following Wallace in Java

Following Wallace in Java

March 16, 2009

Hotel in Jakarta

If I were to arrive in Jakarta, this is probably the kind of room I would get. It could pretty much be any hotel room anywhere in the world. If I turned on that TV I could undoubtedly find the international versions of BBC or CNN. I would feel right at home. As I picked up The Malay Archipelago (1869) by Alfred Russel Wallace, the great naturalist, I was curious to learn about his experience traveling through Java, the island on which Jakarta is located. Wallace gives a decent portrait:

The Hôtel des Indes was very comfortable, each visitor having a sitting-room and bedroom opening on a verandah, where he can take his morning coffee and afternoon tea. In the centre of the quadrangle is a building containing a number of marble baths always ready for use; and there is an excellent table d'hôte breakfast at ten, and dinner at six, for all which there is a moderate charge per day. [84]

His hotel was far smaller than the hotel palaces of our time, but it just as surely offered an expected set of comforts. Those emphatically British comforts have been supplanted by the international comforts of a modern hotel.

Wallace is primarily concerned with the natural environment of the Malay Archipelago, which is largely defined by the modern nation of Indonesia.. with a lesser portion being now Malaysia. Wallace is at pains to explain that these islands are quite large. He presents the island of Borneo (today's Kalimantan) with the British Isles superimposed upon it:

Borneo and British Isles

Wallace writes: "... in one of them, Borneo, the whole of the British Isles might be set down, and would be surrounded by a sea of forests" (2). That's a lovely image of all Britain being swallowed up by Borneo. He also explains that the island of Java is about the size of Ireland, although being long and thin it is of quite different shape. Point taken: these are not minor islands but something like a Europe of the seas.

Wallace singles out Java for special praise: "...Java is probably the very finest and most interesting tropical island in the world" (76). He acknowledges the deep history of Java, but to do this he cites previous sources. It's not his area of expertise. Wallace's real interest is in the natural environment of Java, which is marked by 45 volcanoes, active and inactive. Jakarta is a modern megacity, but further out in Java there are stunning natural scenes such as the picture below:

Java Volcano

This is a photograph of Bromo, an active volcano in the midst of a much larger caldera. Wallace does not draw much in the way of landscapes. He illustrates instead some of the small creatures that he discovers:

butterfly from Java

This butterfly has an interesting story connected to it:

One day a boy brought me a butterfly between his fingers, perfectly unhurt. He had caught it as it was sitting with wings erect sucking up the liquid from a muddy spot by the roadside... It proved to be the rare and curious Charaxes kadenii, remarkable for having on each hind wing two curved tails like a pair of callipers. It was the only specimen I ever saw, and is still the only representative of its kind in English collections. [87]

I love that image of a butterfly sucking at a muddy spot beside the road.. and then caught by a boy. It's a perfect image of beauty distracted by the daily mud.

Butterflies play a leading role in this official tourism video for Indonesia:

Watching this video you can feel the transition between Wallace as a discoverer of natural rarities.. and the commodification of those rarities as a tourist draw. This is not completely out of Wallace's ken since he looks forward to a time when the wonders of Java will be more widely known:

I believe, therefore, that Java may fairly claim to be the finest tropical island in the world, and equally interesting to the tourist seeking after new and beautiful scenes; to the naturalist who desires to examine the variety and beauty of tropical nature... [76]

The tourists will come.. and his butterflies will become an ad for the island!

There is something degrading about the tourist's relationship to the place visited. The more tourists, the more a culture begins to parody itself to attract hard currency. One advantage of virtual travel is that I can learn about the world but not enter as a tourist.. and never have to pay money to stay in a palace hotel with its international comforts.