Darwin's Ghosts

by Rebecca Stott

  Whether Darwin had meant to fire a shot across the young collector’s bows, or whether he was being genuinely encouraging, is impossible to say for certain. But Wallace, always slow to pick up the signs of rudeness, was delighted to have received a letter from the naturalist he most admired. For him, Darwin was an ally, and Sir Charles Lyell, with his clever rebuttals of Lamarckian transmutation, a dragon to be slain. Wallace’s entire mission depended now on being able to overturn Lyell’s arguments.

  Darwin’s letter, the very fact of it, galvanized Wallace into writing. He composed four essays for publication in July 1857, all tackling different aspects of the species question, challenging Lyell, presenting evidence, and paving the way for a bolder set of claims. The Sarawak paper was only a statement of the theory, he wrote to Bates, not its development. That was still to come. He was, he added, now writing a book on the subject. It was the first time he had told anyone about the book. He wrote the four essays at white-hot speed while preparing and preserving specimens for hours during the day and keeping swarms of ants at bay. His specimens had to be stored on shelves suspended by ropes from the ceiling to keep the ants from attacking the skins and eye sockets of the dead animals as they awaited preservation. When Ali accidentally left a palm frond touching the shelves, the ants climbed it and swarmed over the treasures, ravaging everything.

  In “On the Natural History of the Aru Islands” Wallace attacked Lyell’s theory of special creation head-on. But though Wallace’s ideas were thrilling, heretical, and revolutionary in themselves, they were buried in dense technical prose, and his essays bore dull, unpromising titles, perhaps because he was acutely aware of his outside status as a collector rather than a theorist. He was trying to sound right: professional, detached, objective. In “Note on the Theory of Permanent and Geographical Varieties” he trod very carefully. “As this subject is now attracting much attention among naturalists and particularly among entomologists,” he wrote, “I venture to offer the following observations, which, without advocating either side of the question, are intended to point out a difficulty, or rather a dilemma, its advocates do not appear to have perceived.”

  Having set his house in order, sorted his files, and sent his letters and papers ahead, Wallace sailed for the Spice Islands on November 19, 1857, on a Dutch steamer, his book forming in his mind and still engaged in an imagined conversation with Charles Lyell, the question of the origin of species continuing to torment him. He was again struck by the marked contrast of vegetation and animal life on the archipelago’s islands: those to the east of Bali were barren with a few low, scrubby plants, while the Spice Islands were covered with dense green forests. He had chosen as his base Ternate, a small island that had been the center of the Spanish and Portuguese clove trade since the sixteenth century. It was a landscape scattered with the overgrown and earthquake-shattered ruins of ancient forts, mosques, and sultans’ palaces.

  The “king” of Ternate, a wealthy Dutchman named Duivenboden, who owned half of the main town, also called Ternate, and ships and more than a hundred slaves, gave Wallace a house five minutes from the market and the beach. The house was in need of repair and furniture, but it had a deep well and a wilderness of fruit trees. Through January 1858, Wallace and Ali feasted on mangoes, milk, fresh bread, meat, and vegetables and tallied up their collections and specimens from the archipelago. Wallace sent the list to Bates proudly. It included 2,000 moths and 3,700 beetles and amounted to 8,540 species in total.

  But though Ternate was comfortable, well stocked with food and resources, and had provided Wallace with a perfect base for his hunting, it was the neighboring Gilolo that captured his imagination, an island shaped like a starfish with four densely forested arms. No one had ever collected there. In early January, Wallace sailed seven miles across the narrow channel to spend a month collecting on the island, finally settling in Dodinga, a village located on a narrow isthmus separating the north and south peninsulas, directly opposite Ternate. It was guarded by a Dutch corporal and four Javanese soldiers who lived in the remains of a small ancient Portuguese fort that had been rent almost in two by earthquakes. One of the first things that struck Wallace, again, was the absolute difference between the two primary indigenous races—the Malay and the Papuan. “Here then,” he wrote, “I had discovered the exact boundary line between the Malay and the Papuan races, and at a spot where no other writer had expected it.”

