Butterfly People

by William R. Leach

  Before he began collecting for money, Doherty had lived in India, mostly in European quarters, and was “always interested in humanity,” studying people as well as butterflies. He read a good deal and usually had “two novels going at the same time,” until he pushed further into Malaysia, “forgot about Anglo-Indian life, and dropped the novels.” He spoke Lepcha, never English, with his “collecting men,” except Malay with his cook, Chedi, the only non-Lepcha. He got tired of talking with Chedi about nothing except “curry and rice.”100

  In 1888, on a recuperative trip to the Perak Museum, in Taiping, Doherty befriended Ernst Hartert, a charming, red-bearded German army officer and ornithologist who had just arrived from collecting in Perak, which was, as he put it, also an “ungemein reiche Schmetterlingswelt,” or an “extraordinarily rich butterfly world.” (The museum had the first library in Malaysia, a magnet for Western collectors).101 Earlier, at a moment of high imperialist theater, Hartert had joined a German naturalist expedition up the Niger River to Sudan, the sixth such venture in Africa by Germans since 1849; with him had been a young Paul Staudinger, on a mission to collect butterflies and beetles for his father, Otto.102 The expedition had shifted gears unexpectedly, abandoning its naturalist agenda in favor of a “geographical exploration of Central Africa,” reflecting the decision of German chancellor Otto von Bismarck to match the British in the scramble for the African interior, and thrilling young Staudinger with the chance to serve “our immortal hero, Kaiser Wilhelm.” Appointed by the ship’s captain, Paul assumed the job of seducing tribal leaders to the German side, enlisting “helpers” in the imperialist mode: forty-three porters, two horse-tending men, a personal servant for himself, and a “Yoruba ‘boy’ ” for Hartert as steward.103 Years later, in an essentially nonimperialist account, Hartert bemoaned the “outrageous horror of slavery” throughout the region, which “christian Europeans” had imposed on Africans.104

  Ernst Hartert at the foot of the Gunong Ijau river, Perak, Malaysia, shortly before meeting Will Doherty in the Perak Museum. From Ernst Hartert, Aus den Wanderjahren eines Naturforschers (Berlin: R. Friedlander, 1901–2).

  On the first day of their meeting Hartert borrowed and soiled one of Doherty’s best suits and consumed all his stationery. “He is the most exigent fellow I ever saw.”105 Yet, famished for friendship, Doherty proposed, almost on the spot, that they collect together in northern India near Tibet. Hartert agreed, aware that German naturalists admired Doherty’s work on butterfly classification, and at the end of July, the two took a steamer through the Bay of Bengal to Calcutta, with, in their tow, thirty-six suitcases, a cook, and a servant.106 They boarded an English rail train, fitted with a luxury dining room car, that crossed the rushing immensity of the Ganges River and veered north toward the Himalayas.107 Once in camp, in the same tent—Doherty never shared a tent with any other man—they talked in German and English about science, philosophy, and politics, disagreeing seldom except about Kaiser Wilhelm, to Doherty a “ridiculous figure.”108 Hartert considered Doherty “no ordinary man,” “thoroughly educated … to an astonishing degree,” and “an instructive talker on almost any subject.”109 Near the Dikrang River just north of Sadiya, Hartert collected specimens of “a new Apatura species” and a small chrysalis that pupated into “a beautiful Poritia” butterfly, later described and named by Doherty as Poritia hartertii. Near Margarita, the two men caught many male skippers, the scents of which Doherty could identify, “half vanilla, half heliotrope, as they flew over our heads.” They studied mimicry in the jungles and also on the wall of their dining tent, where Doherty spotted a piece of bird dung (“Voegelschmutz”) that turned out to be a noctuid moth.110

  In November 1888, Hartert’s military leave ended, and he returned to Germany to marry. Doherty was devastated. “Since he left me I am intolerably lonely,” he wrote his mother. “How I managed to exist before I met him I don’t know at all, nor how long I shall manage to exist without him. I don’t want much society—he was quite enough, a solitude à deux is quite lively enough for me, but I really can’t stand being by myself much longer. There is no hope of our meeting again.” (He was wrong here; they would meet again under quite different circumstances.) Hartert’s companionship reminded Doherty how crucial it was “to want somebody for my very own as it were, who shall regard all other people about us as outsiders.” “Hartert and I got as far as that,” he wrote. “We were a great comfort to each other and both were quite aware of the fact.”111

