The island of Ternate is a small, graceful volcanic cone rising leafy green from the sea in northeastern Indonesia, 1000 kilometers east of Borneo. ternate was once an entrepot of the Dutch empire, from which spices and other precious tropical commodities traveled westward by ship. Today its busy dock area, its fruit and fish markets, its mosques, its old forts, its sultan`s palace, and its tidy concrete houses are strug like carousel lights along a single ring road that traces the coastline.

Its upland slopes are mostly forested and unpopulated, and in those woods, if you`re lucky, you might still spot a certain resplendent bird, emerald-breasted, with two long white plumes dangling capelike from each shoulder, whose scientific name-Semioptera wallacii-honors the man who first brought it to scientific attention.

That man was Alfred Russel Wallace, a young English naturalist who did fieldwork throughout the Malay Archipelago in the late 1850s and early`60s.from this little island, on March 9, 1858, he sent off highly consequential letter, abroad a Dutch mail steamer headed westward.