Ship Fever (11 page)

During the wet season of 1855, Alec was in Sarawak, in north-western Borneo. He'd heard tales of a lively Christmas house-party at the bungalow of Sir John Brooke, the English Rajah of the territory—all the Europeans in the out-stations being invited to enjoy the Rajah's fabled hospitality, and so forth. But he had not been asked to join the party, and he never suspected that Wallace was there. Over that Christmas, and into January, Alec was miles east of the Rajah's bungalow, collecting beetles and hunting orangutans in the swamps along the Sadong River.

For some weeks he'd been blessed with astonishing luck. Moving through the dense foliage he would hear a rustling overhead, then glimpse one of the reddish-brown apes swinging. Branch to branch, tree to tree, never touching the ground. His desire for possession seemed to carve a line in the air between his gun and his target; he aimed and a moment later the orangutan was his. Retrieving the body was more difficult, but here the native Dyaks helped him. As the orangutans fed on the fruit of the durian tree, of which the Dyaks were very fond, the Dyaks were happy to guide Alec to them and then, after the shooting, to fell the trees in which the bodies were trapped, or climb the trunks and lower the bodies down. With their help Alec obtained four full-grown males, three females, and several juveniles. Just before the ague hit again, he also shot another female high in a giant tree. While lashing the body to the carrying poles, one of his Dyak hunters found the orangutan's little infant face-down in the swamp, crying piteously.

This orphan Alec brought back to camp with him. He could
not feel guilty about shooting the infant's mother; this was part of his work, what he was meant to do. But neither could he abandon the small creature who'd become his responsibility. While he lay on his cot, alternately burning and chilled, the infant orangutan clung to his clothes and beard and sucked on his fingers as he might at his mother's breast. For a long time no one had touched Alec. He gave the infant sugar-water and rice-water and coconut milk through a quill, and later offered bits of fruit and sweet potato. The orangutan insisted on clinging to some part of his body at all times. And Alec found this peculiarly touching, despite the weakness and lassitude brought on by his fever. When a pair of strangers walked into his hut, he was flat on his back, in a violent sweat, with the infant curled like a cap around his head.

Wallace, Alec learned from the strangers, had been at the Rajah's bungalow this whole time, staying on alone but for Charles and a Malay cook after the holidays had passed and the Rajah and his entourage had left. Having heard of Alec's plight through some visiting Dyaks, Wallace had sent these two back to fetch him. The pair carried Alec through the swamp and the forest, on a litter made of bamboo poles. Some of his helpers followed with his belongings, including all his crates of insect specimens and the skins and skeletons of the orangutans. The infant rode on his chest.

Wallace had the ague as well. When Alec arrived at the Rajah's bungalow, and first caught sight of the veranda and the huge teak beams, the wicker chairs and the spacious library, Wallace was desperately ill, and in bed. A few days later, when Wallace could get up, Alec was delirious. For ten days the men alternated bouts of fever as if they were playing lawn-tennis, but then finally, after large doses of quinine, both were well at the same time. In their weakened state they sat on the veranda, sipping arrack from narrow bamboos and talking. Wallace claimed that the bouts of ague stimulated his brain.

“Aren't these beetles astonishing?” Alec said, pawing through the box at his feet. His clothes and person were clean, he had had a good dinner, he'd slept on a real bed. He felt wonderful. This Brooke, he thought, truly lived like a king. And even though the Rajah had welcomed Wallace and not Alec, Alec was consoled by the beautiful things he had to show for his isolation.

“In two weeks I collected more than 600 different kinds, sometimes a dozen new species a day—it's bewildering,” Alec said. He held out a beetle with horns twice the length of its body. “Have you come across this one? And what do you make of the remarkable multitude of species here?”

Wallace smiled and turned the beetle delicately on its back. He said, “I have several of these; they're charming. I do not see how a reasonable man can believe any longer in the permanence of species. All species, as you have seen yourself, constantly produce varieties. If this process goes on indefinitely, the varieties must move farther and farther from the original species, and some of these
must,
in time, develop into new species—but how and when does this happen? What is the method by which species undergo a natural process of gradual extinction and creation?”