  Over the next eight years, Doherty worked his way doggedly through Malaysia, collecting for well-heeled Westerners. He returned to America twice to recover his health and to find “some lovely girl” to marry. He wanted one who had “conceived a romantic affection for me upon reading my articles on the Lycaenidae and the Hesperiidae,” a kindred spirit like Daisy Smith, who “enjoyed amazingly” roaming with her husband, Herbert, “through the wildest parts of Central America.”112 Doherty always thought he was unattractive, but many women disagreed. To his cousin May he admitted, “Yes, I really must marry. We shall be very happy, my wife and I. We will migrate like the swans and swallows, and live sometimes in the Amazon Valley or wherever butterflies are to be found, and sometimes in America where people pay for them.”113 Just before sailing back to London in 1895, to resume his work, Doherty went to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and knocked on Samuel Scudder’s door. “I tried to see you twice,” he wrote to Scudder, after failing to find him, “because ever since our little correspondence, and my first sight of your great work, I have been anxious to meet you, and now I am going back to the Far East in six weeks or so.”114

  Doherty’s much shorter second trip home, in 1897, was devoted almost exclusively to recovery from the years of great stress. He had endured deafness in one ear, influenza, and typhoid fever, painful infections of the lip and tongue, insomnia, near paralysis of his legs and arms, and boils on his body and face that prevented him from lying “down in any position without great pain.”115 His mind, too, had been assaulted, by the sight of dense primal forests in northeastern India (Talliar) laid waste by venal British planters, leaving “acres of charred chunks, sometimes piled high on each other,” a reminder of “the burnt forest in the North of Pennsylvania, all black trunks still standing. I don’t know which is the dreariest.”116 He encountered imperialism’s miserable wreckage: a dentist from Philadelphia addicted to morphine; a slim blond German living with his mother on the island of Wetter in “great state”; a “dipsomaniac young woman” who sang lachrymose German songs in her hotel room until three in the morning; Christian missionaries in New Guinea who owned slaves.117 After Hartert left, his loneliness had worsened, and many of his letters home from that period reveal a growing hardness and paranoia. Influenced by that old anti-Semite Henry Elwes, he now spotted Jews everywhere, writing his father in 1890 that “Staudinger’s partner Bang-Haas is said to be a perfect Jew” and believing, incorrectly, that both Strecker and his neighbor and fellow butterfly merchant Levi Mengel were Jewish. Bang-Haas may have been Jewish, but his son, Otto, became a card-carrying Nazi in the 1930s, ending his letters with “sieg heil,” the only evidence, one way or another, about his ethnic identity.118 Doherty canceled his subscription to Harper’s Weekly because the magazine’s editor welcomed Jewish immigration.119 Now alienated from America, he scorned the “stock-gamblers and silver kings” who “imported half a million paupers and outlaws from Europe in order to reduce wages and hasten the general starvation.”120

  In the spring of 1896, he journeyed to Darjeeling to rehire Pambu and Chedi, then sailed to the Dutch East Indies for four happy days with Hans Fruhstorfer, a “fiery, hardworking little man,” who told him “they are wild about you in Germany. If you want to know what Schwärmerei (romantic rapture) is, just go there.”121 Doherty caught some rare butterflies in Batchian, specimens of Ornithoptera croesus, a splendid golden birdwing, which he mailed in tins to Charles Oberthür and Edward Janson, of Janson’s in London.122 “My position is no
w very strong,” he wrote his father.123 But the gloom returned a year later, when he began collecting near New Guinea and enraged natives killed Pambu, “the best of my men,” he wrote to his mother, “equally good with gun and butterfly net, and altogether more reliable than the others, cheerfuller, too. My position is greatly weakened. I was really attached to him.”124

  But what depressed Doherty most in this bleak time was his own wretched performance as a butterfly collector. He had success with birds, but almost none with his chosen interest, and he could ill afford that, since his reputation and self-respect depended on his skill with butterflies. “I am first and foremost a lepidopterist,” he told Hartert, who had tried again and again to convert him to birds. “If I fail in insects, I fail in everything.”125 Repeatedly his collecting suffered when he misjudged the seasons or moths refused his baits. He seemed powerless to control the course of his own life.

