A Blank on the Map Attenborough's Passion Projects

I've been making natural history films for over 60 years

and, in the process, I've been to some very interesting places

but, every now and again, I've been allowed to make a film

about my other enthusiasms -

about the history of exploration,

about tribal objects or the life of a great scientist.

You could call them my Passion Projects.

In 1971, I joined an expedition into a patch of unknown territory

in the heart of Papua New Guinea,

and made a film about it, which we called Blank On The Map.

Nobody, as far as I knew, had ever recorded on film the method

whereby, for 500, 600 years, the rest of the world had been explored.

For all that period of time, if you wanted to explore Africa,

and you were a European, you got on a boat and got off.

If you were lucky, there might be horses,

but there were great parts of Africa where there weren't -

and, if there were no horses,

there was no internal combustion engine - you walked.

There was no other way of doing it.

I thought it was really very, very romantic

and, if you were going into a country that you didn't know,

you would have to take stores, often with a carrier line of 100 porters,

and there was only one place in the world where you could still do that,

and that was in New Guinea.

And I'd told friends of mine in Australia,

"If you discover that anybody's going to do another

"one of these long trips, I would love to make a record of it."

And, after a couple of years of administrating in the BBC,

the message came from my pals,

"We've got a trip going on. It may be the last ever."

And so I said, "Right," and arranged to go.

These arrows and this bow belong to a man

who has never seen a European face.

So does this house.

I'm in the middle of Central New Guinea,

and these wonderful mountains all around

are one of the few places left on the surface of the earth

that are truly unexplored.

BIRDS SCREECH AND CHIRP

Until only a few months ago,

it was thought that this area of Central New Guinea

was completely uninhabited,

and then Laurie Bragg, the assistant district commissioner

who's responsible for this part of the island,

was looking at some aerial photographs

that had been taken to try and map this area,

to make sense out of this tangle of mountain ranges and rivers.

And on the photographs, he saw one or two tiny little pinpoints,

which indicated to him that there,

there were gardens like this one, and houses and people -

people who had not been contacted ever by the outside world.

And so, it was decided to send an expedition to try and find them.

AEROPLANE WHIRS

Aeroplanes first arrived in this country way back in the '20s.

The island of New Guinea is immense - 1,500 miles long,

lying between Australia and the equator,

and 50 years ago, its interior was virtually blank on the map.

The aeroplane has, ever since, been a key tool in filling in that blank.

Sometimes by dropping supplies to explorers

who had marched for weeks on end.

Sometimes by dumping men on a sandbank by an unknown river.

Sometimes, as now, by giving a man like Laurie Bragg

a view of what lies ahead of him before he sets off into new country,

and the view could hardly be described as welcoming -

an unbroken carpet of green corduroy,

jungle as thick and as sticky as you can find anywhere.

PLANE HUMS

-Does the river look OK for the canoes?

-Oh, yes.

There doesn't seem to be very many snags. It is...

It's hard to tell the current from here, but it looks pretty good.

How many times have you been up this river?

-I haven't.

-Oh. Has anybody?

They've been to this next group of people, but not beyond.

There's a village.

It's the last known one.

You can start to see some snags in the river now.

Getting a bit marginal for canoes now.

There look as though there are some bad rapids there.

Will we get as high as this?

We won't get canoes anywhere near here.

I'm just trying to pick out that garden area I saw a minute ago.

There is a big garden complex

underneath the top of this mountain over here.

-Is that everything you want to see?

-Yeah, except for clouds.

Back at his base at Ambunti on the Sepik River,

Laurie Bragg developed his plans

in the light of what he had seen

for a major patrol into those unknown mountains

to discover just what was there.

We'll move from Ambunti here,

downstream along the Sepik in two workboats,

the Opal and the Sapphire,

and come into the Karawari River here.

Follow the Karawari upstream into the Korosameri.

The work boats should get to about here somewhere.

