Will Doherty died in 1901, in the same year as Strecker. Three years before, in 1898, he had come home again to get over another tropical sickness, so ill that his doctor had forbade him to write letters, because they exhausted him. His mother took care of him until the following November, when he felt ready to go back to London. There was no other course, in any case; he needed the money and was determined to keep his place as one of the great collectors.48 In London, Doherty charted his way back to Malaysia and then to a new place for him, East Africa. But right up to the brink of departure, he had doubts, especially about the African trip. Perhaps he wouldn’t find good men to collect for him. Maybe there would be no profit in it. “I feel rather discouraged by Africa, and doubt if I can make it pay,” he wrote. He considered going instead to the Comoro Islands, near Madagascar, where Christopher Aurivillius, an admired Swedish butterfly man, had obtained many insects, but he rejected it as too costly.49 On a visit to Emily Sharpe’s little store in London near the British Museum, around Christmastime, he chatted with Sharpe, a specialist in African butterflies who had named a few herself (for instance, Papilio jacksoni E. Sharpe). They talked of seasonal concentrations, a matter of great concern to Doherty, since he had blundered in New Guinea for such reasons. They may have discussed, too, the lion attacks along the new Uganda Railway, then being built by the British, a tremendous technical feat, erected in part with the aid of American engineers. Theodore Roosevelt himself took that railway in 1909, as his entry point to Uganda for a hunting expedition to kill big mammals for museums in Washington and New York.50
“How far is [the Uganda railroad] open to traffic?” Doherty asked Walsingham’s personal secretary. “I have designs on Victoria Nyanza [the old name for Lake Victoria].” Collectors all along the railroad had been killed, several buried in a cemetery set aside for Westerners in Nairobi, then a busy railroad depot, later the capital of Kenya.51 At a London dinner party, both Rothschild and Henley Gross-Smith, a lawyer eager for tropical rarities, warned Doherty not to go to Uganda. George Hampson at the British Museum “never loses a chance to discourage me,” Doherty reported in a letter to Ernst Hartert, “and Elwes at dinner Monday was very down on it.” On the other hand, he learned that William Holland was exuberant and appealed to him to go.52
Holland’s influence may have been decisive, tipping Doherty into making a fatal decision. By the late 1890s, Holland, empowered by Carnegie, stood for an enormous coterie of institutions, not just natural history museums but botanical gardens, zoos, aquariums, department stores, and specialty shops, all forming a new commercial market that pressed in upon collectors, enticing them with money to take risks throughout the world. Holland had men everywhere, above all in South America and Africa. One such was José Steinbach, a multilingual German immigrant in Bolivia who, beginning in 1900, delivered ten thousand Bolivian birds to the museum, in defiance of the spirit (if not the letter) of the 1900 Lacey Act and with the full knowledge, of course, of Holland. Steinbach sent probably triple that number of butterflies and moths to Holland himself, sometimes traveling for months by ox carriage, with his wife and one of his children in tow, jammed into a “tiny hole” in the carriage to make way for storage.53 Holland paid relatively well but treated Steinbach with contempt, suspicious that even the most accomplished collectors might scheme to cheat him. When Tyler Townshend, a skilled and reliable naturalist, sent Holland his “entire lot” of rare lepidoptera caught in Mexico’s Sierra Madres, Holland dismissed them all as “a lot of rubbish that he absolutely did not care for”; “it looked like a lot gathered in carelessly with a drag net.”54 In 1902, Hans Fruhstorfer, the “fiery” man so admired by Doherty, mailed Holland numerous Burmese butterflies, only to be told that “taken as a whole this is the most abominable lot of rubbish that has ever been offered to me by anyone with whom I have ever had entomological dealings.”55
