Original subtitles

BBC Four Collections - specially chosen programmes

from the BBC archive.

For this collection, Sir David Attenborough

has chosen documentaries from the start of his career.

More programmes on this theme, and other BBC Four Collections,

are available on BBC iPlayer.

Those pictures were taken a few weeks ago in Borneo.

There were three of us, Charles Lagus, the cameraman, myself,

and an Englishman called Dan Hubrecht,

who we met on our way to Borneo,

who was kind enough to come with us for the first few weeks on our trip

because he spoke fluent Malay and he could translate for us

for the first few weeks,

until we learnt enough to be able to get on by ourselves.

We were on our way to look for a dragon, or, rather,

a giant lizard, which lives in one small island in Indonesia.

But we weren't going directly there.

We were going to stop off, on the way,

on some of the interesting islands, to look for animals

to try and film them and to try and catch some.

The first place we went to was Borneo.

We took a ship to a small town called Samarinda,

which is here, at the mouth of a big river, the Mahakam.

The Mahakam is several hundred miles long

and stretches right into the interior of Borneo.

It's a wide, dirty, muddy river

and, like all rivers in this part of the world,

it's the main highway to the interior. So, on our journey,

we passed all these many small boats, travelling up and down the river,

trading from one village to the other.

Late one evening, we had a great stroke of luck,

for a troupe of the extraordinary

long-nosed proboscis monkey

had come down to the river bank to feed.

We stopped the engine.

These are young ones and females,

which only have short, perky, turned-up noses.

But here is a big male, with an enormous, drooping snout.

They soon took alarm at our approach and, within a few minutes,

they fled away back into the forest.

Everyone had told us that the river

was infested with man-eating crocodiles.

But, it wasn't until one morning, three weeks after our arrival

in Borneo, when I was looking for frogs

that were whistling and chirping in the swamps fringing the river bank,

that I actually saw one.

CACOPHONY OF BIRD AND FROG CALLS

And it was no ordinary one, either, but the variety with the long,

thin nose, the gavial.

But, as you can see, nobody could class this little baby

as a man-eater, even though he had got quite a bite.

The river was now getting shallower.

According to our maps, we were now almost on the Equator

and, when we arrived at this small landing stage,

the crew said that we could go no further.

We were greeted by a group of laughing Dayak children,

playing among the canoes.

They seemed very friendly, so we decided to go ashore,

and ask if we could spend a few days

in the village on the bank above, before we returned down river.

Close by, a few men sat in the sun working among stacks of rattan cane.

They had gathered it from the forest

and now were tying it into bundles, in order to sell it, very profitably,

to the Chinese boats, which regularly came up river, to trade.

It was the dry season. The river was low.

To get to the top of the muddy bank, we had to climb up notched logs,

which seem to be a characteristic feature of every Dayak village.

CRICKETS CHIRP

At the top stood four mysterious wooden figures, a reminder that,

though missionaries had long been working in this area,

the majority of the Dayaks were still pagans

and had not long since given up headhunting.

The village itself, like all Dayak villages,

consisted only of a single, long house,

which stretched for several hundred yards along the riverbank.

The people who watched us from the galleries of the house seemed

to be very different from those we had met lower down the river.

For one thing, the women's earlobes were pierced and stretched

and loaded with silver rings, as a sign of wealth.

'The head man was on his way into the forest to hunt.

'He showed us his stout blowpipe, tipped with a spearhead which,

'he said, was very useful for stabbing.

'And his hat, which was very light, and woven from palm leaves.

'We both bought and wore ones like it later on and found them

'to be ideal headwear for the tropics cool and shady.

'He never carried a gun, he told us, but relied on his parang,

'the crude and heavy Dayak bush knife.

'He said that we would be very welcome

'to stay in the village for as long as we wished.'

'The entrance to the long house was up another notched log.

'The Dayaks never seem to use ordinary ladders.

'And inside, we walked along the magnificent floorboards,

'several feet wide and many yards long,

'which had been hand-hewn from teak trees.

'In England, these planks would be worth

'a considerable amount of money, I suppose.'

We were, of course, the object of a great deal of curiosity.

But, after a time, people forgot our presence

and continued with their daily occupations.

The longhouse is the home of the entire village.