And then the river will be too shallow for the work boat,

and the canoes will shuttle us

and the rations and patrol gear up to approximately here,

where I think we'll run out of sufficient depth of water

to take canoes, and from there, we'll have to walk.

-What's the walking going to be like?

-It's going to be very difficult.

-Is it?

-Yes, if we have a look at the aerial photographs of the area...

-I don't want to shock you or anything.

-Ha-ha!

-That's the Salamei river.

-Yeah.

We won't get that far with the canoes.

We'll have to walk from down below here somewhere.

Be moving up along this to that junction there.

-Yeah.

-Which I don't know what it's called.

And then we'll get on to this ridge

and follow that to the crest of the Salamei April Divide.

-Now, you can see garden areas there.

-Yes.

-See them?

-Yeah.

And establish ourselves on that ridge somewhere

-where we find people.

-Mm.

-And let the people come to us.

Patrols have been the means of administering this country

ever since Europeans first settled here. Every few months,

government officers like Laurie Bragg

take a handful of armed native police,

leave their stations, and travel for weeks,

visiting the people in their territory.

In the settled areas, they see that schools are started

and roads built and that the people get some sort of medical help,

even if it's pretty simple.

In the wilder parts, the job's more dramatic.

Tribal feuds must be stopped and elementary law established.

This particular patrol would be different

only because in addition to doing all that,

it was going to walk slap across one of the last

of those empty blank patches on the map

to try and sort out its geography on the ground

and, if possible, contact the inhabitants

who so far have never seen Europeans.

40 years ago, the Sepik River was notorious for its head-hunters.

Indeed, it was news of a spectacular headhunting raid

that made the government decide to establish the station at Ambunti,

240 miles up the Sepik River, in what was then the Dark Interior.

The men of one village had raided their neighbours,

lopped off 28 heads, boiled them and scraped them,

moulded them with clay,

and then stuck them up for display in the cult house.

Even today, it's not unusual to hear of a ritual murder or two

in the remoter parts,

away from the main river and the eye of the government.

90 miles downstream from Ambunti, we left the Sepik

and turned into a tributary that came in from the south.

This river was shallower and hemmed in by rafts of floating reeds,

so we had to leave the two big boats

and carry on in three dugout canoes, fitted with outboard motors.

On the Sepik, we had seen quite a lot of people

travelling along the river in canoes.

But here, there was no-one,

just flocks of ducks and eagles and herons.

After three days of travel,

we came in to land at the last known village on this river, Inaru.

This was the end of the easy bit. From now on, we shall be walking.

Patrols only come up as far as Inaru about once a year,

and none had ever been beyond it.

For the villagers, therefore, our arrival was an important event,

and since there were only about 50 of them,

we represented a massive, almost overwhelming, invasion.

The people of Inaru live very simply.

They plant a few vegetables,

but they rely heavily on the forest to supply them with fruit and meat.

The river provides them with fish, mostly black bony catfish,

and, once a year, it presents them with an enormous bonanza.

Mayflies. For three days, millions of them hatch

and rise to swirl in blizzards over the surface of the water.

No-one knows what particular chemistry in the river

or change in the climate causes all of them

to emerge at the same time in this extraordinary fashion,

but the Inaru people know well enough

that this limitless gift of food will only be here for a day or so.

The newly hatched insects are soft and juicy,

and, eaten still wriggling, just like oysters.

Our porters relished them, just as the villagers did.

Life in the jungle may look as though it's blissful and untroubled,

Adam and Eve in a primitive paradise,

but, in fact, only too often, it's scourged by disease.

The headman had a tropical ulcer on his foot the size of a golf ball.

There were cases of yaws and malaria and skin fungus,

all diseases easily treated by the medicines that we had with us -

and the villagers knew that perfectly well,

and were certainly delighted to see us.

Communication, however, was not easy.

Astonishingly, there are over 1,000 mutually incomprehensible

languages in New Guinea.

The Inaru language is only spoken by these people

and two other villages - about 200 people in all.

If we were to meet any new people on the journey ahead,

interpreters would obviously be invaluable,

but plans to get them had already run into snags.

