Borneo

The island of Borneo sits off the coast of Southeast Asia and is divided among the countries of Malaysia, Indonesia, and tiny Brunei. Between 1896 and 1898, William H. Furness 3rd, Hiram M. Hiller, and Alfred C. Harrison, Jr., undertook several collecting expeditions to Borneo on behalf of the Penn Museum. They spent six months in Sarawak, traveling upriver to Dayak longhouses, they undertook an expedition to Dutch West Borneo, spending several months on the Kapuas River, and then they visited the Mahakam River in Dutch East Borneo. On these trips, they collected ethnographic objects for the Penn Museum and zoological specimens for the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia.