Article

Tigers

From Munshipedia, the MBRAS digital historical encyclopedia

Tigers

Tigers have long occupied a position of considerable significance in the natural history of the Malay Peninsula and the broader region, yet their distribution across the archipelago is far from uniform. While the animal is well attested in the forests of Java and the Peninsula, its presence in Borneo remains a matter of contested tradition and fragmentary physical evidence, a question that attracted the attention of naturalists and colonial administrators from the earliest decades of systematic observation in the region [1]. The tiger’s economic impact on plantation agriculture, particularly in Java, was severe enough to prompt the development of dedicated control methods, while in the Malay Peninsula the animal featured in both scientific documentation and popular natural history writing into the twentieth century [2], [3].

Distribution and the Borneo Question

The most sustained early discussion of the tiger’s range in the region appears in A.H. Everett’s 1880 note, which addressed the conspicuous absence of the animal from Borneo’s fauna [1]. Everett considered two hypothetical explanations for this absence: the first, following Wallace, was that tigers had formerly inhabited Borneo but subsequently became extinct; the second was that a more recent southward range extension from the Peninsula had been blocked by the submergence of the land bridge between the two landmasses [1, p. 158]. Neither hypothesis could be confirmed with the evidence available to him, and the question remained open.

Everett’s investigation turned to indigenous traditions as a source of evidence. He documented accounts of large tigers (harimau) among several distinct groups of the North-West Coast of Borneo, including the Land Dyaks of Serimbo, the Balan Dyaks of the Semunjan river, and the Muruts of the Linbang and Padas rivers, all of whom described the animals as inhabiting caves [1, pp. 158–159]. These traditions, while consistent in their general outline, did not constitute direct observation and could not be independently verified.

The central piece of physical evidence was a tiger’s skull found in a head-house (pangah, a communal structure for storing ancestral skulls) at Singgi, preserved in an ancient camphor-wood dish and treated with extreme veneration by the local Dyaks, who attributed supernatural consequences to its disturbance [1, p. 159]. The skull measured 13⅓ inches in length by 9⅓ inches across the jugal arches [1, p. 159]. Everett argued that if the skull could be proven fossil, it would support Wallace’s extinction hypothesis; alternatively, it may have been imported from Java during the period of Majapahit influence and subsequently made an heirloom, with the tribal traditions deriving from reports of tigers seen in Java or on the Peninsula, or from the original Malayan colonists who carried the memory with them [1, p. 160]. In a postscript, Everett noted that Burns had recorded the Kayans of the Rejang river as possessing a proper name for the tiger and insisting on its existence in the interior, further complicating the picture [1, p. 160].

Economic Impact and Control in Java

The tiger’s impact on human economic activity was most thoroughly documented in Java, where the animal posed a persistent threat to livestock in the densely forested and thinly populated districts of the Preanger region. R.A. Kerkhoven, a European coffee planter resident in the Sinagar district below Soekaboemi, published a detailed account in 1883 of his systematic efforts to eliminate tigers and wild dogs preying on his animals [2]. In his first four years of residence at Sinagar, Kerkhoven lost fourteen horses and karbouws (buffaloes) to tigers and wild dogs before adopting a method of poisoning that proved effective [2, p. 269].

The method relied on wali kambing (Sarcolobus spanoghei), a climbing plant of the Asclepiadaceae family found in low marshy coastal regions [2]. The poison was prepared from the innermost bark of the stem, ground to a yellowish-brown powder, and applied to the carcase of an animal recently killed by a tiger, which the tiger would return to feed upon [2]. The active poisonous constituent was identified by Boscha as coniine, the same alkaloid responsible for the toxicity of European hemlock (Conium maculatum) [2, p. 271]. A single application for a buffalo required a quantity described as “a beer glass three-fourths filled” of the powdered bark; considerably less was needed for a sheep or goat [2, p. 272].

