16 Alfred Russel Wallace – The Voyage to Waigeo
Having come up with his revolutionary idea ‘On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart
from the Original Type’, Wallace embarked on his long planned expedition to Papua
New Guinea and its surrounding islands. This was the natural home of the bird of
paradise, the tree kangaroo and many of the other ‘Australian’ species that he hoped
to find. Knowing the potential difficulties of collecting in this, the remotest part of the
Indonesian archipelago, he wrote:
I am engaged here in a wider and more general study – that of the relations of animals to
time and space, or in other words their geographical and geological distribution and its
causes. I have set myself to work out this problem in the Indo-Australian Archipelago and
I must visit and explore the largest number of islands possible and collect animals from the
greatest number of localities in order to arrive at any definite results. As to health and life,
what are they compared with peace and happiness.Dorey, on the north-west coast of Papua, was where the naturalist René Primavère
Lesson, from the French expedition vessel La Coquille, is believed to have been the
first European to see the beautiful birds of paradise in the wild, some thirty years
earlier in 1824. Transfixed by the vision of the bird in flight with its colourful plumage
and trailing plumes, he apparently forgot that he was meant to shoot and collect this
the most magnificent of all birds, as he wrote:
Whilst we were walking very carefully on a wild pig trail through the dense scrub ... A
Paradisaea suddenly flew in graceful curves over my head. It was like a meteor whose body,
cutting through the air, leaves a long trail of light. We were so amazed that the flintlocks in
our hands did not move.166http://www.ebook3000.com