Warriors of the Sea | Full Focumentary - Planet Doc Full Documentaries

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Papua over 1,400 islands, large and small, scattered between the Equator and north Australia.
Many of these islands are tiny, uninhabited coral atolls.
The majority are of volcanic formation.
Geologically, Papua is a transition zone between the islands of Indonesia and the smaller ones of Oceania.
In caves like this one on the island of Kiriguina, in the Trobriand archipelago,
remains have been found of the first human inhabitants of these islands.
As a result of the last glaciation, the water level went down,
and some Polynesian peoples were able to cross to these small islands.
But then, when the ice melted and the sea level rose again, these communities were cut off.
Dating of the oldest human remains shows that these islands were inhabited over 40,000 years ago.
The different ethnic groups that live on the islands of Papua
were greatly feared by the sailors who dared to navigate the waters of these ‘accursed’ islands.
Head-hunters and cannibals, these fierce warriors of the sea remained isolated until well into the twentieth century.
Their bloodthirsty fame meant that, for a long time, their territory remained unexplored by Europeans.
Still today there are isolated areas where there are cases of cannibalism and ritual decapitations,
especially along the border with Irian-Jaya, on the island of New Guinea.
Traditional customs and rituals remain strong among the inhabitants of these islands,
though now it is unusual to find a village without a mission of one of the over 100 different churches,
which compete for converts among the Papuan natives.
But though they attend worship and prayers to these imported gods,
the Papuans continue to follow their traditional laws and age-old customs.
These young Tolais, from the island of New Britain,
have to undergo a severe initiation before being able to sail alone.
They have to “go to see the fish”, as this ceremony is called;
it is a test of their courage and capacity for suffering.
If they bear the pain without flinching, a string of shells
is placed around their necks, symbolising the passage to adulthood.
They are now ready to face the dangers of the sea, protected by the spirits of the forest.
That is why, during the initiation, they cover their bodies with green sap.
Fishing is the main activity of the Tolai.
They use hooks, nets and harpoons.
The most important journeys are those to trade with other neighbouring islands.
These crossings are subject to the traditional laws, which regulate relations among the different tribes.
The villages do not have a well-defined structure.
The stilt houses are arranged in family groups.
The meeting place is normally the open area opposite the house of the village chief.
As well as fishers, they are also gatherers and farmers.
The pace of life is slow, no one rushes, there is no stress.
The women are responsible for household chores and looking after the children,
as well as gathering fruits from the forest.
The men plant the yam fields, take care of the pigs and go fishing.
They are very hierarchical societies.
For example, in the Trobriand islands, above the village chiefs stands the figure of the Paramon Chif,
who is responsible for everything that happens on the islands.
As in much of Melanesia, the society is matrilineal
the children of the marriage belong to the woman’s clan.
–In Papua, there are over 900 different languages and more than 1,000 different ethnic groups.
Communication would be impossible if it were not for pidgin english,
a language with elements of both English and the native languages.
Yams are the most important crop in the Trobriand islands
In fact, they are a symbol of wealth, both personal and of the clan.
Every man must build a yam house for each one of his wives.
This is where the tubers are stored after the harvest.
They are constructions which can quickly be taken down then rebuilt,
and protect the yams from the humidity during the rainy season.
Between June and July the harvest rites take place.
The largest yams are put on display before being stored.
No one can begin harvesting until the crop of the Paramon Chif has been gathered in.
This is when the most important ritual celebrations on these islands are held.
Each family has to give part of their crop to the Paramon Chif.
This is a tax, which varies from year to year,
depending on the results of the harvest.
While they are storing the yams, the families ask the magic man to carry out a small ceremony,
so the yams will be under the protection of the spirits,
who will make sure they do not rot.
The yam houses are administered by the brothers-in-law of the owners,
or by someone from the woman’s clan,
further evidence of the matrilineal nature of this society.
The houses of the Paramon Chif are richly decorated with wood carvings which symbolise his power.
The importance of these carvings is such that those who make them, occupy a very high position in society.
Magic occupies a central position in the lives of these people.
