Alfred Russel Wallace

by Peter Raby

  This was to be Wallace’s last stay at Ternate. He needed, first, to recuperate, and he was pleased to have Allen to help him prepare his collections for shipment to England. He had a great mountain of mail to read and answer, a nine-month accumulation of letters, accounts, papers, magazines and books. He could, too, begin to make definite plans for his return to England, now that Allen was available to map certain key areas of the Archipelago for him, and so fill in the few remaining gaps. He planned a less arduous route for himself, to Timor first, followed by the much more accessible and civilised islands of Java and Sumatra. He also intended to keep his eyes and ears open for any live specimens of paradise birds. Stevens had passed on his terms for live birds to various potential outlets, including the Zoological Society: with any luck they could pay for his passage home.

  Among his letters was one from Darwin, acknowledging Wallace’s appreciation of The Origin. Darwin was equally warm: ‘You must let me say how I admire the generous manner in which you speak of my Book: most persons would in your position have felt some envy or jealousy.’ Wallace spoke ‘far too modestly’ of himself: ‘You would, if you had had my leisure done the work just as well, perhaps better, than I have done it.’29 In fact, Wallace seemed genuinely relieved that he had not been compelled to write such a book: certainly, the massed detail that underpinned the argument of The Origin would not have been congenial work. As he confided to Bates,

  I know not how, or to whom, to express fully my admiration of Darwin’s book. To him it would seem flattery, to others self-praise; but I do honestly believe that with however much patience I had worked and experimented on the subject, I could never have approached the completeness of his book, its vast accumulation of evidence, its overwhelming argument, and its admirable tone and spirit. I really feel thankful that it has not been left to me to give the theory to the world. Mr Darwin has created a new science and a new philosophy; and I believe that never has such a complete illustration of a new branch of human knowledge been due to the labours and researches of a single man.30

  Publicly, he never wavered in his admiration for The Origin, whatever minor reservations he might later have acquired about the Linnean proceedings. Meanwhile Darwin filled him in on the scientific reactions to the subject. There were more converts among the geologists than in any other branch of science, and certainly more than among naturalists, perhaps because they were more accustomed to reasoning. But there was much opposition – an envious and spiteful notice by Richard Owen in the Edinburgh Review, savage attacks by Adam Sedgwick and J.W. Clark at Cambridge, hostile reviews by Sir William Jardine and Thomas Wollaston, and ‘many others’. Lyell kept ‘firm as a tower’, and would declare his conversion in the autumn. He also informed Wallace about Patrick Matthew, who wrote to the Gardeners’ Chronicle drawing attention to a section of his 1830 work Naval Timber & Arboriculture, which contained a statement about natural selection. ‘My Brother,’ commented Darwin, ‘who is a very sagacious man, always said you will find that some one will have been before you.’ Matthew could claim priority over them both.31 Wallace replied with his latest puzzle, ‘the repetition of the forms & colours of animals in distinct groups, but the two always occurring in the same country & generally on the very same spot’. This kind of mimicry was a phenomenon he could not at present reconcile with Natural Selection: it was a topic he would continue to work on, and would be illuminated the following year by Bates.32

  Wallace left Ternate on New Year’s Day 1861, for Timor, which formed one of the major gaps in his collections. He had previously stayed briefly at Coupang, in the western part of the island administered by the Dutch. He now based himself near Delli (Dili), in east Timor, governed by the Portuguese. Wallace had not been particularly enamoured of the Portuguese whom he had met on the Amazon. He took a dim view of their mismanagement in Timor: no decent buildings, no roads into the interior to encourage agriculture and trade, a miserable mud fort, and a disproportionate number of officers strutting about in gorgeous uniforms. Added to this, the town was surrounded by swamps and mudflats, and distinctly unhealthy: ‘A single night often gives a fever to new-comers which not unfrequently proves fatal.’33 Wallace did not attempt the experiment. His immediate contact, Captain Hart, an English trader and coffee-grower, always slept at his plantation on higher ground two miles from the town, where Frederick Geach, a mining engineer, also had a house. Geach invited Wallace to join him, and he rode up there in the evening, and settled in.