  Doherty had come to see “luck” as one of the “governing factors of the world”: “the stars in their courses seemed to be fighting against us, and none of us doubted for a moment that we were under a curse.”126 In a letter to his mother about Pambu’s death, he wrote that “all is for the worst in the worst possible of worlds, but there is no need of saying so.”127 He advised his brother Harlan never to become a butterfly dealer—it “leads to nothing and unfits one for everything else.” From the island of Biak, he confessed, “My mind seems always going round in the same circle. My ideas are getting ridiculously fixed and dogmatic on subjects of which I know very little—simply for want of anybody to set me right. I have entirely forgotten how to talk.” “Perhaps it is simply terror of Civilization, which is a very awful thing when you come to think about it. Or perhaps it is because I am tired and worn-out.”128 He took refuge in books to combat a “gibbering idiocy,” sending home appeals for cheap editions, reading and rereading Henry James, George Eliot, Jane Austen, Rudyard Kipling, and, above all, Robert Louis Stevenson, whom he thought the finest writer in English. “Reading is about half of life, isn’t it?” he asked. “I sometimes wonder which are the real people, the ones I have known for a week or a month here and there, or the ones in books, that I have known for years and can meet again whenever I please.”129 As the outside world grew uglier, he turned to an inside one, a magnificent substitute and an antidote to the aloneness that threatened to engulf him.

  Yet his moments of commanding success as a collector compensated, at times, for his misery and, perhaps, for his sacrifice of his vocation as a naturalist. His “big line of business” saved his family from poverty, and he gained fame and glory. “I am a personage,” he wrote his father in 1896. “Collectors are fighting over me.”130 “The market for me is limitless.”131 As Americans pursued him, so did the great collecting houses in London, Janson’s and Watkins & Doncaster, as well as rich Englishmen like Frederick Godman and Tory Party member Edward Grey (otherwise known as Lord Walsingham), who specialized in microlepidoptera, the tiniest of moths, and Charles Oberthür, with one of the biggest fortunes in France, a man Doherty greatly respected. In 1889, Arthur Doncaster of Watkins & Doncaster offered to buy all his insects; the sale would have freed him from dependence on private collectors. Otto Staudinger tried to entice him into his army. The wily, bigoted Henry Elwes guaranteed him £500 a year because he had “done more than any other single man” in “collecting” and “studying the materials he obtains,” adding, “You can have your own house.” Doherty rejected that offer (as he did the others), intent not “to be kept or bossed by anybody.”132

  Ironically, Doherty’s warmest patron was Jewish: the young Walter Rothschild, who showered him with money, praise, and data in thrilling doses. On a visit to London in the spring of 1893, Doherty rode by train to Tring, the Rothschild family estate outside London, for his first meeting with his best “correspondent”—he preferred that term over “client” or “customer.” “He seems burning up with zeal,” he wrote his mother, “and I think will do great things for science before he dies.”133 Three years later, Rothschild—a giant of a man with a beard as red as Ernst Hartert’s—escorted Doherty about his greenhouses and butterfly cabinets, hovering over him, citing aloud, word for word, passages from Doherty’s own articles, and “staggering” him with his “wonderful fluency.” “I never saw such a man,” Doherty informed his father. He will be a “really great naturalist, as he ought to be with his powerful mind.”134 During both visits, Doherty saw Hartert, now curator for Rothschild’s bird collections. Hartert, Doherty related, “was very glad to see me.” He introduced his wife, Claudia, and Doherty sat down with him and Rothschild and together they charted out a new phase in his collecting career that would include collecting birds as well as butterflies.135 Doherty would see Hartert frequently over the next years.

