Among the Islands

by Tim Flannery

  CHAPTER 8

  Guadalcanal: Emperor, King and Little Pig

  Charles Woodford must have been a born adventurer. He was working for the colonial office in Fiji when he first travelled to the Solomon Islands in search of natural history specimens. He based himself on Mbara Island off the coast of Guadalcanal, and his 1890 classic A Naturalist Among the Head-Hunters gives a lively account of the dangers and difficulties he faced while working on what was then a wild and lawless frontier.9 The great prizes for him were the majestic peaks that dominate the centre of Guadalcanal—Mount Popomanesu and Mount Makarakomburu. They soar almost two and a half kilometres into the tropical sky—twice the elevation of the tallest on any nearby islands. Such isolated, lofty and mist-wreathed islands in the sky were, Woodford reasoned, sure to be immense treasure houses of unique biological diversity. To a nineteenth-century explorer there was the possibility that anything might live there—perhaps unknown and spectacular birds of paradise, or the world’s largest butterfly—and such discoveries might make a man’s name a beacon in the annals of biological exploration.

  Three times Woodford attempted to scale the peaks, and each time, either through the vicissitudes of the rugged terrain, misfortune, or hostile natives, he was forced back. Once, the messenger he sent to contact the mountain people went missing, presumed eaten. Another attempt—which only got as far as it did by virtue of considerable intimidation and bribery—failed. The village at the foot of the mountain that he had chosen as a staging post was wiped out when twenty of its twenty-nine inhabitants were killed by raiders within a week of Woodford’s arrival. Thankfully, Woodford was out of the village, hunting in the forest, when the raid took place.

  If Woodford could not conquer the peaks, he was determined to rule over the islands. John Bates Thurston, the Fiji-based high commissioner to the southwest Pacific (and Woodford’s boss) had recommended that a resident deputy commissioner for the Solomons be appointed. But the Foreign Office, seeing no way to fund the position from local revenue, refused to act. Thurston was visiting Sydney when the refusal came through, and Woodford saw his chance. Desperate for the job, he cobbled together a finance package out of existing funds, then wrote to the Foreign Office that Thurston had appointed him, and that he was already on his way to take up the post! He then rushed to Sydney, where he convinced his boss (who had a rather low opinion of the ambitious young man) to sign his extraordinary letter, and by 1896 Woodford was making his way to tiny Tulagi Island in the Nggela Group, which would form his base, and eventually became the colonial capital.

  Woodford held the position of deputy commissioner of the Solomon Islands until 1914, and during his time cannibalism and headhunting were greatly reduced, though Malaita and other remote districts remained troublesome. Regrettably, administrative duties curtailed his biological explorations, but fortunately for posterity the collections he made prior to his promotion survive. They’d been sent to the Natural History Museum in London, and among them are creatures never seen by a scientist before or since.

  It was Woodford’s remarkable adventures and collections that first drew me to the Solomons. As I read his story and examined the specimens he’d collected more than a century earlier, I became fascinated with the man and his discoveries. Indeed, this chapter is the story of three rats he collected, two upright apes (Woodford and myself), and the island he explored—Guadalcanal.

  Woodford’s rats came to prominence in the year 1886. Michael Oldfield Thomas, who was then the curator of mammals at the British Museum (now the Natural History Museum, London) opened a crate which had travelled half the world to reach him. Months earlier, in a grass hut by a tropical beach on a distant archipelago, Charles Woodford had placed in it his hard-won collections, the assembling of which had more than once cost lives. Now, after travelling by sail and steam, the items contained in the crate had arrived safely at the desk of the one man who could appreciate their true significance.

  Oldfield Thomas was a most particular individual. Dashingly handsome in the vein of Lord Kitchener, he was the greatest taxonomist, as classifiers of mammals are known, who ever lived. In a career spanning five decades he named over 2000 living mammal species—around one third of the world’s total. This great achievement was made possible only by Oldfield Thomas’s extraordinary diligence and his marriage to an heiress whose fortune permitted him to employ collectors to scour the four corners of the globe in search of novelties.

