Borneo, Celebes, Aru
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Racked with fever, virtually broke and earning a precarious living through sending back to London the plumes of beautiful birds, Wallace (1823-1913) ultimately became one of the most heroic and admirable of all scientist-explorers. Whether living with Hill Dyaks or hunting Orang-Utans or sailing on a junk to the unbelievably remote Aru islands, Wallace opens our eyes to a now long vanished world. Great Journeys allows readers to travel both around the planet and back through the centuries – but also back into ideas and worlds frightening, ruthless and cruel in different ways from our own. Few reading experiences can begin to match that of engaging with writers who saw astounding things: Great civilisations, walls of ice, violent and implacable jungles, deserts and mountains, multitudes of birds and flowers new to science. Reading these books is to see the world afresh, to rediscover a time when many cultures were quite strange to each other, where legends and stories were treated as facts and in which so much was still to be discovered.
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A great selection of excerpts taken from Wallace's The Malay Archipelago and my pick of the Penguin Great Journey books so far.
The excerpts seem particularly well chosen, and in the introduction it even states It has proved nightmarishly hard to extract sections ... as each island on which Wallace lived has its own remarkable atmosphere. If there was one book in this series I am compelled to read in full it would, so far, be this one.
Having said that it is immediately apparent that this book will be disliked by many. At the time Wallace made his journeys and researched the flora and fauna, it was common practice to ‘collect' as many samples as possible. As such it is pretty heartbreaking to read how many Orangutan he shoots during his time in Borneo.
The book starts with a fairly simple explanation of his theory known as the Wallace Line. Basically a theory of which parts of southeast Asia and Australia were joined together in the past, and how recently they have parted. This is based on the dispersion and evolution of various plants and animals located on each island a the time of his investigations. It isn't a long section, and it explains it very well.
Sections on Borneo (Orangutan, then the Hill Dyaks), Celebes [now Sulewesi, Indonesia] (birds & insects, then a description of the sea voyage to the Aru Islands), and the Aru Islands [close to West Papua, Indonesia] (the bird of paradise, and living in an inland village).
I found the whole thing fascinating, well written and richly descriptive.
