The Malay Archipelago

"Yes, they were contemporaries, some would say rivals. It’s wonderful. I always had a copy with me throughout my time in Indonesia. I read it cover to cover when I was younger, but when I was in Indonesia, I would flip to certain sections that correlated with my travels. He also writes about what is now Singapore, East Timor and Malaysia. He covered a lot of ground and I would use him as a sort of field guide. He’s such a companionable person. His temperament is almost anti-Victorian because he’s so gentle, and it really comes across in his writing. He’s so interested in the local customs and in going about his peculiar business, collecting beetles and cataloguing these species that no one in the West had ever heard of before. And he’s incredibly patient, too, spending years at a time out there. So I would go to various islands and I often found his accounts to be remarkably relevant. For example in Makassar, which is a big port city in South Sulawesi, he talks about the Bugis people who live there, the limestone cliffs, and some of the animals he collected. When I went there, I ended up hanging out with a lot of Bugis people and going to the limestone cliffs to see the cave paintings that depicted some of the animals he wrote about. Indonesia is one of those places that’s not super-traversed in English-language travel literature. It’s in the historical record for sure, but it’s not like, say, Afghanistan, where you have so many travelogues about ‘Oxiana’ and the Silk Road and so on. So especially given the slimmer pickings, Wallace has always been like a companion to me. Yes, he’s really great. The only sad thing about reading it is you realize how many of the animals he talked about aren’t really there anymore. In northern Sulawesi, he talks about this bird called the Maleo that lays its eggs in the sand. It doesn’t sit on its eggs, but uses the heat of the sand to hatch them. It’s a fantastic, unique bird and I’ve wanted to see it for a long time. But when I went to Manado in 2018, I was told that there are only one or two—if any—left and I wasn’t going to be able to see one, most likely."