  The species named by Oldfield Thomas have often been denigrated by his successors, for he frequently named them on the basis of a single individual that differed from its near relatives in only the tiniest ways. Because individuals in a population can vary greatly, such ‘species’ were often thought of as mistaken identifications by later generations of mammalogists. But today, with the application of techniques such as DNA sequencing, we are learning that Oldfield Thomas’s eye for new species was unerring: almost invariably, when the validity of his work has been questioned, his judgment has been verified.

  Great men are often greatly flawed, and Oldfield Thomas’s greatest deficiency appears to have been a lack of interest in almost anything beyond his work. He was unmoved by the British countryside and—surprising in a biologist—took no interest in its flora and fauna. A colleague recalled that once, when Oldfield Thomas was looking at the beauty of the night sky, all he could think to say was that he’d classify the stars if he could. Life outside his work and marriage, which remained childless, seems to have been limited to croquet tournaments played during summer holidays at various British seaside resorts.

  Our only other insights into his concerns come from a thin scatter of articles he wrote for newspapers, all of which deal with practical matters. One sketches a design for ear plugs for soldiers in the firing line, while another gives directions for pedestrians wishing to avoid collisions with vehicles and bearers of advertising sandwich boards. In others he endorses starvation as a cure for influenza, and the learning of Braille by the sighted so that they could read in bed at night without disturbing their partners.10

  Because the field of mammalogy is so enormous Oldfield Thomas employed several associates, the most brilliant and prolific of whom was Knud Andersen, a Dane who specialised in classifying bats. Between them, Oldfield Thomas and Andersen would do the pioneering work on the mammal fauna of the Solomon Islands.

  Andersen was every bit as gifted and dedicated a taxonomist as Oldfield Thomas, and his 1912 compendium on the fruit-eating bats, Megachiroptera, is still the standard work. During World War I he was researching a widely anticipated companion volume—a complete classification of the Microchiroptera, or insectivorous bats. These bats account for almost a quarter of all living mammal species, so this was a mammoth task. Judging from his many preliminary publications in various scientific journals he had almost completed it by the end of 1918 when he vanished from the face of the Earth. The only clue to what had happened was contained in his last publication, and it was irritatingly uninformative. The article dealt with the classification of the leaf-nosed and false vampire bats. It was submitted to the journal by Oldfield Thomas because, he said, ‘Dr Knud Andersen … expects to be absent from his scientific work for some time.’11

  Rumours swirled around the museum in the years following Andersen’s disappearance. Some opined that he had committed suicide in despair at leaving the manuscript of his magnum opus on the insectivorous bats on the train while on his way to work. Others said that he had been a spy for the Hun during the war and, fearing discovery, had fled the country. Whatever the cause, it was universally agreed that his disappearance was a scientific tragedy. To this day nobody has attempted what he so nearly accomplished, and so the world still lacks a volume dedicated solely to an comprehensive classification of the Microchiroptera.

  According to his colleagues Oldfield Thomas was something of a hypochondriac—a ‘perpetual valetudinarian’ in the language of the day, whose hard-to-pin-down symptoms included heart palpitations and stress.
He became obsessed with the effects of diet and daily massage, and he would retire to a darkened room after lunch each day for an hour-long nap. As with so many museum curators, when he retired from work in 1923 he carried on as if nothing had changed, turning up at his office punctually each day. Then, in 1928, tragedy struck. Oldfield Thomas’s wife died, and after some months the grand old taxonomist seemed unable to carry on. Having long been a member of the euthanasia society he was well prepared. Evidently he had decided to die as he had lived: he shot himself with his handgun while sitting at his museum desk.

