Funny about book people and non-book people.
I was sitting in a dirty and depressing Chinese rooming house on Bacan island, talking to an Indonesian who worked for the electricity board and who was reluctantly on the island for business. He was fascinated by the guidebooks I carried, rich in detail, full of photos of beautiful people and places. After drinking tea and eating fried bananas with him I felt I could ask why most of the books about Indonesia were written by foreigners. “Orang asing pikir bedah”, he replied. Foreigners think differently. I asked him to explain. More or less he said: “Indonesians are tied to the daily search for ways to stay alive; foreigners look for ideas.”
I think he was too hard on his countrymen and certainly too starry-eyed about the noble intentions of the white race. I offered a somewhat different theory. That basically the Indonesian vision is inward-directed and therefore focused on family and bangsa, which is a person’s tribe or race or language group; and of course the needs of the immediate family. But foreigners have weaker family structures, not to mention smaller families, therefore they find it easier to extend their vision outward, to other cultures.
Wallace carried a strong box filled with coins with which to buy specimens, pay laborers and have boats built. He wore heavy leather boots, impractical for the humid tropics, noting on one trip “the constant walking in water, and over rocks and pebbles, quite destroyed the two pair of shoes I brought with me, so that, on my return, they actually fell to pieces, and the last day I had to walk in my stockings very painfully, and reached home quite lame.”
In Aru I was invited for tea at the house of a man named Ely, and I glanced around and did a quick inventory – the only externally-produced things he owned were cooking utensils, plastic buckets, his machete-like parang and a few gardening tools, a battery-powered cassette player and kerosene pressure lamp. Plus a few clothes hanging on nails and two pictures of Indonesian movie stars ripped out of a magazine and nailed to the wall. Ely was in the cash economy, barely, not much changed from Wallace’s day when he wrote: “The houses and furniture [in Aru] are on a par with the food. A rude shed, supported on rough and slender sticks rather than posts, no walls, but the floor raised to within a foot of the eaves, is the style of architecture they usually adopt. Inside there are partition-walls of thatch, forming little boxes or sleeping-places, to accommodate the two or three separate families that usually live together. A few mats, baskets, and cooking-vessels, with plates and basins purchased from the Macassar traders, constitute their whole furniture; spears and bows are their weapons; a sarong or mat forms the clothing of the women, a waistcloth of the men.”
I asked Ely what he would really like if he could have anything. “An outboard engine,” he said, somewhat hopefully, perhaps thinking that I was about to offer him a present.
I asked this illiterate but wonderfully self-sufficient man what his most valuable possession was. I was expecting, but not looking forward to his saying “My bible.” Instead he said the only sensible thing, and he said it immediately. “My bow and arrow.” Quickly he added: “And my parang.” I asked him why. “With those I can hunt and build a new house.”
When Wallace was returning to England following four years collecting in the Amazon and Rio Negro, the ship on which he was sailing, the brig Helen, caught fire. He lost much of his collection, acquired tediously over four years, containing one-of-a-kind specimens which were new to science, which would have earned the young man a substantial amount of money, and which would have given him a boost towards acceptance by the snotty scientific establishment of London.
How did Wallace feel? Wallace-biographer Arnold Brackman speculated that “Wallace raced to his cabin and snatched up a small box…which [was] luckily at hand. The box contained a set of pencil drawings of different palm species, together with notes on their distribution and characteristics; a collection of sketches, drawn to scale, of fishes, with notes on their color, dentititon, and scale structure and a Portuguese folio notebook containing his Rio Negro diary and notes made while mapping both the Rio Negro and Uaupés. Everything else, [his entire collection] the labor of four years, was smoldering and burning in the hold beneath the cabin. Wallace also grabbed his watch and a purse containing a few sovereigns, the only money he posssessed.”
Wallace had lost most of his painfully obtained collection, and later wrote: “I cannot attempt to describe my feelings and thoughts during these events [the burning of the Helen]. I was surprised to find myself cool and collected. I hardly thought it possible we should escape, and I remember thinking it almost foolish to save my watch and the little money I had…My collections, however, were in the hold and were irretrievably lost. And now I began to think that almost all the reward of my four years of privation and danger was gone. What I had hitherto sent home had little more than paid my expenses, and what I had with me in the Helen I estimated would have realized about £500. But even all this might have gone with little regret had not by far the richest part of my own private collection gone also. All my private collection of insects and birds since I left Para [current day Belem] was with me, and comprised hundreds of new and beautiful sepecimens which would have rendered (I had fondly hoped) my cabinet, so far as regards American species, one of the finest in Europe.”
So, what kind of gift from the present would Wallace most appreciate?
A camera? Maybe, but that would just add to the paraphernalia.
Swiss Army knife? One of those insecticide fogging machines used by scientists in Panama to collect arboreal beetles? A good medical kit, with lots of mosquito repellant?
I looked up what the Singapore Straits Times newspaper published during the period Wallace was living on the mercantile island and was surprised by the goods he would have had access to.
Ads promoted perambulators, buggy whips, Irish linen, and horse hair petticoats. Perhaps he picked up a few bottles of Rolands Macassar Oil, “patronized by Queen Victoria”, which “prevents Hair from falling off or turning grey,…cleanses it from Scurf and Dandruff.”
