Book description
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. Great Journeys
allows readers to travel both around the planet and back through the
centuries - but also back into ideas and worlds frightening, ruthless
and cruel in different ways from our own. Few reading experiences can
begin to match that of engaging with writers who saw astounding things:
Great civilisations, walls of ice, violent and implacable jungles,
deserts and mountains, multitudes of birds and flowers new to science.
Reading these books is to see the world afresh, to rediscover a time
when many cultures were quite strange to each other, where legends and
stories were treated as facts and in which so much was still to be
discovered. Alfred Russell Wallace (1823-1913) was a Welsh naturalist,
geographer, anthropologist and biologist. Having worked with Walter
Henry Bates in the Amazon (and lost all his collections in a
catastrophic fire at sea), Wallace spent 1854 to 1862 wandering across
the East Indies (now Malaysia and Indonesia) from Sumatra in the west to
New Guinea in the east, earning his living as a bird-skin collector. It
was while he was in the Aru Islands, off the coast of New Guinea, that
(quite independently of Darwin) Wallace realised the true 'origin of the
species'.