In 1898, Holland dragooned America’s greatest all-round tropical collectors, Herbert and Daisy Smith, to get butterflies and birds in South America. Holland knew a good deal about the Smiths after Herbert contacted him, looking for work at the museum. Poor and raising a young son, he told Holland, who was well aware of Smith’s competence, that he would be happy to “accept a small salary,” while his wife would work for nothing. “I can truly say that I am actuated by no mercenary motive,” he wrote.56 Briefly, both Smiths worked in the museum itself, Daisy, of course, without pay, but Holland wanted them back in the jungles to get him insects, and, fortunately or unfortunately for selfless Smith, that was exactly what he wanted, “crazy to go back to South America to collect insects.”57 A profoundly dedicated naturalist, he hoped, in his “spare” time, to launch a “Biologia Meridionali Americana,” a biological study of a South American region covering an immense amount of fauna and modeled after Frederick Godman and Osbert Salvin’s efforts in Central America.58 Late in 1898, Smith took Daisy, their son, and two assistants to Santa Marta, Colombia, to collect birds for the Carnegie museum. Privately, he contracted with Holland to supply “all the Lycaenidae, Hesperiidae, and Lemoniidae, which said Smith may take during his visit, to a number not to exceed thirty specimens of any one species,” along with “at least one pair of all other species of diurnal lepidoptera taken by said Smith.” Holland committed to pay ten to twenty cents per specimen.59
But Holland had his sights on more than South America. His greatest dream was to be seen as a worldwide authority on African butterflies, and by African, he meant all of sub-Saharan Africa. As early as 1888 he had told Strecker, “I should like to do for Africa what Marshall or De Nicéville are doing for India.”60 He even paid to get articles he had written on African insects into strategic periodicals, footing the bill for publication in Scudder’s Psyche and Henry Skinner’s Entomological News, where he wanted to present his “600 African species new to science,” collected in the field by somebody other than Holland. “Next to going to Africa,” Holland informed his doting, always unquestioning parents, “is the pleasure of studying the beautiful creatures which come from that far-off land and of naming them.”61 “I desire to give them to the world,” he wrote Skinner.62 And, with help from people like Will Doherty, everybody’s premier collector, who knew what he was observing, Holland might nail a sure place in entomological history. In February 1900 he wrote Doherty to get “all the Hesperiidae and Lycaenidae which you can take” from East Africa, the “entire catch of these things,” and the “moths of Africa,” too, “from any given locality or well-marked region, say, for instance, Kilimanjaro.” And get me “all the butterflies which you can take from Madagascar or all the moths you can take from Madagascar,” he added. He wanted omnium because “I like to work up the insects of a group or of a faunal region at my entire leisure, without feeling that because of the possession of material possibly made by the same collector my labors will be nullified unless I rush into print.” He promised to pay thousands of dollars for the butterflies and moths.63
In March 1900, Doherty came down with a mild attack of malarial fever and couldn’t work or eat; Hartert offered to nurse him, but he revived sufficiently to take a last stroll through London and pick up the cashier’s checks Rothschild had generously provided, “pulling” him “out of hole.”64 He paid a sad farewell to Hartert: “So good bye, old fellow, in case we don’t meet again. Possibly I may make Trinidad or some other place my headquarters, but not as a married man. You are luckier.”65 Doherty left for Paris in late March to meet with Charles Oberthür (also enthusiastic about Africa) to get help with passports to the French colonies.66 Sometime in late May, thin and sickly, he took a steamer from Paris to Mombasa, an old Arab port city under British control, and began hunting butterflies, notably for Holland.
Between the fall of 1900 and the early spring of 1901, Doherty and Holland had a nasty exchange of letters. The Mombasa butterflies were “very common,” “exceedingly small,” and “hopelessly familiar,” Holland spewed forth. Mombasa is “already an overworked and hopeless locality,” he declared.