We're expecting to get a Bisorio bloke

to interpret for us.

We haven't got him yet.

And Bisorio people live over in these hills over here

and they're nomadic...

and the local people here have agreed to go and look for them,

but they're not sure they're going to find them.

When did they last see them?

They saw two blokes... two men from this group a month ago

when they came in from the hills over there to trade for tobacco.

So, the constable and two Inaru men set off in a canoe

to try and find us an interpreter,

a nomad, who might be anywhere

in several hundred square miles of forest,

and who might not be to keen on being discovered anyway.

It seemed a fairly tough assignment.

The next day, we ourselves would set off on foot,

following the river into the mountains.

Since from here on we should be in uncontrolled country,

there was a chance we might have to defend ourselves,

so Laurie issued bullets to the police and, at the same time,

as the regulations insist, gave strict instructions in pidgin

on when and how a man was permitted to fire them.

And so the march began. There was no track,

so two men at the head of the column had to cut a path through the bush

wide enough for people burdened by heavy and bulky loads.

Because we had no idea

when or where we might find villages from whom we could get food

and shelter, everything we needed had to be brought with us

and carried on men's shoulders - tents, medicines, lamps,

surveying equipment, radio gear, personal baggage,

trade goods such as beads and salt and knives,

photographic equipment, axes, buckets, and above all, food.

Food for us, food for the carriers of equipment,

and more food for those carrying food.

We marched up the east bank of the river,

but the main area of unknown country lay to the west,

and so, eventually, we had to cross it.

At this point, it was just possible for one man without a load

to swim across, but to get the whole party over,

we had to build a bridge.

The New Guinea forests most generously provide you

with everything you need

for the construction of a first-rate suspension bridge -

primarily Kanda, a kind of long, straggling cane

that grows throughout the forest,

draping itself over trees

and along the ground like a carelessly laid cable.

It grows, astonishingly, into lengths up to 500ft long

and it's as strong as any rope.

Three lengths bundled together will form the basic cable

on which to put our feet.

One on either side will serve as handrails,

and the whole contraption will be tied together

with string made from splitting kanda.

106 carriers, quite apart from ourselves,

have got across that bridge.

106 sounds an absurd, almost ludicrously, large number,

but the basic calculation is this -

if one man carrying nothing or carrying just a tent or trade salts

or a radio is going to survive in the field for a fortnight,

he needs two other men, carrying nothing

but food to provide him with food and them with food.

If you want to stay longer than a fortnight in the field,

and we do, you've either got to arrange for an air drop

or you've got to live off the country.

We can't live off the country

because there are very few people here

and, anyway, turning up for dinner with 106 porters

is hardly a way to endear yourself.

Or else, of course, we could starve.

We're planning to get an air drop.

But first, we've got to cross this river.

MEN SHOUT

The forest, as we had seen from the air,

was as continuous as a carpet.

There were no clearings, no patches of grassland, no meadows,

and in order to get enough clear space in which to pitch tents,

we had to cut down trees,

and that takes time and energy.

So every day we stopped at about four o'clock in the afternoon.

That gave us time to make camp and get settled in before sundown.

But since by then we had been marching for nine hours anyway,

it was none too soon for most of us.

The first job on making camp in the evening

was to put up the aerial for the portable radio,

so that Laurie Bragg could report back to his base at Ambunti

and they would know just where we were if anything were to go wrong.

Ambunti, Ambunti portable. Ambunti, Ambunti portable. Do you read?

Roger. Now, on the aerial photograph,

we're on the Salamei river

immediately north of the nick in the top frame.

Our intention now is to remain at this campsite

for one or two days,

to allow the constable and the Bisorio interpreters

he's gone to look for to catch us up.

Have you got that, over?

Yeah, roger, roger. That's all. Roger.

After three days of hard walking, a rest day is a blessing

that everybody's grateful for.

Their bruises and cuts and strains

get a chance to heal,

there's one man who's got a dose of malaria...

and it also gives a chance to see something of the wildlife

in the forests around here.

