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He was one of the great British adventurers, naturalists and writers in an age which boasted many such intrepid wandering spirits. Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913) has been described as a gentle giant of a man, tall, spare with a determined jaw setting off features that were filled with curiosity and kindliness. Like most of us, he was something of a paradox—a man with a keen scientific interest and yet an ardent believer in spiritualism. He was also a self-made man of little formal education whose intuitions about the natural world were uncanny. He anticipated the main ideas in Darwin’s evolution revolution and invented Wallace’s Line, an imaginary geographical demarcation between Asian and Australian mammals that turned out to be quite real.

It was this curious combination of traits in the man that led me to find Alfred Wallace in a Borneo jungle with Ulysses Vanders in the beginning of Ghost Eater. Wallace is teaching Ulysses about the clever mimicries of certain butterflies while First Mate Ulysses bides his time in Sarawak awaiting the recovery of his captain from malaria.

On reflection, the butterfly expedition introduces one of the themes of the book, illusion and subterfuge, although I can’t say that this was a conscious idea when I recorded it. And it is Wallace who acts as an intermediary between and Ulysses and Charles Brooke, Rajah of Sarawak, setting the plot in motion. Wallace serves as a catalyst when he presents Ulysses with the secret journal of his 1862 adventure to Sumatra, a journal that introduces Ulysses to mysterious Sumatra. Finally, the quest for Papilio Aurensis, the butterfly known as “The Golden Sura” stems from Wallace’s desire to simply have a specimen.

Wallace was a sojourner in Rajah James Brooke’s Sarawak during his travels throughout Southeast Asia, an astonishing eight year journey (1854- 1862) that resulted in his travel masterpiece, The Malay Archipelago. It was in Sarawak that Wallace wrote the famous 1858 essay, sent to Darwin in England, in which he puts forward an independent theory regarding natural selection and “survival of the fittest”, a phrase not coined by Wallace, as widely believed (Herbert Spencer did); however, according to Charles H. Smith, it was Wallace "who suggested that Darwin use the phrase as a means of conveying the basic idea of natural selection to non-specialist readers."

As for the “lost journal” it is a fictional invention but one that is in tune with Wallace’s intuitive sense of reality, not surprising in one who counted among his intimates and fellow believers in a Higher Power, Alfred Lord Tennyson and Thomas Carlyle. This sensibility frequently earned him the undeserved contempt of his more scrupulous, and duller, scientific contemporaries, such as the botanist Joseph Hooker and even, to a degree, his colleague Charles Darwin. The journal serves as Ulysses Vander’s introduction into the illusory nature of world of mysterious Sumatra, the and prepares him for the most harrowing encounter of his journey, that of his own haunted past.

As for the historicity of Wallace’s presence in Sarawak in 1875, there is no record of Wallace having returned to Borneo after 1862. However, Wallace did retire into seclusion for a year following the loss of his six year old son Bertie in 1874, so a brief clandestine trip to the haunts of his young manhood might have been possible, even necessary; certainly, it teases the mind.

Recommended Reading About Alfred Russel Wallace

Alfred Russel Wallace: The Malay Archipelago (Dover Press, 1962). This is a classic of adventure and discovery not to miss! Long in the public domain, it is also abundantly available on the web.

Peter Raby: Alfred Russel Wallace: A Life (Princeton UP, 2001). A recent and engaging portrait of the great man.