Alfred Russel Wallace – The Voyage to the Aru Islandsthe hip to halfway down the thigh, and the universal Malay sarong, of gay checked colours,
worn around the waist or across the shoulders in a variety of ways.Wallace settled in a village outside Macassar where he soon learned that not a single
person could speak more than a few words of Malay and hardly anyone had seen a
European before. The disagreeable part of this was that he excited terror wherever he
went. Dogs barked, children screamed, women ran away and men stared as if he were
some strange monster. He describes how pack horses and buffaloes on the roads were
startled by his appearance and if he came upon a well where women were drawing
water, or children bathing, a sudden flight was the certain result, ‘All of which were
very unpleasant to a person who does not like to be disliked, and who had never been
accustomed to be treated like an ogre’.
What Wallace found in the forests outside Macassar was astounding because there
were hardly any insects, hardly any beetles and very few butterflies. Only the birds
seemed a little more promising but he found no barbets, no trogons, no broadbills, and
no shrikes such as he had seen in Singapore, Malaya or Borneo. He wrote that whole
families and genera were altogether absent and there is nothing to take their place.
Moving further inland he found that:
While the Celebes is poor in the actual number of species, it is yet wonderfully rich in
peculiar forms, many of which are singular or beautiful, and in some cases absolutely
unique upon the globe.In biogeographical terms Sulawesi has a central position in the Indonesian
archipelago and Wallace expected to find a rich diversity of wildlife, but with a land
area double that of Java it had half its number of mammals and land birds. To his
surprise he found that Sulawesi was the poorest in the number of its species and the
most isolated in the character of its species compared to the great islands of Indonesia:
The position of the Celebes is the most central in the Archipelago ... Such being the
case, we should naturally expect that the productions of this central island in some degree
represented the richness and variety of the whole Archipelago ... As so often happens in
nature, however, the fact turns out to be the reverse of what we should of expected; and an
examination of its animal production shows Celebes to be at once the poorest in the number
of its species and the most isolated in the character of its productions of the great islands
of the Archipelago ... in proportion to the species which inhabit it far fewer seem derived
from other islands, while far more are altogether peculiar to it; and a considerable number of
its animal forms are so remarkable, as to find no close allies in any other part of the world.143