Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 2012, 105, 472–477.
COMMENT
How Charles Darwin received Wallace’s Ternate paper
15 days earlier than he claimed: a comment on van
Wyhe and Rookmaaker (2012)
ROY DAVIES*
188 St Leonards Road, East Sheen, London SW14 7NN, UK
Received 27 September 2011; revised 9 December 2011; accepted for publication 12 December 2011
bij_1858
472..477
Van Wyhe and Rookmaaker (2012) postulate a set of events to support their claim that Wallace’s ‘evolution’ letter,
posted at Ternate in the Moluccas in the spring of 1858, arrived at Darwin’s home on 18 June 1858. If their claim
were to be proven, then evidence that Darwin probably received Wallace’s letter 2 weeks earlier than he ever
admitted would clearly be erroneous, and any charges that he plagiarized the ideas of Wallace from that letter
would be shown to be wrong. Here, evidence against this interpretation is presented and it is argued that the letter
did indeed arrive in the port of Southampton on 2 June 1858 and would have been at Darwin’s home near London
the following day. If this were true, then the 66 new pages of material on aspects of Divergence that Darwin entered
into his ‘big’ species book in the weeks before admitting he had received the letter could be interpreted as an
attempt to present Wallace’s ideas as his own. © 2012 The Linnean Society of London, Biological Journal of the
Linnean Society, 2012, 105, 472–477.
ADDITIONAL KEYWORDS: Banda – Batavia – Cores de Vries – Gilolo – Koningin der Nederlanden – Lyell
– mail system – Malay Archipelago – Principle of Divergence.
Van Wyhe & Rookmaaker (2012) present a set of
historical events by which they aim to prove that
Wallace’s letter and essay proposing a theory of evolution by means of natural selection, posted at
Ternate in the Moluccas in the spring of 1858, arrived
at Darwin’s home on 18 June 1858, and not 2 weeks
before as has been claimed previously (McKinney,
1972; Brackman, 1980; Brooks, 1984; Davies, 2008).
Charles Darwin, in his letter to Lyell of 18 June 1858
(Davies, 2008: 149–152), claimed that, earlier that
day, he had received a letter from Alfred Russel
Wallace. In that letter, Darwin wrote that Wallace’s
ideas in his essay on how species originate were so
close to his own that ‘even his terms stand as the
Heads of my Chapters’ (Burkhardt & Smith, 1990). It
has been argued previously that Lyell and Hooker,
over the following days, colluded to find a way for
their friend to be acknowledged as equally deserving
with Wallace of the title of ‘discoverer’ of the theory of
how new species originate (Davies, 2008). At a special
meeting of the Linnean Society on 1 July 1858, the
two men presented selected passages from an essay
that Darwin had written 14 years before but never
published, together with a letter written to Asa Gray
of Harvard University 9 months before in which he
claimed the discovery of a ‘Principle of Divergence’
(Darwin & Wallace, 1858). With these extracts, Lyell
and Hooker intimated that Darwin had equal claim to
that of Wallace as the discoverer of the theory of the
origin of species.
Van Wyhe and Rookmaaker consider they have
found evidence indicating that those who argue that
Wallace’s letter arrived in London on 2 June 1858 are
wrong, and that Wallace’s letter did indeed arrive at
Darwin’s home on 18 June 1858 as he claimed. Their
argument is dependent on: (1) that the letter was
posted at Ternate on 5 April, rather than 9 March,
1858; (2) that the mail service was inefficient and
unpredictable; and (3) that there was a previously
unknown ‘uninterrupted route’ for Wallace’s letter to
Darwin’s home. In fact, as I now describe, the Dutch
Colonial administration in the East Indies had put in
*E-mail: [email protected]
472
© 2012 The Linnean Society of London, Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 2012, 105, 472–477
COMMENT ON VAN WYHE AND ROOKMAAKER (2012)
place a system that ensured all mail was dealt with
in an organized, secure and predictable manner,
which had worked without interruption for many
years (Brooks, 1984; Davies, 2008).
