In Amazonia

by Raffles, Hugh

  There is, for sure, a loneliness in this gipsy life, but it nonetheless has a special appeal for Bates. How should we understand its charms? We need to think again about his feelings on the eve of departure from Pará or, at least, his representation of them as he closes The Naturalist and meditates on the appeal of a vagabond existence. In the aftermath of so many complaints about the indolence of Amazonian people, in the midst of his stark vision of industrial England, and as a conclusion to an account that can have left no reader in doubt as to the heroic character of his collecting efforts, his wistful appeal to another way of life finds him looking both apprehensively forward and fretfully back. On this last evening on the Amazon, Bates’ anti-nostalgia draws on the grim figure of the industrial Midlands landscape that embodies so many anxieties about his future prospects. It is a gloom brimming with tentative, defeated forebodings that even should he escape the hosiery workshop for which he has been raised, the scientific reward he craves for these eleven years of Amazonian hardship is no more than a sweetly poisoned chalice, promising only a life forever cut off from the entomologizing pleasures from which he is to sail in the morning. At this moment of crisis, there is—just for an instant—a final chance to reconcile with that transcendent yearning insistently loosening the clutch of his stubborn reproduction of alterity. For one final moment, he frees himself from his disdain for indolence and envies that fabled three-fourths of Amazonians living free of slavish conventionality. Then, with the shudder of presentiment, he hammers the lid down tight on the last of his collection and strides on board the ship for Liverpool.

  THE LIVES OF SPECIMENS

  When Bates finally left the interior it was at the insistence of a local riverboat owner appalled at the deterioration in his health and at his rapid loss of weight and strength. His sustaining dream—to reach the Andes and maybe the Pacific—was deferred, indeed abandoned. Reading his notebooks, letters, essays, and monograph, the isolation and vulnerability of his experience are striking. From them comes a powerful sense of contradiction: not simply ambivalence, but, as we have seen, articulate, contradictory expressions of attachment and dislocation, of identification and indifference. Yet the crudeness of his racialized caricatures is jarring and seemingly belied by the considered character of his conduct in the field. And it appears that his internal struggle is with conventionality, that his journey, no matter where it takes him, is haunted above all by the commonplaces of middle-class England—by his own institutional aspirations, by the confines of his familiarity with geographical and ethnological thought, and by the anxious letters from home urging his return to the family business, that, despite its audacities, his life is already unfolding as a series of unheroic compromises.

  Bates’ insecurities were fueled by his continuing status as little more than a professional collector. We know already that this was the role for which, from an elite perspective, he was best equipped. It is also clear that it was one neither he nor Wallace particularly relished. Despite their reservations, however, it was only through entering the Banksian networks of commercial science that these independent, although not independently wealthy, travelers were able to finance their expedition.43 Before finally resolving on the Amazon as a destination, they visited William Hooker at Kew and Edward Doubleday in the Lepidoptera Department of the British Museum, arranging commissions for plants and rare insects and receiving assurances that demand for the fauna and flora of the Amazon was still strong despite the work of naturalist predecessors. More important, they engaged an agent, Samuel Stevens, an amateur entomologist and brother to a noted London natural history auctioneer. Stevens earned his commission: he successfully disposed of their collections, reliably forwarded money to Pará, and acted as a local booster, enticing metropolitan savants with extracts from Bates’ letters, which he published at regular intervals in the Zoologist and other leading journals.44

  Clearly, even for such rank amateurs there were locations on the networks of science and geography waiting to be accessed. The key nodes—sites of commercial possibility and social aspiration—were obvious: the institutional centers of metropolitan natural history based in Kew and Bloomsbury. Less transparent but equally material were the cumulative structures of fluvial exploration through which, as we know, northern South America had been accessed since the late sixteenth century. Victorians were self-conscious about their Elizabethan inheritance, and much as Hakluyt had looked to King Arthur and Owen Madoc for legitimating imperial precedent, mid-nineteenth-century British expansionists found their glorious tradition in Ralegh and in Hakluyt himself, both of whom inspired significant institutional centers and whose works were reissued in new and influential editions.45

