Artist Dossier 125,660 Specimens of Natural History Curated by Anna-Sophie Springer & Etienne Turpin Komunitas Salihara, Jakarta, Indonesia Opening 15 August 2015
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Introduction to Dossier The importance of the Indonesian archipelago as a region for revolutionary scientific discoveries— especially regarding the theory of evolution, studies of biogeography, and the Homo erectus—cannot be overestimated. Yet, this legacy is seldom reflected in the form of colonial knowledge production predominantly stocking museums in Europe. By revisiting Alfred Russel Wallace’s (1823–1913) eight-year collecting expedition through the Malay archipelago, 125,660 Specimens of Natural History considers the mobility of colonial collections and the environmental transformations they produced against the background of both postcolonial museology and recent concerns regarding the sixth extinction and the Anthropocene. From 1854 to 1862, Wallace travelled Kepulauan Nusantara, documenting the region’s biodiversity and amassing a gigantic collection of specimens for European museums. He also carefully studied this collection in order to deduce the theory of evolution through natural selection, and the theory of biogeographical distribution, from his array of specimens. But while the Malay archipelago once provided the natural habitat for three quarters of all the world’s flora and fauna (explaining its popularity with European naturalists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries), scientists now suggest that by the end of this century Southeast Asian rainforests will have disappeared by two thirds, with biodiversity being reduced by fifty percent. Today, the pinned insects and taxidermy birds, reptiles, and mammals which Wallace gathered also suggest the severe environmental transformations in process since the region’s colonial occupation. The 125,660 Specimens of Natural History project combines archival research at the collections of the Lembaga Ilmu Pengetahuan Indonesia’s Museum 2
Zoologicum Bogoriense, the British Natural History Museums of London and Tring, the Berlin Museum fßr Naturkunde, and the Tropenmuseum of Amsterdam, with photographic documentary works by Fred Langford Edwards, and artist-led fieldwork and artworks produced in Southeast Asia in order to directly confront the radically transformed, postnatural landscape that has replaced the idyllic purity of Wallace’s colonial impressions. The exhibition invites ten artists from Southeast Asia to retrace and reassess the expedition, its documents, and artifacts. After premiering at Komunitas Salihara in Jakarta, the project is planned to travel to natural history museums in Berlin, London, and Amsterdam. This exhibition route follows the path of colonial knowledge as a way to bring the work of Indonesian artists into meaningful dialogue with major European institutions. The exhibition will feature the documentary photography of Fred Langford Edwards, who has worked intensively on documenting specimens collected by A.R. Wallace in various European museums of natural history and relevant zoological collections. The work of Fred Langford Edwards is a sustained and multilayered consideration of discourses of knowledge. His practice includes field research and the novel use of collections of artifacts accumulated in the name of particular branches of science, medicine, anthropology and the wider culture at large. In this dossier, the photographs of Wallace specimens on the front and back cover as well as on page 1, among other places, are reproduced courtesy of Edwards. www.fredlangfordedwards.com
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A bird of paradise specimen collected by Wallace for his private research collection. Photo by Etienne Turpin; courtesy of the Zoological Museum at Tring, UK. 4
Labels of Wallace specimens at the London Natural History Museum; photo by Etienne Turpin. 5
125,660 Specimens of Natural History The fact that A.R. Wallace became a professional collector who made his living by catching and preserving animals in the Tropics, in part, explains why he would amass a collection of the enormity of 125,660 specimens. Purely scientific collectors rarely collected more than 20,000 specimens. But Wallace relied on his collecting work as a commercial enterprise for several years, supplying a demand for exotic specimens at the time en vogue in Victorian England. In contrast to Charles Darwin, who came from a bourgeois context, Wallace was from a poorer family, left school when he was 14, and did not have a formal education in zoology or natural history. Although there is no doubt that Wallace was very intelligent and had a revolutionized biology, his professional training, however, was as a land surveyor. To some degree he was therefore a professional “measurer.” Thus, when we look at Wallace, what we find is an entanglement of scientific and economic interests, and this is something that is very important to understand regarding the legacy and the broader trajectory and implications of tropical expeditions such as his. Because, what happens in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is that “Nature” is increasingly replaced by the notion of “Natural Resource,” focusing on those elements of nature that can be utilized for human purposes––eventually, on a large, industrial scale.
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Frontispiece of Wallace’s A Narrative of Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro, 1889. 7
Before Wallace’s Malay Expedition The Malay expedition was not Wallace’s first long journey to a foreign continent. In fact, historians have speculated that he would have never travelled to Southeast Asia if his first trip had not ended in failure. In 1848, Wallace had set out to South America together with his friend Henry Bates. He spent four years exploring the area along the Rio Negro, collecting a formidable array of tropical fauna. But in 1852, during his return to Europe, the vessel carrying his specimens, the Helen, caught fire and sank, and he lost nearly his entire collection. Some zoologists and historians of science, the “Darwinians,” tend to debate whether Wallace ever followed a clear scientific objective in addition to his economic trajectory. However, his early letters testify to Wallace’s keen interest in the creation of species. Inspired by Robert Chamber’s Vestiges of the natural history of creation (which was published anonymously in 1844 due to its controversial theses), Wallace wrote to Bates in 1847, while planning the South American journey: “I should like to take some one family, to study thoroughly––principally with a view to the theory of the origin of species.” With the Helen destroyed in accident, only a second exploration could bring Wallace closer to the solution of this riddle and two years later, in 1854, he left England for Singapore.
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Ferdinand Magellan (c. 1480–1521) was a Portuguese explorer who served King Charles I of Spain in search of a westward route to the “Spice Islands,” or what are known today as the Maluku Islands in Indonesia. Magellan became known for having successfully captained the first expedition from Europe to Asia by the west, rounding the Americas by the south and crossing the Pacific Ocean for the first time, which resulted in the first circumnavigation of the Earth. The first Europeans arrived in Java in 1513 on Portuguese ships coming from Maluku; in 1522, they built a port near today’s Jakarta.