  For several weeks, Wallace did not move far from the house. Seven years in the tropics had left their mark, and his recent long voyage from Waigiou to Ternate especially had knocked the stuffing out of him. He was prepared at last to admit as much in letters home. ‘My health, too, gives way,’ he confessed to Sims, ‘and I cannot now put up so well with fatigue and privations as at first.’34 He even asked for a plan of his mother’s small cottage in Hammersmith, so that he could work out whether there might be room for him there as well. Meanwhile, there was a little valley with a stream nearby, with the water shaded by fine trees, and he rambled about, collecting a few birds and several remarkable and rare butterflies, such as the swallowtails Papilio aenomaus and Papilio liris. He had just Ali now as his hunter and assistant, and was not collecting with the same intensity as before, though it was as important as ever to him to make systematic notes, vital evidence for his study of distribution. He and Geach, with whom he struck up an immediate rapport, then made a short trip into the mountains, staying at a ‘village’ – three houses – two thousand feet up: there was a mist or cloud for much of the day, so it was not much good for insects, but Wallace enjoyed eating mutton on evenings cool enough to make a fire an additional pleasure. Geach told him about the absurdity of the Portuguese, who had hired him from England to open up a copper mine without conducting a proper mineral survey. Wallace speculated on what might be done to make the country properly productive: sheep, wheat, rice, potatoes, coffee could all be made to thrive, and pay.

  Geach left for Singapore, and Wallace spent his evenings instead with Hart, who borrowed The Origin of Species and discussed the issues at length. Wallace continued to collect. The Timor bee-hunters intrigued him – beeswax was an important export. He watched a group at work in his valley: a man would climb a smooth-barked tree with a bush rope, to one end of which a wood torch was attached; seventy or eighty feet up, he would transfer himself to the branch from which the huge honeycombs were suspended, smoke out the bees, slice the comb free with his knife, and then lower it to the ground by a thin cord. Even down on the ground, the disturbed bees became rather numerous, and Wallace had to run for it, beating the bees away with his net but at the same time capturing some (Apis dorsata) for specimens. He also acquired one of the honeycombs, which he later presented to Darwin.35

  Timor was especially significant to Wallace, as it forms, with Lombock and Flores, the third of the group of major islands possessing a distinctive fauna, lying between Java and Australia. When, later, he had the evidence of Charles Allen’s collections from Flores to work on in addition, he was able to suggest the intermediate nature of the islands’ fauna, and to argue that they were properly oceanic islands, populated by a ‘chapter of accidents’ from the neighbouring larger land-masses, and never – in terms of recent geological epochs – part of either Java or Australia.

  From Timor, he moved to Bouru, west of Ceram, filling yet another gap, a location with attractive potential as it was practically unknown to naturalists. It was on the monthly Dutch mail-steamer route, and he and his men and baggage went ashore on the small boat that came out to receive the post-packet. Wallace took some time before he found a promising collecting-ground, sending Ali off in one direction while he explored inland. Everywhere they encountered mud, high coarse grass, or cajuputi trees – districts ‘absolutely destitute of interest for the zoologist’. After further enquiries, some proper forest was located on the south coast, and Wallace set off, initially by boat and then by trekking along the beac
h, as the coastal waters were too dangerous for praus.

  In Bouru, Wallace’s years of experience soon transformed the little hut he borrowed: he had learned to travel more lightly. He fixed up a mosquito-net, partly enclosed with a large Scotch plaid, to form a sleeping apartment. He had a rough table made, with its legs buried in the earth floor to form a flat and stable surface, at which he could sit in his portable rattan chair, with his books, penknives, scissors, pliers, pins and specimen labels arranged before him. A line was hung across one corner, to dry his cotton underwear, washed each day. A bamboo shelf held crockery, and other hanging shelves kept the collections out of the ants’ path while they were drying. Then out of the boxes which were ranged around the thatch walls would come his few luxuries, coffee or tea, and sugar and biscuits, to the surprise of the local people. Like the Aru Islanders, they could not understand what Europeans could possibly do with the birds and insects that were being so carefully preserved. The conditions on Bouru were tough. Wallace had left his spare boots on board the steamer, and, since his others were dropping to pieces, he had to move about barefoot, risking a wound that might lay him up as in Borneo and Aru. Ali trod on an enormous snake in the long grass, a twenty-footer at least, ‘like a tree being dragged along through the grass’. Ali was becoming almost as obsessive a collector as Wallace. He had seen a beautiful small bird of the genus Pitta, and he was so intent on securing it that on their last night he went off to sleep at a little hut in the forest, in order to have a last try for it at daybreak: he came back in triumph with two specimens, one with its head blown completely off, but the other in ‘very good order’, a new species ‘very like the Pitta celebensis, but ornamented with a square patch of bright red on the nape of the neck’.36 They returned to Cajeli, packed up the collections, and were ferried out to the steamer, en route to Ternate. Everything was transferred on board, and Wallace did the rounds of his friends to say his goodbyes. The steamer headed first west towards Menado, and then south for Macassar and Java.37 So Wallace finally left the Moluccas, ‘among whose luxuriant and beautiful islands’ he had wandered for more than three years, and where he had formulated his theory of natural selection.

