From the book - AUTHOR'S NOTE

THE DIGOEL RIVER, which flows into the Arafura Sea on the southern shore of the Western (formerly 'Dutch') New Guinea, is one of the world's largest but least known rivers. I say largest not in reference to its length but rather to its breadth and to the quantityof fresh water it carries to the ocean; and which I say least-known I mean there is no civilised settlement in its densely forested and swampy basin, most of which - except for the immediate precincts of the river channel - remains to this day unexplored, and inhabited only by 'uncontrolled' savages, who are headhunters and cannibals.

The river rises in the vicinty of Mount Juliana, 14,700 feet high, in the great Central Range of New Guinea, and flows southerly, receiving many tributaries, for a distance of some 350 miles but is widening channel has never been accurately surveyed. It flows through region of heavy tropical rainfall. At its mouth the channel is six miles wide. It narrows gradually upstream to between two and three miles wide, but far inland it remains more than a mile wide.

Its drainage basin, of approximately 15,000 square miles by map measurement, is bigger than that in superficial area, as its headwaters are in broken mountainous terrain, as yet unexplored, except from the air. These ranges are as high as the Swiss Alps; but the rainfall in New Guinea is much greater than in Europe, so the Digeol - and its neighbour the Fly River in Australian Papua - are each greater in volume of flow than the Rhine or the Danube.

The run-off of heavy rainfall from those serrated limestone ranges causes perpetual flooding in the lower levels of the Digoel Basin, where the river long ago brokes its banks. Some fifty miles upstream from the mouth this flooding extends to vast swamps of reeds, which are the breeding grounds of unnumerable crocodiles. This was the attraction to the party which I led into those swamps.

Our expedition was made in the 1950s, when this terrain was in Dutch New Guinea, some years before the Indonesian takeover of that territory in 1962-3. The expedition was illegal, for it was impossible to obtain permission from the Dutch to enter that 'uncontrolled' region.

We were tresspassers, so, even though the Dutch have since been evicted from that territory, I have used fictitious names to conceal the identity of my companions, as I do not wish to incriminate them; but with this exception the narrative is true in every detail, and all the place-names are actual.

Our intention was solely to hunt crocodiles for their valuable skins, and not to make scientific studies of native customs, but those customs which came under my notice I have described as I observed them. Where it has been necessary to use pidgin lingo in dialogue I have adapted it a little, for easier digestion.

As I have said, the swamps of the Digoel River have never been systematically explored, and the natives remain headhunters and cannibals to this day. In the 1940s an expedition, led by Donald F. Thompson, D.Sc., a renowned anthropologist, was attacked by the savages, and had to use machineguns. That incident is described in Dr. Thompson's article in "Wlkabout Magazine" of January 1951. It supports what I say in these pages.

We crocodile-poachers, tresspassing there, risked our lives to obtain the skins of saurians from which shoes and handbags would be made for dainty ladies who could scarcely imagine how those skins were obtained. We risked our lives to make quick money, but not easy money; yet I believe that the allure of adventures was the main motive of our expedition. It seems so now, when I think back to it.

G. Bahnemann
Brisbane, Australia