Left: Stained glass window, Lisbon Geographic Society; photo courtesy of Etienne Turpin. Next page: Gerardus Mercator, “Insulae Indiae Orientalis Praecipuae, in quibus Moluccae celeberrimae sunt,” from the Atlas sive Cosmographicae Meditationes de Fabrica Mundi et Fabricati Figura, Amsterdam, 1616; courtesy of the Library of the Lisbon Geographic Society. 10
“Batavia” is the Latin word for The Netherlands; it was the name the Dutch gave to the port town at the Java Sea in 1619, which since 1946 is known as Jakarta. The Dutch first arrived in 1596, establishing the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC) in 1602. One of the largest Western trading company with quasi-governmental authority, it is often considered the first multinational corporation. For 200 years, the VOC dominated colonial trade relations between Europe and Asia, rivaled only by the British East India Company. As a result of the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War (1780–84), the British periodically took over as colonial rulers in the Malay archipelago between 1800–24. The Indonesian colonies were given back to the Dutch, however, when Napoleon (1769–1821) was defeated and the Dutch and the British signed a treaty redistributing the land according to the status quo from the turn of the century.
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Map of Batavia from 1667; courtesy of Collectie Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam.
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Franz Wilhelm Junghuhn (1809–1864) was a German-Dutch botanist and geologist living and working on Java since 1835. He produced the first comprehensive map of Java (published in 1855) for the Dutch colonial government. The three meter long document was lauded by Alexander von Humboldt for its “beauty and excellence.” Though formally concerned with geography and volcanic topography, its strategic role as an imperialist weapon should not be underestimated. Even though the VOC had been in the archipelago for 200 years, the Dutch colonial military continued to struggle in battles with local warriors in the decades before Junghuhn created this detailed cartographic overview. Because of their stunning precision, Junghuhn’s maps revolutionized the knowledge of the island and its nature; it took nearly a century before these maps were significantly updated by more modern means.
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“The northern side of the Merapi, seen from an altitude of 7,500 ft at southern slope of the Merbabu. November 1836.� In this image, Junghuhn drew himself into the scene. Plate X, Topographischer und naturwissenschaftlicher Atlas zur Reise durch Java (Magdeburg: E. Baensch, 1845); courtesy of Deutsche Staatsbibliothek, Berlin.
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Plate XX, “Skizze from Krater Galungung,� Topographischer und naturwissenschaftlicher Atlas zur Reise durch Java (Magdeburg: E. Baensch, 1845); courtesy of Deutsche Staatsbibliothek, Berlin.
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Cage Alam Junghuhn – Junghuhn Natural Park, Lembang, north of Bandung with Junghuhn’s grave and a memorial in the background; photo courtesy of Hawe Setiawan.
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Until the theory of evolution was discovered in the mid-nineteenth century–– proclaiming that animal and plant species developed gradually through genetic mutations, and thus were interrelated and in their further development not frozen in time––many Europeans had speculated about the origin and order of species. Usually, the understanding was that all species were created and put into the world by God––who had also put the human at the top of this divine order. Next page: This table, made by Carolus Linnaeus in 1735, divides the animal kingdom into six main classes. 22
The 1854–62 Malay Expedition Between 1854 and 1862, the British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913) explored the Southeast Asian Malay archipelago, ardently documenting the region’s geography and biodiversity while amassing a gigantic collection of specimens for museums in Europe. Chronicled with great meticulousness, his field work, findings, and personal experiences are recorded in the book The Malay Archipelago: The land of the orangutan, and the bird of paradise—A narrative of travel, with sketches of man and nature, published in 1869 after Wallace’s return to Europe. The map shown on the next page is from the book; it shows his route which began in Singapore. Besides this travelogue, written for a popular audience in Europe, Wallace also wrote a number of other scientific books based on his observations and notes from the archipelago; several handwritten notebooks, manuscripts, and many of his letters to family, friends, and colleagues have been preserved. The Wallace Letters can be read online thanks for the Wallace Correspondence Project at the London Natural History Museum, which digitized and catalogued many of them. Scans of the Notebooks can be accessed through the website of the Linnean Society in London.
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Indonesia has over 17,000 islands; in the eight years that Wallace spent in the archipelago, he undertook 70 expeditions to every large island and a better part of the small ones. In total, he travelled 22,500 km, often in solitude. It was through these extensive journeys that he accumulated his monumental collection of 125,660 Specimens of Natural History. The exact list is as follows: 310 specimens of mammals; 100 reptiles; 8,050 birds; 7,500 shells; 13,100 lepidoptera (butterflies); 83,200 coleoptera (beetles); and 13,400 other insects. The map above comes from Wallace’s book The Malay Archipelago; the black lines mark his journeys, starting in Singapore in 1854, and show the Aru Islands as his westernmost destination. Left: Detail from “Ejecting an Intruder.” Illustration in Wallace’s The Malay Archipelago, 226. 28
In part, Wallace collected so many specimens for economic reasons; other explorers with similar goals tended to collect no more than 10,000 specimens. Lacking a formal university education, Wallace was a professional collector, shipping the material to an agent in London where the objects––many of them never seen before in the West––were in high demand and easily sold. Nevertheless, Wallace had a longstanding scientific interest and was looking for precise evidence about the development and relationship between species. In 1847, he wrote in a letter to his friend Henry Bates, where he states: “I should like to take some one family, to study thoroughly––principally with a view to the theory of the origin of species.” A few years later, he co-discovered the theory of evolution by natural selection as a result of his practice of collecting and comparing animals in the Malay archipelago.
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This portrait shows Wallace in the archipelago; it includes a bird of paradise specimen and his notebooks. Painting by Evstafieff in the collection of Down House (home of Charles Darwin); courtesy of English Heritage Photo Library.
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Although it is common to attribute the theory of evolution by natural selection to Charles Darwin, in fact, Darwin only published his views on the subject after letters had arrived from Sarawak (1855) and Ternate (1858) in which the young Wallace stated his idea of evolution. Darwin’s The Origin of Species was first published in 1859. Thanks to his extensive studies on animal distribution across different islands and continents, Wallace is also known as the “Father of Biogeography.”
