Hunting for Museums

Abstract

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...