In Amazonia

by Raffles, Hugh

  Bates was an unlikely figure to be keeping such elevated company.9 Rising from unglamorous beginnings as a provincial amateur naturalist, he trained himself in the rudiments of scientific methodology by stealing time from apprenticeship in a hosiery warehouse. He worked the long but standard hours of artisans and the lower middle class—arriving to sweep out at 7:00 A.M. and finishing at 8:00 in the evening, six days a week—and he read and studied voraciously, closely following ideas current in the social theory, politics, and natural history of the day.10 With Wallace, he debated Malthus’ Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830–33) and its appended summary of Lamarck’s theory of the transmutation of species, Robert Chambers’ Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), Humboldt’s Personal Narrative (1816–34), Darwin’s Voyage of the ‘Beagle’ (1839), and, eventually—and decisively—William H. Edwards’ A Voyage Up the River Amazon, Including a Residence at Pará (1847).11 By the time they left Liverpool in April 1848, ambitious and energized and bound for Pará, the two young naturalists had definite ideas about the possibilities of tropical adventure: their journey would solve the mystery of the origin of species.

  Science was a recognized avenue of social mobility at a moment of unprecedented upheaval in industrializing British society.12 Nonetheless, for men in their early 20s with little formal education, few connections, and no money to speak of, this was a presumptuous agenda. The established scientific hierarchies sanctioned a clear and subordinate role for the self-educated enthusiast, the amateur lacking the cultural capital to penetrate the elite institutions then proliferating professional procedure. Needless to say, there was little encouragement to theory-making. Field-naturalists like Bates and Wallace were infantrymen in the taxonomic war on natural disorder, their spoils supplying armchair savants with the exotic specimens that crowded the natural history cabinet. And, as we might expect, the achievement in crossing class lines was to be recurrently complicated by compromise. Once Bates took up his post at the RGS, his original writing was largely restricted to narrowly focused (although massive) exercises in insect classification. The remainder of his scholarly work was editing. He compiled a richly illustrated six-volume compendium of travel and natural history vignettes, managed the Society’s two journals, made newly available a number of classics of Victorian geography, and oversaw the publication of other people’s exploration narratives.13 Writing Bates’ obituary in Nature, Wallace complained that onerous administrative duties had impeded his friend’s ability to contribute to natural history and had destroyed an already frail constitution.14

  Despite lacking formal qualifications, Bates was a graduate of the rich tradition of popular education flourishing in early-nineteenth-century Britain. Although he left school at age 13 to enter apprenticeship, he managed to assemble the basis of a natural historian’s education by attending night classes at the Leicester branch of the Mechanics’ Institutes. Bodies such as these formed the most visible expression of a vigorous culture of radical self-improvement among English artisans during the first half of the nineteenth century, a period in which, in E. P. Thompson’s words, “the towns, and even the villages, hummed with the energy of the autodidact.”15

  Part of this energy was invested in the spread of provincial popular science and, in particular, in the growth of local natural historical field societies emphasizing informality and low subscription rates. Open to men and women, these clubs rapidly became both popular and fashionable, and their outings as much social as scientific events. Botanical collecting and the pleasurable field excursion, previously rather eccentric occupations, became increasingly acceptable ways of spending free time as field equipment was produced in more affordable forms, and the democratic implications of Linnaean binomialism became apparent in field guides that came out in portable editions.16 Bates explored Charnwood Forest with a homemade butterfly net, foraging with his brother Frederick on the property of the Earl of Stamford, “who did not strictly preserve for game,” and steadily building his private natural history cabinet.17

