The Macassans followed the monsoonal winds, leaving in December or January at
the beginning of the western monsoon and returning in July or August at the onset of
the eastern monsoon, in a voyage that took them away from home for nine months. For
the Macassans this annual voyage to the Aru Islands was looked upon as a rather wild
and romantic expedition, full of novel sights and strange adventures. For Wallace, it
was the lure of the bird of paradise that had brought him to the archipelago in the first
place and here was an opportunity to reach their distant lands. Despite his trepidation
it was a lure he could not resist:
When I found that I really could do so now, had I but the courage to trust myself for a
thousand miles voyage in a Bugis prahu, and then for six or seven months among lawless
traders and ferocious savages. I felt somewhat as I did when a schoolboy.Coastal traders from Macassar, François-Edmond Pâris, Le voyage de la Favorite 1830-1832The Bugis prahu is in part a copy of a western schooner of the mid-nineteenth
century which traded around the archipelago during that period and has been described
many times in books by the ship’s captain and author, Joseph Conrad.
It is built without a nail or any iron being used. Its shipwrights use only an axe,
handsaw, adze and auger to shape and fit the ribs and planks of its hull in a time-
honoured tradition. The boats are built organically, according to the nature of the
timber, and according to a plan that is only in the mind of its master builder, and
Wallace wrote that the best European shipwrights could not produce sounder or closer
fitting joints.
Alfred Russel Wallace – The Voyage to the Aru Islands 145