As he stood in awe beneath dozens of pulsing golden fans, Wallace became the first naturalist ever to observe the mating ritual of the Greater Bird of Paradise, unaware of the scope of destruction to come. The “civilized man” he feared was already gnawing at the edge of those virgin forests. In ports throughout the archipelago, commercial hunters and traders exchanged sacks of the dead birds with outstretched plumes, slaughtered at the peak of mating season to feed a marketplace that was taking root in the West.
After twenty million years, their predators were on their way.
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• • •
For the next five years, Wallace spent months at a time in intense privation in the tropical depths of the Malay Archipelago, crammed into shacks, methodically netting, bagging, bottling, skinning, labeling, and studying the minutest variations between specimens.
He had set up a home base on the small island of Ternate, seven hundred miles north of Aru, renting a forty-square-foot house on the outskirts of the island’s main town. After exhausting expeditions, he luxuriated in the comfort of his hut, with verandas on either side framed with palms, a deep well with pure, cold water, and a nearby grove of durian and mango trees. He planted a small garden of pumpkins and onion and was reinvigorated by the steady supply of fish and meat.
But at the start of 1858, he found himself again stricken, this time with a malarial fever. Despite the 90-degree heat, he wrapped himself in a blanket and began to sweat. In his fevered state, he thought about the question that had first sent him trekking into the Amazon, on the origin of new species. What had caused the emergence of so many unique and extravagantly different Bird of Paradise species, thirty-nine in all? Were they purely the result of external conditions, like flood and drought? What caused one species to outnumber another? He recalled the “positive checks” to the growth of human populations—war, disease, infertility, and famine—described in 1798 by Thomas Malthus in “An Essay on the Principle of Population,” and he considered how they might apply to animals. Since they typically bred much more quickly than humans, animals would have overcrowded the planet were it not for similar Malthusian checks. “Vaguely thinking over the enormous and constant destruction which this implied,” Wallace continued, “it occurred to me to ask the question, Why did some die and some live? And the answer was clearly, that on the whole the best fitted live. From the effects of disease the most healthy escaped; from enemies, the strongest, the swiftest, or most cunning; from famine, the best hunters.”
Two hours into his malarial episode, Wallace was racing toward a complete theory of natural selection, until “it suddenly flashed upon me that this self-acting process would necessarily improve the race, because in every generation the inferior would inevitably be killed off and the superior would remain—that is, the fittest would survive.” He thought of the specimens he’d gathered from forests and jungles that had been changed constantly by rising and falling sea levels, climate change and drought, and realized that he had “found the long-sought-for law of nature.”
Wallace waited anxiously for the fever to break so he could start capturing his thoughts on paper. Over the next two nights, he sketched out his theory, which he excitedly addressed to the man he most revered: Charles Darwin. “I wrote a letter,” he later recalled, “in which I said I hoped the idea would be as new to him as it was to me, and that it would supply the missing factor to explain the origin of species.”
On June 18, 1858, Charles Darwin wrote in his journal: “interrupted by letter from AR Wallace.” As he read Wallace’s paper, he realized with mounting dread that the self-taught naturalist, thirteen years his junior, had independently arrived at the same theory he’d been quietly nurturing for decades. “I never saw a more striking coincidence,” he wrote in a letter to his friend, the geologist Sir Charles Lyell. “Even his terms now stand as heads of my chapters,” referring to the book on natural selection he’d been drafting.
“So all my originality, whatever it may amount to, will be smashed,” Darwin wrote, confessing that while he hadn’t been planning on publishing his own theory yet, he felt compelled to by the appearance of Wallace’s paper. Then again, he did not want to be accused of intellectual theft. “It seems hard on me that I should be thus compelled to lose my priority of many years’ standing,” he wrote, but “I would far rather burn my whole book, than that he or any other man should think that I had behaved in a paltry spirit.”
Wallace was searching for more Birds of Paradise in New Guinea when Darwin’s allies in the scientific establishment settled upon a plan to resolve the question of who rightfully deserved to be credited as the originator of the theory at a meeting of the Linnean Society, the world’s oldest consortium of biologists.
