by Peter Raby
When Mr Wallace came down the Rio Negro, in September, 1851, he showed me a few figures of Palms. I pointed out to him which seemed to be new, and encouraged him to go on. I also proposed that we should work them up together, I taking the literary part and he the pictorial, which he declined.
By printing that comment, Hooker is clearly implying that Wallace would have done much better for the cause of science to have collaborated with a specialist. More unkindly, he also published Spruce’s unofficial ‘review’: ‘The descriptions are worse than nothing – in many cases not a single circumstance that a botanist would care to know; but the accounts of the uses are good.’15 People were more forgiving about the travel book, conscious of the losses Wallace had sustained. There are wonderful sequences within it, but Wallace could not decide whether he should concentrate on a personal narrative of his travels, or attempt a work of systematic and scientific observation. In attempting to do both, he ended up with a hybrid, and the sections of minute detail, for instance in his final chapter ‘On the Aborigines of the Amazon’, draw attention to the earlier gaps and absences, no doubt caused by the loss of some of his journals. It is still a remarkable book, suffering only in comparison with his later writing, or with Bates’s The Naturalist on the River Amazons.
Meanwhile, Wallace bought Lucien Bonaparte’s 1850 study Conspectus Generum Avium, and copied additional notes on Malaysian species on its wide margins, so providing himself with the nearest thing to a field guide. He also acquired J. A. Boisduval’s 1836 volume Diurnes: Papilionidae, Pierides, to assist with identification of the butterflies. He read books of more general interest, including one that would leave a powerful impact on him, Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics, especially the chapter on ‘The Right to Use the Earth’. The broad evolutionary flow of Spencer’s arguments, and their application to social issues, seeped into Wallace’s thinking to take an influential place beside the ideas of Robert Chambers’s Vestiges. He spent long hours in the insect room of the British Museum. There, one day, he was introduced to another visitor, Charles Darwin, or so he recollected. The meeting, if it took place, made little impression on either.
A second application was made to the Lords of the Admiralty. Dr Shaw was empowered to apply to the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company to grant Wallace a free passage. Meanwhile Wallace kicked his heels in Upper Albany Street, and wrote a reference for a friend of his brother John, James Wilson, who volunteered to join an expedition to Northern Australia sponsored by the Royal Geographical – ‘a good bushman’, he commented on Wilson – and it even crossed his mind to try Australia himself. But at last the Admiralty connection came good. Wallace dispatched his heavy equipment to Singapore, including most of his books, by the cheaper Cape route, and went down to Portsmouth in January 1854 to take up his quarters on HMS Frolic. The Frolic was bound for Sydney, from where Wallace would make his way to the Eastern Archipelago. Newman, in his presidential address to the Entomological on 23 January, quoted at length from Travels on the Amazon, and wished Wallace better fortune and God speed on behalf of the Society.16
Wallace settled himself in on board. He was given a friendly welcome by Captain Nolloth, invited to sling his cot in a corner of his cabin, and provided with a small table to write and read at. He began to look forward to a voyage in the congenial company of a remarkably pleasant set of officers, and amused himself by matching individuals to the types he had met in Captain Marryat’s seafaring novels. For a while, he must have imagined himself almost in the position of Darwin on the Beagle. Days and weeks passed on board, and then the ship’s sailing orders were cancelled. The Frolic was to be diverted to the Crimea. Wallace wrote off to the Admiralty, lugged all his chattels grumpily to the Keppels Head at Portsea, and prepared to face the less attractive alternative of heading for Australia by a ‘circuitous’ route in HMS Juno under Captain Freemantle, who, Wallace informed Shaw, was ‘not spoken well of’. He was doing his best to exercise patience ‘as much as on the Amazon’, but would be glad of any certainty instead of the ‘disagreeable suspense I have been & am in’.17 The flow of brisk requests continued. He already had a general letter of recommendation to Her Majesty’s Consuls. He now sought a letter from the Admiralty for commanders of ships on the Australia and East India stations to offer him facilities for exploring any little-known islands they might touch at. He wrote accepting the offer on the Juno, but soon changed his mind. A few days later he was back in London knocking on Sir Roderick Murchison’s door, and received, for his persistence, a first-class ticket to Singapore on the next P. & O. steamer, the Euxine.
This was an unexpected bonus, allowing him the comparative luxury of taking an assistant, Charles Allen, as apprentice collector, something that could not have been accommodated on a naval ship. Charlie was an undersized sixteen-year-old, who looked more like thirteen or fourteen, the son of a carpenter who had done some work for Wallace’s sister. It must have been a sudden decision on the part of both parties, and one that both would have cause, at times, to regret.
