The Malay Archipelago

The story of how one man travelled some 14,000 miles, collected 250,000 specimens and changed the face of science

‘I slept very comfortably with half a dozen smoke-dried human skulls suspended over my head’

Of all the extraordinary Victorian travelogues, The Malay Archipelago has a fair claim to be the greatest - both as a beautiful, alarming, vivid and gripping account of some eight years’ travel across the entire Malay world - from Singapore to the western edges of New Guinea - and as the record of a great mind. As Wallace, often under conditions of terrible hardship and sickness, battles through jungles, lives with headhunters, and collects beetles, butterflies and birds-of-paradise, he makes discoveries about the workings of biology that have shaped our view of the world ever since.