The Malay Archipelago

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Front page
Fold-out color map from The Malay Archipelago 1869 with the physical geography and itineraries of Alfred Russel Wallace (thin black lines). The deep waters that separate Borneo from Sulawesi (Celebes) form what came to be known as the Wallace Line.

The Malay Archipelago (English: The Malay Archipelago , full title: The Malay Archipelago: The land of the orang-utan, and the bird of paradise. A narrative of travel, with sketches of man and nature ) is a book by the British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace , describing a research trip that he carried out from 1854 to 1862 in the southern Malay Archipelago . These include the islands of Indonesia , then known as the Dutch East Indies , Malaysia , Singapore and New Guinea . Wallace covered about 20,000 kilometers during this trip.

It is widely considered to be one of the most influential books ever to be published on the Indonesian islands. The book is dedicated to Charles Darwin .

context

In 1847, Wallace and his friend Henry Walter Bates , both in their early twenties, agreed that they would go on a collecting trip to the Amazon "towards solving the problem of origin of species" (German: to solve the problem of the origin of species). ( Charles Darwin 's book On the Origin of Species was not published until 11 years later, in 1859. It was based on Darwin's own long collecting voyage on the HMS Beagle , the publication of which was triggered by a famous letter from Wallace ( Ternate manuscript ) to the during his stay in Ternate during the Malay Archipelago period and in which the theory of evolution through natural selection was broadly described in about 4000 words.) Wallace and Bates were inspired by reading the seminal book "A Voyage Up the River Amazon, with a residency at Pará "by the American entomologist William Henry Edwards from 1847. Bates stayed in the Amazon for 11 years and then wrote The Naturalist on the River Amazons (1863); However, Wallace, who had a fever, traveled home with thousands of copies in 1852, some for science and some for sale. The ship and its collection were destroyed by fire at sea near Guiana. Instead of giving up, Wallace wrote about the Amazon in both prose and poetry and then set sail again, this time for the Malay Archipelago.

publication

Treeps, Hurstpierpoint , the house where The Malay Archipelago was largely written

Much of the Malay Archipelago was written in Treeps, the family home of Wallace's wife in Hurstpierpoint , West Sussex . It was first published in the spring of 1869 as a one-volume first edition, but was reprinted in two volumes by Macmillan and Company (London), the second edition in the same year by Harper & Brothers (New York). Wallace returned to England in 1862, but explains in the preface that, given the large number of specimens and his poor health, it was a long time after his sojourn in the tropics. He noticed that he could have printed his notes and diaries immediately, but said that it would have been disappointing and of little help. Instead, he waited until he published his findings, and other scientists had described and named about 2,000 of his beetles ( Coleoptera ) and over 900 Hymenoptera , including 200 new species of ants , as new species. The book went through 10 editions, the last being published in 1890.

The German translation by the zoologist Adolf Bernhard Meyer appeared as early as 1869 under the title Der Malayische Archipel. The home of the orangutan and the bird of paradise. Travel experiences and studies about the country and its people .

content

In the preface Wallace summarizes the trips statistically, lists the thousands of scientific objects that he has collected (over 125,000 in total), and some of the results that a closer examination of these objects has produced.

In the first chapter he describes the physical geography and geology of the islands, also with regard to the role of volcanoes and earthquakes . He also goes into the patterns according to which fauna and flora are distributed, for example with regard to the (later so-called) Wallace Line , according to which a species boundary runs through the middle of the island world, west of the only Asian, east only Australian Forms of animals occur.

The following chapters describe in detail the places he visited on his journey. Wallace does not write chronologically, but summarizes the areas visited in roughly equal sections: The Indo-Malay islands ( Singapore , Malacca , Borneo , Java and Sumatra ), the Timor group ( Bali and Lombok and Timor ), the Sulawesi - Group ( Celebes ), the Moluccas ( Banda , Ambon , Ternate , Jilolo , Kaioa , Batchian , Seram , Goram and the Watubela Islands and Buru ) and the Papua Group ( Aru Islands , Kei Islands , New Guinea with the city of Dorey and Wageu ). At the end of each section, he summarizes the natural history of the area described. The final chapter is an overview of the ethnic, linguistic, and cultural differences among the peoples of the region, and a guess as to what those differences might say about their history.

In addition to the scientific enumeration and evaluation of the plants and animals found, Wallace provides a wealth of observations of the natives, their languages, their way of life and their social organization. He writes about the biogeographical patterns he observed and their significance for natural history based on the biological ( evolution ) and geological history of the region. He also tells some of his personal experiences during the trip as well as encounters with people from contemporary history. He meets Thomas Stamford Raffles , the founder of the city of Singapore , James Brooke , the first of the White Rajahs of Sarawak and his nephew Charles Johnson Brooke as well as the later founders of Christianity in New Guinea, Carl Wilhelm Ottow and Johann Gottlob Geißler .

Illustrations

"The Great Shielded Grasshopper" drawn and signed by EW Robinson

According to the preface , the illustrations are based on Wallace's own sketches, photographs or copies. Wallace thanks Walter and Henry Woodbury for some photos of the countryside and the locals. He thanks William Wilson Saunders and Mr. Pascoe for horned flies and very rare longhorn beetles: all others are from his own enormous collection.

The original drawings were made directly on the blocks by leading artists such as Thomas Baines , Walter Hood Fitch , John Gerrard Keulemans , EW Robinson , Joseph Wolf and TW Wood , according to the list of illustrations . Wood also illustrated Darwin's Descent of Man , while Robinson and Wolf both also provided illustrations for The Naturalist on the River Amazons (written by Wallace's friend Henry Walter Bates in 1863 ).

Influences

Joseph Conrad was very impressed with the book and used it as a source for some of his short stories.

Several other books related to the book have appeared recently. An example of this is the 1996 book The Song of the Dodo by David Quammen , which embeds Wallace's Indonesian trip in the context of the island's biogeography .

pads

Original editions

German first edition

Modern editions

  • The Malay Archipelago. The home of the orangutan and the bird of paradise. Travel experiences and studies about the country and its people. After the translation from the English by Adolf Bernhard Meyer, edited and annotated by Michael Uszinski, Verlag der Pioniere, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-941924-00-0 .
  • The Malay Archipelago. The home of the orangutan and the bird of paradise. Travel experiences and studies about the country and its people. Completely modernized e-book edition based on the translation by Adolf Bernhard Meyer. Published by mach-mir-ein-ebook.de, Hamburg 2012, Volume 1: ISBN 978-3-944309-10-1 , Volume 2: ISBN 978-3-944309-15-6 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Bates was 22, Wallace was 24.
  2. ↑ Mallet, Jim: Henry Walter Bates . University College London. Retrieved December 11, 2012.
  3. ↑ a b Shoumatoff, Alex: A Critic at Large, Henry Walter Bates Archived from the original on August 6, 2015. In: New York . August 22, 1988.
  4. ^ Edwards, 1847.
  5. ↑ George Beccaloni: 2005- "Treeps" plaque . 2008.
  6. ^ Wallace, 1869. pp. Vii-ix.
  7. ↑ van Wyne, John: Malay Archipelago . Wallace Online, National University of Singapore. 2012. Retrieved June 23, 2013.
  8. ↑ See Commons Category: EW Robinson
  9. ↑ 'THE SENSES OF PRIMITIVE MAN': JOSEPH CONRAD, WHR RIVERS, AND REPRESENTING THE OTHER IN 'THE END OF THE TETHER'

Web links

Commons : The Malay Archipelago (book)  - Album with pictures, videos and audio files