Table of Contents
Captain James Cook (1728-1779) failed to see much of New Guinea or its inhabitants the Papuans. By late 1770, when the battered Endeavour reached the southern shores of New Guinea, Cook and his crew were on their way home and little disposed to attempt contact with the island's reportedly hostile people. But on Monday, 3 September, Cook (1955:408), 'having a mind to land once in this Country before we quit it altogether', went ashore in the pinnace in a party of twelve, accompanied by the naturalists Joseph Banks (1743-1820) and Daniel Solander (1733-1782). The first moment of encounter was pure Defoe: 'we had no sooner landed than we saw the print of Mens feet fresh upon the Sand'. Just two hundred yards further along the beach, the ship's party was attacked by three or four men throwing 'darts' and lime powder. After firing a volley, they retired, followed 'by 60 or as some thought about 100 of the natives'. From the safety of the pinnace, the Europeans:
now took a view of them at our leisure; they made much the same appearance as the New Hollanders, being nearly of the same stature, and having their hair short cropped: like them also they were all stark naked, but we thought the colour of their skin was not quite so dark; this however might perhaps be merely the effect of their not being quite so dirty.[1]
Other than a cursory examination of their 'darts' and a short digression on the curious practice of discharging lime powder from bamboo pipes, this was about all that Cook had to say on the subject of Papuans.
The relative absence of references to New Guinea in the literature of the Cook voyages and in subsequent Cook scholarship weighed heavily on the early development of an anglophone anthropology of the Papuans, as it has also on the historiography of that anthropology. Anglophone debate about 'race' in Oceania has hinged largely on the terms established by the Cook voyage literature, most obviously through the contrast between the 'two great varieties' of South Sea Islanders identified by the naturalist Johann Reinhold Forster (1729-1798) and later re-cast as Melanesians and Polynesians.[2] Until the onset of concerted European exploration of the main island of New Guinea in the 1870s, Papuans or 'Oceanic Negroes' were the subject of much metropolitan anticipation and speculation. In his instructions for the scientists on Baudin's expedition of 1800-4 (1978:175-6), the French naturalist Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) listed a series of locations whose inhabitants were 'still insufficiently known' and first amongst them were 'the Papuans, or inhabitants of New Guinea, who have long been regarded as Negroes'. Though French voyaging scientists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had been the first to generate systematic descriptions of Papuans,[3] their influence on European thinking about New Guinea and its inhabitants does not appear to have extended much beyond the mid-nineteenth century, perhaps because French interest in Oceania beyond its established colonial territories subsequently waned.[4]
Instead, we find repeated reference in European literature from the mid-nineteenth century to the writings and authority of a trio of British authors: the colonial administrator and philologist, John Crawfurd (1783-1868); the navigator and translator, George Windsor Earl (1813-1865); and the field naturalist and co-founder with Charles Darwin (1809-1882) of the theory of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913). Where previous observations on the inhabitants of New Guinea had derived largely from transient shipboard voyagers, each of these three authors was resident at or closely in contact with one or more of the region's early settler outposts, such as Batavia, Singapore, and Port Essington. All three published their views on the contrasting moral and physical characters of the Malay and the Papuan. Their authority as field observers was widely acknowledged and their reports furnished metropolitan debates with the means to fix these racial categories within a global schema of human difference. Most importantly, they generated their own accounts of these categories, acting as both field observers and metropolitan theorists. However, the importance they assigned to moral traits and questions of character and comportment in the distinction of racial difference sets them apart both from earlier comparative anatomists and from later anthropologists.[5] The dramatic contradictions and value reversals evident in their individual pronouncements on the Malay and Papuan 'types' neatly illustrate the struggles of an emergent nineteenth-century science of race to agree upon standards, or perhaps styles, for field observation, analysis, and comparison.
My focus here is on just three of the themes common to the writings of these authors: the increasing priority accorded to observation or presence in the field; the fundamental role of cardinality or orientation in the regional comparison of human populations; and the gathering centrality during this period of notions of racial purity and boundedness. The period of the mid-nineteenth century, immediately preceding Europe's first substantial engagements with New Guinea and with Papuans, coincided with a broad regional transition from voyager to resident or settler discourses as the principal conduits for knowledge about indigenous Oceanian people. On a global scale, this was also the era that witnessed the increasing deployment in anthropological observation of a rhetoric of precision (Bravo 1999; Ballard n.d.) and a privileging of new types of more intensive, terrestrial observation, championed by naturalist collectors such as Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) and Alfred Russel Wallace — developments that would prove crucial to the consolidation of a science of race.
