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.
A month ago, Charles Lagus and I
returned from spending four months in search of a dragon,
or, to put it another way, in search of the largest lizard in the world.
It lives on one tiny little island in the South Pacific,
and nowhere else in the world at all.
The name of the island is Komodo.
And I have to admit that, before we started planning this expedition,
I had no idea where Komodo was and had to look for it on the map.
And I found it here. Just there.
Here is Bali, Java, Borneo and Sumatra.
Well, having found it on the map, we then had to try and get there,
but nobody in London could give us any idea as to how we could do so,
so Charles and I decided the thing to do would be to fly to Singapore
and then somehow, in some way or another, make our way
slowly southwards and eastwards through these islands to Komodo.
But we weren't going to keep our eyes shut on the way.
We were going to look at many other things.
And the first place we decided to go to was Borneo.
There we had the good fortune to meet a good friend who spoke English
and who spoke Malay. He was an Englishman called Dan Hubrecht.
And he said that he would come with us for the first week
to translate until we learned enough Malay to get on by ourselves.
The first place we went to was here at the mouth of this river,
the Mahakam River, which goes right into the heart of Borneo.
We wanted to go there particularly to catch orang-utans.
The river is wide and muddy,
and it's the main highway for trade up into the interior of Borneo.
And on our way, we passed many craft.
This little sampan which a villager was paddling up the river.
And sometimes, too, much bigger boats, like this Chinese-owned...
I was almost going to say a junk,
but it is a peculiar craft which had a wood-burning engine.
And here was our own craft, a trim little launch with a diesel engine
which had a shallow draft and could take us right far up the river.
We travelled upriver for five days,
deeper and deeper into the heart of Borneo,
passing on our way enormous rafts of logs,
each carrying a man who will live on board throughout the three weeks
it will take him to drift down to the sawmill at the river mouth.
After five days' travel, we came to a small riverside trading post,
and there on the jetty we met our first Dayak.
He was obviously a man from the forests of the interior
who would certainly know something about the animals to be found there.
So we stopped to talk to him.
First I asked him the question which we had been asking
everybody on our journey upriver.
Were there any orang-utans in the forests hereabouts?
To our delight, he said there were many near his village.
I offered him a cigarette, which, there as well as here,
is as good an introduction as any, and we chatted a little more.
As we talked, I noticed, lying at his feet, a rattan carrier
and I asked him if he would carry our gear for us.
He said he would, so immediately, we unloaded all our equipment,
cooking pots and pans, food and water bottles,
as well as all the film and recording apparatus.
While he and two of his friends were loading all this
into their carriers, I asked him how far it was to his village.
"Well," he said, "one hour's walk away for a Dayak."
And then, looking at me, he added, very unflatteringly,
"But three hours for a white man."
The jetty at which we had moored was really just a floating store
which traded with the boats travelling up and down the river,
dealing mostly with rattan, crocodile skins and fish, which were
brought to the store by the Dayaks from the forests of the interior.
On our way up the bank, we passed some of the fish,
which was lying, neatly split in half, drying in the sun.
We soon found out why our Dayak had said
that the journey would take us a long time.
The path, such as it was, seemed to lie
through a succession of deep pools,
which we had to cross on slippery, submerged logs.
Our Dayaks crossed them as though they were walking down a main road.
We had to take a little more care over our balance.
After less than two hours, which we thought wasn't bad going,
we came at last to the village.
Just a few small shacks and one enormous house,
several hundred yards long, in which nearly all the villagers live.
At the top of the notched pole, which was the only ladder
into the house, we were met by the chief of the village,
who welcomed us very hospitably.
Then he took us into his private room in the long house, and we sat down
for the lengthy formal greetings which are the correct preliminary
to any sort of negotiation in this part of the world.
We had brought with us some crude tobacco and palm leaf husks
which we had been told was the Dayaks' favourite form of cigarettes.
I wasn't quite sure how you smoked it, but the chief soon showed me.
And indeed, it was a very pleasant smoke, even if it was rather thin.
The introductions and formalities over,
I broached the subject of orang-utans,
and the chief told us that,
yes, there were many of these creatures round the village.