No one does anything without first consulting the witch doctors,
who will prescribe, according to the case, the actions and ceremonies
that will have to be performed in order to ensure success.
Illness and misfortune have their origins in magic,
either because you have offended a spirit, or because someone else has cast a spell against you.
When they are ill, or when they believe they are the victims of a spell because things are going badly,
they turn to the magic men to cure them or solve their problems.
The world of the dead is just as real as that of the living.
It exists at the same time, but in a parallel, hermetic sphere,
only accessible through the rituals and knowledge of magic of the witch doctors and medicine men.
As in all animist societies, nothing happens by chance.
Everything, good and bad, is the result of the intervention of beings from the other world.
On the island of Kiriwina we attend a purifying ceremony.
The participants, under the protection of the medicine man,
invoke their ancestors to fight and drive out the evil spirits which have caused a bad harvest.
When the medicine man senses that the protective spirits have arrived,
he orders the participants to move away,
to the edge of the forest, to exorcise the evil they have inside them.
Then, they receive his blessing, which will protect them form malign influences.
In the dead of night, on the island of New Britain,
the Tumbuan mask dances to the beat of the canes.
They invoke it to ask it to intervene between men and the gods.
It is a messenger spirit who brings and takes communications from the other world.
Each village has its own masks.
The initiated gather together in the forest with the carver and tell him what the mask should look like,
and how it should be decorated.
Then, they have to bless it, through a complicated liturgical process
which lasts for around three months.
During this time, only those in authority can see it.
When it is completed, one night without warning,
the mask suddenly appears in the village
for the women and the non-initiated it was created by the spirit of the forest itself.
Pigs are very important in Papua.
They are a symbol of wealth.
The more pigs a family has, the higher their social level.
There is no celebration at which pigs are not sacrificed.
Among the majority of the island peoples,
the dowry consists of a certain number of pigs.
They are also used as compensation for any possible wrong a clan may have committed against another.
The coconut is the other important element in their diet,
and one of the main economic resources.
When, at the start of the twentieth century,
it was discovered that copra oil greatly reduced the cost of steel manufacture,
these islands became extremely important places for European industry.
This is one of the reasons for the rapid colonisation of the region.
To obtain the oil, they dry the copra, or pith of the coconut in these ovens.
Then, they grind and press it.
By squeezing the pulp of the coconut, they also obtain the highly nutritious milk.
They use it as a drink, and to cook the cassava, wrapped in banana leaves.
The coconut palm is one of the most valuable trees for the inhabitants of Papua.
Virtually every part of it is used.
From the husk, they make ropes and fabrics,
and with the inner shell, which is much harder, they make all types of utensils.
After extracting the oil, the copra is used as cattle feed.
The juice of the flowers is boiled to obtain sugar.
They also eat the young shoots, which have very high energy value.
From the bark they obtain resin, and with the leaves make baskets,
hats and the roofs of their houses.
Finally, the wood is used to make furniture and oars, and in construction.
Another extremely useful plant in these latitudes is the banana tree.
Apart from the fruit, which is present at most meals,
the leaves are used to wrap foods to be cooked or fermented.
Dried in the sun, they make skirts and costumes with them.
They also serve as tablecloths and even as umbrellas.
The canoe builders are very important in these communities
They have the same social status as the carvers of yam houses.
A man may not have a house,
but if he does not have a boat he virtually does not exist for the community.
Even the old men, though they can no longer sail, keep their canoes,
riddled with woodworm, at the side of their houses.
Their souls will travel in them when they die.
They are a symbol of life, which mystically unites them with the sea
and maintains them in contact with the world of the living.
When they die, their canoes are abandoned far from the shore,
so the currents will carry them out to sea,
to the mermaids who will accompany their spirit
on its final voyage to the realm of the gods.
They believe their boats bear the traces of all the acts and deeds of this life.
They are the summary of everything they have been and everything they have done.
When the canoes reach their final destination,
the gods can read them and decide the fate of their souls.
In the Trobriand islands, hundreds of defiant warriors await the arrival of their enemies.
