Bird-of-paradise Hunters and Zoological Expertise
The forgotten Ternatian hunters of the 1903 North New Guinea Expedition and their contributions to colonial zoological collections
In the spring of 1903, a bird-hunter from Ternate went out into the Cyclops Mountains in the northern part of, what was then, Dutch New Guinea. His name was Rasip, and he had been employed as a hunter for the first official Dutch expedition to New Guinea. He returned from this trip with an exquisite bird for the expedition’s zoological collection, a female Diphyllodes Magnificus, commonly known as the magnificent bird-of-paradise. This specimen can still be found in Naturalis, the largest natural history museum in the Netherlands, more than a hundred year after it was first collected. However, Rasip was never officially recorded as the collector of this specimen. Instead, the names of the two European members of the expedition who were officially responsible for the zoological collection have been logged as the specimen’s collectors. The zoological collection of the first New Guinea expedition consists of hundreds of specimens. This case of Rasip’s contribution to this collection being forgotten, begs the question, who really put this collection together?
One of the goals for the North New Guinea expedition, commonly known as the Wichmann expedition after the expedition’s leader Arthur Wichmann, was to create a collection of New Guinea zoology. In Ternate, one of the smaller islands of the Moluccas to the west of New Guinea, the expedition employed two hunters for this goal: Rasip and Marenggé. (Their names are also spelled as Rassip and Maringi by several of the expedition’s European members.) Both had been to New Guinea before, as bird-of-paradise hunters. While this job might sound peculiar to us now, Rasip and Marenggé actually belonged to a considerably large group of semi-professional hunters from the Moluccas who were engaged in the bird-of-paradise hunt in New Guinea.
Birds-of-paradise pelts and feathers were a sought-after commodity for global trade in the late 19th and early 20th Century. Feathers were in high demand for the fashion industry in Europe and America to adorn ladies’ hats. Naturalists were interested in the birds’ pelts, for zoological research. Rasip and Marenggé’s experience in New Guinea was most likely a prime reason to employ them, as none of the European expedition members had ever set foot on the island.
Rasip and Marenggé stayed with the expedition for three months, and mostly collected birds. It seems as though they primarily collected on their own. They left the expedition’s base camp early in the morning and came back at midday. The European scientific staff hardly ever joined them on these hunting trips, which suggests that the Ternatian hunters made their own choices about which birds to collect. The freedom which was granted to Rasip and Marenggé to collect shows how much their work was valued and trusted by the expedition’s European members. Not only were their skills as bird hunters valued immensely, but also their expertise in properly preparing bird pelts, which was essential to conserving specimens.
We know next to nothing about Rasip and Marenggé’s practice of bird hunting. However, it is very likely that they relied on local knowledge about bird habitats from Papuans. For the hunt on birds-of-paradise, it was customary that Ternatian birds of paradise hunters worked together with local Papuans. In exchange for barter goods, Papuans brought Ternatian hunters to the mating grounds of birds-of-paradise, which was virtually the only place where these birds could be shot. The magnificent bird-of-paradise which Rasip collected for the expedition was thus most likely collected after knowledge exchange with local Papuans, although it is also possible that Rasip went back to a place where he had shot a bird-of-paradise before.
After Rasip and Marenggé left the expedition in early June of 1903 to go back to Ternate, their skills were sorely missed by the European members of the expedition. In their travel accounts, they lament the loss of such skilled hunters and preparators. However, in the scientific results of the expedition, Rasip and Marenggé’s contribution to the zoological collection was completely omitted. The majority of the birds in the North New Guinea collection from the first few months of the expedition were collected by Rasip and Marenggé. The official collectors have been logged as Lorentz and Beaufort, the expedition’s European zoologists. While Rasip and Marenggé’s skills were essential in compiling a collection of New Guinean birds, their hard work left no trace in the expedition’s afterlife.
By Henrike Vellinga
Further reading
Primary sources on the 1903 North New Guinea Expedition
- A. Wichmann, Bericht über eine im Jahre 1903 ausgeführte Reise nach Neu-Guinea, Nova Guinea 4 (Leiden, 1917).
- H.A. Lorentz, Eenige Maanden onder de Papoea’s (Leiden, 1905).
- L.F. de Beaufort, ‘Birds from Dutch New Guinea’, in Nova Guinea 5:3 (Leiden, 1909), 389–421.
Secondary sources on bird-of-paradise hunters in New Guinea
- L. Y. Andaya, ‘Flights of Fancy: The Bird of Paradise and Its Cultural Impact’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 48:3 (2017), 372–89, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022463417000546.
- P. Swadling, R. Wagner, and B. Laba, Plumes from Paradise: Trade Cycles in Outer Southeast Asia and Their Impact on New Guinea and Nearby Islands until 1920 (Sydney, 2019).
- R. Cribb, ‘Birds of Paradise and Envrionmental Politics in Colonial Indonesia, 1890–1931’, in P. Boomgaard, F. Colombijn, and D. Henley (eds.), Paper Landscapes: Explorations in the Environmental History of Indonesia (Leiden, 1997), 379–408.