The CFZ blogging family would like to introduce you to a new guest blogger: Richard Holland, editor of Paranormal Magazine, and all round good bloke. He intends to be a regular visitor tho these pages, and I am sure that you will all agree with me that this will be jolly good news for all of us..Of the many hobbies I inflict on my ever-dwindling bank balance is my enthusiasm for bound volumes of wonderful Victorian/Edwardian magazines like The Strand, Pearson’s and Pall Mall, stuffed full as they are of Golden Age illustration, crime and spook stories and contemporary commentary.
One of my favourites is Wide World, which first started publishing in the 1890s. Wide World was packed with adventure stories from the exploration (and exploitation) days of the British Empire, as sterling chaps with enormous moustaches forged their way through jungle, desert and mountainous wastes encountering indigenous peoples and, yes, monsters on their way.
I’ve republished several edited highlights from my Wide World collection in the ‘Unearthed’ section of Paranormal Magazine, many of a cryptozoological nature (or supernature). Two of these were devoted to what the editorial chaps of the early 1900s liked to refer to as ‘Man-Monkeys’. ‘The Hunt for the Man-Monkey’ retold an expedition to Borneo, which included the celebrated Rajah Brooke, to capture a Mai-as, described as an ‘extraordinary animal emphatically distinct from any other variety of the ape family [and] gifted with a really high degree of intelligence’.
Needless to say, rather than capture this splendid hominid, they end up shooting one (the accompanying illustration of the savage-looking beast was a Rider Haggard-style treat). ‘The dead body of the monkey having been skinned and the flesh removed,’ we are informed, ‘the skeleton was brought back to England, where it remains in the possession of the owner of the yacht who had organized this expedition.’ Frustratingly, neither the name of the owner or his yacht is vouschafed to us, however: does the skeleton still exist, mislabeled maybe in some private collection?
The other story referred to the Mudevar tribe, also known as Tiger People, who inhabited the jungles of the Cardamom Hills near the Southern India Malabar Coast. These hairy, dwarfish, ape-like people were entirely new to me. Like the Mai-as of Borneo, they are described as living in ‘nests’ high up in the trees. They used boluses to kill their game, which would include humans if they were lucky enough to get one. For this reason alone, we are informed by the translator of a hill-tribe chieftain’s yarn, they were cheerfully slaughtered by other tribespeople. I believe their former stamping ground has been largely cultivated now, all that jungle tamed. They must be long extinct, or, if they were human, absorbed into the more general Malabar gene pool.
I would be pleased to learn how well-known the Tiger People are in cryptozoological circles. Does anyone have any more information on them? And what of the Wild Man of Borneo’s missing skeleton? The Wide World does feature stories that are patently untrue or exaggerated, although I suspect the editors at the time may have been unaware of this. But the tales of the Man-Monkeys do have the ring of authenticity to me. So, over to the experts at the CFZ!
Richard Holland, Editor of Paranormal Magazineand Uncanny UK.
One of my favourites is Wide World, which first started publishing in the 1890s. Wide World was packed with adventure stories from the exploration (and exploitation) days of the British Empire, as sterling chaps with enormous moustaches forged their way through jungle, desert and mountainous wastes encountering indigenous peoples and, yes, monsters on their way.
I’ve republished several edited highlights from my Wide World collection in the ‘Unearthed’ section of Paranormal Magazine, many of a cryptozoological nature (or supernature). Two of these were devoted to what the editorial chaps of the early 1900s liked to refer to as ‘Man-Monkeys’. ‘The Hunt for the Man-Monkey’ retold an expedition to Borneo, which included the celebrated Rajah Brooke, to capture a Mai-as, described as an ‘extraordinary animal emphatically distinct from any other variety of the ape family [and] gifted with a really high degree of intelligence’.
Needless to say, rather than capture this splendid hominid, they end up shooting one (the accompanying illustration of the savage-looking beast was a Rider Haggard-style treat). ‘The dead body of the monkey having been skinned and the flesh removed,’ we are informed, ‘the skeleton was brought back to England, where it remains in the possession of the owner of the yacht who had organized this expedition.’ Frustratingly, neither the name of the owner or his yacht is vouschafed to us, however: does the skeleton still exist, mislabeled maybe in some private collection?
The other story referred to the Mudevar tribe, also known as Tiger People, who inhabited the jungles of the Cardamom Hills near the Southern India Malabar Coast. These hairy, dwarfish, ape-like people were entirely new to me. Like the Mai-as of Borneo, they are described as living in ‘nests’ high up in the trees. They used boluses to kill their game, which would include humans if they were lucky enough to get one. For this reason alone, we are informed by the translator of a hill-tribe chieftain’s yarn, they were cheerfully slaughtered by other tribespeople. I believe their former stamping ground has been largely cultivated now, all that jungle tamed. They must be long extinct, or, if they were human, absorbed into the more general Malabar gene pool.
I would be pleased to learn how well-known the Tiger People are in cryptozoological circles. Does anyone have any more information on them? And what of the Wild Man of Borneo’s missing skeleton? The Wide World does feature stories that are patently untrue or exaggerated, although I suspect the editors at the time may have been unaware of this. But the tales of the Man-Monkeys do have the ring of authenticity to me. So, over to the experts at the CFZ!
Richard Holland, Editor of Paranormal Magazineand Uncanny UK.
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