DAY 158

PHOTOGRAPHIC CURIOSITIES

The Last First Contact

WORLDS COLLIDE

“The white man came from there. We’d never seen such a thing. Did he come from the ground? Did he come from the sky? The water? We were confused...” —Papua New Guinea highlander¹

In the early 1930s, the Leahy brothers of Australia led an expedition of explorers into the highlands of Papua New Guinea in search of gold. They were the first Europeans to penetrate the interior of the island—and happened to bring along filming equipment and cameras. The images they captured provide a firsthand view of the native population’s initial perceptions of the outsiders.

The native peoples of Papua New Guinea’s highlands lived isolated from the outside world for centuries before the Leahy brothers’ expedition.

The indigenous highlanders would later tell journalists that, at the time, they had assumed that the explorers were the spirits of the dead. The only time anybody had seen another human look so pale was after the body had already begun to decompose. Some of the Leahys’ photographs show crowds of people weeping with joy, believing that their deceased loved ones had finally returned to the land of the living.

Barring some Hollywoodesque arrival of extraterrestrial visitors, a first encounter of such magnitude will likely never again be documented. Similar experiences are possible on a smaller scale, however. Years ago, this author visited a remote village in the Sierra Madre Occidental of northern Mexico, home to the reclusive Rarámuri indigenous people. Many of the local children had never seen a person of European descent in their lives; their reactions to my appearance ranged from confusion to outright terror. —DJS