The scientific voyages in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries laid the foundations for a re-ordering of the relationships between field sites and metropolitan centres as 'ocular demonstration', or observation in the field, came to be accorded increasing privilege (Withers 2004). The first half of the nineteenth century witnessed the rise to prominence of the naturalist field observer and the Malay Archipelago and New Guinea, along with the Amazon and central Africa, were the type locations for this new genus (Driver and Martins 2005). Yet, if field observation carried new weight, this was still counter-balanced by the metropolitan or textual domination of scientific knowledge. Field observers operated very consciously with a sense of the necessity for accomplishment and the required discovery of new species and their enquiries were permeated by a keen awareness of the concerns of their metropolitan sponsors and audiences. Reports from the field on human subjects represented a complex amalgam of received and anticipated forms of expression of their differences, on one hand, and the material imprints of the encounter on the other. Despite the apparent valorization of ocular demonstration, field observers were often limited in their capacity to confront or contradict metropolitan theories of race and their reports sought systematically to exclude what Johannes Fabian (2000) has recently described as the 'ecstatic' dimension of the encounter — the excess of experience that confounds anticipation but, in descriptions of racial difference, is repeatedly elided in the translation from the relational intimacy of personal diaries to the distanced perspective of published narratives.
Presence, in this context, implies direct experience, principally through the instrument of vision; Fabian's (1983) earlier account of 'visualism' in anthropology offers a useful point of departure for an understanding of the role of observation in the representation of human difference. Visualism, in Fabian's analysis (1983:106), consists of an emphasis on visual and spatial conventions for representation. Subscription to these conventions by observers and their readers endows them with the capacity to communicate the essential character of a culture or a physical type: 'the ability to "visualize" a culture or society becomes almost synonymous for understanding it'. Fabian's visualism supplies a handy metaphor for the process of reduction of human cultural or physical complexity to a few key traits, such that information on stature for Pygmies or curly hair for Papuans becomes all that is required to convey a large body of other implied and associated knowledge about the subject under observation (Ballard 2001). Under these terms, the physical presence of the observer assumes a heightened priority in the attribution of authority.
The cardinality of comparison is a largely overlooked element in the constitution of regional topographies of difference in Oceania. As implied by Cook's observations above on Papuans and the use of Aboriginal Australians as a comparative foil, trajectories of travel had a pronounced influence on the character of descriptions and the terms of comparison. Most of the major scientific voyages of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had traversed Oceania from east to west, or south to north, approaching Melanesia by way of the central Pacific or around Australia in order to evade the political delicacies of access through the Dutch-controlled East Indies. Under these conditions, what would come to be termed Melanesia in the anglophone literature referred not so much to the island of New Guinea as it did to the extended archipelagic screen of Vanuatu, New Caledonia, and the Solomon Islands which came to serve as the primary negative poles for positive evaluations of Polynesia.[6] What emerges from a reading of the pre-twentieth-century anglophone anthropology of Papuans, however, is that the racial character of Papuans (as distinct from Melanesians) was historically defined not so much through comparison with Polynesians to the east as with Malays to the west. This is evident even in the writing of the French navigator Jules-Sébastien-César Dumont d'Urville (1790-1842) who, despite his later fame as promoter of the more limited division of the Pacific Islands into Melanesia, Polynesia, and Micronesia, nonetheless included New Guinea and Australia within his denomination 'Melanesia'. Dumont d'Urville looked both east and west in his speculations on the racial character and origins of the Papuans: 'Their name, Papuans, according to the most common explanation, indicates their black colour, by contrast with that of the Boughis and the copper-coloured inhabitants of the Malaysian Islands'.[7] In comparison with the more holistic vision of the French writers of the period, each of the three anglophone authors addressed here essentially approached and viewed New Guinea from the west. From this perspective, Papuans were described principally through a series of contrasts with Malays.