When he was on the island of Gilolo (now Halmahera) close to the smaller island of Ternate in
February 1858, Alfred Russel Wallace first came to
understand and then write down a complete outline
of the process of how new species originate. As
previously argued (McKinney, 1972; Brooks, 1984;
Davies, 2008), as February turned to March,
Wallace left Gilolo for Ternate, intent on sending his
theory to Charles Darwin by the next available
packet steamer, which was due to arrive early in
March. He had thought out his theory in between
bouts of fever and had waited anxiously for the termination of his fit so that he could make notes. On
two succeeding evenings, he wrote it out carefully so
that he could send it to Darwin by the mail steamer
scheduled to arrive in the next day or two (Wallace,
1903; 1905). He had sent two previous letters (no
longer extant; but see British Library : ADD46434
for Darwin’s responses) to Darwin outlining his
nascent beliefs regarding the relationship between
varieties and new species after the publication of his
‘Sarawak Law’ paper in September 1855 (Brooks,
1984; Davies, 2008). The only response came from
Samuel Stevens, his agent, who informed him that
the feeling in London was that Wallace should stop
theorizing and stick to collecting (Marchant, 1916)
However, he was unaware that his article had captured the interest of Charles Lyell. Six months after
reading the Sarawak Law paper, Lyell, during a
visit to Darwin, had warned him that the ideas in
that paper had led him to believe that Wallace
might yet thwart Darwin’s ambition to become the
first man to explain convincingly how new species
originate (Davies, 2008: 66–67).
When the mail steamer Ambon entered the port of
Ternate on 9 March 1858, Wallace was waiting for the
delivery of some boxes (Pearson 2005, Wallace
Journal for 1858, entries 128 and 129). Once the mail
had been taken off the steamer, he would have
learned there was a letter for him. It was from
Darwin saying, among other things, that, despite
Wallace’s concern, both Charles Lyell and Edward
Blyth, an eminent naturalist then working in Calcutta, had thought well of his ideas in the Sarawak
Law paper (British Library: ADD 46434). Until he
read Darwin’s letter, Wallace could have had no
inkling of Lyell’s enthusiasm for his ideas. Indeed,
after reading Wallace’s Sarawak Law in November
1855, Lyell had immediately opened a new species
notebook and written on its first page the single word:
‘Wallace’ (Wilson, 1970). The awareness that the mail
steamer was to arrive in ‘a day or two’ also suggests
473
that Wallace was already back on Ternate when he
was completing his paper and thus this was where his
ideas were first written down. Location has been an
issue for many over the years, ever since McKinney
(1972) first suggested that Wallace had used famous
Ternate rather than humble Gilolo as the geographical background to his great idea.
If, by the time the steamer had arrived and Darwin’s letter opened, Wallace had not by then posted
his letters (one to Darwin, enclosing his theory, and
one to the brother of his friend Henry Bates), then
it would surely have taken only a few minutes
to scribble a brief note on the outside of the letter
before posting it to Darwin, giving him permission
to show his theory to Lyell if Darwin thought it
sufficiently important. However, if both letters had
already been posted before the Ambon arrived at
Ternate, then, equally, it would have been the work
of only a few minutes for someone as resourceful as
Wallace to have reclaimed his letter to Darwin from
the mail that had yet to be put aboard the packet
boat, write out his brief message, and return it to
the post-master as the steamer readied itself
to leave port. It appears extremely unlikely that
Wallace would have retrieved the letter if he had not
been given an assurance that he could return it
before the steamer left port. His need for Darwin to
read his paper as soon as possible was paramount
not only because, in his first letter to Wallace,
Darwin had claimed he was planning to publish his
species theory in the near future, but also because
of Wallace’s natural excitement and desire to tell
someone who would understand that he had
achieved his life’s ambition to discover how species
originate.
