CHAPTER V 



Wallace and the Dutch East 



I 



N MY pocket at the start of our journey I had the best 

 of all passports to the Dutch East Indies. It was a letter 

 of introduction from Mr. Agassiz to Dr. Treub, the fa- 

 mous botanist, head of the Gardens at Buitenzorg and 

 Minister of Agriculture. After our mild zoological ad- 

 ventures in India and Burma, we finally fetched up in 

 Batavia. Major Ouwens, the charming and friendly direc- 

 tor of the Zoological Museum in the Buitenzorg Gardens, 

 passed the word along, and all day streams of men and 

 boys — and girls too, for that matter — Uned up either at 

 the museum or at our lodgings near by with hollow joints 

 of giant bamboo carefully plugged with wads of grass and 

 leaves. Each contained a treasure — snakes of countless 

 sorts, frogs, toads, lizards, insects, and fishes. We pickled 

 and shipped unceasingly. I had been for a long time sur- 

 reptitiously learning Malay, so that when I reached Java 

 I could bicker and bargain, and consequently acquired a 

 great collection very reasonably. 



We had some weeks on our hands in Batavia before the 

 trim little steamship BotJo made one of her three-a-year 

 voyages to the eastern islands of the far-flung empire of 

 Insulindia. After deep cogitation, we had picked out this 

 voyage as offering a chance to see the greatest number of 

 locaHties mentioned by Wallace. There were numberless 

 voyages to choose from, as the little steamers of the K.P.M. 



