The Malay Archipelago

    The Malay Archipelago is a book by the British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace that chronicles his scientific exploration, during the eight year period 1854 to 1862, of the southern portion of the Malay Archipelago including Malaysia, Singapore, the islands of Indonesia, then known as the Dutch East Indies, and the island of New Guinea. Its full title was The Malay Archipelago: The land of the orang-utan, and the bird of paradise. A narrative of travel, with sketches of man and nature.

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Publication and reception

It was first published in 1869 in two volumes by Macmillan and Company, and was revised through 10 editions with the last published in 1890. It is considered to be one of the most influential books ever written about the Indonesian islands.^[1]

Contents

The preface summarizes Wallace’s travels, the thousands of specimens he collected, and some of the results from their analysis after his return to England. The first chapter describes the physical geography and geology of the islands with particular attention to the role of volcanoes and earthquakes. It also discusses the overall pattern of the flora and fauna including the fact that the islands can be divided, by what would eventually become known as the Wallace line, into 2 parts, those whose animals are more closely related to those of Asia and those whose fauna is closer to that of Australia. The following chapters then describe in detail the places Wallace visited. Wallace includes numerous observations on the people, their languages, ways of living, and social organization, as well as on the plants and animals found in each location. He talks about the biogeographic patterns he observes and their implications for natural history, both in terms of biology (evolution ) and the geologic history of the region. He also narrates some of his personal experiences during his travels. The final chapter is an overview of the ethnic, linguistic, and cultural divisions among the people who live in the region and speculation about what such divisions might indicate about their history. The book is dedicated to Charles Darwin.

Influence on later works

Joseph Conrad was very impressed with the Malay Archipelago, and used it as source material for some of his novels including Lord Jim.^[2] More recently it has influenced a number of books including:

• The Song of the Dodo by David Quammen published in 1996, which discusses Wallace’s Indonesian explorations in the context of the development of the scientific discipline of island biogeography.^[3]
• The Spice Islands Voyage by Tim Severin, which was published in 1997, and was subtitled The Quest for Alfred Wallace, the Man Who Shared Darwin's Discovery of Evolution attempts to retrace Wallace's travels.
• Archipelago: The Islands of Indonesia: From the Nineteenth-Century Discoveries of Alfred Russel Wallace to the Fate of Forests and Reefs in the Twenty-First Century, by Gavan Daws and Marty Fujita, published in 1999, which uses Wallace's observations as a baseline of comparison to better understand environmental issues in modern Indonesia.^[4]

See also

• Malay Archipelago
• Wallacea
• Wallace Line
• Operation Wallacea

Notes

References

• The Spice Islands Voyage: The Quest for Alfred Wallace, the Man Who Shared Darwin's Discovery of Evolution by Tim Severin ISBN 0-7867-0721-6