The Charles Hose Collection at the British Museum

Iban Hornbill Figure | *Kenyalang*
© The British Museum

The Charles Hose Collection at The British Museum

Curated by Steven G. Alpert

Charles Hose was a giant of a man, physically and figuratively in terms of his accomplishments. He is probably the best remembered regional officer serving under the White Rajahs of Sarawak reign. Charles Hose entered the Sarawak Civil Service in 1884. He was assigned to the remote and newly designated eastern Baram District, an area that had only recently been ceded by the Sultan Brunei to Charles, the Second white Rajah. Anyone interested in the history of the Brooke era and North Borneo is acquainted with Hose's work as an able administrator, peacemaker between various tribes in the 1890s, as a zoologist with twelve species named after him such as Hose's pygmy flying squirrel or Hose's leaf monkey, or his prodigious work as an ethnologist. His careful observations of the peoples he encountered resulted in several entertaining and well-written classic books. Traveling as a young man fifty years ago along the same rivers that Hose once traversed, it was essential to read The Pagan Tribes of Borneo (1912) or Natural Man (1926) or The Field Book of a Jungle-Wallah; Being a description of shore, River and Forest Life in Sarawak (1929) to further understand the environment, its history and some of its people's traditional customs.

In addition to being a keen ethnologist, Charles Hose assisted in collecting and placing the art of local traditions in the collections of a number of museums, including Cambridge and Oxford, as well as in private collections. While he collected fine older material, Hose was also responsible for encouraging various Kayanic peoples, particularly along the Baram and Tinjar rivers, to continue carving and creating items based on traditional material culture to meet the period's burgeoning demand for both specimens and curios. Our readers who are knowledgeable about the University of Pennsylvania's Borneo collection will know that it was collected by William Furness, Alfred Harrison, and Hiram Hiller on their well-known travels between 1896-1898. This and many other Borneo collections were in large part orchestrated by or curated under Charle's Hose's tutelage. Hiller's journal conveys the collecting spirit of the day while describing a buying frenzy at the longhouse of the famous Kenyah paramount chief, Taman Bulan Wang. There the adventurers found themselves "in the midst of a regular bargain day at Wanamaker's." (A famous Philadelphia department store). The chief and some of his men contributed shields, spears, and blowpipes, etc., as "we bought right and left and feeling under obligations to the men for bringing us up we did not haggle with our friends on the prices." On their own, and without Hose's connections and influence, they found a very different collecting environment further south when following in the footsteps of the Dutch explorer, A.W. Nieuwenkamp from the Kapuas, Putus Sibau, to the Mendalam rivers stating that "prices are awful and we are compelled to bargain like a Chinese trader to get anything at a decent price. When Nieuwenhuis was here he spoiled these people paying any price they demanded evidently." (Alpert: 2016)

In fact, many Dayak items from Sarawak from this period that are now in museums can be traced to Hose. In 1905, the British Museum acquired Hose's own collection of Borneo artifacts numbering some 3,000 items. Some of the most outstanding consist of intricately carved or painted house panels that are rare exemplars of the genre. These include one of my most favorite Kayan carved panels exuding a remarkable composition of sinuous protective creatures to an exuberantly painted board from the galleries of great houses to an animated array of carved human-like figures from a Sebop longhouse. The number of finely crafted ceremonial jackets, hats and adornments represent stellar period pieces. Distinctive standing figurative carvings were also preserved in forms that largely disappeared soon after Hose's tenure in the region. From one of the finest asymmetrical Kayan shields extant to a superb Melanau deity and a fine Iban kenyalang or harvest festival carving of the hornbill deity, the Hose collection contains items from many of Sarawak's diverse traditional groups. His former holdings allow us an opportunity to more fully appreciate and understand the vast array of creativity and virtuosity within Dayak art traditions, particularly at a time when the old ways of living were being informed and changed by coming into contact with the Brooke administration, a moneyed economy, world religions, and modernity. Our debt to Charles Hose remains a large one. Art of the Ancestors is pleased to honor his vibrant legacy, insights, and great personal appreciation for various Bornean art forms.

— Steven G. Alpert, founder of Art of the Ancestors