Left: Frontispiece of the first edition of Wallace’s book The Malay Archipelago (“Kepulauan Nusantara”), published in 1869. Next page: Plumage of a Great Bird of Paradise, Paradisaea apoda, collected by Wallace on the Aru Islands and today held at the Cambridge Zoological Museum; photo courtesy of Fred Langford Edwards. 32
Dr George Beccaloni, Curator of Orthopteroid Insects & Director of the A.R. Wallace Correspondence Project, London Natural History Museum, showing project co-curator Anna-Sophie Springer the difficulty of finding “Wallace specimens” among the storage cases of the museum’s collection. While it might be of interest to historians of science which collector originally gathered which specimen, at natural history museums, they are usually filed according to taxonomic order alone. However, as long as the original labels are still attached to the objects it is possible––although cumbersome––to distinguish them in the collections; photo courtesy of Etienne Turpin. 35
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Discovering Biogeography Why is Wallace remembered as the “Father of Biogeography”? First of all, “biogeography” has to do with the distribution of species across landmasses such as the Earth’s continents, but also across islands, such as those located in the Malay archipelago. Studying, comparing, and indexing animal anatomies, Wallace also most carefully cataloged where the species were found. At some point he noticed that the islands he had studied differed in their biodiversity and that the fauna of some islands was more similar while other islands completely differed from one another even though they might be located more closely together, geographically. If the species were created as finite creatures by an omnipotent God such differences would seem unnecessary. But if the species evolved over time, and from each other, then geographical proximity and distance would most certainly play a role regarding the inheritable biological information available in specific regions. It was especially through studying Southeast Asian birds that led Wallace to noticing the zoological differences across the Malay islands. Wouldn’t one assume these animals would be able to cross ocean stretches most easily through flight? And yet, Wallace realized that the avifauna of Java and Sumatra were very different–– regardless the narrow stretch separating the two islands. While the drifting of the continents would not be discovered until 1912 (by the German Alfred Wegener), Wallace deduced that the islands of the archipelago must have been separated from the mainland Asian continent at different times––some earlier, some later–– through sea level rise caused by melting Ice Age glaciers. Wherever the water was narrow but very deep even birds and insects did not cross and thus did not coevolve. The sharpest biogeographical difference Wallace 38
determined divides the regions east and west of Bali and Lombok. The discovery is remembered through the socalled “Wallace Line” running between the two islands and northwards between Borneo and Sulawesi. It marks the division between Asian fauna (“fauna orientalis”) and Australian fauna (“fauna australis”). An excerpt of Wallace’s analysis published in his article “On the Physical Geography of the Malay Archipelago,” Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London, (1863), can be seen on the following spread. It should be noted that the biogeographical distribution of endemic species today no longer exists in the natural state Wallace encountered. Instead, human activities have produced a mixing and blurring of species that has become increasingly dense over the last 150 years.
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Above and previous page: Map from the German edition of Wallace’s The Geographical Distribution of Animals: Die geographische Verbreitung der Thiere (Dresden: Verlag R. von Zahn, 1876.) 40
Excerpt from A.R. Wallace, “On the Physical Geography of the Malay Archipelago,” Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London, Vol. 33 (1863), 228–29.
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Evolution by Natural Selection
Above: A cover illustration of Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, originally published in 1859. Left: Charles Darwin’s first sketch of an evolutionary tree from his First Notebook on Transmutation of Species (1837) on view at the American Museum of Natural History. 44
In his autobiography My Life (1905), Wallace reflects on the importance of reading Malthus’ Principles of Population. Insights gained from this book, in Wallace’s own words, gave him the “clue to the effective agent in the evolution of organic species” while he was in Ternate in 1858. Image: detail from North American Journal, 1886–87; courtesy Linnean Society, London; photo courtesy of Etienne Turpin. 45
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Details from a page of Wallace’s Species Notebook with a list of specimens collected between 14 March until 1 April 1855. At the bottom of the list, Wallace wrote the sum (1,428) and calculated an average of 71 specimens per day. Courtesy of Linnean Society, London; photo courtesy of Etienne Turpin.
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British beetles play a role in the narrative insofar as Wallace was first exposed to natural history when his friend Henry Walter Bates introduced him to beetle collecting in Leicester, England, in the 1840s. In an anniversary paper given at the Linnean Society in 1908, marking the publication of the original Darwin– Wallace paper on the theory of evolution (1858), Wallace himself emphasizes the formative role of beetle collecting, calling himself and Darwin “ardent beetle-hunters.� Beetles comprise approximately one-quarter of all named species. Globally, some 350,000 species have been identified; for comparison, birds total approximately 10,000 species and mammals about 5,400. Since 49
the biodiversity of beetles is rich in the temperate zone of the British Isles, some have argued that “training” on beetles was the perfect preparation for encountering the overwhelming richness of species in the Tropics. (See Andrew Berry, “Collecting and the Theory of Evolution,” 2008.) Above: “British Coleoptera,” in Wallace’s Species Notebook; courtesy Linnean Society, London; photo courtesy of Etienne Turpin. Next page: Wallace specimen of a beetle from Borneo in the collections of the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff. Photo courtesy Fred Langford Edwards. 50
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The image on the left shows the disassembled bones of a Semioptera Wallacei or “Standardwing,” a species of bird of paradise, from the skeletal department of the largest ornithological collection in the world at the Zoological Museum at Tring, UK, belonging to the London Natural History Museum; courtesy of Fred Langford Edwards. The bird was named in honour of A.R. Wallace, who discovered it for science in 1858. Following its original discovery, the standardwing wasn’t seen again by any scientist for about 60 years. It lives on the North Maluku islands of Halmahera, Bacan, and Morotai. Birds of paradise were first brought to Europe on the vessel of Magellan in the early sixteenth century. However, these were dead specimens which did not convey a true impression of the birds in their natural habitats, and led to a vast mythology.
Next page: Sketches of the Semioptera Wallacei from one of Wallace’s notebooks in the Linnean Society, London; photo by Etienne Turpin. 54
Wallace kept a series of different notebooks, some dating back to his exploration of the Amazon River between 1842–44. Ten of these notebooks are kept at the Linnean Society in London; it is also possible to access them on the digital platform http://linnean-online.org/wallace_notes.html. The image on the right shows a page from his notebook Eastern Butterflies in which Wallace exclusively recorded systemic notes and drawings of these types of insects. Wallace remarks on his excitement of catching specimens of a newly discovered butterfly, the “bird-winged butterfly” or Ornithoptera: “On taking it out of my net and opening the glorious wings, my heart began to beat violently, the blood rushed to my head, and I felt much more like fainting than I have done when in apprehension of immediate death. I had a headache the rest of the day, so great was the excitement produced by what will appear to most people a very inadequate cause.” (The Malay Archipelago, 342.)
