Featured Book
Searching for Ganesha
Searching for Ganesha Collecting Images of the Sweet-Loving, Elephant-Headed Hindu Deity Everybody Admires Publishing details ISBN: Paperback: 978-2-940573-37-0 ISBN: eBook: 978-2-940573-38-7 248 pages More than 200 full-color, museum-quality photos of Ganesha objects in Paul’s collection Prices: Paperback: $34.95 eBook: $9.99 A sample selection of pages from the book Description Across […]
Featured Photos
Featured Articles
Searching for Orwell
There are worse travel strategies than to visit places with evocative names.
There’s Timbuktu, Congo, and Okavango in Africa; and Salvador de Bahia, Darien, and Patagonia in Latin America, names which purr with history and poetry.
But Asia’s resonant place names beckon to me above all others. There’s Sumatra, Java, and Borneo; Malacca, Vientiane, and Makassar; Kelantan, Kathmandu, and Ayudhya. Not to mention the rivers: Ganges and Yangtze, Mahakam and Mekong. And the one I was headed towards: Ayeyarwady.
My destination was Katha, a small town on the Ayeyarwady (Irrawaddy) River, which has achieved a modicum of recognition. It was here, between 1926 and 1927, that a British policeman named Eric Blair spent six months as one of 90 British police officers in Burma. Eric Blair, who subsequently took the pen name George Orwell, based his 1934 novel Burmese Days on a fictionalized version of Katha that he dubbed Kyauktada (which is derived from the name of a district in Rangoon).
News & Events
Enhancing the Narrative
A historian quickly learns there is little absolute truth. The authors of personal memoirs and observer narratives enhance, misremember (sometimes deliberately), censor, and leave out chunks of information.
Rarely, though, do historians try to go beyond the facts and speculate on the emotions, intentions, and psychological motivations of their research subjects.
As a fun exercise, I’ve created several “imagined conversations” between Alfred Russel Wallace and his assistant Ali, based on tidbits of information and provocative clues found in Wallace’s narratives.
What’s His Name?
Why should we care about an illiterate 19th-century teenager from Borneo named Ali? More to the point, why should we spend time trying to learn his full name?
A lad simply named Ali, spent six years travelling with Alfred Russel Wallace throughout Southeast Asia.
The primary source for information about Ali comes from Wallace, who mentions Ali 42 times in his classic book The Malay Archipelago and again in his autobiography My Life. In addition, there are three elements of (convincing) second-hand evidence that add context to Ali’s life, but none of them mention Ali’s family name. Spenser St. John, a close friend of James Brooke, the first White Rajah of Borneo, employed a competent young cook named Ali, and it appears that Ali left St. John’s service to work with Wallace. Brothers Frederick and Arthur Boyle, young English adventurers who explored Sarawak, hired Ali as guide and camp manager. They called him Ali Kasut, Ali of the Shoes, in recognition of the black leather shoes he always wore. And in 1907, Thomas Barbour, a respected American naturalist, met a “wizened od Malay man” on Ternate island who called himself Ali Wallace. The idea that Ali described himself as son-of-Wallace is poignant, but doesn’t help with genealogical research.
What I learned by writing an “enhanced biography” of a little-known 19th-century teenager from Borneo
“Look Here, Sir, What a Curious Bird” What I learned by writing an “enhanced biography” of a little-known 19th-century teenager from Borneo Consider the lives of great men and women who explored the curious corners of the world, who made momentous discoveries in science and technology, who created important works of art. We can safely […]