When you're tramping through it -

110 men, lugging patrol boxes about -

you make a certain amount of noise

so you don't expect to see much wildlife in the bush.

But moving alone and by yourself, well, you've got a chance.

But this bush around here in New Guinea

is a very strange sort of bush.

There aren't any big mammals - there are no monkeys,

there aren't elephants or tigers or lions.

In fact there are no big mammals at all in New Guinea.

But what this forest DOES have,

and which gives it a unique excitement and splendour,

are birds of paradise.

We've already heard them calling around the camp,

and with any luck we might see some of them.

And there IS one -

lurking low down in a tree,

swinging his train of yellow plumes.

These marvellous birds assemble in the tops of trees

and display to one another every morning

in the half-light of early dawn.

That is a wonderful enough sight, which few people have seen.

Now, however, it was afternoon,

and it looked as though we might be even more lucky,

and see a rare performance of the display dance

in the full blaze of sunshine.

Undoubtedly, these plumed males

assembling in their display

were getting more and more excited.

Slowly, they hopped onto higher and higher branches,

until they reached the very summit of the tree,

where they had stripped the leaves from one branch

so that on this, their display ground,

they could dance unimpeded.

Now there were eight of these splendid creatures

in a frenzy of excitement,

displaying to one another as their performance mounted to its climax.

This is a males' dance only - a competition

not so much to impress the female,

but to gain dominance over rival males.

It's always performed in the same tree,

and that is often their downfall -

for some tribes hunt them for their plumes,

which are used as money with which to buy pigs and wives.

Here, however, in this uninhabited wilderness,

they can dance unmolested.

And this, apart from the pig, is the biggest mammal in the island.

An absurd and endearing creature, the tree kangaroo.

Above it was another - a baby.

It seems quite ridiculous that an animal shaped like a kangaroo

should have decided to try and climb into a tree.

Its legs, which are splendid for hopping,

seem to be a positive liability up in the branches, and indeed,

to be truthful, tree kangaroos are pretty clumsy creatures

and always in imminent danger of falling out of their trees.

Another of New Guinea's splendid and extraordinary decorated birds -

the Goura pigeon.

The largest of all the pigeons,

with a marvellous silver-spotted tiara,

which it uses just like the birds of paradise in display dances.

It spends most of its time on the ground,

and, unhappily for its own wellbeing, makes pretty good eating.

The next day, seven days after leaving Inaru, the constable,

who had gone to look for the interpreter, caught up with us.

He gave his report to Laurie in pidgin,

and though I couldn't understand all he said, it looked like bad news.

HE SPEAKS IN PIDGIN

THEY SPEAK IN PIDGIN

He had found no-one. It was a real blow.

But there was nothing we could do now except go on.

You have to watch where you put your hands.

If you grab a branch for support,

in order to steady yourself, without looking at it closely,

as like as not you will stab your palm

full of long, barbed thorns.

It's extraordinary in the circumstances

how quickly you become quite a good practical botanist,

able to recognise some sorts of tree in a flash.

Now that we had left the rivers,

we were navigating for much of the time on simple compass bearings.

HE SPEAKS IN PIDGIN

And then, suddenly, two weeks after setting out,

as we cut our way up a ridge,

the sharp eye of our trackers noticed an old break in a sapling.

Someone else, a few months ago, had passed this way.

That morning, we saw several more.

The rigs we were following must be a route used by those people

whose houses we had seen from the air. They couldn't be far away.

Indeed, they might well be watching us

as we crashed so clumsily and noisily through the forest.

And then, unexpectedly, we marched into a clearing,

and there ahead of us was a house.

It was big enough to hold an entire family group of 20 or so people.

It was also clearly a fortress,

built on stilts for protection,

with loopholes through the sides

from which defenders could fire arrows.

The question was whether the fortress was manned,

and whether we, without interpreters to explain our intentions,

would be taken as friends or enemies.

Oi!