Previous page: Wallace’s bird specimens at Tring with original labels; photo courtesy of Etienne Turpin. Right: Sketches from Eastern Butterflies; courtesy Linnean Society, London. Next page: A specimen of Ornithoptera Croesus found by Wallace on Batchian near New Guinea in 1859; courtesy of Linnean Society. Photo courtesy of Fred Langford Edwards. 59
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Butterfly drawings created by Wallace in one of his notebooks; photo by Etienne Turpin; courtesy of Linnean Society. 64
Through his collecting, Wallace supplied the scientific community with around 1,500 new species of birds and insects and he tried to find each one at least six times––both because it provided him with more copies to sell, but also because he understood that he needed to be certain about the anatomy and features of the different animals which often only differed from each other in the minutest detail. As long as the specimens in the museum collections are still connected to their original labels, today it is possible to distinguish those specimens Wallace wanted to keep for himself from those that he sold off through his agent Samuel Stevens by the mark of a red line across the paper. Wallace spent 14 months in Sarawak, Borneo. He collected many beetles by picking them up from downed timber cleared for the coal mining operation around the Santubong River. The image on the right shows a page with pasted beetle wings from Wallace’s Species Notebook. The bottom two lines scribbled with pencil read: “In Amboyna the perfect Euchirus longimanus is roasted & eaten by the makers of Sago sugar.” (Photo courtesy of Fred Langford Edwards and Linnean Society, London.)
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The image on the left shows the so-called “Tree of Life” or “Pedigree of Man” drawn by the German biologist Ernst Haeckel for his book The History of Creation (1876). As indicated by the title of the illustration, the human species is situated at the top of a relational network of animal species and thus is represented literally as the crown of the tree with the trunk as a central axis leading up to this crown. Haeckel, like many other early evolutionists, considered the human species as the pinnacle of evolution. The close kinship to and apparent descent from the apes, however, often posed an ideological problem to “transmutationist” thinkers––as evolution was first called. For this reason, Haeckel himself was looking for the missing link that would explain human evolution; in 1866, he boldly postulated that such a clue— which he referred to as the “Ape-Man of Java”—could be found in the Malay Archipelago. And, while a student of Haeckel indeed succeeds in unearthing the bones of one of the oldest examples of a Homo erectus, it was not until 1900–01 that Haeckel himself visited Java. It should be noted that although this image is one of the most iconic depictions of an evolutionary tree, the visual metaphor was used by other scientists before. Charles Darwin, for example, sketched one in his notebook in 1837.
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European Consumption Trade relations between Southeast Asia and Europe go back many centuries. Ever since its foundation, the port city of Batavia/Jakarta––strategically located in the Sunda Strait between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea––has served as a maritime gateway for supplying Europe with consumption goods from Asia. Textiles from India, spices from the Malay archipelago, and silk/silver from China and Japan, as well as slaves were shipped to the Western world on the ships of European colonizers such as the Dutch, the Portuguese, the Spanish, and the British. When the Industrial Revolution began at the end of the eighteenth century, the old logics and traditions of supply and demand changed however and Europeans became increasingly interested in exploring and exploiting the region also for its natural resources. F.W. Junghuhn for example studied the geology of Java, sending reports about both wood and minerals to contacts in The Netherlands, Germany, and England. Over the last two centuries, Indonesia (or the Dutch East Indies) has been the world’s largest exporter of certain renewable goods, such as quinine and crude palm oil, respectively. For several decades, extremely high quantities of wildlife such as birds of paradise and precious tropical woods were exported, too. Today, large multi-national mining and palm oil corporations continue to threaten and actively destroy zones of primary rainforests for the purpose of resource extraction.
Left: “Natives Shooting the Great Bird of Paradise.” Illustration from Wallace’s The Malay Archipelago, 337. Next page: A bird skull collected by Wallace stored in the skeletal collection of the Tring Zoological Museum, UK; photo courtesy of Fred Langford Edwards. 70
Edwardian bird hat with Great Bird of Paradise attachment; courtesy of Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History, USA. 73
Wallace was one of the first Westerners to ever behold the birds of paradise alive in their natural habitat. Because of their unique plumage, the birds quickly became very popular collector’s items and were also used in fashion, especially women’s bird hats. Traditionally referred to by the Malay as Manuk dewata (“God’s birds”), it is their second, and later, Malay appellation, Burung mati (“dead birds”) that expresses the cruel irony of their fate as mascots for the expulsion from paradise. For only a few decades after Wallace left Asia, the hunting and trade of birds of paradise saw export numbers reach annual highs of up to 80,000 skins. These activities caused a farreaching conflict among the colonial authorities that lasted for forty years and ended with a prohibition on killing the birds in 1931.
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Museum collections gain new scientific roles today because of the transformation of natural ecosystems “outside.” Historic specimens from the 18th or 19th century are an archive of biomolecular information that otherwise would not be accessible today; by making use of these specimen-archives, the institutions incorporate “postnatural” perspectives into their work. Image: Dr Robert Prys-Jones, Head of Bird Group, Department of Life Sciences, Tring Zoological Museum, UK, explaining the catalogue system of the skeletal collection on the bone of a bird; photo courtesy of Etienne Turpin.
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Land Use Transformation As humans are travelling between the continents with greater mobility, taking and bringing with them elements from nature that belong to specific geographic habitats, they become powerful agents in transforming the biological equilibria of the planet (i.e. through breeding, domestication, fertilization, plantations as well as through the displacement and extinction of species). The realization that the impact of human agency on the earth systems is similar to major volcanic eruptions or asteroid collisions; humans have the power to change the consistency of these systems and radically alter the planet’s geology. This has led scientists to coin the term the “Anthropocene.” For about ten years, this term has been suggested to claim a geologic age that is determined by human agency, especially as a result of species extinction. Worldwide, frogs are currently among the most threatened of all animal species. As Elizabeth Kolbert writes in The Sixth Extinction, it has been discovered that a microscopic fungus colonizes the skin of most frog species, causing their rapid death in vast numbers. It is believed that the fungus has been spread around the world due to human mobility.
