From the Ornithological Collection of Rev'd A.J. Bissette (1867-1914)
In 2012 the artist Oliver Bancroft was invited to examine the rediscovered remains of an ornithological collection: stacks of damp boxes packed with misshapen bird skins and faded taxidermy.
Intrigued by this once treasured, now neglected body of work, Bancroft began to investigate its contents and to respond to the labours of its curator, the Reverend Alfred Jerome Bissette (1853-1914).
BIRDS FROM THE DARK PARTS OF THE MAP is the result: a suite of 21 hand-coloured etchings depicting undocumented specimens from Bissette’s extraordinary collection, crafted meticulously using techniques familiar to the great Victorian naturalists of the 19th century.
This is the extraordinary story behind the project, of the forgotten man at its heart, and of the darkness still to be uncovered in our world map today...
THE MAN
Alfred Jerome Bissette (1853- 1914) was born a fragile, sickly boy and enjoyed a sheltered childhood.
The only son of wealthy Presbyterian Canadian bankers, he was home schooled and spared the trials of formal education. Segregated from his peers, he instead nurtured a love for the natural sciences and collected animals (dead and alive) from the garden and surrounding woodlands. At 18, he surprised his parents by turning away from the financial world his father had intended for him and journeying to England to read Divinity.
Bissette’s parents died suddenly aboard the SS Ville du Havre, during its fateful transatlantic collision in 1873. They had hoped to visit their son and tour the continent, but their loss seemed only to spur Bissette on to his own dreams of international voyage, for he joined the Christian mission soon after. Liberated from financial concerns by his inheritance, Bissette invested heavily in his fascination with birds. Travelling with the mission, he immersed himself in the strange flora and fauna of distant lands, driven further afield by an insatiable scientific and spiritual awe. His ventures brought him to the very remotest parts of the world, where he seemed blissfully ignorant of the colonial repressions around him.
Bissette’s scholarly and religious passions appear to have been profoundly connected. His bibles are beautifully ornamented with ornithological drawings and his journals filled with scriptural marginalia. For Bissette, birds ultimately expressed the majesty of God and in their diverse variety bore witness to the grandeur of His creation. Though enthusiasm for his mission work waned, faith never left his writings, where ornithological study and spiritual musing merge in a single language.
The events of 1907, however, brought a violent and unexpected close to this fruitful period. Bissette’s last expedition, among the Andaman Islands, ended disastrously when his team were attacked by indigenous tribesmen. Bissette was lucky to survive only superficial wounds, while several companions were killed. The trauma of the experience seems to have affected him greatly. His endurance diminished, and besieged by consecutive bouts of tropical fever, he descended into a morbid gloom. He lost all love of the travails of exploration and in his journals obsessed with guilt over the incident.
Marooned in England, Bissette’s collecting dwindled, as did his writing. After a long period of convalescence, he eventually returned to the pulpit, where he found in ‘civilised’ church life a long- lost inner calm. Substituting for sabbatical colleagues in parishes across the country, he made plans for preserving and presenting his collection. Eager to capitalize on the popular appetite for trophies amassed from the imperial front, Bissette looked to exhibit his birds to the public. He sought the advice of noted naturalists and was particularly keen to secure the support of Baron Lionel Walter Rothschild of Tring and the Natural History Museum. Their one and only meeting, in 1910, was to have a pivotal effect on Bissette’s reputation and the distribution of his collection. While the details of their acquaintance remain unknown, the two gentlemen left with wildly differing perceptions of one another. Bissette recalled in his diaries a conversation ‘strained, yet cordial and polite’; Rothschild’s reaction, by contrast, was curiously severe. In a robust letter to the British Ornithologists’ Club, penned soon after their meeting, he requested that Bissette’s application to the Club be refused, remarking that ‘The credibility of the natural sciences in this country must not be allowed to suffer at the hands of such fantasists.’
Perhaps word of Bissette’s unusual independence preceded him. He had encountered and befriended several of Rothschild’s 400 or more international runners, but time and again declined their invitations to collect specimens for their employer. His relationships with such people were often sincere: in Papua New Guinea, the collector Albert Stewart Meek repaid an unspecified favour to Bissette by gifting him a rare specimen instead of passing it on to his intended client, Rothschild. Occurrences such as these undoubtedly coloured Rothschild’s impression of the man.
The Club and other zoological societies soon bowed to Rothschild’s demands and declined Bissette’s applications. His reputation tainted, he was met by scholars and researchers with animosity and suspicion. Bissette found himself ostracised from the very scientific circles whose approval he was so eager to gain.
In isolation, his devotions redoubled. His collection now a personal venture, he began to exhibit his findings at church and made use of bird specimens in his sermons. In 1913 Bissette was inspired by the growing popularity of cinema to create a film about his travels – one that would intrigue and educate a young audience about the unknown corners and creatures of the world. This project he never saw completed.
