MOLT’S IDEAL was not without precedent. Natural history had always been an outsourced business. Someone had to fill the cabinets of curiosity, to steal the world from the world and bring it back, or no one would believe it.
Even Carolus Linnaeus had his students do the collecting for him. Of the seventeen young men who scoured the earth for the Swede, whose own farthest journey was to Lapland, just over half survived their travels, and one went mad. The students died of malaria in Java, North Africa, and Guyana; of fever in the East Indies, tuberculosis in Turkey; gastroenteritis in Guinea; suicide on a Russian steppe. None of this discouraged their successors as the centuries wore on, as the royal cabinets grew into royal museums and as wars and revolutions opened those museums to the public, which only wanted to see more specimens. The trouble was, collecting them required a tougher constitution than most of the leaf-sketching aristocrats who walked those museum halls possessed. In 1819 France’s Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, insatiable in its appetite for life pickled, pressed, mounted, and dried, began training young men from working-class families as traveling naturalists, who would shoot, label, and preserve on behalf of those who preferred not to. It sent these mercenaries of natural history to Madagascar, India, and Australia, where they, too, often met splendid misfortunes. Many of the young travelers hoped that this route would provide them a back door into science, but generally, if they were lucky, they found work as taxidermists. There simply weren’t enough museum jobs to go around, and the well-born occupied the best posts.
Natural history’s class divide deepened as the traveling field men, the shooters and baggers, came to view themselves as the true naturalists. They saw life in the field, with its complex interactions, whereas all that happened in museums, sneered the English collector Philip Gosse, was that “distorted things are described, their scales, plates, feathers counted; their forms copied, all shriveled and stiffened as they are; their colours, changed and modified by death or partial decay, carefully set down; their limbs, members, and organs measured and the results recorded in thousandths of an inch; two names are given to every one; the whole is enveloped in a mystic cloud of Graeco-Latino-English phraseology … and this is Natural History!”
But the museum men kept wanting, so the collectors kept collecting. Natural history became a veritable industry as the Victorian age advanced, with elite taxidermy firms holding their own stables of collectors, steering them toward the profitable species, those the museums most desired.
Were it not for such firms, a young Alfred Russel Wallace might well have remained a frustrated lecturer at the Victorian equivalent of a community college, pinning the beetles of Leicester and reading Charles Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle as he drifted off to sleep. It was Samuel Stevens, a specimen dealer, whom the twenty-four-year-old Wallace approached in 1847 about an expedition to Brazil to collect insects that Stevens would sell to the British Museum.
Seven years had passed since Charles Darwin, born into the Wedgwood pottery fortune, had secured his fame and a permanent seat among the science Brahmins of London with an account of his Beagle journey, nearly a year of which was spent in Brazil. Wallace, a middle-class amateur, could hope to make a similar trip only by collecting for money. His three-year turn in Brazil was marred by heartbreaking setbacks—shipments held up at ports for his failure to bribe, and a cargo fire that destroyed all his specimens and his notes. In 1855, Wallace was back in the field, collecting for Stevens in the Malay Archipelago, when he mailed to Stevens a rather ambitious-sounding monograph, “On the Law Which Has Regulated the Introduction of New Species.” The obscure specimen collector, on the fringes of science, had touched upon the mechanism by which species changed or died off, edging close to Darwin’s still-unpublished theory of natural selection.
In February 1858, while shooting birds of paradise in eastern Indonesia, Wallace contracted malaria. In the ensuing fevers, he seized on what he needed to round out his theory, which he drafted in two days and mailed to Charles Darwin, whom he greatly admired, for an opinion. It had been a century since Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae had attempted to put Creation in order; here, Wallace laid bare its secret law. The life of wild animals, wrote Wallace, is a “ ‘struggle for existence,’ in which the weakest and least perfectly organized must always succumb.”
What happened next is well-known: The similarities caused Darwin and his colleagues to panic. The result was a hasty joint reading of both men’s works at the Linnaean Society in London, an arrangement that protected the “priority” of Darwin’s theory while acknowledging Wallace’s independent formulation of a like one.
When Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life was published in 1859, Wallace was back in the jungle, skinning his primates, pinning and labeling his insects. He had a living to make. Six years later, he was still in Borneo, shooting orangutans for Stevens. In May 1865, he wrote: “I found another, which behaved in a similar manner, howling and hooting with rage, and throwing down branches. I shot it five times, and it remained dead on the tree … I preserved the skin of this specimen in a cask of arrack, and prepared a perfect skeleton, which afterwards was purchased for the Derby Museum.”
By his final return, Wallace had amassed some 125,000 specimens, 1,000 of them new to science.
At the dawn of the twentieth century, Darwin was dead, Wallace surveyed his gardens from a wheelchair, and the specimen collectors continued in the perilous ministry of science, skinning and preserving for their distant patrons. England’s Walter Rothschild, the most prodigious, generous, and voracious museum man who ever lived, employed no fewer than four hundred—this not counting the insect men—to fill his personal zoo and museum in Hertfordshire. Most of Rothschild’s field men were also adventurers of limited means, who died now and then of typhoid, cholera, dysentery, and yellow fever; one had his arm bitten off by a leopard. Rothschild’s niece and biographer, Miriam Rothschild, worried for them. “[If] they survived the occupational health hazards of their trade, they seemed to lose much of their joie de vivre as time went by,” she wrote. “Bouts of fever and other tropical diseases undermined their constitution, and they lost their sense of well being. Furthermore they were rarely able to save any money for an honourable retirement, and the life they led did not fit them for so-called civilization.”
When specimen mania leaped, like a long-reaching brush fire, to the New World, the same roughed-up collectors came to work for American institutions. America’s natural history craze had been delayed by the Civil War, and in the years after it ended, new museums and zoos went up fast. The scramble for specimens was every bit as intense as it had been in Europe. But at least there was a place for the field men in America. With no scientific aristocracy firmly established, anyone was free to take part. P. T. Barnum, a museum man before he was ever a circus man, promoted natural history like some sort of patent medicine, a cure for the discontents of an industrial age, and though Barnum’s version of natural history included taxidermic hoaxes like his “Feejee mermaid,” a fish sewn to a monkey, he forged lifelong ties with the curators at the Smithsonian, Harvard, and the American Museum of Natural History, donating dead animals to them and underwriting their expeditions. When William Temple Hornaday, a specimen collector, buffalo hunter, and the Smithsonian’s chief taxidermist for a time, started the National Zoo, he brought Barnum on as a consultant. The zoo’s head keeper was hired away from Barnum’s circus.
In 1906, Hornaday left Washington to build the Bronx Zoo, where he added to its exhibits a vast number of horns and mounted heads. The horn craze had started in England, with trophies from African safaris, but it suited America, where natural history was fast becoming a more macho affair. The eighteenth-century naturalist wandering the Jardin des Plantes, filling notebooks with musings on lichens—this would not do. The new naturalist was rugged to the extreme. The Nile and the Amazon were no objects to him, and he emphasized, over all el
se, the dangers of his journeys: glaring lions, flesh-munching piranhas. The new naturalist was meaty, bass-voiced, the fictional Professor Challenger of A. Conan Doyle; or he was like the real-life Theodore Roosevelt, a hybrid of naturalist and sportsman: fearless, yet virtuous. Not content with merely shooting and stuffing, he brought the best of his animals back alive.
The next crop of field men embraced the new ideal, and then some. In the 1920s and ’30s Frank Buck, of Gainesville, Texas, wore a mustache and pith helmet and collected for American zoos their tigers, snow leopards, pygmy water buffaloes, and crocodiles. This involved substantial risks in the days before tranquilizer darts, and Buck’s adventures building traps and bossing around natives became fodder for his wildly popular, if ghostwritten, books. Buck’s formal education had ended in middle school, a fact he was always touchy about, but he called himself a scientist when it suited him. In Bring ’Em Back Alive, Buck explained why he deserved the title, disparaging the museum men like his forebears a century earlier:
I know a man on the staff of a great museum who by the hour can trace back for centuries the feathered ancestors of birds that I have collected by the thousand … This man is an authority even though he has never left the United States. He is primarily a student. I am a student, too, but in a different way. I have had to make a study of such hard-boiled details of the collecting business as the best way to get a snarling tiger out of a pit cage without getting messed up in the process, how to transfer a murderous king cobra from a crude native container to a modern snake box.
