The Tiger and the Theodolite:
George Coleman’s Dream of Extinction

For as long as I can remember, growing up in Singapore, I believed that tigers were an all-too-present reality. How could I not? They took the signs of our petrol stations and grinned cheerfully from our cereal boxes. More than mere figments of tale and imagination, they were, for me, the sight and smell of orange fur and heavy paw. Only later did I realize the erroneous nature of my childhood belief: it was a Kiplingesque world that I had dreamed into existence. Modernity, as they say, is disenchantment. By the beginning of the twentieth century, tigers were almost extinct in Singapore, more the gradual result of a series of partial measures like bounties and pit traps than a concerted effort to exterminate them (the last one was shot in 1930). Driven and hunted down, they were all but priced out of existence. One or two occasionally showed up in urban areas, unannounced—there’s that famous anecdote of a tiger who snuck under a billiards table at Raffles Hotel in 1902—but by the opening decades of the twentieth century, they had entered into myth and memory, no longer figures of our (necessary) reckoning.

What made tigers such a menace in Singapore was that they were man-eating. The number of humans consumed by the island’s tigers was disproportionately high: one figure in the first half of the nineteenth century puts the number of people killed every year at 300—nearly one a day. What made these creatures fearful was that they struck at the boundaries of urban civilization, attacking people on the frontier. John Cameron, an editor of the Straits Times in nineteenth-century Singapore, was “fully convinced that 365 men per annum have their lives dashed out by the crushing stroke of the tiger’s paw.”1

Charles Burton Buckley disputed Cameron’s assertion, yet offered his own statistic: “The truth of the statement that the loss of life through tigers on the island reached at one period the extent of one man every day has often been doubted; but five men in eight days, as early as 1840, seems to show that it was not improbable.”2 […] Buckley was writing or revising his entry sometime in the 1860s, when the tiger threat had diminished. He was careful to mark the distance between the 1830s and 1840s and his present (“as it was then”), during which interval the ecology of modern Singapore had undergone radical change: new roads were cutting through the jungle, like a scythe clearing a steady path into the island’s interior. [...]

Heinrich Leutemann, Unterbrochene Strassenmessung auf Singapore (Road Surveying Interrupted in Singapore), wood engraving, c.1865–85. Collection of the National Museum of Singapore, National Heritage Board

It is in this light of Singapore’s shifting ecology that we can situate Road Surveying Interrupted in Singapore, a colored lithograph, made circa 1865‒85 but referring back to a moment in the 1830s, when the tiger posed a real and present danger to the population of Singapore. In the lithograph, we see the then Government Superintendent of Public Works and Land Surveyor of Singapore, George Dromgold Coleman, attacked by a tiger. Several native convict-assistants around him are thrown back by the animal’s roaring leap, while Coleman himself—the figure daintily under the parasol at left—a bit more calmly recoils. Look too at how the surveying equipment, dead center, is dramatically toppled over; even the stool on which the machinery is placed seems to horizontally fly.

[…] The image puts us foot-first in the jungle: we are like Coleman, recoiling from the charged leap (though we also witness the attack at a slight distance, and from the side). The tiger is notably depicted in three-quarters profile, leaping both leftward and forward—as though about to burst through the picture plane itself. Collapsing the moment of the tiger’s leap and the spectrum of reactions of the convict-assistants, the picture hits us in a single blow.

Several aspects of Coleman’s encounter have a touch of the miraculous: the fact that none of the convicts were dragged away or eaten alive, for instance, or that Coleman, too, managed to escape with his life. Yet what seems particularly far-fetched—difficult to understand yet ultimately plausible—is how tigers were so unbelievable in Singapore in 1835, enough to warrant the necessity of the town-dwellers returning to the theodolite fragments to confirm the event. More than having a cautionary air (“Don’t tread too far into the jungle”), the event poses a deeper epistemological problem: what exactly did Coleman see and not see? From what was he recoiling? And what of the tiger itself—was it a figment of fear and imagination, more spectral than real? The theodolite fragments work hard to anchor both animal and event in reality. Then there is the central fact of Coleman surveying: mapping territory, part of the process of clearing the jungle and expanding into the interior. One thing the picture does is to unwittingly turn us into complicit viewer-surveyors. And finally, why does the tiger in the image seem to be attacking not the humans but the theodolite? Attacker and attacker, facing each other, aim themselves at scattered targets. […]