It should also be remembered that Wallace carried
no threat to the integrity of ‘Her Majesty’s’ mail. His
travels in search of specimens to send home had made
him one of the most familiar figures in the archipelago over the previous 4 years. He constantly sent
letters to his agent in London and knew every nuance
of the mail system and many of the captains and
crews of the boats that carried the mail since he had
travelled on them as a passenger during his time in
the islands; some as recently as the previous November, December and January (Brooks, 1984, 175–178).
These landing-stage scenarios, however, are dismissed by van Wyhe & Rookmaaker (2012). Whether
the letters had already been posted or not, and we
have no way of knowing, the authors claim that ‘there
was no time’ and ‘apparently it was not possible’ and
‘it seems the packet was at Ternate for maybe as little
as an hour’, thereby suggesting that a whole hour (let
alone exactly how long the steamer might have been
at Ternate) was not sufficient for someone as capable
as Wallace to scribble out a short sentence on his
© 2012 The Linnean Society of London, Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 2012, 105, 472–477
474
R. DAVIES
letter to Darwin. In the face of such uncertainty, they
still conclude that ‘the only occasion when that letter
could have left Ternate was by the following month’s
steamer which was not to arrive there until April 5th,
1858’.
However, there is no evidence offered for these
claims, and the suggestion that, when on Ternate,
‘Wallace never replied to a letter by the same mail
boat on which it arrived’ discounts the emotion
Wallace must have felt when he discovered that the
great Charles Lyell had approved of his work after
almost 10 years of formulating his ideas both in
situations of intense loneliness and also in the classridden natural history societies of London. It is not
difficult to understand that his reaction to such a
letter might have been different had it been yet again
only another request from Darwin for information
about local species.
In their Introduction, van Wyhe & Rookmaaker
(2012) state that they intend to show how it was the
mail steamer of 5 April (the Makassar) that actually
carried Wallace’s letter on the first leg of its journey
from Ternate to Java. However, when, in a letter
written years later, Wallace says that he sent the
letter to Darwin by the next post, he was not talking
about the Makassar, the 5 April mail steamer, but the
Ambon, which left on 9 March. This is confirmed by
the letter to the brother of Henry Bates, which
arrived in Central London on 2 June 1858, having left
Ternate on 9 March aboard the Ambon (Davies, 2008).
The possibility that his letter to Darwin did not also
leave by that steamer seems little more than wishful
thinking. To deal with it, however, we need to understand precisely how integrated were the local and
international postal and shipping services of the mid19th Century.
In the East Indies at that time, there were two
companies collecting and organizing mail deliveries
for the Dutch Colonial administration centred on
Batavia (now Jakarta), the capital city of Java. Both
companies were contracted to take mail from Java to
Singapore once every month (à Campo, 2002: 42). On
the 12th of each month, the Nederlandsch-Indische
Stoomboot Maatschappij (the Dutch East-Indies
Steamboat Company), was contracted to transport all
mail collected from the islands of the archipelago, and
from Java itself, to Singapore and, once there, to
place the mail for Europe under secure storage until
it was picked up by a P&O liner heading homeward
from Hong Kong at the end of the first leg of its
journey. The journey from Singapore to Southampton,
England, took approximately 6 weeks.
The Company’s other duty when at Singapore
was to pick up mail from Europe aboard a P&O
liner heading for Hong Kong, outward bound from
Southampton, and deliver it back to the postal
authorities at Batavia. The mail picked up for the
return voyage to Batavia was never scheduled to be
delivered to the islands of the archipelago but only to
addresses within the island of Java itself.