“The method?” Alec said. Wallace passed the beetle back to Alec and Alec held it cupped in his palm. Since his first day in the archipelago he'd been haunted, vaguely, by the question Wallace now posed clearly: where had all these creatures come from? But Alec had had no time to theorize, caught up as he was in the urgency of trying to capture and name everything he saw.

“There must be a
mechanism,
” Wallace said.

The rain was falling steadily. From the trees three Dyaks emerged and joined the men on the veranda; Wallace produced a piece of string and tried to show them how to play the child's game of cat's cradle. Much to Alec's astonishment the Dyaks knew it better than he did. The three of them stood in a close circle, weaving figures he'd never seen before on each other's
hands and passing the cradle back and forth. When Alec joined them they netted his fingers together.

Later Wallace showed Alec the lone specimen he'd found of a huge new butterfly, which had brilliant green spots arrayed against the black velvet of its wings. “I have named it
Ornithoptera Brookeana,
” Wallace said. “After our host.” In return Alec showed Wallace how happily his little orangutan, whom he'd named Ali, lay in his arms as he brushed its long brown hair. He tried not to feel jealous when Ali leapt into Wallace's lap and licked his cheek. Wallace was Alec's friend, but also his rival, and sometimes Alec longed for Wallace to have some failing. A certain coldness, say. Or an absent-mindedness, brought on by deep thinking. But it seemed there was no part of their lives in which Wallace could not surpass him.

The ague struck them both again on the following day—and to their great sorrow, it also struck Ali. Wallace, too weak himself to rise from bed, had Charles give the infant castor-oil to cure its diarrhea, but although this worked the other symptoms of fever continued; Ali's head and feet swelled; and then he died. Everyone at the bungalow much regretted the loss of the little pet. When Alec's own strength returned, he wept over Ali's body and then decided to bring the skin and skeleton home with him. Ali was sixteen inches tall, four pounds in weight, with an arm-spread of twenty-four inches. Alec made these measurements, but he shrank from the task of preparing the specimen and thought to have Wallace's Charles help him out. Wallace discouraged that.

“Charles is a nice boy,” he said. “But quite incapable—look what he has done with this bird.”

He showed Alec a bee-eater Charles had been putting up, which resembled Alec's own first specimens. The head was crooked, a lump of cotton bulged from the breast, and the bird's feet had somehow been twisted soles uppermost. Alec looked at this, sighed, and steeled himself to prepare Ali's remains alone.
Separating the skin from the bone and muscle beneath, he reminded himself that, in so doing, he served science. Was this science? That night he was unable to sleep. Some hours after the bungalow had lapsed into silence, he found himself outside, in the dripping forest, slashing savagely at a tangle of lianas.

Not until later did he learn that somewhere during this long run of fever-soaked days, Wallace had written a paper on the possible origin of species by, as he put it,
natural succession and descent
—
one species becoming changed either slowly or rapidly into another…Every species has come into existence coincident both in time and space with a pre-existing closely allied species.
His paper caused a stir when it was published in England that September, bringing him to the notice of such eminent men as Lyell and Darwin.

What was Alec doing while Wallace was writing? Tossing on his sweaty bed; mourning his little orangutan as he sorted and arranged his insect collections. He prepared a shipment for Mr. Barton, with a long anxious letter about the difficulty of his finances, and how much he needed to receive a good price for this batch of specimens. He wrote,

Enclosed please find:

(note: multiple specimens enclosed of many species)

Alec never claimed that his financial difficulties kept him from such fruitful speculations as Wallace made; he knew that Wallace, like himself, spent precious hours sorting and crating specimens and was largely dependent on the income from the sale of same. Alec merely noted that Wallace had Charles, however incapable; a bungalow-palace where he might return from time to time to regain his strength; and powerful friends.