  Bates’ parents were staunch Unitarians, and their four sons grew up in the midst of the Dissenting tradition that throve with particular vitality in the northern and Midlands textile trades. Strongly ethical, solidaristic, and experimentally communitarian, rational in its theology, progressivist in its enthusiasm for science, and activist in its commitment to civil and religious liberties, Unitarianism was also wracked by internal division and subject to political appropriation by more orthodox reformist tendencies in the rising middle class.18 If Thompson has justly celebrated the tumult of the industrializing period from 1780 up to the reforms of 1832 as revelatory of the crosscutting cultural richness of class-in-the-making, we should not forget that the succeeding decades of the 1830s and 1840s were when the hatches were battened down, grueling depression set in, and we witness the destruction of “pre-industrial traditions [that] could not keep their heads above the … rising level of industrial society.”19 As local clubs and societies lost their economic base, popular scientific education became increasingly sporadic and dependent on middle-class patronage.20 By the 1830s, the locally set curricula of the Mechanics’ Institutes tended to reflect the aspirations of Noncomformist manufacturers, and orthodox political economy was displacing artisan Radicalism. The Leicester Institute seems to have hung on longer than most—at least judging by its ability to generate opprobrium. In the early 1830s, offended local clergy could still be roused to castigate it as a school “for the diffusion of infidel, republican, and levelling principles.”21

  Wallace, whom Bates befriended in Leicester public library in 1844, was a follower of Robert Owen, the charismatic and paternalist socialist. Owen’s utilitarian and rigorously rational social engineering materialized in the cooperative movement that transformed itself into the organized trades union confederation, and it also inspired and directed the influential utopian “communities of equality” at Orbiston in northern Britain and New Harmony, Indiana. Wallace remained consistently vocal about his Owenism, speaking and publishing on socialist themes throughout his life. Bates’ political convictions were more circumspect, but marginality was similarly a part of his self-fashioning: “A scientific man,” he wrote in his journal, “is not expected to be otherwise than heterodox.”22 And, when it came to sponsoring Peter Kropotkin, whom he met after the charismatic anarchist-geographer’s release from prison in Clairvaux in 1886, Bates could be direct. In his active encouragement of the project that led to Mutual Aid (1902), there is the explicit reassertion of an early cooperative politics in the face of the rising influence of Huxley’s and Spencer’s individualist interpretations of natural selection.23

  As we might expect, then, idealistic political consciousness suffuses the Amazonian accounts of both young naturalists. One way in which it manifests is through the appearance of programmatic and utopian communitarianism in repeated visions of ordered, cooperative European settlement. Wallace, for example, imagines forest plots converted into prosperous mixed-cropping and livestock farms in a tropical version of European smallholder agrarianism. This is no mere reverie, but rather a small-scale blueprint for colonial settlement on the lines of the experimental Owenite communities: “two or three families, containing halfa-dozen working and industrious men and boys, and being able to bring a capital in goods of fifty pounds.” The Radical tenor of the plan is barely concealed:

  The idea of the glorious life which might be led here, free from all the money-matter cares and annoyances of civilization, makes me sometimes doubt, if it would not be wiser to bid [England] adieu forever, and come and live a life of ease and plenty on the Rio Negro.24

  The rationalist utilitarianism of their early ideological formation also feeds a recurring anti-nostalgia that pervades the travel writings of both men. Something approaching poignancy appears in narratives grappling with the need to conventionally understate yet somehow communicate emotional excess. Bates, at the climactic moment of departure from
Amazonia, has a sudden moment of brutal clarity:

  During this last night on the Pará river, a crowd of unusual thoughts occupied my mind. Recollections of English climate, scenery, and modes of life came to me with a vividness I had never before experienced, during the eleven years of my absence. Pictures of startling clearness rose up of the gloomy winters, the long grey twilights, murky atmosphere, elongated shadows, chilly springs, and sloppy summers; of factory chimneys and crowds of grimy operatives, rung to work in early morning by factory bells; of union workhouses, confined rooms, artificial cares and slavish conventionalities. To live again amongst these dull scenes I was quitting a country of perpetual summer, where my life had been spent like that of three-fourths of the people in gipsy fashion, on the endless streams or in the boundless forests.25

  This is an untenable contrast, and it is one to which I will return. Bates moves quickly to defuse this tension with a passage that at once signals the progressivist and determinist limits of a mid-century Radical consciousness saturated by racialized identifications.26 “It was natural to feel a little dismayed at the prospect of so great a change,” he continues,

  but now, after three years of renewed experience of England, I find how incomparably superior is civilized life, where feelings, tastes, and intellect find abundant nourishment, to the sterility of half-savage existence, even though it be passed in the garden of Eden. What has struck me powerfully is the immeasurably greater diversity and interest of human character in a single civilized nation, than in equatorial South America, where three distinct races of man live together.27