Oi!

There was no reaction. Nothing moved.

The entrance was barricaded with a huge, heavy plank.

It looked as though the house was deserted, but we couldn't be sure.

It could be that the people were simply not at home,

but out hunting somewhere in the forest.

Or that they had taken fright at our approach

and were somewhere nearby, watching what we would do.

Or it could even be an ambush.

This narrow corridor is a very effective fortification.

Nobody could get into this house armed only with spears

and bows and arrows...

if the owners didn't want them to.

And this is the only room.

These...

I don't know what's in here.

From the weight of it, it's quite light,

perhaps it's a dancing skirt.

And here, carefully strung on vines...

..these, I think, are the eggs of the bush turkey, the megapode.

The back here...

RATTLING

These dancing beads, dancing rattles.

And here at the back...

..jawbones of pigs, carefully strung up and preserved.

The pig, all over New Guinea,

is an animal of great ceremonial importance.

And this is unusual. At least, I've not seen it before.

The jawbones of piglets, too.

And this savage and effective-looking dagger...

carefully incised on the tip.

This is made from the leg bone of the cassowary,

the New Guinea ostrich.

And here, a formidable armoury of arrows.

These, with the bamboo blades, are normally used for killing pigs.

And these, with the hardwood points, sometimes the bone points,

I asked one of the local people once what they were used for,

he said, "Oh, they killing man." These are war arrows.

A rack of firewood.

And above me, the rafters of the roof

are most carefully and meticulously lashed with a decorative pattern.

The fireplace.

The stones are still warm. They were here just recently.

Here is the fire stick that they use for making fire.

It's got those notches.

You put it beneath your foot and...

..pull it with a rattan cane.

So they were here quite recently. But now...

..the place is totally deserted.

We couldn't have stayed by that house any longer,

for we were running short of food.

But although we hadn't actually seen the people themselves,

we had learned quite a lot about them from the house itself

and the objects inside it.

The following day, we were due to get an airdrop of supplies.

Before we had set out,

Laurie had agreed with the pilot on a date for the drop,

and together, they had picked a place which -

judging from the air photographs - seemed suitable,

where the ground was relatively flat

and the plane could get a decent approach run through the mountains.

Our problem now was to get there on time and, preferably,

with all our gear dry.

MEN SHOUT

When we got to the drop site, we felled trees to make

an open space and spread out tarpaulins

as markers for the pilot to aim at.

And just so that several tons of stores weren't dropped

on the tarpaulins we used as tents, we concealed those with branches.

The pilot would need all the help he could get to find us,

so we lit a fire as well.

PLANE ENGINE ROARS

THEY SHOUT

Hopeless, miles off target!

The porters were furious.

It would be a lot of work climbing around in the bush

trying to find those bags.

PORTERS SPEAK OWN LANGUAGE

For the second pass, he came in much lower.

Bang in the centre.

One, two, three, four, five.

Three passes, six bags on each drop,

18 bags of rice, tinned meat,

sugar and salt that somehow had got to be found.

That day, our spirits were high.

We had been on short rations for some time past,

and everyone was looking forward to an enormous meal that evening.

The next morning, things didn't look quite so good.

The loads, which over the past few days

had been getting lighter and lighter as we ate our way through them,

had suddenly become crushingly heavy again

with all the stores from the airdrop.

Always, as we marched, Laurie took bearings on mountains

and river bends to check where we were on the air photographs

and build up a detailed map of our progress.

One of the least attractive experiences of walking

through forest like this are these creatures.

Eugh.

A leech.

Fortunately, I managed to get it this time,

before it started sucking my blood.

But there are plenty more of its brothers around here

just waiting for me to pass their way.

I can see them even here, on the leaves.

The existence of the leeches in this forest is, to me, really, a puzzle,

because they are creatures which are very specially modified

to live only on blood -

say a human being's blood or pig's blood -

but there are very, very few pigs in these forests

and even fewer human beings.

And yet, wherever we walk, every day,

we see dozens and dozens and dozens of leeches.

