N. N. MIKLOUKHO‐MACLAY, PIONEER OF PACIFIC ANTHROPOLOGY

Abstract

A. P. ELKIN has recently drawn attention1 to F. S. Greenop's valuable biography2 of the nineteenth century Russian scientist and explorer, N. N. Mikloukho-Maclay. His life and work are of particular interest to students of New Guinea in that he was the first European to live on the Maclay (or Rai) coast and was equipped by his scientific training to obtain ethnographic and other material of unique value. His life's work, however, took place over a much wider area, and his interests, were extremely broad. His education reveals something of his turbulent and inquiring nature. After studying for a while at St. Petersburg University, he broke on his course there to study philosophy and jurisprudence at Heidelburg, medicine at Leipzig, and natural science and medicine at Jena. At the age of 22, Haeckel acknowledged his abilities by taking him on a scientific expedition to the Canary Islands, during which time he also visited Spain and North Africa. After further zoological research in Sicily, he went alone, dressed in Arab fashion, to the Red Sea region, where he carried out marine research and visited Jeddah, Suakin and Massawa. As Markov3 has pointed out, he was one of the earliest followers of Darwin, and his work in the field of marine zoology entitles us to regard him as a pioneer of this science in Russia, one of his greatest achievements being the establishment of the faunal links between the Mediterranean and the Indian Oceans. Markov also stresses his defence of monogenesis in the evolutionary controversy of the day, a consideration always in his mind during his subsequent Pacific research. His expedition of 1871-72, which brought him to the Maclay coast, was partly inspired by Carl Behr, who had already written an anthropological treatise on the Papuans from second-hand materials, but it appears that Maclay was unsuccessful in obtaining funds for a^wider project which he had in mind an expedition for the study of zoology, ethnology, physical anthropology and linguistics on a pan-Pacific scale. Although he obtained little support from the Imperial Russian Geographical Society, many prominent individuals helped him, and he secured the assistance of the Navy. This latter fact is commemorated in the name of the Vitiaz Strait between the northern New Guinea coast and Long Island. The Vitiaz was the ship which brought him to the area in 187 1. (The Isumrud Strait between Karkar