Alfred Russel Wallace

by Peter Raby

  When he sailed on 25 January 1856, he left Charles Allen behind. Bishop McDougall was short of teachers for the mission, and offered to educate and train the young man, who was ‘of a religious turn’. Charles had proved a frustrating apprentice, and although Wallace offered to take him with him on different and more generous terms, paying him piecemeal as a collector, he preferred to stay in Sarawak. Wallace hardly knew whether to be glad or sorry: ‘It saves me a great deal of trouble and annoyance, and I feel it quite a relief to be without him,’ he admitted to Fanny. ‘On the other hand, it is a considerable loss to me, as he had just begun to be valuable in collecting.’21 He felt Charles would be secure enough, with the McDougalls and Brooke as his mentors. In Charles’s place went the fifteen-year-old Ali, a promising shot and a more tractable apprentice. It was also much cheaper and simpler to travel without having to worry about food and bedding for a second European.

  For almost four months, Wallace found himself pinned down in Singapore, waiting for funds, waiting for a ship. After the excitements of Borneo, it was particularly irksome to be wholly dependent on the mail from England, especially when the burden of Stevens’s next letter was a complaint that the recent consignment was ‘a very poor lot for Borneo’. Wallace leaped to his own defence. They were all collected in the wet season – before the Simunjon idyll – and he had characterised them himself as ‘a very miserable collection’ apart from the moths. He despaired of specimen-fanciers who despised small insects and who assumed, quite wrongly, that tropical insects were in general large and brightly coloured. The constant cry before he left London was ‘Do not neglect the small things’; ‘The small things are what we want because they have never been collected in the Tropics.’22

  Meanwhile, he desperately needed money for the next expedition. Insects that he had caught at Simunjon during his first months in Borneo had left Singapore on the Cornubia in August 1855, sailing via the Cape. Stevens acknowledged their arrival in a letter of 6 January 1856, to which Wallace responded on 10 March. Until the collections had been placed and sold, no money would be forwarded to Singapore – and that could be another three months: it was a slow and uncertain process. Stevens had, in fact, been as active as he could on Wallace’s behalf. The Ornithoptera brookiana was described to the Entomological Society on 2 April 1855, and a ‘splendid specimen’ was exhibited on 4 June; another box of Coleoptera from Borneo was shown on 5 November, and a box containing three fine species of Lucanidae, including a remarkable variety of L. brookiana, on 7 January 1856, one day after their arrival in London.23 Wallace’s name, extracts from his letters, his latest specimens, were a constant theme at the Society’s transactions, but that did not necessarily translate into profit. Wallace smarted at the implied rebuke, ‘a very poor lot for Borneo’; Stevens also informed him that several naturalists expressed regret that he was ‘theorizing’, when what was needed were more facts. In other words, he should stop writing speculative papers, and concentrate on his collecting.

  The Sarawak paper was published in September 1855. Wallace waited in vain for reaction, either hostile or complimentary. None came, apart from Stevens’s annoying message. Darwin read the paper, and made some annotations in the margin of his copy: ‘Nothing very new’ – ‘Uses my simile of the tree’ – ‘It seems all creation with him’.24 Darwin cannot have read the paper very carefully, and was perhaps misled by Wallace’s use of the word ‘create’ in connection with the Galapagos species, or by his unusual use of the word ‘antitype’, when ‘prototype’ might have made the meaning clearer. He might, too, have already discounted Wallace as a potential theoriser of any weight, judging him by his inconsistent and comparatively amateurish book on the Amazon. But others had absorbed the implications, and alerted Darwin. Edward Blyth, whose own writings had been noted carefully by Wallace, wrote from Calcutta, ‘Good! Upon the whole!’; friend Wallace had ‘put the matter well’. ‘Has it at all unsettled your ideas regarding the persistence of species,’ Blyth asked directly, unaware of the private direction of Darwin’s thoughts, ‘not perhaps so much from novelty of argument, as by the lucid collation of facts and phenomena?’ Charles Lyell’s own monumental works on the geological record provided the underpinning for Darwin, as indeed they did for Wallace, and perhaps not surprisingly Lyell sensed the significance of the Sarawak paper. He began a new notebook on species, and started to contemplate the worrying possibility of transmutation. On a visit to Down, Darwin’s Kent home, Lyell was initiated into Darwin’s theory of natural selection.25 In return, he urged Darwin to accelerate, and to publish, in case he should be forestalled.

