crouching in their frail sail boat that had survived many a
tempest; since the mutineers of the Bounty had cast them adrift
in the mid-Pacific. In the early years of the nineteenth
century the scientifically directed Astrolabe arrived, under
the command of Dumont D'Urville, and, later, Captain Owen
Stanley in the Rattlesnake, with Huxley as his zoologist, Then,
in 1858, came Alfred Russel Wallace, the codiscoverer of
Darwinism, who, by the way, is said to have been the first
Englishman who ever actually resided in New Guinea.

The daring explorers and painstaking surveyors came and went,
but the great island remained a land of dread and mystery,
guarded by the jagged reefs of its eastern shores, and the
shallow mud flats, stretching far to sea-ward beyond the mouths
of the great rivers of its southern coast. So inaccessible was
Papua that even the excellent harbor of Port Moresby, the site:
of the present capital, was not discovered until 1873. One has
but to stifle for a while in the heavy air that flows lifeless
and fetid over the lowlands as if from a steaming furnace, or
to scent the rank odors of the dark swamps, where for centuries
malaria must linger, to appreciate the reason for the
long-delayed European settlement of the country. But those who
blaze the path of colonial progress are not to be deterred by
temperatures or smells; let us remember that Batavia, "the
white man's graveyard," is now one of the world's great
commercial centers; and Jamaica, the old fever camp of the
British army, is now a health resort for tourists.

Papua, the land of the tired eyes and the earnest face, of the
willing spirit and the weary body, waning as strength fails