Into the heart of Borneo: An account of a journey made in 1983 to the mountains of Batu Tiban with James Fenton

This is a classically-shaped travel a very long river voyage into the far interior of a tropical jungle towards an unexplored mountain range. A journey inspired by Joseph Conrad, it is framed by a knowledge of the great Borneo naturalists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Alfred Russel Wallace, Charles Hose and William McDougall, Robert Shelford. It includes a changing portrait of the greatest English poet of his generation, James Fenton, a jungle in himself. Sponsored by the Sunday Times, advised and equipped by 22 SAS, and setting out with the blessing of the University of Oxford, the British Museum (Natural History) and the Harvard University Museum of Comparative Zoology, the two-man expedition, with three Sea Dyak trackers, reached, much to their surprise, the Tiban massif in the very centre of Borneo, an area unvisited since Mjoberg’s expedition (and then only from the Indonesian side) in 1926. Redmond O’Hanlon writes with wit, and wears his learning lightly.