Sent to investigate the steamy jungles of Malaya in the 1930s, John Corner had grown to detest the work. Most of the time, the ambitious young Englishman felt baffled and frustrated. All around him towered some of the world’s most magnificent trees, many of them new to science, yet he couldn’t even begin to identify them. It wasn’t that he lacked the taxonomic skill. But to work out their place in the plant kingdom he needed a flower, a seed and a leaf, and more often than not his quarry was out of reach, high up in the forest canopy.
At first, he tried to match fallen fruits to parent trees, but was quickly defeated in these immensely complex forests. In desperation, he followed logging teams and scrabbled among the newly felled giants, struggling to record species which, for all anyone knew, might be about to disappear from the face of the Earth. Then, one day in 1937, he visited a village near the Thai border. As he sat on a log discussing local names for trees with the villagers, an elder strolled by with a large monkey in tow. It was a berok, or pig-tailed macaque. As Corner admired the beast, locally renowned for its prowess at collecting coconuts from massive palm trees, he suddenly saw a solution.
THE young botanist had conceived an audacious plan. If a captive monkey could learn to throw down coconuts, perhaps it could be trained to retrieve rare fruits and flowers instead. Back at the Botanic Gardens in Singapore where he worked, Corner’s scheme was regarded as eccentric at best. Yet in time, his maverick approach to tropical forest research would be celebrated throughout the world. What’s more, one of his monkeys would save his life.
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On that April day in 1937, he didn’t hesitate. Bargaining with a villager, he quickly bought a young male pig-tailed macaque called Merah and bundled him into his hired car. The monkey would flourish, the locals told him, on a diet of cooked rice with plenty of fruit and vegetables. Once up in the canopy, the berok would help himself to insects, spiders, lizards and birds’ eggs.
Taking Merah out into the forest a few days later, Corner began to understand why the villagers chose beroks to harvest coconuts. These monkeys seize every opportunity to make a noise, and especially love sending things crashing down on the unwary. “This was a hazard against which I had ever to be alert,” he recalled.
Merah’s training began in small trees, where he learned the meaning of Malay phrases asking him to “pull that off” or “set free the leaves” or “jump from one tree to another”. Each moment of mutual comprehension seemed as satisfying for the monkey as for the botanist. On one occasion, when Merah was sent up a fig tree and at last understood what was wanted, Corner had to take cover as 50 figs hurtled down. The fig tree turned out to be a new variety and Corner was able to clinch several botanical details that had been in doubt.
With impressive speed, Merah also learned to manage the long cord that prevented his escape, freeing it effortlessly as he moved through the canopy. At the same time, Corner learned to be patient if his assistant decided to take an unscheduled break to pursue a tasty spider or a stick insect.
It wasn’t much to ask. After all, with the monkey’s help Corner was able for the first time to botanise freely in the forest, and return time and again to the same places to study the leafing or flowering of the trees without destroying them. One of Merah’s greatest strengths was that he could sample the huge variety of medium-sized trees, between 10 and 20 metres tall. These species were too small to attract the foresters, yet were often the most interesting of all.
Four months later, disaster struck. One day, Merah declined his food and grew increasingly listless. For days after that, he slept most of the time, and could only sip a little sweetened lime juice. His malaise baffled experts at Singapore’s College of Medicine. When Merah eventually died, Corner felt “as if my dainty Ariel had departed”.
“The tragedy has never left me,” he wrote. “In the ensuing years, with a better understanding of forest defences, a feeling of guilt crept on me, and remains.” Corner suspected that Merah had been killed by a species of fishtail palm (Caryota) that the monkey had climbed at his request. Only later did he discover that the tree’s fruit and leaves are covered in highly irritant needle-like crystals of calcium oxalate. Merah must have swallowed some of the plant, fatally damaging his gut.
During his short career, Merah had single-handedly collected specimens from more than 300 species of tropical tree. So Corner decided to try again, this time with official approval. An item for the upkeep of monkeys was included in the Botanic Gardens’ annual budget, making his next beroks, Jambul and Puteh, probably the first monkeys to become government employees.
Puteh, who Corner reckoned knew 24 words of Malay, was to become the most talented of all. Corner would show him fallen flowers or fruits and send him up to find them, shouting Bukan itu (“not that”) when the wrong ones came down, and then Itu-lah, ambil lagi (“that’s right, get more”) when the right ones arrived. “I reached the state when I could collect almost anything from high up in the forest,” Corner recalled.
The monkeys were wary of the epiphytes that grow high up on the forest trees, as they often harboured nests of biting ants. Nonetheless, Puteh would pull off the twigs from these plants as he went aloft, as if to say “Do you want that?” Ambil lagi would bring more and Bukan, naik lagi would send him up higher. Sometimes, Corner didn’t even see the trees from which Puteh successfully collected twigs and flowers and leaves intact. Working with the berok was like fishing in the treetops, Corner reckoned.
Thrilled with his success, Corner decided to set up a school for botanical monkeys. He would breed his own superior race of beroks, and use them to carry out a comprehensive survey of the forest. He calculated that half-a-dozen monkeys, each supervised by a Malay plant collector, could traverse the forest at set intervals and gather specimens to identify every tree, climber and epiphyte.
But in 1942, just as Corner was poised to establish his breeding colony, the Japanese occupied Singapore. Two days before the fall of Singapore, Corner set his botanical monkeys free. All, that is, apart from Puteh. Now an adult male and a father, Puteh had turned nasty. A few months earlier, he had torn a long slab of Corner’s right forearm from the bone, putting it out of action for almost a year. So on the eve of the occupation, and being unable to turn Puteh loose for fear he would attack other people, Corner forced himself to shoot his erstwhile forest companion.
“I did not then know that I killed the one who in all probability saved my life,” Corner later wrote. Had Puteh not disabled his arm, Corner would have remained conscripted into the Singapore Volunteer Force and become one of its ill-fated prisoners of war. Instead, he was allowed to stay on at the Botanic Gardens, where he quickly won the respect of the Japanese scientists put in charge. Corner’s influence undoubtedly helped to prevent the looting of libraries, gardens, museums and herbaria. Today, specimens collected by the botanical monkeys are still lodged in Singapore, in Britain at Cambridge and Edinburgh, and at Leiden in the Netherlands. Corner himself went on to become a world-renowned professor of tropical botany at Cambridge.
And without his monkeys, Corner could never have written his first book, Wayside Trees of Malaysia, published in 1940. Now in its third edition, it is still the best book on the subject. In 1942, the Japanese official in charge of the Botanic Gardens sent a copy to Hirohito, the Emperor of Japan, and insiders said it was the only book he ever read in bed. From then on, Corner felt he owed his comparative freedom to some direction from on high – and again, he had the beroks to thank for that.
Corner died in 1996, but he would surely be pleased that botanical monkeys are still at work, on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. There, a team of French botanists has recruited local coconut macaques to sample the trees as part of the Global Canopy Programme, a network of researchers investigating biodiversity in the treetops. According to Valérie Trichon of the Laboratory of Terrestrial Ecology in Toulouse, one monkey can sample as many as 70 trees in a day. The macaques understand a host of Indonesian commands, including “climb”, “jump”, “to the right”, “to the left”, “at the end”, “bite it”, “take it”, “take the fruits”, “take the flowers”, “again”, “that’s enough” and “come down”. She offers one safety tip. Never stand under a tree where a monkey’s at work.