Crawfurd, Earl, and Wallace collectively laid the British foundations for the notion of a unified Papuan 'type' as an object for study and they did so principally through the device of opposition to a similarly idealized Malay type. The requirement of Papuan unity for their simple pair of racial types drastically reduced, and also effectively eclipsed, the burgeoning classificatory complexity of their French counterparts. In the cases of Crawfurd and Earl, it might be argued that the simplicity of their initial representations reflected at least in part the limits of their personal experience of Papuans. As they became acquainted with further reports, so their accounts of Papuans gradually became more elaborate and admitted increasing variability. Yet Wallace, despite his considerably more protracted engagement with people across the full breadth of the archipelago, insisted on describing Papuans and Malays in terms that were even more starkly contrasted while emphasising their internal unity to a far greater degree. What was the attraction for these writers of a simple oppositional pair of types, and why — experience apparently to the contrary — should that attraction have proved even stronger for Wallace than it did for Crawfurd or Earl?

Raffles (1817) had contributed significantly to this opposition between Malay and Papuan in electing to publish the image of his young ward Dick Papua in a volume ostensibly devoted to Java. Eager to promote the civilized qualities of Javanese culture and history as comparable to those of Europe, Raffles was of course drawing the attention of educated London to his role in Java and thus to himself. As Forge (1994:147,150) observed, to achieve this equation Raffles needed to distinguish 'the civilised Javanese from the undifferentiated savages with which popular imagination peopled the whole archipelago'. Two of the colour plates in the first edition of his History of Java — the frontispiece showing a refined Javanese aristocrat looking to the left, and the final plate of the second volume, 'a misshapen and nearly naked savage looking away to the right' — served neatly to establish this contrast.^[86] Hampson (2000:62) made the further point that Raffles, with Cook's fate in mind, was 'consciously setting the boundary between Cook's Pacific and his own East Indies'.

As I have suggested, Wallace had another, more theoretical agenda to service through the promotion of a profound distinction between Malay and Papuan, which was the notion of a long chronology for human evolution. As the meeting place of two of his three 'great races or divisions of mankind', the Malay Archipelago provided the perfect stage for a demonstration of the role of biogeography in asserting the depth of human antiquity. If Papuans, along with their Australasian fauna, were native to New Guinea, and Malays and their Asiatic fauna to the palaeocontinent now known as Sunda, then the essential Negroid unity of African Negroes and Papuans could only be accounted for by migrations so ancient that they predated the current form of the continents. All the narrative and rhetorical skill that Wallace could muster was thus directed at emphasizing the sharpness of the divide between Malay and Papuan.

Boon (1990:22) has argued that Wallace's emphasis on dualism in the Malay Archipelago became an all-encompassing 'totemism' in which the zoological and human distinctions that he wished to establish were condensed in the form of the bird of paradise from the Aru Islands, adjacent to New Guinea, and the orangutan of Borneo: 'each fauna pulls its human counterpart ['wild Malay' Dayaks and Papuans] towards its extreme characteristic: lyrical divinity on the one hand, bestial might (beneath apparent docility) on the other: avian grace versus animal urge'. There is something powerfully compelling about the simplicity of a dual opposition, both for the popular readership of Wallace's Malay Archipelago and for the intellectual peers whom Crawfurd, Earl, and Wallace each sought to impress. All three came to London to some extent as outsiders — Crawfurd from Scotland, Earl from the colonies, and Wallace from a family of reduced circumstances — and all three were concerned with advancement and keenly aware of the need, apparent to scholars then as now, to 'come out strong'.

The simple opposition of Malay and Papuan propounded by Crawfurd, Earl, and Wallace has profoundly influenced western representations of difference in the Malay Archipelago and continues to find expression in contemporary political debate. Despite the obvious flaws in detail in each of their arguments, the caricatures of Malay and Papuan created through this opposition have become entrenched in popular conception, perhaps most notably through the novels of Joseph Conrad.^[87] Having failed to draw on Cook and his literature, the intertextual stream of representations of Papuans sketched in the first part of this chapter found new vigour in the writings of Crawfurd, Earl, and Wallace; which invites the hypothetical question of how Papuans and New Guinea might subsequently have been figured had Cook on each of his voyages entered the Pacific not from the east but from the west, via the Malay Archipelago and the coasts of New Guinea.