Alfred Russel Wallace – The Voyage to WaigeoArriving at Manokwari Bay on the north-west coast of Papua, Wallace and his four
assistants set about building a hut at Dorey that would serve them for the next few
months of collecting. When they had finished building he brought up all his goods
and stores and considered himself fairly established as the only European inhabitant
of the vast island of Papua New Guinea. This was the end of the wet season and the
whole country was still soaked in water. Food was scarce and his group was reduced
to eating the corpses of the birds they had shot to collect the skins. A single parakeet,
Wallace complained, had to serve him for two meals. He describes regularly wading
up to his knees in mud and then slicing his ankle while clambering over the trunks and
branches of fallen trees. This wound soon turned septic and for several weeks he could
not leave his hut. Driven to despair, Wallace describes his situation:
I was tantalized by seeing grand butterflies flying past my door, and thinking of the twenty
or thirty new species of insects I ought to be getting every day. And this, too, in New Guinea- a country which I might never visit again – a country which no naturalist had ever resided
in before – a country which contained more strange and new and beautiful natural objects
than any other part of the globe. The naturalist will be able to appreciate my feelings, sitting
from morning to night in my little hut, unable to move without a crutch.
There was, however, a profusion of insects around their hut and on his best day
Wallace collected seventy-eight distinct sorts of beetles. There was also a very
aggressive species of small black ant, which swarmed all over his work table while
attempting to carry off his specimens from under his nose. This was meant to be the
dry season but the rain continued. And there was worse to come, as he and almost all
his party were beginning to suffer from fever or dysentery or both. Wallace recovered,
but a young man named Jumaat he had brought from Ternate as a shooter died and
they buried him according to Islamic ritual in a cotton shroud. They were all terribly
ill and the death of their friend and compatriot was surely enough to convince them to
leave. The trip to Papua was a disaster and Wallace now longed to get away from this
place as much as he had ever longed to get there. But there was no regular shipping
service sailing from Dorey, and only after almost four months of misery could they
finally return by ship to Ternate:
We bade adieu to Dorey, without much regret, for in no place which I have visited have
I encountered more privations and annoyances. Continual rain, continual sickness, little
wholesome food, with a plague of ants and flies, surpassing anything I had before met with,
required all a naturalist’s ardour to encounter; and when they were unaccompanied by great
success in collecting, became all the more insupportable. This long thought-of and much-167