Panthera tigris had existed in Singapore at least as far back as a million years ago, not long after the geological beginnings of the island. They swam across the straits from the Malay Peninsula, and eventually settled on the island. But what is interesting is that they only became a presence for humans not in 1819, when the British first landed on the island, but about a decade later, in the 1830s. Buckley, for instance, cites a report stating that the first mention of tigers was in a newspaper account of September 8, 1831, “when a Chinaman was killed by one near the road leading to New Harbour, not far from the Sepoy Lines.”3 He explained the recent tiger attacks on humans thus: “it was when the gambier and pepper plantations began to extend beyond the town that tigers commenced to be so dangerous … [The Free Press in May 1839 remarked that] ‘It was singular that the settlement should have existed for about 18 years before any occasion of death by tigers was heard of, and that fatal accidents of the kind should happen now [i.e. 1839] just as the island began to be cleared of jungle, and roads carried into the interior in various directions’ [emphasis mine].”4 Already in the 1860s, there was an awareness that tiger attacks were bound up with human encroachment into the interior. […]

[T]he lithograph, I would argue, speaks to the urban unconscious of this moment in 1835. It speaks to the colonial desire to penetrate into and symbolically claim virgin territory. We see Coleman and his surveying equipment knocked over and disrupted by a tiger. (The surveying equipment is a sign of progressive technology: the Ramsden theodolite, no less, recently developed in the 1780s, had been used to map the whole of Southern Britain by triangulation—a process bound up with the politics of Enclosure in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain.) The tiger is at first the antithesis of what is surveyed: palpable and fleshy rather than something abstracted, moving and suspended in air rather than fixed on the land. Yet the animal is so real that it begins to take on the quality of a specter. It is the imagined underside of what is surveyed, the resistance to the synoptic view. […]

The appearance of tigers on the island in the 1830s was tied to shifts in the global economy. Tiger attacks, to repeat, took place on the jungle frontier, at the edge of gambier and pepper plantations. […] These plantations contributed significantly to the total value of Singapore’s trade, which was 3.625 million pounds in 1833, but had risen to 11. 6 million by 1860.5 As more and more immigrant Chinese wanted to cash in on the profits, they were eager to open up arable land in Singapore, and so the frontier was gradually pushed from the Town in the south, towards the virgin areas in the north and west. [...] Many of these planters were supported by Chinese shopkeepers and merchants in the town of Singapore, who usually claimed a portion of the future earnings until the loan was fully repaid: it was a highly capitalist enterprise. Moreover, because these crops were exhausting to the soil, and it was not worth waiting the ten or so years for the soil to become cultivable again, new plantations were continually opened. As a result, planters spread into the neighboring Malay state of Johor as well.

The plantations were worked by immigrant labor. The men most in danger of tiger attacks were Chinese workers on these plantations close to the surrounding wall of the jungle. Rather than being independent workers, these laborers were hired or half-hired servants; in other words, they were cheap, often immigrant labor who had recently landed on the island. At times both tigers and immigrant laborers seem to partake in a kind of shared symmetry. Each wanted to know what the other was doing, the better to keep their cautionary distance: “The notoriety of the island for tigers has spread far and wide, and one of the first inquiries made by new arrivals … is as to the freedom of the locality from these monsters.”6 […]

Because, again, of underreporting, we do not know exactly how many laborers were killed on these plantations or the rate of their replacement. [...] If these laborers were preyed upon by tigers, a larger form of consumption was thus taking place—[of] a revolving pool of low- or semi-wage laborers in the colonial port of Singapore for the expanding British economy. Early colonial Singapore was built on a ghostly labor. [...]

