IN THE WAKE OF Wallace
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.
“Every seaman wil admit that my first voyage in my own boat was a most unlucky one.” The great naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace wrote these words 150 years ago.
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
