By Aeroplane to Pygmy Land: revisiting the 1926 Smithsonian Institution / Dutch colonial government expedition

See attachment below for full programme

Lectures and Web Launch

Matthew W. Stirling (1896 - 1975), pioneer archaeologist and ethnologist, was moved by curiosity for ‘pygmies' and the unknown interior of New Guinea. After resigning from the Smithsonian where he was assistant curator until 1924, his wanderlust brought him to Netherlands New Guinea. In 1926, he led a Smithsonian / Dutch colonial government expedition to the highlands of New Guinea, which produced a wonderful film and startling photographs of people and panoramas by C.C.F.M. Le Roux, curator of the Museum of the Bataviaasch Genootschap.

The expedition was the first to use a hydroplane in New Guinea. The small aircraft was transported by boat from Surabaya and up the Mamberamo River. The base camp built where the vessel could no longer travel up river became home to the Dutch and American expedition leaders, a military escort of 75 Ambonese soldiers, around 130 Dayak canoemen and carriers, and some 250 Malay convicts who mainly worked as carriers. From the Rouffaer River, the expedition spent three months in the interior of the northern central ranges of West New Guinea. During aerial surveys of the terrain, Stirling spotted cultivated land in area thought to be uninhabited.

Stirling brought home 20,000 feet of film footage, much of it featuring ‘pygmies' who had never before seen outsiders. While most of the nitrate film footage was lost, Paul Michael Taylor of the Smithsonian Institution has recently disclosed some spectacular surviving fragments.This footage and other digitalized materials from the expedition will soon be available, together with interpretive essays, as part of the Smithsonian Institution's Digital Editions (http://www.sil.si.edu/expeditions/1926).Although all copies of Stirling's original film, ‘By Aeroplane to Pygmy Land' appeared lost, a Dutch compilation has been preserved. An abridged version of ‘Wonderen uit Pygmy Land' was released as ‘Expeditie door Nieuw-Guinea 1926' (B&W 80 min. silent film) in 1995 by the Film Museum in Amsterdam.

The 1928 New York Times review of ‘By Aeroplane to Pygmy Land', screened at the 55th Stret Playhouse, took particular interest in ‘the manner in which the explorers are supposed to uncover the habitat of these Nugollo Negritoes. First they espied a clearing in the land's dense verdant cloak, and then, through telescopic lenses, they took pictures of the pygmies, showing them at first unsuspectful, but finally apprehensive. They are a wily lot, those little Ethiopians.' Explorers drew their inspiration from popular and scientific imagery of Africa since the 1870s, which had its roots in Greek and medieval European legends about small humans. The imagery of pygmies and their ‘Stone Age material culture' is later employed in the Dutch film to underpin racial differences between whites, Dayaks and Papuans. Alluding to the slow progress of New Guinea's colonisation, the Dutch film ends with a dramatised departure of the expedition team from the highlands and poses the question: Will the pygmies miss the Europeans?

Overlooked until now are the telling notes contained in the diaries of the director of the National Herbarium in Bogor, Docters van Leeuwen, and the military commander Posthumus, and, of course, Le Roux. Together with the pictorial stories and Le Roux's posthumously published three-volume set De Bergpapoea's van Nieuw-Guinea en hun woongebied (1948-1951), their observations narrate Papuan interactions with outsiders that are worth revisiting. The Smithsonian Institution, the National Museum of Ethnology, the Papua Heritage Foundation and IIAS are organising this revisit in Leiden, during which the expedition website will officially be launched, parts of the film screened, photographs displayed and some of the collected artefacts exhibited, while speakers will detail the dynamics of the expedition and the meaning of its outcomes.

 

Preliminary programme:

Thursday 16 November 2006

09.00 Coffee and tea

09.45 Start of Programme

12.00-13.30 Lunch break

Around 18.00 Reception and Weblaunch

Confirmed presentations:

By Aeroplane to Pygmyland: Revisiting the 1926 Dutch and American Expedition to New Guinea

Dr Paul Michael Taylor (and) Christopher J. Lotis, Asian Cultural History Program, Smithsonian Institution

