Oceanian Art [antikvár]

PREFACE To explore remote parts of our globe has always been a great temptation for Hungarian scientists. Studying the history of Hungarian science we find that, from the beginning of the 18th century onwards, a steadily increasing number of scientists exchanged their peaceful existence at home for a life of vicissitudes and dangers in boreal or tropical regions, impelled by the ambition to enrich universal human knowledge with the results of their explorations. There is no continent which has not been penetrated by Hungarian explorers. Letters written by Hungarian missionaries in the 18th century afford early—and thus very valuable—information about the Indian tribes of Brazil, Peru and Bolivia : the ' Descriptio Moxitarum in Regno Peruano," a work written by Franciscus X. Éder and published at Buda in 1791, is still regarded as one of the outstanding sources of Peruvian ethnography. It was in the middle of the 19th century that János Xantus, who was forced into exile by the defeat of Hungary's War of Independence of 1848-49, collected his North American and Mexican material in the spheres of natural science and ethnography, while László Magyar made valuable notes concerning the inhabitants of the Lunda Empire, a heterogeneous people living along the tributaries of the river Kongo. These pioneers were closely followed by a host of explorers : Sámuel Teleki and László Höhnel discovered the Rudolf and Stefania Lakes in the course of their East African expedition in the second half of the 19th century, and it was likewise from East Africa that Pál Bornemissza sent his copious ethnographical collections to the Hungarian National Museum. In the present century attention has turned to West and Central Africa. While Emil Torday's ethnographical investigations were concerned with the tribes of the Kongo Basin, Rudolf Fuszek devoted himself to the art of the Libérián tribes. Prominent among the explorers of Asia was Sándor Körösi Csoma, whose Tibetan linguistic works in the middle of the past century enjoyed universal esteem; Ármin Vámbéry, in the guise of a dervish, visited a number of Central Asiatic cities forbidden to •ivhite men at that time. Bernát Munkácsy, Károly Pápai, Károly Jankó carried on ethnographic field work among the Finno-Ugrian peoples. Ignác Halász explored Lapland and Benedek Barátosi-Balogh studied life among the riparian inhabitants of the river Amur. The Far East, Indonesia, Australia and the South Pacific Islands had a similar attraction for Hungarian travellers and explorers. János Xantus, in the course of his far-eastern tour in the 1870s, travelled all over Indonesia and even ventured a stay among North Borneo's tribes, then mostly unknown. From Astrolabe Bay in North New Guinea, Sámuel Fenichel, from 1891 to 1893—when he succumbed to malaria — sent several consignments of ethnographic and other