Article

Natural history

From Munshipedia, the MBRAS digital historical encyclopedia

Natural history

Scope and Historical Definition

Natural history in the Malay Peninsula and Borneo, as documented in the Society’s literature, refers to the systematic collection, description, and classification of the region’s fauna and flora during the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The practice was inseparable from colonial administration, commercial enterprise, and the labour networks of local communities, and it produced one of the most extensive biological records of any tropical region in the Victorian era. The single most celebrated example is the collection of 125,660 specimens assembled by Alfred Russel Wallace over eight years of fieldwork across the Malay Archipelago, today’s Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and East Timor [1, p. 41]. Yet this figure, while frequently cited, obscures the collaborative and commercial character of the enterprise: Wallace’s collection was assembled with the indispensable labour of a vast network of local people, including boatmen, porters, guides, cooks, hunters, and informal specimen providers, with at least 1,200 individuals estimated to have aided him in some capacity, alongside more than 100 Europeans [1, p. 67]. The broader practice of natural history in the region thus encompassed not only the work of named European collectors but also the often-unrecorded contributions of Malay, Chinese, Dayak, and other local communities whose ecological knowledge and physical labour made the collecting possible.

The Wallace Expedition and Its Human Infrastructure

The Wallace expedition, conducted in two principal phases (1854–56 and 1860–62), remains the most extensively documented natural history undertaking in the region’s history. Wallace’s own financial notebooks, held at the Natural History Museum, London, record total payments to his principal assistant Charles Allen of 4,480.64 guilders for specimens and 702.07 guilders for travel expenses, totalling 5,182.71 guilders (approximately £500 at the time) [2, p. 17]. Allen, who was actually fourteen years old when he departed England in March 1854 rather than the sixteen Wallace later claimed, collected over 28,438 specimens during his independent 1860–62 campaign across the Moluccas and New Guinea, amounting to roughly a quarter of Wallace’s total [2, p. 2]. Extrapolating from monthly output, the total contribution of Allen and his team across both periods of employment may have reached 48,000 specimens [1, pp. 63–64].

The Malay assistant Ali, who first appears in Wallace’s records in December 1855 at Sarawak as a personal servant and cook, gradually transformed into the expedition’s chief collecting assistant. He did not begin shooting and skinning birds until Lombok in mid-1856, and did not become Wallace’s “head man” until the Aru Islands expedition of 1857 [3, pp. 4–7]. His most celebrated achievement was the discovery of Wallace’s Standard Wing (Semioptera wallacii) on the island of Batchian on 24 October 1858, a new genus of Bird of Paradise that Wallace described as “a great prize” and a “completely new form” [3, pp. 14–15]. Ali is estimated to have collected roughly 5,150 of Wallace’s 8,050 bird specimens, making him the expedition’s principal ornithological collector [3, p. 24]. His wages, reconstructed for the first time by van Wyhe and Drawhorn, amounted to approximately f.9 per month (equivalent to 5 Singapore dollars or 13s. 4d.), placing him at the lowest tier of colonial labour; his total earnings over the voyage are conjectured at approximately f.450 or £45 [3, pp. 24–25].

The scale of human involvement extended far beyond these named individuals. At Si Munjon in Sarawak, Wallace paid a cent per insect to local Dayak and Chinese workmen, and approximately 63 people are estimated to have been directly involved in orangutan locating, hunting, and retrieval [1, pp. 46–47]. The Goram island voyage alone required just over 300 men serving as boat crews across multiple vessels [1, p. 59]. The human infrastructure was not without cost: the assistant Baderoon, a Macassar boy of about sixteen, gambled away four months’ advance wages within a week of arriving at Aru and subsequently became the temporary slave of a woman who paid off his debt [1, pp. 51–52]; Jumaat, a Ternate assistant, died of dysentery at Dorey in New Guinea, the only one of Wallace’s assistants known to have died in his service [1, p. 56].