Left: Wallace’s watercolor of the flying frog Rhacophorus nigrapalmatus painted in Sarawak, Borneo, 1855. Curators are unaware of any actual specimen of this frog collected by Wallace, and the painting might be the only evidence; image courtesy of the Library of the London Natural History Museum. 78
From 1836 on, F.W. Junghuhn explored vast regions of Sumatra and Java, mapping and collecting information about the islands’ natural features, often following instructions from Dutch governors and European correspondents. Thus, he made enquiries about climate, fertility of the land, natural and mineral resources, types of wood, etc. Regarding Sumatra, he was instructed to also explore the political attitude, language and writing, customs and habits of the population, especially about notorious cannibalistic practices. Image: Junghuhn, lithograph of Telaga-Patengan, in: Java-Album. LandschaftsAnsichten von Java. Nach der Natur aufgenommen von Franz Junghuhn. (Leipzig: Arnoldsche Buchhandlung, 1856); courtesy of Deutsche Staatsbibliothek, Berlin.
A blossoming Primula imperialis is being inspected by Professor Busgen on the Pangrango circa 1910; courtesy of Collectie Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam. 81
In April 1839, Junghuhn is the first European to climb the 3000 meter high Gunung Gede-Pangrango, which he calls a “castle in the clouds.” Here he discovers a flower hitherto unknown to botanists. It is a type of primula as they also exist in Europe. In contrast to the small plants he knows from home, the variation Junghuhn finds on the volcanic plateau however exceeds the height of 1 meter and he therefore names it Primula imperials Jungh. Only six months later, Junghuhn visits the area a second time, but to his dismay he notices that it has already been partly deforested, with the oldgrowth trees being replaced by European fruit saplings. Realizing that he himself first communicated the discovery of the fertile land to botanists at the Buitenzorg Institute in Bogor near the foot of the mountains, he concludes: “Wistfully I left this beautiful summit; wistful for seeing how many of its solitary blossoms had already been crushed, and how many a small, beautiful tree had had to fall to the axe since the short time that I had first made this place known in Buitenzorg.––A significant expanse of its lovely forest…already had been hopelessly mowed down.” (Topographische und naturwissenschaftliche Reisen durch Java, 1845, 495.)
Ernst Haeckel visited Java in 1900–01. Below is an image of one of his watercolours showing the Gunung Salak near Buitenzorg. In his accompanying description he lauds the “highly painterly charm” of the orchards. Assuming he does indeed refer to the same place Junghuhn visited 60 years earlier, the area must have completely changed: The imported fruit saplings Junghuhn was so shocked about have successfully taken root, giving a harmonically integrated, near natural appearance. Next page: Mooji Indie painting by Ernst Haeckel; courtesy of Deutsche Staatsbibliothek, Berlin. 82
Lithograph of an orangutan in the style of a natural history illustration, from Haks and Maris, Lexicon of Foreign Artists Who Visualized Indonesia, 1600–1950, Utrecht, 1995. 85
Habitat While a number of 310 collected mammals might seem insignificant among a total of more than 125,000 collected specimens, Wallace’s vivid descriptions of the relentless hunts and killing of the orangutans (or Mias, or “Man of the Forest”) no doubt leave a strong impression when reading his travelogue. Today, due to extensive deforestation and the planting of oil palms across the archipelago, around 80% of the orangutan habitats are already destroyed, causing their numbers in the wild to dwindle rapidly. Even when it is difficult to get exact numbers, it is believed that not more than 50,000 orangutans are left in the rainforests of Sumatra and Borneo, the only two islands that provide natural habitats necessary for orangutans to live in the wild. Regarding rainforest ecosystems and biodiversity loss two things are especially important to note: To say that tropical rainforests are “megadiverse ecosystems” means that their species, while small in numbers, are extremely specialized and adapted and they vary across rather small geographic areas while living in close association with each other (food chain). Together, specialization and rarity produce effects of high vulnerability to environmental changes and disruptions. The more fragmented the forests become, the less species survive in them, even if there remain “habitat island” areas of seemingly intact forest. As Elizabeth Kolbert writes in The Sixth Extinction, “In the absence of recolonization, local extinctions can become regional and then, eventually, global.” Although it might not be obvious, colonial expansionist activities across the Tropics early on also produced reflections about conservation and environmentalism. While Charles Darwin was less concerned with issues 86
of species extinction, Wallace was a strong supporter of conservationist ideas. in 1863 he wrote: “If this is not done future ages will certainly look back upon us as a people so immersed in the pursuit of wealth as to be blind to higher considerations. They will charge us with having culpably allowed the destruction of some of these records of creation which we had it in our power to preserve and while professing to regard every living thing as the direct handiwork of the creator.” (Wallace, “On the Physical Geography of the Malay Archipelago,” Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, Vol. 33 (1863), 233–34.
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Orangutan skins in the mammal collection of the Lembaga Ilmu Pengetahuan, Indonesia’s Museum Zoologicum Bogoriense. Photo courtesy of Etienne Turpin. In contrast to the specimens that the general public of natural history museums is familiar with––stuffed animals in lifelike poses displayed in front of naturalistic landscape paintings––the specimens which biologists working with animals access tend to look quite differently. In the vertebrae categories, the skeletons are usually not only separated from the skins or furs, but also stored in different departments. Another practice is to preserve complete animals in alcohol or formaldehyde. These so-called “wet specimens” or “spirit collections” enable the study of the organs or tissue of animals which can be requested for dissection and are thereafter put back into their jar for the next user.
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Orangutans, tigers, elephants, and rhinoceroses are some of the large, majestic mammals whose threats of extinction make it into the global news. Nevertheless, there are hundreds of other species facing similar fates. The image on this page shows the skull of a Sumatran rhino in the storage facilities of the Indonesian Institute of Science (LIPI). Many specimens in the Indonesian collection date back to the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries when Sumatran rhinos and their cousins, the Javan rhinos, were so frequent that they were considered agricultural pests. Southeast Asia’s rapid deforestation, however, has caused their natural habitats to shrink to a minimum and their populations have been radically reduced. Of the Javan rhino, which used to be very common across all Southeast Asia, no more than 50 individuals survive in a single sanctuary, the Ujung Kulon National Park on Java’s westernmost peninsula. For example, consider Junghuhn’s description of discovering the fertile plateau on Gunung Gede/ Manellawangie in 1839: “I followed, always keeping on rhinoceros pathways…expecting nothing more certainly that suddenly reaching the abyss of a terrible crater on whose forested edge I expected I was walking. How to describe my astonishment, however, when I suddenly found myself on the edge of the forest, seeing before me smiling in the sunshine a flat meadow, fringed entirely by forest and traversed, in its middle, by a small creek! Two rhinoceroses were feeding on the edge of this creek.” (Topographische und naturwissenschaftliche Reise durch Java, 1845, 447.)
