The ancient rainforest of Borneo, inspiration for many an explorer.
And I'm here to tell the story of one in particular.
I'm travelling in the footsteps of one of the great forgotten heroes
of natural history - Alfred Russel Wallace.
Wallace's journey will take me on an exotic expedition.
Whoa, look at that!
Full of magical encounters.
This is an extraordinary moment.
I first heard about Wallace
when I was trekking through the jungles of Indonesia 15 years ago,
and I've been fascinated by him ever since.
This geeky Victorian collector changed our understanding
of life on earth.
Along with Charles Darwin,
he came up with one of the greatest scientific ideas of all time,
the theory of evolution by natural selection.
These two men came from two very different worlds
that were destined to collide
as they independently came up with this explosive theory.
But now, 100 years on, Wallace has been forgotten.
I guess you could say he's the missing link
in the story of evolution.
Only by entering Wallace's world can I hope to understand
this obsessive maverick, who risked his life on his relentless quest
to crack the origin of species.
And I'm on a mission to get Wallace the recognition he deserves.
Wallace's brilliance comes from his insatiable curiosity
for the natural world, and I suppose that's a passion that we share.
I chased butterflies as a kid... And I trapped them as well.
I didn't just chase them for no reason,
that'd be weird, wouldn't it? Pointless.
Look, look at my bandy legs. Oh!
PARROT WOLF WHISTLES
Oh, thanks, Merle.
SQUAWKS GENTLY
I've gone on now to bigger things, parrots, chameleons, snakes.
But for Wallace,
uncovering the mysteries of the natural world became an obsession,
and it took him to the remotest corners of the world,
even to the brink of death.
He's an unlikely hero.
He came from humble origins. He had a fractured childhood.
A feckless father who was financially hopeless,
squandered most of the family's money, which meant
that at the age of 14, Wallace had to leave school and earn a living.
Wallace yearned to see the world and discover its secrets.
But people from his social class weren't supposed to go
on grand scientific expeditions.
That was exclusively the preserve of the Victorian scientific elite.
And that's what I admire so much about Wallace,
he overcame these obstacles.
He defied what would have been a humdrum destiny.
He carved out his own wilder, more adventurous path
and became the greatest naturalist of his era.
Tracing Wallace's extraordinary story
will take me to the other side of the globe.
But first, I want to see if there's any sign of him
in the one place you'd expect, London's Natural History Museum.
And sure enough, pride of place, Charles Darwin, but where's Wallace?
Wallace should be up here alongside Darwin because, after all,
when the theory of evolution by natural selection
was first announced to the world,
it was the Darwin-Wallace Theory, two names tied together as equals,
and in fact it was known as a joint theory for decades.
Wallace's name has been lost from history.
But he hasn't completely disappeared from here.
Venture behind the scenes, and his legacy is everywhere,
revealing how an outsider without wealth or connections
became a globe-trotting naturalist.
HE CHUCKLES
Wow, look at this!
This puts my ironically moth-eaten cabbage whites into perspective.
In these cases are just a fraction of the tens of thousands
of specimens that Wallace collected.
These specimens were his pay packet.
Freelance collecting was how Wallace funded his far-flung expeditions.
But it was a precarious career,
dependent on the fashions of the time.
The sheer scale of this collection is just staggering.
Wallace discovered about 5,000 new species,
of which 200 still bear his name.
Like these, Wallace's rose chafer beetles,
and these are Wallace's long horns.
There's something magical about being able to get quite so close
to these birds, for example. I mean, look at this.
This is the King Bird-of-paradise.
Wallace described this as having "the gloss as of spun glass,
"and these tail feathers as elegant glittering buttons."
The sheer abundance of species captivated Wallace.
Why were there so many?
Where had they come from?
The Victorian explanation - that God created everything -
seemed stretched to absurdity.
And he was not alone.
Others, including Charles Darwin, were desperately trying to unlock
the mystery of the origin of species.
The species question, as they called it,
was obsessing all naturalists at the time. Why were there so many species?
Other people, of course, had the idea that the whole of life was connected
and every animal was related to everything else,
but nobody had worked out the mechanism, that was the great thing.
I just find it's extraordinary that Wallace got there
through his own devices, you know.
Darwin had a much... Far different life, far different background,
he was connected with the world of science
and Wallace was pretty much operating on his own.
