Intro to a speculative biography of Ali

Posted on 29. May, 2025 by Paul Sochaczewski in Alfred Russel Wallace and his assistant Ali

Look Here, Sir, What a Curious Bird
Intro to a speculative biography of Ali, Alfred Russel Wallace’s assistant in the Malay Archipelago

Trustees of the British Museum

The only photograph of Ali, taken in Singapore in 1862 shortly before Alfred Russel Wallace returned to the UK. Ali would have been around 22-years-old.

Hand-colored lithograph of Semioptera wallacii by John and Elizabeth Gould from John Gould’s The Birds of Australia. Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London.

Semioptera wallacii, the only new bird of paradise Wallace discovered. It was actually shot by Ali, who presented it to Wallace with the (likely translated) comment: “Look here, sir, what a curious bird.”

Consider Alfred Russel Wallace’s iconic hero’s journeys, exceptional even by the standards of other intrepid 19th-century British explorers.

In 1848, Wallace and his friend Herbert Walter Bates said, in effect, hey, let’s go to the Amazon and collect butterflies and beetles. Admire their youthful audacity. Wallace was 25, Bates 23. Neither had ever left the UK. They had little money, no expedition experience, not a word of Portuguese, zero academic training in biology, taxidermy, or taxonomy, and no patrons to give them financial support or useful introductions. But they went, and Wallace spent four years exploring the Amazon and Rio Negro. On the return voyage the ship on which Wallace sailed, the Helen, caught fire and sank in the Atlantic. He lost most of his extensive South American collection of “natural productions,” and almost his life, spending 10 days in a leaky lifeboat hoping to be rescued. On his return to England he swore never to go on another sea voyage.

But he did. He was given a travel grant from the Royal Geographical Society and spent eight years (1854-1862) exploring the island nations of what he dubbed the Malay Archipelago.

All hero stories revolve around conflicts and problems. Wallace had a middling social status in the ossified British class structure, yet he rose to scientific prominence. He left school at the age of 14, but managed to write 21 authoritative books and hundreds of scholarly articles. He travelled independently, without military or diplomatic support. He was always just a few steps from penury — he earned enough to survive by sending natural history specimens to Samuel Stevens, his “beetle agent” in London, who then sold the critters to enthusiastic collectors in Europe. He developed, independently of and prior to Charles Darwin, a theory of evolution by natural selection.

While in the Malay Archipelago he amassed 125,660 mammals, reptiles, birds, shells and insects, including, famously, 17 orangutans. His collection included more than 5,000 species new to Western science. He explained the geological explanation for what later became known as the Wallace Line that explains why the difference between the fauna of western and eastern Indonesia. Wallace wrote authoritatively about the humanity of the “savages” with whom he stayed, while collecting 57 extensive vocabulary lists of obscure local languages.

* * *

Wallace’s journey in Asia was rich with challenges and achievements. He couldn’t have done it alone. In 1855, while living in Sarawak, now a Malaysian state on the island of Borneo, he hired a 15-year-old Malay lad named Ali. Wallace is well-known. Ali is a footnote. He deserves more credit.

* * *

Just as Wallace learned and evolved, Ali was on his own journey of discovery.

Starting out as a cook, Ali himself grew and became a valuable assistant. He learned to collect and mount specimens — historians John van Wyhe and Jerry Drawhorn estimate that Ali probably collected some 5,000 of the 8,050 birds Wallace took credit for, including numerous rare and new species. Wallace visited dozens of small islands and had to create some 100 new base camps, each time requiring a dozen or so men to help him pack and move. Ali helped organize this travel (just imagine the negotiations with self-important village chiefs, unreliable porters and laborers, and greedy merchants, whose eyes no doubt grew large when they saw a white man like Alfred come to buy supplies). Ali was a servant, but the pair developed a mutually supportive friendship; Wallace called him “my faithful companion.” In his classic book, The Malay Archipelago, Wallace mentions Ali, often in long passages, 42 times.

* * *

If it hadn’t been for Wallace’s writings, Ali would have remained one of millions of, what historian John Miksic calls, “people without history.”

* * *

There’s an awful lot we don’t know about Ali. We speculate on where he came from. We aren’t sure how Wallace met him, whether he ever went to school, or where he settled after he parted ways with Wallace. And most interesting (and frustrating), we have no idea what Ali thought of the tall, awkward, bearded Englishman who spent his days collecting innumerable insects and his nights writing in a small notebook by the dim light of an oil lamp.

