsistence diet consisted of sago, the decomposing heart of a fallen sago palm, which the World Health Organization claimed had no nutritional value. There also were coconuts on the island and on all the islands in the Louisiade Archipelago, and sago grubs---giant maggot-like bugs that were consumed alive or roasted.
One day my friend Simon and I and a gaggle of teenage boys, who followed me everywhere, headed off across the island to visit the school teacher and his wife at the one room school. The well-travelled path snaked through a dark forest with pocked limestone formations all around. Near the schoolhouse the forest opened onto a vast white sand beach. A hundred yards offshore you could see the edge of the reef where the waves were lapping. Beyond that reef lay very deep water and sharks.
As we left the forest I noticed a coconut husk on the ground. It looked like it had been ripped off the inner coconut but I didn’t see any coconut shell. The husk hadn’t been removed with sharp hacks from a machete; it looked like it had been torn or shredded.
When the schoolhouse visit wound up we all started back towards the village. As we passed the coconut husk again I asked Simon what had done that. I knew there weren’t any monkeys on the island so what could have done that?
“Oh”, Simon said, “A Pwawiwi did that. They eat coconuts. They’re land crabs”
And so I heard all about Pwawiwis as we walked back to the village. There was a folk tale about how they would dance, pushing their claws skyward, then dipping down and pushing them towards the ground. They lived in the forest and they came out at night.
By the time we got back to the village I had a plan.
I had nine or ten Australian rat traps that I bought in Port Moresby. I wasn’t sure if I’d need them but I got them just in case. Now I knew what to do with them. They were serious traps and resembled miniature bear traps with claw-like jaws and were made of steel, not wood. I also had shark line---super strong nylon fishing line. I’d set the traps along the forest path, baiting it with shaved coconut meat. I’d tie them to trees with the shark line so the Pwawiwis couldn’t get away.
After Simon had returned to his house I told my plan to the teenage boys who were milling about.
“This is great”, I said. “We’ll catch these Pwawiwis and have crab meat for people to eat.” I was thinking in particular of the oldest man in the village who by that time had no teeth. Although these giant crabs were eaten in some parts of the Pacific I didn’t know that nobody on Sabarl ate land crabs, also known throughout the Pacific as coconut crabs, because, in addition to coconuts, they ate garbage and it was possible to get sick from doing so.
“Don’t you think this is a great idea?” I asked.
Islanders, not wanting to be negative about anything, seemed enthusiastic and encouraging, nodding their heads and smiling.
The next day we met up as planned and headed off to set the traps, me leading the way and yapping while the kids followed me like I was the Pied Piper.
As I set the last trap and tied it to the tree with the shark line I told them we’d come back in the morning with a big sack to collect the crabs and set the traps again. They grinned back at me, one of them twisting the bottom of his sarong as he grinned.
In the morning the boys came to my house as planned and we set off to harvest the Pwawiwis, to put them in the big sack.
Well we managed to find just one trap. It was mangled. The shark line on all the others had been cut or snipped or something, but the traps were gone.
We returned to the village in silence and I went up the ladder and into my house where I spent the whole day thinking about the disaster. What kind of crabs were these things, anyway?
Late that night there was a commotion outside my house with kids calling my name. I went to the door and looked out. There were about fifteen boys, one holding a hurricane lamp and one holding a long stick. Simon was standing there with his pipe clasped between his teeth and his hands behind his back. He nodded his head towards the stick and said “Pwawiwi.”
At the end of the stick was a horrific monster crustacean. It must have been two feet long. If anyone needed an example of a creature for a horror film this was it. It had one small claw clamped on the stick and one gigantic claw was opening and closing franticly in mid air all around the stick. When it clamped shut it sounded like two blocks of wood banging together.
In the commotion the Pwawiwi let go of the stick and fell to the sand, the kids dropped the hurricane lamp and scattered, as did Simon.
When morning came I went down the ladder and looked under the house. There was a furrow of sand that looked like a small plow had been at work. It began where the Pwawiwi fell, continued under the house and out the other side, disappearing into the edge of the forest.
© Kent Jones 2016
I found myself living on a tropical island in Papua New Guinea in 1976.
My wife, Debbora, was a PhD student in Anthropology at Cambridge University in England and her field work ultimately involved a study of magic and ritual practices of the people of Sabarl Island, although we didn’t know specifically where we’d end up until we arrived and began investigating. Sabarl is a tiny coral atoll in the Calvados Chain of islands, in the Louisiade Archipelago, Milne Bay Province, Papua New Guinea. It’s as remote a place as anywhere in the world.
It took months of preparation and organization to get there. Debbora was granted a visa as an anthropological researcher. I was given status as an affiliate of the Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies and was tasked with recording songs, poems and stories, and taking photographs of various processes for the Institute, which I did.
