Huon Gulf Collections and Collectors: Changing Perspectives on Understanding the Art of the Huon Peninsula and the Vitiaz Strait Huon Gulf Collections and Collectors: Changing Perspectives on Understanding the Art of the Huon Peninsula and the Vitiaz Strait.By Robert L. Welsch The Huon Gulf is one of the areas on the mainland of Papua New Guinea that was contacted by Europeans earliest, and yet the region and its art are among the least well known of the major art-producing regions of New Guinea. It is my contention that the Huon Gulf, by which I will refer to the coastal areas of Morobe Province, has a rich set of art traditions that has been largely ignored by American researchers in favor of better-known parts of the island such as the Sepik region, the Papuan Gulf, or the Massim. Map of the north coast of New Guinea The earliest European settlement was at Finschhafen, named for the famous German explorer, ornithologist, and ethnographic collector Otto Finsch. As an ornithologist, Finsch had long been attracted to the exotic birds of New Guinea, and as early as 1865, while a curator at the museum in Bremen, Finsch (1865) published a volume on New Guinea that summarized what was known of the island at that time. In 1879 he set off for an extended expedition to the Pacific during which he made several trips to New Guinea before any part of what is now Papua New Guinea had been claimed by a European power. During this time he made a collection of birds and ethnographic objects, returning to Germany in 1882. During part of this time he worked in collaboration with one of the earliest German settlers in New Guinea, Franz Hernsheim (Finsch 1884, Hernsheim 1883). In 1884 Finsch returned to New Guinea in the steamer Samoa as German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck’s Imperial Commissioner (Finsch 1888a, 1888b). He was charged with mapping the coast, proclaiming Germany’s protectorate over the Northeast quadrant of New Guinea, and the negotiating of contracts for land with local landowners in several parts of the new colony. Otto Finsch When collecting objects, Finsch principally insisted that villagers paddle or swim out to his ship, which was anchored some distance from the shore. This practice limited the size of the objects he tended to collect as well as the kinds of objects he collected, especially esoteric ritual objects, masks, and the like. After returning to Germany he cataloged his collection according to various object types, irrespective of where the objects were obtained. In 1895 he sold one part of his collection to the Columbian Museum of Chicago (now The Field Museum) and an even larger collection to the American Museum of Natural History in 1897. Some of his collection found its way to the Museum für Völkerkunde in Berlin (Dahlem), but a much larger and more systematic collection was acquired by the Museum of Ethnology in Vienna. Although the collections in New York and Vienna contain more detailed documentation describing the objects as well as their materials and supposed uses, it is clear that Finsch had only a general understanding of any of the more than one hundred native groups he collected from. The New Guinea Company personnel were undoubtedly busy collecting ethnographic objects, masks, carvings, and the like from their first contacts with people in the villages, because they viewed ethnographic objects as just another commodity, often one much easier to acquire than plantation crops (see Buschmann 2009). One Company employee, who was active in the colony from the early or mid-1890s until just before World War I, was Captain Hermann Voogdt. It appears that his major collecting activities began around 1902, becoming quite intense later in the decade, particularly in 1907–1910. Voogdt made regular trips to Finschhafen and down into the Huon Gulf as far as Samoahafen, near the border with British New Guinea. Here the Lutheran missionaries had established the southernmost of their stations. It appears that Voogdt would work his way down the coast in his steamer Siar, picking up and delivering cargo and buying collections when there was some spare time before embarking for the next port. Voogdt near Friedrich Wilhelmshafen 1902, Dieter Klein Collection Although some of Voogdt’s Huon Gulf collections found their way to the museum in Berlin, some of the most important of these collections are in Chicago at The Field Museum. George Dorsey met Voogdt during a two-month collecting trip to German New Guinea. For a few weeks, Dorsey was a passenger on Captain Voogdt’s little steamer. At the request of Governor Hahl or one of the administrators of the