Bissette died a few months after the outbreak of The Great War. News of the conflict had greatly depressed him and his ‘tropical gloom’ soon returned. He withdrew from his parish duties and retired to his bed, where he lay silently until his death of an undiagnosed illness in December 1914.
Bissette’s reputation remained discredited among the ornithological community long after his death. Friends and close associates made repeated – and failed – attempts to pass his collection on to the same societies that had spurned him. His specimens and belongings were eventually boxed away and forgotten.
In the 1980s, Bissette’s work was rediscovered and pieced back together from various storage sites, sheds, garages and second-hand shops across southern England. All this was achieved single-handedly by the late Angus Neville, a retired station attendant and bird enthusiast. Neville found part of the collection hidden away in Coulsdon train station, and during his retirement set about locating its surviving remnants.
Now, more than 100 years after Bissette’s death, the revaluation of his work can finally begin. BIRDS FROM THE DARK PARTS OF THE MAP serves to restore his rightful place as an important marginal figure in the history of ornithology.
THE PROJECT
When the artist Oliver Bancroft was first introduced to Bissette’s collection in 2012 he found many of its specimens had suffered severe decay.
Some were so drastically decomposed that he could rely only on descriptions from the collector’s own journals to imagine how they might have appeared.
Methodically piecing together Bissette’s notes, textbooks and boxed-up scraps, eventually an overview of the collection and its creator’s story emerged. Alongside a vast miscellany of personal effects, Bancroft archived over 1,000 ornithological samples; a small library of Bissette’s diaries, bibles, and scholarly tomes; and an antique body of photographic material, which the artist has painstakingly restored.
As the importance of the collection became apparent, Bancroft extended his project with trips to Sri Lanka in 2013 and the Andaman Islands in 2018, intent on following in Bissette’s footsteps and expanding on the tales of his travels – and the mysterious specimens he brought back with him.
It is now over a century since the disappearance of Bissette’s collection. With BIRDS FROM THE DARK PARTS OF THE MAP, Oliver Bancroft breathes life into these dead remains. In these tender etchings we glimpse but a fraction of the hidden beauty that awaits us, still to be rediscovered, as these places become part of the world map once more.
THE BIRDS
Each species illustrated in BIRDS FROM THE DARK PARTS OF THE MAP has been reconstructed from scrupulous examination of the specimen’s remains and Bissette’s own notes.
All, with a few exceptions, were ‘taken’ by Bissette’s own hand from a range of environments: coastlines, deserts, mountain ranges and forests, from equator to polar regions. Represented are a broad variety of genera, including gull, owl, pigeon, chicken and shrike.
When, however, it came to cross- referencing Bissette’s descriptions with the 10,000 known species from around the world, these 21 birds drew a blank. What connects them is their capture in locations that have remained hidden to modern scientific observation.
Bissette travelled the world for the best part of a quarter of a century. His search for the unknown took him first across sub- Saharan Africa, then through Asia and Indochina, into the Pacific to Papua New Guinea via Malaysia and Indonesia, and out across the Indian Ocean.
This was a golden age for Western expedition, fuelled by national ambition and wanderlust, when hunger for exploration was at its fiercest. European powers raced to cast off the shadows of the world and lay claim to newly discovered lands, carving up territories and dispatching emissaries to the furthest reaches of the globe. The word ‘Dark’ – with all its prejudicial connotations – was deployed to describe those unknown pockets of the map that withstood their discovery.
Remoteness – by extreme elevation, harsh climate, or dense jungle growth – has kept many of these places from human intrusion. Locations like Mount Bosvai and Mount Mabu, untouched for centuries by Western feet, have only very recently been ‘formally’ researched for the first time. But the birds of DARK PARTS OF THE MAP were captured in sites that have not been exposed but obfuscated; far from unveiling their secrets, they have had a veil of darkness thrown over them.
Over the last 100 years international warmongering has raised deliberate borders: test site perimeters, off-limit military facilities, no-man’s-lands and no-go zones. Elsewhere, rapacious industry has seen landscapes scarred and ecosystems stressed to breaking point. These are not areas that have resisted man’s imposition: they are places where man has contested the cohabitation of others. A clear picture of their environment has been wilfully obscured.
But today, exploration and scientific documentation is no longer the sole privilege of colonial powers. Our desire for an unprejudiced understanding of the planet confronts our human urge to illuminate the unknown regions of the planet. In the cases of Acre, West Papua, and North Sentinel Island, should their ‘darkness’ be left undisturbed?
When science asks eagerly for the scars of the earth to open, we must answer: what has been lost to blind progress and power? And what will be rediscovered in the dark parts of the map?
