ISABELLE RICQ            


THE SIXTH CONTINENT

Alfred Russel Wallace was a British naturalist who did extensive field work in the Malay archipelago (nowadays called Indonesia) where he identified the Wallace line, dividing the flora, fauna and human specificities of the Eastern part of Indonesia from that of Asia.
Wallace even expressed the hypothesis that the Eastern part of Indonesia was formerly part of another continent now partly sunk beneath the ocean: a sixth continent.

From 1854 to 1862 he travelled through the Malay archipelago to collect specimens and to study Nature. His observations of the marked biological and zoological differences accross a narrow zone in the archipelago led him to the hypothesis of a zoogeographical boundary now known as “the Wallace line”.

His studies and adventures there were published in 1869.

This is the scientist's look of Wallace upon the nature of the archipelago and his words, sometimes cold, which my pictures attempt to illustrate.
Here the Wallace line is materialized by a dotted line, on the left side are pictures frop the western part of the archipelago, whereas on the right side only species from the eastern part are displayed.

All citations are extracted from The Malay Archipelago.
"It is an island-world, with insular ideas and feelings, customs, and modes of speech;
altogether cut off from the great continents into which we are accustomed to divide the globe, and quite incapable of being classed with any of them.
Its dimensions, too, are continental."
"In the whole region occupied by this volcanic belt earthquakes are of continual recurrence, slight shocks being felt at intervals of every few weeks or months,
while more severe ones, shaking down whole villages, are sure to happen in one part or another of this district almost every year."
"If the claim of Australia to be a fifth division of the globe be admitted, I would ask for this great archipelago to be considered a sixth. "
"Two very strongly contrasted races are found in this region: the Malays who inhabit almost exclusively the western half of the Archipelago ...”
“... and the Papuans whose head-quarters are New Guinea and some of the adjacent islands."
"The amount of diversity between these two regions is fully as great as exists between Africa and South America."
"The Malay hair is very constant, being invariably black and straight."

"The Papuan hair is very peculiar, being harsh, dry, and frizzly, growing in little tufts or curls."
"The colour of the typical Malay is a light reddish-brown, with a more or less olive tint. The colour may be compared to that of cinnamon or half-roasted coffee, and it is on the whole very constant over a wide extent of country."

"The colour of the Papuan people is a deep sooty-brown or black, sometimes approaching but never quite equalling the jet-black of some African tribes. It varies in tint more than that of the Malay, and is sometimes a dusky-brown."
"The hair of the Malay people is very constant [...] so much so that any lighter tint, or any wave or curl however slight, is rarely met with, and may I believe be considered a sure proof of the admixture of some foreign blood."
"At length I am in Celebes! I have been here about three weeks, and as yet have not done much, except explored the nakedness of the land. And it's indeed naked.
I have never seen a more uninteresting country than the neighbourhood of Makassar."
"The arms, legs, and breasts of the Malays are, to use a common expression, as smooth as the palm of one's hand, and almost as completely destitute of any growth of hair."

"The face of Papuan men is adorned with a beard of the same frizzly nature as the hair of the head. The arms, legs, and breast are also clothed with hair of a similar nature."
"The arms, legs, and breasts of the Malays are, to use a common expression, as smooth as the palm of one's hand, and almost as completely destitute of any growth of hair."

"The face of Papuan men is adorned with a beard of the same frizzly nature as the hair of the head. The arms, legs, and breast are also clothed with hair of a similar nature."
"The Malay forehead is rather rounded, the brows low, the eyes black and very slightly oblique."

"The Papuan face is somewhat elongated, the forehead flattish, the brows very prominent."
"Where shall we find human types offering more remarkable contrasts than these?
If mankind can be classed at all into distinct varieties, surely the Malays and Papuans must be kept for ever separate."
"There seems every reason to believe that human kind may have also existed at the time when a great continent occupied the tropical portions of the Pacific Ocean. [...] I believe that the Papuan people are descended from the inhabitants of a land that has now in great part sunk beneath the ocean."
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