if he could get across to the main island of
Aru he might still find some. This voyage
across the narrow straits was delayed
because of the threat of pirates:Just as I was trying to arrange a trip to the
larger island, a fleet of Maguindanao pirates
made their appearance, committing great
devastations, and putting the whole place in
an uproar; and it was only after they had been
sometime gone that confidence began to be
restored, and the natives could be persuaded
to take the smallest voyage. This delayed
me two months in Dobbo without seeing a
Paradise bird.The Maguindanao pirates came
from the Sulu Archipelago south of the
Philippines and made regular raids on
small unprotected settlements in the
eastern Indonesian archipelago, where
they carried off what they could, including
women and children, and then escaped in
their well-manned prahus to hide on some
uninhabited island and prepare for their
next raid. One evening after Wallace had
crossed over to Aru and reached his base
at Wanumbai, he heard the cry of ‘Bajak! Bajak!’ (Pirates! Pirates!) The villagers all
rushed down to the beach with their weapons, but it proved to be a false alarm and was
only their comrades returning from a fishing trip:
When all was quiet again, one of the men, who could speak a little Malay, came to me and
begged me not to sleep too hard. ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Perhaps the pirates may really come,’ he
said very seriously, which made me laugh and assure him I should sleep as hard as I could.For Wallace sleeping here was hard, as ants, spiders, centipedes and scorpions all
shared his hut. The collecting was poor but after two or three days one of his assistants
returned with a jewel, the king bird of paradise – a bird that no European had seen in
the wild. This is what Wallace had come so far to see and he was ecstatic:
The legless birds of paradise, Paradiesvögel,
Jan Jonston, 1650Alfred Russel Wallace – The Voyage to the Aru Islands 153