Collecting in the Malay Peninsula: Selangor and Kedah

The practice of natural history in the Malay Peninsula proper is documented in a different register from the Wallace expedition, reflecting the earlier stage of colonial penetration and the smaller scale of individual collecting ventures. W. T. Hornaday’s 1879 account of a six-week expedition to the territory of Selangor, read before the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society in April 1879, provides a detailed field report from a territory only four years into formal British administrative control following the Pangkor Treaty of 1874 [4, p. 124]. Hornaday, a professional naturalist who would later become Keeper of the Indian Museum, Calcutta, operated within the framework of the British Residency at Klang, his access to the interior facilitated by the Resident, Captain Douglas, and the Superintendent of Police, H. C. Syers, who accompanied him on the Batu expedition [4, pp. 124].

Hornaday’s collecting at Jerom, a Malay village near the mouth of the Sungei Bulu, yielded ten crocodiles, the largest (Crocodylus porosus) measuring 12 feet in length and weighing 415 pounds [4, p. 125]. A tusked male elephant, not yet full grown, was killed at Batu after a stalk of approximately fifteen paces; the animal’s back was “completely encrusted with a hard cake of dry mud” as protection against flies [4, pp. 127–128]. Rhinoceros sumatranus was observed in the territory, with one individual noted as having been caught alive [4, p. 131]. The government had established a reward of $50 for each black panther (Felis perniger), which Hornaday described as “a pest” [4, p. 130]. His partial list of mammals of Selangor includes species ranging from Hylobates lar to Elephas indicus, with notes on abundance, rarity, and the circumstances of collection [4, pp. 130–131].

Hornaday’s account is notable for its explicit framing of scientific collecting and territorial consolidation as mutually reinforcing enterprises. He observed that the making of good roads constituted “the subjugation of Malays,” and that the carriage road from Damasara to Kwala Lumpur, 17 miles in length, would be “of the greatest importance both in developing the adjacent country and insuring the preservation of order” [4, p. 126]. This linkage between natural history and colonial governance was characteristic of the period.

In Kedah, A. W. Hamilton’s 1930 note records Malay names and brief natural history observations for a selection of birds and fish, including the scarlet-backed Flower-pecker (Sepah Peteri), the Fantail Flycatcher (Chenchala or Murai Gila), the Purple Heron (Seriap), and the Malayan Banded Crake (Sintar Api) [5, pp. 330–333]. Several entries include short ethnographic remarks: the heron’s former abundance and its nesting in perepok reed beds, with royalty collecting eggs on elephant-backs; the banded crake’s capture in rotan basket traps set in converging twig fences; and the use of serow meat and spittle as a healing unguent [5, pp. 331–332]. The note closes with a description of the Malay practice of pitting ikan pelaga (fighting fish of the genus Betta) against one another in glass jars, with bets placed on the outcome [5, pp. 332–333].

Borneo and the Labuan Specimen Network

Natural history collecting in Borneo during the 1850s was centred on Labuan, a British colony established in 1846, and was conducted by a small community of European naturalists and geologists whose work was mediated through London-based publishers and taxonomists. James Motley, an English geologist and naturalist, collected extensively in Labuan and the adjacent coasts of Borneo between 1849 and 1859 [6, p. 113]. His 1855 publication, Contributions to the Natural History of Labuan, and the Adjacent Coasts of Borneo, published by Van Voorst, London, was intended as the first of a series but remained a one-off [6, p. 113]. The specific name Copsychus stricklandii, a White-crowned Shama endemic to Sabah and north-east Kalimantan, was described in this work and named after the geologist Robert St. John Strickland, who was killed in August 1853 when he sidestepped a slowly approaching train on a railway cutting and was struck by a faster one he did not see [6, pp. 116–117]. The naming decision had been made well before Strickland’s death: Dillwyn wrote to him in January 1853 announcing the intention to honour him [6, p. 117].

The Labuan specimen network also connected Motley to Wallace. A meeting in Swansea on 15 August 1853, where Wallace, Dillwyn, and Strickland all examined Motley’s Labuan specimens, had been overlooked by previous scholars [6, p. 117]. A British Library letter from Motley to Wallace, dated 1858, proves they corresponded but never met in person, despite both being in Singapore in April, May, and September 1854 [6, p. 117]. Motley’s career ended tragically: he died in the Banjermassin War massacre of 1859 along with his wife and three children, and his last specimen consignment, described as “from poor Mottley,” arrived in December 1859 [6, p. 115].

