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A traveller is mistaken for someone to heal the ailing native chief, and has a narrow escape.
PS: Around this time in history, there actually was an expedition to Papua New Guinea, in a region governed by the Dutch. The area was uncharted, full of clannish tribesmen, some were even thought to be canabals. The explorer in the story refers to black men being too lazy to work. It’s not that at all. Instead, the tribes were so polarized by their long standing feuds, that crossing a border would mean certain death by the men in the land they entered. Thus, the explanation why they might refuse to travel.
In a book about a rescue of a downed airplane near the end of World War 2 in this same area, titled “Lost in Shangri La” I found that the tribes had a legend of white men who left them years ago, and would return from the air. To some degree, the tribes men thought that the whites were a kind of god. The novelty of their white skin is what got them through the many borders from one tribe to another.
In that early expedition, there was some gunplay, but not exactly as is portrayed in this drama. From the white man’s perspective, a native resisted their passing through the land, and showed enough force to convince the white traveller the only way was to shoot him. He was later reprimanded for it by the Dutch government. From the black man’s perspective, he resisted because the party was coming from his feuding neighbors, and he thought they were spies. He was also probably curious about their white skin and was a little forward in showing it.