  The end of a narrative can be even more diagnostic than those calculated ethnographic moments-of-arrival to which Clifford Geertz has drawn attention.28 Bates’ contrast between (temperate) intellect and (tropical) sensuality was both conventional and definitive, and, as we see below, registers an allegiance to the evolutionism of climatic determinism as well as a susceptibility to the long-standing belief in the “weakness” of America.29 Native Americans, who bathed “as dogs may be seen doing in hot climates,” were simply not in the right place:

  The impression gradually forced itself on my mind that the red Indian lives as a stranger or immigrant in these hot regions, and that his constitution was not originally adapted, and has not since become perfectly adapted to the climate. It is a case of want of fitness; other races of men living on the earth would have been better fitted to enjoy and make use of the rich unappropriated domain. Unlike the lands peopled by Negro and Caucasian, tropical America had no indigenous man thoroughly suited to its conditions, and was therefore peopled by an ill-suited race from another continent.30

  Here was an explicitly formulated environmental determinism that we can readily associate with the simplified materialist theoretical procedure of the Darwinian emphasis on the physical determinants of speciation; a contemporary scientific common sense that gained a persuasiveness and coherence from the alignment of natural selection with the familiar biological hierarchy of race already regulated by Linnaeus, among others. Indeed, it was a reasoning that enabled Bates to find ample evidence that native Americans were constitutionally unsuited to what Humboldt would have considered the encompassing physique générale of the Amazon.

  In contrast, tropical nature is a thing of wonder. Writing to his brother Frederick just two years before he finally left these rivers, Bates apologizes for the brevity of his unflattering description of people in Ega, but “they are so uninteresting and unamiable a set of animals that you must excuse my giving any further account.” Instead, and with deliberate emphasis on the opposition, he continues:

  The charm and glory of the country are its animal and vegetable productions. How inexhaustible is their study! … It is not as in temperate countries (Europe), a forest of oak, or birch, or pine—it is one dense jungle: the lofty forest trees, of vast variety of species, all lashed and connected by climbers, their trunks covered with a museum of ferns, Tillandrias, Arums, Orchids, &c. The underwood consists mostly of younger trees,—great variety of small palms, mimosas, tree-ferns, &c., and the ground is laden with fallen branches,—vast trunks covered with parasites, &c…. One year of daily work is scarcely sufficient to get the majority of species in a district of two miles circuit.31

  With its elegantly heightened language and cascading detail, this is an unmistakably Humboldtian conceit. And it is one that resonates with more than just rhetoric. In a famous passage introducing the Personal Narrative, Humboldt contrasts the experience of voyagers to the New and Old Worlds. He is, he confesses, “fully sensible of the great advantages enjoyed by persons who travel in Greece, Egypt, the banks of the Euphrates, and the islands of the Pacific, in comparison with those who traverse the continent of America.”

  In the Old World, nations and the distinctions of their civilization form the principal points in the picture; in the New World, man and his productions almost disappear amidst the stupendous display of wild and gigantic nature.32

  Bates, too, sees Amazonians fading away in the shadows of a forest that is alternately “interminable,” “glorious,” “sombre and oppressive,” “strange and wonderful,” and “teeming with valuable productions.”33 Yet his understanding of the relationship between people and nature is explicitly contingent on ideas of race and class and modulated by an associated vision—to which only rarely do native Amazonian farmers conform—of the way a rural landscape should be organized. Bates’ imagination dwells in a potent aesthetic of European settlement: individual holdings, fences, gardens, geometric space, monocultural rows, ornamental flowers, and domesticated animals. Resonant images of a simple but honest frontier life build an agrarian narrative that calls up a tradition of European family farming in alien environments—Australia, New Zealand, North America—while, as we have seen, simultaneously incorporating the utopian aspirations of petit-bourgeois dissent. The coherence of this notion of a tamed, morally acceptable nature reordered along utilitarian lines is such that on those occasions Bates does recognize horticultural practices he assesses them by how closely they approximate this regimented norm. Necessarily, such criteria privilege the prosperous. Wealthy farms, and what are considered well-organized holdings, meet with approval. Struggling cattlemen, in contrast, invite scorn for their self-inflicted distress:

