In Amazonia

by Raffles, Hugh

  24. Alfred Russel Wallace, A Narrative of Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro, with an Account of the Native Tribes, and Observations on the Climate, Geology, and Natural History of the Amazon Valley (London: Reeve, 1853), 231, 232.

  25. Bates, The Naturalist, 406.

  26. See Susan Thorne, “‘The Conversion of Englishmen and the Conversion of the World Inseparable’: Missionary Imperialism and the Language of Class in Early Industrial Britain,” in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Colonial World, ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 238–62.

  27. Bates, The Naturalist, 406–7.

  28. Clifford Geertz, Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 1–24.

  29. See Antonello Gerbi, The Dispute of the New World: The History of a Polemic, 1750–1900, trans. Jeremy Moyle (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973); and idem, Nature in the New World: From Christopher Columbus to Gonzalo Fernández de Ovideo, trans. Jeremy Moyle (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985), on the persistent belief—expounded most famously by Hegel and Buffon—that the New World is inferior to the Old and, specifically, that American animal life (including human) “suffers from degeneration and arrested development” (Gerbi, Nature, 3). On ties between race and climate, see David N. Livingstone, “The Moral Discourse of Climate: Historical Considerations on Race, Place and Virtue,” Journal of Historical Geography 17, no. 4 (1991): 413–34; idem, The Geographical Tradition: Episodes in the History of a Contested Enterprise (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993).

  30. Bates, The Naturalist, 278. I have suppressed a paragraph break. Racial theorizing in Brazil was indelibly complicated by the hybridity of categories, and Bates was generally disapproving of the existing solution to his race problem. Occasionally, however, he is open to ambivalence: “It is interesting,” he notes in Cametá, “to find the mamelucos displaying talent and enterprise, for it shows that degeneracy does not necessarily result from the mixture of white and Indian blood” (ibid., 77). “Degeneracy” continued to be a preoccupation of Brazilian elites as well as foreign visitors. Nancy Leys Stepan, The Hour of Eugenics: Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996) provides an important account of the assemblage of race, sex, science, and nation that was to cohere later in the century. For the race politics that animated the Cabanagem, see Cleary, “Lost Altogether”; and, for sharp commentary that follows race and nation into the era of mestiçagem, idem, “Race, Nationalism and Social Theory in Brazil: Rethinking Gilberto Freyre,” Economic and Social Research Council Transnational Communities Programme, Working Papers Series: WPTC-99-09, Oxford, 1999.

  31. Bates to Frederick Bates, Ega, May 30, 1856, Zoologist 15 (1856): 5658–59.

  32. Humboldt and Bonpland, Personal Narrative, vol. 1, xxi.

  33. Henry Walter Bates, “Some Account of the Country of the River Solimoens, or Upper Amazons,” Zoologist 10 (1852): 3592; Bates to Stevens, Santarém, April 12, 1852, Zoologist 11 (1852): 3726; Bates to Brown, Pará, October 19, 1848, Zoologist 8 (1849): 2840; Bates to Brown, Pará, June 17, 1848, Zoologist 8 (1849): 2837; Bates, “Some Account,” 3597.

  34. Bates, Naturalist, 197–98. I have suppressed a paragraph break.

  35. Foucault’s observation that natural historical modes of representation are characterized by the “nomination of the visible” is apposite here. See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1994), 132. In this context we can also think about Bates’ mobilization of racial typing. Note, for example, the seamless move from observed, surface traits to correlative innate characteristics in the following passage: “The cheek-bones are not generally prominent; the eyes are black, and seldom oblique like those of the Tatar races of Eastern Asia, which are supposed to have sprung from the same original stock as the American red man. The features exhibit scarcely any mobility of expression; this is connected with the apathetic and undemonstrative character of the race. They never betray, in fact they do not feel keenly, the emotions of joy, grief, wonder, fear, and so forth” (Bates, Naturalist, 39–40; emphasis added).

