The naturalist and zoogeographer Alfred Russel Wallace enjoys an authority that has endured beyond that of either Crawfurd or Earl, due in large part to his travels and observations in the Malay Archipelago between 1854 and 1862.[51] Wallace's account of these travels, first published in 1869 as The Malay Archipelago: the Land of the Orang-utan and the Bird of Paradise; a Narrative of Travel with Studies of Man and Nature (1869a), ushered in a golden era of naturalist exploration in New Guinea and the Moluccas. Couching his developing theory of biogeography and species evolution in the form of a travelogue, The Malay Archipelago proved to be enormously influential not only for natural history and zoogeography in general but also more specifically for regional scholars; it is still regarded as perhaps 'the most famous of all books on the Malay Archipelago' (Bastin 1986:vii). Immediately translated into German (1869b) and Dutch (1870-71), Wallace's narrative set a standard against which much subsequent writing on the region has been measured. During the 1870s, Wallace was followed by a wave of naturalist explorers, each bearing copies of his book and consciously emulating his earlier feats: amongst them, the Russian Nikolai Miklouho-Maclay (1846-1888); Wallace's German translator Adolf Bernhard Meyer (1840-1911); and the Italians Odoardo Beccari (1843-1920) and Luigi Maria d'Albertis (1841-1901). Though Wallace's fame rests largely upon his work as a naturalist and his position as the 'moon' to Darwin's 'sun' in the development of a theory of evolution, he was equally fascinated by human as by other zoological subjects: 'The human inhabitants of these forests are not less interesting to me than the feathered tribes'.[52]
The lengthy duration of Wallace's field experience was exceptional, by any standards. As his eight years in the Malay Archipelago had been preceded almost immediately by five years of travel and collection in Brazil between 1848 and 1852, Wallace could claim to have spent twelve of these fourteen years in the field. In marked contrast to earlier observers or collectors, he operated independently, depending on the sale of his collections, and not as part of a ship's crew or a well-funded expedition — though the claim to independence conveniently ignores the colonial network of friends and acquaintances upon which Wallace leaned and the equally central contribution of his assistants, such as Charles Allen and Ali (Camerini 1996). While his predecessors had typically spent little more than a few days onshore, Wallace's visit to Dorey or Doreri Bay (Manokwari) during a period of three and a half months in 1858 marked the first sustained presence of a naturalist in New Guinea.[53]
Where Earl had insisted that 'a single glance' was sufficient to distinguish Papuans from Malays or Malayu-Polynesians, Wallace felt the contrast to be so pronounced as to almost preclude the need for visual diacritics. It was at the Kai Islands in the southeast Moluccas, on the last day of 1856, that Wallace experienced something of an epiphany in his conception of racial difference, as three or four canoes containing some fifty men approached his boat:
I now had my first view of Papuans in their own country, and in less than five minutes was convinced that the opinion already arrived at by the examination of a few Timor and New Guinea slaves was substantially correct, and that the people I now had an opportunity of comparing side by side belonged to two of the most distinctive and strongly marked races that the earth contains. Had I been blind, I could have been certain that these islanders were not Malays. The loud, rapid, eager tones, the incessant motion, the intense vital activity manifested in speech and action, are the very antipodes of the quiet, unimpulsive, unanimated Malay … These forty black, naked, mop-headed savages seemed intoxicated with joy and excitement … School-boys on an unexpected holiday, Irishmen at a fair, or midshipmen on shore, would give but a faint idea of the exuberant animal enjoyment of these people … Under similar circumstances Malays could not behave as these Papuans did … These moral features are more striking and more conclusive of absolute diversity than even the physical contrasts presented by the two races, though that is sufficiently remarkable (1880a:415-6, original emphasis).[54]
While Wallace advocated the comparison of moral features observed in conjunction with physical traits as a guide to racial distinction, he insisted that environmental factors exerted less influence over the moral than the physical and that moral character was thus a more durable and fundamental ground for discrimination (Brooks 1984:164).
Wallace's famous description of the Australasian and Asian faunas of the Malay Archipelago as 'two distinct faunas rigidly circumscribed, which differ as much as do those of Africa and South America',[55] was echoed in the forcefulness of his distinction between Malays and Papuans:
Between the Malay tribes, among whom I had for some years been living, and the Papuan races, whose country I had now entered, we may fairly say that there is as much difference, both moral and physical, as between the red Indians of South America, and the Negroes of Guinea on the opposite side of the Atlantic (1880a:417).
But if Wallace, like Crawfurd, had first observed Papuans as slaves, appeared to subscribe to Crawfurd's fundamental division of the Malay and Papuan, and apparently shared the latter's taste for African analogies, his description of the details of these physical and moral differences followed more closely that offered by Earl, again directly contradicting Crawfurd. In terms of stature, Wallace (1856:202-4) claimed that 'the Papuan decidedly surpasses the Malay, and is perhaps equal to the average of Europeans'.[56] For Wallace, the Papuan face possessed 'an altogether more European aspect than in the Malay' and, although he acknowledged that the 'intellect' of Papuans was 'very difficult to judge', he was 'inclined to rate it somewhat higher than that of the Malays, notwithstanding the fact that the Papuans have never yet made any advance towards civilisation'. Equally as confident or emphatic in his pronouncements as Crawfurd, in less than half a century Wallace had produced a valuation of the differences between Malays and Papuans diametrically opposed to that of Crawfurd.
[51] Wallace is now well served by biographers, including the recent works by Raby (2001) and Fichman (2004). See the Alfred Russel Wallace website for further details of Wallace's own publications and of writing about his work. Accessed 4 April 2005, online <www.wku.edu/~smithch/>.
[52] Wallace [1856-61]: entry 71; Williams-Ellis 1966.
[53] In the event, Wallace was ill and house-bound for much of his time in Dorey Bay, though this scarcely diminished the benefit to his reputation of his sojourn in New Guinea. Proximity to Papuans failed to translate into empathy, however. Years later, when Thomas Barbour (1944:47) sent him photographs of the Papuans of Dorey Bay, Wallace replied 'that he was sorry I had, for he disliked them so'.
[54] Vetter (2006) nicely identified the additional emphasis placed by Wallace on this contrast by comparing the account in his original journal entry with the more elaborate version published more than a decade later.
[55] Wallace to Bates, 4 January 1858, quoted in Wallace 1905, I:358-9.
[56] For emphasis, and not presumably as the result of any new data, Wallace would revise this statement in his republication of the 1865 paper as the final chapter of The Malay Archipelago to read 'equal, or even superior, to the average of Europeans' (1880a:586).