  Oblivious of any such impact on the world of scientific thinking, Wallace plunged back momentarily into the economics and practicalities of collecting. The Borneo Company’s vessel the Water Lily sailed on 5 March with a batch of orang skins and skeletons, and five thousand insects for sale, including fifteen hundred moths, which he worked very hard to get: he claimed, not entirely accurately, that he had stayed ‘alone up on the top of the mountain for a month or more’.26 There was also a human skull for Dr Joseph Davis, provenance unknown.

  Wallace did not let time pass unprofitably, while he kicked his heels in Singapore, staying with his French missionary friends, and fasting with them each Friday on omelettes and vegetables, ‘a most wholesome custom’. Stevens had sent him a box of books, and he could therefore press on with his researches, annotating and transcribing into the Species Notebook – and Singapore offered a library, and journals. He could, too, practise his Malay with Ali, and asked Stevens to buy Crawfurd’s Malay Dictionary, and send him the second volume by post; he would manage without the grammar. He also continued to collect on Singapore island, training Ali as he did so. In Singapore, too, he could be in touch with other naturalists: by letter with John Bowring, collecting in Java, and in person with the plant-collector Thomas Lobb, who had been in Moulmein and was setting off to Labuan, in Borneo, plant-hunting for Veitch’s the nurserymen. He also wrote a letter at Stevens’s prompting to Bates, although with no mention of his Sarawak paper. Now, on 12 May, his vessel was almost ready to sail for Macassar, calling for a few days first at Bali, a voyage of some forty-five days against the monsoon. It had been extremely frustrating, he told Stevens, ‘6 months utterly lost and at great expense. Such things people never reckon when estimating the profits of collectors.’ But prospects now were good, he assured his agent: ‘I have made preparations for collecting extensively by engaging a good man [not Ali, a Portuguese called Fernandez] to shoot and skin birds and animals, which I think in the countries I am going to will pay me very well.’27 It was crucial for continued success that Stevens should instruct Hamilton Gray & Co. to forward money to him. They were allowing him to draw only up to £100, and his living expenses and stores for the trip had made a great hole in that already. What animals did people want? Lories, and cockatoos, he assumed, ‘and if I can reach the bird of Paradise country (the Arroo Isles) I shall be able to prepare good specimens of those gorgeous birds, one of the greatest treats I can look forward to’. By moving backwards and forwards through the islands for the next two years, he planned to escape the wet season.

  In the event, the voyage to Bali was swift: twenty days from Singapore, in the Kembang Djepoon (‘Rose of Japan’), a schooner owned by a Chinese merchant, with a Javanese crew and an English captain, before they anchored at Bileling, on the north side of the island. They were there for just two days, time enough for Wallace to be astonished and delighted by the intensity of cultivation, and for him to secure a few birds and butterflies. (He looked back with regret at a lost opportunity, not realising at the time how significant a location he was in.) Then they sailed on to Ampanam, in Lombock, where he planned to await a passage to Macassar. He and his boxes passed safely through the heavy surf, and he took up quarters with an English trader, an ex-sea captain called Carter.

  Lombock, like Bali, was wonderfully and intensely cultivated: rice, tobacco, coffee, cotton and hides were exported in
abundance. ‘Our manufacturers and capitalists are on the look out for a new cotton producing district,’ Wallace informed the world. ‘Here is one to their hands.’28 The level of cultivation meant that the territory was disproportionately the poorer for collecting; but by travelling to the south part of the island Wallace was able to overcome this drawback. To his great excitement, he discovered that the bird population was entirely unexpected, and threw ‘great light on the laws of Geographical distribution of Animals in the East’.29 The islands of Bali and Lombock were of nearly the same size, the same soil, aspect, elevation and climate; and they were within sight of each other – the Lombock strait is no more than twenty-eight kilometres at its widest point. Yet the fauna of each was distinct; in fact, Wallace stated, they ‘belong to two quite distinct Zoological provinces, of which they form the extreme limits’. As an instance he cited the cockatoos,

  … a group of birds confined to Australia and the Moluccas, but quite unknown in Java, Borneo, Sumatra and Malacca. One species however (Plyctolophus sulphurens) is abundant in Lombock but unknown in Bali, the island of Lombock forming the extreme western limit of its range and that of the whole family. Many other species illustrate the same fact and I am preparing a short account of them for publication.30

  Wallace had, fortuitously, come across the dividing line between the Asian and the Australian biological regions, a major discovery in his thinking about species, and about their distribution and evolution.

