WCP357

[1]¹

Singapore. September 30, 1854. 

My dear Mother,—I last wrote to you from Malacca in July. I have now just returned to Singapore after two months' hard work. At Malacca I had a pretty strong touch of fever with the old Rio Negro symptoms, but the Government doctor made me take a great quantity of quinine every day for a week together and so killed it, and in less than a fortnight I was quite well and off to the jungle again. I see now how to treat the fever, and shall commence at once when the symptoms again appear. I never took half enough quinine in America to cure me. Malacca is a pretty place, and I worked very hard. Insects are not very abundant there, still by perseverance I got a good number and many rare ones. Of birds, too, I made a good collection. I went to the celebrated Mount Ophir and ascended to the top. The walk was terrible—thirty miles through jungle, a succession of mud holes. My boots did good service. We lived there a week at the [2] mountain, in a little hut built by our men, and I got some fine new butterflies there and hundreds of other new and rare insects. We had only rice and a little fish and tea, but came home quite well. The height of the mountain is about 4,000 feet. ... Elephants and rhinoceroses, as well as tigers, are abundant there, but we had our usual bad luck in not seeing any of them.

On returning to Malacca I found the accumulations of two or three posts, a dozen letters and fifty newspapers....

I am glad to be safe in Singapore with my collections, as from here they can be insured. I have now a fortnight's work to arrange, examine, and pack them, and then in four months hence there will be some work for Mr. Stevens².

Sir James Brooke³ is here. I have called on him. He received me most cordially, and offered me every assistance at Sarawak. I shall go there next, as the missionary does not go to Cambodia for some months. Besides, I shall have some pleasant society at Sarawak, and shall get on in Malay, which is very easy, but I have had no practice—though still I can ask for most common things. My books and instruments arrived in beautiful condition. They looked as if they had been packed up but a day. Not so the unfortunate eatables. . ..—I remain your affectionate son,

ALFRED R. WALLACE.

"Malacca is a pretty place. Insects are not very abundant there, still, by perseverance, I got a good number, and many rare ones. Of birds, too, I made a good collection. I went to the celebrated Mount Ophir, and ascended to the top, sleeping under a rock. The walk there was hard work, thirty miles through jungle in a succession of mud-holes, and swarming with leeches, which crawled all over us, and sucked when and where they pleased. We lived a week at the foot of the mountain, in a little hut built by our men, near a beautiful rocky stream. I got some fine new butterflies there, and hundreds of other new or rare insects. Huge centipedes and scorpions, some nearly a foot long, were common, but we none of us got bitten or stung. We only had rice, and a little fish and tea, but came home quite well. The mountain is over four thousand feet high. Near the top are [2] [p. 177]¹beautiful ferns and pitcher-plants, of which I made a small collection. Elephants and rhinoceroses, as well as tigers, are abundant there, but we had our usual bad luck in seeing only their tracks. On returning to Malacca I found the accumulation of two or three posts — a dozen letters, and about fifty newspapers.

...I am glad to be safe in Singapore with my collections, as from here they can be insured. I have now a fortnight's work to arrange, examine, and pack them, and four months hence there will be work for Mr. Stevens.^{2, 3}

"Sir James Brooke⁴ is here. I have called on him. He received me most cordially, and offered me every assistance at Sarawak. I shall go there next, as I shall have pleasant society at Sarawak, and shall get on in Malay, which is very easy; but I have had no practice yet, though I can ask for most common things."

I reached Sarawak early in November, and remained in Borneo fourteen months, seeing a good deal of the country. The first four months was the wet season, during which I made journeys up and down the Sarawak river, but obtained very scanty collections. In March I went to the Sadong river, where coal mines were being opened by an English mining engineer, Mr. Coulson⁵, a Yorkshireman, and stayed there nearly nine months, it being the best locality for beetles I found during my twelve years' tropical collecting, and very good for other groups. It was also in this place that I obtained numerous skins and skeletons of the orang-utan, as fully described in my "Malay Archipelago."

[3] [p. 178]⁶In another letter referring to the Dyaks, I say :— "The old men here relate with pride how many 'heads' they took in their youth; and though they all acknowledge the goodness of the present rajah, yet they think that if they were allowed to take a few heads, as of old, they would have better crops. The more I see of uncivilized people, the better I think of human nature on the whole, and the essential differences between civilized and savage man seem to disappear. Here we are, two Europeans, surrounded by a population of Chinese, Malays, and Dyaks. The Chinese are generally considered, and with some amount of truth, to be thieves, liars, and reckless of human life, and these Chinese are coolies of the lowest and least educated class, though they can all read and write. The Malays are invariably described as being barbarous and bloodthirsty; and the Dyaks have only recently ceased to think head-taking a necessity of their existence. We are two days' journey from Sarawak, where, though the government is nominally European, it only exists with the consent and by the support of the native population. Yet I can safely say that in any part of Europe where the same opportunities for crime and disturbance existed, things would not go so smoothly as they do here. We sleep with open doors, and go about constantly unarmed; one or two petty robberies and a little fighting have occurred among the Chinese, but the great majority of them are quiet, honest, decent sort of people."