Sunday,
February 3, 2019, 14:16 by David Dandria
On
February 5, 1862, the P & O Steamship Euxine left Alexandria bound for
Marseilles, with a stopover in Malta. On board was a special and unusual cargo
in the charge of one Alfred Russel Wallace, identified simply on the passenger
list as “Mr Wallace”.
This
unusual cargo consisted of two live male birds of paradise that Mr Wallace had
purchased in Singapore for £100 and was “determined to bring them to England by
the overland route under my own care”, as he wrote in his 1869 book The Malay
Archipelago: The Land of the Orang-utan, and the Bird of Paradise. They would
be the first two examples of these wonderful birds to reach Europe.
Birds of
paradise are exotic birds, the males of which have flamboyant and colourful
plumage; they are found in southeast Asia, mainly in the Malay Archipelago and
Indonesia. When the first Europeans sailed to this part of the world in search
of rare and precious spices such as cloves and nutmeg, Malay traders gave them
skins of birds which were so strange and beautiful as to excite their
admiration. The traders called these birds in Malay “Manuk dewata” (Birds of
God) and the Dutch traders started calling them in Latin avis paradiseus
(paradise birds).
An early
description of the birds by John van Linschoten in 1598, states that “no one
has seen these birds alive, for they live in the air, always turning toward the
sun, and never lighting on the earth till they die; for they have neither feet
nor wings, as may be seen by the birds carried to India”. This fanciful
description arose from the fact that when these birds were captured by natives
for despatch to India, their feet were cut off for ease of transportation; in
fact, one species still bears the scientific name Paradisea apoda (footless paradise bird), given by Carl Linnaeus in
1760, at a time when no perfect specimen had been seen in Europe, and
practically nothing was known about them. This species is now known as the
Greater Bird of Paradise and is one of the most spectacular members of the
family.
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