By George Beccaloni PhD, May 2024
(work in progress)
While working on a book provisionally titled Alfred Russel Wallace’s Travel Journal from the Malay Archipelago (1856-1862), I attempted to locate the sites where Wallace collected animal specimens (and a few ferns) during the 10 weeks (15 July - 25 September 1854) he spent in what is now Malacca (Melaka) state in mainland Malaysia. Malacca (then one of the British Straits Settlements) was the only region of mainland Malaysia he visited, and he collected at three sites there in the following chronological order: c. 2 weeks at the village of Gading (it no longer exists, but was located about 2.5 miles Northeast of the town of Durian Tunggal); c. 4 weeks at Ayer Panas (to the east of Gading); and 10 days on an expedition to climb to the summit of Mt Ledang (then known as Mt Ophir).
Because Wallace spent longer collecting at Ayer Panas than he did at the other two collecting localities combined, the greater part of his Malacca collection was from there. He described the area as follows:
"... I went to a place in the interior called "Ayer Panas" (hot spring), about fifteen miles from Malacca. Here there is a Government bungalow, which the late Resident, Captain Ferrier, had kindly offered me the use of. I was accompanied by a young gentleman of Malacca who wished for change of air and exercise, and whose acquaintance with the Malays and their language was of much use to me. We took provisions with us for a month, as nothing was to be had on the spot, and the only communication with Malacca was by special messenger.
The bungalow was pleasantly situated on a gentle elevation by one of the narrow, flat, winding paddy-field valleys, which are such a characteristic feature of the Malacca district. Along the borders of this valley were numbers of scattered Malay houses, all elevated five or six feet on posts, a mode of building which seems general in this part of the world, from the Peninsula to New Guinea. Two or three Malay police resided in the house, of which they had charge, and a Hindoo convict living in a little hut adjoining did the sweeping and cleaning. Numbers of fruit-trees grew near the house, the Durian and the Jack being the most abundant, with the ever-present Areca palm, and a noble gigantic species, the Borassus Gomuti, from the juice of which a coarse sugar called "jaggery" is made and sold in small cakes by the Malays. Sometimes grated cocoa-nut is boiled with it, and it then forms an agreeable sweetmeat, which, in the absence of any other delicacies, we used for our dessert.
We remained here nearly a month, exploring the jungle in every direction, and making extensive collections of birds, insects, etc. Here I first saw the huge bats commonly called "flying foxes," whose wings often expand five feet. They came in the evening to the fruit-trees near the house, looking more like aerial machines than any living creatures. It was truly an extraordinary sight to behold these great-winged animals for the first time, so totally different are they from anything we can behold in Europe. They are much esteemed for food by all the inhabitants of Malacca, and we soon had an opportunity of tasting one, but it was too tough for me to pronounce an unprejudiced opinion on its merits as an article of food. Several fine species of squirrels were abundant, and these were much better eating." (WCP358)
Wallace collected many hundreds of insect specimens and many birds during his stay there. While it is currently unclear if any of the bird species were new to science, we know that hundreds of the insect species were. One in particular (a butterfly) stands out. In his 1869 book The Malay Archipelago, he wrote:
"At Ayer-panas we had a comfortable house to stay in, and plenty of room to dry and preserve our specimens; but, owing to there being no industrious Chinese to cut down timber, insects were comparatively scarce, with the exception of butterflies, of which I formed a very fine collection. The manner in which I obtained one fine insect was curious, and indicates how fragmentary and imperfect a traveller's collection must necessarily be. I was one afternoon walking along a favourite road through the forest, with my gun, when I saw a butterfly on the ground. It was large, handsome, and quite new to me, and I got close to it before it flew away. I then observed that it had been settling on the dung of some carnivorous animal. Thinking it might return to the same spot, I next day after breakfast took my net, and as I approached the place was delighted to see the same butterfly sitting on the same piece of dung, and succeeded in capturing it. It was an entirely new species of great beauty, and has been named by Mr. Hewitson Nymphalis calydona [now Agatasa calydonia, Wallace's Glorious Begum Butterfly]. I never saw another specimen of it, and it was only after twelve years had elapsed that a second individual reached this country from the north-western part of Borneo."
