Hunting for Museums

This article begins on the floor of the laboratory of the Kaffrarian Museum in King William's Town, South Africa, in mid January 1949, where the body of the museum director, Guy Chester Shortridge, has just been found. The inquest found that he had died from ‘strychnine poisoning, self-administered’. Strychine was used in the museum as an insecticide and for the preservation of animal specimens. Many of these specimens had been obtained from the early 1920s on the 13 hunting/collecting expeditions that Shortridge went on with the museum's skinner and taxidermist, Nicholas Arends. Funded at times by the British and American Museums of Natural History, these trips to Namibia, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Botswana and Zambia provided these museums, together with the Kaffrarian, in the region of 25,000–30,000 specimens. Shortridge used the information he gathered on his expeditions to publish a two-volume directory titled Mammals of South-West Africa. Arends, who left the museum some time after Shortridge's death, and in1960 secured an appointment as a technical assistant in the Zoology Department of the newly established University College of the Western Cape, co-authored Trapping Safaris, a vivid account of the museum's collecting expeditions. Using these published works, together with correspondence from the museums in London, New York and King William's Town, this article analyses how the Kaffrarian Museum's expeditions into southern and central Africa established institutional knowledge and authority of mammals by making use of colonial structures of administration and supply chains in networks of international museums. Through examining these networks of empire and the narratives produced, this articles considers how the categories of history and the historical sciences were inscribed in and through the lives and deaths of these museum hunters and collectors.