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DR. HAGERUPS PHOTOGRAPHS FROM NIAS:
The Danish botanist Hagerup visited Nias in 1915. This is the first time that all his photographs fro Nias are shown.

  
 
”If you think, that botany is a peaceful occupation, and you don’t do anything but picking flowers and counting pollen, then Dr. O. Hagerup, from the Botanical Museum of Copenhagen will tell you another story, what the the doctor haven’t experienced”. That was written in a Danish newspaper in connection with Dr. Hagerups 70th birthday. And he had really experienced a lot, for instance did he participate in professor O.Olufsens expedition from Senegal to Niger in 1927, a trip that nearly cost him his life because of dysentery, the expedition is a tale of an eternal battle with the sun, and life threatening fever.
 
Hagerup started as a gardeners apprentice, and his daily work and cooperation with poor day-labourers, gave him a rare insight in other peoples lives, or as he told a journalist on his 60 years birthday “thanks to those years, did I understand the hard conditions of the lower classes. The frugality and my understanding of the simple pleasures of life helped later on, how else do you think I, as an academic would have survived among the cannibals of Sumatra?” His work as an apprentice delayed him, and it wasn’t until 1911 that he started at university. Half a year before he completed his studies, did he follow his brothers advise to visit him on Sumatra were the brother was a road engineer.  


Hagerup in Niger

His stay on Sumatra was a year filled with wonders and strange sounds and sights that he would never forget as long has he lived. He also visited Nias where he photographed. Later he told about the trip to Sumatra “That was the greatest experience. I only spoke a few words of the Batak language, I had a camp bed and a rifle and I lived the happiest life of a young scientist among the cannibals, in a jungle where no white man had put his footprints before me”. He wrote later on in 1931 “on a small island, Nias close to the cost of Sumatra lives some very wild and fierce tribes. Seamen who are familiar with the area, state that they would rather go down with their ship, mouse and men, than end up among the terrible inhabitants of this small island”.

His trip home from Sumatra was also very dramatic; the trip home brought the Young Hagerup via the United States of America that had just entered the 1 World War, Hagerup was arrested for being a German spy, the authorities had ignored the fact that Hagerup was Danish and furthermore a citizen of a neutral country. He was shortly afterwards realeased.

In 1925 he travelled to Scorebysund in Greenland with Captain Ejner Mikkelsen to found a new colony. The trip was very dramatic, the ship lost its means to radio communicate and they also lost the rudder and the rigging! They were caught in a hurricane for 4 weeks, and they barely survived.

The year after did Hagerup go to Sahara, were he worked on his doctorate thesis regarding plants hereditary changes during immense variation of temperature. The trip nearly cost him his life due to violent attacks of fever. As late as 1935 did Dr. Hagerup give up his vagabonding and roaming lifestyle and settled down and got employed at the Botanical Museum of Denmark.

He wrote about his own life when he was old “I have had a rich youth, richer than must”, “I wish nothing undone, after a short period as a freethinker in my youth, I have now found my peace in Christianity, and I look at the youth today with compassion, as our ship to Greenland they are in stormy waters, rootless and marked by the uncertainty that two world wars have created.  

The photographs that are shown here, has never before been publicised by the National Museum of Denmark. They are kindly lend to the museum by the ever helpfully daughter of Dr. Hagerup, Ruth Hagerup.


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 

  
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