Ring of Fire

by Lawrence Blair; Lorne Blaire

  The voyage from Europe was a hazardous undertaking, with fairly poor odds on returning at all, let alone with a holdful of spice. The island aromas also came tinged with scents of the dark unconscious. To run amok, for instance, comes from amok, the island term for the ‘killing madness’, or a frenzied thirst for blood. The early spice traders also encountered the daunting ‘home team’ of defending mariners, the Bugis tribe, who so terrified them with their skill and ferocity that the word ‘Boogie man’ entered our language, and still haunts our dreams.

  Marco Polo seems to have been the first European actually to have made it there and back. He was laughed to scorn for returning with tales of people who actually ate the nests of birds, which they boiled over fires of burning black stones – seven centuries before the same black stones were discovered and harnessed in Europe to fuel the Industrial Revolution. Many of the subsequent early navigators recorded a brush with the southern archipelago, long before its general shape was known. Magellan’s tattered fleet, on its historic circumnavigation, lost a further ship in Indonesian waters while limping home after Magellan himself had been killed in a skirmish in the Philippines. Captain Cook broached the forbidding shores of west New Guinea, and lost several men there in a fight with the Asmat cannibals, under circumstances similar to those in which he would later lose his own life in the Hawaiian Islands. More fortunate early encounters are recorded by such master mariners as Sir Francis Drake and the notorious Captain Bligh. It was after being cast adrift in a longboat by the mutinous crew of Bounty that Bligh managed to make his monumental open-boat voyage with a handful of faithfuls to safety, and ultimately revenge, on the Indonesian island of Timor. Drake, on the other hand, the piratical darling of Good Queen Bess, returned from a transglobal raiding adventure with a holdful of Indonesian spices, and paraded through the streets with his crew bedecked in the captured finery of the most astounding oriental silks and damasks ever to have been seen in England. Drake’s most treasured Indonesian memento was a mummified ‘mermaid’ from Sumatra, which aroused much excitement as the proof that mythological beings were alive and well in the Eastern seas, even if their mortal remains oddly resembled the resinous union of a fish and a monkey. But we believed a lot in those days; protected by our innocence and by our conviction in our one God, under whose banner we could righteously pillage the world.

  Less practical perhaps than spices, but also commanding the highest prices in the auction houses of Europe, were the precious shells which came from the Moluccas – the Kingdoms of the Spice Islands. Wonderfully bizarre, compared to the local species, they seemed to symbolize a sudden awakening from the drab monotones of medieval Christianity to a much richer world than had previously been imagined. Wherever we travelled amongst the islands we would collect rare and exotic shells which became for us like fragile clues in a paper-chase of changing life forms as we moved across cultural as well as zoographical boundaries.

  The birth of science, and its bitterest pill, the Darwinian Theory of Evolution, was to be oddly influenced by Indonesia, and can be partly traced through the subtle relationship between Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, which recent evidence strongly suggests produced not only one of the most revolutionary achievements in the history of science but also one of its most intriguing deceptions. For it is now quite certain that Darwin, who gives no credit to Wallace in his Origin of Species, would have been quite unable to write it without his essential contribution. Far more than a further unsavoury tale of professional infighting for accreditation amongst the greats, the outcome – on the principle that the discoverer leaves his imprint on his discovery – has profoundly affected the subsequent tenor of both science and the humanities.4

  Darwin was a member of the landed aristocracy who had flirted with theology at Cambridge before becoming a highly respected naturalist. He undertook only one expedition, travelling for five years aboard Beagle with all the modern conveniences of the day, and spent the next 45 years as a hypochondriacal recluse in his English country mansion, churning out voluminous erudite papers for the scientific establishment, while privately pursuing his haunting suspicion that species diverged to become other species. He was fully aware of the blasphemy implicit in suggesting that human beings were not created by God as separate and distinct from nature, and of the turmoil that such a theory would release on the Victorian world. It is plain from his private correspondence that, even if he had discovered by himself the mechanism by which species diverge, he had no intention of publishing until after his death. But it was the arrival of the brilliant paper from the much younger, socially insignificant Alfred Russel Wallace which forced his hand – affording Darwin the full posthumous credit for Wallace’s discovery, and the bequeathing to subsequent generations of a ‘Darwinian bias’ which is considerably less enlightened than Wallace’s own interpretation. ‘Survival of the strongest’, for instance, and its tooth-and-claw ethic which became associated with Social Darwinism, is not at all what Wallace had meant by ‘survival of the fittest’, where fitness was defined by him as a far subtler and more complex weave of forces than mere pugnacious self-interest. A further major difference was in the two men’s attitudes towards tribal peoples whom Wallace recognized as fascinating equals, rather than as ‘a lower order of the human race’, which was Darwin’s perhaps unwitting contribution to 20th-century racism.

  Wallace was a different animal who, through a combination of circumstances and personal courage, was thrust into broader horizons. Against Darwin’s five years in Beagle, Wallace had spent four years exploring the Amazon basin, followed by eight years, largely alone, travelling throughout the Indonesian islands expressly seeking a solution to the evolutionary divergence of species. He collected what was to amount to over 125,000 species of flora and fauna, many of which were entirely new to science. He lived cheek-by-jowl with the peoples of the region, absorbing their environment and languages. He sailed with the Bugis tribe to the haunts of the Greater Bird of Paradise, and one night, delirious with fever beneath the volcanoes of Ternate, he had a sudden vision of the entire dynamic of natural selection. Many of the explorers of the time were afflicted and often killed by malaria, or the ‘ague’ as it was called. ‘Those who have had the advantage of experience in such matters’, wrote Austen Layard, a contemporary of Wallace who had discovered the ancient city of Nineveh, ‘know that one of the results of fever is a considerable excitement of the brain, consequent audacity and no small additional loquacity only limited by physical debility.’

  Frontispiece of Wallace's masterful Malay Archipelago.

  It was in such a state of mind, suffering from malaria in the Moluccas, that Wallace had his vision. ‘During one of these fits,’ he later recalled,5 ‘while again considering the problem of the origin of species… there suddenly flashed upon me the idea of the survival of the fittest.’

  In this ague-altered state Wallace perceived the whole symphony of evolutionary change with such immediacy that he feared it would escape him like a dream before he could write it down. Over the following days between attacks he managed to pen his brilliant 15-page paper called ‘On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type’, and mailed it to Darwin, whom he had never met, with shy requests for his comments.

  The ‘Ternate’ paper threw Darwin into a panic. He suddenly risked losing the crowning glory of a lifetime’s secret endeavour to an unknown malarial ‘fly-catcher’, as the humble naturalist-explorers were known. After weeks of private anguish followed by questionable closed-door lobbying of the leading minds of the Royal College of Science, Darwin found himself forced to go public on the issue of evolution for the first time, when both their papers were read at the Linnean Society of London on that momentous July evening of 1858. What is seldom revealed in the history books, though perfectly easy to verify, is that Darwin’s contribution was less a paper than a rambling series of notes which contained nothing novel, whereas Wallace’s ‘Ternate’ paper was the first complete exposit
ion in writing of ‘Descent and Divergence with modification through variation and Natural Selection’ – which is the very kernel of what has become known as the ‘Darwinian’ theory of evolution. Although some kink in the confluence of timing and temperament may have robbed Wallace of his posthumous fame, it may also have robbed the rest of us, through this century of science, of a broader view of the hidden forces of life.

  Wallace, strongly influenced by the multi-dimensional environment and circumstances under which he had perceived the Theory, had also anticipated its very limitations, which are only now being explored by ‘new’ Darwinists and modern theorists of evolution. To him, the ‘checks and balances’ of Natural Selection were only some of the forces operating in what he saw as the evolution of spirit or mind through matter. Recognizing amongst the life-filled Indonesian islands a way of being and mind as alien as it was complementary to Western thought, Wallace’s writings were also amongst the first to gleam with an enlightened futurism. He was amongst the earliest modern scientists to confront seriously the supernatural dimensions of nature and mind, and was a pioneering author who supported, amongst other novel ideas, equal rights for women, social justice, nature conservation and land distribution.

  Whereas Darwin had laboured with left-brain precision in solitary confinement with fossils and formaldehyde, Wallace had wandered, alone and open-minded, through the cauldron of the world, amongst a diversity of life unimagined by Western minds. His malarial dream was to transform the world by providing the key to the Theory of Evolution for which Darwin had striven so long. However, although his bust shares a place of honour in the apse of Westminster Abbey with that of Darwin, commemorating him as a great co-pioneer of rational science, elsewhere his memory is largely eclipsed – perhaps because of the premature breadth of that dream. Only in the Ring of Fire, in the Eastern islands he loved, is his name writ large – on any globe worth its salt – in The Wallace Line.

  The Wallace Line commemorates his observation that a zoographical division slices the Indonesian archipelago in half, running down between Celebes and Borneo, Bali and Lombok, and thinly separates very old and very new life-forms. Nowhere to the west of the Wallace Line can be found the giant Cassowary, Birds of Paradise or marsupials of Australasia, and nowhere to the east of it are found the tigers, elephants, primates and early man which crossed the land-bridge once connecting Java, Sumatra and Borneo to mainland Asia. In the early days of Darwinism, when the race was on to find tangible evidence of the ‘missing link’ between apes and men, it was again from Indonesia that, from a few molars and shreds of skull, Java Man and Gigantopithecus would briefly rise to claim the title. Distressing as it was for the Victorian establishment to contemplate having descended from monkeys, it would not be long before new advances in physiology and biochemistry revealed that we virtually are monkeys – differing from the chimpanzee, for instance, by a single chromosome in our genetic code. And, again, the monkeys, like ourselves, are still more lizards than anything else; for, as Carl Sagan points out, by far the longest period of our air-breathing history was spent evolving through the Age of Reptiles.6 He suggests the millions of years we spent as reptiles are what have kept the myth of the dragon alive in the art and literature of the world, and this theory also has a physiological basis. Sagan and other experts refer to our three separate brains (quite apart from our right and left lobes) each with its own biochemistry. The top, thinnest, most recently evolved neocortex is the rational ‘thinking cap’, found only in such higher animals as whales, primates and humans. Beneath it lies the limbic system, seat of the strong emotions and intuitive responses which we share with birds and lower mammals. Beneath that again is a bulb at the top of the spine, the Reptilian (or R-) complex, governing our deepest autonomic functions. Our biochemistry is part dragon: the ‘R-complex’, which awakens when our thinking and feeling brains are off-guard, in trance, afraid or asleep, is a dragon brain. It is the root of our sense of smell and taste, fear and desire, and it still remembers the dragons we ate and were eaten by. It dreams dark dreams, but keeps the engine-room running, the peristaltic movements, the flight and fight hormones. No one quite knows what lives in that dark sea of the deep genetic unconscious.

  In the early days of discovery medieval cartographers used to mark the empty, unexplored spaces on their maps as ‘Where Dragons Be’. But it wasn’t until 1912, from the volcanic outcrop of Komodo in Indonesia’s Lesser Sundas, that the myth of the dragon became reality with the discovery of Varanus komodoensis – a running, swimming, tree-climbing lizard, over 12 feet long and very carnivorous. The Komodo Dragon lives on pigs, goats, deer – and man, if he can get him. He is an evolved and voracious hunter, scenting his prey with a long, pink, forked tongue which flickers over the ground like a flame. High on the Borassus Palm escarpments of Komodo stands a cross to Baron Von Reding Biberegg, who died here in 1974. Although there have been several since, he is the first known Westerner to have been eaten by a Komodo Dragon.

  The fertile biochemistry of forests constantly racked and renewed by volcanic eruption – which once prevailed throughout the cooling surface of the globe – still continues in Indonesia, and amongst her trembling islands we find time-capsules of our earliest beginnings, when dragons stalked the earth. Throughout Indonesia we found that the fears of myth are still alive today. Newspapers frequently publish macabre photographs of people who have been cut, too late, from the innards of enormous snakes, some of which reach 30 feet long. We were to meet them ourselves, when we followed the professional python-hunters into the burial caverns of Celebes island.

  In the Age of Reptiles, some species sought to escape their cousins by growing smaller and climbing higher. A few sprouted wings and took to the air, without bothering to become birds first. Flying reptiles still disconcertingly glide and slither through the Indonesian sky. The eight-inch-long Draco volans, or ‘flying dracula’ lizards, swoop amongst the eaves of our Balinese house. In Borneo there are flying frogs, which parachute laterally on voluminous feet. There’s even a flying snake, which flattens itself into an aerofoil and swims through the air like flying tagliatelle.

  Lizards of course became birds – some as unearthly as the Greater Bird of Paradise, and others, like the Cassowary, which reversed tactics somewhere in the past and returned to the earth again. This flightless, 600-kilo relative of the Australian emu has a head like a monstrous purple turkey, runs through the undergrowth in small bands, and has been known to kick a man to death with its six enormous taloned toes. Just as the early European explorers of the North Atlantic would bring back the tusks of narwhals and pass them off as the horns of unicorns, so would the early Arabian and Indian sailors bring back the massive bones of the Cassowary as evidence of the giant ‘roc’ of the Sinbad sagas, or the Garuda bird of Hindu mythology, which is today the symbol of Indonesia’s national airline.

  Some lizards climbed higher still in that primordial forest, their claws changing into fingers with opposing thumbs. Their eyes migrated from the sides of their heads (where their cousins still keep them), to look forward with acute stereoscopic vision, and their brains began to mushroom in proportion to their bodyweight. Almost identical in size and looks to this prosimian ancestor of ours is the extraordinary tarsier, a primate just six inches tall, found only in the high jungle canopy of Indonesia and the Philippines. With human-like mouth and hands, and enormous eyes in a head which can swivel 180°, the Dyaks of Borneo refer to him as hantu – meaning ‘ancestral spirit’. Like an apparition of our goblin beginnings, the tarsier still stalks the treetops at night.

  Some of this goblin’s progeny were later to descend to the ground again, increase in size, and stagger towards human-ness. It was from the same haunts as the tarsier that the original ‘Wild Man of Borneo’ – the orang-utan, or ‘man of the forest’ – was to reveal himself: a creature so vulnerable, so resonant with human emotion, that we could not fail to see ourselves in him.

  The islanders of course do not share our West
ern compulsion to distinguish ourselves, the rational ‘observers’, from the rest of nature. Their unhesitating assumption that they contain all life as much as they are contained by it has helped them forge what to our eyes is an almost supernatural intimacy with their forests and creatures. They acknowledge that elephants and man, for instance, have a very close relationship, having climbed the evolutionary ladder side by side, losing hair together, returning to and re-emerging from the sea again, growing warm blood, emotion and long memories. They even went to war together. Like the moguls of India and Siam before them, the ninth century Sumatran kings commanded great armies mounted on trained fighting elephants. Their wild descendants are still very much at large today, and with the gradual encroachment on their habitat there are increasing reports in the local newspapers of troupes of elephants rampaging through Sumatran villages in grand old-fashioned style. A few years ago the cousin of a Sumatran friend of ours was killed by a singularly persistent elephant. He came across it raiding his fruit garden, unwisely wounded it with buckshot, and was chased up a tree for his trouble. He remained there for what must have been an anxious day and a night while the elephant returned to and from a nearby stream with trunkfuls of water with which it was finally able to loosen the roots of the tree, push it over, then trample its victim just as his belated rescue party arrived on the scene.

  In the jungles of north Sumatra lie the long-abandoned temple ruins of Moera Takoes. Built in the eighth century by an unknown Shivite sect, they honour the elephant god Ganeesh – the Hindu patron of, amongst other things, partying, wisdom and jovial abundance. Although the people who built this temple have long since vanished, legend has it that during certain summer full moons the wild elephants arrive to roister amongst the ruins. We discovered that the temple is surrounded by durian trees, the fruit of which ripens and ferments through June and July. These highly alcoholic, elephant-sized olives are occasion for a drunken orgy of pachydermic proportions.