In Amazonia

by Raffles, Hugh

  Stevens and Bates collaborated to exploit the plasticity of tropical nature by drawing on and raising the nascent symbolic capital of Amazonia. The agent’s chummy note to Zoologist readers that introduced the first extract from Bates’ correspondence gives some insight into his sophisticated management of the gentlemanly codes smoothing the paths of commerce:

  Thinking some of the readers of the ‘Zoologist’ who are acquainted with Mr. H. W. Bates would like to hear how he is getting on in his rambles of South America … I have the pleasure of sending extracts from some of his letters to me; and notwithstanding the many hardships he has undergone his health continues most excellent, the climate being fortunately very delightful and healthy. Among the many charming things now received are several specimens of the remarkable and lovely Hectera Esmeralda, and an extraordinary number of beautiful species of Erycinidæ, many quite new, and others only known by the figures of Cramer and Stoll.69

  Bates’ first letter follows immediately, and Stevens, with a canny eye to the authenticity of the primitive, edited it to begin: “I get on very well with the Indians.”

  A great deal of Bates’ activity was driven by demand. He conferred with Stevens over the preferences of individual savants, and carefully chose specimens to whet their appetites and induce them into signing on as subscribers. Despite his expertise and Stevens’ supplies of taxonomic monographs, however, Bates’ letters reveal that he frequently had only an approximate idea of what it was that he was shipping.70 Novelty was not a negotiable character, but neither was it readily apparent. Revealingly—as an insight into the historicized and ideological underpinnings of foundational scientific activity—the selection criteria Bates was forced to apply in lieu of precise inventory were almost entirely aesthetic, based on the attractiveness and size of the organism. This was shrewd, if necessary, practice. Metropolitan demand was based as much on taste as on gaps in the systematic grid.71 Given the latitude presented by the vast spaces existing in biological taxonomies, buyers wanted their novelties to satisfy as both aesthetic objects and natural historical icons.

  A typical passage from Bates’ letters in the Zoologist—exotic and anecdotal—ties identifiable specimens to a particular collecting practice, offering insight into the daily life of the field scientist abroad while revealing how the inclinations of metropolitan savants set the terms for his spatial practice, with his response to their needs determining his work rhythm.72 On shipping a consignment of “the beautiful Sapphira, which you wished for more particularly,” he cautioned Stevens:

  I hope what I send will satisfy you…. Do not think it an abundant species because I now send you so many; it is because I devoted myself one month to them, working six days a-week with a youth hired to assist me, both of us with net-poles 12 feet long.73

  Metropolitan demand for a particular item also often dictated Bates’ destination. Once there, he might find himself filling orders for items of distractingly peripheral, though symptomatic interest—the human hair referred to earlier or precise matches of Indian skin tone, for example. In this way, the purity of his science became subject to diverse corruptions, of which he himself was only too aware. No matter how far his wanderings took him from the metropolitan hearth, he never managed to shake off his dependence on the lifeline of the imperial-scientific network, nor make the leap of faith into that life of “liberty and independence” about which he had written so elatedly to Frederick. He demurred, fighting to carve out areas of autonomy by prioritizing the search for insects and carefully tending to his private stock, selling only duplicates and keeping as full a set as possible at his side for reference.74

  Even more than the celebrated butterfly mimics, it was the beetles of Ega that guaranteed Bates’ fame among his entomologist peers. His astonishing haul from that site alone included 3,000 species new to Europeans. This was the climactic event that transformed the obscure naturalist and fulfilled the promise of travel. It shows the collection to be a site where the rich particularity of the local was simultaneously evoked and unmoored and a regional identity reinforced. Bates and Stevens’ textual framings marked the biological exuberance captured in Ega as both local and transcendent, placed yet symptomatic. In contrast to now-standard arguments about the stripping of context and social meaning (i.e., culture and locality) from organisms in their incorporation in the circuits and projects of metropolitan science, it is clear that systematics here involved considerably more than a practice of decontextualization.75 The extraction of insects from the forest and their reinvention as specimens in the collection demanded persistent, manufactured traces of locality as key components of value at every point. At the same time, scientific practice participated actively in a narrativizing of geography.

  It is as his day closes and the tropical night shutters down that we meet this naturalist on the Amazon. When we read through his letters and notebooks today, we find him hunched over a cluttered table in an empty room on the outskirts of an isolated forest settlement, ceaselessly numbering species by the smoky glow of his oil lamp—totaling and bracketing, calculating and parsing, until the fine balance between time devoted to other people’s requirements in order to support his personal project and that tenacious project itself is lost, and the activity becomes its singular justification. His status, his identity as traveler, explorer, and, most important, scientist, becomes inseparable from the numbers. And, when he finally publishes The Naturalist, the first data he presents, on the second page of the preface, are a species count, the bald enumeration of his outrageously massive collection:

  Mammals

  52

  Birds

  360

  Reptiles

  140

  Fishes

  120

  Insects

  14,000

  Mollusks

  35

  Zoophytes

  5

  14,71276

  The theatricality of this rather Conradian image of Bates—deep in the jungle fastness, isolation nibbling at his rationality, forsaken at the distant terminus of a precarious but confining imperial network—should not distract from the point at issue: Bates’ collection had a heavy load to bear. It explicitly signaled the abundance of Amazonian biology. But it also wracked his already frail constitution and—in the tales of hardship and tribulation—collapsed into itself that commonplace bifurcation between the ecstatic profusion of tropical nature and its pervasive menace. Moreover, although his collection was the emblem of his social and professional aspiration, in the act of assembling it he was irreducibly marked (once again) as plebeian. It is in this light, as much as in terms of his hopes about employment and the aggressive contemporary contest to define science, that we should understand his distressed reaction when John Gray, the keeper of the Department of Zoology at the British Museum, raised demeaning, calculated queries about the material he had brought back from his travels.

