NEW GUINEA GOLD
By Edmond Demaitre
We have recently had several accounts of New Guinea and Papua by Govern- ment officers engaged in the difficult job of exploration and pacification. Now for a change we have a French traveller's impressions of the lesser-known terri- tories of the interior. The translator did well to reject the original title : L'Enfer du Pacifique. Gold-mining camps and cannibals may not be heavenly, but a primitive country which is being, on the whole, so well and so sympathetically developed—as the author recognises—deserves to escape the cheap exploitation of sensation- mongering writers. New Guinea Gold (131es, iO. 6c1.) keeps to the facts, though in dealing with the hard lot of the• average gold-prospector M. Demaitre indulges too frequently in sentiments of "the miner's dream of home" type. Charlie Chaplin does it much better. And the story of the first discoveries of the pioneers and of Levien's solution of the problem of transport is good enough to hold our interest without any trap- pings. Levien's aeroplanes conquered the almost impassable jungles and mountains which surround the gold- fields, and iave New Guinea an industry.
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