by Peter Raby
Thinking it very unlikely that two snakes had got on board at the same time, I turned in and went to sleep; but having all the time a vague dreamy feeling that I might put my hand on another one, I lay wonderfully still, not turning over once all night, quite the reverse of my usual habits.16
By April 1859, Wallace had been away from England for five years, and he was coming under pressure from his family to return home: the success of his collecting, his assured scientific reputation, his bouts of illness, were all put forward as good reasons, especially by his brother-in-law Thomas Sims, perhaps acting as family spokesman. These were ingenious arguments, Wallace admitted, but they left him quite unmoved. ‘I have much to do yet before I can return with satisfaction of mind; – were I to leave now I should be ever regretful & unhappy … I feel my work is here as well as my pleasure & why should I not follow out my vocation.’ He agreed that he already had enough materials for a ‘life’s study’ of entomology as far as ‘the forms & structure & affinities’ of insects were concerned.
But I am engaged here in a wider & more general study – that of the relations of animals to time & space, or in other words their Geographical & Geological distribution & its causes. I have set myself to work out this problem in the Indo-Australian Archipelago & I must visit & explore the largest number of islands possible & collect animals from the greatest number of localities in order to arrive at any definite results. As to health & life, what are they compared with peace & happiness.17
This was the master plan underpinning his relentless quartering of the Archipelago, and it may be significant that this expansive study – ‘of the relations of animals to time & space’ – pre-dated his reading of The Origin of Species. He continued to work at the problem. Celebes, in particular, puzzled him, and he stayed at or near Menado, on the end of the north-eastern peninsular, between June and September 1859. From the social perspective, he found the island, under the Dutch system, a model of what he thought colonial government should be: paternal despotism, acceptable because it led to moral and physical improvement.
If we are satisfied that we are right in assuming the government over a savage race and occupying their country; and if we further consider it out duty to do what we can to improve our rude subjects and raise them up toward our own level, we must not be too much afraid of the cry of ‘despotism’ and ‘slavery’, but must use the authority we possess to induce them to do work which they may not altogether like, but which we know to be an indispensable step in their moral and physical advancement.18
By the time he wrote the concluding sections of The Malay Archipelago, Wallace was giving greater emphasis to that ‘if’. But he remained convinced that the Dutch system was, at the very least, superior to the English, because it was allied to the grand law of continuity and gradual development: it was evolutionary, leading the people on – and, of course, upwards – by gradual steps towards a ‘higher’ state of civilisation. The British attempted to force their ‘civilisation’ on a subject people at once: ‘We demoralise and we extirpate, but we never really civilise.’19 Certainly, the Dutch system made this part of the island a very convenient and comfortable place to collect in. The local people were the most industrious, peaceable and civilised in the whole Archipelago; luggage was delivered as promised, houses prepared, boats or guides were available for hire, and Wallace found a particularly helpful ally in the eldest son of the governor of the Moluccas, who organised a large hunting party for him.
The island’s geology and its fauna intrigued him. While he was there he experienced an earthquake, serious enough to make him appreciate the vast forces at work: ‘We feel ourselves in the grasp of a power to which the wildest fury of the winds and waves are as nothing.’20 Near by there were hot springs and craters, spurting jets of steam and boiling mud. These phenomena made him especially conscious of the geological changes that must have taken place in remote epochs. The species he collected were of extraordinary individuality: eighty species of birds peculiar to Celebes; eleven out of fourteen species of terrestrial mammals, including the sapi-utan, or wild cow, and the babirusa, or pig-deer (both captured in the hunt); of the swallow-tailed butterflies, the Papilionidae, there were twenty-four species, of which eighteen are not found on any other island. Another feature was the complete absence of several groups found in the Moluccas as well as in Borneo and Java, but not here. All this, to Wallace, pointed to an origin for Celebes of the remotest antiquity. He continued to think over the problem for the rest of his life.
Leaving Celebes for the third and final time, he decided to make Amboyna his base temporarily, while he filled in the gaps in his knowledge of the Archipelago, and in particular Ceram, and the adjacent islands. A preliminary reconnaissance on Ceram, involving long wet treks through the forest, yielded magnificent butterflies, but left Wallace in a very poor state of health. He had been bitten all over – ‘covered head to foot with inflamed lumps’ – and he was laid up for two months, confined to his house.
He had plenty of reading matter. Darwin sent him, naturally, a copy of The Origin of Species (he may have sent him the proofs), and Wallace responded with a typically generous but objective appraisal. ‘I most completely agree with you’, replied Darwin, ‘on the parts which are strongest & which are weakest.’ Darwin reached out over the oceans to include Wallace in the campaign to promote natural selection: ‘I can very plainly see, as I lately told Hooker, that my Book would have been & be a mere flash in the pan, were it not for you, Hooker & a few others.’21 As well as these pleasant thoughts of his place in the scientific community, Wallace now had a European companion to talk to. Charles Allen had withdrawn from the mission in Sarawak, and, with Brooke’s help, found temporary employment with the Borneo Company. Wallace persuaded him to take up his former occupation, this time as a freelance collector paid largely by results. He found Allen two assistants, Cornelius, a lad from Menado – ‘very quiet and industrious’ – and a local man, Theodorus Matakena, whom he had trained to skin birds. Four more years in the east had matured Allen, and Wallace was able to enjoy his company for a while, and to plan the next phase. Allen was dispatched to the north coast of Ceram, and from there to the ‘unexplored’ island of Mysol; Wallace headed east, along the southern coast of Ceram, with his final destination Waigiou: he was off again in search of paradise birds.
But first he made a detour down the chain of coral islands that stretched towards Ke and Aru. This satisfied his curiosity, but did not bring many rewards in terms of collecting. There were, too, several unnerving episodes: one small hired prau was borne on strong currents, and only a timely issue of spirits put enough vigour into the rowers’ arms to pull them to safety. A second, equally miserable vessel took him further east, but the currents and winds proved too much for his crew. The alternatives seemed to include a week at sea in a small, open and heavily laden boat, or the risk of being driven ashore on the coast of New Guinea, where they might all be murdered, the recent fate of the crews of two local trading praus. Reluctantly, Wallace ordered a return to Goram. Here he bought a small prau for £9, and decided to convert it to his own specifications. He got out his saw and chisels, and set to work, to general astonishment. He arranged for a Ke boat-builder to fit new ribs, and, in the absence of augers, had to bore all the holes with hot irons. But even when leading by example, he could not instil a satisfactory work ethic into his labourers, whom he had hired to complete the prau and then crew her to Mysol, Waigiou and Ternate. Perhaps it was fortunate that when they reached Ceram, the entire crew decamped overnight. Wallace seemed inclined to put all this fecklessness down to the local diet of sago, which was far too readily available. He calculated the economics: in ten days a man could produce enough food for a whole year, a cost, in money terms, of twelve shillings. There was no proper incentive to progress. He managed to scrabble together a crew to take him to Wahai, where he was hospitably received by the Dutch commandant and by his old New Guinea acquaintance, Rosenberg. Rosenberg lent him some money
to pay off his men and hire a fresh crew. He also found a cri de coeur from Charles Allen, who was running out of supplies on Mysol – rice and, crucially and less easily solved, insect pins.22
The first leg of the voyage was about sixty miles of open sea. The wind and the current carried them vigorously past Mysol, and poor Allen was left to fend for himself. Wallace then steered for a group of small islands, and after four days of being tossed about in the open boat they managed to find an anchorage. Two of the men were put on shore to cut jungle rope, and make the prau secure. Suddenly, the anchor slipped, and the boat drifted slowly but inexorably away on the current, which was too strong to row against. There was a lot of frantic shouting and gesticulating, and the two men disappeared from sight into the forest. Wallace presumed they were going to build a raft. However, he soon saw smoke rising: they had decided to build a fire to cook shellfish. Wallace was now anxious about his own predicament, and he and his crew just managed to reach the safety of a small island two miles off. They rested there, and the next day scoured the island for water, eventually finding some in a sheltered rock-hole. There was no sign of the two marooned men, but Wallace was not so worried about them. They had choppers, and could cut down a tree to make sago. They could dig for water, and harvest for shellfish. On the third day he sailed on to Waigiou. Once established there, he hired a boat to go and rescue his abandoned crew, who eventually turned up ‘in tolerable health, though thin and weak’, after surviving for a month on roots, shellfish and turtles’ eggs. Conscious that his actions might seem a little ruthless, he gave an extensive commentary:
Having swum to the island, they had only a pair of trowsers and a shirt between them, but had made a hut of palm leaves, and had altogether got on very well. They saw that I waited for them three days at the opposite island, but had been afraid to cross, lest the current should have carried them out to sea, when they would have been inevitably lost. They had felt sure I would send for them on the first opportunity, and appeared more grateful than natives usually are for my having done so; while I felt much relieved that my voyage, though sufficiently unfortunate, had not involved loss of life.23
Wallace could now turn his attention to the natural history of the island.
As there were no suitable houses available in the scattered village of Muka, Wallace had one built on the edge of the forest, siting it near the path and the stream, and close to a fine fig tree. It was a kind of lean-to shed, with walls of thatch, supplemented by the prau’s sails, and with palm-leaf mats for the roof. After some adjustments, the roof was made relatively watertight, and he could concentrate on birds of paradise. The villagers maintained that none were to be found in the immediate vicinity, but Wallace could actually hear them, and the very first day he went into the forest he saw one, the rare red species Paradisea rubra, found only on Waigiou. His hunter brought him a female, and there was a good deal of shooting and missing. Then the figs began to ripen, and the birds came to feed. The birds moved so quickly, and the foliage of the surrounding trees was so dense, that there was as much watching as shooting of a bird in many respects more remarkable and beautiful than the two large species he had already obtained:
The Red Bird of Paradise
The head, back, and shoulders are clothed with a richer yellow, the deep metallic green colour of the throat extends farther over the head, and the feathers are elongated on the forehead into two little erectile crests. The side-plumes are shorter, but are of a rich red colour, terminating in delicate white points, and the middle tail feathers are represented by two long rigid glossy ribbands [sic], which are black, thin, and semi-cylindrical, and droop gracefully in a spiral curve.
He had managed to shoot only two males on ‘his’ tree, ‘when they ceased visiting it, either owing to the fruit becoming scarce, or that they were wise enough to know there was danger’. They had to be hunted in the forest.24
Muka was not a comfortable base: there was very little fresh food to buy, apart from the occasional fish. As in Ceram, the people were dependent on the abundant sago palm, so did not grow vegetables or fruit: in Wallace’s view, this kept them in poverty, and poor health, and as the majority seemed to have a Papuan slave to do all the labour, they lived in almost absolute idleness. They appeared to be a mixed race, part Malay and Alfuro from Gilolo, part Papuan from New Guinea; Wallace saw this as more evidence of the distinctness between the two races of the Malay Archipelago, which had intermingled in unoccupied territory ‘at a very recent epoch in the history of man’, rather than being a modification of one and the same race.25
Since birds of paradise remained his principal goal, Wallace eventually took the locals’ advice, and made for Bessir, where the specialist hunters operated. He left his helmsman behind with the prau, hired an outrigger, and spent a disagreeable day being tossed about on his way to what was in fact a separate island of raised coral. There was a little hut just above a white sandy beach, which the chief offered to him – a dwarf’s house, eight feet square, with the ridge over the raised level only five feet from the floor, and the space below offering scarcely four and a half feet clearance. Wallace fixed up a small table and shelves in this cramped space, and would crawl inside to work, or to have his meals; at night, he slept above, while his men spread their sleeping mats on the ground. This was his home for six weeks.
It was a good opportunity to re-read The Origin of Species, and to write to George Silk about it. Wallace was still largely unaware of the public’s response to Darwin’s book. But he had read it through, now, five or six times, each with increasing admiration – it would live as long as Newton’s
Principia:
The cycles of astronomy or even the periods of geology will alone enable us to appreciate the vast depths of time we have to contemplate in the endeavour to understand the slow growth of life upon the earth … Mr Darwin has given the world a new science, and his name should, in my opinion, stand above that of every philosopher of ancient or modern times. The force of admiration can no further go!!!26
Years later, Wallace confided to his doctor that, when he received the proofs of The Origin, he put aside his own projected book of theory, a decision that he seems to have kept extremely private.27 Certainly, he did not mention to Silk that Darwin’s book had effectively blocked his own. The copious notes on Lyell, all the extracts and references in his notebooks, would have to serve another purpose.
The hunters arrived, and Wallace paid for his birds up front, with hatchets, beads, knives and handkerchiefs. Only one hunter was confident enough to take goods to the value of two birds: the others bided their time. Three days later, bird one arrived, still alive, but tied up in a small bag and so with damaged feathers. Wallace explained that he wanted as perfect specimens as possible: if the birds were to be kept alive, they should be secured on a perch with a string round one leg. The other hunters now decided to join in, and compounded for anything from one to six birds. Even so, many birds arrived in poor condition, but those that had been caught the same day were put in a bamboo cage, with troughs for food and water, and Wallace did his best to nurture them, feeding them on fruit and live grasshoppers. His efforts all failed, but he stayed on for as long as possible to add to his collection. His own and his men’s diet was meagre. Tough pigeons and cockatoos supplemented the rice and sago, but there was scarcely enough fruit such as plantains, or vegetables, for the local inhabitants. He became thin and weak, and suffered from intense headaches; and an attack of malaria left him so apathetic that he could not face the sago diet, and had to fall back for nourishment on his emergency rations, two tins of soup. It was time to go. The hunters brought their last birds, and one returned the axe he had received in advance. The man who had bargained for six came running up just as the boat was being loaded, and handed over the last bird, saying ‘Now I owe you nothing’ – ‘unexpected instances of honesty’ that made a deep impression on Wallace.28 He took away twenty-four fine specimens of Paradisea rubra, as well as several other entirely new or
extremely rare species of birds – the New Guinea kite, a new goat-sucker – and wonderful butterflies, with a superb green Ornithoptera, ‘one of the glories of my cabinet’.
The voyage from Waigiou to Ternate provided a catalogue of obstacles. Rats had gnawed through the sails in twenty places which meant buying new matting. Head winds and contrary tides and currents hindered their progress west, and when they finally arrived at Gilolo, they were forced to the north coast, and even then had to claw their way along by rowing. Wallace listed a set of Pauline disasters: ten times aground on coral reefs, four anchors and a small boat lost, no oil for the compass lamp, shortages of food and water, and ‘not one single day of fair wind!’ When they were successively nearly swamped by a tidal wave, and then overtaken by a hurricane, the old steersman was convinced that theirs was an unlucky boat, and that they were paying the penalty for having neglected the Bugis holy oil ceremony when the prau was first refitted. After a total of thirty-eight days, instead of the estimated twelve, they finally reached Ternate, where Charles Allen was waiting. Wallace had received a note from him on the way back, via the captain of a passing trading prau, which had cheered his spirits. Allen had been understandably apprehensive, especially after having been left to his own devices on Mysol. He had done reasonably well there, though he had only collected a few paradise birds. Wallace was impressed by his independence, and courage, and persuaded him to undertake several more dangerous, solo expeditions, to New Guinea, to the Sula Islands, to Flores, and to Coti, on the east coast of Borneo.