  36. Bates, Naturalist, 77. It was Wallace who expressed these ideas in their most polemical form and who most clearly theorized the intersection of race and environment. See, particularly, Alfred Russel Wallace, “The Development of Human Races Under the Law of Natural Selection,” in Natural Selection and Tropical Nature: Essays on Descriptive and Theoretical Biology (London: Macmillan, 1891 [1864]), 167–85. David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 61–75, 156–65, discusses scientifically supported racial hierarchization and the malleability of the European tradition of environmental determinism that “identifies non-European peoples with the forces of nature and then places nature in opposition to culture” (158). Wallace, though, was more rigorous in also allowing for the effects of such a binarism on European development. He and Bates are able at times to share in the Rousseauian fantasy of the indolent, sensual native as innocent primitive, but they read it through the prism of scientific selection in which intellectual and moral capacity is judged by the ability of a race to transform nature in the name of progress. Spurr finds explicit and convincing links between evolutionary science and the rather non-specific “colonial discourse” he is concerned to delineate. See George W. Stocking Jr., Victorian Anthropology (New York: The Free Press, 1987), 96–102; Nancy Leys Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 57–84 (both on Wallace); and Adam Kuper, “On Human Nature: Darwin and the Anthropologists,” in Nature and Society in Historical Context, ed. Mikulás Teich, Roy Porter, and Bo Gustafsson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 274–90.

  37. Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1993).

  38. Bates, Naturalist, 280.

  39. Bates to Frederick Bates, Ega, May 30, 1856, Zoologist 15 (1857): 5658.

  40. Bates to Frederick Bates, Ega, September 1, 1855, Zoologist 14 (1856): 5018. Bates’ relativism was not always positively humanist in the terms I am suggesting: it could also be inflected by a class snobbery that ascribed negative characteristics to the uneducated.

  41. Controversial, that is, because of the humanity it afforded the child. See Bates, Naturalist, 275–77.

  42. Bates, Naturalist, 75–76. I have suppressed a paragraph break.

  43. For a useful discussion of Joseph Banks’ efforts to establish a global network of botanical collectors during the late eighteenth century, see David MacKay, “Agents of Empire: The Banksian Collectors and Evaluation of New Lands,” in Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany, and Representations of Nature, ed. David Philip Miller and Peter Hanns Reill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 38–57. Adequate consideration of Joseph Banks’ pivotal role in the story of colonial science would require a supplementary essay. Harold B. Carter, Sir Joseph Banks, 1743–1820 (London: British Museum [Natural History], 1988), breathed new life into Banks scholarship, rehabilitating a figure that historians of science had tended to overlook largely because he wrote little. Important discussions can be found in Mackay, “A Presiding Genius of Exploration: Banks, Cook and Empire, 1767–1805,” in Captain James Cook and His Times, ed. Robin Fisher and Hugh Johnston (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1979), 20–39; idem, In the Wake of Cook: Exploration, Science, and Empire, 1780–1801 (London: Croom Helm, 1985); and John Gascoigne, Joseph Banks and the English Enlightenment: Useful Knowledge and Polite Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

  44. Extended fragments of Bates’ letters to Stevens as well as of others to his family and friends were published in the Zoologist between 1850 and 1857 (vols. 8–15) under the heading “Extracts from the Correspondence of Mr. H. W. Bates Now Forming Entomological Collections in South America,” or the more general “Proc
eedings of Natural-History Collectors in Foreign Countries.” Bates also submitted (via Stevens) several detailed accounts of short excursions. On Wallace’s relations with Stevens, see Jane Camerini, “Wallace in the Field,” in Science in the Field, ed. Henrika Kuklick and Robert E. Kohler, Osiris 11 (1996): 44–65.

  45. Botanist Richard Spruce, for example, in an 1849[?] diary entry, writes: “How often I have regretted that England did not possess the magnificent Amazon valley instead of India! If that booby James, instead of putting Raleigh in prison and finally cutting off his head, had persevered in supplying him with ships, money and men until he had formed a permanent establishment on one of the great American rivers, I have no doubt but that the whole American continent would have been at this moment in the hands of the English race!” (quoted in Smith, Explorers of the Amazon, 254–55). Schomburgk’s 1848 edition of Ralegh’s Discoverie was also an inspiration to a generation of North American artists; see Katherine Emma Manthorne, Tropical Renaissance: North American Artists Exploring Latin America, 1839–1879 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1989). The institutional centers I am referring to are the Raleigh Club and the still-flourishing Hakluyt Society.