Research and Documentation

The Society’s literature on natural history reveals a significant shift in scholarly priorities over time. The earliest contributions, such as Hornaday’s 1879 field account, are written in the idiom of the colonial naturalist: the emphasis is on the specimens obtained, the animals observed, and the practical conditions of collecting, with little reflection on the human networks that made the work possible [4]. The account reads as a zoological report embedded within a narrative of territorial administration, and its framing of road-building as subjugation reflects the assumptions of its era without self-critique.

By the early twentieth century, the Society’s natural history contributions had narrowed in scope. Hamilton’s 1930 Kedah notes represent a different genre: a brief, practical record of local names and observations, closer in character to a field notebook than to a research article [5]. The emphasis has shifted from the grand collecting expedition to the accumulation of vernacular knowledge and minor taxonomic corrections.

The most substantial recent scholarship has been devoted to recovering the human infrastructure behind the Wallace expedition and correcting the hagiographic framing of Wallace as a lone genius. Van Wyhe’s 2018 article challenges the anachronistic characterisation of Wallace as a “field biologist” or “scientist” in any modern professionalised sense, insisting instead that he was a Victorian commercial collector-naturalist whose enterprise was fundamentally a product of colonial-era labour networks and purchasing-power asymmetries [1, p. 41]. The primary sources—particularly the day-by-day journals and the specimen notebooks with their marginal annotations attributing finds to named individuals—provide the evidential basis for estimating headcounts at each collecting location [1, p. 41]. Rookmaaker and van Wyhe’s 2012 biography of Charles Allen addresses a parallel gap: the near-total absence of biographical information about the young Englishman who served as Wallace’s collecting assistant, whose contribution of over 28,438 specimens was integrated into Wallace’s published totals without separate attribution [2, p. 17]. Van Wyhe and Drawhorn’s 2015 article on Ali similarly corrects persistent misconceptions about his role, demonstrating that he was far more than a passive servant but a skilled hunter, a knowledgeable informant, and the discoverer of at least one major new species [3, p. 3].

A recurring theme in this recent scholarship is one of attribution and erasure. All specimens preserved in British museums from the Wallace expedition are credited to Wallace alone, and no species bears Allen’s name [2, p. 17]. The irony is compounded by the fact that Wallace’s own map of the Malay Archipelago includes a line for “Mr. Allen’s routes” that is incomplete and partly obscured by Wallace’s own travels [2, p. 17]. These studies collectively argue that the history of natural history in the region cannot be separated from the history of colonial labour, and that the specimens in museum collections represent not merely biological data but the accumulated, largely unacknowledged work of thousands of local people.

MBRAS Sources

References

  1. John van Wyhe (2018). Wallace’s help: the many people who aided A. R. Wallace in the Malay archipelago JMBRAS 91(1): 41–68. Read on JSTOR
  2. L.C. Rookmaaker and John van Wyhe (2012). In Alfred Russel Wallace’s shadow: his forgotten assistant: Charles Allen (1839–1892 JMBRAS 85(2): 17–54. Read on JSTOR
  3. John van Wyhe and Gerrell M. Drawhorn (2015). ‘I am Ali Wallace‘: The Malay Assistant of Alfred Russel Wallace JMBRAS 88(1): 3-31. Read on JSTOR
  4. W.T. Hornaday (1879). Account of a naturalist’s visit to the territory of Selangor JSBRAS 3: 124–131.
  5. Hamilton A.W (1930). Kedah natural history notes JMBRAS 8(2): 330–333.
  6. M. Laverty (2013). Three men and a bird – Motley, Dillwyn, Strickland, and Copsychus stricklandii – and an introduction to Bornean nature for Alfred Russel Wallace JMBRAS 86(1): 113–119. Read on JSTOR