Louisiades Prep - Wars

World War I

The German protectorate covered Bismarck Archipelago and North-east New Guinea 1884-1914.

In one of the first actions of the First World War, Australian troops relieved the Germans of their territory in the Battle of Bita Paka. In 1921 the League of Nations gave German New Guinea to Australia.

World War II

Jan - Feb 1942. Bismarck Archipelago falls to Japan in the Battle of Rabaul. 

The Japanese began preparing to invade Australia, which led to the Kokoda Track campaign beginning in July 1942, and the Battle of Milne Bay in August 1942.

Battle of Milne Bay

The Japanese were trying to knock out an airfield near Alotau, which risked their sealane south towards Australia. The Australians successfully defended against their attack.

The battle is considered to be the first in the Pacific campaign in which Allied troops decisively defeated Japanese land forces. Although Japanese land forces had experienced local setbacks elsewhere in the Pacific earlier in the war, unlike at Milne Bay, these actions had not forced them to withdraw completely and abandon their strategic objective. As a result of the battle, Allied morale was boosted and Milne Bay was developed into a major Allied base, which was used to mount subsequent operations in the region.

Siege of Rabaul (1943)

Allied forces attacked the Japanese base at Rabaul.

Allied advances 1942-44

Deboyne Island was a Japanese seaplane base during World War II.The Japanese found that their new base was just a little too close to the allied planes based at Port Moresby and the base was quickly abandoned. The Japanese never returned to the island however several ‘Zero’ fighter planes were ditched in the area during the Battle of the Coral Sea. One remains virtually intact in the shallow waters of Deboyne Lagoon.

Louisiades Prep - Anthropology

The Louisiades are in the southern part of a wider area known as The Massim. It is to anthropology roughly what the Galapagos Islands are to evolution. Participant observer anthropology started here, and it has been a sacred area for anthropologists ever since.

It makes sense to me to try and understand it as much as possible before we go there.

The Louisiades are in the southern Massim.

Geology

The Indo-Australian Tectonic Plate has been moving north since the break-up of Gondwanaland. The Indian part collided with Asia about 50 million years ago, and the crumple zone of the leading edge threw up the Himalayas. The crumple zone of the Australian part hitting the Pacific plate threw up the New Guinea highlands.

This article gives a good overview of many of the issues.

Australia’s epic story: a tale of amazing people, amazing creatures and rising seas

The line between the Australian plate (known as Sahul) and the Eurasian plate created a discontinuity of fauna known as the Wallace Line discovered by Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer of evolution. Monkeys and elephants to the north-west; marsupials to the south-east.

Sahul was a single island until the ending of the last ice age about 10,000 years ago. You could have walked from New Guinea to Tasmania until then. 

My last boat was called 'Sahula' in recognition of this area that I hoped to cruise in.

The line of contact between the plates around the Pacific is associated with volcanoes and earthquakes. It is known as the Ring of Fire. 

Ring of Fire

The volcanoes in the area of New Guinea and the islands east of it lead to plenty of obsidian, which was important for high quality tools for stone age cultures such as the Lapita, and mines of gold and copper recently, eg Ok Tedi, Lihir Island,  and Bougainville Island. There was a gold rush on Misima and Sudest Islands in 1888.

 Human occupation

The first wave out of Africa

The second wave from Taiwan - the Lapita people.

Recent research on DNA has shed more light on the origins of the Lapita people.

DNA reveals Lapita ancestors of Pacific Islanders came from Asia.

The Lapita people have been called 'The Vikings of the Pacific'

They established a base in the Bismarck Archipelago in about 1400 BC. They used volcanic glass called obsidian in their tools. They had outrigger canoes, spoke Austronesian languages, and produced characteristic Lapita pottery.

Lapita pottery found here

Their descendants became the Polynesians, who colonized the Pacific.

The Papuan peoples tended to live on the New Guinea mainland. They speak about 600 different languages. The Austronesians tend to live on the islands and coastal areas. They have about 200 languages. More on the languages of the Pacific here.