They have emerged from the forest at the first light of day,
after performing the ceremony to invoke the god of war.
These cruel headhunters have become sportsmen in a strange game,
Trobriand cricket, which is an important social event.
It was the British missionaries who taught them this game,
in an attempt to channel the innate aggressiveness of these people into sport.
The cricket teams are made up of 11 players,
but here they are all from the same tribe or village.
Sometimes, each side can have a hundred or a hundred and fifty men,
and the match can last for days.
Before the game begins, the rival teams sing old songs, which speak of their warrior exploits.
It is a way to incite and impress the rival team.
Then, they exchange betel nuts, as a symbol of fraternity.
These nuts, also called baual, are slightly narcotic.
The Papuans eat them all the time, mixed with burnt coral dust, which increases the stimulant effects.
The cricket bats are decorated with clan and magic symbols
similar to those that decorate the bodies of the players.
The regulation dress is the same as they used in the past when going to war:
shorts made from dried banana leaves,
coloured bands around legs and arms, and feather headdresses.
The original rules of the game have been altered over time
and have incorporated the old warrior rituals.
The only similarity with cricket as we know it
is the fact that the ball is hit with the bat,
and players run from one wicket to the other.
All the rest is magical and ancestral liturgy.
For these cricket warriors, a defeat at the hands of another village is a real tragedy.
When a player is out, he is considered dead, and they cry as if he had really died.
In the same way, every certain number of runs is celebrated like a major victory.
During the three or four days that the match lasts,
the women of the host village are in charge of preparing the food for the visiting team,
and organising the farewell ceremony, at which the Paramon Chif will give out the prizes,
in the form of betel nuts and yams, to the most outstanding players.
On the islands of Papua there are many volcanoes, a lot of them active,
like Turvurvur, which in 1994 destroyed the city of Rabaul, the capital of the island of New Britain.
Thanks to a false alarm in 1984, the city was ready for evacuation,
and there were no victims.
A week before the eruption, there was an earthquake, which alerted the authorities.
For four days, Turvurvur spat out lava and red hot rocks which set alight many houses.
Everything was covered in ash.
But the worst was to come later.
When reconstruction work had begun, the rains arrived,
and the ash that had been deposited on the mountain slopes was washed down by the waters,
flooding and burying the city.
Since then, the Turvurvur volcano has continued to spew out toxic gases,
and the smoke warns of the constant danger.
Any plans to rebuild the city and the port seem to have abandoned forever.
The people moved to nearby Kokopo, which is now the administrative capital.
Old Rabaul is for the time being buried beneath the ash,
a reminder of what the force of nature is capable of, and how man is powerless against it.
Rabaul was an important military enclave for the Japanese during the Second World War.
A strategic place, fundamental for such famous battles as those of Guadalcanal or the Coral Sea.
The north of this island of New Britain quickly became a fortress.
The bay was mined, the roads concealed with trees,
and some 580 kilometres of underground passages were dug,
linking the different barracks and encampments,
where they would not be seen by the allied airforces.
There are still some Japanese ships moored inside the tunnels
built along the coast, opening directly into the sea.
It is calculated that in Rabaul and the surrounding area over 20,000 tonnes of bombs fell.
In the bay, many remains of ships have been found, and thousands of torpedo shells.
In time, these metal structures have been populated by algae and corals,
which are home to a large number of marine species.
Scuba divers from all over the world come here to see them.
In any corner of the island we can find rusted war remains and cemeteries
which tell of the horror that war brought to these islands in paradise.
Dances are an essential part of the spirituality of these people.
Through dance, they invoke the spirits, to ask them for protection and favour.
The Tolai who, numbering around 180,000, are the most numerous group on the island of New Britain,
invoke the duk-duk and the tumbuan, which are spirits of the forest.
It would seem these people originally came from the Duke of York islands,
which are in the entrance to the bay of Rabaul.
On their headdresses they place small carvings
which represent the protective spirits of each clan of initiates.
These clans are governed by a council of ancients and by a chief chosen by this council.
The dancers remain apart from the rest of the people,
in a magical area which no one can enter.