  But though the month of February may have promised the most fruitful collecting expedition Wallace had yet undertaken, he had not counted on malaria. Within days of his arrival, he experienced the first fevers of the recurrent attacks that would paralyze him physically for the best part of the month and force him to leave the physical work to Ali. His mind wandered every day while he waited for the fever to pass; memories crowded into his brain, alongside fragments of books he had once read in dusty, drafty libraries and bookshops in England and Wales. The debilitating malaria attacks worked like alchemy in his brain, stirring the depths of his memory, providing new arrangements and juxtapositions of ideas. The answer surfaced suddenly like a wreck from the ocean bed.

  The revolutionary essay he produced over the following evenings, still weak from fever, was written in imagined and excited conversation with both Darwin and Lyell and was called “On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type.” He could have sent it directly to one of the zoological journals that might have published it quickly, but he knew it needed an advocate, someone who would defend it. In those long days of illness, Darwin had become a fellow traveler to him, a correspondent and ally.

  Wallace had learned to be patient. He knew he could not receive a reply from Darwin for at least three months. As soon as he had recovered his strength, he returned to work, making plans and gathering provisions for the next expedition—beeswax, spoons, string, penknives, wide-mouthed collecting jars, and food. In April, as the boat carrying his letter moved ever closer to Europe, Wallace sailed to an island called Dorey, off the mainland of northern New Guinea. There he suffered the usual cluster of minor disasters that made him feel increasingly as if the wildlife of the Malay Archipelago were taking its revenge on him. “I was the first European who had lived alone on this great island,” he wrote proudly, “but partly owing to an accident which confined me to the house for a month, and partly because the locality was not a good one, I did not get the rare species of birds of paradise I had expected.… The weather had been unusually wet, and the place was unhealthy.” A wound on his ankle ulcerated in the wet conditions, and one by one his assistants fell ill with malaria. Immobilized again, this time for a further month, Wallace read Dumas’s novels and back copies of the Family Herald. When the schooner finally took the weakened men back to Ternate, there were no letters waiting for him from Kent.

  Back in England, when Wallace’s letter finally reached Darwin at Down House in June, Darwin was devastated. “Your words have come true with a vengeance—that I should be forestalled,” he wrote to Lyell, his syntax contorted with anxiety. “I never saw a more striking coincidence; if Wallace had my MS sketch written out in 1842 [Darwin began his first “pencil sketch” of his species theory in 1842 and completed the full 230-page abstract in 1844] he could not have made a better short abstract! Even his terms now stand as heads of my chapters.… So all my originality will be smashed, though my book, if it will ever have value, will not be deteriorated; as all the labour consists in the application of the theory.” When no letter came from Lyell in reply, he wrote again a week later asking for advice—should he publish quickly; could he do so honorably? “I would far rather burn my whole book,” he wrote, “than that he or any other man should think that I had behaved in a paltry spirit. Do you not think his having sent me this sketch ties my hands? … If I could honourably publish I would state that I was induced now to publish a sketch … from Wallace having sent me an outline of his conclusions. We differ only [in] that I was led to my views from what artificial selection had don
e for domestic animals.”

  He added a postscript: “It seems hard on me that I should be thus compelled to lose my priority of many years’ standing, but I cannot feel at all sure that this alters the justice of the case.” He appealed to Lyell to determine where that justice lay. Lyell sent the paper to Hooker and assembled an emergency meeting of the Linnaean Society in which to present the material of both men for publication: Wallace’s paper of 1858 and Darwin’s unpublished 230-page essay of 1844.