More likely Wallace was tempted by “The Greatest Medical Discovery of the Age” which was Perry’s Cordial Balm of Syriacum, used to “restore the impaired power of life when exhausted by the follies of youth, maturity or old age.”
Wallace certainly could have used some good maps. A Zippo lighter. A lightweight tent and hammock. Ballpoint pens.
I’m sure he would have welcomed any of these gifts. But I’ve decided to give him something more mundane, but perhaps more useful.
So I’ve opted for a gift that is not valuable, not frivolous, not decorative. About as practical as you can imagine. I keep on thinking of Wallace moving camp, keeping insects out of his specimens, keeping his rice and gunpowder dry. It must have been hell when the skies opened and rain fell like Thor himself was pissing down on the jungle.
My gift to you Alfred: A large selection of plastic bags – ranging from the heaviest duty giant-sized garbage bags to small easily-sealable sandwich bags. For your journals. For your butterflies. For your coffee. For your sanity.
Enjoy.
Chapter 8
WHO GETS CREDIT, WHO TAKES CREDIT, FOR CHANGING THE WORLD?
Did Darwin steal from Wallace? Attributing glory can be a tricky business
TERNATE, Indonesia
Who gets credit, and who takes credit, for changing the world?
July 1, 1858 was a modest news day in mid-19th century London. Thirty-nine year old Queen Victoria went horseback riding, Madame Tussaud announced a wax image of United States President James Buchanan, and the steamship North Star arrived from New York in eleven days and six hours, a new record.
But in the evening of that date, 150 years ago, an event occurred which, according to journalist Arnold Brackman, was “one of the great watersheds in the history of Western civilization.”
That cool evening members of the London’s august Linnean Society on Piccadilly heard two unpublished fragments about evolution written by the famous
naturalist Charles Darwin, and a fully thought-out paper written by relative unknown Alfred Russel Wallace.
Neither Darwin nor Wallace was present. Darwin stayed at his home in England mourning the death of a son to scarlet fever; Wallace was in distant New Guinea chasing butterflies and beetles.
Wallace’s paper, formally titled On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type, and popularly dubbed The Ternate Letter or the Ternate Paper after the eastern Indonesian town from where he mailed the study to Charles Darwin, was the first complete explanation of the process of natural selection, which introduced the concept that “the fittest would survive.”
To simplify a complex story, as a result of Wallace’s paper, Charles Darwin was pushed to complete Origin of Species, which was published in 1859. No doubt we will see a media blitz in 2009 when the world will celebrate the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin’s bestseller (which will also be the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth); perhaps similar to the visibility given in 2005 to the 100th anniversary of Einstein’s “Miracle Year”, during which Einstein published his special theory of relativity.
Alfred Russel Wallace, who was unaware that his paper had even been presented to the Linnean Society, continued collecting and writing about biogeography, island biology, changing sea levels and anthropology of the Malay archipelago, a region where he spent eight productive, but isolated years.
Darwin, a member of the British scientific elite, became a household name; Wallace, who left school at 14 and came from a modest family, ended up as a (rather important) footnote in history.
Historians and conspiracy theorists debate whether it was Wallace or Darwin who first conceived the concept of natural selection.
Some researchers argue that it was scientific coincidence – that both men had their eureka moments independently. Such an occurrence is not uncommon; it’s called a “multiple”: Newton and Leibniz both discovered calculus. Oxygen was discovered by Carl Wilhelm Scheel in 1773 and by Joseph Priestly in1774. Color photography was invented almost simultaneously by two Frenchmen. Four independent researchers discovered sunspots, all in 1611. Six men invented the thermometer and nine invented the telescope. And so on.
Nevertheless, a small but vocal group of Friends of Alfred suggest that Wallace came up with the key to evolution. And that Darwin stole it from him.
While the older and much better established Darwin had undoubtedly been thinking about evolution and collecting voluminous data, up to that moment he had not published a single word on the subject.
Wallace, on the other hand, had written several papers on evolution prior to the Ternate Paper, including the 1855 Sarawak Law, which stated the now obvious principle that “Every species has come into existence coincident both in space and time with a pre-existing closely allied species.”
Did Darwin plagiarize Wallace? The question can be addressed in both legal, and anecdotal terms.
British lawyer David Hallmark, who is a trustee of the Wallacea Foundation based in Indonesia, notes that as Darwin had not previously published and as the letter from Wallace stimulated publication it follows that Wallace was first and Darwin, whatever he wrote, was second. Also, Hallmark adds, when Darwin did publish he failed to attribute to Wallace the impact of the younger man’s Ternate Paper on his own works, yet Darwin used the Wallace theory as his own. Therein lies the prima facie case of plagiarism.
There is circumstantial evidence that Darwin knew he had wronged Wallace and felt guilty about his actions.