Ships owned by Cores de Vries, the other company
involved, were employed to leave Batavia for Singapore on the 26th of each month to deliver shipments of mail to the P&O liner heading home from
Hong Kong. However, these shipments consisted of
Java mail alone. They never included mail collected
from the islands. The mail they picked up from the
outward bound P&O liner arriving from Ceylon and
heading for Hong Kong was mail that would be sorted
immediately the steamer docked at Batavia and
which, within 24 h, would be heading for the island
of Celebes and the Moluccas. Table 1 summarizes
the pattern of collection and delivery that existed
between December 1857 and June 1858 at Singapore
(data from The Singapore Free Press and Javasche
Courant). It shows the coordination between the Koningin der Nederlanden leaving Batavia on the 12th of
each month and the Banda leaving on the 26th of
each month. The system was so organized that the
main steamer of the Netherlands steamboat company,
the Koningin der Nederlanden, always delivered the
mail collected from the islands along with mail from
Java, whereas the Banda, the main steamer of Cores
de Vries, never delivered the islands mail to Singapore but delivered mail for the islands back to
Batavia. The entire enterprise was metronomic and
entirely predictable (Table 1).
Once the Banda had deposited the mail it had
brought from Singapore at the main post office in
Batavia, she, or one of her sister ships, had to be
ready within 24 h to take on board the mail for the
islands and to deliver it to Surabaya, eastern Java,
in the quickest possible time (à Campo, 2002: 41;
Davies, 2008). At Surabaya, another of the Cores de
Vries fleet would be waiting for that mail before
starting its monthly journey around the islands.
However, something rare happened at Singapore
when the Banda arrived there after her journey from
Batavia on the 26 March 1858. She arrived on 31
March and waited for the P&O liner from Ceylon,
which eventually arrived on 3 April. However, the
liner had no mail on board (Table 1). The Singapore
Free Press, in its issue of 8 April 1858, announced
that the liner, Pekin, was not carrying any mail
because there had not been a steamer at the port of
Suez to convey the mail from there to Ceylon. Because
this was shortly before the very date when van Wyhe
and Rookmaaker claim the Banda picked up the
islands mail from the mail steamer Makassar, the
consequences deserve closer examination.
The Banda would have steamed back to Batavia
from Singapore empty-handed, arriving there by 7
© 2012 The Linnean Society of London, Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 2012, 105, 472–477
26–30 December
Banda: delivers Java mail
12–20 January
Kon. der Ned: delivers islands
mail
26–31 January
Banda: delivers Java mail
Second monthly dispatch
First monthly dispatch
© 2012 The Linnean Society of London, Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 2012, 105, 472–477
12–16 April
Kon. der Ned: delivers islands
mail (letter to Bates’ brother
on board)
26–30 April
Banda: delivers Java mail
12–16 March
Kon. der Ned: delivers islands
mail
26–31 March
Banda: delivers Java mail
Kon. der Ned, Koningin der Nederlanden.
Second monthly dispatch
First monthly dispatch
Second monthly dispatch
First monthly dispatch
Second monthly dispatch
First monthly dispatch
12–16 February
Kon. der Ned: no islands mail
on board
26 February to 2 March
Banda: delivers Java mail
12–16 December
Kon. der Ned: delivers islands
mail
First monthly dispatch
Second monthly dispatch
Dutch packet leaves Java –
arrives in Singapore
Batavia Post Office sorts
mail for Europe
29 April
Singapore: offloads islands mail
14 April
Pottinger: offloads Java and late
islands mail
3 April
Pekin: no islands mail on board
18 March
Bombay: offloads Java mail
5 March
Cadiz: offloads islands mail
16 February
Norna: offloads Java mail
22 January
No P&O liner: no steamer at
Suez. No mail
1 February
Singapore: offloads two cargoes
of mail
2 January
Ottowa: offloads islands mail
17 December
Aden: offloads Java mail
P&O liner for Hong Kong
arrives with Mail from Europe
23 January
Kon. der Ned: no Java
mail on board
2 February
Banda: Islands and
delayed Java mail on
board
19 February
Kon. der Ned: Java mail
on board
6 March
Banda: islands mail on
board
20 March
Kon. der Ned: Java mail
on board
4 April
Banda returns empty
handed. No islands mail
on board
18 April
Kon. der Ned: Java and
late islands mails on
board
1 May
Banda: returns with
islands mail
3 January
Banda: islands mail On
board
18–21 December
Kon. der Ned: Java mail
on board
Dutch steamer leaves for
Batavia
1 May
Pekin: Java mail on board
UK scheduled arrival: 18 June
UK scheduled arrival: 2 June
21 April
Bombay: islands mail on board
UK scheduled arrival: 18 May
23 February
Ganges: no islands mail
UK scheduled arrival: 2 April
8 March
Singapore: Java mail on board
UK scheduled arrival: 18 April
23 March
Norna: Islands Mail on board
UK scheduled arrival: 2 May
5 April
Cadiz: Java mail on board
UK scheduled arrival: 18 March
23 December
Singapore: islands mail on
board.