Yes, Darwin went to university, after all, and Darwin's father
was a wealthy man, and Darwin was landed gentry, and Wallace,
as you said, left school when he was 14, earned his living as a surveyor.
But he was, I mean, he was a dedicated constant,
unceasing scientist, wasn't he?
I mean, he just looked and thought and labelled
and accumulated evidence.
I think he was one of the most admirable human beings going around.
So it's time to leave London and head east,
just as Wallace did in 1854.
I'm following his ground-breaking expedition
to the region which is now Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia.
But Wallace knew it as the Malay Archipelago.
And I want to understand what it was that he saw and experienced here
that ultimately enabled him to make his great intellectual leap.
I'm picking up the trail in Jakarta, Indonesia.
Wallace was 31 and had gambled everything on the hope
of profitable collecting in this mysterious, little-known region.
This was exploration without a safety net,
and his adventure would last eight long years.
TRAFFIC ROARS AND HORNS BEEP
I was the farmer in Nanny McPhee, the sequel.
That's probably where you know me from.
For me, it's like coming home.
I've been travelling here for 15 years,
and I love the chaos, the colour and the energy.
But to Wallace this was all brand new and a much wilder place.
He wrote, "There are always a few tigers roaming about,
"and they kill on average a man every day."
BIRDS CHIRP
Visiting local markets gave Wallace a glimpse
of the exotic creatures that lay in store.
He knew they would fetch a good price
with Victorian collectors back home.
Stuffed animals were the latest status symbols,
the bling of their day.
Ah, yeah.
From Kalimantan.
Kali... Borneo, yeah?
It's a macaque, yeah? Yeah.
Oh, careful!
I name Edgar.
Hey, Edgar. How'd you end up here, mate?
$50, 30 quid for a little baby macaque.
MACAQUE SQUEAKS
What?
Thanks, Edgar.
You know, you dread to think what the circumstances are
that led them to be here.
They're such social animals, and seeing them on their own
is kind of heartbreaking really.
Particularly in a place like this
where they're just... another commodity.
Wallace could have stocked up on such easy pickings,
but for him animals were never just commodities for making money.
He was driven by a desire to understand how nature worked,
and for that he had to head out into the wilderness,
and the Malay Archipelago was brimming with opportunities.
This great string of 17,000 islands stretches along the equator,
from Sumatra in the west to the coast of New Guinea in the east.
150 years ago, this area was a zoological black hole.
People knew about the tigers of India
and the kangaroos of Australia, but the archipelago was a mystery,
a lost world in-between,
a place of "here be dragons."
Fearless, Wallace dived straight in.
He set sail for Borneo, the third largest island on earth.
In these jungles, his ideas about evolution began to take shape.
He was a lone European setting out into the oldest rainforest
in the world, where malaria and other tropical diseases were rife.
Animals which Wallace could only have seen as fanciful etchings
or withered skins, he now had the chance to see in the flesh.
BIRD CHIRPS
It's just fantastic being this close
to these wild macaques.
We've just come across a little family group,
they seem to be OK with us being this close.
Just paddling along this stretch of river...
..you're struck by the sheer number of species that we're seeing.
Huge diversity of birds...
primates.
This is what Wallace would have encountered
on his first foray into the jungle.
To Wallace, each creature was another clue that might unlock
the mystery of the origin of species.
He wanted to explain what made each animal unique,
how it fitted into the bigger picture.
These are proboscis monkeys, and they're found only here on Borneo.
And they're known locally as "monyet orang putih",
which means "white man monkey".
Which I have to say I'm slightly offended by.
It's a rather less than flattering comparison, with their huge noses,
gouty demeanours, pale faces
and permanent state of arousal.
Rather like large sections of the English aristocracy.
Wallace was fascinated
by the possibility that humans and monkeys could be related.
And his belief was only reinforced when he came across
the "Man of the Forest", the orang-utan.
He spent weeks struggling to keep up with his tribal guides,
waist deep in crocodile-infested, swampy jungle
trying to get close to these great apes.
Luckily, my guide Eric has a good idea where we might spot one.
Ah, there. Bill, the orang-utan.
Where?
In those branches over there.
Right between that big tree... Just behind it.
Got it.
Oh! Fantastic!