How they survive, I don't know.

Where they get their food from, I have no idea.

I just wish that they themselves realised

that their existence and survival is an impossibility.

And this, on the other hand, is one of the most engaging,

indeed slightly lunatic inhabitants of the forest - the echidna.

An amiable, myopic creature

which has the same nonsensical group of characteristics

as the duck-billed platypus.

It's got warm blood, feeds its young on milk and lays eggs.

There are poisonous snakes in New Guinea,

and undoubtedly, they exist in some numbers.

But they are very hard to find, and usually,

they slither away before you have a decent chance to look at them.

This one is quite harmless. A beautiful emerald green tree python.

And then, once more, we came across signs of human beings.

This is a pig trap.

The pig would come down this corridor

and trigger off a log hanging above it with a spear in it.

The trap was old and long since sprung,

but at least it was a sign that the forest was inhabited.

Day after day, we trudged on.

We made careful notes of all the rivers that we crossed -

which way they flowed and how far apart they were -

of the different kinds of rocks we saw on the river beds

and the kinds of trees in the forests.

We took altitude readings and natural history notes,

and compass bearings of prominent peaks and rivers.

Certainly, we left behind us a trail through the bush

that would make it much easier

for anyone who ever had to come this way again.

As we made camp on the 25th night of the patrol,

it was no good denying that we were feeling pretty depressed.

We had all hoped to get some glimpse of the shy people

who we knew lived here.

But we were now within three days of coming out on the other side of

the blank on the map into known country,

and we haven't seen anything of them.

PORTERS SPEAK OWN LANGUAGE

Laurie reckons that we must be in the territory of a tribe

known to their neighbours as the Biami.

Their name was the only word of their language that we knew.

So that evening we sent out a porter

to call that name over and over again.

Biami!

Biami!

Biami!

Biami!

Biami!

It was very cold that night.

Next morning, it was drizzling, and no-one was anxious to move -

until suddenly, a porter called out "Biami", and there they were.

Biami, huh?

-Biami.

-Biami.

Biami. Biami.

THEY SPEAK OWN LANGUAGE

Bia-ma, Bia-ma, Bia-ma, Bia-ma...

Bia-ma, Bia-ma.

-Siti.

-Siti.

-LAURIE:

-Sitifa?

Sitifa is the name of a river.

THEY CONTINUE IN OWN LANGUAGE

'We tried to ask them, by gestures,

'to bring in their women and children and to bring us food.

'It was not that we really needed their taro or bananas,

'but trade is a proper and decent relationship

'with dignity and respect on both sides.

'We didn't want our meeting to become a question of the rich

'handing out gifts to the poor.

'Perhaps, too, they might persuade their neighbours,

'who had run away from us, the Bukaru, to come in as well.

'But with no common words between us except for proper names,

'the message wasn't easy to get across.'

TRIBESMEN SPEAK OWN LANGUAGE

Bukaru, Bukaru...

'One of the most popular gifts in the remoter parts

'of New Guinea is newspaper.

'It is used for smoking the raw, powerful tobacco

'that every village grows.

'Some people will carry a load for a day for a couple of sheets or so.

'But these people normally use dried leaves as cigarette wrapping,

'and had no idea what to do with the paper.

'They took it rather as though it was some sort of useless memento.

'This plainly was not a success, so Laurie tried salt instead.

'This was much better received, and what with that, and cigarettes

'made for them from newspaper by the police, all looked well.'

-Bikaru...

-Bikaru.

-Lalu.

-Lalu, Lalu... Bukaru.

-Bukaru.

Bukaru.

PORTER ATTEMPTS TO TRANSLATE

'After about an hour, when they started to leave,

'they seemed to be as delighted with the meeting as we were ourselves.

'That night, we reported back to base

'in a much happier frame of mind.

'Except for the fact that the radio was giving serious trouble.'

FEEDBACK

I'll go ahead, I think that's through to base.

Our position is I1, the bottom of I1.

