The Motuan people of the area now known as Port Moresby traded their pots for sago, other food and canoe logs, sailing from Hanuabada and other villages built on stilts above the waters of the bay.
The Hiri expeditions were large scale. As many as 20 multi-hulled canoes or lakatoi, crewed by some 600 men, carried about 20,000 clay pots on each journey. To the Motuans, not only was the Hiri an economic enterprise but it also confirmed their tribal identity through its long and dangerous voyages.
Colonization
There was already an important trade centre on the site of Port Moresby when the English Captain John Moresby of HMS Basilisk first visited it. He sailed through the Coral Sea at the eastern end of New Guinea, saw three previously unknown islands, and landed there. At 10 a.m. on 20 February 1873, he claimed the land for Britain and named it after his father, Admiral Sir Fairfax Moresby. He called the inner reach "Fairfax Harbour" and the other Port Moresby.
No Europeans settled there until ten years later, when the southeastern part of New Guinea was annexed to the British Empire. British New Guinea was transferred to the newly established Commonwealth of Australia in 1906, and became known as Papua. From then until 1941 Port Moresby grew slowly. The main growth was on the peninsula, where port facilities and other services were gradually improved. The first butcher's shop and grocery opened in 1909, electricity was introduced in 1925, and piped water supply provided in 1941.
World War II and after
During World War II, some Papuan men enlisted in the Papua Infantry Battalion, and others as carriers over trails and rough terrains (porters) as supply support to Allied and Japanese armies during long jungle marches. The biographer of General Douglas MacArthur, noted historian William Manchester makes it plain in his seminal biography of the General, American Caesar, that
