by Peter Raby
Their collections grew. Bates specialised in insects, especially butterflies, spiders and beetles. Wallace was also looking for plants and trees – Isidoro would instruct his foreign employers by addressing a series of parenthetical remarks on the trees they passed, appearing to speak ‘rather to them than to us’.12 Wallace wanted a specimen of the caripe tree, whose bark was used in pottery manufacture, and Isidoro led them deep into the forest, axe on shoulder. The caripe they eventually found was young, without fruit flowers, so it was spared; but they came upon all kinds of magnificent specimens of palms, especially the paxiuba. There were twenty-three specimens of palms around Pará which had distinct native names, Wallace reported later to Hooker.13 Wallace, especially, would try his hand at anything. The veranda began to fill up: one morning, they discovered a ten-foot boa outside, tied to a good-sized stick. They had a box fitted with bars, and the boa was installed with some difficulty: its breathing sounded like ‘high-pressure steam escaping from a Great Western locomotive’.14 Antonio, an Indian boy who had joined their hunting parties, brought them a young sloth, which slept peacefully on the back of a chair for three days, but refused food, and died of hunger: another skinning job for Wallace.
In search of new locations they made two visits to the rice and timber mills at Magury. Leavens, the Canadian manager, had invited them, after receiving their letter of introduction from Edwards. The first time they walked the twelve miles, a journey that took them six hours because of all the natural diversions on the way, including many plants, and several butterflies they had not seen before – the Haetera esmeralda, and gigantic blue morphos that evaded capture. This first meeting led to a longer stay, during which Wallace made his first ‘acquaintance’ with monkeys. One was finally shot: ‘The poor little animal was not quite dead, and its cries, its innocent-looking countenance, and delicate little hands were quite childlike.’ Wallace’s feelings were laced with pragmatism: ‘Having often heard how good monkey was, I took it home, and had it cut up and fried for breakfast’ – it tasted a bit like rabbit.15 He also tried agouti, a kind of guinea-pig – ‘rather dry and tasteless’. There were many different varieties of birds, too, to supplement their collection. Leavens was planning a major expedition up the Tocantins river, to search for a supply of cedar, Cedrela odorata, much prized for cabinet-making and canoe-building. He invited Wallace and Bates to join him, and, while he was making the arrangements, they went back to Pará to pack up their first consignment for England: 553 species of Lepidoptera – including 400 butterflies – 450 beetles, and 400 of other orders, 1,300 different species in all, with a total of 3,635 specimens, and twelve chests of plants. The bulk of this was sent to their agent, Stevens; but there was also a box of dried specimens, principally palms, for Sir William Hooker at Kew, which Wallace hoped would be worth £10 together with the cost of the freight. Wallace gave Hooker details of his forest trip with Isidoro, but took care to make it clear that, as they were attending almost entirely to insects, and intended to move on to birds, it was quite impossible ‘to find time to make any thing of a general collection of Plants’. Wallace, no trained botanist, was not quite sure of his ground with Hooker. He certainly did not wish to put himself under any obligation, though it sounds as if they might have had the £10 up front. ‘I send the few dried plants (a few hundred specimens) principally ferns – you can perhaps dispose of them and allow what you consider them to be worth.’16 Hooker would later be a little dismissive about Wallace’s book on palms.
Wallace’s drawing of trees near Pará
The trip to the Tocantins took Wallace and Bates away from Pará for the first time, and was crucial in providing them with experience in long-distance Amazon travel. Leavens had hired a two-masted vigilinga, equipped with two arched wickerwork awnings thatched with palm, one for the three Europeans, one for the provisions and baggage: the vessel was 27 foot long by 8 foot in the beam, and fitted to withstand heavy seas – ‘although our voyage was only a river trip, there were vast sea-like expanses of water to travel’. The mouth of the Tocantins lies some eighty miles south-west of Pará, and the river itself has a course of 1,600 miles. They took guns, boxes to store their collections, and three months’ stock of provisions, and they had a crew of four, comprising Isidoro as cook, Antonio, the pilot Domingo and Alexandro, an Indian employed by Leavens, ‘an expert sailor and indefatigable hunter’, according to Bates: ‘To his fidelity we were indebted for being enabled to carry out any of the objects of our voyage’; he was ‘a quiet, sensible, manly young fellow’.17 Another Indian ‘deserted’ just as they were about to leave – this would become a recurring problem. Even for this limited internal journey, they required a whole series of passports and clearances, which, luckily, Leavens managed.