  The lazy and ignorant people seem totally unable to profit by these [natural] advantages. The houses have no gardens or plantations near them. I was told it was useless to plant anything, because the cattle devoured the young shoots. In this country grazing and planting are very rarely carried on together, for the people seem to have no notion of enclosing patches of ground for cultivation. They say it is too much trouble to make enclosures.34

  Poor Amazonians’ inability to transcend local nature signifies a moral crisis, and the landscape through which Bates passes references their degeneracy.35 Bates ties what he sees as agrarian disorder to Amazonians’ inability to resist a decadence generated by the easy fertility of nature and the super-abundance of life’s necessities. “The lower classes,” he tells us, “are as indolent and sensual here as in other parts of the province [Pará], a moral condition not to be wondered at in a country where perpetual summer reigns, and where the necessaries of life are so easily obtained.”36

  Nevertheless, there was considerably more to Bates’ Amazonian experience than repetitious complaint might propose. And there are times, even in the retrospection of The Naturalist, when the apparent certainties dissolve and representational hierarchies collapse. In Ega, where he lived long enough to become a familiar sight around town, Bates experiences the dislocation of what Michael Taussig has called “second contact,”37 a moment of carnivalesque subversion that here occurs during a local festa:

  One year an Indian lad imitated me, to the infinite amusement of the townsfolk. He came the previous day to borrow of me an old blouse and straw hat. I felt rather taken in when I saw him, on the night of the performance, rigged out as an entomologist, with an insect net, hunting bag, and
pincushion. To make the imitation complete, he had borrowed the frame of an old pair of spectacles, and went about with it straddled over his nose.38

  It is the sense of disappointment, of trust betrayed and community rebuffed, that makes this moment so troubling—especially so when we realize that these are the very same people whom he has described to Frederick as “taciturn, idle, and phlegmatic; so apathetic that they never appear to feel any of the emotions or affections.”39 As the closing passage of The Naturalist, with its longing invocation of days spent in “gipsy fashion” suggests, his personal engagement is more complex than his theoretical architecture can allow. There is, he had written to his brother, “liberty and independence [in] this kind of life,” and, at times, he is able fluidly to evoke his sense of a hard-won freedom with palpable conviction and an empathy for his Amazonian associates that brings a submerged relativism welling up to the surface of his text.40 We find it in his adoption and subsequent burial—preceded by a controversial public baptism—of a kidnapped Indian child in Ega.41 It is there in his undisguised pleasure on his excursions with local hunters, in the intimate camaraderie and his fascination with their skills. It breaks through in his sensitivity to the generosity of poorly provisioned rural hosts who scramble through their minimal resources to assemble meals for an unexpected guest. It has sufficient substance to signify an alternate structure of feeling that endows his account with the layered richness that can come so powerfully from uncertainty. One such occasion finds him at night sailing on the Rio Tocantins toward the town of Cametá. He has been dozing on deck, wrapped in a sail, listening to the crew talk and sing:

  The canoe-men of the Amazons have many songs and choruses, with which they are in the habit of relieving the monotony of their slow voyages, and which are known all over the interior. The choruses consist of a simple strain, repeated almost to weariness, and sung generally in unison, but sometimes with an attempt at harmony. There is a wildness and sadness about the tunes which harmonise well with, and in fact are born of, the circumstances of the canoe-man’s life: the echoing channels, the endless gloomy forest, the solemn nights, and the desolate scenes of broad and stormy waters and falling banks…. I fell asleep about ten o’clock, but at four in the morning John Mendez [the pilot] woke me to enjoy the sight of the little schooner tearing through the waves before a spanking breeze. The night was transparently clear and almost cold, the moon appeared sharply defined against the dark blue sky, and a ridge of foam marked where the prow of the vessel was cleaving its way through the water. The men had made a fire in the galley to make tea of an acid herb called erva cidreira, a quantity of which they had gathered in the last landing-place, and the flames sparkled cheerily upwards. It is at such times as these that Amazons travelling is enjoyable, and one no longer wonders at the love which many, both natives and strangers, have for this wandering life. The little schooner sped steadily on, with booms bent and sails stretched to the utmost. Just as day dawned, we ran with scarcely slackened speed into the port of Cametá, and cast anchor.42