Finally, this chapter seeks to track the elaboration during the nineteenth century of notions of the boundedness or purity of racial types that began to emerge from the late 1820s as the central problem for a scientific knowledge of race. This development proceeded not through direct theorization of the essential character of racial purity but rather through contemplation of the problems posed by racial 'mixing' or miscegenation — a challenge that had long preoccupied slave-holding communities in the Americas and would continue to fuel racialist conceptions of difference in Oceania, as elsewhere.[8] The accounts of Papuans furnished by Crawfurd, Earl, and Wallace united what had previously been a largely disparate field of observations. The principal method in each case consisted of a willingness to distil a multitude of received and personal observations in order to produce an attractively simple opposition between fundamentally racial types. The significance and novelty of their contribution is best appreciated in the context of prior European representations of Papuans.
Etymologies for the term 'Papua' are illuminating insofar as they track the semantic shifts and slippages between references to people, place, and race. Modern usage itself is scarcely fixed, with Papuans commonly identified either as the autochthonous inhabitants of the main island of New Guinea or as the residents of either of three different administrative regions: the provinces of Papua and West Papua within the Republic of Indonesia, in the western half of the island, and the former territory of colonial Papua in the southern half of what is now Papua New Guinea. Linguists, meanwhile, reserve the term 'Papuan' for a loose set of highly differentiated languages defined negatively as being 'non-Melanesian' or 'non-Austronesian', some of which extend westward to the Indonesian islands of Timor, Alor, Pantar, and Halmahera and south and east to the Torres Strait and the Bismarck Archipelago (Ross 2005). Sidney Ray (1858-1939), noting Earl's earlier work on Papuan anthropology, provided the definitive statement of 'Papuan' as a linguistic appellation in 1892:
For these non-Melanesian languages of New Guinea I used the name Papuan. This did not imply any community of character or origin in the language so-called, but merely served as a convenient term to indicate their archaic features as the probably aboriginal languages of the great island of New Guinea (1926:24).
Solely for the purposes of this chapter, I refer to the main island as New Guinea and to the inhabitants of New Guinea and its wider fringe of associated islands as Papuans, without distinction.[9]
Since the mid-nineteenth century, conventional wisdom has derived the term Papua from a putative Malay source, papua or puahpuah, usually defined as 'frizzy-haired', with the additional implication of black or dark skin colour. Yet in his search for an origin for this association, the historian and former official of Netherlands New Guinea, Sollewijn Gelpke (1993:320‑1), could find nothing earlier to substantiate this association than the series of often conflicting definitions provided by Crawfurd in 1852: '"papuwah (Jav. and Mal.) frizzled", "a negrito of the Indian islands; an African negro"'; '"pâpuwah, frizzled; the island of New-Guinea; an inhabitant of that island being of the negrito race'"; and '"Negro of the Indian Islands: Papuwah, puwah-puwah"'. Crawfurd identified the 1812 dictionary of the orientalist and philologist William Marsden (1754-1836) as his key source and yet Marsden's dictionary offers only 'papūah as "frizzled" and "crisp curled (as certain plants)"'.[10] Gelpke's careful enquiries have established that the term Papua was first documented by Portuguese explorers in the sixteenth century and referred loosely to the islands lying to the east of the northern Moluccas.[11] As Portuguese and Spanish knowledge of the region grew, the scope of the term gradually narrowed to encompass the mainland of New Guinea and the neighbouring Raja Ampat and Schouten island groups and reference was made equally to 'as Papuas' (the Papuan islands) and 'os Papuas' (the Papuans) (Gelpke 1993:322-6). What was initially a cardinal direction had come to identify, first, a fixed set of locations and then the inhabitants of those places, before assuming its final reference to the physical attributes of black skin and frizzly hair. By the late eighteenth century, Papua (the location) was defined in reverse as the residence of black-skinned and frizzly-haired Papuans.[12]