Company, Voogdt often transported scientists on his steamer. Some of the scientists, who happened to have an interest in anthropology, collected in the same rural ports as Voogdt. We know from Dorsey’s diary entries—published in the Chicago Tribune the year following his return to Chicago—how Dorsey collected in the few hours available in one or another of these ports. Dorsey did not visit the Huon Gulf himself, as he had spent too much time with Voogdt on the North Coast of New Guinea and up the Sepik River, but Dorsey’s account of his visit along the Sepik Coast with Captain Voogdt captures the flavor of early collecting styles in 1908. The Siar anchored off Stephansort, Dieter Klein Collection In his published diary, Dorsey wrote about his visit to Vanimo, a bit off the usual track for the Siar: “We returned at 5 o’clock to the Siar in two boats well laden, for the captain early gave up the hope of recruits and traded in earnest for his own collection. The other two boats already had returned, but had not a single recruit. Smart people these; why should they leave their own fine land, with plenty of food, to work for the New Guinea Company for something they do not want?” (Dorsey 1909: No. 48). Although Dorsey was always prone to exaggerating his own skill and ability, it is clear that most of the cargo in these two whale boats used to get from the ship to the shore were mostly filled with Voogdt’s collection, assembled by the captain and two to six of his crew. At every port, Voogdt arranged for his men to unload whatever cargo was destined for this village and to load any cargo destined for another port community. Then, Voogdt preferred to collect the most valuable cargo of all: labor recruits who were willing to sign a contract for a year of plantation labor. He received the largest number of recruits at less frequently visited villages, but where he could not do much recruiting, he immediately turned to collecting ethnographic objects. Dorsey, like Captain Voogdt and nearly all other collectors, used the same set of trade goods to buy the wooden bowls, carvings, pots, wooden pillows, arrows, and other objects that we now recognize as characteristic of the Huon Gulf. Dorsey tells us in his diary that he stocked up on “sticks of tobacco, canes, pipes, porcelain arm bands, knives, beads, matches, etc.” (Dorsey 1909: No. 35). Later he added what he called a “‘trade box,’ full of trade—calico, fishhooks and lines, stick tobacco (Virginia), knives, big and small hatchets, and U.S.A. axes (the natives won’t have a German-made ax), beads and planes, which the natives use as a substitute for their shell or stone adze blades, and matches” (Dorsey 1909: No. 44). Elsewhere he mentions small mirrors and various colors of paints, all much desired by the villagers. Voogdt turns out to have been, in Dorsey’s words, “an assiduous collector” (Dorsey 1909: No. 48). At one point the captain had acquired a number of birds of paradise, so his cabin was “ablaze with fluffy gold, for he has hung all his birds up to dry; it is a gorgeous sight!” Voogdt had invited Dorsey to join him in the Huon Gulf, but Dorsey had already spent some weeks longer in German New Guinea than he had originally planned and had to return to Chicago. During these weeks he had collected more than 2,000 objects, but nothing from the Huon Gulf, which he was eager to represent in The Field Museum’s collections from German New Guinea. George A. Dorsey So, before leaving the colony, Dorsey arranged to buy a large part of Voogdt’s collection. The captain was about to return to his home in Hamburg and planned to ship his collection back to Germany. But with a possible sale of his collection to Dorsey’s Field Museum, he was happy to ship his material to San Francisco, where it traveled by rail to Chicago. There, at The Field Museum, Dorsey could examine the collection and would be able to convince the Director of its superior quality. As I have outlined elsewhere, the Voogdt Collection arrived in three shipments and was eventually accessioned in three lots (FMNH acc.). The first shipment Voodgt sent off about the time of Dorsey’s departure, the second, which contained much of the Huon Gulf material, was sent a few months later and gives us a sense of what Dorsey himself might have acquired had he accompanied the captain a few weeks longer. Voogdt visited Chicago in the spring of 1909 and negotiated a price of 2,400 marks for the Huon Gulf collection, which Dorsey estimated would have been worth five or six times that amount from any other source (FMA, Dorsey to F. J. V. Skiff, 9 Feb 1909). Voogdt, for his part, preferred to sell his collection