Although we obviously don’t know everything that Darwin and his colleagues thought or said to each other, there is an illuminating paper trail of letters in which Darwin referred to the events as a “miserable affair” and his relationship with Wallace as “a delicate situation”. Darwin admitted, in a letter to the famous botanist Joseph Hooker, a friend who helped manipulate the Linnean Society presentation to Darwin’s benefit, that he had written “half a letter to Wallace to give up all priority to him”. Later, sounding a bit like Richard Nixon, Darwin wrote “I never did pick anyone’s pocket”. Darwin was clearly torn between doing the right thing and coming in second declaring “it seems hard on me that I thus should be compelled to lose my priority of many years standing but I cannot feel at all sure that this alters the justice of the case.”
So, on this anniversary I ponder ethics and history.
I do not know for certain whether Darwin plagiarized Wallace.
What I do know for certain is this.
First, the theory of evolution changed forever the way we view ourselves and our place in the universe. It was one of mankind’s great intellectual leaps forward.
Second, the July 1, 1858 gathering in London produced barely a ripple. Where were the fireworks, the polemics, the headlines? The president of the Linnean Society, Thomas Bell, noted in his 1858 annual report that the year “has not…been marked by any of those discoveries which at once revolutionise…the department of science in which they occur.”
BALI, Indonesia.
A son gazes back at his mother in a village near the southern coast of this oft-visited island. The photo was taken in 1973; their village has since been razed to make way for more modern buildings; during recent visits I have been unable to find their whereabouts.
Photo: Paul Sochaczewski
VI.
WALTZING BANANA ISLAND
THE NEXT FRONTNTIER
SEARCHING FOR ENIGMAS
I know where the dinosaurs are; not far at all
EN-ROUTE TO PULAU VALSE PISANG, lndonesia
Some guys with stardust in their eyes and too much red wine in their veins spend their lives searching for Atlantis or Eldorado. Other adventurers windsurf across the Atlantic. Yet other men and women seek an elusive metaphor, like Peter Mathiessen’s snow leopard.
I have a simpler quest. I’m looking for “Waltzing Banana Island”.
“Waltzing Banana Island”, or to put it in its correct Indonesian-French nomenclature Pulau Valse Pisang, is a tiny speck of land in far eastern Indonesia. My search for the island is devoid of socially-redeeming value. I’m simply intrigued how it got it’s name. A misspelling of the Dutch valsche, which would make it the False Banana Island? An abundance of fruit trees, or a crescent-shape? Or, more romantically, perhaps it was named by French explorers aboard the Astrolabe who charted those waters, now called Rajah Ampat, in the mid-19th century. Since the banana is a euphemism throughout Indonesia for the male sexual organ, perhaps the lonely French sailors found the local lovelies très charmantes and welcoming.
Later this year I plan to look for Waltzing Banana Island.
But sort of along the flight path lies the Hobbit-enhanced island of Flores, where I heard a particularly juicy tale on my previous visit. A community headman named Pak Nico, noting my rather esoteric interests, said that one night in his isolated coastal village he heard a screeching cry. It “sounded like something out of that dinosaur movie”, he said, referring to Jurassic Park, which apparently had made it’s way to the TV broadcasts of this distant corner of Indonesia. He did not see anything, but his fellow villagers swore they had viewed a frightening T-Rex-like creature which climbed trees and ate pigs and goats. It’s called marengket in the local Mangarai language. Such tales are common, but the bottom line is until you capture one you ain’t got nothin’. Nevertheless Pak Nico added that several years ago a villager had killed one of the animals but had neglected to keep the bones. Imagine, a relict dinosaur which lives on the north coast of Flores. And I know where it is – a long day’s journey in a four-wheel vehicle, then a couple of hours walk. Not far at all.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Paul Spencer Sochaczewski wrote Redheads, a comic conservation adventure set in a mythical sultanate on Borneo, and co-authored Soul of the Tiger: Searching for Nature’s Answers in Southeast Asia, which examines the eco-cultural revolutions than have influenced people-nature relationships. He has had some 600 by-lined articles appear in ma
jor publications.
After leaving the United States to serve in the Peace Corps he lived in Malaysia (in Sarawak, on the island of Borneo), Singapore, Indonesia, Switzerland and, currently, Thailand.
While with WWF - World Wide Fund for Nature International, Paul campaigns to protect rainforests and biological diversity. He was global communications director of the International Osteoperosis Foundation.
Paul created and runs two writing workshops: Exploring Your Personal Odyssey, which helps people write their personal stories, and Wake Up Communications which helps people tell a technical story to general audiences.
He is chairman and creative director of IGOLF-International Golf and Life Foundation, which promotes environmental and social responsibility in golf worldwide.
Paul enjoys street food and searching for unusual Ganesha images.
OTHER BOOKS BY THE AUTHOR
Soul of the Tiger
(co-authored with Jeffrey A. McNeely)
“A timely, revealing, delightful and yet totally unsentimental look at the relationship between our own and other species which must lie at the heart of all successful conservation.”
LYALL WATSON, author of Supernature and The Dreams of Dragons
“Provocative and engrossing…a solid combination of natural history and anthropology.”
Publishers Weekly
“A rich exotic kettle of myths, origin tales, ritual dances, blood sports, natural history oddities, human animal soul transfers and transformations…A lush ecocultural travelogue of myth and ritual.”
The Sultan and the Mermaid Queen Page 28