Wanderings in the Interior of New Guinea

Abstract

IT is not often that a work of fiction calls for notice in the pages of NATURE; but we have here an exceptional case. This book has been favourably noticed in some of the daily and weekly papers as a genuine narrative of travel and an addition to our knowledge of an almost unknown region, and it therefore becomes a duty to inform our readers that it is wholly fictitious. It is not even a clever fiction; for although the author has some literary skill and some notion of the character of savages, he is so totally ignorant of the geography and the natural history of the country he pretends to have explored, and so completely unacquainted with the exigencies of travel and exploration in trackless equatorial forests, as to crowd his pages with incidents totally unlike any that occur to the actual explorer, and with facts altogether opposed to some of the best established conclusions of physical geography. We proceed to give proofs of the accuracy of these statements. First, as to his geography. He starts from a point a little to the east of Torres Straits, of which he is so injudicious as to give the latitude and longitude (both to seconds) from his own observations. He also gives a map of his route, but without scale or meridian line. He describes himself, however, as travelling generally northwards with only such divergences as the country necessitated, and we may therefore take it that his route was nearly north, as it should have been to cross the island. But although he gives no scale to his map, he (again injudiciously) gives the dimensions of a large lake, along one side of which he travelled, as “between 60 and 70 miles long, 15 to 30 broad,” which being laid down on his map furnishes an excellent scale, and shows that the total distance from his starting point in a straight line to the place he professes to have reached must have been somewhere between 560 and 620 miles. Now, the total width of Nesv Guinea is here 380 miles only, and the] longest distance possible to go without reaching the sea is just about 620 miles, which takes you to the shores of Geelvinck Bay.

Wanderings in the Interior of New Guinea.

By Capt. J. A. Lawson. With Frontispiece and Map. (Chapman and Hall, 1875.)