If you've got that, give us a long roger, would you?

-MUFFLED REPLY:

-Roger, roger...

Strength at half, strength at half,

we've got a broken wire in the set, over.

MUFFLED REPLY

I think you said you had nothing for us, I didn't hear properly.

If you're writing in to the DC, you could let him know

that we have found our first group of people,

first group of people, we will stay here tomorrow

and maybe some of them will come in.

But would they?

Would they be sufficiently convinced of our goodwill

to risk another visit?

Certainly, they had seemed happy enough when they were with us,

but no-one was taking any bets.

But the next morning, there they were again.

And what is more, they were carrying loads of food.

TRIBESMEN SPEAK OWN LANGUAGE

'There wasn't much of it.

'Certainly not enough to make much difference

'to the rations of 100 men.

'But it was a proper basis for trade.

'Now they seemed sufficiently confident for me

'to look at their personal ornaments,

'and perhaps in the process discover a few Biami words.

'In his ear, he had what I recognised as a cassowary quill

'bent into a ring.

'Every one of them had two ritual punctures in his nose,

'and he had pegs in them. What were they?

'It turned out they were just little wooden pegs.

'There was a bone through his ear as well, but from what?'

-Kokomo, kokomo.

-Kokomo.

-Kokomo?

-Mm.

DAVID SQUAWKS

'Hornbill.

'This was the claw of a tree kangaroo.'

Salam?

Uh?

'So the Biami word for tree kangaroo is "salam".

'And now, trading began.

'This time, one of the police offered glass beads.

'Again, highly valued by other tribes.

'But again, though they accepted them, they didn't seem overjoyed.

'So we went back to salt.

HE SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE

'Laurie now tried to put local names

'to some of the rivers on his sketch map.'

I suppose it's Setifa.

'But then the Biami decided that we wanted to count

'how many rivers there were.

'The gestures used in counting vary considerably from tribe to tribe.

'If we could discover their method,

'we might learn something of their tribal connections,

'so Laurie listed the names of rivers he had already discovered.'

-Hiyami.

-Hiyami.

-'Six.'

-Lalu.

-Lalu.

'Eight.'

-Harifa.

-Harifa.

'Nine.'

Samo.

Sao. Sao, Sao!

Sao, Sao, Sao...

'11.'

The cost of bringing about this meeting has been quite considerable.

Over 100 men have marched for other four weeks.

There have been at least three cases of pneumonia

and a great number of bruises and abrasions and cuts.

Not to mention an airdrop. Is it worth it?

Well, nobody knows what are in these valleys.

It may be that there is gold here.

It may be, like a valley less than 100 miles away,

it is rich with copper.

If it is, and if the West, European man, moves in here

with all his technology, the fate of these people

is likely to be a very unhappy one.

All we know in the past of people like this

who have come face-to-face with Western technology

leads us to suppose that it is very difficult for them

to survive that clash.

And so, the only chance of bringing these people to terms

with the world outside is a gradual process over years,

over tens of years,

in which, gradually, they get to know

what happens in the outside world.

Gradually, they get to believe that people like ourselves

are their friends and not their enemies.

Gradually, they have enough confidence in us to allow us

to give them medical help and educational help.

It would have been easy, I daresay,

for us to have tried to dazzle them now

with some of our technological conjuring tricks,

to have played back their recorded voice

or to have taken their picture on an instant camera.

But when you are faced with encounters like this,

such tricks seem tawdry and trivial.

It's not that we can do those tricks,

that they have got cassowary quills through their nostrils,

or that we happen to live on bits of cow's meat wrapped up

in a cunning way in bits of metal.

It is not the differences between us that are important,

it is the similarities.

It is the fact that when one of us laughs,

the other knows what he's feeling.

That is when one of us hit his stomach and scowls,

the other knows that he's hungry.

These are the things that are the bond between us,

and these are the things that we want to emphasise.

I cannot suppose that they will give as their full confidence.