to The Field Museum because the price he would receive would be higher than from any curio dealer or auction house. Frederick J. V. Skiff, Director of the Field Museum, Chicago from 1894 to 1921 In the end, Field Museum Director Skiff agreed to purchase the Voogdt Collection, which the museum had received in 1909, and after some negotiation with Voogdt over the price, all of the material was accessioned into The Field Museum’s collections and the transaction was concluded by May 1910 (FMA, Dorsey to D. C. Davies, recorder, 5 May 1910). By this time Voogdt had returned to German New Guinea after some months’ leave and continued to collect. Some of his collection had not been sent to Chicago, but had been sent back to his home in Hamburg. his is when Dorsey’s diary was published in the Chicago Tribune in 100 installments. In Dorsey’s exuberance about his own abilities and his exaggerations about what he saw when in the German colony, he made less than charming comments about his many German hosts in the colony, who had wined and dined him and given him free passage on New Guinea Company ships and discounts on his freight. Someone in Chicago sent the clippings back to German New Guinea, where public sentiment turned sharply against Dorsey, The Field Museum, and Dorsey’s assistant curator, Albert B. Lewis, who had recently arrived in German New Guinea. Voogdt was undeterred by Dorsey’s braggadocio and bravado, having gotten to know him personally, but noted in a letter in February 1910 that “I am very sorry to tell you that Mr. Heine is much alarmed about what you wrote in one of the Chicago leading papers. He has returned the little souvenir you so kindly sent him—and your man Mr. Lewis had a good deal of trouble about it. Why did you do that?” (FMA, Voogdt to Dorsey, 26 Mar 1910). One senses that Voogdt would gladly have continued to sell his collections to Dorsey and The Field Museum, but public opinion among his German New Guinea colleagues made this an untenable prospect. He still had a couple of thousand objects to sell and in the end took a loss by selling them to the Umlauff, the largest curio dealer in Hamburg. Dr Albert Buell Lewis Voogdt must have communicated this fact to Dorsey, because the latter immediately set about purchasing this collection as well. As I have described in some detail, many of these objects had been collected by Voogdt while Dorsey was busy collecting objects along the coast west of Friedrich-Wilhelmshafen (the modern Madang) (Welsch 2000). As suggested by Voogdt’s letter from March 1910, Lewis had already arrived in German New Guinea and had spent the first six months of his four years in Melanesia blissfully unaware of the anger that Dorsey’s Tribune columns had produced among his German hosts. But by the time he reached Friedrich-Wilhelmshafen on April 5, he learned that he was largely left to his own devices in the colony and could not rely on any help from the New Guinea Company for transport, for shipping, for supplies, and the like (Welsch 1998:1: 226–228). Ironically, because the Huon Gulf was not on a regular shipping route, when Lewis reached Finschhafen on February 12, there was no ship that could take him into the Huon Gulf, so he chartered a native canoe and crew to sail or paddle from village to village down the coast from Finschhafen to the mouth of the Markham River, and then further south to near the border with the Australian territory of Papua. It was in the Huon Gulf that Lewis first learned how to rely on his very positive relations with New Guinea villagers in their home communities. These were important skills to learn and the Huon Gulf gave him lots of experience. Nevertheless, Lewis collected more than 850 objects from his seven weeks in the Huon Gulf. Many of these objects were not nearly as important as those collected by Voogdt that entered The Field Museum’s collections either directly or indirectly from him, but because we have his original field notes and his photographs we can understand these objects in ways that none of his contemporaries seemed aware of (Welsch 1998:1: 187–220). Captain Eduard Dallmann of the steamer Samoa Also, because of Lewis’s diaries and field correspondence we have a better idea of how collectors worked in the Huon Gulf. The most important of these other collectors were the Lutheran missionaries from the Neuendettelsau Mission. In 1885 Captain Dallmann of the steamer Samoa opened the New Guinea Company’s first station on the mainland of German New Guinea at Finschhafen, the harbor he had previously named for Otto Finsch. This site, however, proved unhealthy because of the high incidence of malaria, and