Indeed, he said, they were constantly raiding the village's
banana trees, and they regarded them as a pest.
So the next day, leaving Dan in the long house with the Dayaks,
we set off through the bamboo groves that surrounded the village
to look for the apes.
After an hour, I found on the forest floor the rinds and cores
of durian fruit, which I knew was the favourite food of the orang-utan.
I showed it to the Dayak who had come with me,
and he confirmed what I had hoped.
The way in which it had been chewed showed that it had been
eaten by an orang-utan.
One must have been here early this morning.
We looked up to see where the fruit had come from.
And there, 50 feet above us, we saw a nest.
"Did one sleep there?" I asked.
"Yes," he said. "One was there last night."
So the trail must still be warm, and the ape was probably quite close.
A few minutes later, we heard a crashing in the branches ahead.
And there, only a few yards away,
we spotted a great, furry red form swaying in the trees.
Far from being frightened of our presence,
he showed little inclination to dash away through the trees, but just
hung there, screaming and breaking off branches to throw down at us.
SNORTING
A few minutes after that last shot was taken, there was an explosion,
and I looked around and I saw that one of the Dayaks
who had come with us during the afternoon was holding a smoking gun.
He had tried to shoot that orang-utan.
I'm very glad to say he had missed it.
And I turned to tell him what I thought about it,
and it seemed to me really almost murder.
But he said, "Well, there are many orang-utans here.
"They steal my bananas, they steal all my crops.
"They are pests. I must shoot them." And away he went after it.
But at least our conversation delayed things a bit,
and I'm very happy to say that he never caught it.
Well, it was three weeks later before we saw another orang-utan.
We had moored the boat for the night by a very small Dayak village
and I walked in to question the villagers
to see if there were any animals about there.
An old man was sitting on the veranda of one of the houses
and I called up to him to ask if he had got any animals.
As a reply, he pointed to a box
and said that he had got a young orang-utan inside.
This was very good news indeed.
I asked him if it was a big one because,
if it was, it might well be untameable and would be no use to us.
But he said no, it wasn't, and he asked me if I would like to come up
and have a look at it.
And indeed he had got a young orang-utan,
very wild and very frightened, biting and scratching,
which he had caught only the day before.
I asked him what he wanted for it, but his first price was enormous.
He told me that he had found it raiding his plantation
at the back of his hut.
But catching it, he said, had been a very troublesome business.
"It had tried to bite me on my arm," he said,
"and then it had attacked my chest and scratched me just here."
I looked inside the box to see whether it was fit,
but I couldn't see it clearly,
so I asked him if it was in good condition
and he said yes, it was,
except for a graze on its wrist and another on its elbow.
We discussed the price for a long time,
and he said that because it had been so difficult to catch,
he would want a great deal for it.
But at last we agreed to barter it for a lot of our tobacco
and, delighted with this stroke of luck, we lifted the heavy cage down
and carried it off the veranda, back to the ship.
WILDLIFE THRUMS AND CHIRPS
Being newly caught, the ape crouched in the corner of his cage
and, very understandably, tried to bite anyone who went to touch him.
And I decided that we had better leave him for a little while
to let him settle down.
In any case, by now we had got together such a large collection
of animals - parrots, squirrels and many other creatures -
that feeding and cleaning them was more than a full-time job.
But it wasn't long before Charlie, as we had christened him,
began to calm down.
Slowly, we managed to win his confidence,
and soon, every time I passed his, cage he stretched out his hand
to attract my attention, in the hope that he'd get some more food.
When I put my hand in his cage on the third day,
he no longer snarled and scratched.
So, with some condensed milk on the handle of a spoon,
I decided to try and lure him a little way out of his cage.
To begin with, he was a bit irritated at not being given his food directly.
Then I decided to trust him sufficiently to put my finger
right in his mouth.
But I couldn't let him have the tin
in case he might cut himself on the sharp edges.
And then, for the first time, four days after we'd had him,
we encouraged him to come right outside his cage.
To begin with, I was a bit nervous because we were travelling downriver
and I wasn't sure what sort of chaos he was going to create
among all the equipment and cages of animals that was on the ship's deck.
Within a few days, he was so tame that he allowed me
to put ointment on the bad graze which he had on his wrist.
