I was disturbed. This site should be a museum, not a hovel. It was here, in February 1855, that Wallace wrote what later became known as the Sarawak Law, a short scientific paper that set the stage for the theory of natural selection that he wrote three years later while in Ternate, in eastern Indonesia.
Although the Sarawak Law seems simplistic today, at the time it was considered a major (and courageous) step towards understanding the question of whether species changed, and if they did, how. Wallace wrote: “Every species has come into existence coincident both in space and time with a pre-existing closely allied species.” Put another way, new species don’t just fall from they sky, they have a causal link with something that existed previously.
I continued to tour the dilapidated beachfront house in Santubong, wiped the cobwebs off my face and imagined Wallace relaxing on the verandah, discussing his ideas with a skeptical Brooke and an even more disbelieving Spencer St. John, Brooke’s secretary, who wrote “We had at this time…Mr. Alfred Wallace, who was then elaborating in his mind the theory…of the origin of species…if he would not convince us that our ugly neighbors, the orangutans, were our ancestors, he pleased, instructed, and delighted us by his clever and inexhaustible flow of talk – really good talk.”
Orangutans were a key reason British explorer, naturalist and beetle-collector Alfred Russel Wallace came to Asia between 1854–1862. “One of my chief objects in coming to stay at Simunjon [in Sarawak] was to see the orang-utan [or great man-like ape of Borneo] in his native haunts, to study his habits, and obtain good specimens,” Wallace wrote.
Wallace was successful in obtaining “good specimens”. He famously shot 17 of the red apes to obtain skins and skeletons that were sold to British collectors via his London-based “beetle agent”, proudly noting that the South Kensington Museum offered “one hundred pounds in gold for an adult male [orangutan] skin and skeleton.” Big money for a penniless explorer whose only source of income was the revenue earned from the sale of “natural productions” that he collected.
While charismatic megavertebrates like the orangutans were obvious financial treasures for Wallace, his bread and butter came from beetles and butterflies, moths and ants, birds and curiosities like flying squirrels.
Wallace found the moth-collecting exceptionally productive in the vicinity of Brooke’s small bungalow in the hills of Peninjau, an hour outside the charming state capital Kuching.
Some thirteen years ago I intended to visit the site but wanted some knowledgeable company. Traveler’s serendipity blessed me as I explained my interest in Wallace to a lady who ran one of the many antique shops along Kuching’s riverside. “You should meet Uncle Ho” she said. “He would know about Peninjau.” Some ten minutes later, almost on cue, “Uncle Ho” – Ho An Chon, one of Sarawak’s leading historians, wandered into the shop. I asked how they knew each other and the lady explained that she was the daughter of the first Sarawak chief minister, and Uncle Ho had been one of her father’s close friends.
My good luck was to continue. I arrived at the neat village at the base of the steep hill, and we stopped at a house to ask directions. The man who answered the door was Stephen Senyium, an old school friend of Uncle Ho’s whom he hadn’t seen for decades; Senyium then guided us to the summit.
Using Wallace’s notes: “a cool spring under an overhanging rock…huge boulders as big as houses,” we climbed the “steep pyramidal mountain…covered with luxuriant forest,” and found the site of the long-abandoned “rude wooden lodge where the English Rajah was accustomed to go for relaxation and cool fresh air.” Of course the structure was gone but surprisingly, the belian ironwood supports were still partially intact, some 150 years after the lodge had been built.
Wallace, alone for much of the time, found it the best spot in Asia for capturing moths, some 1,386 of them over 26 nights. “I placed my lamp on a table against the wall,” he wrote, “and with pins, insect-forceps, net, and collecting-boxes by my side, sat down with a book…on good nights I was able to capture from a hundred to two hundred and fifty moths…some of them would settle on the wall, some on the table, while many would fly up to the roof and give me a chase all over the veranda before I could secure them.”
No doubt during the lonely rainy nights he had ample time to think about evolution.
