Samuel Stevens had taken out a £200 insurance policy—roughly $30,000 today—on the specimen collection in the event of its destruction, but the money was little consolation. There was no way to file a claim on lost scientific insights, not to mention stories for a book of his own, in the spirit of Darwin.
What was he to do? To tackle the origin of species, he would need new specimens, which required another expedition. But his resources were limited, his body depleted, and his reputation nonexistent. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the terra incognita that had once hazily marked unexplored forests and islands was rapidly vanishing from maps. The gunships of the British navy, now dominant, sailed into ports and harbors to seize virgin territories and pry colonies from senescent empires such as the Dutch and Portuguese. More often than not, they traveled with a naturalist on board. Darwin’s Cambridge professor had recommended him for the voyage of the HMS Beagle, a navy ship tasked with opening up much of South America’s west coast and the Galápagos Islands, and his father covered all incidental expenses over the five-year journey. The botanist J. D. Hooker, Darwin’s close friend, boarded the HMS Erebus in 1839 for a four-year expedition in the Antarctic, and then the HMS Sidon for several years in the Himalayas and India. These were men of Royal Societies, from great families with deep pockets, and they were naming hundreds of new species each year. Wallace didn’t have any Cambridge dons to recommend him for berths on upcoming expeditions.
If Wallace was to leave his mark, he had little time to wallow. As soon as he regained his health, he began to write his way into the hallowed rooms of London’s scientific societies, drawing upon his recollections and the few sketches he’d saved. Only five weeks after his return, he read a paper on Amazonian butterflies before the Entomological Society. He went to the Zoological Society with a presentation on the monkeys of the Amazon, theorizing that when a great ocean once covering the region receded, three rivers—the Amazon, the Rio Madeira, and the Rio Negro—had divided the land into four parts. The “great divisions” that resulted explained the variation and distribution of the twenty-one species of monkeys he’d observed there.
Wallace didn’t have an answer to the origin of species, but he knew that geography was an essential instrument in the search. He railed against the sloppy way in which other naturalists recorded geographical data: “In the various works on natural history and in our museums, we have generally but the vaguest statements of locality. S. America, Brazil, Guiana, Peru, are among the most common; and if we have ‘River Amazon’ or ‘Quito’ attached to a specimen . . . we have nothing to tell us whether the one came from the north or south of the Amazon.” Without precise information on the range of different species, it would be impossible to know how or why species diverged. The tags, in his view, were nearly as important as the specimens to which they were attached.
In the months after returning, Wallace became a fixture at London’s scientific societies, but his true priority was selecting the site of his next adventure. A return to the Amazon, though, was pointless—his friend Bates was still there building a massive collection and by now was so far ahead of him that it would defeat the purpose. It hardly made sense to retread Darwin’s route, and Alexander von Humboldt had already summited the mountains of Central America, Cuba, and Colombia. Wallace needed to find a gap in the record, a stretch of the map that hadn’t yet been combed over by a rival naturalist.
After reading a description of “a new world” with an “animal kingdom unlike that of all other countries,” Wallace settled on the Malay Archipelago, which had yet to be explored by a natural historian. In June 1853, with his reputation growing, Wallace took a proposal to Sir Roderick Murchison, president of the Royal Geographical Society, describing an itinerary as ambitious as it was protracted: Borneo, the Philippines, the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, Timor, the Moluccas, and New Guinea. Wallace planned to spend a year or two in each location—an expedition that could easily demand a dozen years. Murchison agreed to find Wallace passage on the next ship traveling toward the region and to broker valuable introductions to colonial authorities.
In preparation, Wallace frequented the insect and bird rooms at the British Museum of Natural History in London, lugging along his copy of Prince Lucien Bonaparte’s Conspectus generum avium, an eight-hundred-page volume that described every known species of bird up to 1850, and making meticulous notes in its margins. He soon realized the museum had an incomplete collection of the strangest and most beautiful birds on the planet: the Birds of Paradise.