But ointment to Charlie looked a bit like condensed milk,
and he wanted to taste it.
Within a week, he was spending most of his days rambling round the ship
all by himself.
More than anything else, the food he loved was an egg.
And so finally Charlie became, to all intents and purposes,
an extra member of the crew.
And here is Charlie, safe and sound, back in London.
Hey, Charlie. Charlie.
Whoa, dear! That's it.
And with him is Mr Smith, the head keeper of the monkey house.
And how is he, Mr Smith?
Very much recovered from his long and arduous journey, David,
and he's going to settle down.
I think he's going to be with us for a very long time.
- Good. He's a good lad, is he? - He's a very good chappie.
I was surprised, you know,
because I've never handled orang-utans before,
but I was surprised at the rate at which he got tame.
To think that I could handle him within three days surprised me.
Yes, well, orang-utans are very much
like the little girl with the curl, you know.
When they're good, they're very, very good,
but when they're naughty, they are really horrid!
- Well, I think Charlie's very good. - Charlie's going to be very good
and a proper charlie! HE LAUGHS
They're very unpredictable animals, you know,
and they get into all sorts of scrapes.
- Yeah. - And Charlie's no exception.
Good, well, as a reward, Charlie, if I haven't broken it, there.
What about that?
SMITH: Very interesting to see how they eat an egg without spilling any.
ATTENBOROUGH: Never spills a bit, does he? You've not changed, Charlie.
Does he get an egg a day these days?
- SMITH: He has two eggs every day. - ATTENBOROUGH: Good.
SMITH: And thoroughly enjoys them.
ATTENBOROUGH: That was one of the difficulties with us, you know,
with getting eggs,
and often I would have liked a nice fried egg or something
and we could only get two, so Charlie had them.
Didn't you, Charlie?
Hey.
One mustn't go by the melancholy look
on the orang-utan's face, you know, Mr Attenborough,
because all orang-utans have that sad look.
One can never tell whether they're really happy or not.
ATTENBOROUGH: Well, I certainly... As you were saying the other day,
he's got a real poker face.
SMITH: That's right, he has a poker face.
You can never tell how many aces he has in his hand.
But, of course, that is because of a lack of facial muscles.
They can't make the expressions the same as we can.
And it seems to me that they're very much slower
and very much more gentle, in a way, than chimpanzees, is that true?
SMITH: They are. The chimpanzee is very emotional
and does things without thinking,
but the orang-utan is very slow but deliberate.
And if he does something or wants to do something,
it's very difficult to dissuade him.
Well, as you were seeing earlier on that film,
we had a lot of trouble with Charlie on the ship...
- Yes, yes. - ..gambolling about.
Have you finished that egg?
Hey.
- To the last drop. - Yes!
Um... Of course, the name "orang-utan" is,
as I discovered out there, is a Malay name, isn't it?
- Yes. - Which means "old man of the woods".
- Old man of the woods. - He certainly looks an old man.
How old would you say he was?
I should say Charlie would be about two to two and a half.
As old as that?
But of course they take a long time to grow up
and I've no doubt Charlie's father weighed as much as 400lb.
Well, that one I saw in the tree, I would have thought
was almost five feet high. Could that be?
Just over four feet.
4'4" to 4'6" is the usual height.
- But they're so enormous. - They are.
There are two varieties, you know. One is rather taller than the other.
That is the one that has the large facial callosity.
- And what is Charlie? - Charlie will be one like that.
The other is a round-faced one which is more rotund.
And how long do you think we'll be able to play with him like this?
Oh, for several years yet. For at least another six years, I'm sure.
Well, Charlie, I'll come and see you often. Eh?
SMITH: Dessert.
Aw! You were always very fond of that, weren't you?
Well, now, what about that?
SMITH: I'm sure he's going to make many, many friends at the zoo.
ATTENBOROUGH: Well, I shall never forget him.
I think, actually, he had better go back
to his nice warm cage in the zoo,
and thank you very much for bringing him.
Well, after we'd had Charlie for a bit, we continued up the river
several, or about 50 or 60 miles to visit some more Dayaks.
And we'll be back next week to show you what we found there.
So until then, from the three of us, good night.