A Deadly Boomerang, Made and Thrown With Precision

1898

He Learned the Secret From the Natives of Australia

Civilized people, especially of the English speaking races, pride themselves upon their discoveries in electricity with which they now operate the guns of great ships of war, and they point with fear and trembling as well as satisfaction to the perfection in all sorts of dynamite bombs and explosives which they may, on occasion, use to kill people by the hundreds; but with all their cleverness, says the Detroit Free Press, they have never learned to make what a savage can fashion out of a crooked stick. It has been stated that there is nothing made of wood which a Yankee boy cannot copy with the aid of his jackknife, but the man who said that had probably never heard of a boomerang.

Horace Baker of New York, who spent several years in Australia, and went "boomerang crazy," is said to be the first white man who ever made boomerangs that would "go," and he learned to make them by almost living with the savages and watching them as they sat whittling away at a piece of wood with their crude stone hatchets and sharp shells.

Besides those which he has made himself, Mr. Baker has the largest collection of real Australian black man's boomerangs in this country. There are almost a hundred of them, and a queer lot they are. Some of them are haggled as if the savage had used his teeth to make them, yet as true to the boomerang principle as the perfectly carved specimens which decorate his walls. He keeps them hung up in clusters as some men have their guns and pistols arranged with a view to proud display before their friends. A few of these date away back to the time when Captain Cook landed on the coast of Australia.

"Why is it so difficult to make a boomerang?" said this connoisseur of the crooked stick. "Well, because it is so delicately balanced that the least divergence from the proper angle will alter its course in the air and prevent the perfect revolution which is necessary to its flight. When correctly made, a boomerang should balance exactly on a knife blade held at its centre, if it doesn't balance, some more whittling must be done on the heavy end. That seems easy enough — to whittle a piece of curved wood into a flat shape — so that the ends balance exactly — and if that were all there is to it, any boy could make one. The hard part of it is to cut the edges in such a way that they will strike the air at a certain angle in one part of the curve, and at another in another part, and so on until every line of both edges contributes to the perfect revolution of the weapon. Then, when it is whirled, it has two motions, the rotary one, which is a result of its shape, and the forward one, given it in the throwing. It's a pity that the baseball players cannot 'get onto' those black fellows' 'curves.' A pitcher who could do it would make his fortune.

"The quality of wood used has a great deal to do with the excellence of a boomerang. The Australian brave will tramp miles to find a branch of the right shape, and a wood of the proper density. Gnarled trees are at a premium there, and the heaviest wood is the best. Our lignum vitae corresponds the nearest to the tree they like best. The piece for the boomerang is usually cut where a branch curves out from the tree trunk, for this is the most natural crook in the tree's formation.

"In throwing a boomerang, the savage holds it by one end over his right shoulder, his body turned to the right, then without straightening the arm he whirls the body back to front position, bringing the weapon with the arm still bent, with it, then suddenly lets go, straightening the arm at the elbow as he does so. This adds the force of the whole body to the momentum of the weapon, instead of depending entirely upon that of the arm. It will go whirling around, keeping straight ahead for a certain distance then gradually swerve to the left and at last return to the thrower.

"When a savage wants to kill or disable a kangaroo, he throws it so that it will strike the ground at a stated distance from him and then begin turning somersaults until it reaches the kangaroo, striking him even then with such force as to break a leg or kill him, if it strikes on the head.

"Or suppose he sees a flock of ducks swimming about on the river. He creeps up softly behind a clump of trees, throws his boomerang swirling over the tree tops in a curved line which he can calculate as well as a civilized gunner sights a straight one, and down comes the flying stick among the ducks flopping like a live thing, and killing or disabling everything within reach of its wooden wings. It really looks very much like a bird in its flight through the air.

"The savages have many different varieties of these weapons. The average length is twenty-four or twenty-six inches. Such as these are used in hunting birds, rabbits and other small game, and none of them weighs over three-quarters of a pound. There are immense hunting and war weapons which are as much as three feet long, but they are rarely used, and nobody has sufficient strength to throw them so that they will return."