Wild Man from Borneo: A Cultural History of the Orangutan

3. Wanted Dead or Alive: Orangutans on Display

58 3  Wanted Dead or Alive Orangutans on Display In the eighteenth century, European elites began to develop an appetite for natural history collection. Kings and queens, princes and dukes, doctors and merchants, accumulated so-called cabinets of curiosities, some from the natural world (naturalia ), some made by humans (artificalia). In the same spirit, a smaller number of wealthy or powerful individuals maintained menageries of exotic animals, often sponsoring artists to record them in sketches, paintings, and figurines. In the beginning , both kinds of collection were fundamentally miscellaneous. The tooth of a bear might sit incongruously on a shelf alongside a piece of filigreed silverwork or, in the menagerie, a South American capybara might be housed next to an Africanbaboon.Theirownerscollectedwhatfellintotheirhands,someemploying curators as their holdings grew, supplemented by commissions of especially rare specimens. In this way, several cabinets and menageries began to take on the character of scientific collections, aiming at some degree of comprehensiveness and making themselves available for research. The great collections eventually became the core of national museums and zoological gardens, publicly embedding a spectacular vision of the natural world. Very little is known about the display of orangutans in Europe before the last decades of the eighteenth century. The Blauw Jan menagerie in Amsterdam ran for more than a hundred years (c. 1675–1784) as a clearinghouse for exotic animals, but the only evidence of an orangutan in its stock is the sketch made by Jan Velten in the early 1700s.1 The young female who became the focus of the “orangutan war” between Vosmaer and Camper in 1776 was housed in Prince Willem V’s menagerie at Het Kleine Loo, where members of the public could come and observe it. Although the court painter Aart Schouman later depicted the orangutan Orangutans on Display  59 roaming free with other exotic animals in a tranquil Dutch landscape, the reality at Het Kleine Loo seems to have been one of wrought iron cages and wooden shelters.2 Whentheorangutandied,the“war”thateruptedoverwhetheritscorpse should have gone to Vosmaer to be taxidermied or to Camper for dissection was prompted by the rarity of the specimen and the incompatibility of the two intentions .Behindtheconflict,however,wasCamper’scontemptforVosmaer’spreparation of the orangutan for display in a way that emphasized its “traces of humanity.” Science might stress the animality of the red ape, but Vosmaer, like many curators who followed him, recognized that the public would be more attracted to a specimen that challenged the human-ape boundary. As Carl Niekerk suggests, there was a tension between “exhibitional” and scientific values: just how much should scientific accuracy trump the public pleasure and interest that was served by an imaginative display?3 In the late eighteenth century, live orangutans were still exceptionally uncommon in Europe, and most red apes were held as pickled or stuffed specimens. By 1782, Sir Ashton Lever’s Holophusikon, one of the finest London collections of its Aart Schouman, The Menagerie of Willem V, 1786 (Sliggers and Wertheim, Een Vorstelijk Dierentuin, 71, Walburg Press, used by permission) 60  Chapter 3 time, had boasted a male and female orangutan among its “very curious monsters and monkies.”4 Lever’s large array of specimens was arranged aesthetically rather than scientifically, the aim being to dazzle visitors with the diversity of nature rather than to educate them in its patterns.5 Skins, skulls, and skeletons of orangutans could also be found in the British Museum and in a few university and private collections. Well-connected scientists generally had access to these specimens across the European continent, but members of the public saw them mainly in the form of printed, illustrated catalogues. Handbills and newspaper advertisements for menageries promised viewings of rare creatures among their exotic wares, but in the case of anthropoid exhibits, it is often difficult to identify amid the rhetoric of the fairground precisely what was being displayed. A survey of news clippings announcing various human-like “beasts” in long lists of attractions at London shows in the 1790s illustrates the problem. What are probably apes of some kind but not orangutans are cast in these columns as “Wood Monsters,” “a little Black Man,” “a Man-Tyger,” an “Arabian savage,” and a “Satyr of the Woods” from Scythia with “Face, Breasts, Hands and Feet, representing human nature.”6 These advertisements gave few clues as to whether the exhibits were alive or dead, which suggests that in the domain of...