  He landed at Sourabaya, on the north east of Java, and spent a fortnight packing up his recent collections, and writing letters. After all these years of roughing it, he was staying in a hotel – but a noisy one, he hastily added. ‘Of course, my dear mother, I shd. not think of living anywhere but with you, after such a long absence, – if you feel yourself equal to housekeeping for us both.’ He would need only, besides a small bedroom, one large room ‘or a small one if there is besides a kind of lumber room where I could keep my cases & do rough & dirty work’.38 He was beginning to tune in to events in England once more, asking Silk for news, tracing the current scientific debates in the pages of the Athenaeum. But he still had to investigate Java, and Sumatra. He set off towards Mount Arjuna, this time in a carriage, paying, to his disgust, the equivalent of half a crown a mile for post-horses. The expense soon cut down any ambition to make a longer journey. He found a good spot for birds – ninety-eight species in a month – and had time to admire the architectural remains, and, rarely for him, to enjoy local music – the ‘gamelang’. He even acquired a two-foot-high bas-relief carving of the Hindu goddess Durga, to be shipped home with the peacocks and hornbills.

  He took the opportunity to study in more detail the Dutch system of managing a colony, which he had approved in Celebes. He makes some interesting observations on what occurs when, in his Darwinian terms, men of a ‘superior’ race trade freely with men of a ‘lower’ race. Apart from the specific temptations of spirits and opium there is the temptation of obtaining goods on credit, to be paid for by some crop perhaps not yet planted, ‘or some product yet in the forest’:

  He has not sufficient forethought to take only a moderate quantity, and not enough energy to work early and late in order to get out of debt; and the consequence is that he accumulates debt upon debt, and often remains for years or for life as a debtor, and almost a slave.39

  Wallace knew all about debt. By instinct he was uncomfortable with the concept of colonisation, but regarded it as inevitable. If it had to be done, then it was better conducted by the Dutch, who, in theory at least, worked in co-operation with the chiefs, on a stake-holder principle which provided a fixed wage, and a share of any surplus profit: a system that should operate to everyone’s advantage, and progress, in the most fertile and productive island in the world.

  Having exhausted the locality, he decided to try his luck in the west of the island. He moved to Batavia, and stayed a week at the Hotel des Indes – real luxury, with a sitting room and bedroom opening on to a veranda. From there, he took a coach to the Botanical Gardens at Buitenzorg, forty miles inland, rode on another twenty miles into the mountains, and hired a road-keeper’s hut for a fortnight. This was a more fruitful collecting-ground, both for birds and butterflies:

  On the very first day, my hunters obtained for me the elegant yellow and green trogon (Harpactes reinwardti), the gorgeous little minivet fly-catcher (Pericrocotus miniatus), which looks like a flame of fire as it flutters among the bushes, and the rare and curious black and crimson oriole (Analcipus sanguinolentus), all of them species which are found only in Java, and even seem to be confined to its western portion.40

  He was also offered a rare and curious butterfly, Charaxes kadenii, ‘remarkable for having on each hind wing two curved tails like a pair of callipers’.

