author
Charles Hose
1863–1929
A restless collector of stories, wildlife, and firsthand experience, this British administrator spent decades in Borneo and turned what he saw there into vivid writing. His work bridges travel, natural history, and early ethnography, with a strong sense of place throughout.
1 Audiobook
The Pagan Tribes of Borneo A Description of Their Physical Moral and Intellectual Condition, with Some Discussion of Their Ethnic Relations
by Charles Hose, William McDougall
About the author
Born in Hertfordshire in 1863, Charles Hose was a British colonial administrator, zoologist, and ethnologist best known for his long service in Sarawak, on the island of Borneo. He was educated at Felsted and studied at Cambridge before entering the service of the Rajah of Sarawak in the 1880s.
During more than twenty years in Borneo, he became closely associated with the region’s peoples, landscapes, and wildlife. He collected zoological specimens, wrote about natural history, and documented local cultures in ways that made his name known both to readers of travel writing and to scholars interested in Southeast Asia.
Hose later published books drawn from those years, including work on the peoples and environments of Borneo. He died in 1929, and he is still remembered for writing that combines exploration, observation, and a lasting record of life in Sarawak at the turn of the twentieth century.