The route from England to our final destination began with a flight from London to New Delhi on British Airways. There we changed planes (and airlines---to Cathay Pacific) and flew on to Manila in the Philippines for an overnight in the five star Hotel Manila (five star in an earlier decade anyway), and stayed in a room that reeked of dampness, mildew and pesticides, and also was home to the biggest cockroaches I’d ever seen. The next day we flew to Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea, on Air New Guinea.
We then stayed a week at the University of Papua New Guinea in student housing, collecting supplies, etc., before flying to Gurney airfield on the east coast of the country in an aging DC3 aircraft. I remember being impressed at the size of the upholstered seats---real cloth, not plastic---probably original and from the 1940’s.
Then there was another overnight at a Catholic mission in Gurney, sleeping under mosquito nets on beds with the legs placed in coffee cans half full of a turpentine/water mix to keep insects off the beds and away from any occupants. At “lights out” time---maybe around 10:00 PM---the generator shut down and the bare light bulbs in each room flickered and went out. Within an hour I began to hear what sounded like tennis balls bouncing on the floor---not many, maybe four in total over a few minutes. But since I had to use the bathroom I turned on my flashlight and shone it around the floor. There I saw two tarantulas slowly moving along. Then another one dropped from the woven ceiling and bounced on the floor. I stayed in bed until the light of dawn provided enough illumination for me to make it to the bathroom without any surprises. What a night.
The next leg of the journey involved a twin-engined Cessna that flew us to the island of Misima. I sat next to the pilot, a burley Australian, who was assured by the mechanic on the ground at Gurney that “she be right, mate”, referring to one of the engines which had streaks of oil running down the cowling. En route I watched the temperature gauge on that engine climb as the oil pressure dropped. We landed at Misima on a dirt runway, the wind sock blowing in one direction at one end of the runway and the one at the other end blowing the opposite way.
We stayed a few nights with an Australian patrol officer on Misima before boarding a small supply ship, a wooden vessel maybe 70 feet long, and headed for the eastern-most Catholic mission station in Milne Bay, on the island of Nimowa. It took us two days to get there.
The mission at Nimowa was a kind of Disneyland-like paradise---manicured gardens, rock-lined paths and clapboard Cape Cod-style buildings. In charge, and assisted by three nuns, was Father Anthony “Tony” Young, in many ways the most remarkable person I’ve ever met in my life. An Australian who originally planned on becoming a doctor, his calling to help others was remodeled at med school and he instead became a Jesuit priest. He was kind, resourceful, creative---a spiritual, intellectual adventurer who performed his job as a priest while accommodating the great variety of different people who lived on the many islands in that part of Milne Bay. He could perform Mass in the morning and in the evening sit with elders around a campfire telling bawdy stories and chewing beetle nut. When he was due to be transferred to another mission station one of the chiefs from a nearby island told the visiting archbishop if Father Young was transferred the chief would take another wife. And so he stayed. In fact at the time of this writing I know that he is still there, four decades later.
It was Father Young who assisted us in finding the right island community for research into magic and ritual. It took three visits to three different islands but in the end Sabarl Island, with its roughly 490 inhabitants, all of whom spoke the unique Sabarl language, was chosen.
The island itself had no fresh water. Fresh water was obtained by sailing to an uninhabited island where the Sabarl people tended their gardens every so often during daylight hours. That island had fresh water marshes and a small river. It also had crocodiles and anepholes mosquitos, which transmit malaria. The malaria mosquitos came out at night and could not fly the distance to Sabarl. That fact and the lack of fresh water on Sabarl meant malaria was not a serious problem for residents of Sabarl. Should people be stuck on the “garden island” due to rough weather and/or high seas, they had conveniently built overnight huts on stilts in the shallows far enough from land that the mosquitos could not reach them there either.
Time spent on Sabarl with the indigenous people was wonderful. I never felt so safe. Three of the village elders, including Sote’, the chief, spoke English and we got on very well. I helped build a house for us to use while we were there, and “for Father Young to visit after that”. I cut trees for the frame, cut and split some kind of bamboo-like plants for the floor and walls, and harvested pandanus leaves that the women wove into roofing material. House building was a community effort and something that everyone seemed to enjoy. And when a house was complete it signaled the time for a village-wide feast hosted by the new home owners.
I explored the island with teenage boys who one day took me to a series of caves with skulls set back into the walls, all from an earlier era I was told. I sailed with the men in outrigger canoes, the hulls hollowed from logs made of teak or “kivi”, a kind of bastard teak, the sails made from pandanus leaves, flour sacks and bits of old cloth. Although they looked fragile they were anything but. The outriggers could go where no other vessels could travel, banging over the shallow coral reefs and hurling along in the deep water between islands. When the Sabarl people sailed out of sight of land they would steer their canoes based on the temperature of the water, assessed by dipping a hand in as they sailed along, and the currents that they seemed to have been programmed to know.
