It would be difficult to find a more remote corner of the world than the eastern region of what the Victorians knew as the Dutch East Indies. It was there that the remarkable Alfred Russel Wallace spent eight years criss-crossing its coral-rich seas on an epic adventure between 1854-62. Not just collecting tens of thousands of animal specimens to send back to London, but also theorising the Wallace Line and, most spectacularly, arriving at the same conclusions of Darwin that natural selection drives species evolution.

Mark spent two weeks on Wallace’s trail on a traditional Indonesian pinisi boat, exploring seas and islands he had never heard of.