About The Book
In the Andamans and Nicobars is the narrative of an adventurous cruise in the schooner Terrapin of two scholars hunting for new species on the islands off the coast of Burma. The book contains notes on the history of the islands, their fauna, flora, geology and ethnology, and the anthropomorphy, customs and languages of the various tribes that inhabit them. It is partly a tale of the passionate pursuit of scholarly excellence that conceals the adventurous spirits of those early zoologists on the look-out for novel species. This book reports on dozens of new rodents and birds, with such strange creatures as the megapodes, and the occasional new species of pig, bat and monkey adding to the glory of the scientists. The author, also a skilled photographer, spared no efforts in capturing the natives and the exotic locations on film. Writing about events, both interesting and very unusual, in the history of these isles of cannibals and pirates, the author enlivens his account with references to earlier attempts at colonization, which were mostly fruitless. As scholars of the old style should be, the author and his fellow 'species hunter' were well read. Once they had become accustomed to the strangeness of the people on these pristine islands, which had been used as a penal colony by the British for half a century, they reflected on reasons for the declining numbers of tribesmen. A world unknown, not only in terms of the rare animals it contains, but also in regard to the customs and languages of the stone age tribes living there, is reported to be vanishing. And this was but the year 1900...
Introduction
In October 1900 the author and his companion, the zoologist William Louis Abbott, set out on the Terrapin for the Andaman and the Nicobar Islands. This book is the result of this expedition. It is a description of how specimen hunters-or should we call them new species hunters?-went about the business of gaining knowledge of the fauna of locations that had not been thoroughly investigated by earlier visitors. Islands being isolated as they are, and thereby isolating species from a great deal of natural competition, tend to have great potential in terms of species that are new to science because they harbour a number of unique ecologi-cal niches. The book benefited from being checked for accuracy by the eminent scholar of the area, E. H. Man, whose 1884 work The Aboriginal Inhabitants of the Andaman Islands was the most elaborate study until then. In 1906, A. R. Radcliffe-Brown arrived for a two-year stay and produced what was to become the definitive and last study of the primitive tribes on the Andaman Islands. His work The Andaman Islanders was published in 1922 and was reissued several times until its latest edition of 1964. Radcliffe-Brown's was the last major re-search project and the trend reported by Boden Kloss in 1903 relating to the alarming lack of new blood and descendants among the primitive tribes of the Andaman Islands continues to this day. Now, it seems, only a hundred of the indigenous tribal people are left. This book speculates on the reasons for their disappearance. The Andaman Islands number more than two hundred. The southern Nicobars are nineteen in number and have an altogether different type of inhabitant. Whereas the inhabitants of the Andamans were stone age, cannibalistic and ruthlessly brutal negrito people, the Nicobars had a strange mixed population. It was perhaps more Malay than any other race but contained traces of early travelers, including those that had mingled with them since the early arrivals of the Arabs, Chinese, Portu-guese, Burmese, Karen and a host of other occasional travelers who left behind some words in the language and some genes in the pool. Unfortunately, judging that new blood had not rejuvenated the race. The locals' strange habit of adopting the names of sea captains and other travelers, whatever hopes they may have harboured in practising this transposition, brought them no benefit. Moreover, early visitors also left a virulent strain of syphilis which contributed to the decline in the population and dealt conclusively, but probably inadvertently, with any less vigorous recombinations of human genes. of The mixing of races seems to have begun in the ninth century but there is ample evidence of earlier knowledge Ptolemy is believed to have known about both groups of isles. In his discussion of the ethnology, languages and anthropology the Nicobar peoples, the author acknowledges the contributions of another author-ity on the Islands, V. Solomon, a Christian Madrassi who stayed for five years on the Kar Nicobar island and filled the positions of meteorological observer, port officer, schoolmaster, and catechist, while acting unofficially as magistrate and amateur doctor. He has commented on as well as supplemented the book and is given due credit for a whole chapter on the customs of the Kar Nicobarese people. Credit is indeed due to him for having stayed on as an observer at a weird ritual, that of digging up the bodies of ancestors then picking the rotten flesh off the bones. The heads of certain corpses were reburied but the other bones seem to have been carelessly tossed in the bushes, a feat that we believe may have contributed to the thriving rodent and dog population on the isles. Also, we tend to believe that it was not only because of the rejoicing in this annual ritual, so religiously observed, that most missionary efforts met with apathy and resistance. They also encountered other rituals such as those to cast the devil into the sea -the devil is believed to have been brought by the missionaries, perhaps because they were constantly preaching about him. However, first things first, new species discovered by the author and his compan-ion are plentiful. The book does not describe them in the rigorous fashion that the rules of scientific discoveries and taxonomy demand. This would no doubt be boring for the average reader, although lists in chapters and appendices on the fauna and flora of the islands are available. The fauna were no less strange than the inhabitants. As could be expected with islands that sit next to one of the busiest shipping lines in the world, then and now, there must have been many introductions.
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