  46. See Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 3–15. Obviously enough, in an early-nineteenth-century Latin American context of newly independent nation-states, much of the administrative technology Cohn describes for India fell outside a formally colonial context. However, there can be little doubt as to the depth of penetration of British capital into the region, the excited interest of British entrepreneurs and scientists once access became available, and the application of modalities of data collection and management that correspond in large measure to those mobilized in other regions of the world and circulated through the same institutional calculating centers. See Richard Graham, Britain and the Onset of Modernization in Brazil, 1850–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968); Buarque de Holanda, História geral, 64–99. Also: Henry Lister Maw, Journal of a Passage from the Pacific to the Atlantic, Crossing the Andes in the Northern Provinces of Peru, and Descending the River Marañon or Amazon (London: John Murray, 1829); William Smyth and Frederick Lowe, Narrative of a Journey from Lima to Para, Across the Andes and Down the Amazon, Undertaken with a View of Ascertaining the Practicability of a Navigable Communication with the Atlantic by the Rivers Pachitea, Ucayali, and Amazon (London: John Murray, 1836); John Dickenson, “Bates, Wallace and Economic Botany in Mid-19th Century Amazonia,” in Seaward and FitzGerald, Richard Spruce, 65–80, 66–67.

  47. See the important historiographical recuperation of this work by Antonio Porro, O povo das águas (São Paulo: Vozes, 1995), especially 181–98; and David Cleary, “Tristes Trope-iques: Science and the Representation of Nature in Amazonia Since the Eighteenth Century,” paper presented to the Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago, May 11, 2000. The key primary texts—long ignored by English-language scholars—are Padre João Daniel, Tesouro descoberto no Rio Amazonas, Anais da Biblioteca Nacional, vol. 95, 2 vols. (Rio de Janeiro: Biblioteca Nacional, 1975), and Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira, Viagem filosófica pelas Capitanias do Grão-Pará, Rio Negro, Mato Grosso e Cuiabá (Rio de Janeiro: Conselho Federal de Cultura, 1971–74). Cleary accurately describes the latter’s expedition, which lasted from 1783 to 1792, as “the beginning of professionalised natural science in the Amazon basin” (“Tristes Trope-iques,” 5). Daniel was a Jesuit priest resident in the Amazon from 1741 until the Pombaline expulsion of the order in 1757.

  48. Distant in Grant Duff, “Obituary,” 251.

  49. I am drawing here on Bruno Latour’s notion of “cycles of accumulation,” Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 215–57. Also, Bruce Braun, “Producing Vertical Territory: Geology and Governmentality in Late Victorian Canada,” Ecumene 7 (2000): 7–46. See C. Barrington Brown and William Lidstone, Fifteen Thousand Miles on the Amazon and Its Tributaries (London: Edward Stanford, 1878); William Chandless, “Ascent of the River Purûs, and Notes on the River Aquiry,” Journal of the Royal Geographical Society 35 (1866): 86–118; idem, “Notes on a Journey up the River Jurúa,” Journal of the Royal Geographical Society 39 (1869): 296–310; idem, “Notes on the Rivers Maué-Assú, Abacaxis and Canuma,” Journal of the Royal Geographical Society 40 (1870): 411–32.

  50. Prior to leaving London, Bates and Wallace met with William H. Edwards—a recent graduate of the new “natural history” courses at Williams College and author of A Voyage Up the River Amazon. Edwards provided valuable letters of introduction to Europeans and North Americans in Belém and the interior. The book had made a powerful impression on the two friends. In his autobiography, Wallace writes that “[it] gave such a pleasing account of the people, their kindness and hospitality to strangers, and especially of the English and American merchants in Pará, while expenses of living and of travelling were both very moderate, that Bates and myself at once agreed that this was the very place to go to” (Alfred Russel Wallace, My Life: A Record of Events and Opinions, vol. 1 [New York: Dodd, Mead, 1905], 264).

