After Waiting
Another Week Or Two Till He Was Nearly Starved, He Returned To
Wahai In Ceram, And Heard, Much To His Surprise, That I Had Left
A Fortnight Before.
He was delayed there more than a month before
he could get back to the north side of Mysol,
Which he found a
much better locality, but it was not yet the season for the
Paradise Birds; and before he had obtained more than a few of the
common sort, the last prau was ready to leave for Ternate, and he
was obliged to take the opportunity, as he expected I would be
waiting there for him.
This concludes the record of my wanderings. I next went to Timor,
and afterwards to Bourn, Java, and Sumatra, which places have
already been described. Charles Allen made a voyage to New
Guinea, a short account of which will be given in my next chapter
on the Birds of Paradise. On his return he went to the Sula
Islands, and made a very interesting collection which served to
determine the limits of the zoological group of Celebes, as
already explained in my chapter on the natural history of that
island. His next journey was to Flores and Solor, where he
obtained some valuable materials, which I have used in my chapter
on the natural history of the Timor group. He afterwards went to
Coti on the east coast of Borneo, from which place I was very
anxious to obtain collections, as it is a quite new locality as
far as possible from Sarawak, and I had heard very good accounts
of it. On his return thence to Sourabaya in Java, he was to have
gone to the entirely unknown Sumba or Sandal-wood Island. Most
unfortunately, however, he was seized with a terrible fever on
his arrival at Coti, and, after lying there some weeks, was taken
to Singapore in a very bad condition, where he arrived after I
had left for England. When he recovered he obtained employment in
Singapore, and I lost his services as a collector.
The three concluding chapters of my work will treat of the birds
of Paradise, the Natural History of the Papuan (stands, and the
Races of Man in the Malay Archipelago.
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
THE BIRDS OF PARADISE.
AS many of my journeys were made with the express object of
obtaining specimens of the Birds of Paradise, and learning
something of their habits and distribution; and being (as far as
I am aware) the only Englishman who has seen these wonderful
birds in their native forests, and obtained specimens of many of
them, I propose to give here, in a connected form, the result of
my observations and inquiries.
When the earliest European voyagers reached the Moluccas in
search of cloves and nutmegs, which were then rare and precious
spices, they were presented with the dried shins of birds so
strange and beautiful as to excite the admiration even of those
wealth-seeking rovers. The Malay traders gave them the name of
"Manuk dewata," or God's birds; and the Portuguese, finding that
they had no feet or wings, and not being able to learn anything
authentic about then, called them "Passaros de Col," or Birds of
the Sun; while the learned Dutchmen, who wrote in Latin, called
them "Avis paradiseus," or Paradise Bird. John van Linschoten
gives these names in 1598, and tells us that no one has seen
these birds alive, for they live in the air, always turning
towards the sun, and never lighting on the earth till they die;
for they have neither feet nor wings, as, he adds, may be seen by
the birds carried to India, and sometimes to Holland, but being
very costly they were then rarely seen in Europe. More than a
hundred years later Mr. William Funnel, who accompanied Dampier,
and wrote an account of the voyage, saw specimens at Amboyna, and
was told that they came to Banda to eat nutmegs, which
intoxicated them and made them fall down senseless, when they
were killed by ants. Down to 1760, when Linnaeus named the
largest species, Paradisea apoda (the footless Paradise Bird), no
perfect specimen had been seen in Europe, and absolutely nothing
was known about them. And even now, a hundred years later, most
books state that they migrate annually to Ternate, Banda, and
Amboyna; whereas the fact is, that they are as completely unknown
in those islands in a wild state as they are in England. Linnaeus
was also acquainted with a small species, which he named
Paradisea regia (the King Bird of Paradise), and since then nine
or ten others have been named, all of which were first described
from skins preserved by the savages of New Guinea, and generally
more or less imperfect. These are now all known in the Malay
Archipelago as "Burong coati," or dead birds, indicating that the
Malay traders never saw them alive.
The Paradiseidae are a group of moderate-sized birds, allied in
their structure and habits to crows, starlings, and to the
Australian honeysuckers; but they are characterised by
extraordinary developments of plumage, which are unequalled in
any other family of birds. In several species large tufts of
delicate bright-coloured feathers spring from each side of the
body beneath the wings, forming trains, or fans, or shields; and
the middle feathers of the tail are often elongated into wires,
twisted into fantastic shapes, or adorned with the most brilliant
metallic tints. In another set of species these accessory plumes
spring from the head, the back, or the shoulders; while the
intensity of colour and of metallic lustre displayed by their
plumage, is not to be equalled by any other birds, except,
perhaps, the humming-birds, and is not surpassed even by these.
They have been usually classified under two distinct families,
Paradiseidae and Epimachidae, the latter characterised by long
and slender beaks, and supposed to be allied to the Hoopoes; but
the two groups are so closely allied in every essential point of
structure and habits, that I shall consider them as forming
subdivisions of one family.
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