  Unlike Conrad’s incarnation of the colonial nightmare, Bates made it home to the “inanities of ‘society’” that his friend, the banker and essayist Edward Clodd, tells us he loathed.77 Not only was a new Bates, the translator of butterflies and beetles, making his appearance in London. With him came the Amazons—where an inexperienced Leicester naturalist could find nearly 15,000 species, “no less than 8000 … new to science,” and an emerging site of unrestrained hyperbole.78

  IMPUNITY AND IMPURITIES

  I should have liked a sympathizing companion better than being alone, but that in this barbarous country is not to be had. I have got a half-wild coloured youth, who is an expert entomologist, and have clothed him with the intention of taking him with me as assistant: if he does not give me the slip he will be a valuable help to me.

  —Bates to Stevens, Pará, August 30, 1849

  Metropolitan science—its theorizings, its literatures, its spectacular collections, its popular showcases—relied on an insistent stream of material, much of which flowed through still embryonic channels originating in distant territories
.79 As we have seen, commerce and aesthetics combined to influence the shape of its production in fundamental ways. Bates’ struggle to control a space within the imperial-scientific networks—his dogged attempts to carve out autonomy through on-site taxonomy—can be interpreted as an effort to capture more and more of the analytical activities associated with particular prestigious nodes. This was critical to his destabilization of the hierarchy of professionalizing science. We can see him striving to insert himself at what were structured as progressively higher levels, where advancing status corresponded to the increasingly manipulated character of the data being handled.

  Although it was with deep misgivings that Bates enfolded himself in the embrace of the metropolitan species grubbers, it was perhaps even more unsettling to be caught in the bonds of dependency that tied him to his Amazonian porters, guides, cooks, canoeists, pilots, nurses, hunters, collectors, protectors, translators, advisors, informants, companions, hosts, and local experts like Vicenti, a “dreadfully independent and shrewd” character, who, nonetheless, “is an excellent assistant to us”:

  [H]e is better acquainted with the names and properties of plants and trees than any man in Pará, and is a glorious fellow to get wasps’-nests, and to dig out the holes of monstrous spiders.80

  Bates’ on-the-ground interaction with Vicenti and the other rural Amazonians with whom he worked offers one more way to think about the making of the region. There were, we know, commercial and institutional imperatives shaping his traveling practice, and we have already seen enough of the materialities of exploration to realize that this story is not entirely about an Anglophone siting of Amazonia. But what happened to Bates’ natural science in the moment of encounter with Amazonians and this hyperbolic nature? What mimetics and hybridities ensued from the field politics of intersubjectivity?81

  European travelers had complained of labor shortages in the Amazon well before the Cabanagem. But Bates’ ability to travel was wholly predicated on the availability of people prepared to fulfill the overlapping functions of crew member, porter, and guide. Even when he closely follows the emerging hospitality trails of European assistance and local political authority, moving along a network of planters, merchants, and municipal officials assembled through letters of introduction arranged in London, Pará, and Santarém, his progress can be held up for days or weeks or even entirely halted by the inability to secure assistance.82 Despite their own divisions, there are times when elites and subalterns appear to conspire in obstructing him. Considerably delayed in making a planned trip to the upper Tapajós in 1852, he finally sails in June, a season of treacherous tides and unpredictable storms:

  In arranging my voyage, I found the usual difficulty in finding men. Indians only understand the management of canoes; and these are so few in number in comparison to the demand for them, that they are not to be found. The authorities only can assist a stranger, but these parties in Santarém are not at all obliging, and I was compelled to hire two mulattoes,—one, a coarse specimen from the South of Brazil, the other, a harmless young fellow of very little use to me. The bigger one proved a great annoyance. I soon found that he understood less of navigation than myself; but he was insolent, and would have his own way. Our first day’s voyage was very inauspicious. We weighed anchor at Santarém at 8, A.M., after a good deal of trouble with the police officers, who would not let this fellow go until I had paid his debts.83

  They arrived in Aveyros after running aground and coming close to death. Bates at once dismissed the two men and used his prior acquaintance with the town authorities to secure the Indian crewmen on whom he placed such value. Within days, he was off again, but in his next letter he tells a familiar, if ironic, tale:

  Altogether [this voyage on the Tapajós] has been the most labourious excursion I have made…. The two Indians I obtained with great difficulty of the Commandant of Aveyros, gave me constant trouble and anxiety,—two lazy, insolent young lads, who at last, when I wished to ascend the river to Curé, refused to accompany me any further.84