Illustration of Nymphalis calydonia from Hewitson (1855).
Information about what Wallace collected in Malacca is scattered across a number of field notebooks, letters and many dozens of publications by him and others, which named the new species he collected. A few of these can be seen HERE, HERE and HERE. The lion's share of all his specimens are now in the collections of the London Natural History Museum and the Oxford Museum of Natural History.
Although we knew that Wallace lived in the government bungalow at Ayer Panas, its location was unknown to Wallace scholars until now. However, while searching on the internet for information about Ayer Panas I discovered that it was marked on an 1887 "Map of the Malacca Territory", a section of which is shown below.
Interestingly, the bungalow is shown to be in a forest reserve. An official 1888 report (CLICK HERE) states that the reserve was 3,242 acres (13 square kms) and that it was created "before 1883". Although I have not yet had time to do detailed research, it seems that the colonial administration set up many such reserves in the Straits Settlements to protect primary forests containing large trees suitable for timber. Such trees were selectively extracted over time and natural regeneration was allowed to occur.
To see what had become of the forest I looked at the area on Google Earth and was shocked to discover that all or most of it has been destroyed, and replaced by what look like oil palm plantations and various types of development.
Screenshot from Google Earth of the area. Note that the government bungalow was slightly to the north of Kampung Ayer Panas.
Close-up of the area, with the approximate boundary of the original forest reserve in red.
I have not managed to find any information about current land ownership, or when the reserve ceased to exist, but curiously, if you do a search in Google Earth for "Ayer Panas Forest Reserve" it takes you to this area.. I am sure Wallace would be very sad, although not surprised, with what has happened to the forest since he was there. As he wrote in his 1898 book The Wonderful Century; Its Successes and Its Failures:
"The struggle for wealth...ha[s] been accompanied by a reckless destruction of the stored-up products of nature, which is even more deplorable because more irretrievable. Not only have forest-growths of many hundreds of years been cleared away, often with disastrous consequences, but the whole of the mineral treasures of the earth's surface, the slow products of long-past eons of time and geological change, have been and are still being exhausted, to an extent never before approached, and probably not equalled in amount during the whole preceding period of human history."
Another very appropriate quote by Wallace is as follows:
"It is for such inquiries that the modern naturalist collects his materials; it is for this that he still wants to add to the apparently boundless treasures of our national museums, and will never rest satisfied as long as the native country, the geographical distribution, and the amount of variation of any living thing remains imperfectly known. He looks upon every species of animal and plant now living as the individual letters which go to make up one of the volumes of our earth's history; and, as a few lost letters may make a sentence unintelligible, so the extinction of numerous forms of life which the progress of cultivation invariably entails will necessarily obscure this invaluable record of the past. It is, therefore, an important object, which governments and scientific institutions should immediately take steps to secure, that in all tropical countries colonised by Europeans the most perfect collections possible in every branch of natural history should be made and deposited in national museums, where they may be available for study and interpretation.
If this is not done, future ages will certainly look back upon us as a people so immersed in the pursuit of wealth as to be blind to higher considerations. They will charge us with having culpably allowed the destruction of some of those records of Creation which we had it in our power to preserve; and while professing to regard every living thing as the direct handiwork and best evidence of a Creator, yet, with a strange inconsistency, seeing many of them perish irrecoverably from the face of the earth, uncared for and unknown." (Wallace, 1863).
For a related, but happier, story click HERE
References
Hewitson, W. C. 1855. Illustrations of New Species of Exotic Butterflies Selected Chiefly from the Collections of W. Wilson Saunders and William C. Hewitson [3] (Agrias & Nymphalis). London : John van Voorst.
Wallace, A. R. 1863. On the physical geography of the Malay Archipelago. Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, 33: 217-234.