Retracing Wallace's spicy adventure

Retracing Wallace's spicy adventure

The Spice Islands Voyage: In Search of Wallace;
By Tim Severin;
Little, Brown and Co 1997;
Hardback A$35;
267 pp

JAKARTA (JP): The idea of circumnavigating the remote Spice
Islands appeals to our sense of romance and adventure. Its
allure lies in the chance discovery of a paradise of pristine
sandy coves in deep clear waters, home to diverse and little-
known cultures.

Imagine a streamlined wooden perahu slicing through the water,
rectangular canvas sails strained taut by wind and glowing orange
in late afternoon shadows. The vast deep blues of sea and sky
are broken by an island looming dark in the distance.

This image adorns the cover of Tim Severin's new book, The
Spice Islands Voyage: In Search of Wallace. The prau has been
christened the Alfred Wallace and transports Severin's team of
explorers during their expedition around the Spice Islands.

The Spice Islands Voyage is not just another travel book. It
is a tale of adventure on the high seas. Instead of a Spanish
galleon or the famous Bugis prau pinisi, Severin's crew of seven
set sail from the Kai islands in Southeast Maluku in a custom-
made 14-meter traditional wooden prau kalulis.

It is also the story of a quest to retrace the journey through
Maluku of intrepid English scientist-explorer Alfred Russel
Wallace.

In 1858, during a malaria-inspired delirium, Wallace conceived
a theory about the origin of species based on the revolutionary
idea of survival of the fittest. After penning an essay in a
palm-thatched house on Ternate island in Halmahera, Wallace sent
the package by mail steamer to England addressed to Charles
Darwin.

By the end of the following year, Darwin published his theory
of evolution by natural selection to great international acclaim.
Wallace's Ternate-composed breakthrough -- arrived at
independently in a remote corner at the end of the world -- was
immediately and forever after overshadowed in the public memory.

In The Spice Islands Voyage, Severin, a champion of the modest
and bookish Wallace, makes the controversial accusation that
Darwin used Wallace's work to advance his own theories without
providing adequate public acknowledgment. Wallace himself never
accused Darwin of anything so underhand but, as Severin says,
"stepped into Darwin's shadow, deliberately and courteously".

Severin's expedition sets out to restore Wallace's memory to
its proper place in history. Wallace was, Severin says, "someone
so genuine and so humane that he should not be forgotten". So,
almost 140 years later, Severin orders and oversees the
construction by Kai islanders of a replica vessel of the kind
that Wallace sailed on during his four-year voyage around the
Indonesian archipelago.

Aboard the tapered perahu, the crew -- including a
photographer, an artist, an environmentalist, and an
ornithologist -- enjoys cramped living quarters and swift but
sometimes precarious passage.

Severin, himself a veteran explorer, uses Wallace's The Malay
Archipelago as a navigational tool. With this excellent guide in
hand, he goes in search of the Red Birds of Paradise, the Wallace
Standard Wing and the Bird-Winged Butterflies.

During his pursuit, he sails from Kai, around the Banda and
Seram Seas to Irian Jaya, Halmahera and on to Manado on the
northernmost tip of Sulawesi.

It was Sulawesi's unique and bizarre animal life -- its
babirusa and anoa -- which inspired Wallace's theory about the
correlation between zoology and geography. He identified a
boundary between land animals, birds and insects which, he
hypothesized, had spread from the Asian mainland and those which
originated from Australia. This boundary is now known as the
Wallace line.

Through Severin's deft narration, the reader appreciates the
diversity of the flora and fauna of equatorial Indonesia. We also
catch glimpses of the lives and livelihoods of its inhabitants as
well as some of the traditional methods of resource management
still in practice.

On a more somber note, Severin discovers that some nature
areas have not remained unspoiled. On the small island of Enue,
part of the South-East Aru Marine Reserve, every nest along a
stretch of beach favored by female green sea turtles had been
plundered.

What had at first appeared to be an archetypal small South Sea
island was, on landing, an "empty desolate landscape" that
"looked like a casualty of war".

Severin writes: "The nest robbers had been coming methodically
and staying to strip every single nest along the beach, not just
to dig up a single nest as passing fishermen might do."

He guesses that the eggs may have been exported as delicacies
to Jakarta or Singapore if not sold for local consumption. The
midnight observation of the exhausting labors of a female turtle
to lay and protect her eggs renders this vandalism even more
tragic.

With both happy and sad tidings, The Spice Islands Voyage is a
good yarn for the armchair explorer as well as biography, history
and ecology woven into one.

-- Indrawati

The reviewer is a postgraduate student at Monash University
in Australia.