Wallace and The Malay Archipelago

Alfred Russel Wallace travelled the islands of the archipelago from 1854 to 1862 and published The Malay Archipelago in 1869. His route ran from Singapore and Sarawak through Bali and Lombok, Makassar, the Aru Islands, Ternate, Ambon and Seram, and on to New Guinea. He collected for sale and for natural history, and his book is the account of eight years spent in the eastern islands, where the spice trade had begun centuries before him.

Wallace was a naturalist, not a cook, and his book is not a cookery text. It belongs among the authorities of this chapter because it records, with a collector's habit of plain notice, what was eaten and grown in the places he lived and worked. Sago, rice, coconut, fish, fruit and the produce of the clove and nutmeg gardens appear in it as the ordinary materials of the islands, set down by a traveller who depended on them for his own meals. His pages on Ternate, Ambon, the Aru Islands and Makassar describe a trading world in which food moved with ships, and that is the reason Eleanor Ford returns to him in Fire Islands. Ford's book follows the spice route of the eastern archipelago, and Wallace is one of the earlier travellers whose presence she draws on for the character of that region. His account of sago is the clearest example. The sago palm, Metroxylon sagu, gave the eastern islanders a staple that did not depend on the rice field, and Wallace, who lived among sago-eating communities, wrote of it as a food he came to value himself. The starch pressed into cakes and baked, or stirred into a paste, is the same material that Maluku cooks use today, and Ford describes it in the context of the islands where he found it. The same book gives weight to the clove and nutmeg islands. Clove, Syzygium aromaticum, and nutmeg, Myristica fragrans, were the reason Europeans came to Maluku, and the history that surrounds Wallace includes the VOC, the conquest of Banda in 1621 and the monopoly that followed. Wallace arrived two centuries after that, when the old monopoly had gone, and he wrote of the spice gardens of Ternate and Ambon as a working agricultural landscape. For the reader of this library his value lies in being a witness to the eastern islands in the middle of the nineteenth century, between the age of the spice monopoly and the modern nation. Wallace is also the author of the biological boundary that carries his name, the line between the fauna of Asia and that of Australasia, which he drew from the contrast he saw between Bali and Lombok. That line is a matter of zoology, yet it explains why the archipelago is read island by island in this book. The cooking of Bali and Lombok, of Sulawesi, of Maluku and of the western islands differs as sharply as the animals do, and the geography that struck Wallace is the geography on which the regional chapters are built. The essay therefore places The Malay Archipelago beside the works on which the entries rest, as a primary witness from outside the kitchen. Ford reads it for the sense of place it gives to the eastern islands, and the reader should take it for what it is: a naturalist's narrative, valuable for the produce, the trade and the landscape it records, and not a source of recipes.

The table that Wallace saw in the eastern islands was built on sago, fish and fruit, seasoned by what the gardens and the sea supplied. In Maluku today, as Ford writes of it, sago paste is eaten with a sour fish soup and with grilled fish, and the sauces are bright with chilli, lime and fresh herbs. The clove and nutmeg that drew the world to these islands remain part of the local cooking, used in small quantities for their fragrance.