Jungle stories from ‘Dok’ Kostermans (1906–94), prisoner of war on the Burma–Thailand railway

Abstract

While living in Bogor in Indonesia during the mid-1980s, I became aware of an eccentric character who everyone referred to as ‘Dok’ Kostermans. I had heard a number of stories about Kostermans’s World War II (WWII) experiences and how he was lucky to have survived. There were also stories about his more recent jungle expeditions to remote tropical areas of the Malaysian Archipelago. He was a prodigious plant collector and highly regarded in his field of botanical taxonomy. With his reputation preceding him, when I met him one night at a birthday party, I was surprised to be introduced to a tall lanky man wearing a red wig. The occasion called for dress-up and he had come as Harpo Marx. Kostermans, then in his seventy-eighth year, exuded good humour, a zest for life and physical stamina that never seemed to diminish.