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.