The Spice Islands Voyage
By Tim Severin
In 1858, Alfred Wallace, while suffering from malaria, wrote a brief essay which made its way to Charles Darwin, who had been searching for the solution to a problem for two decades. When Darwin finally published ”On the Origin of Species” a couple of years later, he gave credit to Wallace, who nonetheless faded into obscurity. Tim Severin decided to retrace his voyage. He and his crew spent several months in the Spice Islands, stopping at Wallace’s ports of call from the Aru Islands in the east to Sulawesi in the west, recording everything they saw. Here is their story.