The Birds of Paradise occupied a perch in the Western public’s imagination worthy of their mythical name. The first skins, brought to Europe by Magellan’s crew as a gift for the king of Spain in 1522, were missing their feet—such was the skinning practice of early Bird of Paradise hunters—leading Carolus Linnaeus, the father of modern taxonomy, to name the species Paradisaea apoda: the “footless Bird of Paradise.” Many Europeans thus believed that the birds were inhabitants of a heavenly realm, always turning toward the sun, feeding on ambrosia and never descending to earth until their death. They thought females laid their eggs on the back of her mate, incubating them as they soared through the clouds. The Malayans called them manuk dewata, “God’s birds”; the Portuguese referred to them as passaros de col, “birds of the sun.” Linnaeus described nine species that had never been spotted since, known to the traders in the archipelago as burong coati, “dead birds.”
Pope Clement VII owned a pair of the heavenly skins. Young King Charles I, posing for his portrait in 1610, stood confidently next to a hat bedecked with a stuffed Bird of Paradise. Rembrandt, Rubens, and Bruegel the Elder captured their undulating plumes in oil on canvas. Entranced as the West was by these supposedly celestial beings, no trained naturalist had ever observed them in the wild.
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On March 4, 1854, eighteen months after his calamitous return from South America, Wallace boarded a Peninsular & Oriental steamer that ferried him through the Strait of Gibraltar, past the citadels of Malta to Alexandria, where he boarded a barge that traveled up the Nile to Cairo, where he loaded his gear onto horse-drawn wagons caravanning across the eastern desert toward Suez. The Bengal, a 123-foot cargo barque, took him the next leg, stopping in Yemen, Sri Lanka, and the “richly wooded shores” of the Strait of Malacca before depositing him in Singapore.
Within a month of arriving, Wallace sent nearly a thousand beetles from more than seven hundred species to Stevens. To gather such a haul, he kept a grueling schedule. Each morning he was up at five-thirty to analyze and store the insects collected the previous day. Guns and ammunition were readied, and insect nets were repaired. He’d have breakfast at eight, then head into the jungle for four or five hours of collecting, after which he would return home to kill and pin insects until four p.m., when dinner was served. Every night before bed, he’d spend an hour or two recording specimens in his registry.
The British Museum was buying up nearly everything Wallace sent home. Stevens, wanting more of anything that could be captured and sold, asked if he might speed up his collecting by also heading out at night, triggering an irate reply: “Certainly not . . . night work may be very well for amateurs, but not for the man who works twelve hours every day at his collection.”
Gathering specimens was taxing, but protecting them against the constant threat of scavengers was maddening. Small black ants routinely “took possession” of his house, spiraling down papery tunnels onto his work desk and carrying off insects from under his nose. Bluebottle flies arrived by the swarm and deposited masses of eggs in his bird skins: unless they were swiftly cleaned, the eggs would hatch into maggots and feast on the bird. But his greatest enemies were the lean, hungry dogs pacing outside: if he left a bird he was in the midst of skinning for an instant, “it was sure to be carried off.” Wallace hung bird skins from the rafters to dry, but if he left a stepladder too close, the dogs would climb up
and make off with his most cherished specimens.
The passage of time also presented a unique danger. For centuries, taxidermists had struggled to determine the best method to preserve birds for future research. They’d tried pickling them, drowning them in spirits, bathing them in ammonia, shellacking them, and even baking them in ovens, but each of these techniques led to the ruination of the skin or damaged the beauty of the feathers. It was only in the previous few decades that naturalists had perfected the art of skinning birds, by making a fine incision from the belly to the anus, stripping out their guts, scooping their brains out with a quill, cutting out the roots of the ears, extracting their eyeballs and replacing them with cotton, and applying a coating of arsenical soap to the skin. By the middle of the nineteenth century, guidebooks with ghastly tips abounded: fashion a noose out of a pocket handkerchief to strangle maimed birds, use No. 8 shot when hunting birds smaller than Pigeons, No. 5 for those of “greater hulk,” and knock a wounded and aggressive Heron firmly on the head with a walking stick in order to subdue it. Tendons should be cut from the feet of larger birds of prey. Grebes should be skinned from the back instead of the gut. Toucans’ tongues should be left in their skulls. Instead of being sliced open, Hummingbirds could be dried over a stove and packed with camphor.