Rather than shirk from the field men’s affronts, the museum men just borrowed their testosterone.
As a very young man, Raymond L. Ditmars had toiled unhappily in the entomology department of the American Museum of Natural History, starved for adventure, labeling insects and keeping a live rattlesnake on his desk, waiting for the day the museum opened a reptile department. But the museum was slow to do that, and Ditmars quit in frustration. Ditmars’s friends feared that he’d thumbed his nose at the scientific establishment a tad rashly for a young man with only a high school degree, at a time when college was starting to mean something at zoos and museums. In 1899 Ditmars was relieved to be hired by W. T. Hornaday as the Bronx Zoo’s first curator of reptiles.
Within a decade Ditmars had penned two books: Snakes of the World and Reptiles of the World. Theodore Roosevelt, president at the time, liked them enough to send Ditmars a letter, but they were dry, survey-like volumes, nothing to read with a flashlight under the covers. Then, in the early 1930s, Ditmars retooled the same books into wild collecting yarns that proved far more popular.
Stretched in undulating fashion in the trunk of a fallen tree, lay the big “cotton-mouth.” Huge he looked in the light of our lamp, his sides showing olive green, while the rough scales of the back seemed as black as velvet. Slowly turning toward the boat he gave us a glassy stare and a flash of forked tongue. It was easy work slipping a noose over that wicked head, when we swung him, writhing furiously, into the boat.
A strong odor of Frank Buck now permeated Ditmars’s prose. Indeed Ditmars and Buck knew each other well. Buck collected for the Bronx Zoo and boasted in his books of his services to “Dr. Ditmars, America’s greatest reptile authority.” And Buck had taught Ditmars that in the public imagination, the quest for the specimens mattered more than the specimens themselves.
By the time Ditmars died, in 1942, the great museum and zoo expeditions had ended. Museums found themselves bloated with specimens, some of which were burned deliberately in bonfires. Specimen collecting, one of the few reliable business opportunities natural history had ever provided, had become unprofitable and in certain cases illegal. Few of America’s once-copious taxidermy firms survived the Second World War.
But Ditmars’s fraying, yellowing volumes long outlived their author. The reptile curators at the new zoos had devoured them in their youth; a young Hank Molt all but memorized them.
In the long-reaching light of the Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania, middle school library, Molt had read his favorite part of Ditmars’s autobiography, Thrills of a Naturalist’s Quest, over and over. In it, a teenage Ditmars, alone in his parents’ attic, opens his first crate of serpents, fresh off a ship from Trinidad: a rat snake, a tree snake, a coral snake, a fer-de-lance, and finally a very large and deadly bushmaster, which Ditmars pauses, appropriately enough, before unveiling: “It made considerable displacement in the bag, and where its sides pressed outwardly upon the cloth, rough scales showed through like the surface of a pine cone …”
“When he opened that box I was right there beside him,” Molt said. “Each snake was a ceremony, a transformation.” He stole the book.
In his high school years, Molt made contact with the surviving contemporaries of Ditmars and Buck, adopting, gradually, the posture of a sophisticated herpetologist. He wrote Roger Conant, the Philadelphia Zoo’s curator of reptiles, to request information about rat snakes—specifically, how he could get some. Conant advised that the fifteen-year-old Molt try to “get into the country, far away from Philadelphia, and take a look.” But at fifteen one cannot get far away from anything, and all Molt had were his books.
“Ditmars working in the museum for ten cents a day, with all these stern people,” Molt said. “Frank Buck going to get rhinos or elephants ninety fucking years ago, when there was no treatment for malaria, just some gin and tonics when you got a chance. Overcoming these odds like they were nothing.” They were inspiration enough.
