In search of Darwin's shadow

In this "me, my, mine" age of marketing and public relations, Alfred Russell Wallace would have been regarded as a bit of an eejit. There he was, some 150 years ago, racked by malaria on the Spice Islands - now called the Moluccas and part of Indonesia - where he was gathering extraordinary samples of plant, insect and bird life.

During his bouts of feverish delirium, he began to formulate a theory. He wrote an essay, just over 4,000 words long, and posted it to a well-known contemporary back in England, Charles Darwin. By then a semi-recluse, Darwin was gobsmacked.

"I never saw a more striking coincidence," Darwin wrote in amazement. For while the "father of evolution" laboured over years, Wallace the unknown scientist had taken a fraction of the time and ink to set out a simple explanation of the same theory.

"Astounding" and "naive" is how Tim Severin describes Wallace's reaction when Darwin betrayed his trust, rushed into print and put his own name to the revolutionary concept. Instead of consulting his legal advisers, or even expressing some outrage, Wallace was selfless to the last. Not only did he state that the idea was really Darwin's anyway, but he also "stepped into his shadow". When Wallace brought out his own book on evolutionary theory, he called it Darwinism.

Clearly bowled over by such generosity, Tim Severin has stepped into Alfred Wallace's shadow for his latest project, some two decades after his famous recreation of the Brendan voyage across the north Atlantic. Almost. Relying on the explorer's travel book, The Malay Archipelago, Severin and his support team retraced Wallace's route around the Spice Islands of equatorial Indonesia in a prahu or small native sailing boat, built to the 19th-century style.

Modesty doesn't pay in Severin's business, however. The craft carried satellite communications, complete with a website on which schoolchildren back home could track the course. The University of Limerick organised the outreach education programme, and it was sponsored by the Department of Education and IBM Ireland. The book, the television film, the interviews and lecture schedule were all primed for a Christmas market.

As with all his projects - the Brendan route, the odysseys of Sindbad, Jason and Ulysses, the horseback route taken by the First Crusade and by Genghis Khan, and his recent China voyage from Hong Kong across the Pacific - Severin is a true professional. He spent two years researching and preparing for the trip, drawing up a passage plan designed to link the most significant places identified by Wallace. His crew included scientists who would be able to assess the changes that had occurred in the Moluccas since Wallace's time there.

Timelessness was one recurring feature; in one town of 7,000 inhabitants on the Banda islands, they encountered only three cars and one small pick-up truck. Birds of paradise, the focus for Wallace's own travels, symbolised all that was, and is, wonderful about Moluccan wildlife - and all that is depressing. Severin's group found just four of the species that Wallace recorded, and so the verdict on the future of the fragile environment is "mixed".

Genuine efforts to preserve the environment contrast with the polluted brown stew in one bay where before there had been a crystal-clear submarine coral garden. Wallace had waxed lyrical about Ambon harbour, near the island of Seram and Manado in north-east Sulawesi, and yet when one of Severin's own crew fell in, his skin broke out in red itchy blotches.

With his own boundless energy, and the loyal support of crew members such as Trondur Patturson, Severin has restored Wallace to where he belongs in the scientific community. It is a tribute to the author that virtual reality cannot replace actual experience, even if that experience is re-created, patented and packaged for our armchair consumption.

Lorna Siggins is a staff journalist with The Irish Times