The Spice Islands voyage Book

The Spice Islands Voyage, in Search of Wallace is the June choice for our Indonesian bookgroup but I'm reading it early because it's hard to source and we need to circulate the library copy as best we can.

It's more than a travel book. Tim Severin is an explorer who specialises in recreating historic voyages, and the list of his books at Wikipedia is impressive:

Tracking Marco Polo (1964) - Motorcycle ride from Venice to Central Asia along the Silk Road
Explorers of the Mississippi (1968)
The Golden Antilles (1970)
The African Adventure (1973)
Vanishing Primitive Man (1973)
The Oriental Adventure: Explorers of the East (1976)
The Brendan Voyage (1978) - Sailing a leather currach from Ireland to Newfoundland
The Sindbad Voyage (1983) - Sailing an Arab dhow from Muscat, Oman to China
The Jason Voyage: The Quest for the Golden Fleece (1986) - Sailing from Greece to Georgia
The Ulysses Voyage (1987) - Sailing from Troy to Ithaca
Crusader (1989) - Riding a heavy horse from Belgium to the Middle East
In Search of Genghis Khan (1991)
The China Voyage (1994) - Across the Pacific Ocean (almost) on a bamboo raft named Hsu-Fu
The Spice Islands Voyage (1997)
In Search of Moby-Dick (1999)
Seeking Robinson Crusoe (aka In Search of Robinson Crusoe) (2002)

Lest you think that these adventures were merely Boys Own Adventures, here's a snippet from The Spice Islands Voyage that suggests otherwise:
This was the other, darker side to the apparent tropical paradise of palm trees, green forests and sandy beaches through which we were sailing, and where Wallace had soldiered on for six years of field work. During the Spice Islands voyage all of us suffered at one time or another from chills and low-grade fevers, even though we had modern medicines and, in Joe, our own doctor on board. In Banda a small insect bite on my leg turned septic in six hours and puffed up as if I had been bitten by a venomous insect. I felt giddy and unwell as if I had severe flu, and was dosed with antibiotics. Leonard developed blotches on his face, and Joe was tormented by rashes all over his body. Even Yanis with his iron constitution and india-rubber physique could sometimes be seen curled up miserably underneath a scrap of sailcloth, shivering and with his eyes dull with fever. Julia was by far the most vulnerable. In the twelve months during which she assisted the project, she contracted one bout of typhoid and had dengue fever twice. (p.129)
The 'Wallace' referred to in this excerpt, is Alfred Russel Wallace, the British naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist, and biologist who is famous for two things: conceiving the theory of evolution independently of Darwin (which prompted Darwin to stir his stumps and publish The Origin of Species instead of dithering about); and identifying in 1859 the line separating the fauna of the Indo-Malayan and the Austro-Malayan regions in the Indonesian archipelago. Asian birds, bats and mammals are west of the line, and unique Australasian fauna are only found east of the line. As you can see from the diagram the science has developed since Thomas Huxley named this line after Wallace, because we now know more about ancient sea levels and the continental shelves, but Wallace's observations were still an amazing achievement.

Darwin, Severin tells us, got the lion's share of the credit for the theory of evolution, for as the years went by he was to make fewer and fewer references to his co-discoverer, instead referring to 'my doctrines' (as distinct from what he dismissed as Wallace's excellent memoir). So eventually everyone forgot that the theory of evolution was originally introduced to a small scientific gathering in Victorian London who would have thought of it as the Darwin-Wallace theory. 'Survival of the fittest' indeed...

Wallace wasn't, apparently, bitter about this. Severin says he came back from south-east Asia and stepped into Darwin's shadow, deliberately and courteously. His book, The Malay Archipelago, was the monument he preferred... However in later years when Wallace was struggling to support a wife and family, Darwin was at least instrumental in Wallace receiving a pension in recognition of his work. Later still, Wallace also received medals, honorary doctorates and an Order of Merit so at least among scientists, his pioneering ideas have been acknowledged. Severin's coverage of the intricacies of this controversy is excellent.

To read the rest of my review please visit