Look at that.
Good spot.
That's got to be a big male.
I can just see a huge, hairy back.
And he's just hanging out here waiting for the sun to come up.
HE SIGHS HAPPILY Brilliant.
That's my first sighting of a Bornean orang-utan.
And he's got his back to me.
HE SPEAKS IN LOCAL DIALECT
See, this is the sort of thing that I really admire about Wallace,
is that he came through this jungle in the 1850s...
..with all manner of Victorian paraphernalia -
collecting jars around his neck,
huge, heavy trunks and butterfly nets.
He was...he was a tough cookie.
Trying to spot our orang from the forest floor isn't easy.
You'd think something the size of a man couldn't just disappear,
but it can.
Where is he, Eric? He's in there.
Yeah?
Just here?
Yeah. See the bunch of leaves, sitting on the branch here.
Wow!
That's absolutely huge.
OK, now he's on the move, let's follow him round.
Got a fantastic view of it now, just up here.
I just love the way that he just hangs out there.
He's not really bothered with us, he's just taking his time eating.
It's just amazing to see him in the wild.
It's one of those things I've always wanted to do.
This is an extraordinary moment.
The thought of Wallace shooting these gentle giants
I find deeply uncomfortable.
That was the Victorian way.
But unlike many of his contemporaries
he also thought it important to observe them alive.
He wrote the first ever account of the behaviour of these great apes.
Wallace noted how their long, powerful arms enable them
to travel easily through the treetops.
"He never jumps or springs, or even appears to hurry himself,
"and yet manages to get along almost as quickly
"as a person can run through the forest beneath."
He described their dextrous hands used to pluck fruit.
Writing to his sister, he remarked on how an orphan orang seemed
so like a human baby, and recognised their intelligence.
"When it is very wet, the orang covers himself over with leaves,
"which has perhaps led to the story of his making a hut in the trees."
All that Wallace saw in Borneo reinforced his conviction
that humans and orangs were related.
Yet this was an idea ridiculed by Victorian Society,
and put him on a collision course with the Establishment.
Wallace was paddling against the current of popular belief.
He was trying to challenge the accepted view
of how the world was the way it was.
And that view was summed up very simply, in two words,
Natural Theology, God did it.
God created all living things and that was it.
Once he'd created them, they didn't change, they were fixed, immutable,
and when species died out he just made new ones.
And that was the accepted belief of the Establishment,
of the Church, of science.
Well, Wallace was on a very different path,
a path which would ultimately lead him to deny God.
So to take this path took tremendous bravery,
it took physical toughness and great intellectual courage.
But who was going to listen to such a radical idea
from a self-taught beetle collector with no connections?
It wasn't a challenge for the faint-hearted.
Even Cambridge-educated Charles Darwin,
himself a pillar of the Establishment,
knew he had to tread carefully.
Darwin had made his epic voyage via the Galapagos Islands,
18 years before Wallace's arrival in Borneo, and had since developed
his radical theory of evolution, but he'd told only a few close friends.
Darwin wanted incontrovertible proof before going public,
and had buried himself in a study of barnacles
and then pigeons in his comfortable house in Kent.
Wallace, by contrast was in uncharted territory -
no tea and scones out here!
He was living in rough jungle camps, surviving pustulating ulcers
that laid him up for weeks, and eating whatever came to hand.
Here we are, this is a durian fruit.
And it's an extraordinary looking thing.
It's covered in these vicious-looking spikes.
Orang-utans love this stuff, and so do tigers.
Wallace was a huge fan of these things,
and he actually writes about it, where he says,
"In Borneo I found a ripe fruit on the ground
"and eating it out of doors,
"I at once became a confirmed durian eater."
And he makes the point about eating it out of doors
because there's a kind of a whiff of something rotten coming off it,
so what I'm going to do is I'm going to try and get into it and taste it.
And already I can smell this extraordinary aroma coming off it.
I'll have to give it a couple of decent whacks.
Ah, there we go.
This is it, this is the stuff, the pulp.
It just defies all your senses
because your nose is telling you, "No!"
Let's just remind ourselves what Wallace thought of it.
He said, "The pulp," which is this, "is the eatable part.
"Its consistence and flavour are indescribable."
Well, he's right there.