This year I found that a minor evolution in Wallace awareness has taken place in Sarawak.
I went back to Sarawak for the 2005 Rainforest World Music Festival, held each year in the Sarawak Cultural Village in Santubong. Several days later, I presented a paper at an international conference in Kuching called “Wallace in Sarawak – 150 Years Later”. I was thrilled that academics in Sarawak wanted to recognize Wallace’s contribution to science. The meeting was opened by Sarawak Chief Minister Taib Mahmud, who encouraged the local university to “set up a Wallace Centre at Santubong where we can showcase his pioneering works [in order to inspire] our young scientists.” It was an impassioned speech from a man not generally considered a friend of nature, referring to Wallace’s ideas as an “important piece of history of relevance to modern policy makers,” and noting how Wallace “rose above his station in life through sheer personal efforts and never-give-up attitude.” Referring to the important role that his state played in developing Wallace’s thoughts, Taib Mahmud added that “Sarawak became for Wallace what Galapagos was for Darwin.”
As one of the conference participants, I returned to Santubong, to visit the site of Rajah Brooke’s bungalow, where I had cleared cobwebs and chased bats several years earlier.
I was surprised to see that signboards had been constructed, directing traffic to “Wallace Point”, and I arrived to find that the 1950s-era government bungalow on the Brooke site had been dramatically cleaned and spruced up. While the well-educated executives of the Sarawak Economic Development Corporation, which is responsible for the site, were on a steep learning curve about why all the fuss was going on, there was no shortage of big ideas floating around concerning what should be done with the hillside retreat. I proposed a “living museum”, which would highlight Sarawak’s biodiversity but also showcase how Wallace captured and identified beetles, how he stuffed birds, and what he did to prevent tropical insects and rats from eating his hard-earned “natural productions”. The Earl of Cranbrooke, who wrote Mammals of Borneo among other seminal works, had another, perhaps better, idea. He suggested that the site should be developed as a refuge from modern stress, proposing the creation of a “Wallace Center for Contemplation and Original Thought.”
Neither of these grandiose ideas have been implemented [but in 2008 Sarawak officials designated nearby Santubong Mountain as a national park]. After this initial burst of enthusiasm there has been little progress to either develop the historic site or recognize Wallace’s achievements in Sarawak and encourage Malaysian researchers to pursue new scientific frontiers. The site remains empty, populated perhaps by lonely ghosts and the memories of big lonely ideas.
[David Spencer Hallmark co-authored one version of this article]
Chapter 2
WILDERNESS IN SINGAPORE? WHO WOULDA THOUGHT?
Singapore proved a Coleoptera paradise for Victorian explorer Alfred Russel Wallace; new creatures still emerge
BUKIT TIMAH, Singapore
Visitors come to Singapore to shop or to learn about other cultures, to close a business deal or attend a conference.
A century and a half ago, though, one of Singapore’s most interesting guests came to collect beetles. In the process he changed forever the way we look at our world and ourselves.
The man with the passion for Coleoptera was Alfred Russel Wallace, a Victorian-era naturalist/collector/philosopher who is noted in scientific circles for his work in taxonomy, biogeography, island biology, and for developing, independently of Charles Darwin, the theory of natural selection.
Surprisingly, and reassuringly, Singapore’s forests, which so impressed young Wallace, still harbour unusual new creatures.
But Alfred Russel Wallace found pleasure in small things, and his favourite beetle-hunting ground during the eight years he spent in Southeast Asia was Bukit Timah, today Singapore’s flagship nature reserve.
Sponsored by the Royal Geographic Society, which approved his application to “[investigate] the Natural History of the Eastern Archipelago in a more complete manner than has hitherto been attempted,” Wallace first made Asian landfall in Singapore on April 20, 1854. He made the island state one of his base camps, visiting at least four times during his collecting trip through what are now Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia. This landmark voyage netted him 125,660 specimens, including some 900 new species of beetles, 200 new species of ants, 50 new species of butterflies, and 212 new species of birds.