  The highlight of his visit was a long slow climb to the summit of Pangerango, ten thousand feet. This was his only experience of climbing to such a height near the Equator, and so being able to observe stage by stage as the tropical flora and vegetation gave way to the temperate, and finally to the alpine. At nine thousand feet he found the royal cowslip, Primula imperialis. The existence of modified forms of European genera on the mountains of the Himalayas, for example, was a puzzle for naturalists: the distances were too great to be explained by the agency of the wind, or birds. Wallace, who had digested chapter two of The Origin of Species, followed Darwin’s hypothesis ‘for the present’ that, during the glacial epoch, temperate forms of plants extended to the tropics, and even, by the most elevated routes, had crossed the Equator and reached the Antarctic regions.41 Wallace, plotting the fauna of the Archipelago, was confident that Java had formerly been connected to Asia. Here, as he botanised on the rim of the crater, was abundant plant evidence to support the simple hypothesis of modification by natural selection. The European forms – violets, St John’s wort, guelder-rose – brought English landscapes to his mind. He was longing for a field of buttercups, he confessed to Fanny: ‘A hill of gorse, or of heath, a bank of foxgloves & a hedge of wild roses & purple vetches surpass in beauty anything I have ever seen in the tropics.’42

  The weather was beginning to break, and, though he tried to find another location, insects and birds were scarce. So he returned to Batavia, packed up his collections, and took the Singapore mail boat as far as Muntok, on the island of Banca. From there he found a passage across the straits to Sumatra, and hired a rowing boat to take him a hundred miles up river to Palembang. As in Java, there was too much cultivation for fruitful collecting. He enquired about forest, and had to kick his heels for a week before he could make arrangements to strike inland, by the military road. He came across an isolated guard-house at Lobo Raman, and settled down to do what collecting he could during the monsoon. If he could not add much in terms of quantity – the shortage of beetles disgusted him, he complained to Bates – there were special features that intrigued him: especially butterflies that seemed to mimic another species.43 There were rhinoceros in the forest: he once disturbed one feeding; and a curious flying lemur; and a most unusual ape, the siamang. As he had done in the Amazon, Wallace was planning to take some live animals home, and he bought a small siamang. He fixed up two poles underneath his veranda, and tried feeding it by hand in an attempt to tame it, because it had taken
an apparent dislike to him. One day, it bit him so sharply while he was giving it food that he lost patience and beat it – ‘which I regretted afterward, as from that time it disliked me more than ever’.44 But it seemed to like his Malay assistants, and kept them all amused for hours as it swung from pole to pole.

  Bates had forwarded to him a copy of his 1861 paper on the insect fauna of the Amazon valley, and Wallace urged him to send one to Darwin: it would ‘establish your fame and at the same time demonstrate the simplicity & beauty of the Darwinian philosophy’.45 (Bates had indeed done so; he was already in regular correspondence with Darwin, who on 21 November had heard Bates’s second paper on the topic at the Linnean.) Wallace also wrote to Darwin, wanting to know more of what was going on among naturalists. Huxley and Owen seemed to be at open war – ‘but I cannot glean that any one has ventured to attack you fairly on the whole question, or ventured to answer the whole of your argument’.46 From Silk he begged for items of real interest – ‘But please! no party polities’. European culture was beckoning to him. Had Silk read Great Expectations, or Essays and Reviews? What about the Gorilla War, raging around the head of the explorer Paul du Chaillu? Had he been to see Charles Blondin, wire-walking at the Crystal Palace for £100 a performance? Wallace was in the last stages of his travels – ‘Then ho! for England!’47 This time, however, he did not intend to return home empty-handed.

  The birds of paradise formed, by his own admission, a chief objective of Wallace’s voyages. This was partly because of their strange beauty, a beauty that had already made them objects of value in the Archipelago, as well as in Europe, and partly because they seemed to inhabit the most remote and inaccessible places – Waigiou, the Aru Islands, and the mainland of New Guinea. It was a challenge, first, to purchase them in any shape or form at all, let alone see them in the wild; and the greatest challenge would be to bring one back alive to England. In a letter to Stevens he set out his terms, brisk, businesslike, and somewhat peremptory – he wanted a definite arrangement with the Crystal Palace Company, including a free first-class passage for himself from Singapore: if he brought back one bird alive, the rate would be £100, £50 for the second, and £25 a head for any more up to ten: ‘If they won’t give this price I will not trouble myself even if I can get them for nothing.’48 (Stevens passed these terms on to Philip Sclater, Secretary at the Zoological Society, who eventually agreed them.) ‘In my next voyage to New Guinea,’ Wallace informed Stevens, ‘I think it probable that I may get some live Paradiseas.’49 On Waigiou – July to September 1860 – Wallace was attempting to collect and keep alive the red bird of paradise.