"A rich, butter-like custard, highly flavoured with almonds,
"but intermingled with it come wafts of flavour that call to mind
"cream cheese, onion sauce, brown sherry and other incongruities."
Sounds like the old Christmas dinner's
gone in the trifle there, big stir.
He says, "In fact, to eat durians is a new sensation,
"worth a voyage to the East to experience."
Well, I'd better try it then after that build up.
Let's try some of this pulp.
Mmm. It has got the most amazing taste.
It's like somebody's put a quiche in a car and left it for four days.
It's delicious!
Wallace survived where many explorers died.
Disease killed most,
but being murdered by local tribes was an occupational hazard.
While most Europeans saw them as primitive natives,
Wallace was ahead of his time.
He learnt their language, respected their skills,
even though they were head-hunters.
The tradition of hunting heads has mercifully died out,
though my guide, Eric, remembers his family's connection.
Your grandfather was one of the last of the head-hunters you say.
Wallace met a lot of head-hunters
while he was travelling through Borneo and he talks
about the perception of them would have been they were savages,
you know, there were people just cutting people's heads off
and sort of violent lives,
but actually they had quite ordered societies.
This is a sort of, a kind of a part of the culture then, really?
It is.
Part of their religion almost.
Their way of life.
Wallace wasn't a total convert to tribal life.
He wrote of having to endure their music.
Perhaps this local instrument will give me a clue why.
You play it like this or like this?
Like this.
HE BLOWS A FEW NOTES ON PIPES
I like it. Light, portable,
you could use it as a snorkel.
THEY GIGGLE
You sense Wallace was relaxed here.
After one evening he remarked, "I slept very comfortably
"with half a dozen smoked, dried human skulls
"suspended over my head."
Over the 15 months that Wallace was in Borneo,
he relied on tribal people to help him push deeper into the interior.
Would these uncharted jungles reveal new evidence
to support his radical ideas of evolution?
Wallace turned his attention to the mind-boggling diversity of insects.
"To study one group thoroughly would," in his opinion,
"deliver some definite results."
So he set himself a punishing schedule of bug collecting.
I'm taking out my net, lashed to a bit of bamboo.
It's heavy and a bit cumbersome
but hopefully it'll bag me some butterflies.
Wallace did this for hours and hours, day after day.
The trick is to keep your eye on the prize,
but that's the problem, you can't see where you're stepping.
Then there's the humidity, the tropical heat,
not to mention the blood-sucking leeches.
This is not some prissy pastime.
Oh!
It's extreme.
SIGHS EXASPERATEDLY
On the floor, come here.
It's impossible!
OK, time for a rethink.
I'm going to channel the spirit of Wallace.
Stay calm, pick my spot, wait for them to come to me.
LAUGHING OFF CAMERA
HE GROANS
Ha-ha-ha! Look at that - I've caught a frog.
Brilliant!
HE CHUCKLES CONTENTEDLY
It's not the intended quarry.
The frog, thinking it was safe, was some way downstream, not realising
this is actually the Hodgkiss 4000B with detachable frog catcher.
Thus surprising the frog.
I mean, look at it, it looks surprised.
I did not expect that.
Right, on you go. Go on then, go on.
Ho-ho!
That's the way to catch 'em.
This is actually a delicate, little wood nymph.
It just takes me back to when I was about 10 years old,
trying to catch Purple Emperors in the New Forest,
and not succeeding, because they were all fluttering
at the tops of the fir trees and you needed some special extendable net
to get there, and I wasn't quite at that level of seriousness.
But me and my cousin spent many summers chasing butterflies.
It's quite a thrill when you get one in the net.
This is a beautiful sort of lacy, translucent creature,
and it just sort of flutters along gently in the forest.
Really, a lot of other butterflies
are just hell for leather, like, running in fear of their lives,
but this thing just seems to be taking its time.
I think because it's highly toxic, its larva feeds on poisonous leaves,
so it's sort of, I think it's maybe got a bit more swagger.
"Yeah, eat me if you want, but you're going to pay!"
Like any collector, if there's one thing that you really prize
that you've been after for a long time and you finally get it,
there's a sort of thrill of attainment
and Wallace had that on many occasions.
He would be after certain species of butterfly for months.
