Context
In 1847, Wallace and his friend Henry Walter Bates, both in their early twenties, agreed that they would jointly make a collecting trip to the Amazon "towards solving the problem of origin of species"; Charles Darwin's book on the Origin of Species was not published until 11 years later, in 1859, itself precipitated by a famous letter from Wallace which described the theory in outline. They had been inspired by reading the American entomologist William Henry Edwards's pioneering 1847 book A Voyage Up the River Amazon, with a residency at Pará. Bates stayed in the Amazons for 11 years, going on to write The Naturalist on the River Amazons (1863); Wallace, ill with fever, went home in 1852 with thousands of specimens, some for science and some for sale. The ship and his collection were destroyed by fire at sea near the Guianas. Rather than giving up, Wallace wrote about the Amazon in both prose and poetry, and then set sail again, this time for the Malay Archipelago.
Read more about this topic: The Malay Archipelago
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