Losing a poorly preserved bird skin to insects or a mangy dog was nearly as bad as seeing them go up in flames. To help with the quotidian tasks of specimen collecting, Wallace had brought along a sixteen-year-old named Charles Allen. Early in their expedition, he happily informed his mother that Charles “can now shoot pretty well. . . . He will soon be very useful, if I can cure him of his incorrigible carelessness.” But within a year, Wallace had lost all patience and begged his sister to find a replacement: “I could not be troubled with another like him for any consideration whatever. . . . If he puts up a bird, the head is on one side, there is a great lump of cotton on one side of the neck like a wen, the feet are twisted soles uppermost, or something else. In everything it is the same, what ought to be straight is crooked.”
After eighteen months, Wallace and young Allen parted ways. For his specimens to survive into posterity, he recruited a young Malay assistant named Ali, whose attention to detail was a welcome change. In the first two years of his voyage, Wallace sailed from Singapore to Malacca, Borneo, Bali, Lombok, and Makassar, gathering some thirty thousand specimens, six thousand of which were distinct species. Perhaps mindful of the lessons of the Helen, he routinely dispatched crates of skins to Stevens. The Peninsular & Oriental’s “Overland” route was the swiftest but costliest: seven thousand miles by sea to Suez, a sweltering caravan to Alexandria, and a steamer to London—a journey of seventy-seven days. Otherwise he sent his cases on a four-month voyage stowed aboard ships sailing around the Cape of Good Hope.
Nearly three years into his expedition, though, he had yet to see the Birds of Paradise.
In December 1856, when a half-Dutch-half-Malay captain told Wallace of a place where the coveted birds might be caught, Wallace and Ali eagerly set sail on a ramshackle prau for a tiny cluster of islets a thousand miles to the east known as the Aru Islands. Before him lay roving bands of pirates, impassable jungles of towering mahogany and nutmeg, malaria and venom, and thousands of unknown species to discover. Fluttering somewhere in its depths were the elusive Birds of Paradise and one of the greatest scientific breakthroughs in history.
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As the prau inched east across the Flores and Banda Seas, Wallace took stock of his supplies: a pair of shotguns, a bag of shot, and a hunting knife. His specimen boxes were stacked neatly in the corner of his bamboo hut tethered to the prow’s deck, along with a pouch of tobacco and a collection of small knives and beads to use as payment to local bird and insect hunters. In bottles and pouches, he carried arsenic, pepper, and alum for preserving specimens, and hundreds of labels, upon which were printed the words COLLECTED BY A. R. WALLACE. Drawing ever closer to the Birds of the Gods, he measured his food stock in periods of time: a three-month supply of sugar, eight months’ worth of butter, nine months of coffee, and a year of tea.
Time was the key to understanding how Aru and the nearby island of New Guinea first produced the mysterious Birds of Paradise. One hundred forty million years ago, a supercontinent in the southern hemisphere known as Gondwana began to break apart. After forty-six million years, the Australian Plate separated and began drifting north. For eighty million years, as the Australian Plate slowly drifted into tropical waters, a wide range of birds winged throughout the continent, among them the common ancestor of both Birds of Paradise and crows and jays of the family Corvidae. Twenty million years ago the crowlike Birds of Paradise began to diversify. Two and a half million years before Wallace first approached the islands, the landmass of New Guinea, the second largest island in the world behind Greenland, emerged from the ocean just off the northern coast of Australia. Colliding tectonic plates drove up a spine of mountains that continue to grow faster than anywhere else on earth. Over the next million years of Ice Age, sea levels rose and fell and rose again. Every time the water receded, a land bridge appeared between Australia and New Guinea, allowing plants and animals and birds to cross between the two. But when the water rose, the birds left on New Guinea were once again isolated.