An additional and possibly prior sense of the term Papua is hinted at in Gelpke's research and in the writings of Iberian and other European explorers. The Portuguese Gábriel Rebelo observed in the 1560s that, '''Papua, em todas as linguas de Maluco diz Cafre" ("Papua" in all Moluccan languages, means "heathen")'.[13] Cafre, or kāfir, the Arabic term for heathen or non-believer, nicely captures this additional quality of Papuan as a negative reference to all those people of the region who remained unconverted to Islam and culturally undomesticated by the Islamic principalities of the Moluccas.[14] The Raya Papua or King of the Papuans, rather imaginatively described by Antonio Pigafetta in 1521, was thus the putative sovereign of the non-Moslem population of the interior of Halmahera and the islands to its east. The Spaniard Luis Váez de Torres, arriving in the Moluccas via the southern coast of New Guinea in 1606, similarly wrote that the 'Moors … carry on conquests of the people they call the Papuas, and preach to them the sect of Mahomet'.[15]
How then did European writers and observers come to restrict the term Papuan primarily to physical attributes and how did they set about composing an increasingly precise definition of those attributes? European voyagers apparently first heard of 'Papoia' from about 1511 and, in this moment before the actual encounter, the Portuguese Tomé Pires (1944, I:222) could still record (if not credit) accounts of Papuans couched in the medieval mode as 'men with big ears who cover themselves with them'. From 1526, when the Portuguese Jorge de Meneses landed and 'wintered' at Biak, the terms employed to describe Papuans were dominated by explicit analogy with sub-Saharan Africans. The Englishman William Dampier (1652-1715) in 1700 and the Frenchman Louis-Antoine de Bougainville (1729-1814) in 1768 were amongst the many for whom the inhabitants of New Guinea and nearby islands were 'Negroes' while others, such as the Spaniard Diego de Prado y Tovar in 1606 and the Dutchman Jan Carstensz in 1623, referred to them still more generically as 'Kaffirs' or as 'Indians'.[16] Africa's ghostly presence in the Pacific was given further substance in 1545 by the Spaniard Iñigo Ortiz de Retes when he named the main island of the Papuan archipelago 'New Guinea', reflecting both the perceived similarities between the people of New Guinea and of West Africa and the fond hope of the presence of gold through the alchemy of appellative association.
Beyond this common focus on Africa as a pole of comparison, there was little uniformity amongst the physical characteristics listed for the inhabitants of New Guinea. The variation between different Papuan communities evident to European observers was described in terms of 'types', 'peoples', 'men', 'classes', and 'nations' as well as 'races'. The word race in its modern biological sense did not obviously feature in descriptions of Papuans until the visits to New Guinea of the French Restoration scientific voyages under Louis de Freycinet (1779-1842) in 1818-19, Louis-Isidore Duperrey (1786-1865) in 1823, and Dumont d'Urville in 1827-28 and 1838-40.[17] Hair and skin colour were the two primary physical attributes upon which definitions of 'the Papuan' rested. As Douglas (Chapter Two, this volume) shows with respect to accounts of indigenous communities more generally in Oceania, the wide variation in skin colour reported both within and between different communities by observers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries gradually gave way to an increasingly uniform consensus on the more limited chromatic range proper to pure types or races. Where Prado and Torres could write in 1606 of adjacent communities along the south coast of New Guinea as variously 'tall and white', 'tawny', 'not very white', the 'colour of mulattos', or 'very dark' and the Dutchman Henrik Haalbos, sailing with Abel Janszoon Tasman (1603-1659) in 1643, of people along the north coast as 'tawny', 'pitch-black', or 'yellow',[18] from the time of Dampier's encounters with the inhabitants of New Guinea and the Bismarck Archipelago in 1700, Papuans were described simply and almost universally as 'black'.[19] While finer chromatic gradations continued to be discerned amongst Papuans, 'black' in an Oceanic context indicated colour within a hierarchical frame; henceforth, on any axis of comparison, Papuans could safely be presumed to be darker than most other Oceanic peoples.
