We had only been in our camp at Wakatimi for one day and it already seemed as if the place was beginning to show some sign of order, when a melancholy tragedy threw a gloom over the spirits of the whole expedition. On the afternoon of January 9th Mr. Wilfred Stalker, who had had plenty of experience of tropical and Australian jungles, went out from the camp taking his collecting gun to shoot some birds. The usual daily rain began at about four o’clock, but as we were all busy with various occupations in our tents his absence was not noticed until after six o’clock, when it was already pitch dark and the rain was falling in torrents. Beyond the camp was dense jungle intersected by creeks and pools of water, difficult enough to traverse by day but absolutely impassable in darkness, so there was nothing to be done that night but to hope anxiously that Stalker’s bushcraft had prompted him to make a shelter of some kind, if disaster had not already overtaken him. At dawn Lieut. Cramer sent out parties of soldiers in all directions, and soon all of us, Europeans, Gurkhas, and native soldiers were out searching and shouting and firing shots. With some difficulty we explained to the natives what had happened, and we offered them large rewards if they were successful in finding him, and many of them joined with us; but though the ground was carefully quartered and the search was continued all that day and a part of the next not a trace of him was found anywhere, and it was evidently hopeless that he could ever be found alive. On the second day, when the search had been abandoned, the natives were convinced of his fate, and two of the more important people came over from the village and wailed loudly outside his empty tent.
On January 12th all doubts as to his end were set at rest when a canoe manned by four Papuans, smeared with mud as their custom is in such circumstances, brought back his body from a creek about half a mile from the camp, where it had been found. Up to that moment there had been present in our minds the horrid suspicion that he might perhaps have fallen the victim to foul play. We thought that natives finding him wandering alone might have been tempted by his possessions and have murdered him, but it was evidently not so and we could only hope that by drowning death had come swiftly to him.