There were no civets or cats hunting them on the remote islands. No monkeys or squirrels with which to compete for fruit and nuts. For millions of years, there were no humans to cut their trees down or hunt them for their feathers. Without natural predators, the males had no need to develop armament for self-defense. Similarly, they had no need to blend into their surroundings, and there was no harm in standing out. The abundance of fruit, isolation, and safety provided by these islands created the perfect conditions for what would become known as runaway selection—over millions of years, the Birds of Paradise developed extravagant plumage and elaborate dancing rituals on meticulously prepared dance floors, all in the ostentatious pursuit of the ultimate goal: sex.
When Wallace finally arrived at Aru, he searched for locals who could guide him into the jungles but came up against an unexpected problem: the river channels veining the islands were plagued by pirates known to seize everything from a boat, even a man’s clothes. They burned villages and took women and children as slaves. No matter how many beads Wallace had to offer, the residents of Aru weren’t lining up to help him search for some birds. Eventually he found someone to paddle him through a mangrove up a small river to the two-hut village of Wanumbai, where he traded a knife for a room in a crude hut that he shared with twelve other people. Two cooking fires were burning away in the middle of the room when he stepped in.
He was so close, he could hear the distinctive wawk-wawk wawk-wawks of the birds echoing from the treetops in the early morning hours. Eager to lay eyes on them, he waded through muck and heat, hounded by mosquitos. By night, he was besieged with sand flies, which left little circular welts on his limbs. In the tropical haze, they swarmed his legs until they became too swollen and ulcerated for him to walk, forcing him to convalesce in his hut. Though he’d traveled thousands of miles across deserts and oceans to finally see Birds of Paradise in the wild, he was hobbled in the final yards by minuscule sand flies—revenge, he joked, for all the thousands of insects he’d caught and pinned. “To be kept prisoner in such an unknown country as Aru, where rare and beautiful creatures are to be found in every forest ramble . . . is a punishment too severe,” he complained in his journal.
Wallace put his beads and blades to work, offering a bounty for anyone who could bring him a living Bird of Paradise. Ali, his assistant, set off with indigenous hunters, armed with blunt-tipped arrows and tiny snares devised to capture the birds without damaging their plumage.
When Ali emerged from the forest clutching a King Bird of Paradise, Wallace rejoiced. The small bird had an otherworldly beauty: an “intense cinnabar red” body, a “rich orange” head, �
�deep metallic green” spots above the eyes, a bright yellow beak, a pure white breast, and cobalt blue legs. From its tail emerged two wiry feathers that spiraled tightly into two glittering emerald coins. “These two ornaments,” Wallace wrote, “are altogether unique, not occurring on any other species . . . known to exist upon the earth.”
He was overcome: “I thought of the long ages of the past, during which the successive generations of this little creature had run their course—year by year being born, and living and dying amid these dark and gloomy woods, with no intelligent eye to gaze upon their loveliness; to all appearance such a wanton waste of beauty.”
As he marveled on their extraordinary evolutionary journey, his thoughts turned worriedly toward the future. “It seems sad, that on the one hand such exquisite creatures should live out their lives and exhibit their charms only in these wild inhospitable regions . . . while on the other hand, should civilized man ever reach these distant lands . . . we may be sure that he will so disturb the nicely-balanced relations of organic and inorganic nature as to cause the disappearance, and finally the extinction, of these very beings whose wonderful structure and beauty he alone is fitted to appreciate and enjoy.
“This consideration,” he concluded, “must surely tell us that all living things were not made for man.”
Before departing Aru, he witnessed a “dancing-party” of the Greater Bird of Paradise, the particular species first brought to Europe as footless skins by Magellan’s surviving crewmembers over three centuries earlier and displayed on a hat like a trophy by King Charles I. High in the widespread canopy, twenty coffee-colored males with yellow heads and emerald throats stretched their wings and necks before elevating a wispy fan of gold-orange plumes overhead. En masse they began to vibrate their feathers, hopping from branch to branch, turning the treetop into a kind of thrumming “golden glory,” all for the discerning eyes of the drab-colored females perched nearby.
The Feather Thief Page 3