The results were substantial. Since the beginning of 1863, Kerkhoven and his hunters destroyed forty royal tigers and panthers, plus a large number of wild dogs, using this method; his brother at Ardjasari killed two panthers and six royal tigers using the same poison [2, p. 275]. Kerkhoven situated this method within a broader pharmacological context, citing Filet’s Plantkundig Woordenboek (1876), Rigg’s Sundanese Dictionary (1865), and Boscha’s chemical analysis, reflecting the hybrid epistemic world of late nineteenth-century Dutch East Indies plantation society in which local Sundanese ethnobotanical knowledge and Dutch colonial scientific literature were brought into dialogue [2].

Kerkhoven also contrasted the Javanese tracking method, which relied on footprints, vomit, and trained dogs in steep, densely overgrown ravines, with the elephant-backed howdah hunts familiar from Bengal, arguing that the latter was impractical in the Preanger terrain [2]. The article thus served both as a practical guide to tiger control and as a window into the daily hazards faced by colonial planters in a landscape where the boundary between cultivated estate and dense forest was porous and dangerous.

Hunting and Cultural Significance

The appended letter from E.J. Kerkhoven, brother of the planter, provides a vivid narrative of a specific tiger hunt that took place on 2 February 1875 in the ravine of the Kali Tji Enggang [2, pp. 279–280]. Fourteen men tracked a poisoned tiger through the ravine, culminating in a volley of ten shots from multiple hunters, followed by a final shot through the head at a range of approximately twelve paces [2, pp. 279–280]. The tiger’s skin was carried home in triumphal procession through the village, accompanied by angklong players, and the narrative closes with the domestic detail that the hide was destined as a rug for the writer’s absent wife [2]. A buffalo purchased for ƒ52 was among those lost to tigers in the weeks preceding this hunt, underscoring the direct economic stakes involved [2, p. 280].

In the Malay Peninsula, the tiger continued to attract attention in the early twentieth century. A. Locke published “The Tigers of Trengganu” in 1993, indicating that the animal remained a subject of regional natural history writing in the northeast Peninsula well into the modern period [3]. The brief note by J.C. Moulton in 1922, titled “A tiger at sea,” appears on the same page as a discussion of a Ruddy Crake specimen from Johore, and the title likely refers to a separate item on that page rather than to the bird itself [4]. The precise content of Moulton’s tiger note is not recoverable from the available record, but its presence confirms that the tiger retained a place in the natural history correspondence of the period [4].

Research and Documentation

The Society’s literature on tigers reveals a clear evolution in both scope and method across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The earliest contribution, Everett’s 1880 note, was fundamentally a question of biogeography: it sought to resolve whether tigers had ever inhabited Borneo, drawing on indigenous oral traditions, a single physical specimen, and the theoretical framework of Wallace’s work on faunal distribution [1]. The method was necessarily speculative, constrained by the absence of direct observation and the difficulty of distinguishing fossil remains from imported heirlooms.

Kerkhoven’s 1883 article shifted the focus from distribution to practical management, reflecting the immediate economic concerns of the plantation economy in Java [2]. His account is notable for its integration of local ethnobotanical knowledge with Dutch colonial pharmacology, and for its frank documentation of the scale of predation and the methods employed to counter it. The article represents a genre of colonial natural history writing in which the observer’s economic interest is inseparable from the scientific record.

By the early twentieth century, the tiger had become a more familiar and less enigmatic subject in the region’s natural history literature. Moulton’s 1922 note, however brief, suggests that the animal was now a routine entry in the correspondence of naturalists rather than a subject of fundamental biogeographical debate [4]. Locke’s 1993 article on the tigers of Trengganu indicates that the subject continued to generate regional studies into the late twentieth century, though the available record does not permit assessment of its specific arguments or findings [3].

The overall trajectory is from speculative biogeography, through practical economic documentation, to routine regional natural history—a pattern that mirrors the broader consolidation of knowledge about the region’s fauna over the course of the colonial period.

MBRAS Sources

References

  1. A.H. Everett (1880). The tiger in Borneo JSBRAS 5: 157–160.
  2. R.A. Kerkhoven (1883). A tiger hunt in Java JSBRAS 12: 269–281.
  3. A. Locke (1993). The Tigers of Trengganu : 207.
  4. J.C. Moulton (1922). A tiger at sea JSBRAS 85: 214.