“I could do nothing in the way of adding to the literature on the subject except to publish a list of species.”67 He tried to check the negatives, knowing how much Rothschild looked after Doherty’s well-being. He paid about $450 for the collection, a “good deal more than it is worth,” he had to add, but he didn’t dare treat Doherty as he had Fruhstorfer, who got nothing for his pains.68 Holland had no desire “at all” to “find fault,” only to “stimulate to best effort.” “I think that if you do the kind of work that I believe you are capable of in this region, science is going to be wonderfully benefitted,” he wrote at the end of a January 11, 1901, letter, “but the first haul by your nets in the suburbs of Mombasa I fear has yielded very little.”69
Weeks later, talking into his Dictaphone, he “found fault” with Doherty’s notion that he should be paid in advance for his demanding collecting work. He would, of course, make allowances for Doherty’s own “fault-finding” and the “querulous tone” in his letters, in light of Doherty’s “discomforts” caused by the extremes of cold and heat near Mount Kilimanjaro, but, “the trouble with you my dear Doherty,” he said,
is that you are not definite and business-like in your dealings with us. I have written a number of letters to which I received no reply whatever.… It is not customary for institutions to pay for collections in advance of their receipt, especially when not a single intimation is given by letter as to the number of specimens or anything else which is necessary to know in order to make a settlement.… If you expect us to be prompt and explicit it is not asking too much to require of you that you will also take the time to write down what you understand and what is wished. Our business contracts with collectors and others are generally made by letter. Your communications have been few and infrequent, and by no means explicit in reference to money matters that it is highly important that we should know.
Doherty’s letters to Holland did not survive (perhaps Holland, wisely, destroyed them), but one can infer from the words “fault-finding” and “querulous tone” that Doherty took nothing sitting down. And surely, the bureaucratic lecturing by Holland, after years of his shabby business behavior, must have seemed rich indeed. And what, possibly, could Doherty have thought of Holland’s final words: “As I look out the window while dictating my letter, my eyes are greeted by the sight of whirling snowflakes and hillsides in ermine. Winter is upon us with genuine force, and though you speak of enduring lapland nights where you are in the tropics, I am sure you would enjoy the refreshing exhilaration which we feel in view of the wintry storm which surrounds us.”70
At the same time, clear across the Atlantic Ocean, Herbert and Daisy Smith, in Colombia, were struggling to supply Holland with his butterflies. Collecting along the coast of Santa Marta, alone and without assistants, Herbert was infected so badly by sand flies that the skin peeled off his palms, and Daisy caught malaria, the deadliest kind. Herbert paddled her and their son by canoe through driving rain back to Santa Marta, to seek care from the local “Sisters of Charity.” Daisy suffered greatly.71 Yet despite this misery, Smith mailed off hundreds of butterfly species to Holland, apologizing for lacking time “to work in the mountains.” Holland’s response was to criticize him for the lack of “novelties.” Staudinger, he said, had sold him these things years ago! “Have some mercy on a man!” Smith replied. “After you have ransacked the world to get together the finest collection in North America, you can hardly expect to turn out many novelties for so small a lot as mine.”72
Both Smiths were experienced amateur naturalists who loved South America and ached to do a survey of its fauna. They were quite happy to work for rich “aristocrats,” who were often as dedicated as themselves to expanding for everyone the knowledge of the natural world. But there was no symbiotic relationship between them and Holland. Smith, so decent himself, seemed never able to admit that Holland was not decent, that he was no honorable boss mason, that he was, in fact, a new kind of man in a new institutional age—a parasitoid on other people’s talents and achievements. (“The best place to collect butterflies,” Holland told an Iowan naturalist in 1903, “is in another man’s collection who has been at it for many years.”)73 Ironically, Holland, too, was an amateur, but by the late 1890s, he had come to despise amateurs as too uppity and romantic, as losers, in fact, even though he habitually robbed them blind of their own gifts.