  51. On the often clandestine instrumentalities of British botany in Latin America—the most notorious South American examples of which were the transfer of rubber and cinchona to Asia—see Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the ‘Improvement’ of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); and Lucile H. Brockway, Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens (New York: Academic Press, 1979). The professionalization of botany and zoology occurred concurrently with that of other emerging sciences. See, for example, Robert A. Stafford, Scientist of Empire: Sir Roderick Murchison, Scientific Exploration and Victorian Imperialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

  52. Distant in Grant Duff, “Obituary,” 251.

  53. For example, a cataloguing entry from his field notebooks: “Probably new species of the genus—at any rate I have the descriptions of 5 out of the 7 sps known and it does not agree,” Bates, [The Amazon Expeditions], manuscript in collections of Entomology Library of the British Museum of Natural History, London, 1851–59), vol. 1, 183. Or, Bates to Stevens, April 30, 1851, Zoologist 9 (1852): 3232: “My great objection is, that I cannot mention any animal, or insect, or plant, under a name by which it will be recognized.”

  54. Linnaeus cast himself as Adam in the frontispiece of the 1760 edition of the Systema naturae. Interestingly, the trope points to the restricted nature of the field collectors’ Eden: they could wander there, but the political economy of natural history prevented them from exercising the critical authority. This hierarchical division of labor between collector and theorist is present even in Bacon’s Novum organum of 1620 (Francis Bacon, The New Organon, ed. Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverthorne [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000]). See Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 99.

  55. Bates to Darwin, October 17, 1862; in Stecher, “Darwin–Bates Letters,” 35 [letter 32]. Contemporary social scientists find themselves making a very similar case in relation to the hermeneutics of fieldwork: see, for example, Geertz, Works and Lives.

  56. Bates to Darwin, May 2, 1863; in Stecher, “Darwin–Bates Letters,” 45 [letter 48]; idem, November 24, 1862(?); in ibid., 38 [letter 35].

  57. For an introduction to Humboldt’s geography, see the lucid discussion by Malcolm Nicolson, “Alexander von Humboldt and the Geography of Vegetation,” in Romanticism and the Sciences, ed. Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 169–85. Susan Cannon, Science in Culture: The Early Victorian Period (New York: Neale Watson, 1978), was responsible for the rediscovery and configuration of “Humboldtian science” in the history of science and includes a useful commentary on Darwin. For an important recent r
eassessment, see Michael Dettelbach, “Humboldtian Science,” in Cultures of Natural History, ed. Nicholas Jardine, James A. Secord, and Emma C. Spary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 287–304.

  58. Nicolson, “Humboldt,” 170.

  59. Ibid., 180. For a discussion of the inverse relationship—the impact of voyages of exploration such as Humboldt’s on the Romantic poets—see Alan Frost, “New Geographical Perspectives and the Emergence of the Romantic Imagination,” in Fisher and Johnston, Captain James Cook and His Times, 5–19.

  60. See Cannon, Science in Culture, 16–24, for an elegant discussion of Ruskin and Dickens in this context.

  61. The key work here remains Foucault, The Order of Things. As I argue below, however, there were contradictory imperatives enforcing a reliance on these very specificities, and locality—in a broad sense—was a crucial supplement to the specimen.

  62. A point made by Humboldt himself: “The progress of the geography of plants depends in a great measure on that of descriptive botany; and it would be injurious to the advancement of science, to attempt rising to general ideas, whilst neglecting the knowledge of particular facts,” Humboldt and Bonpland, Personal Narrative, vol. 1, x.

  63. On competition between the state and collectors, see Satpal Sangwan, “The Strength of a Scientific Culture: Interpreting Disorder in Colonial Science,” The Indian Economic and Social History Review 34 (1997): 217–50.

  64. For example, the colonial foresters described by K. Sivaramakrishnan, Modern Forests: Statemaking and Environmental Change in Colonial Eastern India (Stanford: Stanford Univesity Press, 1999).

  65. Hooker to Bates, May 13, 1863, cited by Clodd, “Memoir,” lxvi; emphasis in original.