After his return from the 1926 Dutch and American Expedition to New Guinea, Matthew Stirling (1896-1975) embarked on a film-lecture tour with the title "By Aeroplane to Pygmyland" (also the title of the silent film that played during the lecture). Like many of the expedition's lasting images, Stirling's original title set modern technology (airplanes, motion pictures) in the most primitive and exotic of settings. The contrast surely reaffirmed the wider collaborative projects of scientific advancement and collecting artifacts for the expanding national museums of both nations. Yet both Dutch and American records of the massive expedition have until now remained mostly unpublished. Our paper examines, from the American records, the inter-ethnic organization and makeup of the expedition (Americans, Dutch, Dayak, Malay convicts, Ambonese and other soldiers, and various ethnic groups of New Guinea). We consider the expedition as a kind of multiethnic village, for which we briefly outline a "village ecology" at this important moment in Indonesia's colonial and nationalist history, and in the history of Dutch East Indies science. Stirling's own American "model" for an expedition had a scientific grounding, but took its shape and its ecological basis from other areas of American life, including its commercial sponsorships (since it had no Smithsonian or U.S. government funding). This contrasted starkly with the Dutch mode of conducting expeditions. Our paper notes that the 1926 expedition's central, collaborative scientific questions and goals -- from filling in ethnographic "blanks on the map" to explaining the geographic distribution and origin of pygmy populations -- remain valid collaborative goals and still-unanswered questions today. We therefore introduce the new Smithsonian Digital Editions on-line publication which "revisits" this 1926 expedition, presenting new interpretive essays along with previously unpublished American expedition diaries, photos, and film footage in an inter-connected multimedia format allowing comparison among multiple sources. We hope this format will be used to integrate other records (especially the unpublished records of Dutch expedition members). In the future, by returning with this publication to the area of the 1926 expedition, we may also include updated perspectives from the descendants of those encountered 80 years ago. This "revisiting" will provide the people of Western New Guinea (and the Dayaks, Ambonese, as well as Dutch, Americans and others) a new form of access to our interwoven history.

The 1926 Stirling expedition,

As documented in Dutch archival sources.

Dr Steven Engelsman,

Director National Museum of Ethnology

Matthew Stirling's travelogue film "By Aeroplane to Pygmyland" was a very visible report of the 1926 expedition up the Mamberamo river into the unknown interior of New Guinea. Much less visible are the reports of the three Dutch key-persons in the expedition": the botanist director of Bogor Botanical garden Docters van Leeuwen, the self made ethnologist and military engineer Le Roux and the commander of the military detachment captain Posthumus. Their diaries are kept in the National Archives in the Hague. Historian drs. Henrik Imanse has recently studied those sources and provided a story of the expedition much different from what Stirling's film tried to get across. The lecture will present those findings and recommend to publish all Dutch archival sources on the web as well. It also explains why at a certain moment the expedition changed its name into: from "American-Dutch" to "Dutch-American".

Expeditions in the early 20th century: Stirling's expedition in context

Dr Anton Ploeg

From the beginning of the 20th century the colonial administration of the Dutch East Indies made a great effort to explore west New Guinea. In my presentation I focus on a single part of this effort, viz. the scholarly expeditions into the central highlands. They took place over the decades in a long series and the Stirling expedition was one of them. Most of them were largescale and most were organised in a similar way. My presentation deals with the place of the Stirling expedition in this series and its contribution to the overall exploration effort.

Photography during the Dutch-American Central New-Guinea Expedition (Stirling Expedition)

Dr Steven Vink, Royal Tropical Institute, Amsterdam

The Dutch-American Central New-Guinea Expedition was photographed by four of its members: Dr. W.M. Docters van Leeuwen, biologist and expedition leader, C.C.F.M. Le Roux, topographer and ethnologist, M.W. Stirling, anthropologist and ethnologist, and R.K. Peck, film operator. The collections remained private until they were donated to institutions. The American members took their collections to the U.S; the Le Roux and Docters van Leeuwen negative collections went to the Tropenmuseum photo collection; Le Roux's panorama-photo-collections went to the Royal Dutch Geographic Society before being donated to the Tropenmuseum photo collection a few years ago.

My power-point lecture will address differences in style and subjects between the four photographers, photographing conditions during the expedition, the cameras used, and the post-expedition history of the photographs. The lecture will try to bring together, for the first time, images from the expedition dispersed worldwide.

Collecting material culture during the Dutch-American expedition to the Nassaugebergte, Central Highlands New Guinea 1926

Drs. Kees H. van den Meiracker, Keeper of the Collections/curator Oceania department. Wereldmuseum, Rotterdam.

Museums of ethnology were founded in the Netherlands in the second half of the 19th century. The first exhibitions featured objects from foreign cultures while later exhibitions also included photographs. Museums at the time were closed for the general public and only accessible by appointment.