Here is one: Two human beings, coincident in time and space, cannot simultaneously think the same thought; one always precedes the other. As Wallace always preceded Alec, except in a single case. For consolation Alec had this: that
he
was the first to bring living specimens of paradise birds to the western world. And he believed he was the first American to see these creatures in their native forests.

Although Alec thought of Wallace often, and longed to see him, the Malay Archipelago is a very big place and they never crossed paths again. Not until the winter of 1860, while Alec was on Sumatra plowing stupefied through a year's accumulation of letters—his mother was ill, or had been the previous May; his brother Frank had married; Mr. Barton had sold his last shipment of insect specimens for a gratifying sum, but had advanced all the money save for a pittance to his father, at his father's request—did he again hear news of Wallace.

In a letter Mr. Barton, who kept up with the natural history journals in both England and America, recounted to Alec how at Ternate, while suffering again from the ague, Wallace had written a further essay on the origin of species and mailed it to Darwin for comments. The essay had caused a sensation, Mr. Barton said, summarizing its main points for Alec. It had been
read at a meeting of the Linnaean Society, along with some notes of Darwin's expressing a similar idea.

Genius,
Alec thought, sitting stunned on his wooden stool. That's what had come of Wallace's ague. Of his own, which was upon him again, there were only incoherent letters begging to know the true state of his finances. He would not repeat to anyone what he wrote to his family. To Mr. Barton he wrote,

Thank you for your last, and for the most interesting news of Wallace's essay. You cannot imagine how tired I am after my last year's voyages. During the recent months, when I might have been resting, I have been cleaning, labeling, arranging and packing the enclosed: some 10,000 insects, shells, birds, and skeletons. Also hiring men and obtaining stores for my trip to Celebes and the Aru Islands
—
none of this made any easier by the fact that you have sent me hardly enough money to live on. Do not give the proceeds of this shipment to my family, but forward a full statement directly to me.

Perhaps this is when Alec first wondered why his journal had deteriorated into little more than a tally of species, interspersed with fumbling descriptions of places and people. Why all he'd observed and learned had not crystallized in his mind into some shimmering structure. Certainly he'd never lacked for facts—but he was caught like a fly in the richness around him, drowning in detail, spread too thin. If he were to narrow his gaze, perhaps? Focus on one small group of species, contemplate only them? Then he might make both his reputation and his fortune.

As a boy he'd spent hours in the Philadelphia museum staring at a skin labeled
Magnificent Bird of Paradise:
red wings, dark green breast-plumes, cobalt-blue head, a stunning yellow ruff or mantle, and behind that a second mantle of glossy pure red. Sprouting from the tail were two long spires of steely blue. He
had stared not only because the skin was so beautiful, but because it had no wings or feet.

Birds with no feet—could there be such a thing? From a book in the museum's library, he'd learned that Linnaeus had labeled the skin he'd seen
Paradisea apoda,
or the footless paradise bird. A Dutch naturalist wrote that the paradise birds, wingless and footless, were buoyed up by the beams of the sun and never touched the earth till they died. How tantalizing, Alec thought now, looking up from his papers and crates. They were elusive, irresistible; and their skins were so rare as to be very valuable. Money crossed his mind, as it always had. Nearly penniless, and still without a wife or any possibility of supporting one, he seized on the prospect that the paradise birds might save him. Had Wallace married yet? He thought not. Once more he gathered the necessary supplies and prepared to disappear from sight.

After a long journey in a native
prau
from Celebes, during which his life was often in grave danger, he arrived in the Aru Islands. He shut his eyes to the fabulous trees, the astonishing moths and ants, and sought singlemindedly the Great Paradise Bird, with its dense tufts of long golden plumes raised to hide the whole body; the King Paradise Bird, so small and red, with its beautiful, emerald-green, spiral disks lifted high on slender paired shafts. The islanders with whom he was staying took him to see the
sacaleli,
or dancing-party, of the Great Paradise Birds.