And of one specimen, he writes in a state of rapture,
"On opening the glorious wings, my heart began to beat violently,
"the blood rushed to my head, and I felt much more like fainting
"than I have done when in apprehension of immediate death."
Wallace's obsessive collecting didn't stop at butterflies.
Any insects caught his eye.
And his perseverance was heroic.
He climbed ridges, forged raging rivers
and camped in caves, all for the chance of finding more specimens.
On one day, tribesmen helped Wallace collect
74 different species of beetles.
34 were new to him.
In three weeks he collected over a thousand distinct types,
he was on a roll.
He noted the intricate camouflage which makes some near invisible to their predators, and me.
Look at this katydid, it's absolutely huge,
and yet it's perfectly camouflaged on this leaf.
This exquisite detail on its wing, even has the veins of the leaf.
Wallace would have had you, mate.
Day by day, his body of evidence grew.
Each insect was a new piece of the jigsaw towards understanding
why there were so many species.
I mean, 80% of all known species are insects,
around one million different types. Had God really designed every one?
Perhaps they were just easier to make than, say,
a giant panda or a warthog.
I'd forgotten how fiddly this is.
But it brings back memories.
And actually, you can be quite firm with the top vein.
Here, you see,
it's actually quite strong
so you can gently tease it up.
Wallace reckoned insects held the key,
and as he prepared each specimen, he got the chance to really study them.
Such amazing detail...
in Wallace's drawings.
And he was meticulous in noting down all the features
of every single insect and specimen he collected.
I mean, you have to really focus a forensic eye on these specimens
and then they reveal their most intricate beauty.
Oh, look, our pill bug is waking up.
I thought he was dead.
He's been asleep for 24 hours.
He's just now sort of decided the coast is clear.
You need to be flipped over.
There you go.
What I love about Wallace's notebooks
is they give you a window into his mind.
You can see just how vigilant and nerdy he really was,
but that made all the difference.
To Wallace, Borneo wasn't just full of curiosities,
the minute variations he saw meant more.
They were powerful evidence towards evolution.
Imagine three beetles.
Natural Theology would say that each was clearly a separate species,
designed by God in its own discrete box, if you like.
But as Wallace collected more and more specimens,
he saw subtle variations within each species, or box.
Some had longer legs, others slightly different markings.
And crucially, there was no clear point where one species ended
and the next began.
To Wallace, there were no boxes.
Instead, what he saw was that the boundaries between species
were blurred, suggesting species were related.
This was a direct contradiction to Natural Theology.
In this remote corner of Borneo, Wallace took his first step
towards realising his dream of a new theory.
He was not alone in having wild ideas,
but to be taken seriously, he would ultimately have to publish.
Yet rushing into print was dangerous,
it could make or break your reputation.
Only ten years before, a controversial book about evolution,
or "transmutation" as the Victorians called it,
showed Wallace the pitfalls of publication
without supporting evidence.
The Vestiges Of The Natural History Of Creation.
Robert Chambers was the author on this edition,
but at the time, it was published anonymously
and it caused a sensation.
It was an enticing gumbo of fact and supposition,
exotic tales of six-fingered persons,
insects created by electricity,
a platypus born of a goose.
Crucially, it suggested transmutation
and it had fans far and wide.
Queen Victoria herself liked Prince Albert to read her passages before retiring.
"A platypus born of a goose, you say, Albert? One is intrigued!"
Critically, it was shredded - too trashy for science,
too radical for the Church,
and anyone who put their name to it,
their reputation would be in tatters. Darwin was very dismissive.
But for Wallace, it was an inspiration.
In fact, he wrote to his friend Henry Bates, "I need to study more."
Principally, with the idea of the theory of the origin of species.
He would get there eventually, but he still had a long way to go.
And throughout his painstaking progress,
Wallace had to work hard to protect his valuable specimens.
See, this is what Wallace was up against.
No sooner had he collected something,
the jungle tried to reclaim it.
Without specimens to sell, he'd have to pack up and go home,
and give up on his intellectual dreams.
It was a battle he couldn't afford to lose.
Ants especially would devour his hard-won treasures,
and carry away his evidence.
Dogs dragged off a prized orang carcass,
locals drank all his pickling alcohol,
rats nicked his bird skins.
Every creature lost cost him money.
But he had a few tricks up his sleeve.
He set the legs of his desk in saucers.