  Meanwhile, out in New Guinea in the middle of June, Wallace, who had recovered from his ulcerated ankle and returned to collecting beetles, fell sick with another fever that was followed by “such a soreness of the whole inside of my mouth, tongue and gums, that for many days I could put nothing solid between my lips.” Two of his Malay hunters and assistants fell ill, one with fever, the other with dysentery. As he and Ali tended the sick boys, ants continued to swarm, building a nest on the roof, making papery tunnels down every post, carrying away insects from under his nose as he worked on them, and biting him day and night; blowflies settled in swarms on his bird skins, laying eggs that hatched maggots in hours. Jumaat, an eighteen-year-old Muslim boy hunter from Bouton, died from a fever on June 26. The sea journey back to Ternate, which should have taken five days, took seventeen because the winds would not fill the sails or blew from the west rather than the east.

  In England, Darwin’s baby son, Charles, was dangerously ill with scarlet fever; he died on June 28. His wife and daughter were ill with diphtheria. Darwin asked others to make the necessary decisions about Wallace’s paper. He had no strength or heart to do so. When both sets of papers were presented to the Linnaean Society for a judgment, the assembled members agreed that Darwin had priority. That same day, an exhausted and seriously thin Wallace was walking the deck of a prau watching for a wind that would not come.

  When Joseph Hooker remembered the occasion many years later, he recalled feeling that a battle had begun there in the Linnaean Society that day:

  The interest excited was intense, but the subject was too novel and too ominous for the old school to enter the lists, before armouring. After the meeting it was talked over with bated breath: Lyell’s approval, and perhaps in a small way mine, as his lieutenant in the affair, rather overawed the Fellows, who would otherwise have flown out against the doctrine. We had, too, the vantage ground of being familiar with the authors and their theme.

  When Hooker wrote to him to explain, Wallace’s reaction to the verdict was famously measured and professional. If he felt badly treated, we have no record of it. He wrote to Hooker from Ternate on October 6, 1858:

  Allow me in the first place sincerely to thank yourself and Sir Charles Lyell for your kind offices on this occasion, and to assure you of the gratification afforded me both by the course you have pursued, and the favourable opinions of my essay which you so kindly expressed. I cannot but consider myself a favoured party in this matter, because it has hitherto been too much the practice in cases of this sort to impute all merit to the first discoverer of a new fact or a new theory, and little or none to any other party who may, quite independently, have arrived at the same result a few years or a few hours later.… It is evident that the time has now arrived when these and similar views will be promulgated and must be fairly discussed.

  Wallace appears to have been delighted to have been part of the process by which Darwin had been forced to publish; he had no doubt that Darwin’s book was more thorough than his own and that Darwin had the right to claim priority.

  All of Wallace’s early letters express satisfaction at being recognized by such eminent men. It seems certain that given the choice between living through the public opprobrium that Darwin suffered, the outrage of bishops, and the war that had now been openly declared between naturalists in England, and continuing to hunt for terra incognita or as yet undiscovered species, Wallace would have chosen the latter. Over the years, Wallace told the story of his discovery of natural selection and its fate at the hands of the gentlemen of the Linnaean Society so many times that he rarely questioned it or considered that there might have been anything unfair about what had happened. In his autobiography he called his discovery a “sudden intuition” that had been “hastily written” and that bore no comparison to the “prolonged labours of Darwin, who had reached the same point twenty years before me, and had worked continuously during that long period in order that he might be able to present the theory to the world with such a body of systematized facts and arguments as would compel conviction.” It was the compelling of conviction that was yet to be accomplished, increment by increment, argument by argument. Both men were heretics and infidels after all, just different kinds who behaved in different ways.

  And what of Ali? Once Wallace had left Sumatra by mail steamer in 1862, what did Ali remember of his former master? Did he talk of his godlessness, or his heresy, or his fine hunting skills? To Ali, Wallace was a man like himself, making a living by hunting and selling animal skins, but also a man of wisdom and knowledge who asked questions that made the world bigger and older. If Wallace had talked to him about how new beetles and lizards were coming into being all the time, through a process of constant destruction and adaptation too slow for the eye to see, if he had told Ali that animals and humans were all in competition for land, that nature worked through competition for food and resources, and that was how new species came into being, infinitely slowly, limbs lengthening, feet webbing, beaks curving, could he, as a young Muslim boy, have accepted that way of seeing as truth? No doubt Ali held all of those competing explanations together in his head and continued to puzzle it out for himself; he might not have thought of Wallace’s theory and the truth of the Qur’an as in opposition but might instead have considered them both possible truths, possible miracles. Birds of paradise were gifts of Allah, given to adorn the earth for man; but did Ali ever lie awake wondering and imagining how they had come to be over millions of years?