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Skull of a Sumatran Rhinoceros shelved in the collection of the Museum Zoologicum Bogoriense; photo courtesy of Etienne Turpin.
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In the 19th century, several non-endemic species of trees were introduced to Java by the Dutch, who then began to experiment with their monoculture cultivation. One of those trees was the Oil Palm, brought over from West Africa in 1848 in the form of four seeds. Another species was the South American Cinchona Tree, which Alexander von Humboldt had described on his journeys from half a century earlier. The latter had become popular with the colonizers of the Eastern hemisphere because its quinine-containing bark was used as a cure for Malaria. The photographs above are from 1860–1900 and show a group of Cinchona trees (left) and their plantation (right). It was none other than F.W. Junghuhn who, in 1856, received the mandate to oversee the implementation of these plantations; a colleague had established the initial zone, consisting of 144 trees (which failed) on the eastern slope of the Gunung Gede, in the area of Cibodas. It is worth noting that Junghuhn was an outspoken opponent of monoculture plantations because he understood their inherent ecological weaknesses. 91
Yet, by 1863, one year before his death, he had managed to increase the number of Cinchona trees to over 115,000. Until the end of World War II, the Malay archipelago (or then the Dutch East Indies), was the largest exporter of quinine worldwide. (Both images courtesy of the Collectie Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam.)
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Image: Photograph depicting the Museum voor Economische Botanie, Buitenzorg, Java (circa 1900–30); courtesy Collectie Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam.
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Next page left: A scene under a tree, from Haks & Maris, Lexicon of Foreign Artists Who Visualized Indonesia, 1600–1950, Utrecht, 1995. Next page right: “I call it Q. fagiformis Jungh.” From Junghuhn, F.W., “Der Zustand der angepflanzten Chinabäume auf Java,” Bonplandia: Zeitschrift für die gesammte Botanik, VI. Jahrg., No. 1, 15 January 1858. 94
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Kerangka burung tropis dikumpulkan oleh Wallace dan disimpan dalam koleksi kerangka Museum Tring Zoological; foto oleh Fred Langford Edwards.
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Like the Cinchona trees, the Oil Palm (Elaeis guineensis) was also introduced to Indonesia in the mid-nineteenth century, with the first four seeds being brought from West Africa in 1848. It took until 1911, however, that the first commercial oil palm plantation was implemented in Sumatra. Today palm oil is the most widely used vegetable oil in the world; because it is relatively cheap compared to other oils, it is used in massive quantities for cooking, especially in India and China. In Indonesia, 85% of the palm oil consumed is used for cooking food. However, palm oil is usually a hidden ingredient in most commercial products internationally, ranging from cosmetics, to lubricants, and fuels. Today Indonesia is the world’s largest producer of palm oil––even if between 60–70% of the country’s plantations are owned by Malaysian investors. Monoculture oil palm plantations are developed by heavily deforesting the rainforests of Borneo and Sumatra, especially in provinces such as Kalimantan and Riau. While this has a positive effect on the GDP, deforestation alone causes around 20% of the annual CO2 emissions into the atmosphere. Writing in as far back as the 1840s, Junghuhn understood the transformational effects of deforestation on the biosphere and predicted “extreme” weather conditions to arise from the colonial use of land for plantation developments.
Previous page: Photograph of a skeleton of a tropical bird collected by Wallace and stored in the skeletal collection of the Tring Zoological Museum; courtesy of Fred Langford Edwards. Right: A monument in the Bogor Botanical Garden commemorating the import of oil palm seeds to Indonesia in 1848; photo courtesy of Anna-Sophie Springer. 99
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With 14 months spent in Borneo’s Sarawak between 1854–55, this area is where A.R. Wallace spent the most extended time of his expedition; it is here that he formulated his so-called first law of evolutionary theory, which reads: “Every species has come into existence coincident both in space and time with a preexisting closely allied species.” The Malay Archipelago used to rank among the world’s greatest concentrations of biodiversity, which is one reason Wallace could amass such a massive collection of specimens from the region to ship to European collectors. While his vast collection stocked museums with exotic, previously unknown materials, Wallace also carefully studied this collection in order to deduce the theory of evolution through natural selection, and the theory of biogeographical distribution, from his array of specimens. Yet, as a result of logging, bush fires, agricultural clearings, gold mining, road construction and oil palm plantations, many of the areas abundant with plant and animal life that Wallace recorded have rapidly vanished. In fact, contemporary zoologists have despairingly admitted that the material evidence for a theory of evolution would unlikely to be found today because of such widespread environmental devastation. Currently on the island of Borneo, deforestation occurs two times faster than global average; according to the latest studies, over 70% of its intact lowland rainforests have been cleared since the 1970s, mostly for palm oil and timber plantations. It is precisely this type of forest which houses the highest levels of biodiversity, that is, contains the highest amount of different species of plants and animals. Deforestation goes along with cutting industrial roads into the forests. In Borneo, these through roads now exceed a total length of 270,000 km, which equals 6 trips around the globe along the equator.
Maps and statistics: Gaveau, Sloane, Molidena et.al., “Four Decades of Forest Persistence, Clearance and Logging on Borneo,” PLOS one, July 2014, vol. 9, issue 7. 102
Deforestation of peat swamp forest for oil palm plantation in Kalimantan Province, Borneo, 2014; photo by Walhi.
The Greenpeace report Certifying Destruction shows that a certification by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO)––a voluntary association for the industry whose members account for around 40% of global palm oil production––is failing to protect international household brands from the risk that the palm oil they use is tainted with deforestation. Diagram from Certifying Construction (September, 2013), 4.
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A worker carries a palm oil sapling onto a cleared area to be planted in the coming days, Tripa peat forest, Aceh Povince, Sumatra, June 2012; photo courtesy of Paul Hilton.