Then poured in a little oil,
"being the only barrier these terrible ants are not able to pass".
When ants found his birds they would swarm over the suspended skins.
But Wallace devised an ingenious bamboo cup which held oil
to interrupt their route down the string.
This was ingenuity born of commercial necessity.
Nightfall brought Wallace some respite.
After each strenuous day he was in bed by eight,
just as the dark jungle came alive.
At one camp, villagers brought Wallace a nocturnal creature
that seemed to defy another key rule of Victorian science,
that God designed animals perfectly.
And if we're lucky, I can find it.
I'm looking for Wallace's flying frog, and it's not easy
because it spends most of its time up there in the jungle canopy.
About the only time it comes down to ground level is at night,
to mate in a little pond. And I've found a pond over here
and by the sound of it there's a lot of frog action going on.
So I'm going to investigate.
Well, you're cute, but you're not Wallace's frog.
He's there, look at that! Whoa! Look at that.
This isn't a Wallace.
He's got these wonderful Gollum-like,
sticky pads on his toes.
On you go. Ooop-la!
Ah, but what's that? Look.
Under here. I think I've got one.
Look at that. This is Wallace's flying frog.
It's the most amazing creature, look at it.
And when it was discovered, this was the first time
anyone had found anything so fantastical and strange.
Extraordinary creature.
'His discovery was like science fiction,
'a whole new concept of what a frog could be.'
And it has these huge webbed feet.
I think you can see that. There look, look at that.
Which allow it to actually glide through the forest.
All right, we can do this. That's where you're headed, there's a leaf.
OK, I'm going to let you go.
Fly.
Wow!
Look at that.
Not bad for something trying to fly with its feet,
but hardly a perfect design.
Wallace looked at it and he thought,
"Well, if it was meant to fly, why didn't God give it wings?"
This looked like a creature that was adapting, a creature in transition.
These amazing frogs were in-between swimmers and fliers.
Webbed feet, originally perfectly adapted to swimming,
had morphed into imperfect parachutes,
yet they allowed the frogs to glide around the high canopy
and not waste effort climbing down to the forest floor and up again.
Wallace's flying frog undermined another key concept of Natural Theology -
the idea that species were fixed from their creation
until their extinction.
Instead, the frog's intermediate form was provocative evidence
that species could change.
With the onset of the rainy season, storms kept Wallace inside for days.
The forest turned into a quagmire and collecting was futile.
At last, he was free to concentrate on the problem of evolution.
Wallace's mind wandered beyond Borneo,
to consider the whole of life.
He was looking for patterns in the natural world.
He spent long hours consulting his impressive jungle library,
convinced the answer was staring him in the face.
"C. Pollase Vig. Nectem..." Open brackets.
"C. Terrestris Gould Asiaticus."
"SW Hydrobata Asiatica." Close brackets...
Huh...
Ah, it's not exactly easy reading.
Wallace had a hunger for learning,
he was always trying to increase his knowledge.
And in his jungle library,
he had extraordinary reference books like this,
three volumes of Charles Lyell's Principles Of Geology.
this extraordinary book,
this is Bonaparte's Conspectus Generum Avium.
This is every bird in the world in Latin.
Now, to us, these seem dry and impenetrable,
but to Wallace, he could see colours, plumage, feathers.
All of this was just yet more tantalising parts of the puzzle.
From his musty tomes, Wallace discovered
that geography dictated where different animals were found.
Patterns he'd seen in Borneo were repeated around the world.
Now he had enough to risk publication.
He set out a rule that described
how similar species related to each other
through time and across space,
and it would become known as his Sarawak Law.
This wasn't the theory of evolution, he wasn't there yet,
but it was a great stride forward.
From thousands of his own observations and those of others,
Wallace saw a very clear pattern.
Similar species were clustered together in the same area.
All the macaws were in tropical America,
whereas all the cockatoos were in and around Australia.
To Wallace, this was no coincidence.
It implied these neighbouring species were related,
and more than that, they shared ancestors in the distant past.
He compared his idea to a tree.
The gnarled old trunk represented extinct species
giving rise to branches, twigs
and finally the new leaves were the creatures he saw around him.
But make no mistake,
Wallace had not yet solved the mystery of the origin of species.
He had no explanation for how a creature might change over time.