A similar shift is evident in European descriptions of Papuan hair. For the earlier Iberian and Dutch voyagers, the presence or absence of facial hair was possibly more important than the form of head hair and frequent reference was made to Papuan men with 'thick beards'.[20] Again, Dampier was perhaps the first to emphasize the actual form of head hair, writing of 'Curl-pated New Guinea Negroes' with 'frizled' or 'short curl'd Hair'.[21] By the 1760s, Bougainville and the Englishman Philip Carteret (1733-1796) were employing the term 'woolly' along with 'frizzled' while Thomas Forrest (1729?-1802?) introduced the epithet 'mopheaded Papuas' in 1779.[22] But it was the French Restoration voyages that focused especial attention on Papuan coiffure, with lengthy descriptions and elaborate illustration of the 'mopped' or 'bushy' hairstyles sported by men in north-western New Guinea, in particular (Figure 12).[23] The coincidence of this discovery with the mid-nineteenth century re-definition of 'Papuan' as 'frizzle-haired' is surely no accident. By the 1850s, the racial metonymy was taken for granted, as in the summation of an anonymous reviewer (Anon. 1854:50): 'A black skin and a frizzly head of hair make the Papuan'.
![Figure 12: Jules-Louis Le Jeune, 'Habitants du Port Dori. Nouvelle Guinée' [1823].'Inhabitants of Port Dori, New Guinea' (Le Jeune [1822‑5]: folio 131).](../images/fig12.jpg)
Pen and wash drawing. SH 356. Vincennes, France: Service historique de la Défense, département Marine. Photograph B. Douglas.
A third shift over time in European accounts of Papuans has to do with the other general characteristics deemed necessary for an accurate portrayal of the differences between Papuans and other Oceanic peoples. A striking element of pre-nineteenth-century accounts is the emphasis on nudity and body decoration, whether clothing, paint, piercings, scarification, or tattoos. Without an established literature and thus a set of preconceptions about Papuans, early European observers concentrated on what was most visually arresting in their encounters. However, by the nineteenth century, clothing and decoration were increasingly of less significance to racial taxonomy than the body beneath. Nineteenth-century descriptions of encounters with Papuans moved almost immediately to questions of height, colour, hair, and bodily form, visually stripping Papuan bodies of the encumbrances of culture. Where early European explorers had imagined near-naked Oceanian people as potentially clothed and converted to Christianity (Thomas 1994:73), their later nineteenth-century counterparts, meeting clothed Oceanians, conceived them naked once again.
A history of all the other descriptive terms routinely applied to Papuans lies beyond the scope of this paper but it should be stressed that the definition of Papuan-ness for Europeans rested as much upon a host of largely negative attributions, including cannibalism, savagery, treachery, polygamy, and the poor 'usage' of women, as it did upon purely bodily characteristics. For the purposes of this chapter, however, the persistence of a specific axis of comparison for Papuans is of particular interest: for almost all those voyagers for whom encounters with Papuans were deemed worthy of extended comment, the strongest contrast lay not to the east, where apparently more subtle gradations led from what is now Fiji through Island Melanesia to New Guinea, but rather to the west, where a sharper break was commonly discerned between Papuans and Malays.
Dampier noted this contrast in 1700 in the Moluccas, where he distinguished between 'a sort of very tawny Indians, with long black Hair' and 'shock Curl-pated New Guinea Negroes'; in 1767, Carteret identified a striking break between the Admiralty Islands, peopled by 'woolly headed black, or rather copper coloured Negroes', and the Micronesian inhabitants of tiny Mapia Island, to the north of western New Guinea, whom he described as 'Indien Copper Colour'd … [with] fine long black hair'; and Forrest differentiated 'two sorts' of inhabitants of the Molucca Islands, 'the long hair'd Moors, of a copper colour, like Malays in every respect; and the mopheaded Papuas'.[25] The Restoration French voyagers vigorously restated this distinction, with the surgeon-naturalists Jean-René Constant Quoy (1790-1869) and Joseph-Paul Gaimard (1793-1858) writing of 'a race … similar to that of southern Africa, apparently stranded [égarée, literally "strayed"] in the midst of the Malay race which inhabits the archipelagos of Sunda, Borneo, and the Moluccas' (1823:117).
