Wild Man from Borneo: A Cultural History of the Orangutan

1. From Satyr to Pongo: Discovering the Red Ape

10 1  From Satyr to Pongo Discovering the Red Ape In 1641, the Dutch anatomist Nicolaes Tulp published a book with the bland title Observationes Medicæ (Medical Observations). Tulp is best known now for his depiction in Rembrandt’s celebrated painting The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp, in which the doctor is shown explaining the features of a human cadaver to an audience of students. Tulp’s real-life interests, however, extended beyond human anatomy to the biology of other creatures. Chapter 56 of Tulp’s book was titled “An Indian Satyr” and opened with the paragraph: Althoughitliesjustoutsidethefieldofmedicine,Ishallweaveintomyaccount here a mention of the Indian Satyr which was brought, as I recall, from Angola and presented to Frederik Hendrik, Prince of Orange. This satyr had four feet, but because of the human appearance [gedaante] it shows, it is called Orang Outang by the Indians, or forest man, and by the Africans Quoias Morrou. It is as tall as a child of three years and as stout as one of six.1 Tulp’s account was the first attempt by a trained scientist to provide a detailed description of a great ape. After the introduction above, he went on to describe the state of the creature’s muscles, the texture of its skin, the color of its hair, the shape of its thumb. He had seen the creature when it was still alive, and he described the way in which it drank liquid and how it pulled a blanket over itself to go to bed. The description, though stretching over little more than a page, was a model of direct scientific observation of a kind that had nothing in common with the wild stories of fantastical beasts in distant places that was still the stuff of travelers’ tales in the early seventeenth century. Discovering the Red Ape  11 Even more impressive, Tulp illustrated his brief account with an engraving of the creature. Like his description, the engraving was clearly done from real life. The folds of skin, the wispy hair, the disconsolate expression on the face, have nothing of the conventional formalism of the previous centuries. This picture was an attempt to bring the reader into the presence of a new creature. In two respects, however, Tulp’s report is puzzling. First, he recalls that the creature came from Angola. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Angola was a large and well-known state on the western coast of southern Africa. The European sense of geographical boundaries was far less strict at that time than it Tulp’s “Orang-outang,” 1640 (Tulp, Observationes Medicae, 271) 12  Chapter 1 is now, and Angola in its broadest sense included the habitat of the great ape we now know as the chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes). In its general posture, however, and in small but significant details such as the relatively small ears and relatively hairless chest, the engraving more closely suggests the ape that we know as the orangutan(Pongopygmaeus)thanitdoesachimpanzee.Wecanprobablytherefore take seriously Tulp’s protestation of uncertainty (“as I recall, from Angola”) and accept that the creature in the engraving is indeed an orangutan.2 Tulp himself never visited the East Indies, where the Dutch East India Company (VOC) was in the process of building up a commercial empire from its base in Batavia (now Jakarta), but he was aware of the presence of great apes in the Indonesian archipelago, for he states later in the same chapter: In fact, the king of Sambaca [probably Sambas, on the northwestern tip of Borneo3] once told our brother-in-law, Samuel Bloemaart that these Satyrs, especially the males, on the island of Borneo, have so much confidence of spirit and such strong musculature that they have more than once attacked armed men, not to mention the weaker sex, the women and girls.4 Thesecondpuzzle,however,liesinname“OrangOutang”thatTulpattributes to the creature in its Indies form and that he accurately translates as “forest man” (in Malay, the lingua franca of the Indonesian archipelago, orang means “person” and utan or hutan means “forest”). There is no literary record, however, of the Malay-speakingpeoplesoftheIndonesianarchipelagousingtheterm“orangutan” oroneofitsvariantstorefertotheapebeforethemiddleofthenineteenthcentury. The web-based Malay Concordance Project, located at the Australian National University, contains many references to “orang hutan,” but before the midnineteenth century they all refer, sometimes in a derogatory tone, to human beings who inhabit the forests.5 Thomas Bowrey’s 1701 Dictionary English and Malayo, Malayo and English...