Wallace’s help: the many people who aided A. R. Wallace in the Malay archipelago
Abstract
Alfred Russel Wallace was a quintessential Victorian collector-naturalist, remembered for his eight years of collecting throughout the Malay Archipelago, today’s Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and East Timor. Written accounts almost always note that Wallace collected 125,660 natural history specimens, but almost no one mentions that he had a great deal of help in assembling this vast collection. His published and unpublished writings contain references to an array of hired assistants, boatmen, porters, cooks and guides. Along with the well-known assistants usually mentioned, Charles Allen and Ali, hundreds of local people helped Wallace by showing him where local animals lived and explaining how they behaved, and they procured the vast majority of the vertebrates in his collection. This article suggests that at least 1,200 individuals helped Wallace in one way or another, and the number could easily have been twice as large.
Summary
This article challenges the persistent hagiographic framing of Alfred Russel Wallace as a lone genius or “the greatest field biologist of the nineteenth century,” arguing instead that his celebrated collection of natural history specimens was assembled with the indispensable labour of a vast network of local people. Van Wyhe draws on Wallace’s published writings, unpublished voyage journals, field notebooks, and correspondence to reconstruct the human infrastructure behind the eight-year collecting expedition, moving beyond the two well-known assistants (Charles Allen and Ali) to document the hundreds of boatmen, porters, guides, cooks, hunters, and informal specimen providers who made the work possible.
The article also corrects anachronistic characterizations of Wallace, insisting that he was a Victorian commercial collector-naturalist rather than a “field biologist” or “scientist” in any modern professionalized sense. By situating Wallace within the economic and social conditions of mid-nineteenth-century colonial Southeast Asia, van Wyhe demonstrates that the collecting enterprise was fundamentally a product of colonial-era labour networks and purchasing-power asymmetries. The primary sources—particularly the day-by-day journals and the specimen notebooks with their marginal annotations attributing finds to “natives” or named individuals—provide the evidential basis for estimating headcounts at each collecting location.
A significant portion of the analysis is devoted to sub-contractors who collected on Wallace’s behalf after his return to Britain, notably Charles Allen, whose independent expeditions produced tens of thousands of specimens that were integrated into Wallace’s published totals without separate attribution.
Key Findings
- Van Wyhe estimates that at least 1,200 local individuals (possibly twice that number) aided Wallace in some capacity, in addition to more than 100 Europeans, bringing the minimum total to approximately 1,300 people (p. 67).
- Charles Allen and his team collected 28,438 specimens during their 1860–62 expeditions; extrapolating from their monthly output, van Wyhe estimates Allen’s total contribution across both periods of employment may have reached 48,000 specimens (pp. 63–64).
- At Si Munjon in Sarawak, Wallace paid a cent per insect to local Dyak and Chinese workmen; approximately 63 people are estimated to have been directly involved in orangutan locating, hunting, and retrieval (pp. 46–47).
- The Goram island voyage alone required just over 300 men serving as boat crews across multiple vessels (p. 59).
- The assistant Baderoon, a Macassar boy of about sixteen, gambled away four months’ advance wages within a week of arriving at Aru and subsequently became the temporary slave of a woman who paid off his debt (pp. 51–52).
- Jumaat, a Ternate assistant, died of dysentery at Dorey in New Guinea—the only one of Wallace’s assistants known to have died in his service (p. 56).
Conclusion
Van Wyhe’s definitive historical takeaway is that Wallace’s achievements were inseparable from the collective, often invisible labour of the communities among whom he lived and worked. The primary enabling factor was economic: by the standards of the Malay Archipelago, Wallace was immensely wealthy, and the purchasing power of his money allowed him to employ large numbers of people for what were to him trivial sums. The cooperation of local people—who provided ecological knowledge, procured specimens, and performed essential logistical services—testifies both to their amiability and to Wallace’s ability to operate across many different cultures, but it also underscores that the history of science must account for the distributed human effort behind individual reputations.
Context
- Primary archival collections explored include Wallace’s voyage journals (Linnean Society of London, MS178a–d), field notebooks (Linnean Society MS180; Natural History Museum London, Z MSS 89 O WAL), and the edited correspondence in van Wyhe and Rookmaaker (2013a), all searchable via Wallace Online.
- The article extends and supersedes the earlier Cranbrook and Marshall (2014) study by providing a location-by-location reconstruction with estimated headcounts and by incorporating sub-contractors (Allen, Geach, Benjamin) whose contributions had previously been undercounted or overlooked.