If 'Papua' as a location had referred initially to an area east of the Moluccas and subsequently to the inhabitants of New Guinea, during the nineteenth century it also emerged as a biologized or racialized toponym found much more widely throughout island Southeast Asia and the western Pacific. This new, racially defined region was variously named 'Mélanésie' by Dumont d'Urville, 'Oceanic Negroland' by the English ethnologist James Cowles Prichard (1786-1848), or 'Papuanesia' by the English colonial lawyer James Richardson Logan (1819-1869) — highlighting the constantly expanding and contracting range of people identified as 'Papuans'.[26] For those authors for whom Papuan encompassed all other forms of 'Negrito', including Aboriginal Tasmanians, Andaman Islanders, and interior communities in Luzon, Mindanao, and the Moluccas, Papuanesia was both a region and a temporal layer in the racial stratigraphy of the region, representing its earliest human settlers. At its broadest extent, the boundaries of this racial zone extended from Fiji in the east, to Tasmania in the south, the Philippines in the north, and the Andaman Islands in the west (Figure 13).
Engraving. Photograph B. Douglas.
The three anglophone authors considered here, Crawfurd, Earl, and Wallace, collectively laid the foundations for theories about Papuans during the mid-nineteenth century. The circle of acquaintance and internal reference amongst the three was almost complete: Crawfurd cited Earl approvingly (though he insisted on referring to him as 'Mr. Windsor East'), borrowed but then misplaced several of Wallace's field notebooks from the Malay Archipelago, and later clashed with Wallace;[28] Earl, in turn, cited Crawfurd's 1820 volume but might not have known much of Wallace as he died before the publication of the latter's major book on the Malay Archipelago; while Wallace had read Crawfurd's writings on the Malay or Indian Archipelago and made frequent reference to the work of Earl. All three were certainly familiar with at least some of the Dutch and French literature on New Guinea. Each of the three authors derived his authority, to a significant extent, through claims to a particular status as an observer in the field. However, the contrasts evident in their varying statements on Malays and Papuans nicely illustrate the transformation in the practice and metropolitan reception of ethnological and anthropological field observations over the passage of just forty years.
[1] National Library of Australia and Australian National Maritime Museum 1999:655.
[2] Forster 1778:228. For more recent discussion of the history of the classification of Pacific Islanders see Douglas 1999; Terrell, Kelly, and Rainbird 2001; Thomas 1989; Tcherkézoff 2003; Chapter Two (Douglas), this volume; but hunt in vain for references to New Guinea in collections on Oceanic encounters such as those edited by Calder, Lamb, and Orr (1999) or Lamb, Smith, and Thomas (2000).
[3] See Chapter Two (Douglas), this volume.
[4] Labrousse (2000:258) provides a useful summary of later developments in French anthropology of the Malay Archipelago, noting the increasing influence of anglophone authors on French scholarship during the latter half of the nineteenth century.
[5] E.g., with little enthusiasm, Wallace (1880a:599-602) extracted a sample of measurements for Malay, Papuan, Polynesian, Australian, and Negro crania from the Thesaurus Craniorum of Joseph Barnard Davis (1867), seeking to test his thesis of the distinction between Malays and Papuans, but concluded that the sample sizes were too small to be meaningful and offered no guide to the identity of individuals from any single race, amongst whom the variation was greater than that between different races.
[6] As Douglas (Chapter Two), this volume, makes clear, French conceptions of the racial cartography of Oceania were considerably more elaborate and holistic in encompassing the entire region (if no less confused in their understanding of ethnic or physical differences). Between 1792 and 1840, the scientific voyages led by Entrecasteaux, Freycinet, Duperrey, and Dumont d'Urville all touched on New Guinea or its surrounding islands, arriving from a variety of directions, with each building in a relatively systematic fashion on the results of their predecessors. A sense of the proliferation of French racial types and of the sheer confusion in their distribution is conveyed in the popular work on the geography and ethnography of Oceania (1836-8) by Grégoire Louis Domeny de Rienzi (1789-1843). Largely summarizing the findings of the earlier voyages, Domeny de Rienzi identified and sought to discriminate between the Papouas (of island Melanesia and coastal New Guinea), the Papou-Malais hybrids of the Raja Ampat islands, the Endamènes or Mélanesiens of Australia and interior New Guinea, the Pou-Andamènes [sic] (hybrid Papou-Endamènes), and the Alfouras (see note 15). The demise in significance — for Papuan anthropology at least — of the results of these French voyages after the mid-nineteenth century may be attributed partly to the long shadow cast by the popularity of Wallace's Malay Archipelago but also demands a more focused examination and explanation than can be offered here.