On July 1, 1858, a letter from Lyell was read before the society: “These gentlemen, having, independently and unknown to one another, conceived the same very ingenious theory to account for the appearance and perpetuation of varieties and of specific forms on our planet, may both fairly claim the merit of being original thinkers in this important line of inquiry.” Lyell then shone the spotlight on his friend: an abstract of an essay Darwin had written in 1844 was read first, followed by a summary of a letter Darwin had sent to the American botanist Asa Gray in 1857. Wallace’s paper was read last, almost as an afterthought.
When Wallace returned to his home base in Ternate, he found a pile of letters waiting for him. “I have received letters from Mr. Darwin and Dr. Hooker, two of the most eminent naturalists in England, which has highly gratified me,” he eagerly informed his mother, mentioning that the paper he’d written had been read at the Linnean Society. “This assures me the acquaintance and assistance of these eminent men on my return home,” he beamed. He proudly asked his specimen agent to buy a dozen copies of the Linnean Society’s journal, then set off on another collecting expedition.
* * *
• • •
Wallace would spend several more years in the Malay Archipelago before completing his itinerary. Over an eight-year period, he had boxed up 310 mammals, 100 reptiles, 7,500 shells, 13,100 moths and butterflies, 83,200 beetles, and 13,400 other insects. But what he prized most were the 8,050 birds he captured, skinned, and shielded from hungry ants, maggots, and rangy dogs before shipping them ten thousand miles to his specimen agent in London, who set aside several thousand for research and sold the rest to the British Museum. By his own estimate, Wallace traveled 14,100 miles within the Malay Archipelago over the course of sixty or seventy separate collecting expeditions. Of the eight years, a full two had been spent in transit.
Wallace dreamed of returning to London with a living Bird of Paradise, but his attempts at caring for them always ended badly. Whenever a hunter brought one to him, flapping in a sack or tethered to a stick, he would deposit the worried bird in a large bamboo cage he’d built, with troughs for fruit and water. Despite treating it to grasshoppers and boiled rice, the result was always the same: on the first day, it fluttered frantically against its confinement. On the second day, it barely moved. On the third, he found it dead on the cage floor. Sometimes the bird convulsed violently before tumbling lifeless from its perch. Of ten living birds, not one survived in Wallace’s care into the fourth day.
So when he heard a rumor that a European merchant in Singapore had successfully caged two young male Birds of Paradise, he curtailed his plans to spend several more months collecting in Sumatra and paid £100 for the pair. If they survived the journey back, they would be the first live Birds of Paradise ever to reach Europe.
During the seven-week return voyage, he had “endless trouble & great anxiety” sustaining them. By the time the steamer approached Suez, his supply of bananas and cockroaches, gathered by the fistful in Bombay, had dwindled, forcing him to slip into the storeroom to sweep roaches into an empty biscuit tin. He nervously shielded the birds from sea spray and cold drafts, riding with them in the train’s chilly baggage c
ar across the desert from the Red Sea to Alexandria. In Malta, he obtained a fresh crop of roaches and melons to tide the birds over until the next resupply in Paris. When at last he arrived at the British port of Folkestone on March 31, 1862, eight years after departing for the Malay Archipelago, he telegrammed the Zoological Society: “I have great pleasure in announcing to you the prosperous termination of my journey and the safe arrival in England (I suppose for the first time) of the Birds of Paradise.”
* * *
–
By the time of Wallace’s return, Darwin was already famous the world over for “his” theory of natural selection; his Origin of Species in its third printing. If Wallace was bitter about Darwin’s elevation, he never revealed it. The scientific establishment now fully embraced him: he was elected an honorary member of the British Ornithological Union and named a fellow of the Zoological Society. The biologist Thomas Huxley declared, “Once in a generation, a Wallace may be found physically, mentally, and morally qualified to wander unscathed through the tropical wilds . . . to form magnificent collections as he wanders; and withal to think out sagaciously the conclusions suggested by his collections.” John Gould, England’s most renowned ornithologist, declared Wallace’s specimens “perfect”—a boon for future research.