I was always looking for ways to improve things, or “help”. Of my many attempts perhaps the craziest was one I came up with to help feed the community, particularly the elderly.
Now, no one on that island was overweight. Their favorite topic of conversation involved food---“kai-kai” they called it. They weren’t very successful at fishing really, the gardens where yams grew were on another island and the yams themselves were tasteless, grainy tubers that likely had very little nutritional value. They had some pigs but they were mostly kept in reserve to be consumed at feasts---rituals that were linked to deaths, marriages, etc. They harvested beche de merle---sea slugs---but wouldn’t eat them. They only would sell them to the government trade vessels whose owners then sold them for consumption in Asia for use as medicines to cure everything from cancer to impotence. For much of the year the main subsistence diet consisted of sago, the decomposing heart of a fallen sago palm, which the World Health Organization claimed had no nutritional value. There also were coconuts on the island and on all the islands in the Louisiade Archipelago, and sago grubs---giant maggot-like bugs that were consumed alive or roasted.
One day my friend Simon and I and a gaggle of teenage boys, who followed me everywhere, headed off across the island to visit the school teacher and his wife at the one room school. The well-travelled path snaked through a dark forest with pocked limestone formations all around. Near the schoolhouse the forest opened onto a vast white sand beach. A hundred yards offshore you could see the edge of the reef where the waves were lapping. Beyond that reef lay very deep water and sharks.
As we left the forest I noticed a coconut husk on the ground. It looked like it had been ripped off the inner coconut but I didn’t see any coconut shell. The husk hadn’t been removed with sharp hacks from a machete; it looked like it had been torn or shredded.
When the schoolhouse visit wound up we all started back towards the village. As we passed the coconut husk again I asked Simon what had done that. I knew there weren’t any monkeys on the island so what could have done that?
“Oh”, Simon said, “A Pwawiwi did that. They eat coconuts. They’re land crabs”
And so I heard all about Pwawiwis as we walked back to the village. There was a folk tale about how they would dance, pushing their claws skyward, then dipping down and pushing them towards the ground. They lived in the forest and they came out at night.
By the time we got back to the village I had a plan.
I had nine or ten Australian rat traps that I bought in Port Moresby. I wasn’t sure if I’d need them but I got them just in case. Now I knew what to do with them. They were serious traps and resembled miniature bear traps with claw-like jaws and were made of steel, not wood. I also had shark line---super strong nylon fishing line. I’d set the traps along the forest path, baiting it with shaved coconut meat. I’d tie them to trees with the shark line so the Pwawiwis couldn’t get away.
After Simon had returned to his house I told my plan to the teenage boys who were milling about.
“This is great”, I said. “We’ll catch these Pwawiwis and have crab meat for people to eat.” I was thinking in particular of the oldest man in the village who by that time had no teeth. Although these giant crabs were eaten in some parts of the Pacific I didn’t know that nobody on Sabarl ate land crabs, also known throughout the Pacific as coconut crabs, because, in addition to coconuts, they ate garbage and it was possible to get sick from doing so.
“Don’t you think this is a great idea?” I asked.
Islanders, not wanting to be negative about anything, seemed enthusiastic and encouraging, nodding their heads and smiling.
The next day we met up as planned and headed off to set the traps, me leading the way and yapping while the kids followed me like I was the Pied Piper.
As I set the last trap and tied it to the tree with the shark line I told them we’d come back in the morning with a big sack to collect the crabs and set the traps again. They grinned back at me, one of them twisting the bottom of his sarong as he grinned.
In the morning the boys came to my house as planned and we set off to harvest the Pwawiwis, to put them in the big sack.
Well we managed to find just one trap. It was mangled. The shark line on all the others had been cut or snipped or something, but the traps were gone.
We returned to the village in silence and I went up the ladder and into my house where I spent the whole day thinking about the disaster. What kind of crabs were these things, anyway?
Late that night there was a commotion outside my house with kids calling my name. I went to the door and looked out. There were about fifteen boys, one holding a hurricane lamp and one holding a long stick. Simon was standing there with his pipe clasped between his teeth and his hands behind his back. He nodded his head towards the stick and said “Pwawiwi.”
At the end of the stick was a horrific monster crustacean. It must have been two feet long. If anyone needed an example of a creature for a horror film this was it. It had one small claw clamped on the stick and one gigantic claw was opening and closing franticly in mid air all around the stick. When it clamped shut it sounded like two blocks of wood banging together.
In the commotion the Pwawiwi let go of the stick and fell to the sand, the kids dropped the hurricane lamp and scattered, as did Simon.
When morning came I went down the ladder and looked under the house. There was a furrow of sand that looked like a small plow had been at work. It began where the Pwawiwi fell, continued under the house and out the other side, disappearing into the edge of the forest.
© Kent Jones 2016