Racked with fever, virtually broke and earning a precarious living through sending back to London the plumes of beautiful birds, Wallace (1823-1913) ultimately became one of the most heroic and admirable of all scientist-explorers. Whether living with Hill Dyaks or hunting Orang-Utans or sailing on a junk to the unbelievably remote Aru islands, Wallace opens our eyes to a now long vanished world.


Alfred Russel Wallace, aside from having a patently misspelled middle name, during his eight years of wandering in southeast Asia, came to realize in a fevered dream off the coast of New Guinea the ‘origin of species’ completely independently of Darwin, who had been secretly mulling over the same concept for some years. The shock of receiving Wallace’s letter announcing his discovery pushed Darwin into writing The Origin of Species, thereby changing the entire course of scientific history – but the timing was entirely thanks to Wallace’s ravings on the Arafura Sea.