  This is one native response to the work of imperial science. It can force the naturalist to surrender zoological specimens that his hungry boatmen would rather eat. It can leave him staring wistfully landward as impatient oarsmen whisk him away from a rich collecting site. It can take him on interminable diversions as his employees ferry relatives and friends between distant riverine settlements. It can see to it that the store of cane liquor he brings along as a preservative is hijacked for more democratic ends.85 It can render valued objects worthless—an alligator’s head with its teeth pilloried for “charms,” in one instance.86 And it can at times create a tenseness that hovers over these travels like a sickly pall to burst into a sudden shower of violence—as when the botanist Richard Spruce narrowly thwarts a murder plot by his four Indian companions.87

  Explorer-scientists were vulnerable and dependent, a resource as well as a burden. The lack of direct coercive sanctions available to the naturalists, their acute physical vulnerability on sparsely inhabited, poorly mapped, and unpredictable rivers, and the generalized labor shortage with which foreign travelers were confronted, all gave local workers unusual relative strength. They were often in the gratifying position of being able to demand payment in advance for a journey and then, on receipt of the money, to abscond or, on occasion, to spend it and then win more before setting out.

  Even though a European traveler was more or less entirely invested with the protective prestige of the Amazonian elite, such social relations were rather different from those that actually obtained between native labor and the local or provincial authorities. Punitive unpaid forced expedition, conscription into the abusive Corpo de Trabalhadores, aggressive press-ganging for provincial militias, routine and sadistic brutality—the intensified state regulation of Indian and ribeirinho labor imposed following the suppression of the Cabanagem radically changed conditions in the interior by extending and deepening racialized forms of control that had previously been limited to the area around Belém.88 While never succeeding in ignoring these disagreeable goings-on, the responses of travelers varied considerably. Some, the North American Edwards, for example, endorsed such arrangements as normalizing an otherwise impossible transport situation.89 For Bates, the situation was more problematic, and at times the post-Cabanagem upheavals seem to echo the industrial revolution transfiguring the rolling Midlands landscape he had only recently scoured for his first butterfly specimens.

  In similar ways but often in contradiction to the demands of metropolitan buyers, native involvement in the naturalists’ progress strongly influenced these explorers’ spatial practices by restricting where they were able to travel, how long they would remain in a particular location, and, frequently, the extent of their investigations once they were settled. In addition, more effectively even than topographical obstacles, the desertions of crew members and servants, or their refusal to enter areas occupied by hostile, undefeated Indian groups, would—just as much as the resilience of those groups themselves—temporarily close off whole sections of Amazonia to scientific enterprise.90

  In general, though, positive support was as frequent as obstruction and as readily forthcoming from rural Indians and ribeirinhos as from members of the elite. The daily logistical assistance given to the visiting naturalists—the sheltering, canoeing, portering, hunting, and fishing that enabled travel—was critical to their success. So, too, was the contribution of the regatões, the itinerant river traders who carried Bates’ collections unescorted, without incident, and often without charge to Pará for shipment to England. Just as the pliability of the relations between Bates and the people who performed many of these services offered room for maneuver on the part of the latter, so for some, this same space, and the favorable wages and novel conditions Bates was forced to offer, made such work inviting.91

  Less mundane, though, were the activities of those individuals who worked for him as collectors. Many of these supplied specimens on approval, and his arrival i
n a village prompted a procession of hunters, young and old, male and female, to emerge from the forest bearing animals for sale. Some helped by training him in specific technologies: the use of blowpipes for killing birds perched high in the forest canopy, for example. Boys accompanied him into hunting grounds, silently indicating animals that he would attempt to shoot and they retrieve in seemingly impenetrable undergrowth. Men allowed him to tag along on hunting trips. Other people—like Vicenti—established more formalized, less transient relationships as assistants. Bates’ 1851 description of his first visit to Ega is helpful here:

  I worked very hard for Coleoptera in Ega from the 1st of January to the 20th of March, being the showery and sunny season, before the constant rains set in. Whenever I heard of beetles seen at a distance, I would get a boat and go many miles after them, and employed a man (the only one disposed for such work in the whole village) with his family, who worked in some clearing in the forest, to hunt for me. Every day he brought me from ten to twenty Coleoptera, and thus I got some of my best things: so that I think I looked Ega pretty well, and the results may be taken as representing the products of the Upper Amazons.92

  Relationships of this type throw questions of authorship into sharp relief,93 and examples from other imperial contexts are not hard to find.94 Take Albert Howard, a sensitive colonial official impressed by the indigenous agriculture he had witnessed in India, who returned to England to found the European organic farming movement.95 Or there is that on which Mary Pratt muses when she wonders if Humboldt’s native guides communicated “their own knowledge of the ecosystem and their reverence for it” during the ascent of Chimborazo that led to the influential planar zonation of the Andes depicted in the Essai sur la géographie des plantes (1807). As Pratt points out, this was an indigenous mental topography that was to reappear in John Murra’s influential “verticality thesis” of Andean resource management and spatio-social organization.96