[7] Dumont d'Urville 1834-5, II:194, my emphasis.
[8] Blanckaert 2003; see also Chapter Eight (Luker), this volume.
[9] My use of the term 'Papuan' might seem to contribute further to the definitional confusion described in this chapter but its retention does serve to underscore the genealogical links between past and contemporary usages.
[10] Marsden (1834:64) would later define Papuah as 'signifying crisp and curled, in the Malayan language, and applied to certain plants as well as human hair'. As Ter Ellingson (2001) has amply documented, Crawfurd was not averse to invention in the form of misplaced attribution. If puahpuah was a Malay term for frizzled hair, it does not appear to have been applied with reference to any other part of the Malay-speaking world, such as Timor. The more obvious Malay term for frizzled hair is rambut keriting (Gelpke 1993:322, 329). By 1838, the German geographer Carl Eduard Meinicke (1803-1876) (without identifying his sources) had moved one step further in confidently asserting that 'The term Papua derives from the remarkable ornament of their hairstyle' and that 'the coastal inhabitants of the Moluccas give the name Papouas solely to those natives of the great northwestern promontory of New Guinea and its neighbouring islands due … to their peculiar hairstyle, and not in reference to their woolly hair, as has previously been believed' (1838:61, 64-5).
[11] Gelpke's (1993:326-9) preferred source for the term Papua, identified in the Biak reference to the Raja Ampat islands to their west as '"Sup i papwa"', or 'the land below … the sunset' , conveys a sense not only of place but also of the political dominance exerted over Biak by the north Moluccan sultanates to the west.
[12] As early as 1779, the East India Company employee Thomas Forrest (1729?-1802?), a fluent Malay speaker, was employing 'Tanna (Land) Papua' as a synonym for 'New Guinea' (1780:v). I am indebted to Diana Carroll for this observation.
[13] Gelpke 1993:325, 327-8.
[14] Forrest, travelling to the north coast of New Guinea in 1774-5 in the company of Malay ships' captains, described its inhabitants as 'Papua Coffres' to distinguish them from the 'Coffres' of other East Indies islands (1780:62, 95, 148).
[15] Torres 1930:233, my emphasis. In this respect, 'Papua' retains a category resemblance to 'Alfuro', another term for people employed widely in eastern Indonesia. Alfuro appears to be derived from the Portuguese forrar, 'free', compounded with the Arabic article al, and was a term widely used in the region to denote animist communities unconverted either to Islam or, later, to Christianity. The observation that communities designated as Alfuros were commonly found in the interior of islands in the Moluccas as well as New Guinea led European observers to conclude that they constituted an aboriginal population that preceded the subsequent arrival of both Papuans and Malays. European attempts during the nineteenth century to define the physical characteristics of Alfuros met with understandable confusion and the term had largely passed into desuetude by the early twentieth century. For a sense of the nineteenth-century debate over Alfuros, see Hamy 1877; Latham 1861; Meyer 1882.
[16] Bougainville 1772:322; Dampier 1709:100, 148; Prado 1930a:171; Souter 1963:128.
[17] See Chapter Two (Douglas), this volume.
[18] Prado y Tovar 1930a:145, 159, 171; 1930b:244; Sharp 1968:48, 49, 52; Torres 1930:229.
[19] Dampier 1709:122, 126, 128.
[20] E.g., Prado y Tovar 1930a:171; see also Sharp 1968:300.
[21] Dampier 1709:100, 126, 128, original emphasis.
[22] Bougainville 1772:342; Carteret 1965:196; Forrest 1780:68.
[23] E.g., Dumont d'Urville 1830-3, IV:604; Freycinet 1825-39, II:47.
[24] 'Inhabitants of Port Dori, New Guinea' (Le Jeune [1822‑5]: folio 131).
[25] Carteret 1965:196, 201; Dampier 1709:100, original emphasis; Forrest 1780:68.
[26] Dumont d'Urville 1832:6; Logan 1850:278; Prichard 1847:213.
[27] Earl 1853: pl. 7.
[28] Crawfurd 1856:295; Wallace 1858-9; 1880a:602.