 Anthropologists

Pre WWII

• Baron Nikolai Miklouho-Maclay (Russian)  Madang area 1870-87
• Reverend Harry Moore Dauncey. Missionary. 1880-1920. 'Papuan Pictures'.
• CG Seligman  (British physician) 1898, 1904. Wrote 'Melanesians of British New Guinea
• W. H. R. Rivers. (British psychiatrist) Described in The Regeneration Trilogy
• Bronislaw Malinowski (Polish) 1915-18 Trobriand Islands. 
• Reo Fortune (NZ psychologist) Wrote 'Sorcerers of Dobu'. Margaret Mead's second husband.
• Margaret Mead (US anthropologist). Manus, Sepik River. 
• Gregory Bateson (British anthropologist) Sepik River. Margaret Mead's third husband.

Some of the shenanigans between Mead, Fortune and Bateson are described in an earlier page in this blog. http://nimrodcat.blogspot.com.au/2012/08/kula-ring.html 

I tried to write a movie script for the story years ago, but it was made into a movie by someone else. 'In a Savage Land'. 

I recently heard that there is a new novel which is a lightly fictionalised version of the same threesome, and that it is to be made into a second movie. Euphoria by Lily King. Youtube of her being interviewed here. Spooky.

But I digress.

I think the important things for prospective cruisers are:

The Kula Ring.

Described by Malinowski in 'Argonauts of the Western Pacific' (free download here).  

There are a mass of islands, stretching from the Louisiades in the east, to the D’entrecasteaux Islands close to Milne Bay, and Woodlark Island and the Trobriands slightly further north. On these islands, certain people belong to the Kula. They participate in an elaborate ritual, with ceremonies and magic that involve them passing ceremonial objects in a circle around these islands. The objects are quite specific; one is an arm-shell called ‘mwali’ made from a cone shell, and the other is a necklace made of spondylus shells, called 'bagi' or ‘soulava’. These objects are precious, but not kept as property. The key is to pass them on. So one man in the Kula who has a ‘mwali’ exchanges it with another man in the Kula who has a ‘soulava’.

 Mwali arm-band. Travels anti-clockwise round the Kula Ring.

Bagi necklace. Travels clockwise round the Kula Ring.

Sexuality

Malinowski described this in The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia.

Most Massim cultures are matrilineal. Descent is traced through the mother and maternal ancestors

Spirit (Baloma) of a deceased ancestor impregnates the woman while bathing in the sea

Responsibility for a baby lies with mother and her brother (not the father).

Sexual taboos very limited.

Oedipus complex absent

Neuroses said to be rare

Many variations in New Guinea. 

This led to the Trobriand Islands getting known as the Islands of Love.

A festival at the time of the yam harvest features conspicuous celebration of sexuality.

A BBC documentary about Malinowski here.

Further episodes here.

Canoes

Most canoes built in the islands are constructed on Panaeati Island (within Deboyne Lagoon), a regional canoe building centre for at least 100 years. Some canoes are built for use by Panaeati residents, but many are destined for other islands (primarily the small islands of the Calvados Chain and neighbouring Vanatinai, or Sudest Island.

Wood carving, historically, has been an important art of the Milne Bay area. The Milne Bay peoples created canoes, called waga. When Charles Gabriel Seligman visited the area in 1904, he described the waga as playing "such an important part in the life of the district," and being a "decorative art" that has "reached its highest expression in the carvings of the ornaments for the prows of the waga."

 Contemporary Anthropologists

* - studying islands of the Louisade Archipelago

• —Mark Mosko (Kiriwina)
• —Andrew Connelley (Kiriwina)
• —Annette Weiner (Kiriwina)
• —Kathy Lepani (Kiriwina)
• —Michelle MacCarthy (Kiriwina)
• —Shirley Campbell (Vakuta)
• —Nancy Munn (Gawa)
• —Martha Macintyre (Tubetube)
• —Susanne Kuehling (Dobu)
• —Maria Lepowsky (Sudest Island)* 'Fruit of the Motherland: Gender in an Egalitarian Society'
• —Debbora Battaglia (Sabarl Is)* 'On the Bones of the Serpent' about mortuary rituals.
• —Fred Damon (Woodlark (Muyua) Is)
• —Ryan Schram (Normanby Is)
• —John Liep (Rossel (Yela) Is)* 'A Papuan Plutocracy: Ranked Exchange on Rossel Island'
• Steven Levinson (Rossel Island)* Linguistics
• —Will Rollason (Panapompom Is)* 'We Are Playing Football'

Art

Good site on the art of the Massim.