After a voyage of only one day, they began to find species new to them: two butterflies they had never seen at Pará, a long, slender brown snake like the stem of a climbing plant, and a sloth, which ended up as dinner. They sailed and paddled upstream to the town of Cametá, where Domingo, the pilot, went missing. ‘If we had had more experience of the Indian character,’ Wallace commented, ‘we should have waited patiently till the following morning, when we should, no doubt, have found him.’18 Man-management on the Amazon was a subtle and essential skill. They would have learned little that was useful from Edwards’s book: when one of Edwards’s crew showed reluctance to take up a paddle he was thrown overboard; Edwards then expressed surprise when the man vanished during the night.
Up river, they stayed at various houses and plantations where Leavens had acquaintances or introductions. Leavens prospected for cedar and bought rubber. Wallace and Bates collected furiously, amusing themselves ‘very well, shooting and entomologising’. Bates saw for the first time the sky-blue chatterer, on the topmost bough of a very lofty tree, safely out of range. Wallace was particularly successful with birds – river birds, and birds in the plantations and forests: waxwings, pigeons, toucans, chatterers, a brown jacamar, a purple-headed parrot. When they spent the night in a village, they would attract an interested audience as they pinned out insects or skinned birds.
The constantly repeated remark, on seeing a bird skinned, was, ‘Oh, the patience of the whites!’ Then one would whisper to another, ‘Does he take all the meat out?’ ‘Well, I never!’ ‘Look, he makes eyes of cotton!’ And then would come a little conversation as to what they could possibly be wanted for. ‘Para mostrar’ (to show) was the general solution; but they seemed to think it rather unsatisfactory, and that the English could hardly be such fools as to want to see a few parrot and pigeon skins.
The butterflies seemed far less problematic to the spectators: these would provide new patterns for printed calicoes, while the insects must be for medicine.19
They made slow progress, as they had difficulty in keeping a crew together. They would cajole, or borrow, a couple of men, only to find them slipping off at the next village. As Bates commented, ‘The people of these parts seemed to be above working for wages. They are naturally indolent, and besides, have all some little business or plantation of their own, which gives them a livelihood with independence.’20 They also had a natural reluctance to commit themselves to a set of foreigners, suspected of being strange in their habits. Nevertheless, Wallace and Bates reached as far as Aroyas (Bates has ‘Arroyos’), ‘the last abode of civilised people’, and pushed on in a smaller open canoe to see the Guaribas rapids – the Indian crew did the pushing, poling them yard by yard against terrific currents. The main fall was about a quarter of a mile wide, ‘bounded by rocks, with a deep and very powerful stream rushing down in an unbroken sweep of dark green waters, and producing eddies and whirlpools below more dangerous to canoes than the Fall itself’.21 They climbed an elevation to gain a better view of the cataract, and were rewarded by the sight of range after range of wooded hills, ‘scores of miles of beautiful wilderness’. In the midst of such solitude, the roar of the cataract ‘seemed fitting music’, and they were disappointed that they coul
d not explore further.22 They retraced their route, and their men shouted and sang in the most wild and excited manner as they shot down the smaller rapids.