  Doherty savored his butterflies in Rothschild’s fourteen hundred cabinet drawers, many of which he had sold to Rothschild for sometimes extravagant sums; he had risked everything to obtain them. Rothschild had already attached dohertyi to the names of countless butterflies and moths, including Attacus dohertyi (the Atlas moth), which Doherty had caught in 1895 in Timor; he saw it in Tring a year later.136 In London, Henley Gross-Smith, a wealthy lawyer, and William Kirby, a curator at the British Museum, were “working up” Doherty’s butterflies from Timor and Sambawa, “publishing them monthly in pamphlets with magnificent plates,” to his great enjoyment. “They are enormously dear.”137 In London, Doherty met Arthur Doncaster, his leading butterfly agent and the co-owner of Watkins & Doncaster. “He is deaf and dumb,” Doherty reported to his mother, “but we wrote down the longest possible conversation with one another, and he introduced me to various people—on paper.” Then Doncaster took Doherty on a tour of Doherty’s own captures through the aisles of Watkins & Doncaster, all “beautifully arranged, set and pinned, a great pleasure to see, and also whole rooms full of others of mine, the cases piled up to the ceiling.”138 The gloom was gone.

  Back in America, Herman Strecker and others were busy making their own collections of exotic lepidoptera. As usual, after dinner each evening, Strecker fled to his “semi-monastic den,” as John Morris referred to his refuge, where his Sehnsucht banished all but butterflies. If it was still light out, he could see, through a window facing east, Neversink Mountain, where he had reveled as a boy in a wild array of butterflies.139 Late in the evenings, he would sit for a long time, supplicant before his specimens, reflecting on them: What an emerald green color this one has, lavishly filling the outside edge of the forewings, and the interior of hind wings. How it glows against the velvety black of the long, lustrous forewings. And this one with all the blue inside the wings—and such a blue, such a diaphanous blue—with black holding hostage the margins and the tails. The universe seemed packed into it, a reminder to Strecker, perhaps, of Humboldt’s “vault of heaven, studded with nebulae and stars.”140 What forces of nature converged to make it seem a gateway to some distant galaxy? And when he was through looking, he read his letters, like the one from a New York dairy farmer who envied his evening pleasure, writing, “What a glorious thing it must be for you, tired with work and trouble to sit down alone with your cases, and glorious flies. I think that should be a splendid way to die, right in front of them with your arms spread out to take the whole glorious collection to your breast.”141 Yes, glorious, splendid, glorious, indeed. “Generally with me everything winds up there ‘like the circle that ever returneth into the selfsame spot.’ ”142

  By 1890 Strecker owned nearly a hundred thousand specimens, three times his 1870 collection, and by 1900, two hundred thousand lepidoptera, including a large portion of North American species, but mostly exotic and tropical specimens.143 In his own “vault of heaven” was a rare African butterfly colored orange-red and black, with a nine-inch wingspan, the male form of Papilio antimachus—the rarest, then, of all Papilionidae. (By the early 1890s, Strecker had obtained several male specimens, through Watkins & Doncaster.)144 The female, even more rare, was hidden within the f
orests, and would not be identified until the century’s end. Another rarity in Strecker’s cabinet was the male Bhutanitis lidderdalii, a beautiful black swallowtail striped vertically in white, with blue, red, and orange together in the tails, named for the English doctor in an Indian regiment who’d discovered it. Its picture, first drawn and colored by William Hewitson, drove numerous collectors into northern India, armed with nets, guns, money, and local coolies. Will Doherty first caught one in the Naga Hills, and in 1890, Elwes mailed Strecker his very own specimen, also probably caught by Doherty.145 Ornithoptera paradisea was snared by one of Staudinger’s men in New Guinea around 1891, green and black in the long forewings, with much gold in the hind wings, the ends of the tails curled delicately, as if molded by a jeweler’s hand. Staudinger himself had described and named it. “I saw the picture of this heavenly thing for the first time in the Iris [Staudinger’s journal],” Strecker wrote, “gewiss hat es den rechten Name es sieht aus wie ein Schmetterling aus dem Himmel.” (Surely it has the right name, as it resembles a butterfly from heaven.) He pleaded for an affordable pair, male and female.