Criticise the cost of postage at your peril. So Dutch army surgeon Pieter Bleeker discovered when in 1847 he was banished from Batavia by the government of the Dutch East Indies for just such a faux pas. Bleeker may have had a knack for rubbing the authorities up the wrong way, but luckily he was equally adept at making the best of a bad situation. During his twoyear exile from the colony’s capital he studied dysentery, and won academic accolades in the process. Despite his success, he longed to be summoned back to Batavia. Only there could he continue his life’s work – an astonishing catalogue of the fish of Indonesia.
NO ONE knows how Pieter Bleeker felt when he set sail for the Dutch East Indies in 1841. He was 22 and on his way to Batavia – now Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia – to take up a post as a military surgeon, third class. It’s probably safe to assume his feelings were mixed. Doctoring was not Bleeker’s calling. He yearned to be a man of science but, thwarted at every turn, had decided to seek adventure in the Far East.
From his youth, Bleeker had two ambitions: he wanted to be famous and he wanted to be a zoologist. Few would have bet on his becoming either. His background was too humble – his father was a sailmaker from Zaandam, a small town north of Amsterdam – and his education too short and sketchy. Bleeker left his overcrowded, second-rate school when he was 12, and his education would have ended there but for the pharmacist who occupied part of the Bleeker home. He arranged for the boy to study pharmacy and, if all went well, Bleeker could eventually look forward to a life behind a counter mixing powders and potions.
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He wanted more, and after qualifying as a pharmacist, scrimped and saved to study medicine. In 1840 he qualified as a lowly surgeon and country doctor, but still lacking a university education he knew he’d never reach the top in medicine. In any case, during his studies he developed a new passion: zoology.
Passion wasn’t enough for the scientific establishment. Twice he applied for a position at the Natural History Museum in Leiden, only to be rejected. He scraped together the means to spend six months in Paris, then the centre of modern systematic zoology, diligently attending lectures by the greatest names in science. It did no good. The plain fact was he had no formal qualifications. Disappointed, Bleeker signed up to become a medical officer in the East Indian army.
In Batavia, Bleeker quickly put his new-found knowledge to good use investigating the local fauna, and after exploring the town’s fish markets, he decided to focus on fish. “It soon became apparent that rather a large number had not yet been included into the registers of science,” he wrote. Fish had other advantages. Collecting them “was neither time-consuming nor very expensive… and the preservation was easy”. All you needed was a good supply of arrack, the local rum.
In 2001, a team of marine scientists from Australia and Indonesia began revisiting Bleeker’s old stamping ground with a more modern taxonomic goal – identifying and cataloguing the species of rays and sharks caught by commercial fishers. Over the next five years, the team made 20 surveys, during which they visited landing sites to pick over the catch. “It smells bad. A lot of the fish have been in the boats for a week. The colours fade. It makes identifying them harder but it’s still doable,” says Will White, a taxonomist at CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research in Hobart, Tasmania, who led the fieldwork.
“It smells bad. A lot of the fish have been in the boats for a week”
Bleeker must have been familiar with those smells as he scoured the markets for fishy novelties. He also arranged for local fishermen to bring him anything unusual and had fish sent by his network of contacts throughout the archipelago. Soon he had specimens of a few hundred species, “including many forms unknown to science”. By 1845, he had proposed to the East Indies government his now famous Atlas Ichthyologique des Indes Orientale Néerlandaises. He was still working on it when he died 33 years later.
Two factors made for slow progress: the project was hugely ambitious, intended to fill 14 volumes, and Bleeker had plenty of other things on his plate. Besides his duties as an army surgeon, he set up academic societies and journals, studied subjects as diverse as volcanism and ethnology, anthropology and economics, and became involved with education and politics.
Then came the postage incident. According to Bleeker, he’d already irritated the authorities by writing an unsanctioned article on the colony’s population statistics. Then, in a letter in a scientific journal, he complained about the cost of sending scientific literature to the Netherlands. A single volume cost more than 100 guilders to ship – a fifth of the sum the East Indies government had awarded Bleeker to work on his Atlas. The government responded by sending him to the provinces.
With his collections stuck in Batavia, Bleeker studied dysentery instead: corpses were quite as plentiful as fish. His findings were translated into English and French and earned him an honorary degree from the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands.
Two years later, Bleeker was recalled to Batavia to teach native students the rudiments of medicine. As always, he had bigger ideas: “Though hardly educated or prepared, a very large majority of the students soon gave proof of a remarkably favourable aptitude.” This prompted him “to extend tuition to the entire field of medicine”. Bleeker headed the medical school from 1851 until 1860, when he returned to the Netherlands.
Despite his many diversions, Bleeker amassed 18,000 specimens, mainly of fish, and published 730 scientific papers, 520 about fish. Then there was his monumental Atlas. Published in instalments, and filled with hundreds of lavish illustrations, it finally brought Bleeker the fame he so craved.
Identifying a new species depends on being able to pick out unique aspects of an animal’s appearance. Some new species stick out like sore thumbs. Others require an intimate knowledge of the shape of the fins, the shading of the underbelly or the number of teeth. Bleeker was a master, discovering 1925 new species of fish, of which 743 remain valid.
“Bleeker was brilliant, his work second to none,” says Peter Last, director of the Australian National Fish Collection at CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research. What makes Bleeker’s achievements all the more remarkable, says Last, is that he worked in a scientific vacuum with limited access to the fish collections scattered around the world’s museums or to the scientific literature (this may explain Bleeker’s outrage at the cost of a stamp). By contrast, when White and his colleagues set off on their surveys, they took laptops loaded with photos, illustrations and descriptions of sharks and rays.
Bleeker’s taxonomic virtuosity did not sit well with everyone, however. Take, for example, his discovery of a dazzling array of sharks and rays. These fish tend to be big and difficult to ship around the world, so his descriptions were not always backed up by samples that could be lodged in museums. Other ichthyologists were sceptical, especially as Bleeker claimed far more species of rays and sharks in Indonesia than were known to exist in any similarly sized region of the world.
“After his death, the critics shot down his claims. They said it was impossible to have so many different species of sharks and rays in such a small area of ocean, usually because they didn’t have that variety in the oceans they studied,” says ichthyologist Martin Gomon of Museum Victoria in Melbourne.
What the critics hadn’t taken into account is the unique nature of the Indonesian archipelago. With more than 17,000 islands, it provides an incredibly diverse range of habitats. Submarine trenches up to 3 kilometres deep slice through the region, preventing the passage of many types of fish and ensuring reproductive isolation. Finally, three tectonic plates collide under Indonesia, and in the geological past they would have brought together many species from different continents. All of these factors contribute to an unusually diverse fish fauna.
Over the past 50 years, Bleeker’s claims have been more than vindicated, most recently by the White team’s survey of sharks and rays. They even added a further 20 species to the total. And how many more are there left to find? “That’s the big unknown,” says White. “But we think we’ve only scratched the surface.”