Wallace was distinctly accident-prone on this trip. Chasing some insects in the forest, he was attacked by a swarm of small but well-armed wasps, and was stung in about fifty places. According to Richard Spruce, he dropped his spectacles in battling with the wasps, ‘and never more ventured to the place to seek them’.23 These were the everyday hazards of the collector: Spruce records being set on similarly by ants, and having to go back to the site to retrieve his collector’s vasculum, and a shoe he had left behind in his haste to escape. On another occasion, Wallace was out bird-hunting with Alexandro in a small montaria on a lake crowded with alligators. Alexandro fired at one, which turned over, and lay floating with one leg sticking up. Wallace grabbed at the claw, only to find the alligator very much alive. It dived under the canoe, and all but capsized them.24 On their return down river, his shooting career almost came to an abrupt conclusion. His gun was lying, fully loaded, in the canoe, with Wallace standing on the landing-place steps. He reached out to take the gun by the muzzle: the hammer, jammed in the boards of the canoe, fired, and the charge clipped his hand near the wrist, passed under his arm, and luckily missed a number of people standing behind him. Wallace bound up his hand with a cotton bandage and set off so as not to miss the tide.25
Back in Pará on 30 September after their five-week trip, the naturalists’ first task was to prepare their collections for shipment. It took them three weeks, and the combined collections, added to the previous consignment, were sufficiently impressive for Stevens to place an advertisement in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History:
SAMUEL STEVENS, NATURAL HISTORY AGENT, NO. 24 BLOOMSBURY STREET, BEDFORD SQUARE, begs to announce that he has recently received from South America Two beautiful Consignments of INSECTS of all orders in very fine Condition, collected in the province of Pará, containing numbers of very rare and some new species … for Sale by Private Contract.26
Stevens also placed extracts of Wallace’s letters in the Annals, describing him and Bates as ‘two enterprising and deserving young men’. Bates’s letters would appear later in the Zoologist. Stevens’s action established a practice that Wallace adopted for the rest of his collecting career, and in his letters to Stevens he would often identify a particular section as suitable for publication.
During the months that followed, Wallace and Bates decided to separate, and to work independently. Their published travels are not at all clear about the reasons for this decision, taken after only five months or so of collaboration. Each of them was distinctly reserved, and courteous by nature; there is no evidence of active disagreement, yet there is a slight evasiveness in their accounts. Wallace’s Travels, published first, are particularly unclear about the split. One moment he and Bates are writing joint despatches to Stevens, the next Wallace is embarking on a series of short independent trips from Pará – and then the ‘we’ of Wallace and Bates becomes the ‘we’ of Alfred and his younger brother, Herbert Edward. Bates’s account marks the separation, but gives no reason. Uncertainty and tension were probably rooted, initially, in money difficulties. They had been in Brazil for nine months, and still had no clear idea as to how much cash their collections were fetching, and whether there was any profit. Without additional finance, they could not risk a long trip into the interior. Their experience on the Tocantins had taught them the difficulties of sticking to a strict timetable, and of finding, let alone retaining, a crew. Besides, the nineteenth-century naturalist needed to carry masses of equipment; and the bigger the party, the more difficulty there was in securing an appropriate boat and crew. Temperamentally, too, the differences between the two men grew more significant in the Amazon than they had appeared in Leicester, or Neath. Bates was comparatively at ease in company, more tolerant, readier to absorb the atmosphere and accumulate knowledge gradually; Wallace more driven, impatient, competitive. Meanwhile, his wounded hand became inflamed, and he had to spend a fortnight with his arm in a sling unable to do anything, ‘not even pin an insect’. The enforced leisure at least meant that he could spend more time observing the habits of the small birds round the house. There was time, too, for speculation:
In all works on Natural History, we constantly find details of the marvellous adaptation of animals to their food, their habits, and the localities in which they are found. But naturalists are now beginning to look beyond this, and to see that there must be some other principle regulating the infinitely varied forms of animal life.27
As soon as his hand had healed, Wallace made a four-day voyage with an orchid-collector, Yates, to Mexiana, a flat island in the mouth of the Amazon used as a cattle ranch, in search of water-birds. He shot and skinned a great many birds – seventy different species in ten days – and took part in the annual alligator hunt. Then he moved into a small house at Nazaré, close to where he and Bates had first lived, and went on collecting. Bates, although he was present in Pará for some of this time, did not join him: ‘I get on very well with the Indians,’ Bates commented, ‘being far more at home and friendly with them than with the Brazilian and European residents.’ Wallace was lucky to recruit Luiz, a Congolese who had originally worked for the Austrian naturalist Dr Natterer in the 1830s, and who proved an excellent hunter. He also made a trip up the Guama river, buying a small canoe, and fitting it up for a small-scale collecting expedition: he was preparing now for greater things, and had written to suggest that his younger brother Herbert might join him. Meanwhile, he explored the west branch of the river, the Capim, as he had a letter of introduction to an estate-owner. Senhor Calistro was extremely hospitable, though Wallace was clearly shocked to discover that such a humane, good-humoured man owned some fifty slaves.