They have taken on the identity of the invoked spirits
and now are not of this world.
If someone who has not been initiated disobeyed this prohibition,
the force of the spirits would possess him, and cause his death.
Though the dances contain elements of magic,
not all are performed for religious reasons.
Among the inhabitants of the Trobriand islands
there are a number of dances simply for pleasure,
performed at special celebrations, or as a kind of courtship ritual.
The men practice the dance steps outside the village, in the so-called tapioca dans.
At dusk, they gather with the girls in the main square of the village, and dance together for hours.
Each step has a particular symbolism.
All the movements correspond to a specific wish, which is interpreted by the matchmakers.
They are performed after the yams have been harvested.
For weeks, these courtship dances can be seen in village after village.
Now, they use foreign instruments like the guitar,
which have been incorporated into the traditional rhythms, and the gentle melodies of the islands.
The girls paint their faces with the symbols of their families and clans.
These serve to identify them.
In this way, the men of their own clan will turn their attention to other girls who they will be able to marry
for these people are exogamous.
The courtships end with the arrival of the rains.
By that time, the matchmakers will have decided which couples can marry the next year,
after having received the approval of their parents and the council of ancients,
who will determine the price of the dowries and on what terms these are to be paid.
The majority of the islands of Papua are coral - incredibly complex ecosystems.
On a rock, polyps will nest, and then, as they die they gradually create a bone-like structure,
on which others settle.
In this way, over thousands of years, they form entire atolls and islands.
Others are of volcanic origin. In this region,
the volcanoes are of the explosive type,
characterised by rapid, devastating eruptions.
In just a few days, a new island can emerge from the sea,
or be destroyed and disappear.
The markets are the centre of life in these villages.
Here, they can find all the products that make up the diet of the Papuan islanders.
The people of the islands are very different from those of Papua New Guinea.
Though they belong to the same country, their customs have nothing in common.
Papua New Guinea is enormous, and there are stills tribes
who live entirely isolated in the interior, never even seeing the sea.
In the highlands, the first contacts with white men took place very recently,
just 50 years ago.
On the islands, things were very different.
European sailors arrived there much earlier,
and today cultural influences have been absorbed to a much greater extent.
Something they greatly value, as well as the betel, is tobacco.
This is prepared in a very rudimentary way.
The leaves, dried in caves, are smoked in pipes, or wrapped to make cigarettes.
Tobacco is also used in rituals, it is a liturgical element.
Its smell attracts the spirits.
They believe that tobacco smoke helps achieve states of communion with the other world.
What is true is that when they inhale the smoke,
they feel more vulnerable,
more sensitive and open to receive the influence of the invisible forces that rule over the universe.
In these lands, far from the madness of the West,
people perceive the endless wisdom that comes from natural sources like the forest,
the sea or the storms, and interpret influences
which have been unable to survive in the industrial and urban system of which we are so proud.
In Rabaul, they still use the sell mony or traditional currency, which they call tambu.
They are small shells threaded together to make necklaces of a particular value.
These shells are very difficult to find.
Those specialised in looking for them consider a good average to be ten a day.
They search the beach for them, and then file them very carefully,
drill a hole through the middle, and thread them on bamboo strings.
The measure used for each necklace is equivalent to the number of shells that fit in a small beer bottle.
Each necklace has around three hundred shells.
Each group of ten necklaces makes up a loloi,
which has the value of thirty kinas, the official currency of the country.
Though they are still used as money in the markets,
in general nowadays they are used for rituals at certain celebrations,
at which the necklaces are broken and the shells shared out.
Great rolls, which can contain up to 90,000 shells, are very rarely broken.
They are a symbol of high social status.
These islands are subject to a kind of traditional, magical law,
which regulates relations of exchange and is known by the name Kula Ring.
Objects made from Spondylus shells, called Soulava,
are passed round clockwise, and the Muali,
which are made from white, conical shells, are passed round anti-clockwise.
The Kula circle includes the islands of Trobriand, Muyua, Lousiade, Samari,
and the D´Entrecasteaux.