The Euxine sailed in March for Gibraltar, Malta and Egypt, taking Wallace away from the frustrations of his English interlude. Whisked from the quay to his Alexandria hotel by omnibus, he decided to go for a quiet stroll with Charlie, and found himself catapulted into the noise and bustle of an eastern city:
Now, then, behold your long-legged friend mounted upon a jackass in the streets of Alexandria; a boy behind, holding by his tail and whipping him up; Charles, who had been lost sight of in the crowd, upon another; and my guide upon a third; and off we go among a crowd of Jews and Greeks, Turks and Arabs, and veiled women and yelling donkey-boys, to see the city. We saw the bazaars, and the slave-market (where I was again nearly pulled to pieces for ‘backsheesh’), the mosques with their graceful minarets, and then the pasha’s new palace, the interior of which is most gorgeous. We passed lots of Turkish soldiers, walking in comfortable irregularity; and after the consciousness of being dreadful guys for two crowded hours, returned to the hotel, whence we are to start for the canal boats.
One of Wallace’s strengths as a traveller was a strong sense of his own absurdity, and his ability to see himself through the eyes of others, whether Indians from the Vaupés, islanders from Aru, or the donkey-drivers of Alexandria. Another was his inexhaustible enthusiasm for other ways of life, and for seeing at first hand the scenes he knew only from literature. Read Thackeray’s ‘First Day in the East’ again, he advised George Silk – ‘and you will understand just how I think and feel’. Everything was of interest – taken up the Nile on barges, ‘with a panorama of mud villages, palm trees, camels, and irrigating wheels turned by buffaloes, – a perfectly flat country, beautifully green with crops of corn and lentils; endless boats with immense triangular sails’.18 Then the Pyramids, and Cairo – Grand Cairo! the city of romance – and a walk in the city, very picturesque and very dirty; and brown bread and fresh butter in a quiet English hotel; and then on to Suez the next morning, in a small four-horsed two-wheeled omnibus, with a meal every three hours, and the skeletons of hundreds of camels lining the road – ‘endless trains of camels’ passed along the route, bearing the Indian and Australian mails, and all the parcels and goods of the passengers. At the eating places, he picked a few of the desert plants, and pocketed a few land shells. They reached Suez at midnight, and the following day were relieved to be on board the Bengal, with large, comfortable cabins, very superior to the Euxine. They stayed a day at desolate, volcanic Aden, and sailed to Galle in Ceylon, present-day Sri Lanka. There they changed ship for the third time, and proceeded on the Pottinger to Penang, with its picturesque mountain, spice trees and waterfall, and from there south through the Straits of Malacca to Singapore.
Wallace arrived in Singapore on 20 April 1854, and spent the first three months of his ‘eight years wandering’ in the Malay Archipelago there, learning about the East, and exploiting the island’s rich resources as a location for beetles and butterflies. Singapore, governed by the E
nglish, energised by the Chinese, offered a cross-section of the Archipelago’s populations: to the native Malays were added Portuguese from Malacca, Klings from western India, Bengalis, Parsees, Javanese sailors, and traders from all the islands to the south and east. Wallace loved the bustle and industry of the city, especially the entrepreneurial activities of the Chinese: in the island’s interior, the Chinese were cutting down the forest trees for timber, and growing vegetables and pepper in the clearings. Wallace befriended the French Jesuit missionaries at Bukit-tima, in the centre of the island, and profited by the woodcutters’ tracks, and by the piles of dead and decaying leaves and bark and sawdust, wonderful nourishment for insects and their larvae. He set to work within the same kind of regime that he had established in Pará:
Get up at half-past five, bath, and coffee. Sit down to arrange and put away my insects of the day before, and set them in a safe place to dry. Charles mends our insect nets, fills our pin-cushions, and gets ready for the day. Breakfast at eight; out to the jungle at nine. We have to walk about a quarter mile up a steep hill to reach it, and arrive dripping with perspiration. Then we wander about in the delightful shade along paths made by the Chinese woodcutters till two or three in the afternoon, generally returning with fifty or sixty beetles, some very rare or beautiful, and perhaps a few butterflies. Change clothes to sit down to kill and pin insects, Charles doing the flies, wasps and bugs; I do not trust him yet with beetles. Dinner at four, then at work again till six. Then read or talk, or, if insects very numerous, work again till eight or nine. Then to bed.19
This might have been routine for Wallace – but it was a rugged initiation for a London boy of sixteen.