What is interesting, pace the widespread belief in the tiger’s propensity for man-eating, is that these animals do not naturally regard humans as prey. In fact, the tiger normally exhibits a deep-rooted aversion to man, and avoids human contact. [...] “At some stage during the tiger’s prehistorical interaction with humans,” ecologist Charles McDougal writes, “avoidance of bipedal man became an adaptive behavioral strategy.”7 There were three historical exceptions when human activities disrupted this symbiotic relationship between tigers and their natural prey: South China, Manchuria, and nineteenth-century Singapore. [...]

The print is careful to show the tiger in three-quarters view, coming a little bit forward in space, again as though about to attack Coleman—and us. Yet tigers do not attack from the front, preferring to attack their prey from behind, after a short dash from good cover.8 The kill is often made with a crushing blow to the nape of the neck. Moreover, walking in a normal upright posture, a human does not represent the “correct” form of prey for a tiger. This explains why often only humans who change their bodily posture—for example, rubber-tappers who bend down—present a more appetizing visual signal to a tiger.

[T]he Coleman image engages in a kind of mythification: in its portrayal of a fearsome, attacking beast, it pits the human at odds with the tiger. But it also sets up an ontological distance between human and animal. Predator and prey are at opposite ends—the better for us viewers to experience the shock of the encounter. Yet even as the image is keen to posit a fundamental separation of man and beast, both creatures were more intimately related—bound together in a symbiotic knot—up to and including the nineteenth century.

Before the nineteenth century in South East Asia, prior to modernity, tigers lived in symbiotic harmony with humans. In regions of Java, Sumatra, and probably the Malay Peninsula, indigenous people refused to kill tigers who had done nothing wrong because they were seen as useful in keeping in check the number of animals which damaged crops, such as the wild boar. Tigers were also creatures that stood at the border between human and animal, and between the living and the dead. First, they were the embodiments of one’s ancestors, and could in this sense offer protection and advice to those on this (human) side of existence. The British official T. J. Newbold observed that “the Malays of the Peninsula, as well as their brethren of Sumatra ... have a superstitious aversion to slaying tigers, which are considered in many instances to be receptacles for the souls of departed human beings, nor can they [be] prevailed upon to make any attempt to do so until the tiger has committed the first aggression, by carrying off a man or some of their cattle.”9 […]

In the Malay Peninsula, the ancestral tiger was regarded as a keramat, a being credited with supernatural powers. Such animals would “treat the human inhabitants of the district honoured by their presence with a benign consideration bordering on condescension, and a child might drive away a kramat [sic] tiger that strayed too near the cattle-folds.”10 A child might drive away an ancestral tiger—testimony to the benign and protective relationship between tiger and man.

[T]igers could also shade into human form, and vice versa. Known as “weretigers,” these creatures possessed a shamanic power, and interacted with humans by way of riddles and trickster-like encounters.11 Most Westerners were skeptical of the possibility of humans to take on animal form: “For all I know,” [the anthropologist I. H. N.] Evans ruefully admits, “all tigers may be thought to be human beings who have assumed an animal shape.”12 Newbold, noticing this same phenomenon in the 1830s, was less skeptical, though ultimately careful to distance himself from the villagers’ beliefs: “They [i.e. the villagers] [emphasis mine] will point out men that have the facility of transforming themselves at pleasure into tigers, or are doomed nightly to become tigers, returning to their natural forms by day; this process is termed ‘Jadi Jadian.’ The belief in Jadi Jadian is still strong, although powerfully contended against by their Mohammedan priests.”13 […]

We will never know for sure if humans were really able to turn into tigers; what we can say with certainty is that tigers, as mythic reality, played a powerful role in boundary maintenance. They were transitional creatures, spiritual in-betweens who variously cautioned, cajoled, and assisted humans in relating to the life-world. [The cultural anthropologist] Robert Wessing relates an anecdote of an informant who had a relative. As this relative grew old

