A faint idea of this long and solitary sojourn in lonely places is given in a letter to his old friend Bates, dated December 24th, 1860, in which he says:  “Many thanks for your long and interesting letter.  I have myself suffered much in the same way as you describe, and I think more severely.  The kind of taedium vitae you mention I also occasionally experience here.  I impute it to a too monotonous existence.”  And again when he begs his friend to write, as he is “half froze for news.”

As already stated, Wallace, at no time during these wanderings, had any escort or protection, having to rely entirely upon his own tact and patience, combined with firmness, in his dealings with the natives.  On one occasion he was taken ill, and had to remain six weeks with none but native Papuans around him, and he became so attached to them that when saying good-bye it was with the full intention of returning amongst them at a later period.  In another place he speaks of sleeping under cover of an open palm-leaf hut as calmly as under the protection of the Metropolitan Police!

Up to that time, also, he was the only Englishman who had actually seen the beautiful “birds of paradise in their native forests,” this success being achieved after “five voyages to different parts of the district they inhabit, each occupying in its preparation and execution the larger part of a year.”  And then only five species out of a possible fourteen were procured.  His enthusiasm as a naturalist and collector knew no bounds, butterflies especially calling into play all his feelings of joy and satisfaction.  Describing his first sight of the Ornithoptera croesus, he says that the blood rushed to his head and he felt much more like fainting than he had done when in apprehension of immediate death; a similar sensation being experienced when he came across another large bird-winged butterfly, Ornithoptera poseidon.

“It is one thing,” he says, “to see such beauty in a cabinet, and quite another to feel it struggling between one’s fingers, and to gaze upon its fresh and living beauty, a bright-green gem shining out amid the silent gloom of a dark and tangled forest.  The village of Dobbo held that evening at least one contented man.”

These thrills of joy may be considered as some compensation for such experiences as those contained in his graphic account of a single journey in a “prau,” or native boat.  “My first crew,” he wrote, “ran away; two men were lost for a month on a desert island; we were ten times aground on coral reefs; we lost four anchors; our sails were devoured by rats; the small boat was lost astern; we were thirty-eight days on the voyage home which should have taken twelve; we were many times short of food and water; we had no compass-lamp owing to there not being a drop of oil in Waigiou when we left; and to crown it all, during the whole of our voyage, occupying in all seventy-eight days (all in what was supposed to be the favourable season), we had not one single day of fair wind.”