ARCHIPELAGO, THE ISLANDS OF INDONESIA: From the Nineteenth-Century Discoveries of Alfred Russel Wallace to the Fate of Forests and Reefs in the Twenty-First Century
By GAVIN DAWS and MARTY FUJITA
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999. (Published in association with The Nature Conservancy.) 254 pages, $45

Vaudine England

Charles Darwin is known to all as the man who elaborated the theory of evolution. But how many have heard of Alfred Russel Wallace? While Darwin was investigating the bird life of the Galapagos Islands and nurturing the patronage of powers back home, young Wallace, a fellow Englishman some fourteen years Darwin's junior, was plunging into the tropical wonders of the Malay Archipelago. Independently but nearly simultaneously, these two men revolutionized the way we see the world. Yet it is Wallace's story that should resonate most with Asian readers, since his pioneering exploration was of our own backyard.
After a nondescript childhood and a formal education that stopped at the age of fourteen, Wallace left England in 1848 to explore the Amazon before heading off to the Moluccas for what became an eight-year-long odyssey of discovery in the area that is present-day Indonesia. During the course of those years, he described what is now called the Wallace Line in the seas between Kalimantan and Sulawesi because he found that much of the flora and fauna to the west of this line was different in type from that to the east. Almost as an accidental byproduct, he also found out why similar but different species existed on adjacent islands. On asking why, he found out that competition for survival produced new variants in what became known as natural selection.
How Wallace did all this is a story of great daring and excitement, interspersed with long months of isolation in places where white men had rarely ventured. Traveling with just the few books he could carry, and containers for his many thousands of specimens, the gangly and awkward Wallace sent back to England over forty dispatches, along with examples of insect and vegetable life never seen before.
"One of these communications, drafted on flimsy paper in the solitude of one of the most remote islands of a remote archipelago, was transformational on a world scale," write Gavin Daws and Marty Fujita in Archipelago. "In less than four thousand words Wallace laid out the principle of the evolution of species by natural selection, which became the new controlling idea of biological science, and above and beyond one of the most influential ideas in the history of all Western science-indeed, of Western culture at large."
In 1869, Wallace's seminal work, The Malay Archipelago: The Land of the Orang-Utan and the Bird of Paradise-A Narrative of Travel, with Studies of Man and Nature was published. A key source for anyone interested in the living makeup of the lands of the equator, it was enormously popular, both in England, where it went through fifteen printings, and in translation around the world.
Archipelago traces Wallace's discoveries with a light touch and quirky eye for detail. It also presents special sections on topics such as "The Naturalist's Cabinet," "Wallace's Biological Laboratory," "Marine Biodiversity," and "Ecology and Behavior of Birds of Paradise." The glorious photographs throughout the book, many taken by Jez O'Hare, are a feast for the eye.

By chapter 8, the authors have leapt to the twentieth century, where the 206 million people who inhabit some 6,000 of modern Indonesia's 17,500 islands are putting more pressure than ever on the profoundly exotic ecology of the archipelago. Much of naturalists' knowledge of current Indonesia is related back to the discoveries of Wallace, and the most recent ecological disaster- the vast fires of Borneo-is also discussed.
Whatever plot the book had in terms of Wallace's lifeline and the Wallace Line is lost in the final chapter as the underlying message is allowed to come through. This is a plea for greater conservancy of Indonesia's impressive biodiversity. "To transpose what Wallace articulated in nineteenth-century prose so that his words can be applied usefully and inspiringly at the turn of the twenty-first century does not take much imagination, just willingness-on the part of Indonesians and the rest of humankind, together," the authors conclude somewhat sanctimoniously. (Garvin Daws is a historian and author of Hawaii: The Islands of Life, and Marty Fujita is a research associate of the Smithsonian Institution and founding director of the Nature Conservancy's Indonesia Program.)
Leaving aside the missionary touch, the text is lively and informative, and the visuals are stunning. Archipelago is a beautiful production of a fascinating story, and makes a welcome addition to any Indonesianist's or naturalist's bookshelves.

Vaudine England first covered Indonesia in the late 1980s and has worked in Asia for the BBC, Reuters, and the Far Eastern Economic Review. She is now Indonesia correspondent for the South China Morning Post.