the headquarters was moved to Friedrich-Wilhelmshafen. But opening a government station at Finschhafen encouraged Johann Flierl and the Lutheran missionaries from the Neuendettelsau Mission to establish their first mission station a few miles away from this harbor. Johann Flierl (1858 – 1947), Lutheran missionary in New Guinea Georg Bamler arrived in 1887 and it is largely due to his efforts that the mission had gradually opened a dozen stations along the coast of the Huon Gulf, up the Markham River, and at Sattelberg in the interior mountains. By 1910 the Lutherans numbered fifteen missionaries at seven key mission stations. By this time the indigenous art and material culture was largely picked over by collectors (Lewis to Dorsey 1 May 1910 in Welsch 1998:1: 156–157): From Finsch Hafen I went by native canoe to the head of the gulf, visiting Labo in the Hertzogsee, and going south as far as Laukanu, beyond Parsi Point. This (Laukanu) is the pot making center for the whole region. In spite of the fact that the place is fairly well cleaned out (Capt. Voogdt and the missionaries together), I got some 400 specimens, many of which I had never seen or heard of before. One night I slept in the house from which Capt. Voogdt had taken the ornamented side boards—the ones we have, I think. [Lewis to Dorsey, 1 May 1909 in Welsch 1998:1: 157] While it might seem that between them Voogdt and the missionaries had depleted the traditional art from these Huon Gulf communities, a sizable portion of the objects found their way into The Field Museum’s collections either from Voogdt, Umlauff, or from the missionaries themselves, many of whom were more than happy to sell objects to Lewis. Unlike the employees of the New Guinea Company who would do nothing for Lewis or the museum, the Lutherans were happy to help anyone that came through if they were not offensive. In all of Lewis’s diaries, notebooks, correspondence, and other notes I found evidence that at least eight of these Lutheran missionaries sold or in a few cases gave him objects for his collection. The largest group of 75 objects came from Bamler at Finschhafen, while another 46 came from Christian Keysser, based at Sattelberg in the mountains above Finschhafen. Stefan Lehner at Bukaua provided 62 pieces, while another 58 objects were purchased from Johann Decker at Cape Gerhards, Johann Hertle and Hans Meier at Finschhafen, Johannes Raum at Cape Gerhards, Georg Stürtzenhofecker at Jabim, and several other unidentified missionaries. While most of these missionaries gave Lewis only a relatively small number of objects, nearly all of them had sent off much larger numbers of pieces to curio dealers and museums in Germany or Australia. One of the most striking lessons that the Huon Gulf can teach us about the relationship between objects and the communities who made or used them is one that Lewis had observed and appreciated almost as soon as he reached Cape Merkus at the western end of New Britain. Soon after arriving in West New Britain he could see numbers of Siassi canoes in the harbors or on the beaches in the villages (Welsch 1998:1: 164, 179, 180). He recognized all too clearly the Siassi islanders who lived on a small group of islands in the Vitiaz Strait between New Britain and the Huon Peninsula. What he didn’t quite understand—because he never really visited Siassi—was that the Siassi people’s islands were so tiny that they had no land for gardens and barely enough for their houses (Pomponio 1992). To survive, Siassi people had to trade with all of their neighbors, both to get the food and other resources they needed and to find objects they could use in what came to be a middleman trade. For Lewis, the West New Britain region was both geographically and economically defined: Intermarriages take place between Pelilo and Siassi to the west, and Pelilo and Moewe to the east, while trade and intercourse is common all along the coast. The people of Siassi often come to Pelilo and go on to Manua (Moewe hafen), making visits and trading. They bring their canoes to sell (6 were sold—1 to Kauukumate, 2 to Kumbum, and 3 to Pelilo) while I was there, at from 3 to 4 pigs each. Siassi is also a distributing center for the regions north, west, and south. From thence come pots from the New Guinea coast, wood bowls and spoons from Tami. (These were also found at Warie and probably further west on the north coast [of New Britain], whence they come by way of Kilinge.) Drums from Tami and Kilinge, netted bags from New Guinea, as well as numerous smaller things, armbands, ornaments, etc.