  As can happen in museums, the contents of his desk remained unexamined for over thirty years. But then, in the late 1960s, John Edwards Hill was appointed curator of mammals. Like Andersen, Hill was a bat expert and, curious to see if he could discover anything about the fate of his illustrious predecessor, he turned the key in Oldfield Thomas’s long-untouched desk drawers. When I met Hill in the 1980s he told me that he was astonished to discover therein a letter, which bore directly on Andersen’s mysterious disappearance.

  It’s not surprising to a museum worker that Oldfield Thomas’s desk could lie undisturbed for three decades. Museums are our best effort at stopping time. Everything in them, from a billion-year-old fossil to the skin of a rat that lived a century ago, survives in its current state only by the ongoing care of generation after generation of curators. But benign neglect plays its part too. Museum storerooms are often stacked to the roof with boxes nobody has peered into within living memory—and as long as temperature, humidity and insects have been controlled, their contents will not have deteriorated.

  A story circulates among museum curators that a French museum once received a shipment of specimens from the Amazon. They’d been collected by a biologist who had vanished into the wilderness, his fate unknown. Because there was no specialist in his area of research, nobody bothered to unpack the crates containing the collection, so they sat, untouched, for a century in a storeroom. Then one day a curious young curator arrived. He opened the crates and in them discovered the smoked corpse of the collector. He’d died in the field, and his faithful Indian assistants had decided to send him home to his family along with the specimens he’d given his life for.

  The letter John Edwards Hill found in the desk was in Andersen’s handwriting and addressed to Oldfield Thomas. In it the Dane confessed that his life was a mess. He had married a dipsomaniac whose love affair with the gin bottle had become unbearable and, while on a visit to Budapest to study bats preserved in the natural history museum there, he’d fallen in love with an exotic dancer. He left his gin-soaked wife only to discover that while the dancer was happy to enjoy his company on a Monday, Wednesday and Friday, she could not elope with him as he had hoped because she was seeing a German count on the other days of the week. Broken-hearted, the greatest chiropteran expert who ever lived vanished. I wonder whether he leapt, despairing, into the Danube, or retreated to some secluded European village to make a garden—and never think of bats again. Unfortunately, the trail goes cold at the letter and we may never know.

  Oldfield Thomas must have realised the moment he opened the crate that Woodford’s collection was a treasure trove of biological discovery. One of the most striking novelties in the consignment was a black bat the size of a cat, whose face reminded him of that of the Arctic fox. He named this great black bat of Guadalcanal Pteralopex, meaning winged Arctic fox in Greek (Alopex being the scientific name for the Arctic fox). Today we know it and its kind as monkey-faced bats. Among the most distinctive of all the creatures found in the Solomons, the monkey-faced bats are to play a key role in this story.

  But even this amazing discovery cannot justly be called the pride of Woodford’s collection. That honour surely goes to three kinds of large-to-gigantic rats that the explorer encountered on Guadalcanal, all of which were new to science. To them Oldfield Thomas gave classical names which translate as the emperor (the largest), king (the middling one) and little pig (the smallest).

  It was these creatures that saw me, one chilly winter morning in the 1980s, standing in the London suburb of South Kensington before the great temple to nature that is the Natural History Museum. Opened in 1881, it is a grand palace dedicated to the living world. It is decorated with columns and tiles bearing images of innumerable living and long-extinct things. For a young scientist from ‘the colonies’, as Australia was still disparagingly referred to in London, it was somewhat intimidating going to the front desk and asking to see the curator of mammals. The post was then held by John Edwards Hill, and his reputation as a researcher of bats was legendary. I expected a distant and condescending reception, but instead was greeted warmly, and told that the collection was at my disposal.

  It’s hard to convey the emotions I felt on entering the great halls where the museum’s treasures are stored. They are off-limits to the public, and few researchers had made the pilgrimage to examine its island rarities. Opening one large steel cabinet after another, I brought to light species of the most extraordinary kinds. Here lay the only remaining example of the giant rat of the Caribbean island of St Lucia. There, a row of skins of long-extinct pig-footed bandicoots from the deserts of Australia. And finally I located the skins of Woodford’s giant rats. Giddy with excitement as I opened the drawer containing them, I hardly knew where to start my examination. I set out my measuring instruments and notebook and got going, for time is extremely precious in such a place.