  A tree fern from Wallace’s The Malay Archipelago.

  Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago (1869)

  In 1907, when the twenty-three-year-old Harvard zoologist Thomas Barbour traveled to the Dutch East Indies with his wife, they had an unexpected encounter in Ternate:

  I was stopped in the street one day as my wife and I were preparing to climb up to the Crater Lake. With us were Ah Woo with his butterfly net, Indit and Bandoung, our well-trained Javanese collectors, with shotguns, cloth bags and a vasculum for carrying the birds. We were stopped by a wizened old Malayan. I can see him now, with a faded blue fez on his head. He said, “I am Ali Wallace.” I knew at once that there stood before me Wallace’s faithful companion of many years, who not only helped him collect but nursed him when he was sick. We took his photograph and sent it to Wallace when we got home. He wrote me a delightful letter acknowledging it and reminiscing over the time when Ali had saved his life, nursing him through a terrific attack of malaria. This letter I have managed to lose, to my eternal chagrin.

  Epilogue

  If Charles Darwin had been able to follow some of the men on his list into ancient Lesbos or eighteenth-century Paris or Cairo, if he had had time to linger there and ask them questions, he would have been struck by the astonishing kinship that existed between himself and his predecessors; perhaps he might even have been moved enough by their hard work, courage, and iconoclasm to become less anxious about his own claim to priority. As he collected information about them for his “Historical Sketch” between 1860 and 1863 and measured their ideas about species and mutability against his own, he did not know that within a hundred years almost all of them would have become virtually invisible to history, and that their invisibility would be directly related to his own rise to scientific sainthood.

  Darwin would have recognized his own story in the struggles of his predecessors. Like Aristotle and Jahiz and Grant and Wallace, Darwin was a maverick; he was an intellectual gadfly whose curiosity was insatiable; he had a passion for collecting be
etles or barnacles, and he pursued the answers to large-scale questions in the minutiae of species difference. In his search for answers he roamed across disciplines, for he knew that new knowledge often appeared in strange and unpredictable places. He valued his friendships with similarly obsessive men and women who would spar with him, challenge his conclusions, and not take him too seriously. Like Aristotle, Maillet, Geoffroy, Grant, and Wallace, everything he had previously understood about nature had been transformed by a long sea voyage. He knew about the mysteries of serendipity; he knew about the profound influence of chance encounters with passionate men such as Robert Grant; and like Abraham Trembley, he knew how powerful microscopes could make new truths visible.

  Just as Aristotle, Jahiz, Leonardo, Maillet, Grant, and Wallace did, Darwin frequently valued the specialized knowledge of local people—beekeepers, pigeon breeders, orchid growers—above the theorized knowledge of scholars. He understood the value and beauty of a hunch; he knew how to pursue such hunches when they were no more than half glimpsed; and he knew that no matter how much he feared the consequences of publishing his heretical ideas, and as much as that fear often made him procrastinate, there would be no stopping him from pursuing the truth of his theory into eventual controversial publication.

  Darwin might have noticed differences between himself and them, too. He would have acknowledged that many of his predecessors did not have substantial private incomes like his own that gave him time to work and intellectual independence. Some, like Wallace, Jahiz, Chambers, and Grant, struggled with poverty in their early years and had to pursue their scientific obsessions late at night or against the thundering of a printing press. He would have admired their achievements all the more for that. Most of his predecessors also lived in large cosmopolitan cities that gave them opportunities to converse with foreigners who had different ideas or ways of seeing the world. Darwin, often struggling with illness or simply shy of company, had to bring such people to him at Down House in Kent or maintain far-ranging conversations across vast distances by letter.