That patch of jungle, not much more than a square mile, provided a fair collection of butterflies and other orders of insects, and an exceptional range of beetles – no fewer than 700 species, many of them ‘new’, including 130 ‘distinct kinds of the elegant longicorns (Cerambycidae) so much esteemed by collectors’.20 This was an excellent start, both commercially and in terms of knowledge. But birds and animals were scarce, apart from the tigers (Wallace reckoned that these killed on average a Chinese every day, principally in the plantations, and their occasional roarings made it rather nervous work hunting for insects among the old sawpits). He decided to try his luck at Malacca, and moved there for two months. He engaged two Portuguese, one to cook and one to shoot and skin birds, and set off inland, where he began to obtain good specimens of birds: eastern trogons, green barbets, a green gaper which was like a small cock-of-the-rock, kingfishers, cuckoos, doves and honeysuckers, all of which kept him ‘in a state of pleasurable excitement’. Back in Malacca, he suffered an unpleasant attack of fever, but on the government doctor’s advice took much larger doses of quinine than he had ever done in the Amazon. He went to stay inland at the government bungalow at Ayer-panas, and in a fortnight recovered enough energy to plan an expedition to climb Mount Ophir, thirty miles to the east. He found a local man interested in natural history, engaged six Malays to carry the baggage, and set off on his first major trek.
The walk there was hard going, along paths often knee deep in mud, ‘swarming with leeches’ which crawled all over them, and ‘sucked when and where they pleased’. But they made a camp at the foot of the mountain in a little hut built by his men near a rocky stream, caught some fine new butterflies, and climbed the mountain. There were wonderful ferns – groves of Dipteris horsfieldii and Matonia pectinata – and pitcher plants. Water was short, so Wallace sampled the half-pint or so contained in each pitcher, which was full of insects and looked uninviting, but turned out to be quite palatable, though rather warm. Refreshed, he went on to the summit, four thousand feet above sea level, as he confirmed when making his coffee by checking with a boiling-point thermometer, cross-checking his readings with a sympiesometer (he was doing his stuff for the Geographical). The top was ‘a rocky platform covered with rhododendrons and other shrubs. The afternoon was clear, and the view fine in its way – ranges of hill and valley everywhere covered with interminable forest, with glistening rivers winding among them.’ From the scenic point of view, he preferred Switzerland, even Snowdon. But there were other headier excitements: the cry of the great Argus pheasant, elephant dung, rhinoceros tracks. They kept up a fire ‘in case any of these creatures should visit us, and two of our men declared that they did one day see a rhinoceros’. Mount Ophir had ‘quite a reputation for fever’, and when they returned to Malacca everyone was astonished at their recklessness in staying so long.21
Wallace’s narrative in The Malay Archipelago strives to create excitement and danger out of a relatively routine expedition, and he excuses its ‘meagreness and brevity’ by lamenting lost letters and notebook, and a paper sent to the Royal Geographical Society ‘which was neither read nor printed, owing to press of matter at the end of a session, and the MSS. of which can not now be found’.22 (In fact, it was judged too short to be printed, and remains in the RGS archives.) But Sir William Hooker printed a long descriptive letter about the trip to Mount Ophir in his journal of Botany. This piece may be something Wallace chose to forget, as it contains some of his less thoughtful and objective writing. For example, writing about the Malays:
They are of short stature, well made, but certainly not good-looking; and, taking the women and girls I have occasionally seen as a fair sample, there is very little necessity for their hiding themselves or covering their faces, unless indeed they are ashamed of them.23
This is a rare example of Wallace writing as the wrong sort of Englishman abroad, with one eye on his public, as though from the balcony of a club in Singapore. Borneo would change him. All the same, this expedition proved a useful first foray, and he never forgot his first introduction to mountain scenery in the eastern tropics.
