The Spice Islands Voyage: In Search of Wallace by Tim Severin, Little, Brown, $250 The last readers heard of Tim Severin, the man who specialises in tracing the routes of explorers, he was bailing out a bamboo raft halfway across the Pacific. His bid to prove that Chinese mariners could have travelled to the Americas before Columbus or the Spanish was about to sink without trace. His voyage ended with the rescuers arriving.
As he usually did, Severin had tried to use exact materials to make his case. He failed then, but has succeeded in dramatic fashion on other voyages, sailing a leather boat across the frozen North Atlantic in tribute to Irish monks who may have followed that route to North America, steering a replica of a Bronze Age galley to seek the landfalls of Jason and Ulysses, and then switching to land to follow in the footsteps of the first Crusaders and Genghis Khan.
The suspicion with The Spice Islands Voyage was that Severin, still a little waterlogged after his Pacific defeat, had chosen an easier target.
Apparently not. Alfred Russel Wallace, Severin's new quarry, was an intrepid British naturalist of some note who made a brave and extremely uncomfortable journey around the southeastern islands of what is now Indonesia in the middle of the last century.
His aim was to further his studies and make a living out of selling rare, and dead, specimens on the London market.
As Wallace's subsequent book, The Malay Archipelago, showed, the going was not easy. Take this extract, reproduced by Severin, in which Wallace recounts the problems he had with his native prahu, a small flat-bottomed sailing ship, off the tip of present-day Irian Jaya: 'My first crew ran away; two men were lost for a month on a desert island; we were 10 times aground on coral reefs; we lost four anchors; the sails were devoured by rats; the small boat was lost astern; we were 30 days on the voyage home which should have taken 12; we were many times short of food and water; we had no compass lamp . . . and to crown it all, during the whole voyage . . . we had not one single day of fair wind.' Severin, sailing in 1996, fared somewhat better. After buying a purpose-built prahu, hiring a local crew and adding his usual band of European specialists, he sailed expertly through the Spice Islands, following the route laid out in The Malay Archipelago, and finding out how much had changed in 140 years.