At the turn of the 20th century there were still many blank spots on the world map (especially in Dutch New Guinea) and these became the objects for military and scientific expeditions. Dutch ethnographical museums sometimes sent employees on these expeditions, and most collected objects ended up in the three major ethnographical museums in Leiden, Amsterdam and Rotterdam.

The more than 500 objects collected during the Stirling expedition - including never displayed or published ethnographic materials from the daily life of "stone-age" people - are still in these museums' collections. My presentation will display some of the major objects collected during the expedition and outline the importance of the collection in general.

Challenges of Colonial Co-operation: the Stirling and Archbold expeditions in Netherlands New Guinea

Larry M. Lake, Messiah College, Grantham, Pennsylvania, USA

While preparing his National Geographic article about the 1938-1939 Netherlands New Guinea expedition in which he discovered the Baliem Valley from his seaplane, Richard Archbold attempted to distance himself from the Stirling expedition conducted 12 years previously. Although he was overruled by editors who included in the March 1941 article a short note about Stirling's work, Archbold's concern was based on his perception of the fragile relationships between American scientists and the colonial government. Recent studies of papers, letters and reports in the Archbold archives at the American Museum of Natural History and at the Archbold Biological Station suggest that although the two expeditions had many parallels, (large ground parties, joint Netherlands and American scientific teams, American aviation support, photographic documentation, and encounters with previously unknown populations), Archbold's long-range plans led him to cooperate with the colonial government in ways he believed would give him higher status than Stirling. Besides competing for publicity with Stirling (the two men were both members of The Explorers' Club, Archbold was also planning a return expedition to Netherlands New Guinea and consequently attempted to avoid any negative press that might put those plans in jeopardy. This paper will include excerpts from Larry M. Lake's forthcoming book, Richard Archbold in New Guinea: Money, Power, and Science in the Colonial Pacific, 1933-1939.

The Dayak Pioneers in the 1926 Dutch-American Expedition to 'Pygmy' Land

Dr Jaap Timmer, Radboud University Nijmegen

In The Sky Travellers the historian Bill Gammage narrates the 1938-1939 Hagen-Sepik patrol and remarks that 'explorers do not explore: they are led' (1998: 50). In this presentation, I will examine the role of the often-overlooked leaders of the 1926 Stirling expedition: the Dayaks. They were the pioneers, travelling with whites whom many Papuans saw as spirits, carrying loads like Papuan women, risking an adventure with whites who classified them as racially distinct from the Papuans, but with whom they quickly felt familiar. They were not drawing lines on maps or collecting plants, artefacts and 'pygmies' but rather actors in a play not knowing its plot while pioneering the unknown. On the other hand, despite advertised as a search for 'pygmies' (and despite the fact that Le Roux actively sought out Papuan communities), it was mostly the case that Papuans came to seek out the American-Dutch expedition. Some groups had already met whites and Dayaks before and sought trade. After they got what they needed from the whites they hung out with the Dayaks. Others, further upstream and uphill, stimulated by fear and drawing on their own cosmological interpretation, sought ritual control of the encounter with these new people or spirits. From a number of studies of patrols into New Guinea we have a good sense of how Papuans saw whites during first contact, but we know very little about how they saw Dayaks and how the Dayaks saw Papuans and whites. Through an analysis of available materials, I will shed light on the role and views of the Dayaks and hint at future research that would establish the role of these pioneers in the historical accounts of the exploration of Netherlands New Guinea. I will acknowledge that like the white leaders and the Papuans, the Dayaks varied in their aims, attitudes and behaviour. They were so often controlling intermediaries but as individuals they too had particular personalities and understandings of how the world worked.

Gammage, Bill 1998, The Sky Travellers: Journeys in New Guinea 1938-1939 . Carlton South, Victoria: Melbourne University Press.

Then and Now: Expeditions to Papua in the Twenty-first Century

Yance de Fretes, Conservation International, Indonesia

Abstract to be announced

W.M. Docters van Leeuwen and the 1926 Dutch and American Expedition's Contributions to the Biological Sciences

E.F. de Vogel, Nationaal Herbarium Nederland

Abstract to be announced

Furthermore:

15 min viewing of the film ‘By Aeroplane to Pygmyland'.

Information and registration:

Please contact the IIAS through m.rozing@let.leidenuniv.nl

T+31-(0)71-527 3317