  Lost in my measuring and recording, I felt a hand on my shoulder. I hadn’t noticed the time. It was John Hill inviting me to afternoon tea. Before leaving Australia, I’d been warned by colleagues about this ritual event. It was considered a singular honour to attend it, and here I was being invited on my first day. But how difficult it was to tear myself away from the collections! I was very glad that I did, however, for in the tearoom were assembled the heroes of my youth—curators who had discovered great chunks of the world’s biodiversity—whom I could now speak to as peers, over a civilised pot of tea.

  At this time I was yet to visit the Solomon Islands, and every specimen I examined was a precious source of information about this most intriguing region. The size of the emperor rat astonished me. It was a powerfully built, greyish creature about the size of a cat. Judging from its short tail, muscular forearms and the soil still lodged under the claws of a specimen preserved in alcohol, it was a ground-dweller and a capable burrower. The king rat was considerably smaller—around the size of a young rabbit. Its fur was more silvery than grey, its body proportions and feet indicating that it was most likely an adroit climber. Like the emperor, its tail was hairless, blackish and studded with tubercles. The little pig was markedly different from these two. Only a single specimen had been collected by Woodford, and very little about this portly rat with its sleek, reddish coat was revealing of its habitat. Its tail, however, was very short, making a life in the high canopy unlikely.

  All three clearly belonged to a rodent genus known as Uromys, meaning naked-tail mouse. They’re an ancient breed of murid that scientists suspect was among the first to make its way from Southeast Asia into Australia and New Guinea. They’d probably arrived by four million years ago, and had subsequently diversified into about a dozen species. But there was a profound mystery here. Guadalcanal sits in the middle of the Solomon Islands chain, and the genus Uromys had not been recorded on any other island in the group. Nor was it present on New Ireland, which is a logical stepping stone for any migrants to the Solomons. How had the ancestors of the emperor, king and little pig travelled from New Guinea to Guadalcanal without leaving populations on any island in between?

  Several explanations were possible. Perhaps the ancestral Uromys had drifted directly from New Guinea to Guadalcanal, or perhaps it had colonised other islands but had become extinct on those. But it was also possible the emperor, king and little pig were not really members of the genus Uromys at all, but had come to resemble them through the process of convergent evolution. Convergent evolution is a c
ommon phenomenon, accounting for the similarity between the thylacine and the dog, for example, and among the rodents it is widespread. The best way to test for convergent evolution is to compare the DNA of the species in question, and that meant an expedition to Guadalcanal, for at that time it was not practicable to use DNA from museum specimens for such tests.

  The hitch was that neither emperor nor little pig had been seen for over a century, and the king not for sixty years. The extinction of island species had progressed apace in recent decades, and perhaps a trip would be futile. Obstacles seemed everywhere, not the least of which was the question of where a young researcher, whose track record was sketchy at best, was to turn for funding for such a quixotic expedition. The National Geographic Society seemed my best hope, and upon returning to Australia I penned a modest proposal aimed at discovering if the emperor, king and little pig still reigned over their distant isle. To my surprise the society agreed to finance my expedition—to the princely sum of US $7000. It was my first significant research grant, and I was determined to make every one of those dollars go as far as possible.

  Most of the money went into airfares and preparations for a trip to Guadalcanal. It was my first visit to the Solomons, but as grateful as I was for this grant, I soon found that there’s only so much you can do with small grants and assistance from the Australian Museum Society. If I was to realise my full ambitions of surveying every major island group in the southwest Pacific and Moluccas, then an adequate, ongoing source of funding had to be found. When it did finally emerge, it came from the least likely of places.