—also obsidian from the volcanic region of north New Britain. There is considerable local trade also. [Welsch 1998:1: 179–180] While Lewis misses out on several key features of the economic system that linked New Britain and the Huon Gulf, he was able to see a large part of the system. But a comprehensive understanding of the system and how the middleman trading patterns worked to link the Huon Gulf and West New Britain would not come until Thomas Harding (1967). Harding originally developed a collaborative research program that he and Marshall Sahlins could pursue together. After Sahlins returned to Michigan after a few months of research in the Vitiaz Strait, Harding stayed on to study the minute details of the system and how it functioned (for a description of the collaborative project, see Welsch 1996). Harding was one of the first post-War anthropologists to study an extended trade network, and his masterful analysis is the first of several analyses that have emerged since then. During the few weeks Lewis spent in West New Britain, he could not have appreciated that all of the food bowls he observed and sometimes collected from the villagers would look identical to the so-called Tami bowls he would see in Finschhafen, Bukaua, Lokanu, Pola, Busama, and Labo. Everyone described them as Tami bowls, but he could not appreciate that the style that Tami carvers used could travel long distances and even across the Vitiaz Strait and into the forests of West New Britain. As in other parts of New Guinea, there were specialized producers such as the Tami islands with their carvings, the Siassi islands with their canoes, or the Lokanu and Bukaua people with their pots. But while each of these communities has their local specialized products that they contribute to the regional system, there were carvers in many villages, not just Tami. Siassi made canoes, but so did other villages. The point here is that as Harding notes in his ethnography of an economic system, the ideas of Tami bowls, Siassi canoes, and Bukaua pots are shared across many ethnic groups with diverse languages and variations in other cultural patterns. But the idea of these things does not necessarily mean that everything called a Tami bowl or a Siassi canoe was actually made in Tami or Siassi. We should see these diverse communities as part of a shared pattern of material culture, partly created by the middleman trade and partly created by the idea of what kinds of objects are essential for proper life, wherever they were crafted. References Cited Archival Sources FMA—Field Museum Archives FMNH Acc.—Field Museum of Natural History, Accession Files Published Sources Buschmann, Rainer F. 2009. Anthropology’s Global Histories: The Ethnographic Frontier in German New Guinea, 1870–1935. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Dorsey, George A. 1909. One Hundred Installments of a Diary of a 47,000-Mile Journey. Chicago Daily Tribune. 16 Aug 1909 to 23 Nov 1909. (Columns concerning German New Guinea ran 18 Sep 1909 through 6 Oct 1909.) References refer to the installment numbers. Finsch, Otto. 1865. Neu-Guinea und seine Bewohner. Bremen: C. E. Müller. Finsch, Otto. 1884. Anthropologische Ergebnisse einer Reise in der Südsee und dem Malayischen Archipel in den Jahren 1879, 1882. Berlin: A. Asher & Co. Finsch, Otto. 1888a. Samoafahrten: Reisen in Kaiser Wilhelms-Land und Englisch-Neu-Guinea in den Jahren 1884 und 1885 an bord des deutschen dampfers “Samoa.” Leipzig: F. Hirt & Sohn. Finsch, Otto. 1888b. Samoafahrten: Ethnologischer Atlas. Typen aus der Steinzeit Neu-Guineas. In 154 Abbildungen. Leipzig: F. Hirt & Sohn. Harding, Thomas G. 1967. Voyagers of the Vitiaz Strait: A Study of a New Guinea Trade System. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Hernsheim, Franz. 1883. Südsee-Erinnerungen (1875–1880). Berlin: A. Hofmann. Pomponio, Alice. 1992. Seagulls Don’t Fly into the Bush: Cultural Identity and Development in Melanesia. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Welsch, Robert L. 1996. Collaborative Regional Anthropology in New Guinea: From the New Guinea Micro-Evolution Project to the A. B. Lewis Project and Beyond. Pacific Studies 19(3): 143–186. Welsch, Robert L., ed. 1998. An American Anthropologist in Melanesia: A. B. Lewis and the Joseph N. Field South Pacific Expedition, 1909–1913. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. (2 vols.) Welsch, Robert L. 2000. One Time, One Place, Three Collections: Colonial Processes and the Shaping of Some Museum Collections from German New Guinea. In M. O’Hanlon and R. L. Welsch, eds., Hunting the Gatherers: Ethnographic Collectors, Agents, and Agency in Melanesia, 1870s–1930s, pp. 155–179. Oxford: Berghahn Books.