  Buoyed by this breakthrough, Wallace enjoyed himself in Lombock. He employed an additional bird-skinner, a Portuguese from Malacca called Manuel, hired a small boat, and tracked along the coast to a wilder spot, where he made a good collection of birds: cockatoos, honeysuckers and mound-makers, large green pigeons which were also excellent eating, an Australian bee-eater, the beautiful ground-thrush Pitta concinna, little crimson and black flower-peckers, large black cuckoos, metallic king-crows, golden orioles, eight species of kingfisher, and the fine jungle-cocks – ‘the origin of all our domestic breeds of poultry’.31 But while the spoils were rich, collecting operations were carried out under more than usual difficulties. He had just one small room for eating, sleeping and working, for storehouse and dissecting room: no shelves, cupboards, chairs or table, and everything shared not only with his host but with swarms of ants and any dog, cat or fowl that happened to wander in. The box on which he skinned the birds, and an old bench whose four legs were placed in water-filled coconut shells to thwart the ants, were the only safe places for his two insect boxes and the hundred or so bird skins that might be drying at any one time. As he explained, all animal substances require some time to dry thoroughly, and ‘emit a very disagreeable odour while doing so’.32 Nevertheless, he shipped off a case to Stevens via Singapore, which included about three hundred birds for sale. ‘The domestic duck is for Mr Darwin and he would perhaps also like to take the jungle-cock, which is often domesticated here and is doubtless one of the originals for the domestic breed of poultry.’33 Wallace had been pressed into Darwin’s network of collectors – these already included Rajah Brooke – who were sending him specimens of pigeon and poultry skins from all round the world as part of his study of domestic and wild varieties of fowl. Darwin wrote to Wallace for the first time in December 1855, with a wants list, opening the way for a more regular correspondence.

  Lombock was not quite so peaceful as Sarawak had seemed. A Balinese woman living with an Englishman was ordered to be ‘krissed’ – a kris is the sharp Malay dagger – by the rajah, because she had accepted a flower from another man. (For a more serious infidelity, a woman and her lover would be tied back to back and thrown into the sea, to be eaten by crocodiles.) Wallace went for a long walk into the country, to avoid being a witness. Then the raja, it was reported, had ordered heads to be cut off to secure a good crop of rice: Manuel would not go out shooting alone, and Ali refused to fetch water unless he was armed with a spear. Wallace made light of these rumours, but Fernandez had had enough, and took the next ship back to Singapore and safety. A few days later, a small schooner arrived, and Wallace was able to secure his passage on the short voyage northwards to Macassar in the south-west corner of Celebes (Sulawesi), arriving there on 2 September.