In 1900, Holland, dressed like a gentleman in the dirty summer heat, traveled to a fossil bed in Wyoming as Carnegie’s obedient servant, to break the state university’s claim on a giant dinosaur Carnegie wanted for his own museum.74 “This is his fancy,” Holland explained, “and we must please him.” He hired a lawyer to buy all the land around the claim and seduced the man who had staked the claim—W. H. Reed, a competent amateur fossil expert—with a three-year contract at the museum.75 He warned the Wyoming legislature not to “antagonize the gracious kindness of Mr. Carnegie” and twice tried to bribe its members.76 Anyone who interfered with his mission or authority, he fired. He fired the coachman who drove him around after the man refused to take his advice on how to drive.77 He fired J. L. Wortman, the head of the museum’s fossil operations, after Wortman told him to “go to hell” for suggesting that he get a couple of “Italians” from the nearby “workmen’s agency” to help him dig up the dinosaur. He fired the original claim staker, W. H. Reed, too, for siding with Wortman and for failing, as he wrote Reed, “to submit yourself, as others must submit themselves to the judgement of those who are over them.” Reed, Holland claimed to a colleague, was a “self-made man who had an exaggerated idea of his own importance and the value of his attainments.” “All things being equal, I prefer the man who had the benefit of a liberal course of training in a literary institution. Such men are far less apt to be troublesome than those who have not had such advantages”; they have “docility, and the disposition of Soldiers, who obey orders.” In a breath, Holland had rid himself of self-made amateurs who had made America’s early nature science (including butterfly science) what it was. “We wish no more Reeds, no more Wortmans,” he declared—and, he might have added, no more Smiths.78
On his return home from Colombia, Herbert Smith felt totally demoralized, unable to work or to think or speak clearly. It took him months to recover. In 1902, Holland, in a letter to a fellow naturalist, bad-mouthed Smith as “the best example of a scientific tramp whom I have ever known—unstable as water” and “irreconcilably discontented with all existing conditions. I fully predict it will not be three months until he will be back again, confessing himself an ass—as he has done before—and asking for a job.”79 Scorned by Holland, a year later, Herbert and Daisy left Pittsburgh forever, to take up a new career at a natural history museum in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, specializing in the freshwater shells of the region (they became world-class experts). Herbert Smith was hit by a railroad car and died in March 1919. By then totally deaf, he did not hear the train coming as he crossed the tracks. Daisy stayed on at the museum, appointed to her husband’s job.80
Doherty never allowed such a man as Holland to dictate his activities. Nevertheless, he was not as lucky as the Smiths, in the end trapped more than they by the exigencies of the commercial market. In 1900, he traveled on the new railway to Nairobi, seeking butterflies, probably in June and July, but he missed everything he went out to acquire, “except in microlepidoptera, which don’t pay.”81 Then he reached the Kikuyu section of the Escarpment, a “magnificent” elevated landmass of ancient origins. “We are on the slope of the Sattima Range,” he told Hartert, “and just at our feet is the broad yellow desert of the Rift Valley. We are cut off from Kilimanjaro by nearly 200 miles of naked desert or grassy plains.” In August, at the temporary terminus of the Uganda Railway, northwest of Nairobi, he put up a small tent, “well-armed” but not as secure as the waterproof hut he constructed for his men, “much safer as regards lions and natives, but too dark for me.”82 The men hunted birds, beetles, mammals (from rats to antelopes), cicadas, wasps, and unusual mosquitoes, and,
net in hand, Doherty searched for butterflies, all at between 6,500 and 9,000 feet.83 He wrote his mother and Hartert about his entire catch. “We have got some dozen of the King of African butterflies,” one of the high fliers, or Papilio rex, a beautiful big, tailless dark brown swallowtail, with white dots on all surfaces and shades of rufous red on the forewing near the thorax, a great mimicker, too, reflecting in every detail a toxic species in the Danaidae family, as Doherty observed to Hartert. For years, Westerners had known of only two specimens of Papilio rex, until Oberthür formally described it in 1886; after that, collectors caught more, slowly forcing down the price.84 To Hartert, Doherty listed seven other swallowtail species caught on the Escarpment, all “in great numbers, including both sexes.” He had got some Palearctic forms, too, and one Acraea species closely resembling Acraea excelsior, which Emily Sharpe had identified and described in 1891.
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