CORRESPONDENCE: The Discovery of the Site of the Legendary House of Alfred Russel Wallace in Ternate

Abstract

Alfred Russel Wallace’s house in Ternate has become legendary as the site where he penned his Ternate Essay outlining his theory of evolution by natural selection and posted it to Charles Darwin in March 1858. Marzuki & Andili (2015) conclude, “Wallace's house in Ternate is the most important science history site in Indonesia”, because this is where he was living when he penned his Ternate Essay. Earlier searches for Wallace’s house concluded that the site was at the Santiong house, based on the presence of an old, deep well and oral history. These findings would have been convincing had there not been any more old, deep wells in the Santiong district where Wallace had lived. This study hypothesized that other old, deep wells might exist within the district. A census was undertaken to identify all such wells - seven were located. The site of one, newly identified, well matched Wallace’s clues most convincingly. This we named the Oranje site. The evidence strongly suggests that Wallace lived on the southern corner of Jalan Merdeka and Jalan Pipit overlooking the southwest bastion of Fort at the Oranje site—not at the Santiong house site.