He settled into a house in Regent’s Park not far from his Birds of Paradise, which drew large crowds at the Zoological Gardens. He bought the most comfortable easy chair he could find for his study and summoned a carpenter to construct a long table, where he began the process of sorting through the teetering boxes of specimens and making notes for a memoir about his travels.
Six years later he completed The Malay Archipelago: The Land of the Orang-utan, and the Bird of Paradise, one of the greatest-selling travel narratives of all time. He dedicated the book to Darwin, “as a token of personal esteem and friendship, but also to express my deep admiration for his genius and his works.” In a letter to Henry Bates, who first traveled to the Amazon with Wallace, Darwin wrote that “what strikes me most about Mr. Wallace is the absence of jealousy towards me: he must have a really good honest & noble disposition. A far higher merit than mere intellect.”
Wallace’s extraordinary achievement in deducing the role of evolution through natural selection has been largely forgotten. But his relentless attention to the geographic distribution of species—enabled by meticulous details on specimen tags—eventually shored up his legacy as the founder of a new field of scientific inquiry: biogeography. The deepwater strait between Bali and Lombok, which he realized formed a dividing line between species found upon the Australian and Asian continental shelves, now appears on maps as “the Wallace Line.” Unfurling eastward across the Malay Archipelago is a 130,000-square-mile biogeographical zone now known as Wallacea.
In all his travels, Wallace captured only five of the thirty-nine known species of Birds of Paradise, one of which, Semioptera wallacii, now bears his name. In an 1863 paper, he explained why he went to such lengths to gather specimens, describing each species as “the individual letters which go to make up one of the volumes of our earth’s history; and, as a few lost letters make a sentence unintelligible, so the extinction of the numerous forms of life which the progress of cultivation invariably entails will necessarily render obscure this invaluable record of the past.”
To prevent the loss of the earth’s deep history, Wallace implored the British government to stockpile within its museum as many specimens as possible, “where they may be available for study and interpretation.” The bird skins surely held answers to questions that scientists didn’t yet know to ask, and they must be protected at all costs.
“If this is not done,” he warned, “future ages will certainly look back upon us as a people so immersed in the pursuit of wealth as to be blind to higher considerations. They will charge us with having culpably allowed the destruction of some of those records of Creation which we had it in our power to preserve.” He challenged the antievolution religionists, “professing to regard every living thing as the direct handiwork and best evidence of a Creator, yet, with a strange inconsistency, seeing many of them perish irrecoverably from the face of the earth, uncared for and unknown.”
Upon Wallace’s death in 1913, the British Museum added to its large collection of his specimens by buying those that had been sold to various private collectors. Deep within the stone and terra-cotta womb of the museum, the curatorial staff unpacked and arranged Wallace’s birds neatly in storage cabinets, alongside Darwin’s finches. Here was a male King Bird of Paradise from the Aru Islands, captured outside the village of Wanumbai in February 1857, just north of the River Watelai at 5°S, 134°E, at 138 feet above sea level. Just as there would never be another Wallace, there could never be another specimen bearing such biological data. The curators protecting these specimens would train apprentices before retiring, just as their replacements would mentor the next generation.
But the threats to their preservation intruded at once. At the outbreak of the First World War, two years after Wallace’s death, German Zeppelins drifting silently eleven thousand feet overhead dumped 186,830 pounds of bombs over London and the coast. At the start of the Second World War’s Blitz, the German Luftwaffe unloaded a hail of bombs over the city for fifty-seven consecutive nights. The British Museum was hit some twenty-eight times; the botany department was nearly destroyed, and the geology department saw hundreds of skylights and windows blown out. The museum’s staff resiliently worked throughout the night to sweep away the damage, but it was clear that their specimens were imperiled.