But what he'd set out
was the clearest and most dramatic explanation yet
for life on Earth, with no need of God.
By sending this audacious paper for publication,
he was laying down a bold challenge to the scientific establishment.
It was like a keen amateur astronomer writing
to Stephen Hawking, saying,
"Dear Stephen, I've worked out the theory of everything,
"I await your prompt response."
Wallace posted his Sarawak Law back to London,
along with many thousands of beetles.
He wasn't scared to publish. He took the gamble,
hoping his paper would get him noticed by the scientific elite.
It was exactly the opposite of Darwin's reaction,
when he'd made his own breakthrough.
17 years before Wallace had sent off the Sarawak Law,
Darwin had already cracked the idea of natural selection,
but he was tormented by it.
He'd admitted to a friend, "It was like confessing to a murder,"
since in effect the theory killed God.
Darwin was fearful of his reputation so he didn't publish, he kept quiet.
Wallace, on the other hand, couldn't wait to tell everyone.
He wanted to shout it from the treetops.
That's what I love about Wallace, he had no hang-ups about reputation,
he was driven on by the search for the empirical truth.
His paper took months to travel back to England,
and when it was published, in September 1855,
Wallace had been away for a year and a half.
He was in Singapore to pick up money from the sale of his specimens,
when he got a letter from his agent, Stevens.
It was not good news.
Firstly, his precious specimens were not well received.
"A rather poor lot," as his agent wrote.
Creatures that Wallace found fascinating were dismissed
as too dark, too small and mostly beetles.
What people wanted were huge colourful things, mainly birds.
Wallace despaired of the whims of London fashion.
And the reaction to his ideas was pretty much equally dismissive.
His agent reported that many in London scientific society
were muttering that he should stop theorising,
and stick to collecting, since what was needed was more facts.
To Wallace, it seemed like the old world
and the old order were closing in.
London society was keen to put him back in his box,
they were keen to pigeon-hole him as a mere collector.
But there was one man who was intrigued by Wallace's work...
..the eminent geologist Charles Lyell.
Instead of acknowledging Wallace, he wrote to his friend Darwin,
urging him to quickly publish his own theory of evolution.
Even though Darwin didn't feel ready, he began to write.
This was the first time Darwin became aware of Wallace
as anything more than a jobbing collector,
but he seems to have misread the Sarawak Law, commenting,
"There is nothing new here." It would prove a significant oversight.
Despite the lack of interest in his ideas, Wallace didn't cave in.
In fact, he was spurred on to find more powerful evidence
to explain the origin of species.
It wouldn't be easy, he was seriously broke.
So to keep his quest alive he would collect
the exotic birds London desired -
the fabled birds of paradise.
But they were only found 5,000 kilometres further East.
He left Singapore on a slow boat.
But there were a pair of islands on the way that would reveal
an inconvenient truth about the animals of the Malay Archipelago.
After three weeks, they stopped off in Bali for fresh supplies,
and ever curious, Wallace grabbed two short days to explore.
The animals Wallace saw here seemed to follow his Sarawak Law,
being similar to those found on neighbouring islands further west.
Bali had tigers and elephants,
pied starlings...
kites...
..and streaked weaver birds.
But there was still much to learn.
Cultural novelties caught his eye.
The impressive rice terracing,
and a particularly Indonesian amuse bouche,
involving dragonflies and sticky goo.
Hiya. What are you doing? Chari japung!
Japung? OK.
So how do you do this, sticky here? Ah, right.
So you just...tip it in, yeah? Yeah. Yeah, OK.
Let's see if we can find one. There's one.
HE PURSES HIS LIPS AND WHISTLES
Japung! Ja-pe-ja-pe-japung. Aw..
Wallace often wrote about how delicious his specimens tasted.
While he was here, he wrote about kids catching
and roasting dragonflies, and it's still a favourite game today.
Oop, got him. There we go.
Oh, yes, a fine catch.
No match for me. Top of the food chain, mate.
In the time it takes me to catch a couple,
my friends have gathered a veritable dragonfly kebab.
Look at that.
That's a good haul, isn't it?
Right let's go and eat them, come on gang, makan.
Their auntie, Sumadi, sets up a mini insect barbecue.
It's really hot, isn't it? Yeah.
