Halmahera
Located between the Molucca Sea and the Pacific Ocean northwest of New Guinea's 'bird's head', sparsely-populated Halmahera, a.k.a. Jilolo, Gilolo, or Jailolo, is the largest of Indonesia's Maluku Islands. The island consists of four heavily forested mountainous peninsulas enclosing three large bays with their openings facing northeast, east and southeast. The islands of Ternate and Tidore lie off the mouth of a smaller bay on the island's west side formed by the isthmus connecting the island's northern peninsula to the other three.
Halmahera's history is closely tied to its smaller clove-growing neighbours. Both Ternate and Tidore were important sultanates in the pre-colonial era. An earlier sultanate of Jilolo on the island's west side was absorbed by the sultanate of Ternate in 1380. Ternate's sultan allowed the Dutch to establish a foothold in northern Halmahera while the southern half remained Tidorean territory.
Naturalist Alfred Wallace''s visit to Halmahera, described in his book The Malay Archipelago, seems to have significantly influenced notions of natural selection via the survival of the fittest that Wallace annotated between bouts of fever in February 1858 on Ternate or Halmahera before forwarding his notes to Charles Darwin.
Links:
Molucca Sea
New Guinea's 'bird's head'
Ternate
Tidore
Jilolo
Alfred Wallace
Charles Darwin