  This was the first of four visits Wallace made to various parts of Celebes, and his initial reaction was one of disappointment. After three weeks he had done little except spy out the nakedness of the land – ‘and it is indeed naked’, he complained to Stevens: ‘I have never seen a more uninviting country than the neighbourhood of Macassar.’34 There were no insects, no beetles, very few butterflies; birds were slightly more promising, especially the raptors. He hoped to find a house inland, in more promising territory, but that meant negotiations with the rajah. Then Ali had been ill with malaria, and as soon as Wallace had nursed him back to health he fell sick himself, which took a week’s regime of quinine to cure, after which he had to do the same once more for Ali – though he was well enough in the morning to cope with the cooking. Reinforcements were clearly needed, so Wallace added another boy who could cook and shoot, named Baderoon, to the party, and a ‘little impudent rascal of twelve or fourteen’, Baso, to carry the gun or the insect net.35 Thus equipped, and with the loan of a pack-horse from a Dutch friend, Wallace shifted his scene of operations to a more promising stretch of forest, and began to realise that the island’s species had ‘a surprising amount of individuality’. ‘While it is poor in the actual number of its species, it is yet wonderfully rich in peculiar forms; many of which are singular or beautiful, and are in some cases absolutely unique upon the globe.’ These forms would continue to puzzle him for many years. Meanwhile, he needed to move on. The rains were coming, and both he and Ali had been unwell again – he suspected a polluted water supply. Back in Macassar, there was mail to answer. Sir James Brooke wrote to bring him up to date. Brooke had been summoned before a commission of enquiry in Singapore, set up by the British Parliament, alarmed by reports of his high-handed ways at putting down insurrections. He could report now that the storm that had been raging on his head had ‘at length blown over’, but the British government was still not prepared to recognise him as ‘an independent sovereign’ in Sarawak.36 The news about Wallace’s protégé, Charles Allen, was not very encouraging: ‘They say he is not clever at books.’ Brooke had read Wallace’s ‘little brochure’ – the Sarawak paper on species – with satisfaction, ‘but I am somewhat misty on these subjects’: at least someone had read it. Wallace had had no reaction so far from England, but he wrote his first letter to Darwin, using the topic of domestic and wild varieties as an entrée. A letter from a proud Mrs Wallace told him that his brother John had had a son. Now that Wallace was an uncle, he had another reason to return home via America: ‘The far East is to me what the far West is to the Americans. They both meet in California where I hope to arrive some day.’37 Wallace was about to make his most adventurous voyage to date, and was in mischievous mood: ‘Has Eliza Roberts got rid of her moustache yet?’ he asked his sister. ‘Tell her in private to use tweezers. A hair a day would exterminate it in a year or two without anyone’s perceiving.’ He was setting off for his ‘Ultima Thule’, committing himself to a thousand miles’ voyage in a native boat, to a place from where the two kinds of birds of paradise known to Linnaeus, the King Bird of Paradise, Paradisea regia, and the Great Paradise bird, Paradisea apoda, were first brought to Europe. Even by the Macassar people themselves, commented Wallace, usually rather sardonic about standard travellers’ tales, the voyage to the Aru Islands ‘is looked upon as a rather wild and romantic expedition, full of novel sights and strange adventures’.38

  7 Heading East

  NEITHER A FALSE start, nor four days confined to his cabin in Macassar harbour because of incessant rain, could puncture Wallace’s enthusiasm. The boat was a prau, shaped something like a Chinese junk and about seventy tons with great mat-sails. There was a thatched cabin on deck, and he secured a section of this to himself – four feet high, six and
a half feet long, five and a half feet wide – ‘the snuggest and most comfortable little place I ever enjoyed at sea’. The cabin had a split bamboo floor, covered with fine cane mats; gun-case, insect boxes, bags of shot and powder, clothes and books against the far wall, mattress in the middle, canteen, lamp and little store of luxuries, tobacco and beads for trading, while guns, revolver and hunting knife hung conveniently from the roof. (The little store of luxuries, and necessities, was quite extensive. Besides an eight-month supply of sugar, coffee and tea, he had a keg of butter, sixteen flasks of oil, and a quantity of bread cut thin, and dried, and slightly toasted, plus a dozen bottles of Madeira and some beer. There was also common starch, ‘good to clean feathers of birds’.) On board, everything smelt so sweetly. There was no paint, tar, new rope, grease, oil, or varnish, but just bamboo and rattan, coir rope and palm thatch, ‘pure vegetable fibres, which smell pleasantly if they smell at all, and recall quiet scenes in the green and shady forest’.1 The captain, Herr Warzbergen, was half Javanese, the crew of thirty mostly from Macassar; there were other traders, and Wallace’s three servants, Ali, Baderoon and Baso, who had now been taught to cook tolerably. Baderoon was in disgrace. He had persuaded Wallace to advance him four months’ wages, claiming he was buying a house; then he had gambled the lot away, and came on board without any spare clothes or provisions. Once under way, Wallace settled down to one of the pleasantest and most peaceful voyages he ever experienced: a calm and efficient captain, a civil good-tempered crew, complete freedom about meals and dress – luxuries far surpassing those ‘of the most magnificent screw-steamer, that highest result of our civilisation’. He tried a little fried shark, celebrated Christmas Day with an extra glass of wine to accompany the usual rice and curry, saw his first active volcano as they passed the Banda group, and admired flying fish rising and falling like swallows. As the year ended they approached the Ke Islands. The water was as transparent as crystal, with colours varying from emerald to lapis lazuli: