by Peter Raby
One striking section of argument derives directly from Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle:
The Galapagos are a volcanic group of high antiquity, and have probably never been more closely connected with the continent than they are at present. They must have been first peopled, like other newly formed islands, by the action of winds and currents, and at a period sufficiently remote to have had the original species die out, and the modified prototypes only remain. In the same way we can account for the separate islands having each their peculiar species, either on the supposition that the same original emigration peopled the whole of the islands with the same species from which differently modified prototypes were created, or that the islands were successively peopled from each other, but that new species have been created in each on the plan of the pre-existing ones.
(Wallace was clearly using the word ‘create’ in the sense of ‘evolve’.) He also illustrated the relationship between past and existing species through the metaphors of a tree – a gnarled oak – or the vascular system of the human body:
Again, if we consider that we have only fragments of this vast system, the stem and main branches being represented by extinct species of which we have no knowledge, while a vast mass of limbs and boughs and minute twigs and scattered leaves is what we have to place in order, so as to determine the true position which each originally occupied with regard to the others, the whole difficulty of the true Natural System of classification becomes apparent to us.
Wallace claimed for his law
a superiority over previous hypotheses, on the ground that it not merely explains, but necessitates what exists. Granted the law, and many of the most important facts in Nature could not have been otherwise, but are almost as necessary deductions from it as are the elliptic orbits of the planets from the law of gravitation.
The theory was clearly stated, but Wallace did not enter into the question of the mechanism, the how. This was certainly no surreptitious, cautious testing of the water, but a public challenge: Forbes had just been elected to a chair at Edinburgh, and, because of the openness and generosity of his nature, was thought highly of even by those who disagreed with his views. He was likely to respond. Wallace clearly wished for a debate, even at long distance, and was not to know, as he wrote out his argument while the rain thundered down on Santubong, that Forbes had died in November at the age of thirty-nine. He sealed up the essay, and sent it to Stevens for forwarding to the editor of the Annals and Magazine of Natural History. Then he went on with his reading, transferring key passages to his Species Notebook, and developing his ideas for the full-scale treatment he was planning, until the rainy season was past. In noting Lyell’s views on the ‘balance of species’, he commented, ‘To human apprehension this is no balance but a struggle in which one often exterminates the other.’ A little later, he comments, ‘Introduce this and disprove all Lyell’s arguments first at the commencement of my last chapter.’7 His mind was humming.
His collecting so far had been sporadic, and certainly not spectacular. He needed to make his way, if not into the heart of Borneo, then at least to new territory away from the Sarawak and Santubong rivers, and back in Sarawak he asked for advice. To the east, a coal works was being opened on the Simunjon river, a small branch of the Sadong river, at the foot of an isolated hill, and Ludwig Helmes suggested Wallace should try his luck there. So Wallace transferred his base, living at first with Coulson, the Yorkshire engineer in charge. He found it such a productive locality that he had a small, two-roomed house built for himself and Charlie Allen, and installed his considerable baggage, everything from camp-bed to teacups and teaspoons. Then there were his scientific instruments, compasses, thermometers, barometers, sympiesometer, and his books, and medicines, and a strong-box for his money and valuables. But it was the collecting gear that took up most space: collecting-nets and boxes, bottles of chemicals and spirits for preserving, and more boards and boxes and jars and casks for the specimens he captured.
Simunjon became his home for the next nine months. In the eyes of an entomologist, it was an ideal location. For hundreds of miles in every direction ‘a magnificent forest extended over plain and mountain, rock and morass’; the rains were receding, the daily sunshine increasing; and, just where he was situated, Chinese and Dyak labourers were felling the virgin forest to clear the ground for mining, and cutting a two-mile swathe for a railtrack to the Sadong river. There were sawpits in the jungle for beams and planks. Everywhere timber was lying on the ground, bark and leaves drying and decaying, rich ground for beetles and insects; and in the sunny clearings and pathways butterflies and wasps abounded.
March 12th. The day was a fine one; – flies, hymenoptera, & wasps were abundant & among them a few longicorn beetles occasionally appeared, sometimes too a bright green buprestis would whiz by & then settle on some trunk or log exposed to the hottest sun, starting off again however on the slightest attempt to approach him.8
Wallace paid the labourers a cent for each insect they brought him. In the previous four months he had collected 320 different kinds of beetles: now in only two weeks he matched that total, an average of 24 separate species a day, and on one memorable day, 76, of which 34 were new to him. His total – and Wallace always kept his eye on the total, as it represented his future bank balance – for Borneo was a round two thousand, and of these all but a hundred were collected at Simunjon, on scarcely more than a square mile of ground. He was delighted now that he had had nothing to do with the Australian expedition. Borneo was the best possible location, and he had even spoken to the rajah about a possible opening for George Silk.
Encouraged by this brilliant start, Wallace settled down for a long stay. He acquired fowls and pigs, planted pumpkins and onions – ‘or we should have nothing to eat’.9 Shoes were a problem – he was busy dissecting and patching, and had become quite an expert in the internal machinery. The other irritation was Charles Allen. Sister Fanny was threatening to send him another assistant: what were his qualities? Did they include neatness and perseverance? ‘Do not tell me that he is “a very nice young man”. Of course he is. So is Charles a very nice boy, but I could not be troubled with another like him for any consideration whatever.’ Charles – the son of a carpenter – was hopeless at carpentry, setting butterflies or putting up a bird – and this ‘after twelve months’ constant practice and constant teaching!’10 Yet out of doors Charles did very well, was an effective collector, an increasingly accurate shot, and good at skinning. But to keep the specimen production line moving, an insect and bird setter was vital, or Wallace would never be able to move from his table.
It was not just beetles that he was acquiring. The butterflies, not so abundant, were spectacular, none more so than a beautiful creature with very long and pointed wings, ‘deep velvety black, with a curved band of spots of a brilliant metallic-green colour extending across the wings from tip to tip, each spot being shaped exactly like a small triangular feather’ – he named it Ornithoptera brookiana, (now Trogonoptera brookiana), after the rajah.11 There was a large tree frog brought to him by one of the Chinese, a ‘flying frog’ that Wallace sketched, a new species, he decided, of the genus Rhacophorus. Sometimes the sky was dark with immense flights of fruit-eating bats. Not having a dedicated professional hunter at this point, the birds, including the hornbills, escaped comparatively lightly as Wallace was so busy with insects, but he nevertheless acquired five squirrels, two tiger-cats, the Gymnurus rafflesii – ‘a cross between a pig and a polecat’ – and the rare otter-like Cynogale bennetti. His notes were not restricted to an animal’s habits: ‘Cuscus – eats fruit and leaves – flesh tender and well-flavoured’; ‘mouse deer – admirable eating – jugged’.12 But these were incidental treasures. Simunjon, his informants had told him, was an excellent locality for orang-utans. A week after his arrival, and only a quarter of a mile from his house, he was out collecting insects when he heard a rustling in a nearby tree: he looked up, and saw his first ‘mias’, moving slowly
from branch to branch. He followed it through the jungle until the ground became too swampy. He recorded it in his notebook: ‘Monday March 19th. This was a white day for me. I saw for the first time the Orang Utan or “Mias” of the Dyaks in its native forests.’ On a tree near by, he found ‘its nest or seat formed of sticks & boughs supported in a forked branch’.13
Wallace’s objectives were to see the orang-utan, or mias, in ‘his native haunts’, to study his habits, and to obtain a range of good specimens. Being a mid-nineteenth-century naturalist, he saw nothing contradictory about doing these things simultaneously. The orangs appeared to be abundant; and they ate a lot of fruit, especially durian, so the Dyaks looked on their destroyer as a benefactor. Wallace entered each specimen in the sequence in his notebook, and later added the eventual purchaser – the British Museum, the Derby Museum – and the price. Over the next six months he shot fifteen. Charles Allen and a Chinese boy were kept busy skinning the animals. The skulls and skeletons were dried, the skins preserved in medicated arrack. The bones were boiled in a great iron pan, covered over at night with boards and heavy stones; even so, the Dyak dogs managed to carry off the greater part of one orang, as well as chewing the leather off Wallace’s boots, and a chunk of his mosquito-net.14 He pursued orangs relentlessly, once wading waist deep to get a good shot at an old male, towing the body down stream behind the boat, and then, unable to spot a convenient place on the bank, hauling him into a clump of trees for the skinning and measuring. The often lengthy stalkings and pursuits gave him a chance to observe both the animal’s feeding habits and the different ways a mias would move through the forest, and this first-hand information was supplemented by what he learned from the Dyaks, especially Kesim, the local head man.
At the same time, he had the rare chance to nurture a baby mias. He shot the mother – no. 7 – on 16 May. No. 8 was lying face down in a bog. He cleaned it up, and carried it home, while it clung on tightly to his beard.15 It was four weeks old. There was no milk to be had, so he fed it rice water from a bottle with a quill in the cork, occasionally adding sugar and coconut milk. He fitted up a little box for a cradle, duly recorded when it cut its first teeth, and soon began to feed it from a spoon. He also found a companion for it, a young hare-lip monkey whom he called Toby, after Uncle Toby in Tristram Shandy. In The Malay Archipelago he puts down all these details with affection, but with a certain objectivity. In a letter to his sister, however – and in an article he sent to Chambers’ journal – he writes in human terms about ‘an orphan baby’ whose mother was a wild ‘woman of the woods’: ‘I am afraid you would call it an ugly baby, for it has a dark brown skin and red hair, a very large mouth, but very pretty little hands and feet …’16 But his hopes of one day introducing the little girl to fashionable society at the Zoological Gardens were dashed. The baby mias failed to thrive, and, he noted on 16 July, ‘after this very ill from dropsy’. In The Malay Archipelago he recorded its death, and his deep regret at the loss of his little pet. The Notebook reveals that he put her out of her misery – ‘killed’; ‘skin in arrack with bones of limbs’; ‘BM £6’.17
For the months of July and August, Wallace was immobilised with an ulcerated ankle, which gave him the leisure to write his various accounts of the orang, including a scientific paper for The Annals and Magazine of Natural History. He was also able to expand the notes for his projected book. Mail reached him even at Simunjon, with a box containing a welcome pair of shoes, and a piece of bacon. ‘The bacon I fear is not eatable,’ Wallace reported to his sister. What did she expect? It had not been scientifically packed and sealed. Next time he would send to Fortnum and Mason direct. After breakfast, he added a softer postscript: ‘The bacon is eatable, just! but very high & very rich of a dark brown colour.’18 There was also family news, and as usual he had a lot of advice to dispense. Fanny and Tom Sims had taken premises for their photography business in Conduit Street – he advised them to put up a handsome plate advertising their ‘palace of photography’ on the corner of Regent Street. Mother ought to go and live in a little cottage somewhere near London, a much better plan than lodging or boarding with them. His brother John and his wife Mary were settled in California; Wallace planned at this stage to return home to England by continuing his journey eastwards, and perhaps doing a little surveying work in America if it promised to pay well.
As the year drew on, and the wet season approached, Wallace began to plan his next stage. He needed fresh funds before he could undertake another major expedition, and that meant a return to Singapore. First, he decided to explore further inland, so he sent Charles back from Simunjon to Sarawak by river with the collections and the bulk of the luggage, and set off with a Dyak-speaking Malay boy up the Sadong river. He stayed at Dyak longhouses, and it was on this trip that he was able to observe and admire the Dyaks’ way of life, and to note the wonderful use they made of the plants and trees around them, especially the bamboo: ‘one of the most wonderful and most beautiful productions of the tropics, and one of nature’s most valuable gifts to uncivilized man’.19 He saw, too, pitcher plants and orchids, and collected fifty species of ferns without devoting much time to the search. He was puzzled by one thing: why were the Dyak villages so small and so widely scattered, when all the conditions most favourable to a rapid increase of population were apparently present – abundance of food, a healthy climate, early marriages? Only one Malthusian check was apparently present – the infertility, as Wallace supposed, of the women, for which he supplied the reason: their incessant hard labour and the heavy weights they had to carry. But he did not stay long enough to absorb the complexity of their society and culture – he gave a very unflattering account of the dancing – though noting their friendliness and curiosity; many of the women and children had never seen a European before, and he obliged by rolling up his trouser leg to reveal his white skin. He slept at night on the longhouse verandas, often with half-a-dozen smoke-dried human skulls suspended above him, and marvelled at the sense of security, and honesty, that prevailed. He reached the hills, and the watershed between the Sadong and Sarawak rivers, and then made his way down river to rejoin the rajah, and recuperate in his bungalow.
It was early in December 1855, and there was no boat leaving for Singapore before the end of January. So he accepted an invitation to spend some time with Brooke and his secretary, Spencer St John, at Brooke’s mountain retreat, a cottage built for him twenty miles up the Sarawak perched just below the summit of a steep thousand-foot hill. The way up was by a succession of ladders, bamboo bridges and slippery paths. Durians and coconut palms grew all around, though not so thickly as to block out the view stretching in one direction up the Sarawak valley to the mountains, and in the other across the green carpet of vegetation to the sea, and the distinctive outline of the Santubong mountain. Swifts darted overhead, and a few steps below the cottage was a cool spring emerging from a cave, for refreshing baths and drinking water, while the local Dyaks brought daily supplies of delicious fruits such as mangosteens and lansats. This was both luxury and stimulus for Wallace. He found Brooke, a fellow chess-player, good company, and, without the restraint of anyone from the mission, the talk ranged freely. Brooke was a firm creationist, but he loved speculation and debate. According to St John, Wallace was even then ‘elaborating in his mind the theory which was simultaneously worked out by Darwin – the theory of the origin of species; and if he could not convince us that our ugly neighbours, the orang-outangs, were our ancestors, he pleased, delighted and instructed us by his clever and inexhaustible flow of talk – really good talk’.20 (Brooke’s own observations on the orangs had been published in the Proceedings of the Zoological Society, 1841.) Then it was back to Sarawak for Christmas, before Wallace returned to the cottage with Charles and Ali, a Malay boy, for three weeks’ intensive collecting: ferns, orchids (Vanda lowii was particularly abundant), land-shells, butterflies and, supremely, moths: one dark rainy night he captured 260, and he was kept catching and pinning until past midnight
. He stayed as long as he could, allowing himself only a week to sort out his collections before the short voyage to Singapore.