UK scheduled arrival:
2 February
7 January
Cadiz: Java mail on board.
UK scheduled arrival:
18 February
23 January
Aden: islands mail on board
UK scheduled arrival: 2 March
5 February
Ottowa: Java mail on board
P&O liner from Hong Kong
leaves for Europe
Table 1. Mail steamer activity at Singapore, December 1857 to June 1858 (compiled from The Singapore Free Press: December 1857 to July 1858)
COMMENT ON VAN WYHE AND ROOKMAAKER (2012)
475
476
R. DAVIES
April. Normally, she would have taken the mail on to
Surabaya. In the absence of mail for the islands,
however, there was still the islands mail to be picked
up. And so the Banda steamed to Surabaya, picked up
the islands mail from the Makassar on 20 April and
arrived back in Batavia on the 23 April (van Wyhe &
Rookmaaker, 2012). Having dropped off the islands
mail at Batavia for it to await the sailing of the
Koningin der Nederlanden on 12 May, the Banda still
had 3 days to prepare for her own monthly assignment of carrying the ordinary Java mail to Singapore
on 26 April. Three days later, the Banda would have
shipped the ordinary Java mail on board, some of it
for Holland in sealed boxes, and made her regular
journey to Singapore reaching there on the last day of
April (Table 1). On 1 May, The Singapore Free Press
noted that the P&O liner Pekin had shipped aboard
the Banda’s cargo of mail and headed for Ceylon and
home. The Banda returned to Batavia carrying
the European mail, including that destined for the
islands of the archipelago.
Two weeks later, the mail steamer Koningin der
Nederlanden, with the islands mail on board, left
Batavia for Singapore. She arrived on 15 May to find
the P&O liner Norna had already offloaded her cargo
of incoming European mail, set course for Hong Kong
and departed. The mail steamer put her cargo of
islands mail aboard the P&O liner Pottinger out of
Hong Kong, which immediately left for Ceylon and
England. Meanwhile, with the Norna’s cargo of European mail safely on board, the Koningin der Nederlanden made for Batavia where she arrived safely on
17 May (Table 1).
Had there been any question of this monthly pattern
being disturbed, there would have been some serious
questions asked at Singapore about such a drastic
change of routine by both the Banda and the Koningin
der Nederlanden. However, there were none. The Singapore Free Press, which quickly printed information
about mail disruptions, simply made the announcement on 20 May that the Banda had left for Batavia
with its shipment of European mail.
My conclusions, then, are that the Banda did
indeed offload the islands mail into the hands of
postal officials at Batavia once it had arrived there on
23 April 1858 and that that particular delivery of mail
destined for England left Batavia aboard the Koningin der Nederlanden on 12 May and would not have
arrived in England until scheduled to do so on 2 July,
which is the day following the events at the Linnean
meeting where it has been argued previously that
Lyell and Hooker met to ensure the future reputation
of Charles Darwin (Davies, 2008).
What evidence is there for the letter having arrived
with Darwin on 3 June 1858 and not 15 days later?