To protect them from Hitler’s bombers, the curators secreted Wallace’s and Darwin’s bird skins in unmarked lorries to manors and mansions throughout the English countryside. Among the safe houses was a private museum in the tiny town of Tring, built by one of the richest men in history as a twenty-first-birthday present for his son. Lionel Walter Rothschild would grow up to earn many distinctions: the Right Honorable Lord, Baron de Rothschild, member of Parliament, adulterer, blackmail victim, and one of the most tragically obsessive bird collectors ever to roam the earth.
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LORD ROTHSCHILD’S MUSEUM
In 1868, as Wallace was finishing up The Malay Archipelago, Walter Rothschild was born into what one historian described as the richest family in human history. His great-grandfather is credited with founding modern banking. His grandfather helped finance the British government’s stake in the company that built the Suez Canal. His father was friends with princes and routinely consulted by heads of state. Walter, by contrast, consorted with dead animals.
When he was four, the Rothschilds moved into Tring Park, a 600-acre expanse anchored by a mansion of red brick and stone. Three years later, while on an afternoon stroll with his German governess, young Walter came across the workshop of Alfred Minall, a construction worker who dabbled in taxidermy. For an hour, the boy watched him skin a mouse, transfixed by the menagerie of taxidermy creatures and birds cluttering the cottage. At afternoon tea, the seven-year-old stood to make a sudden pronouncement to his parents: “Mama, Papa. I am going to make a Museum and Mr. Minall is going to help me look after it.”
Terrified of infectious diseases, drafts, and sunstrokes, his mother kept him confined to the family estate at Tring Park. Walter, chubby and afflicted with a speech impediment, did not play with boys his age. Instead, he darted around with an oversize butterfly net, pinning his quarry to bits of cork. By fourteen, he had a large staff at his disposal to aid in his obsessive collecting of insects, blowing eggs, and ordering rare birds. He arrived at the University of Cambridge with a large flock of kiwis, logging an underwhelming pair of years before returning to the security of his burgeoning natural history collection at Tring. His father had long hoped his firstborn’s obsession with the natural world might fade, allowing him to assume his role in the financial realm as a Rothschild, but it only seemed to intensify. By twenty, he’d accumulated some forty-six thousand
specimens. For a twenty-first-birthday present, his father built him the only thing he seemed to want: his own museum, erected in a corner of Tring Park.
Walter was compelled by his father to try his hand at banking at the N. M. Rothschild and Sons New Court headquarters in London, but he was miserably out of place. Six foot three, three hundred pounds, with a stutter, he was nervous around others, but as soon as he returned to the museum after a day’s work, he relaxed and bubbled with enthusiasm over the latest acquisitions. In 1892, when he was twenty-four, the Walter Rothschild Zoological Museum on Akeman Street in Tring was opened to the public. The museum soon attracted thirty thousand visitors each year, a staggering figure for a small-town museum in those days but a sign of the voracious public appetite for the strange and exotic. Floor-to-ceiling glass cases were filled with stuffed polar bears, rhinoceroses, penguins, elephants, crocodiles, and Birds of Paradise. Taxidermy sharks hung from chains overhead. Outside, a zoo of living animals wandered the grounds of Tring Park: fallow deer, kangaroos, cassowaries, emus, tortoises, and a horse-zebra cross called the zebroid. Lucky visitors caught glimpses of Rothschild astride Rotumah, the 150-year-old Galápagos tortoise he’d sprung loose from an insane asylum in Australia.
Rothschild sported a jaunty Vandyke and bowled around the building “like a grand piano on castors.” He paid no attention to the museum’s budget, buying up specimens like an addict, unwrapping package after package of skins, eggs, beetles, butterflies, and moths sent by an army of nearly four hundred collectors throughout the world. And while he had an exceptional eye for the minutest details of a rare bird skin, he was a disaster when it came to the daily tasks of running a museum and such a large network of collectors. For years, he carelessly threw bills and other correspondence into a large wicker basket. Once it was full, he padlocked it shut and found another one.
The Feather Thief Page 4