What this informant is narrating is not simply the death of his relative, but the seamless transition between human and animal realms, and between the living and the dead. His relative was less leaving the human realm so much as returning to the animal one. And the narration of this tale—moving inexorably from sentence to sentence—gives a sense of the man’s growing weariness not simply of old age, but of humanity as such. There is also an unexpected moment when the tale doubles back on itself, evoking not just the elder’s world-weariness but (more profoundly) the informant-listener’s own acceptance of the departure of his relative into the animal world. As much as the telling of the tale brings the informant to a humbling acceptance of the death of his relative, it also envelops us as readers into the scene, the binding reality of that transformation.

It is not a coincidence that weretiger stories had an urban or commercial aspect. The oldest weretiger story from Melaka in the fifteenth century refers to markets, and in most of these stories weretigers are itinerant pedlars, merchandise sellers, wage-laborers, poor people, or beggars—never peasants (we can say that all tiger stories take place from the vantage point of the peasant—she is always the imagined listener). While the weretiger is usually seen as an outsider, a physically disfigured and poor vagrant, it is better to think of them as operating on the fringes of civilization. They were seen to live in villages of their own, and every so often, they had to travel to the world of humankind, crossing a “river”—the Styx-like border between life and death—where they made the shift from animal to human. The porous relationship between man and animal, between civilization and wilderness, was thus an intrinsic part of boundary maintenance. Yet this urban-commercial aspect of the weretiger is again not surprising, not simply because these animals had a role in boundary policing, but because tigers are themselves, ecologically, boundary creatures—they inhabit not the forest but the border zone between forest and arable lands, which is also the preferred habitat of wild boar and deer. Unbroken tracts of virgin forest (for example, those that cover the typical rainforest zone around the equator) are actually unattractive to tigers due to the scarcity in these places of ground-dwelling herbivorous and omnivorous animals, on which the tiger feeds. Surprisingly, this border zone is created by humans, and it is partial deforestation that creates ecotones attractive to game. […] Not distant beasts of nature, [tigers] are instead permanent spectral embodiments of urban civilization, conjured up by and for us. What if the tiger in Coleman’s image wanted such human encroachment?

In his book Monster of God, David Quammen writes of the inverse relationship between centralized, imperial power and the health of alpha predator populations:

What is striking about his thesis is that, for him, killing lions from horseback and such forms of aristocratic hunting is more than just a symbolic sport, and more than just commerce; it is rather “one aspect of a campaign by which the interlopers, the stealers of landscape, try to make themselves comfortable, safe and supreme in unfamiliar surroundings.”15 His larger point is that, in our unblinking extermination of alpha predators like tigers and lions, we have lost the ability to see ourselves as predators. Colonial violence is not only the stuff of military conquests and civilian subjection—it is a prior, deeper, and more invisible kind, one bound up with our attitude to nature. What characterizes modernity is the one-dimensional human hostility towards alpha predators like tigers: we are unable to see them as having any ecological function other than threatening the lives of “peaceable” humans. Any structural, balancing ecological effect of the tiger on human-animal populations is quickly forgotten with the planting of that first tree, the laying of the first brick and stone. Colonization is not just the conquest of land, not just the formation of disciplined subjects; it is also the war conducted against rival animal populations. “You haven’t conquered a people, and their place,” Quammen writes, “until you’ve exterminated their resident monsters.”16 […]

How interesting, then, that British attitudes towards animals were already formed in late eighteenth-century Java. Raffles, then British Lieutenant Governor of Bengkulu, on a visit to nearby Bukit Kabut, remarked in 1818: “One of the villagers told me that his father and grandfather were carried off by tigers, and there is scarcely a family that has not lost some of its members by them. In many parts the people would seem to have resigned the empire to these animals [emphasis mine], taking but few precautions against them.” Then: “I am doing all I can to resume the empire of man [emphasis mine], and, having made open war against the whole race of wild and ferocious animals, I hope we shall be able to reside on the Hill of Mists [Bukit Kabut] without danger from their attacks.”17 Conquest first occurs metaphorically: Raffles needs to figure these provinces as dangerously animal, wild, and unfree, in order to stake his flag on the superior vantage point of the Hill of Mists (the term “tiger-infested” was frequently used as an epithet for an underpopulated and unsafe area outside the city limits). One empire can take effective shape only through the destruction of another.

Urban space does not simply exist; the land first needs to be tamed. By the time the British arrived in Singapore in 1819, their approach to land and nature had already been determined. All it needed was the complementary will and the easy compliance of the population for the opening up of that territory. As soon as tigers “appeared” to and for humans, their very existence needed to be wished away. The island was, quite simply, not big enough for two alpha predators.

Yet the Coleman image forces us to take another look, for it is more than just a spectral augur of the destruction of inward territory, that first moment of the colonization of the interior. Notice the parasol above and behind Coleman: a decorative accessory used in illustrated global atlases since the seventeenth century as a sign of royalty and nobility, it was also “a visual metonym for the concept of difference itself.” Here the parasol signifies Coleman’s identity as an “alien noble.”18 It is the impracticality of the parasol—its sheer superfluity in this jungle—that secures (and unravels) Coleman’s power in this foreign environment. The parasol/umbrella could also mean differently. Buckley tells us that umbrellas were used as markers on the graves of tiger victims.19 Not only does the parasol then comically fail to protect Coleman from the elements, it is a harbinger of his own death. In the picture, Coleman is already dead—or better, undead. He is caught frozen, precariously poised on a rift in time. Yet Coleman may be mimicking what the tiger already is: we know that tigers were sometimes taken for vampires: “On [a] Tuesday evening [in 1843], a Chinaman, while engaged in constructing a tiger pit at the back of Mr. Ballestier’s [sic] sugar plantation, was pounced upon by a tiger, who, after killing him and sucking his blood, walked into the jungle leaving the body behind.”20 It is the hideousness of that transgression—not respectfully eating the prey but sucking its blood and leaving the body behind—that proves most offensive. And incomprehensible: vampirism took the tiger out of ecological animality, and placed it in the realm of the inhuman.21 [...]

Look again at the Coleman lithograph, especially at the convicts who sprawl and shield themselves from the tiger’s strike. Nameless and (those on the right) faceless, in their very fright and fall they become animal—like the leaping beast in their lack of composure and irrationality (one of them is eerily directly under the tiger, as though crumpling under its weight). The convicts of course serve to figure that aspect of pre-humanity and bare life in Coleman himself, so calm and secure on the left. So free. [...]

What bears contemplation is not the simpler metaphorical usages of the animal, then—not our teddy bears, not the emblems of our petrol stations—but rather the prior, pre-political separation between humans and animals: it is our primordial separation from beasts, from alpha predators like tigers, that have constituted our existence as “humans.” With animals we live, and to animals we circle back. Only by being poised on the uncertain edge of our possible extinction as humans that a discussion of animality can responsibly begin. It is this before-and-after topological space of intensity that concerns us, and is what is so interesting about the Coleman image. On the surface, it is an adventure story: Coleman’s shock and surprise at the attacking tiger, and his quick recovery and poise. But it is also about how the tiger consumes everything in its path. It is the cannibalistic master metaphor that incorporates surveying technology, agricultural capitalism, and humanity as such.22 The image is about the very hinge between the human and the animal: we are brought back to 1835, the moment of man’s encroachment into the interior, the beginnings of capitalism, and the origin of the separation between the human and the animal. We see the irreparable breach in the picture—man facing off against animal—but also the continual circling between them. I want to think of Coleman dreaming not only of the spectral tiger, but also of his own extinction. [...]

This essay was first printed in Lucy Davis (ed.), FOCAS Forum on Contemporary Art & Society, Volume 6. The Substation Singapore/documenta 12 Magazines Project, 2007, pp. 124–50. Abridged by the author for this occasion.