And although each family has a separate compartment,

the life of these Dayaks is a pretty communal one.

Although most of the villagers soon got to know us,

the children never ceased to stare at us with expressions,

which I am afraid, were not unmixed with a certain amount

of fear and apprehension.

The Dayaks are inveterate, and habitual gamblers

and at all times, throughout the day and most of the night,

in one corner or another of the house,

there was a group of men engrossed in a very serious gambling game,

in which everybody was playing for very high stakes indeed.

All the household work, such as milling rice,

was, of course, left to the women.

This mill is made from the trunk of a palm tree.

There is hardly any furniture in the longhouse.

One sits, eats and sleeps on the floor.

But, of course, special arrangements have to be made for young babies.

In the early evening, without warning,

two men walked down the gallery and began to beat on the huge drums.

SONOROUS, STEADY DRUMBEAT

Soon, a dancer wearing a headdress of hornbill feathers

emerged from beneath the longhouse

and began to prance and posture to the music

of the drums and gongs which came echoing from the longhouse.

MELODIC BLEND OF GONGS AND DRUMBEAT

Another masked figure came out to join him.

And then, watched by the entire village

from the gallery of the longhouse, a whole group of men came out

to dance around a newly-erected totem pole.

Well, the dance ended as abruptly as it had begun.

I tried to find out what it had all been about,

but I'm afraid they didn't understand my Malay, anyway,

and I think really they spoke a different dialect altogether.

No-one could tell me,

so we settled down to sleep that night in the longhouse.

Well, sleeping in a longhouse is an interesting experience,

but not one I want to repeat too often.

The noise continued throughout the night,

and was really very loud indeed

and prevented me from sleeping, almost at all.

The men, the gambling party in one corner, were calling the odds

and discussing the price.

There was a party of women not far away who,

at about one o'clock in the morning, started chanting

which went on until dawn, and, as I lay down there

with my head on the boards, people were tramping to and fro.

And the longhouse has a rather odd property.

As you lie with your ear on the boards, it sounds as though

a man walking 100 yards away is, in fact, walking right over your head.

Actually, when you opened your eyes,

it always was somebody walking over your head, anyway!

In addition to all that, there were all the animals.

There were dogs tramping to and fro.

There were hens cackling and, beneath where I was sleeping, anyway,

I think there were at least six pigs in the ground beneath.

Well, we got up, having spent a somewhat disturbed night,

and I met the man who had been wearing the mask in the dance.

And I spoke to him

and managed to make myself understood in my primitive Malay.

And I asked him what the dance was about.

He said it was a funeral dance.

And I said, "But I saw no bodies."

And he said, "No, no, those are in the longhouse."

So I asked him where, and it turned out that they were just a few yards

away from where we had been sleeping.

I was a little perturbed at this,

and so I said, "Had they been there very long?"

And he said, "Well, about two years."

And I said, "Two years?

"Why do you wait two years for a funeral ceremony?"

Well, he said, "A funeral ceremony is a very important business.

"You've got to sacrifice several buffalo,

"and you have to have a big party and lots of food

"and that costs a lot of money.

"So, ever since they've died, we've been saving up for it

"and now comes the party."

And it sounded as though it was going to be quite a party.

So I asked him if we could watch it and maybe film it and record it.

He was very nice, he said that would be quite all right.

And I asked him how long it would go on for.

"Well," he said, "they were quite important people,

"so it would be quite a party and, I should say, about 30 or 40 days."

Well, of course, we couldn't wait 30 or 40 days,

so we explained and said thank you very much.

He was quite upset.

And he was very nice, and he said, as a consolation,

"Since you can't stay, here, I will give you my mask",

which we brought back. So it was that, the next day,

we set off in our launch, once again, down the river.

We could not travel throughout the night,

in case we fouled any of the logs which littered the river.

And one evening, when we had moored early, I started the nightly chore

of feeding and cleaning our collection of animals,

when a Dayak called to me from the bank.

"Hey," he said, "I've got a beruang." Are you interested?

Well, I didn't know what a beruang was,

but I said we were very interested.

And I asked him to come on board, to show it to me.

And "beruang" turned out to be the Malay word for a bear.

