Expeditie door Nieuw-Guinea (1926)

　　Matthew W. Stirling (1896 - 1975), pioneer archaeologist and ethnologist, was moved by curiosity for ‘pygmies' and the unknown interior of New Guinea. After resigning from the Smithsonian where he was assistant curator...展开 until 1924, his wanderlust brought him to Netherlands New Guinea. In 1926, he led a Smithsonian / Dutch colonial government expedition to the highlands of New Guinea, which produced a wonderful film and startling photographs of people and panoramas by C.C.F.M. Le Roux, curator of the Museum of the Bataviaasch Genootschap.
　　The expedition was the first to use a hydroplane in New Guinea. The small aircraft was transported by boat from Surabaya and up the Mamberamo River. The base camp built where the vessel could no longer travel up river became home to the Dutch and American expedition leaders, a military escort of 75 Ambonese soldiers, around 130 Dayak canoemen and carriers, and some 250 Malay convicts who mainly worked as carriers. From the Rouffaer River, the expedition spent three months in the interior of the northern central ranges of West New Guinea. During aerial surveys of the terrain, Stirling spotted cultivated land in area thought to be uninhabited.
　　Stirling brought home 20,000 feet of film footage, much of it featuring ‘pygmies' who had never before seen outsiders. While most of the nitrate film footage was lost, Paul Michael Taylor of the Smithsonian Institution has recently disclosed some spectacular surviving fragments.This footage and other digitalized materials from the expedition will soon be available, together with interpretive essays, as part of the Smithsonian Institution's Digital Editions (http://www.sil.si.edu/expeditions/1926). Although all copies of Stirling's original film, ‘By Aeroplane to Pygmy Land' appeared lost, a Dutch compilation has been preserved. An abridged version of ‘Wonderen uit Pygmy Land' was released as ‘Expeditie door Nieuw-Guinea 1926' (B&W 80 min. silent film) in 1995 by the Film Museum in Amsterdam.
　　he 1928 New York Times review of ‘By Aeroplane to Pygmy Land', screened at the 55th Stret Playhouse, took particular interest in ‘the manner in which the explorers are supposed to uncover the habitat of these Nugollo Negritoes. First they espied a clearing in the land's dense verdant cloak, and then, through telescopic lenses, they took pictures of the pygmies, showing them at first unsuspectful, but finally apprehensive. They are a wily lot, those little Ethiopians.' Explorers drew their inspiration from popular and scientific imagery of Africa since the 1870s, which had its roots in Greek and medieval European legends about small humans. The imagery of pygmies and their ‘Stone Age material culture' is later employed in the Dutch film to underpin racial differences between whites, Dayaks and Papuans. Alluding to the slow progress of New Guinea's colonisation, the Dutch film ends with a dramatised departure of the expedition team from the highlands and poses the question: Will the pygmies miss the Europeans?
　　Overlooked until now are the telling notes contained in the diaries of the director of the National Herbarium in Bogor, Docters van Leeuwen, and the military commander Posthumus, and, of course, Le Roux. Together with the pictorial stories and Le Roux's posthumously published three-volume set De Bergpapoea's van Nieuw-Guinea en hun woongebied (1948-1951), their observations narrate Papuan interactions with outsiders that are worth revisiting. The Smithsonian Institution, the National Museum of Ethnology, the Papua Heritage Foundation and IIAS are organising this revisit in Leiden, during which the expedition website will officially be launched, parts of the film screened, photographs displayed and some of the collected artefacts exhibited, while speakers will detail the dynamics of the expedition and the meaning of its outcomes.