I've eaten some strange things in my time,
but I don't think I've ever eaten dragonfly.
I've eaten sago grubs in the Eastern Moluccas,
I've eaten locusts in Thailand, but dragonfly's a first.
OK. Right, is this one ready?
This is one ready. OK, here we go.
Mmm. Tastes like what?
It's crispy.
Tasty.
Tastes a little bit nutty flavour, from the texture of the wings,
unusual, but cheeky.
Crispy. Nice.
After his brief stay, Wallace rejoined the ship
as it continued east, to the next island in the Archipelago, Lombok.
Though he didn't know it, he was on the verge of an enormous discovery,
which would completely reshape his thinking on evolution.
The channel dividing Bali and Lombok is only 32 kilometres wide,
but these are treacherous waters.
Wallace was sailing into the abyss.
Here, the sea floor drops away to 300 metres.
Worse still, this is a bottleneck
where two great oceans crash together,
where the mighty Pacific surges into the Indian Ocean.
The crossing made a deep impression on Wallace.
"Ripples are very violent in the straits.
"The sea appears to boil and foam like rapids.
"The natives say their sea is always hungry,
"and eats up everything it can catch."
Even when Wallace came within reach of Lombok,
there was still the challenge of the monstrous surf.
When Wallace arrived in Lombok,
he spoke of being grateful for having survived the devouring surf.
Well, I have to say, Alfred, you're not wrong.
Almost immediately, Lombok started to puzzle him.
Animals he expected to see weren't here.
There were no more tigers, no more elephants,
but it was the birds that really threw him.
To anyone else, Lombok would have seemed like just another island.
A little bit dryer maybe, less lush, but not another planet.
But to Wallace, with his forensic eye for detail,
something was very strange.
The animals here were wrong, there were honey eaters
and these guys, sulphur-crested cockatoos.
These were Australian birds, it was just wrong.
It was more than wrong, it was utterly surreal for Wallace.
It was like seeing a zebra trotting down Pall Mall,
or finding a sloth in a gooseberry patch on the Welsh borders.
They shouldn't be there, but there they were, it was a conundrum
and Wallace wouldn't let it lie.
What were these birds doing 1,500 kilometres from Australia?
The zoological black hole that Wallace had entered when he chose
to explore the Malay Archipelago had just revealed its greatest secret.
How could islands so close together feel like two different worlds?
His short, treacherous crossing held the key.
Wallace instinctively knew his discovery was hugely important.
This great string of islands, this vast Archipelago,
had a profound natural barrier which no-one had noticed until then.
Wallace drew a line on the map between Bali and Lombok.
Looking back to the west, to Asia,
Wallace recalled lands of tigers, elephants, orang-utans,
and looking to the east,
the islands would reveal cockatoos, kangaroos and strange marsupials.
He offered an explanation, that this dividing line was in fact
a meeting point of two great animal families,
the wildlife of Asia and Australia.
And to this day, the Wallace Line
is the most significant dividing line of animals on the planet.
To Wallace, this was a fascinating paradox,
baffling, yet thrilling at the same time.
It seemed to defy all his assumptions.
It even contradicted his own Sarawak Paper, because here were
species that were very different, but geographically close.
But far from being disheartened,
it provoked Wallace to ask deeper, more fundamental questions.
How could this happen?
Initially, it seemed like it destroyed his ideas,
but in fact it would give him the greatest ammunition yet
to challenge centuries of thought,
and turn the existing world view on its head.
So, after two years of hard graft, Wallace's ideas were in disarray.
He would have to go back to the drawing board,
and piece together what the Wallace Line meant for evolution.
He was confident the answers to this puzzle lay further east.
Each new island he explored would deliver extraordinary creatures.
Hah, that was amazing!
It came flying over my shoulder like a little gremlin
shot out of a cannon.
Fresh evidence, curious behaviours and inspiration.
I feel now accepted.
His tenacity would put him on a dramatic collision course
with Charles Darwin.
For Darwin, the race was on.
A race that Wallace didn't even know he was in!
But he would never give up his quest for the holy grail,
to unlock the mystery of the origin of species.
And I need to deliver on my promise
to get him the recognition he deserves.
Tonight, the great and the good are gathered here,
so this is the perfect opportunity to put Wallace
back in the spotlight, so, no pressure!
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd