In The Wake Of Wallace

This year marks the 150 th anniversary of Alfred Russel Wallace’s classic book The Malay Archipelago. A cruise onboard a traditional Indonesian schooner explores the archipelago that has changed little since Wallace’s time.

- Mark Eveleigh

AS WE SET SAIL in a luxurious 51-metre superyacht, I sipped my glass of champagne and hoped that our own voyage would be infinitely more fortunate than Wallace’s. The great timber pinisi (a traditional Indonesian schooner) was called Dunia Baru— meaning ‘new world’. As we sailed away from the spice-scented volcanic island of Ternate and passed the sturdy battlements of the Portuguese fort that has stood here for almost 500 years, it was hard to imagine that there was anything new about the scene at all.

Wallace had sailed these waters in far less salubrious style in his own locally built fishing boat. His little skiff was so unlucky that it was assumed to be cursed and his first crew ran away. When he finally got another crew together, his first voyage was fraught with disaster: “Two men were lost for a month on a desert island,” he wrote, “we were 10 times aground on coral reefs; we lost four anchors; the sails were devoured by rats… In 78 days of sailing we had not one single day of fair wind.”