History, ethnography and ethnohistory meet at the moment of contact. Here consider the different assumptions, perceptions and reactions of participants in early contact. In a few months after the first strangers traversed the highlands of Papua New Guinea, three violent incidents at Kunabau and in the Chimbu valley set a pattern of fear of guns and acceptance of white man's power. The unforgotten events of 1933-4-5, involving theft, deaths, and arrests, had lasting consequences for the relations between the Chimbu and the white Australian government kiaps, German missionary padres, New Guinea police, and visitors. Sahlins (1981:67) observes, [p]eople act upon circumstances according to their own cultural presupposions, the socially given categories of persons and things. In his work on the early contacts of Hawaiians with Europeans, and on Fiji, Sahlins is concerned to show the Hawaiians' and the Fijians' interpretations and reactions in their own terms. He makes full use of Polynesian and European sources to explain the events and their meanings. Axtell (1979:2), notes that history, anthropology, and ethnohistory tend to focus on one society or culture at a time. Axtell (1979:9-10), an historian, identifies the task of ethnohistory in treating the contact of two cultures as the recognition of conflicting values and understanding ethnocentric bias and motives in interaction. Another historian, Dening (1988:99), said, I take my historical task to be to describe what actually happened in the past. call that ethnography. Thus in his study of the Marquesas 1774-1813, documentary sources form only a part of the story, informed by his personal knowledge of the area, anthropological analyses of important concepts (such as tapu), and an historian's regard for the background and setting, time, and place of the portentous and violent events. He further elucidates the metaphor of islands and beaches, the frontier and boundary, the intrusion of outsiders who, Dening (1980:20) says, had no capacity to understand the Enota (Marquesans) in their own terms. Dening views ethnohistory as a subdivision of anthropology which concentrates its interest upon the native peoples and their culture. He (Dening 1980:37) comments that ethnohistorians are not quite ready to admit that soldiers and missionaries are also the objects of their inquiry and methods.