The next stopping point for the Macassans were the Kai islands which maps show
are near the hinge point where the islands of Maluku have been bent back upon
themselves after the collision of Australia–New Guinea with this part of the island arc.
Since his time on the Rio Negro and his first encounter with the Baniwa people, Alfred
Russel Wallace had become something of an anthropologist as well as a naturalist, as
he carefully observed and recorded the habits of the native people he encountered. He
also recorded their languages and during his travels in the archipelago he collected
the vocabulary from fifty-seven distinct
regional languages, as well as the
common Malay and Javanese languages.
After spending the three previous years
living amongst the Malay people who
populate most of the archipelago, his
first encounter with the Papuans, with
their darker skin, frizzy hair and different
character, was on arriving at Kai. He
describes how he could have been blind
and still be certain that he had entered a
new world, inhabited by a different race
of people:
The loud, rapid, eager tones, the incessant motion, the intense vital activity manifested
in speech and action are the very antipodes of the quiet, unimpulsive, unanimated Malay.
These Kai men came up singing and shouting, dipping their paddles deep in the water and
throwing up clouds of spray; as they approached nearer, they stood up in their canoes and
increased their noise and gesticulations: and on coming alongside, without asking leave,
and without a moment’s hesitation, the greater part of them scrambled up on our deck just
as if they were to take possession of a captured vessel ... These forty black, naked, mop-
headed savages seemed intoxicated with joy and excitement. Not one of them could remain
still for a moment.Wallace provides an amusing anecdote of himself, from a different race of people,
being observed by a villager when he was collecting insects on Kai. He describes how
an elderly man carefully observed this strange, tall, bearded, bespectacled species of
European man collect an insect, then neatly skewer its exoskeleton with a pin and, as
if carrying out a ritual, place the specimen in a little wooden box. The bemused old
man stood very quietly watching this spectacle, when, as Wallace describes it, ‘he
could contain himself no longer, but bent almost double, and enjoyed a hearty roar of
laughter’.
The fruit, red ribbon of mace and shell of the nutmeg
Alfred Russel Wallace – The Voyage to the Aru Islands^149