The Indonesian Archipelago
6 The Land of the Orang-utan
RETURNING TO HIS Singapore base in September 1854, Wallace busied himself in dispatching consignments to Stevens, in visiting his old friends, and in making final preparations for a major expedition. His books and instruments had arrived from England, via the Cape, so he was fully equipped at last. He took the opportunity of having lots of jackets and trousers made for him by a Chinese tailor, at two shillings a pair. Rajah Brooke was in Singapore, reluctantly preparing to give evidence to the special commission set up to investigate his controversial anti-piracy activities. Brooke’s hospitality and influence would be crucial for Wallace’s success. Wallace met up with him in September, and, as Brooke most kindly offered him ‘every assistance in exploring the territories under his rule’, he decided to make Borneo his next destination, rather than to go to Cambodia with his French Jesuit friend from Bukit-tima.1 Wallace arrived off the coast of Borneo on 1 November 1854. He was to spend longer continuous time there – almost fifteen months – than in any other location on his eastern travels, write his most significant scientific paper to date, and encounter, in its natural habitat, the orang-utan, the great man-like ape of Borneo. As his ship approached the coast, the impressive mass of Santubong mountain appeared, ‘like a great fortress commanding the entrance to the Sarawak river’ in the words of the Italian naturalist, Odoardo Beccari.2 Santubong, a limestone mountain, rises sharply from the surrounding flats, its apparently sheer sides densely covered with forest; the shoreline, scattered with small islands, is fringed with sandy beaches or mangroves, or places where the forest falls right to the sea’s edge. On the riverbanks grow nipa and nibong palms. Wallace was now on the edge of his first great collecting ground in the East, a region as rich, and as comparatively untouched by the naturalist, as the Amazons. ‘I am much pleased with the appearance of the country,’ he wrote to Dr Shaw, ‘(though I am only three days here) there being many more hills than I expected offering facilities for mapping, which I trust to make good use of.’ Remembering the support he had received from the Society, he emphasised the geographical aspects of his enterprise, and enclosed a brief description of Mount Ophir, as further eviden
ce of his industry.3
For the first two months, Wallace used the Sarawak and the Santubong rivers as his means of transport – there were no alternatives – collecting from the river mouths up to Sarawak city – modern Kuching – and then up river as far as the Chinese gold workings at Bau. It was the rainy season, and collections were, by Wallace’s exacting standards, poor. He spent Christmas as a guest of Brooke in Sarawak, and enjoyed the company of the handful of Europeans who formed the compact administration of the rajah, and the contrasting group who were the nucleus of the Anglican mission. Then he moved down river, and in a little house by the mouth of the Sarawak river at the foot of Santubong mountain – directly opposite the present site of Bako National Park – he sat out the rains with his books, his notebooks, and his thoughts, with just a Malay boy to cook for him; Charles Allen he left at the mission. During his evenings in Singapore, he had begun to make notes which eventually developed into a plan for a book, provisionally entitled ‘The Organic Law of Change’. Now, insulated from company, he took advantage of the enforced break from collecting to set out the first stage of the theory, in a paper he entitled: ‘On the Law Which Has Regulated the Introduction of New Species’.4
Brooke’s bungalow on the Sarawak river
The immediate impetus for the paper was the ‘polarity theory’ of Edward Forbes, which was distinctly creationist, and argued for a ‘Divine scheme of organized nature’, an ‘ideal absurdity’ as Wallace described it later to Bates.5 Forbes first put forward this theory as part of his presidential address to the Geological Society on 17 February 1854, just before Wallace set off for the East, but Wallace is more likely to have come across it in journals sent out to Singapore by Stevens. Other influences include Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, François Jules Pictet’s Traité de Paléontologie, the evolutionist theories of Jean Baptiste Lamarck and Robert Chambers’s Vestiges. In his lucid essay, Wallace set out his simple law: ‘Every species has come into existence coincident both in time and space with a pre-existing closely allied species.’6 The key idea that emerges is that of evolution by means of gradual change, so that his law explains ‘the natural system of arrangement of organic beings, their geographical distribution, their geological sequence, the phenomena of representative and substituted groups in all their modifications, and the most singular peculiarities of anatomical structure’ (by these ‘peculiarities’ Wallace was referring to what he described as ‘rudimentary organs’, such as ‘the antitypal sketch of a wing adapted for flight in the scaly flapper of the penguin’, not realising at the time that the majority of such instances were ‘vestigial’ features). Although Wallace was presenting a powerful synthesis of existing knowledge and theory, summarising widely accepted propositions about organic geography and geology, the argument he puts forward is based strongly on his own observations. By travelling and noting so minutely the patterns of distribution of particular classes, orders, families, genera and species, he was able to verify that his broad statements fitted the facts. For example, he used his knowledge of birds he had actually collected to demonstrate one major geographical proposition: ‘When a group is confined to one district, and is rich in species, it is almost invariably the case that the most closely allied species are found in the same locality or in closely adjoining localities, and that therefore the natural sequence of the species by affinity is also geographical’ – a proposition that helps to answer the questions: ‘Why are the closely allied species of brown-backed trogons all found in the east, and the green-backed in the west? Why are the macaws and the cockatoos similarly restricted?’