Well, it was during that period that Darwin added 66
new pages on the subject of divergence to his ‘big’
species book, which were written on pages of a different colour and texture from all the other pages of
that document (Brooks, 1984). Then, on 8 June, he
wrote a letter to Hooker stating that divergence along
with natural selection was now a keystone of his
theory. He committed similar thoughts to his notebook on 12 June (Brooks, 1984; Davies, 2008). Darwin’s subsequent claim to Lyell in his letter of 18
June announcing the arrival of Wallace’s letter that
‘even his terms now stand as Heads of my Chapters’
can be interpreted as an attempt to convince Lyell
that his work was original and primary and Wallace’s
secondary and too late (Davies, 2008: 149).
Some might suggest that, despite this evidence,
something prevented the letter from Wallace arriving
at Down House until 18 June. Of course, this is a
possibility until we begin to question why receipt of
Wallace’s first letter to Darwin, which should have
arrived with him on 12 January 1857, was not
acknowledged by Darwin until the beginning of May,
more than 3 months later (Davies, 2008). Might this
delay have had anything to do with the fact that
between these dates Darwin suddenly discovered not
only a ‘Principle of Divergence’, which Asa Gray was
to dismiss so quickly as ‘grievously hypothetical’, but
also the revolutionary idea, for him, that new species
were only strongly marked varieties; a fact that
Wallace had long accepted as fundamental to his own
theoretical ideas (Davies, 2008)?
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank five anonymous reviewers who
took the time to analyse and comment on the weaknesses in previous versions of this paper. Their knowledge and attention to detail suggests a longstanding
generosity of thought and time for which there can
have been little reward. Specific research for The
Darwin Conspiracy on which this reply is based was
carried out by Femme Gaastra, Professor of Dutch
Maritime History at the University of Leiden,
Holland, who allowed me to access his phenomenal
knowledge of communications and the patterns of
shipping routes and times in the Dutch East Indies in
the middle of the 19th Century. Additional and
invaluable research was carried out in London at the
British Library (Colindale) by my colleague Paul
Hannon into newspaper records from The Singapore
Free Press and the Lloyds Register of Shipping over
the same period of time.
REFERENCES
à Campo JNFM. 2002. Engines of empire: steamshipping and
state formation in Colonial Indonesia. Hilversum: Verloren.
© 2012 The Linnean Society of London, Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 2012, 105, 472–477
COMMENT ON VAN WYHE AND ROOKMAAKER (2012)
Brackman AC. 1980. A delicate arrangement: the strange
case of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. New
York, NY: Times Books.
British Library. ADD46434. Addison collection.
Brooks JL. 1984. Just before the origin: Alfred Russel
Wallace’s theory of evolution. New York, NY: Columbia
University Press, 175–178.
Burkhardt F, Smith S, eds. 1990. The correspondence of
Charles Darwin, Vol. 7: 1858–1859. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Darwin C, Wallace AR. 1858. On the tendency of species to
form varieties; and on the perpetuation of varieties and
species by natural means of selection. Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London. Zoology 3: 45–62.
Davies R. 2008. The Darwin conspiracy – origins of a scientific crime. London: Golden Square Books.
Marchant J. 1916. Alfred Russel Wallace: letters and
477
reminiscences. London: Cassell. Reprint, 1975, New York,
Arno Press.
McKinney HL. 1972. Wallace and natural selection. New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Pearson MB. 2005. AR Wallace’s Malay Archipelago journals
and notebook. London: Privately Printed.
Wallace AR. 1903. The dawn of a great discovery. My relations with Darwin in reference to the theory of natural
selection. Black & White, 17 January 1903, 78–79.
Wallace AR. 1905. My Life. 2 vols. London: Chapman and
Hall, Vol. 1: 361–363.
van Wyhe J, Rookmaaker K. 2012. A new theory to explain
the receipt of Wallace’s Ternate essay by Darwin in 1858.
Biological Journal of the Linnean Society 105: 249–252.
Wilson LG. 1970. Sir Charles Lyell’s scientific journals on
the species question. New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press.
© 2012 The Linnean Society of London, Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 2012, 105, 472–477