He undertook three voyages up this river from 1875 to 1877, where the first was conducted in the steamer SS Ellengowan and the other two in a smaller ship named the "Neva" which was chartered from the Government of New South Wales.

[1] D'Albertis conducted his first trip to the Fly River in the SS Ellengowan steamer which left from the British colonial port of Somerset on the tip of the Cape York Peninsula.

As they began to navigate up the Fly River, D'Albertis had a collision with the native people and after shooting a number of rounds at their watercraft, Chester and his troopers dispersed them causing them to flee in terror.

At other places along the river D'Albertis set off dynamite and rockets to both intimidate the indigenous people and to obtain aquatic life for food and specimen material.

On their return downriver, they accepted an invitation from native people to enter their village, but Chester and his troopers, "wishing to intimidate them" decided to let off a number of shots, killing and stealing a couple of large domesticated pigs.

Chester then proceeded to ransack the long-house of the village, taking ancestral and sacred human remains, weapons and other artefacts for D'Albertis' collection.

Likewise, he stole ancestral bones from sacred long-houses claiming that "I shall turn a deaf ear to this sacrilege..I am too delighted with my prize".

Later colonial administrators of British New Guinea such as Peter Scratchley, William MacGregor and John Hubert Plunkett Murray were critical of the methods employed by D'Albertis.

Although these directors themselves engaged in various repressive and punitive policies against the native peoples, they recognised that the techniques of D'Albertis were very harmful in facilitating British colonisation.

[6] Andrew Goldie, an early British prospector to New Guinea, described an incident at a dinner in Sydney with D'Albertis where after having a steak accidentally thrown at him, the Italian "foamed with rage" and standing up in the restaurant with a bottle in his hand threatened to smash the skull of whoever owned up to being the thrower.

[8] Also, a few years after D'Albertis' voyages, Captain John Strachan made an expedition up the nearby Mai Kussa river which was even more destructive than the Italian's.

Strachan, who seems to have been in a chronic state of irrational paranoia and insomnia, improvised a torpedo-like weapon against a convey of native canoes causing a large amount of damage and number of casualties.

In a high state of anxiety, Strachan later had to abandon his vessel and return to the coast on foot, committing massacres of indigenous people along the way.