* * *

I wonder what we might learn by flipping things around and looking at the Wallace-Ali relationship from Ali’s point of view. What did Ali think about all those characteristics (auto-didactic, science-influenced, relatively wealthy — at least compared to Ali —, curious, much-travelled, open-minded, meticulous, living far from his family, willing to sacrifice comfort for the sake of the quest) that intrigues a modern audience about Wallace? Wallace read books! Wallace carried scientific instruments that he said could indicate the altitude! He wrote notes and letters, oh-so many letters! He came from a country where people didn’t eat rice! Can we speculate how Ali judged his tall, gawky, bearded (beards are a constant source of fascination, and often fear, to many rural Asians) employer? Did Ali defend Wallace when villagers thought he was an evil sorcerer who had the ability to revive his dead specimens at night? At times Ali might have been confused. Wallace was his boss, his superior, his colonial master, but he cared for Ali when he was sick, almost as a father might have done. This wasn’t the way an Englishman was expected to treat a native servant. How did Ali try to make sense of this white foreigner, who, with all the wealth and status that designation implies, deliberately chose not to live like other white foreigners but instead insisted on spending challenging weeks camped out in the forest, in palm-leaf shelters that leaked, fighting rats, dogs, and ants that tried to devour his specimens. And my word, those specimens. Often, they were dull in color and to Ali without interest. Yet Wallace seemed as happy to collect an unremarkable-appearing grey-brown beetle as tiny as a fly with the same enthusiasm as he collected a big, bold hornbill. And what mental illness drove Wallace to spend long periods huddled over his journal writing intently about an ant. A miserable semut! And so many of them! Wallace said they were all different, but Ali couldn’t see much beyond the fact that some were big and some were small and some were black and some were red. Wallace ate miserable food — python, small birds, tiny bony fish — just like the laborers (although he grumbled about it). He actually enjoyed durian. And, we might speculate, Wallace smelled, content to wear the same sweaty clothes for days on end. Ali, on the other hand, took pride in his hygiene, washing his clothes and himself at every opportunity with buckets of rainwater or in a nearby stream. But, Ali had to admit, some of the butterflies and birds were attractive. However, all told, if Ali was in control of the shotguns he might better have used his time and ability to shoot deer for the dinner table.

* * *

I coach writers, and I particularly enjoy working with authors who are writing their personal stories. One of the first, and among the most important, concepts I encourage writers to understand is the “hero’s journey.”

Christopher Vogler is a Hollywood screenwriter whose book The Writer’s Journey explores how a classical mythic structure was used in such iconic films as Casablanca, The Wizard of Oz, Star Wars, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. “All stories consist of a few common structural elements found universally in myths, fairy tales, dreams, and movies,” Vogler says. “They are known collectively as The Hero’s Journey.”

One essential archetype in the hero’s journey is the character Vogler calls the Mentor (and which philosopher Joseph Campbell, author of The Hero With a Thousand Faces, refers to as the Wise Old Man or the Wise Old Woman), who teaches and protects heroes. In classical mythology, as well as contemporary novels, the Mentor is a sage adult — Merlin guiding King Arthur, the Fairy Godmother helping Cinderella, or a veteran sergeant giving advice to a rookie cop.

If you wish to plot Ali’s hero’s journey in this way, then Wallace was clearly the Mentor, and Ali took the role of a keen, but initially naïve, son who grows in competence and confidence as the story progresses. Wallace took him on a magnificent journey, and by the time Ali and Wallace parted company, Ali had, no doubt, matured considerably.

In addition to Campbell’s archetypes, I suggest there is another key element to a hero’s journey, whether fictional or real. That is the “decision point,” the moment when, often following a crisis, the hero is confronted by a major choice, a crossroad, a life redirection, a choice between a safe or a risky option. Choose one path and your life changes in a certain way, choose another and you veer off into an alternate reality. Wallace faced many such critical decision points — when he decided to go to the Amazon, when he chose to book passage aboard the Helen for himself and his collection, and when he decided to overcome the trauma and heartbreak of the sinking of the Helen and continue exploring.

Ali, likewise, had a life-changing decision to make, although he might not have considered it as such. He chose to work for Wallace. (In fairness, Ali might not have had much choice. There is speculative evidence that he had previously served as a cook to Spenser St. John, who gave the young man to Wallace, who was in need of a servant.) Nevertheless, it worked out. As Jerry Drawhorn, of Sacramento State University, notes: “Ali would have been one of the most widely traveled Malays of his age. [With Wallace] he would have seen most of what is today modern Indonesia. He would have seen the ancient Hindu temples of Java; the modern metropolises of Batavia and Singapore; the primitive villages of the people of Dorey and the stylized royal courts of central Java. He tasted modern science and medicine and yet retained his beliefs in ghosts and men who could transform into tigers.”

* * *

The reverse is also true.

Just as Wallace taught and guided Ali through new adventures, perspectives, and skills, Ali was similarly Wallace’s guide. The Englishman was a good pupil, and Wallace’s steep learning curve, abetted by Ali, included mastering the Malay language, and becoming comfortable with an Asian world view in which female man-hating ghosts, crocodile whisperers, bird omens, and kings who consort with mermaids, danced an intricate waltz of life as seen through a rice-wine-infused spectral prism.

* * *

Wallace’s story is entwined with Ali’s. The challenge (and fun) lies in trying to document that joint venture.

And, we might recognize that each of us is on a hero’s journey, and each of us has an under-recognized Ali who has opened doors, given us a boost, supported us during a difficult patch.

Who is your Ali?

This article is excerpted from “Look Here, Sir, What a Curious Bird”