The next step we are going to try is to ask them to take us

down to their house. Whether they will or not, I don't know.

That at least is the next step.

'They led off and we followed.

'Though whether they had really understood what we wanted,

'we couldn't tell.

'But suddenly, our relationship seemed to have

'become a little uneasy, a little strained.

'Perhaps we were pushing things a little too much.'

Oi! Biami-o!

'They had gone. They had simply vanished into thin air.'

-Biami!

-Biami-o!

'There was nothing to do but go on.

'100 yards beyond, we found a house.'

Biami-o!

Two days later, we were in known country again.

In a year's time, perhaps another patrol would come through again,

following in our steps and camping in our campsites.

Maybe by then the Biami,

remembering that we had not forced ourselves on them,

would give in return more of their confidence,

and perhaps their world and ours

might get a little closer to one another.

And meanwhile, that empty blank on the map now contained,

for the first time, a few river names and altitudes,

and a thin, erratic line drawn across it.

I know that because of...

Well, I have spoken to Laurie since then,

but he was very sceptical

as to whether we were going to make the grade.

And it was hard, hard work keeping up,

but equally, I think all three of us were determined to show

that these poms weren't as soft as all that,

or at least could keep going.

When we saw the house, we were very excited,

because this was the first sign of any human habitation

in this vast wilderness.

Laurie hollered, you know, "Hello!" and all of that. Nothing.

Oi!

But we knew perfectly well that there had been, on occasions,

other patrol officers had found such things and had advanced

and got a spear or an arrow straight through their chest.

And there was no way in which you could tell.

And I was very apprehensive, personally.

I'm surprised, actually, I think in the film we rather play it down,

but I was much more nervous than I let on in the film.

So we made our way inside,

and I thought I ought to make a record of it.

Of what was in the house, which is... I drew it in my journal.

And it's quite detailed, really.

"Piglet jaws, cassowary bone dagger...

"suspended bead rattles."

Here was this very intimate living place of people

who knew nothing of you, and you knew nothing of them.

As though you had landed from the moon,

and trying to work out how they live.

We were within two or three days' march of coming out

of the other side of the blank on the map, as it were.

And we had almost given up hope of finding any people at all.

We have found footprints, and we had followed trails,

but we'd seen nobody.

We went to sleep rather depressed.

And then when I was woken up,

I opened my eyes and there was this extraordinary little man,

with his headdress and so on, and black teeth,

looking at me as though I was a ghost or something.

Standing there, peering at me.

And I got up and tried to be

welcoming and unaggressive and so on.

-Biami, huh?

-Biami.

-Biami.

Marvellously, Hugh Miles always slept with his camera

underneath the camp bed.

And he was already there filming, he was absolutely on it.

There was always a possibility

that these people wouldn't welcome strangers,

and in the history of the exploration of Guinea,

there are plenty of examples of people who were met with arrows.

These people didn't meet us with arrows, they were puzzled,

they were baffled by us.

But they weren't aggressive about it.

One was bending over backwards -

if one could show that you were friendlily disposed,

and you do that with jokes, actually.

Just raising your eyebrows to something,

you can tell a joke, with those sorts of gestures,

with hardly any common vocabulary at all.

Well, on the third day, they turned up with some fruit and stuff.

And we gestured, said, "Why don't you take us to your village?"

And after a bit, they decided yes, and they beckoned us.

And so we moved off, and we could see them

ahead of us in the forest, and then, after about, I don't know,

half an hour, quarter of an hour,

I came round a big tree and they weren't there.

And Laurie then called - "Biami, Biami!"

Biami-o!

Nothing.

And then we came to a shelter, and there was a fire,

it was still warm.

But there was also a stick with a skull, a human skull on it.

And, uh... HE LAUGHS

"Mm..."

Whether we had walked into a trap or not, you didn't know.

But we stayed there for a bit, calling for them.

Biami-o!

And then we tried to find their trail and couldn't.

So we went back to the main camp.

And that was it.

TRIBESMEN SPEAK OWN LANGUAGE