Edward Horace Man and his sister, Amy. © Horniman Museum: London

...the sort of man who might send four or five entire Nicobar villages with all the inhabitants beside.

[Correspondence between H. Moseley (Professor in Human Anatomy, University of Oxford) and E. B. Tylor (Reader in Anthropology, University of Oxford), c. 1890.]

Edward Man arrived at Port Blair in 1869 and went on to spend most of his working life on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. He held various positions, including Chief Commissioner. He took many photographs of the people he met and, a keen collector, gathered hundreds of objects from the area.

During the period in which Man collected, the Andamanese were considered to inhabit the bottom rung of an imagined evolutionary ladder. Man was a keen amateur anthropologist and realised he was well placed to gather raw data about the indigenous inhabitants of the islands in the form of notes, observations, photographs and objects. He sent back this information to western institutions and individuals, who then applied interpretations informed by the emerging science of anthropology.