Collecting in Singapore was relatively easy for Wallace, whose prior overseas experience included a long and difficult sojourn on the Rio Negro in the Amazon basin. Staying with Catholic Missionaries at St. Joseph’s in Upper Bukit Timah, Wallace never had to venture far to find his prey. “Almost all these [beetles] were collected in one patch of jungle not more than a square mile in extent,” he enthused in his classic travel book The Malay Archipelago. “In all my subsequent travels in the East I rarely if ever met with so productive a spot.”
One can imagine the gangly, socially naïve, self-taught biologist, his clothes formal, scratchy and worn, his beard scraggly, his John Lennon-like glasses twisted and hanging precariously from his nose, scraping through the bark of a fallen tree in search of beetles. He rummaged through the undergrowth partly out of scientific curiosity, and partly to pay his expenses, since a certain segment of the stay-at-home cognoscenti in England paid well for pickled wildlife.
“In about two months I obtained no less than 700 species of beetles, a large proportion of which were quite new,” he wrote.
Wallace attributed Singapore’s “exceeding productiveness” to favourable soil, climate and vegetation. “But it was also in a great measure dependent,” he wrote, “on the labors of the Chinese wood-cutters. They had been at work here for several years, and during all that time had furnished a continual supply of dry and dead and decaying leaves and bark, together with insects and their larvae. This had led to the assemblage of a great variety of species in a limited space, and I was the first naturalist who had come to reap the harvest they had prepared.”
There is no shortage of naturalists in today’s Singapore, where the country harbours a biological diversity totally out of proportion to its size. What is surprising is not that Singapore has lost a lot of its biological diversity – 106 bird species have become extinct in Singapore since 1819, for example – but that its forests and mangroves still conceal so many undiscovered natural treasures.
“Singapore is associated with shopping and commerce, and most of our forests have been chopped up,” notes Singapore zoologist Peter K.L. Ng. “But the interesting thing is that we’re still making [biological] discoveries.”
Alfred Russel Wallace observed that “the island of Singapore consists of a multitude of small hills, three or four hundred feet high, the summits of many of which are still covered with virgin forest.” As I drive to Bukit Timah, amidst the ordered urbanisation of Singapore’s highways, housing and industry, I am surprised to arrive at the Bukit Timah Nature Reserve and be surrounded by tropical forest. I huff and puff for twenty minutes to reach the top of Bukit Timah (literally “Hill of Tin”, probably a European misunderstanding of the Malay name for the Shorea genus of tall rainforest trees, called temak) and you can see the surprising extent of forest remaining in Singapore. This is Singapore’s central catchment area, which protects the country’s reservoirs. These ecosystems are so diverse that David Bellamy, the outspoken British botanist, remarked “There should be a sign in [Singapore’s] Changi Airport that says, ‘We have a piece of forest with more plant species than the whole of North America!” While this statement exudes some Bellamy-esque hyperbole – Singapore certainly does not have more plant species than North America, but it is nevertheless likely that Bukit Timah does have more plant species diversity per hectare than any forest north of Mexico – it does introduce the concept that there are wonders in Singapore waiting to be discovered.
Peter Ng, associate professor at the National University of Singapore, and director of the Raffles Museum of Biodiversity Research, recounts some of the discoveries he and his students have made while shuffling through the rainforests of the country’s interior, and the mangroves of the coast. Note that several of these creatures are not simply new to Singapore – they’re new to science.
“We’ve found a snapping shrimp that doesn’t snap,” Ng explains of a rare freshwater variety of crustacean. “It was sitting there for donkey years, unnoticed. One day, just by luck, we were out sampling and this popped into the net.”