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Indonesian surfer Dede Surinaya captured in waves littered with trash in the Javanese ocean; photo by Zak Noyle, 2013. 109
Ocean The oceans cover 71% of the Earth’s surface. The expanse of the Pacific Ocean alone is big enough to fit the landmass of all continents. More than 95% of all the planet’s water is in the ocean, which plays an important role in taking CO2 from the atmosphere. As the largest archipelago in the world, Indonesia is surrounded, permeated, and connected by the ocean. With a coastline of 95,000 km, around 18% of the world’s coral reefs are found in Indonesian waters. Comparable to the rainforests on land, underwater reefs are where the greatest number of species dwell. In fact, the highest level of marine biodiversity in the world is found in Indonesian coral colonies. In the archipelago, land and water are equally powerful forces, and it is not for the terrestrial rainforests alone that the country counts as one of the most pivotal “biodiversity hotspots.” Between 70–90% of fish species depend on coral ecosystems, and many human communities do as well. Indonesia’s reefs are said to support one of the largest marine fisheries in the world; but, besides providing this vital substance for fishing, reefs can also alleviate storms and tsunami waves, and help attract tourists concerned with biodiversity. In the Anthropocene, the ocean in general, and corals in particular, are heavily affected by depletion. Ocean acidification and overfishing are two of the main negative factors. Other major problems are posed by agricultural pollution, land development, and sedimentation. The archipelago’s rapid urban development, as well as its heavy rainforest deforestation, lead to erosion and coastal runoff of nutrient-rich soil that suffocates the reefs. Together, these pressures have significantly debilitated Indonesia’s reef ecosystems over the last decades. With only 5% remaining in excellent, healthy condition, nearly 110
Plate 9, “Hexacoralla – Sechsstrahlige Sternkorallen” from Ernst Haeckel, Kunstformen der Natur (Leipzig/Vienna: Bibliographisches Institut, 1899).
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85% of the reefs in Indonesia are threatened to various degrees. A nineteenth-century European biologist named Ernst Haeckel visited Indonesia to research corals in 1900. Although Wallace himself did not collect marine specimens in the archipelago, he recorded his delight in the beauty of coral reefs in The Malay Archipelago: Passing up the harbour, in appearance like a fine river, the clearness of the water afforded me one of the most astonishing and beautiful sights I have ever beheld. The bottom was absolutely hidden by a continuous series of corals, sponges, actiniae, and other marine productions of magnificent dimensions, varied forms, and brilliant colours. The depth varied from about twenty to fifty feet, and the bottom was very uneven, rocks and chasms and little hills and valleys, offering a variety of stations for the growth of these animal forests. In and out among them, moved numbers of blue and red and yellow fishes, spotted and banded and striped in the most striking manner, while great orange or rosy transparent medusae floated along near the surface. It was a sight to gaze at for hours, and no description can do justice to its surpassing beauty and interest. For once, the reality exceeded the most glowing accounts I had ever read of the wonders of a coral sea. There is perhaps no spot in the world richer in marine productions, corals, shells and fishes, than the harbour of Amboyna. 112
Gunung Slamat crater as mapped by Junghuhn in 1847 (detail from his 1855 Java map).
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Aerial view of the largest open pit, Grasberg Mine, Papua; Google Earth 2012.
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Other than plantations, mineral extraction is the other large industrial factor presently causing deforestation in the archipelago. The Grasberg Mine in Irian Jaya, Indonesia, is the largest gold mine and third largest copper mine in the world. It is mostly owned by the American corporations Freeport and its partner Rio Tinto.
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Skull of a tropical bird collected by Wallace and in the collection of the Tring Zoological Museum; photo courtesy Fred Langford Edwards.
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Selected Timeline of Events 1512
Portuguese traders establish first regular contact with peoples of the archipelago (Maluku).
1522
First five bird of paradise skins imported to Europe with Magellan’s ship Victoria.
1602
Dutch East India Company is established.
1611
Jayakarta trading post established; by mid-century, as Batavia (renamed so in 1619), it is an important trade centre, especially for slaves.
1744
The Dutch VOC establishes a garden and mansion at the site of today’s Istana Bogor, next to the Kebun Raya Bogor (botanical garden); the area had been cultivated as a man-made forest as far back as during the Sunda Kingdom in the 15th c., however, when it was used to protect rare seeds.
1758
The 10th Edition of Linneaus’s Systema Naturae marks the starting point for zoological nomenclature; Linnaeus publishes the first ever scientific description of the birds of paradise and names the species Paradisea apoda (“footless” bird of paradise).
1759
The British Museum is founded in London.
1793
The Botanical Garden of Paris becomes the new Muséum national d’histoire naturelle.
1798/99
The Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC) collapses; the English take over “East-India.”
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1811
The English East India Company takes control of Java from the Dutch; Thomas Stamford Raffles becomes Lieutenant Governor of Java.
1812
The first strategic (yet imprecise) survey map of Java is issued under Raffles’s supervision.
1813
Raffles abolishes slavery in Indonesia, but was unable to do the same with debt bondage.
1817
The Buitenzorg Botanical Garden is officially opened by the Dutch as Lands Plantentuin; the first director is German-born Dutch biologist and botanist Caspar Georg Carl Reinwardt.
1819
Raffles founds Singapore for the English.
1820
The Rijksmuseum van Natuurlijke Historie is founded in Leiden as a merger of several existing collections.
1824
The Anglo-Dutch Treaty is signed in London returning the Indonesian colonies back under Dutch rule.
1825–30
The Dutch colonial army suffers losses on Java in battles with the local tribal prince Diponegoro, partly due to incomplete topographical and cartographic knowledge of the island’s interior.
1830–33
Charles Lyell publishes Principles of Geology; pronounces the doctrine of “Uniformitarianism,” the idea that the processes that shaped the earth were still in operation today. After nearly a century of laboratory research, arsenical soap is now the standard solution against insect attacks on taxidermy bird specimens.
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1831–36
Charles Darwin is seasick on the HMS Beagle (and has first volume of Lyell’s trilogy with him).
1835
Franz Wilhelm Junghuhn arrives in Java.
1839
4 Junghuhn climbs the Gunung Gede-Pangrango and discovers the Primula Imperialis Jungh. 10 Junghuhn returns to the plateaux; shocked to find European fruit orchards being cultivated there
1840
Kew Gardens in London is established as Botanical Garden open to the public (the site dates back to 1759).
1844
Robert Chamber’s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation is published anonymously. Junghuhn begins to map Java.