Louisiades Prep - Navigation

This is the biggest trip either of us has done, by far. My way of dealing with anxiety is to prepare, some say over-prepare. But often when one is well prepared, one can more confidently vary the plan, and throw a few jazz notes over the written music.

A source of comfort is that we will be sailing in convoy, at least on the way over, with George's brother Ken, his wife Janice, and two friends. They will be in a larger, faster, catamaran called 'Resolute'.

The wind at this time of year blows fairly predictably from the south-east, often tending towards the east as one approaches the Louisiades. In addition, there is often a strong east to west current near the Louisiades, which leads to advice from many sources to keep south until one is confident of making the landfall you want. Otherwise you might have to beat at the end of the crossing.

Which contributes to our decision to start from Townsville rather than Cairns. The course is a little further off the wind.

This course also gives us a few potential stopovers if the wind is strong and we get fatigued. We can anchor at south Flinders Reef, NW Herald Cay, and Magdaleine Cay. We probably won't, but it is good to be able to break the journey up if we want to.

The Louisiades Yacht Rally has gone from Cairns to the Louisiades every year for the last six years or so. We would have joined it this year, but the organizer, Guy Chester, has decided to give it a break. The rally normally starts at the western end of the big lagoon, and travels eastwards along the Calvados Chain of islands in the archipelago. With the prevailing wind being from the south-east, we have been persuaded that it would be more convenient to start in the east and cruise downwind. 

This raises the question of how and where do we check in for quarantine and customs clearance. The rally arranges to fly an official to the island of Misima, at some expense (shared by all the boats on the rally). After some discussion, and a few phone calls to customs in Alotau, the regional capital of the Milne Bay region, we have decided to sail to the eastern end of the islands and cruise slowly down to Misima, where we will get quarantine free pratique from John Metuselo (aka Metu) who is Health Officer in Bwagaoia (Tels: 6437455, 6437442, or 6437460). We then plan to cruise on further west, intoning the mantra 'we are on our way to Samarai to check in for customs' to anyone who challenges us. The customs officer in Samarai is Felix Dosi (mobile 73373405 in case he is out fishing).

Australian customs in Townsville need to have 96 hours notice of your return. This can be by email to yachtreport@customs.gov.au. If, for any reason we had failed to check into PNG, then they are likely to give us 'extra scrutiny' on our return. It would be helpful if we had kept a careful log of where we had been. We aim to run a 'track' on our chartplotter so we can show it to Aussie customs.

Cruising guide

The best sources of cruising information about the Louisiades that I have found are:

• Yacht Maranatha's blog
• The Louisiades Rally briefing
• Dimdims and Dolphins
• Friends of the Louisiades
• S/V Totem's blog
• Cruising in the Louisiades. (A lovely free eBook from a catamaran called 'Songline')

The Maranatha site is particularly good. I have created a mirror of it on my laptop, since we likely won't have the internet when we are there. This is relatively easy. On a Mac you get the app SiteSucker. Then put the whole top level of the site in (http://yachtmaranatha.wordpress.com), and let it download to your computer. Next open the file 'index.html' in your browser and bookmark it. Now you should be able to browse through the site when you are offline. Its not perfect; many sites contain links that go outside the site itself, but the great majority of the links work fine.

Windows computers use a similar program HTTrack.

I'm impressed with the Maranatha site. I have put most of their waypoints into Google Earth, and they look convincing. The waypoints for the old book DimDims and Dolphins look less reliable. 

I have shamelessly plagiarized from these sources to create a written cruising guide; 

'Cruising the Calvados Chain'. Download it here. It is 140mb.

Whereas the mainland of PNG has some significant security concerns, the islands are relatively safe. This is a compilation of reports of different places assembled by a variety of yachties. Click on the image to go to an interactive Google Earth site with more detail.