Wallace lost his Amazon collection to fire at sea, then sailed east
In 1852, twenty-five days out from Brazil, the cargo of Alfred Russel Wallace's ship caught fire. Two years of his finest Amazon specimens went down, and he drifted ten days in an open boat. Undeterred, he soon left for the Malay Archipelago, where he would conceive natural selection independently of Darwin.
Llanbadoc in Monmouthshire was his birthplace, on 8 January 1823; he was the eighth of nine children in a family whose money dwindled through bad investments. Whether he counts as Welsh is still argued; neither parent was, and he always called himself English, so one scholar settles on an Englishman born in Wales. He left school at 14, apprenticed as a land surveyor with his eldest brother, and absorbed radical ideas from Robert Owen and Thomas Paine at a London mechanics' institute. Tramping the Welsh countryside turned him into an amateur botanist.
Teaching drawing in Leicester, he read Malthus on population, Humboldt's travel narrative and Darwin's Beagle journal, and met a young beetle collector, Henry Walter Bates, who got him hooked on insects. The pair devised a bold plan: collect in the tropics and pay their way by selling duplicate specimens through an agent in London, who took a 20 percent commission. In 1848 they sailed for Brazil. Wallace spent four years on the Amazon and Rio Negro, charting rivers with sextant and compass and following the Uaupés into Colombia. His younger brother Herbert joined briefly and later died of yellow fever.
After the fire, a passing brig bound for London picked up the survivors, who endured short rations before landing in October 1852. Living on £200 of insurance, Wallace still wrote six papers and two books from scraps and memory. Elected to the Royal Geographical Society, he reached Singapore on 19 April 1854 with a young assistant.
The archipelago made his name. He traced the faunal divide now called the Wallace Line, splitting Asian animals from Australasian ones, and his 1858 paper on natural selection appeared alongside extracts from Darwin, pushing Darwin to rush out On the Origin of Species the next year. Wallace later became a socialist, embraced spiritualism to colleagues' dismay, weighed the odds of life on other planets, and was an early voice warning about human damage to the environment.
Source: Alfred Russel Wallace