Ng explains that “another time we found another shrimp, a pinkish, semi-transparent, very small fellow. We could easily have overlooked it – it digs deep holes in banks of streams, you have to bash the bank and chase it out. But this creates a mess – you get lots of leaves and even then you’ll probably miss it unless it moves. And then, even if you see it you think it’s a juvenile. It’s probably restricted to the small stretch of stream where the water flows quickly.”
Imagine a small stretch of a small stream of a small forest in a small industrialized country (Singapore is only about a third the size of Greater London), and you begin to get an idea of how impressive these discoveries are.
“One fellow found a new catfish in the catchment area, a black and yellow clown catfish. It’s a bit of a joke to find one more new fish in this small area.”
One of Ng’s fondest discoveries is a freshwater prawn, which he found in a one-kilometre-long stream which flows near the Singapore Island Country Club, the nation’s premier golf course. The prawn’s diminutive size – similar to a grain of rice – may work in its favour in food-crazy Singapore. “This prawn would probably taste great when fried with eggs,” Peter said, “but since it is so small, it would take quite a number of them to make one omelette.”
Ng’s “all time favourite” discovery came in 1990. In 1988 he wrote a book on the freshwater crabs of Peninsular Malaysia and Singapore in which he recorded five true freshwater crab species from Singapore, including two endemics. “I was pretty confident I had found all the freshwater crabs there were to find on such a small island with so little forest,” Ng says. “But in 1989 a student showed me a photograph of a crab from a small patch of swamp forest in the centre of the central catchment, from an area I had sampled before. The animal looked rather odd, with a rather unusual colour pattern, but I was rather sure of myself then and dismissed it merely as an extreme variant of a common species found there, Parathelphusa maculata. Some months later, I got a specimen of this ‘variant’ myself, and doubts began to surface in my mind about its presumed identity. But the specimen was a juvenile, and I had to get an adult specimen to be dead sure that it was a new species. The student and I subsequently visited the swamp many times, often in the middle of the night, to find this elusive animal; we even sacrificed our New Year’s Eve in 1990 in an attempt to find specimens. They are so secretive. By day, they hide in deep burrows in soft mud and are virtually impossible to dig out. The adults only come out in total darkness in the middle of the night, especially during moonless nights, and even then, they crawl slowly in shallow streams, underneath very dense leaf litter. This behavior, coupled with their well-camouflaged colour patterns, make them almost impossible to see. We finally learned how to catch them, though, by grabbing any clump of submerged leaves that moved. As it turned out, I had been wrong. It was a separate species after all, and to beat everything, it was new to science. I named it Parathelphusa reticulata for its beautiful carapace pattern. Moreover, this species was endemic to Singapore. As later studies showed, it is found only in a f
ive hectare patch of swamp in Singapore, and nowhere else on this planet. This is a reasonably large crab, about 35 mm in carapace width. So if something like this could have been missed for so long, heaven knows what else we are still ignorant of in the catchment. This experience was a humbling one for me – I’ll never again be complacent about biodiversity, even in Singapore.”
Is the Bukit Timah Nature Reserve the same today as in Wallace’s day?
“Walace was surprised that in such a small area he could collect so much stuff,” Ng explains. “Remember, even in Wallace’s time Bukit Timah was a bit of a forested island surrounded by development, although the pressures today are obviously much greater.”
Nevertheless, Bukit Timah’s ecology has changed during the ensuing 150 years, according to Peter Ng.
“If Wallace came back today he’d find a different composition of insects. Bukit Timah is smaller today than it was in Wallace’s time. The forest is gradually dying and the National Parks Board is studying ways to keep it alive.”
Singapore during the Victorian era was alive with commerce and society. The year Wallace arrived more than thirteen thousand Chinese immigrants arrived, many of them dangerous men – rebels and refugees from the civil war raging in southern China. The Crimean War broke out in 1854, jolting Singapore merchants out of their complacency since they felt their country’s defenseless prosperity could make her an attractive target of Russian warships. (Tennyson’s Crimean War-inspired poem Charge of the Light Brigade was published the year Wallace arrived in Asia.)
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