1845
Junghuhn publishes his Topographical Atlas with two initial Java maps folded into it. Wallace reads the anonymously published book Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation igniting in him the fascination with the controversial idea of species transmutation (in Wales, UK).
1846
United States National Museum (Smithsonian, NMNH) is established.
1847
Wallace writes to Bates that “I should like to take some one family, to study thoroughly—principally with a view to the theory of the origin of species.”
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1848
C.L. Bonaparte, Conspectus generum avium is published; Wallace used this ornithological survey to identify birds during his Malay expedition. The first four Oil Palm (Elaeis guineensis) seeds are imported to Bogor from West Africa.
1848–52
Wallace explores South America (Brazil) in order to understand evolutionary change by collecting animals and plants in the Amazon Basin.
1851/52
The Austrian Ida Pfeiffer is the first female European explorer to visit Borneo and Sumatra.
1852
Though import was a topic since 1829, it is only this year that the first Chinchona tree reaches Java. 6.8. Wallace’s Amazon collection and many of his notebooks burn on the Helen in the Atlantic.
1854
Wallace arrives in Southeast Asia; begins his expedition in Singapore; from November, he spends 14 months in Sarawak.
1855
Junghuhn’s Java map is published by the Dutch Ministerie van Kolonien; it measures 79 x 308 cm and revolutionizes the topographical knowledge of the island and its nature. Wallace develops the so-called “Sarawak Law,” in Sarawak: “Every species has come into existence coincident both in time and space with a pre-existing closely allied species.”
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2 Wallace from Borneo to Singapore; he sails via Bali and Lombok to Celebes;
5–6 he spends time on Celebes and writes first letter to 8–12 Darwin in October. 1857 1–7 Wallace visits Kai and Aru Islands, Sahul Shelf; 11 via Ambon to Ternate and Moluccas. 1858
2 Wallace writes “On The Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type” on Halmahera containing the second “law” (natural selection) or “Ternate”-essay. 3–8 Wallace is in Dorey, northern New Guinea. 1.7. Hooker and Lyell organize reading of joint Darwin/ Wallace paper at Linnean Society in absence of both authors; Samuel Stevens, Wallace’s agent, is present.
1859
Darwin publishes The Origin of Species. Wallace travelling through the Moluccas.
1862
Wallace leaves Southeast Asia behind and returns to England taking two live birds of paradise. He continues his biological research with his private specimens.
1864
Junghuhn dies in Lembang near Bandung; grave in Cagar Alam Junghuhn, Lembang.
1866
Darwin, Hooker, Huxley, and Wallace are among those signing a petition to the British Museum’s Chancellor of the Exchequer to separate the natural history collections from the art collections and the library (NHM not established until 1881).
1869
Wallace publishes The Malay Archipelago. 122
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1876
Wallace publishes The Geographical Distribution of Animals.
1880
Wallace publishes Island Life.
1881
Natural History Museum London is established.
1905–20
30,000 to 80,000 bird of paradise skins exported annually to London, Paris, and Amsterdam.
1911
First commercial oil palm plantation is created in Sumatra.
1913
Wallace dies.
1928
The “Wallace Line” is coined as “Wallacea”.
1931
A prohibition of killing birds of paradise is issued in Indonesia.
1936
The Galapagos finches are named “Darwin’s Finches” by British ornithologist Percy Lowe.
1945
Proclamation of Indonesian Independence
1957
British biologist and BBC nature journalist David Attenborough is the first to capture birds of paradise on film for his series Zoo Quest.
1980
WALHI (Wahana Lingkungan Hidup Indonesia, or, The Indonesian Forum for Environment) is founded.
2001
25 million tons of palm oil produced worldwide.
2009
46 million tons of palm oil produced worldwide.
2015
125,660 Specimens of Natural History at Komunitas Salihara, Jakarta.
Photograph of pinned beetles collected by A.R. Wallace in the archipelago; courtesy of Fred Langford Edwards. 124
Online Resources Digitized Wallace Notebooks at the Linnean Society, London: www.linnean-online.org/wallace_notes.html Digitized Wallace Letters and Manuscripts at the Wallace Correspondence Project: http://wallaceletters.info/ Lectures of ARW Centenary at AMNH 12 Nov 2013: www.youtube.com/ playlist?list=PLUraVH7Ik-FH9tATJuDRpjZmHVy92K9fa Sir David Attenborough on birds of paradise: www.amnh.org/explore/ news-blogs/podcasts/alfred-russel-wallace-and-the-birds-of-paradise-with-sirdavid-attenborough Digitized Books by Charles Darwin at the Darwin Manuscript Project: www.amnh.org/our-research/darwin-manuscripts-project/edited-manuscripts/ darwin-s-reading Digital Collection of the Tropenmuseum Amsterdam: www.collectie.tropenmuseum.nl/default.aspx?lang=en PDFs of natural history publications: www.archive.org www.biodiversitylibrary.org
Thank you
Bergit Arends, Franz Xaver Augustin, Annette Bhagwati, George Beccaloni, Lynda Brooks, Elaine Charwat, Yantri Dewi, Nirwan Dewanto, Matthias Glaubrecht, Dian Ina, Charles Leh, Erik Meijaard, Heike Catherina Mertens, Uwe Moldrzyk, Ening Nurjanah, Richard Pell, Jeffrey Petersen, Robert PrysJones, Farid Rakun, Anthony Sebastian, Katrin Sohns, Renate Sternagel, Pim Westerkamp, LIPI/MZB, the SYNAPSE International Curators’ Network, and all image authors and archiving institutions. The research for this project has been generously supported by a Goethe-Institut Research Travel Grant for Curators.
Colophon
Concept & Research: Etienne Turpin & Anna-Sophie Springer Texts & Timeline: Anna-Sophie Springer Edited by: Etienne Turpin 1/2015 Š each author, artist, and holding institution Contact: Dian Ina Mahendra Gallery Manager Komunitas Salihara, Jakarta dian.ina [at] salihara.org Curators: info [at] anexact.org www.salihara.org www.anexact.org/125-660-Specimens 125
Casuarina trees are native to Indonesia. Their generic name aludes to the Malay word kasuari, evoking the similarities between the cassowary birds’ feathers and the plants’ scaly leaves; photo of a label of a subpecies named after F.W. Junghuhn and W.H. de Vries at Bogor Botanical Garden courtesy of Anna-Sophie Springer.