In Alfred Russel Wallace’s shadow: his forgotten assistant: Charles Allen (1839–1892)
Kees Rookmaaker and John van Wyhe (2012) reconstruct the life of Charles Martin Allen (1839–1892), the largely forgotten assistant who accompanied Alfred Russel Wallace to the Malay Archipelago in 1854 and later worked independently as a collector across the Moluccas and New Guinea. Drawing on Wallace’s financial notebooks, Singapore newspaper obituaries, Straits Directories, and church baptismal records, the authors demonstrate that Allen’s contribution to Wallace’s collecting enterprise was far more substantial than previously acknowledged and that his post-Wallace career as a mining engineer and estate manager in Singapore constitutes a previously unexplored chapter in the social history of the colony.
Summary
The article addresses a significant gap in Wallace scholarship: the near-total absence of biographical information about the young Englishman who served as Wallace’s collecting assistant during two separate periods in the Malay Archipelago (1854–56 and 1860–62). Wallace’s own autobiography provides only a brief, somewhat unflattering sketch, and no family papers or correspondence from Allen have survived. Rookmaaker and van Wyhe therefore piece together Allen’s life from four short Singapore newspaper obituaries published in 1892, Wallace’s financial accounts in Notebook 5 (held at the Natural History Museum, London), letters between Wallace and Rajah James Brooke, and the baptismal registers of St. Andrews Cathedral, Singapore.
The first half of the article traces Allen’s collecting career in detail. After an initial period in Singapore, the Malay Peninsula, and Sarawak (1854–56), during which Wallace repeatedly complained of his carelessness, Allen proved capable enough to be dispatched alone across the Moluccas and into New Guinea. The authors reconstruct his itinerary island by island—Ambon, Seram, Misool, Ternate, Halmahera, Morotai, New Guinea (Salawatti and Sorong), Buru, the Sula Islands, Flores, Solor, and finally Borneo—using Wallace’s financial entries, specimen lists, and the occasional corroborating reference from third parties such as the German naturalist Carl von Rosenberg, who found the wildlife at Lelintah on Misool already depleted by Allen’s thorough collecting. The second half follows Allen’s settlement in Singapore, where he worked for the businessman John Fisher in tin mining on the Carimons, gold mining at Chindrass near Mount Ophir, and eventually as manager and proprietor of the Perseverance Estate in Geylang, where he produced essential oils from citronella and lemongrass until his death in 1892.
A central argument of the article is one of attribution and erasure. Allen collected over 28,438 specimens during his independent 1860–62 campaign, amounting to roughly a quarter of Wallace’s total 125,660 specimens from the Malay Archipelago. Yet all specimens preserved in British museums are credited to Wallace alone, and no species bears Allen’s name. The authors note that this was probably standard practice for a paid assistant in the period, but they highlight the irony that Wallace’s own map of the Malay Archipelago includes a line for “Mr. Allen’s routes” that is incomplete and partly obscured by Wallace’s own travels.
Key Findings
- Allen was actually fourteen years old (born 9 June 1839, registered in St Pancras, London) when he departed England in March 1854, not sixteen as Wallace claimed in his autobiography (p. 2).
- During a single collecting period between 4 August and 18 October 1855 at Simunjan, Sarawak, Allen collected 6,198 insect individuals, averaging just over one hundred per day excluding Sundays (p. 5).
- Wallace’s financial accounts in Notebook 5 record total payments to Allen of 4,480.64 guilders for specimens and 702.07 guilders for travel expenses, totalling 5,182.71 guilders (approximately £500 at the time) (p. 17).
- Allen’s New Guinea collection included 22 birds of paradise, 468 birds, 4,166 beetles, and 843 butterflies and moths, for which he was paid 1,221.38 guilders (p. 13).
- The Chindrass Gold Mining Company, in which Allen served as engineer and manager, was liquidated after years of mismanagement; Allen’s 1874 letter to the Straits Times—the only known document in his own handwriting—argued that the reef had been worked out and that the company was spending “at least four times” the value of the gold it extracted (pp. 27–28).
- Allen died of gout on 7 July 1892 at the Perseverance Estate, Geylang, aged 53; his wife Christina died six years later in 1898 (p. 31).
Conclusion
Rookmaaker and van Wyhe conclude that Charles Allen was a hard-working, capable collector whose contributions to Wallace’s scientific output were substantial but systematically unacknowledged in the published record. His post-Wallace life in Singapore—as mining engineer, estate manager, and father of eight children who went on to occupy prominent positions in the colony’s professional and architectural communities—represents a previously invisible thread connecting the natural history of the Malay Archipelago to the social fabric of colonial Singapore.
Context
- Primary archival collections consulted include Wallace’s notebooks and correspondence at the Natural History Museum, London (Notebook 5, WP1/3 series), the Linnean Society of London (Notebook 4), the British Library (Add 46441, Brooke–Wallace correspondence), the Royal Geographical Society letterbook, St. Andrews Cathedral baptismal registers (via National Archives, Singapore microfilms), and the Straits Directories 1864–1894 (pp. 50–51).
- The article contributes to Wallace studies by correcting the record on the scale of Allen’s independent collecting and by providing the first comprehensive biography of a figure who had previously been reduced to a few lines in Wallace’s autobiography. It also intersects with the social and economic history of Singapore in the mid-nineteenth century through its documentation of mining ventures and estate management.