MOLT QUIT Kraft Foods. With his mother-in-law’s money, he bought a pet store in the northern suburbs of Philadelphia. He sold puppies and kittens and continued to receive his special packages from Melbourne and from Maggia, Switzerland. In September 1966, he mailed to zoos a mimeographed sheet introducing himself as Henry A. Molt, Jr., proprietor of the Pet Emporium: “We specialize in rare and unusual reptiles and are currently importing many species seldom seen in captivity! Are you interested in specimens from Madagascar, Australia, New Guinea, Israel, North Africa, Ghana, Thailand, Argentina, and Peru to mention several?” On the back he listed the thirty-five species he had.
“Within days the phone started ringing off the hook at my parents’ house,” Molt said. He made up his prices on the spot, and they were outrageous. The zoos were not deterred. They could spend months negotiating, with meager success, for Australian export permits, or they could pay through the nose. Molt, who had earned $400 a month at Kraft, made $5,000 that week. He never sent out another mailing as the Pet Emporium. From now on he was the Philadelphia Reptile Exchange.
Molt quickly gained repute as a boutique dealer, someone with excellent taste, if such a thing can be said, in reptiles. In list after list, Molt increasingly made mention of his animals’ aesthetic “perfection.” “To all Zoological Parks & Museums,” he began his mailings. “Enclosed you will find our latest listing of reptiles. Unless noted otherwise all specimens are perfect display quality.” He joined the American Association of Zoological Parks and Aquariums and learned to play the curators well, seeking animals that would foster competition and garner high prices. The Carnegie Museum bought any of his reptiles that died.
With each list, Molt’s descriptions grew longer and more emphatic: “Calabar’s ground python (Calabaria reinhardti) VERY RARE!! Burrowing python from limited range in West Africa. Gun metal blue and brick red, $200. Australian water python (Liasis f. fuscus) rich glossy brown with bright apricot belly, rare in U.S. Zoological collections, collected in N. Queensland, Aust. $325.” Some of his animals were so seldom seen that he had to describe what they ate, the natural landscape they inhabited, or the dead museum specimen from which they were known. He did nothing to hide the fact that his best specimens were taken in violation of foreign laws.
Which wasn’t, at the time, much of an issue. In the mid-1960s, little thought was given to regulating the animal trade, a business that was “totally devoid of conscience in those days,” Molt said. A gorilla was about the only animal that required
a special permit to import. Medical research labs, carnivals, game farms, and pet stores relied on cheap and copious imports of wild animals. The animals were transshipped through import firms in Florida, giant wholesale warehouses where nursing baby monkeys were crated without their mothers, parrots came in with half the box dead, and profits were made by drastically marking up what survived. Some two million reptiles were imported every year through these channels, and though the vast majority were farmed baby turtles meant for dime stores, the rest were wild. Stressed, dehydrated, and full of parasites, few survived far past the point of sale. That the animal trade could be cruel and wasteful was not news to members of conservation groups like the Audubon Society and the newly formed World Wildlife Fund, which were pressuring governments to curtail it. But a middle-class family could still return from Florida in those years with a baby alligator, and once in a while a forklift driver at an airport would drop a whole crate of monkeys, sending blood and entrails all over the place.
Only smuggling animals from one of the few “closed” countries, like Australia or Mexico, violated federal law, and that law was the Lacey Act, a largely forgotten turn-of-the-century hunting statute that made it illegal to import game, live or dead, in contravention of a foreign law.
So Molt saw little cause for restraint. His zookeeper in Melbourne scheduled the big shipments of snakes, lizards, and turtles for around Christmas, when postal and cargo workers were overwhelmed. If a shipment contained venomous snakes, the package was mislabeled on the outside. Inside was a warning sticker, “in case the guy got bit,” Molt said. “If they opened it that much we were fucked anyway.”
Every year Molt’s ledgers grew longer. With the exception of a woman wrestler who slept with snakes in her bed, his big customers were all zoos. The Houston Zoo bought four thousand dollars’ worth of animals from Molt in 1968, when a Triumph Roadster cost three thousand. Roger Conant, whom Molt had only a few years before pressed for a job, wrote Molt that the Philadelphia Zoo’s old reptile house was being torn down to make room for a bigger one with a crocodile-filled “jungle river,” among other marvels. “We will be in the market for many things,” Conant told Molt, “and perhaps you might be able to help us obtain them.”
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