Can it be right to keep a number of our fellow creatures in a state of adult infancy, – of unthinking childhood? It is the responsibility and self-dependence of manhood that calls forth the highest powers and energies of our race. It is the struggle for existence, the ‘battle of life’, which exercises the moral faculties and calls forth the latent sparks of genius. The hope of gain, the love of power, the desire of fame and approbation, excite to noble deeds, and call into action all those faculties which are the distinctive attributes of man.28
But such views, Wallace comments, are ‘too refined for a Brazilian slaveholder’; they are the views of a young man driven, if not by the love of power, at least partly by the love of gain and a desire for fame.
Alfred had been the catalyst drawing John, Fanny, Herbert and his mother to Neath, but the family was beginning to disperse once more. Fanny was married now to Thomas Sims, and the couple moved to Weston-super-Mare to set up a photographic business. Herbert was finding life frustrating. He had tried his hand at teaching French as a possible new direction, without much success. ‘Taking every circumstance into consideration,’ he wrote to his sister, ‘upon receiving Alfred’s letters we thought it was best that I should join him in Pará …’ Ironically, just as he was preparing to leave Neath, people started signing up for lessons. ‘But I hope this will be a better speculation for me,’ he went on, in a vein that becomes increasingly emotional. His outfit was so expensive that he could not afford a visit to say his goodbyes in person.
We are doomed to be a scatter’d family, and if it must be so, if circumstance has so ordered it let us meet it bravely, and with honest hearts go forth, resigned and cheerful under the Dispensations of Providence; Farewell my dear Fanny, perhaps we may in some future time yet meet again … Fare thee well and if for ever, now for ever, fare thee well.29
So Herbert left the Neath Abbey ironworks, and caught a ship at Swansea for Liverpool; while John, despairing of making a living as a farmer, headed for San Francisco and the California goldfields. Herbert sailed for Pará on 7 June 1849. He found himself in the company of Richard Spruce, the botanist, bound for the Amazon with his own assistant, Robert King.
Herbert j
oined his brother, and was taken into the forest for his initiation as a collector. To Alfred’s pleasure, he soon shot one of the elusive imperial parrots, Conurus carolineae. They had to wait a while for a suitable boat to take them up river to Santarem, since the canoe on which Wallace had already laid out £10 proved unsuitable for a five-hundred-mile voyage. Eventually they set off at the beginning of August. They slung their hammocks in the covered area, sharing it with a bundle of hides and a powerful smell of salt fish, and settled down to while away long hours waiting for the tide, or warping laboriously along the shore when the wind failed, happily sustained by a pile of books. It was twelve days before they left the labyrinth of channels and moved finally out on to the broad stream of the Amazon itself:
Our imagination wandered to its sources in the distant Andes, to the Peruvian Incas of old, to the silver mountains of Potosí, and the gold-seeking Spaniards and wild Indians who now inhabit the country about its thousand sources. What a grand idea it was to think that we now saw the accumulated waters of a course of three thousand miles; that all the streams that for a length of twelve hundred miles drained from the snow-clad Andes were here congregated in the wide extent of ochre-coloured water spread out before us! Venezuela, Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Brazil – six mighty states, spread over a country far larger than Europe – had each contributed to form the flood which bore us so peacefully on its bosom.30
Alfred shared his love of reading with his younger brother. Their minds had always been full of stories, of history and travel: Humboldt’s Narrative, Prescott’s The Conquest of Peru. Now they luxuriated in the reality, moving slowly up river towards the heart of the continent. They had taken enough provisions for the whole voyage, but supplemented them by catching fish, or by buying fruit when they went ashore. There was plenty to see: flocks of parrots, and great red and yellow macaws, flying across the pale olive, muddy water morning and evening; herons and rails in the marshy places on the banks; gulls and terns swooping over the sandbanks; divers and darters, porpoises ‘constantly blowing in every direction’, and the occasional alligator swimming slowly across the stream.