The Dayak said that, early that morning,

he had found this youngster deserted in the forest

and he had heard that we had wanted animals,

so he had brought it in to us.

I offered to trade him for cakes of salt, which,

up here are in extremely short supply and very valuable.

He asked for 15 and I suggested ten, and we agreed on that.

The little cub was obviously very young.

I reckoned about two weeks old.

He seemed to be in good condition, but he hadn't got any teeth

and obviously was still feeding on milk.

We had got a baby's bottle on board, ready for such a case as this,

but I wondered whether he was yet old enough for us to be able to rear him.

CUB SQUEAKS

First, however, he had to be put in a box and covered up,

so that he kept warm.

As soon as the sun went down, it gets quite cold on that river

and we didn't want to risk our new pet catching a chill.

And then I had to set about the urgent job

of making a bottle of dilute condensed milk.

Urgent, because the little cub

was already calling, very loudly, indeed, for his food.

CUB MEWS FORCEFULLY

The milk seemed to be about the right temperature.

And, to my relief, the young cub was soon guzzling away contentedly.

CUB GURGLES AND SQUEAKS

And here he is, twice as large, I should say,

but still just as hungry

and still making this extraordinary little noise

which he used to make out there in Borneo.

Oh, Benjamin! He has grown considerably since we had him.

I should say, really, he's almost twice the size.

His eyes are now wide open.

He is a honey bear, or a Malay bear,

and although the Malay bear is the smallest of all the bear family,

he, in fact, grows to about four feet long, and,

long before he gets to four feet long, he is unreliable and dangerous.

In fact, the Malay bear is one of the few bears

that you can't ever tame, because they are very temperamental,

they get quite hysterical, and when they're big,

they are liable to go around and smash up the furniture

or whatever there is about.

But Benjamin is still rather sweet,

in spite of the fact that he's got quite big teeth now.

But I shouldn't be... Whoops!

I shouldn't be telling you about this, because Charles Lagus,

the cameraman who took all those pictures, is here.

And Charles has had him in his flat ever since we came back.

And has he caused any trouble, Charles?

Well, he's fairly destructive.

He likes to eat the lino and newspapers,

telephone directories - almost everything.

And...he's lost his pink tummy, which was so sweet.

Yes, it's all grown nicely.

Whoops! Let's have a look at you.

When we first had him, one always thinks that animals

in the wild are nice and healthy, but in fact,

Benjamin was covered with little sores, in which there were maggots,

so one of the first things we did was to sterilise them

and take out the maggots with a pin,

and I think perhaps he's fitter now, than he's been for a long time,

thanks to you, Charles.

Hey, hey! You're going to try him lapping?

He's just beginning to.

Usually, we have to finish up on a bottle, but he's..

DAVID: In Borneo, we were feeding him every three hours

and we took it in turns to get up in the middle of the night

and feed him, when he made that terrible noise.

Do you feed him in the night now?

CHARLES: No, seven hours is now as long as he will go.

But usually we leave a bowl overnight, so he can help himself.

DAVID: That's certainly very good, indeed.

So, he's right off the bottle altogether?

CHARLES: Well, he's still getting the bottle, when

he gets tired of lapping, but I think he's all right now..

DAVID: Unfortunately, he's got to remain on the bottle

for another six months.

Yes. Entirely milk.

Well, rather you than me, I think.

Here, Benjamin. Try a bottle.

You don't want to.

Very nice. Is it going down?

- Yes. - My goodness, look at his throat.

Yes, he's very hungry now.

- Do you still clip his claws? - Yes.

Yes, they're terribly sharp, and he tears all the curtains

and the poor little dog suffers. They play together very well.

Well, you're very sweet. What about his teeth?

Have you had a bite from him?

Yes, he draws blood regularly now, when he misses the bottle

and gets your finger instead.

In that case, I think we'll let him go!

When you've finished, Benjamin, we'll let you go back to your flat

and draw a little more blood!

Well, Benjamin was the last animal which we got in Borneo.

We then had to continue on our way for this giant lizard

and the next port of call was Java.

In Java, we saw volcanoes and we saw many animals, as well,

but we'll be back next week to tell you something about that.

Meanwhile, from the three of us, good night.

HAUNTING TRIBAL FLUTE