Free The Ragged Edge of the World by Eugene Linden

had encountered in the expatriate and missionary communities, this was an eye-opening experience for him. It ultimately inspired him to become a motivational speaker who traveled the country assuring villagers that their hard-earned knowledge of the local flora and fauna had value and that it could disappear in the blink of an eye.
    My other quarry was Father Frank Mihalic, a missionary from the Catholic order Divine Word, who as much as anyone had helped unify New Guinea by first codifying a grammar for pidgin, the common language that allows speakers of New Guinea’s 800 languages to communicate. Mihalic, who died in 2001, had been in New Guinea since 1948, and with wit and sensitivity witnessed its bumpy encounters with the modern world.
    Not entirely through coincidence, I also met up with my then-girlfriend, Tundi Agardy, a marine biologist, who was coming to New Guinea as part of her work in coral reef conservation issues. Even in 1990, New Guinea was still well off the tourist path, and many of its north coast reefs were completely unexplored. Indeed, Tundi had heard tales of marine biologists who discovered new species of clownfish on virtually every dive.
    We met up in Madang, a pleasant enough coastal town where one still had the luxury of an evening stroll without the risk of being robbed by rascals. Tundi has impeccable scientific credentials, but she also has a strong adventurous streak. In short order we had lined up a dive trip with some other marine scientists, as well as an expedition up the Sepik River.
    There are not many cities in the world where you would choose to go diving in the main harbor, but that’s where we went. With virtually no sewage systems on the island, it stood to reason that the harbor was collecting a good deal of what scientists euphemistically call “nutrients.” The waters in the outer part of the harbor were spectacularly clear, however, and it’s possible that the reef waters were so starved for nutrients—the seas off New Guinea have perhaps the clearest waters in the world—that whatever was being delivered into the harbor was gobbled up before it even reached the outer harbor. Or, perhaps, we just missed the pollution. In any event, we got our dose of clownfish darting in and out of sea anemones as well as the usual cast of reef dwellers sporting colors with all the subtlety of a Greenwich Village Halloween Parade. The colors on such “poster fish,” as they are called, serve as a type of semaphore system, reminding individuals whom they school with, mate with, and avoid in the crowded quarters of a reef.
    We got to the Sepik courtesy of Peter Barter, then arguably the most successful tourism entrepreneur in New Guinea’s history. Barter bears a passing resemblance to former NBC anchor David Brinkley, and went on to several high positions in the New Guinea government, ultimately earning a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth. When I met him, he remarked, “Three types of people come to Papua New Guinea: mercenaries, misfits and missionaries. I was all three.” Barter was a bit of a showman, and I’m sure that I wasn’t the first to hear that line. He first arrived as a Qantas pilot, then returned as a missionary pilot. As he got to know the country he saw an opportunity to bring affluent tourists in to see aboriginal life—and, he argues, benefit the locals as well. For every trip on the river, his foundation would donate about 5,000 kina, money that would go for boats, immunizations, school headmasters’ salaries and the like. Tourists also created a lively market for scarification masks, shields and other artifacts, keeping skills alive.
    I could argue in turn, and did, that there is a world of difference between creating artifacts for tourist souvenirs and carving sacred objects as homage to the spirits that animate a culture, but, given the array of threats faced by Papuan natives—which include fundamentalist