When the Soulava or the Muali leave a village,
it may be years before they return, and then just for a few days,
but the fact they have travelled round the entire circle gives them great value.
On board the canoes, decorated in all their finery,
the delegation of a village sets out with the Kula objects
to visit villages on other islands, and make ritual and commercial exchanges.
A new lasting relationship will be born among the different villages they visit.
Apart from trade dealings, the Kula Ring ensures good relations among the different tribes.
The Kula canoes have nothing to do with fishing.
They are large, and can carry up to 14 people.
They have both sails and oars, and the launch of one is a very special event in the village.
Before they set out to sea, different rituals are performed,
so that the canoes will be properly protected by the spirits.
The Kula also transmits the Mwasila,
which is an entire system of teaching on behaviour and ways of being and acting.
It is passed down from generation to generation.
Mwasila is the knowledge of magic which is essential if a village is to form part of the Kulan Ring.
Relations among the over 1,400 islands of Papua
has attracted the attention of experts of all times and from all disciplines.
Though they were traditionally considered ferocious, bloodthirsty peoples,
the island Papuans have always had institutions for establishing relations of fraternity among each other.
Ancestral laws and codes which conditioned their lives and made peace possible,
though they also had strict, implacable measures against foreigners
who dared set foot in their territories.
Today, the islands of Papua are one of the most beautiful natural settings in the world,
and as in so many other places, they are rapidly assimilating the dominant, western culture.
Their customs are abandoned, and their beliefs distorted
through the influence of the over 100 different churches which preach religious doctrines
from the other side of the world.
Little by little, the imported gods are taking the place of the gods
that were born of the mystic experiences of the people themselves.
One western expert who was drawn to these islands
was the British anthropologist of Polish origin,
Bronislaw Malinoswski, who, from 1914, spent four years in the Trobriand islands.
He studied the way of life of these people,
and especially the freedom in their sexual relations.
He published a number of studies on free love in the South Seas,
which scandalized traditional European society.
The Banin, from northern New Britain, put the spirits of the forest to the test of fire.
The initiated have spent almost the entire day hidden in the forest,
invoking the supernatural beings that live in the depths of the jungle.
Their wooden masks are like the face of a duck
that is the image they have of the spirits.
The group of musicians beat a wooden dais with long, hollow canes,
making a monotonous percussive rhythm.
It is they who direct the actions of the spirits,
which dance around a large fire made by the women in the centre of the square.
They give the orders, successively changing the beat of the rhythm.
The spirits obey their wishes.
The test that demonstrates this domination is to pass through the fire,
walking across the burning embers.
The preparation of the costumes of the initiated is a painstaking task requiring a great deal of time.
The branches and leaves, which must entirely conceal their bodies,
so they cannot be recognised, have to be cut that same day, so they are green and do not burn.
The paintings with which they decorate their bodies
are made from natural pigments collected in the jungle.
Each initiate dresses and paints himself in a particular way
to represent specific gods which everyone knows.
A circular piece of wood, placed in the navel,
ensures that the spirit that possesses the initiate cannot escape.
They believe that these creatures from the other world enter and leave though the navel.
The Banin are neighbours of the Tolai, who consider them to be an inferior group.
Their customs and habits are rapidly being wiped out by the Christian sects,
and possibly in just a few years time it will be difficult to witness this fire dance.
That is the fate of many of these peoples, who are irresistibly attracted by western technology.
But the price they pay is high.
Loss of roots and culture makes them unhappy,
but once that road has been taken there’s no turning back.
Perhaps the oldest members are the only ones who realise the social disaster
that forgetting your own culture represents.
Our world is increasingly smaller and more uniform,
and the only way of life seems to be that exported by the West.
But we mustn’t fall into the trap.
With the natural resources of our planet only the rich countries can live the way they do
there’s not enough for everyone.
And yet we continue to encourage distant peoples to aspires to a western style of living,
peoples who will probably never be able to live the way we do.
Perhaps, one day these customs, born from the land in which they live,
will be revived and again give meaning to their existence.
Meanwhile, we will continue to witness the systematic destruction of cultures
that could have taught us many things.