  The English, along with the Dutch, French, and Irish, were shut out of the Amazon by Portugal from the 1630s until the opening of Brazilian ports to friendly foreign vessels in 1808. Deferral, though, as the clamor surrounding Humboldt’s pioneering voyage along the Orinoco and Rio Negro in 1799–1804 made clear, only stimulated appetites. Sixteenth-century American expeditions were rediscovered in the midst of the imperial vogue for travel writing, and seized upon as invitations rather than mere precedents. From 1808 on, Amazonian rivers were flooded with foreign entrepreneurs, spies, and scientists—with most individuals playing multiple roles. Bates and Wallace followed trails established not only by fellow collectors, but also by the repeated attempts of British naval expeditions to map a transcontinental link between the Atlantic and Pacific via the Amazon and Andes, and by the overwhelming domination of Amazonian commerce by British financial institutions.46 Moreover, they were also traveling in the wake of a substantial Portuguese tradition of scientific exploration inaugurated by Jesuits such as Padre João Daniel and given major impulse by the celebrated nine-year expedition of Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira.47 Writing in the RGS house journal following Bates’ death, William L. Distant, an old friend and a fellow entomologist, clearly identified this cumulative aspect:

  Not only did [Bates’] expedition effect a history of the natural treasures of this interesting zoological province, but it also stimulated the zeal of many private and wealthy collectors, who subsequently promoted and assisted other zoological enterprises.48

  William Chandless’ RGS surveys of navigable tributaries took place soon after Bates’ return, as did Brown and Lidstone’s detailed report for the Amazon Steam Navigation Company on the potential of territory ceded to the British firm by the Brazilian state.49 It was through such rapidly proliferating networks that the hospitality trails of sympathetic European merchants and officials came into being. Indeed, the prior existence of logistical support had been one of the factors determining Bates’ choice of the Amazon as a collecting site.50

  We should not ignore the extent to which apparently benign field activities—collecting, connecting, and circulating rare and exotic species, filling orders from metropolitan savants, communicating systematic observations on botany, zoology, physical geography, linguistics, ethnology, and sociology to interested professionals—were often indistinguishable from the more patently instrumental projects of botanical espionage and transplantation also undertaken through state channels.51 Such overlapping projects were of prime importance in configuring the region, and they were dependent on decisive micropolitics. We have seen that natural historical practice was overdetermined by a range of contingencies and orientations—biographical, political, philosophical. Critically, we must also acknowledge that the politics of professionalization in the metropolitan sciences that propelled Bates across the Atlantic were themselves predicated on disciplinary regimes imposed by commercial and aesthetic codes for the collecting of nature then developing in Europe. This is one reason why the natural history collection is of such interest. Tied more tenaciously to traveling scientific practice than even the published narratives, and equally critical to his career, Bates’ vast collection was a key site for the elaboration of identity—both his own and that of the Amazon. Distant, writing in 1892, makes the point most succinc
tly:

  The collections were unrivalled, and one can still hear echoes … of the intense interest with which Bates’ consignments were anticipated. The banks of the great river were at last telling the tale of their inhabitants to the zoologists of Europe, for the collections were widely circulated.52

  The collection was a principal locus of anxiety. Marooned in the field with few reference books and incomplete knowledge of the most recent work in systematics, naturalists (no matter how skilled) were often unable to make the fine judgments that enabled species to be described, classified, and slotted into a Linnaean grid.53 Instead, they supplied the metropolitan expert who, like a bourgeois Adam in his paneled library, simultaneously named and brought the natural world into being, occasionally acknowledging the collector with a Latinate flourish.54 Yet, it was people with the experience of travel behind them—Huxley, Hooker, Darwin, Wallace, and Bates—who were most intimately associated with the Darwinian revolution, and Bates was quite explicit in his belief that this apparent paradox was governed by a causal relationship. In an 1862 letter to Darwin, he notes that his old friend Edwin Brown of Burton-on-Trent

  is amassing material (specimens) at a very great expense. He has never traveled: this is a great deficiency for the relations of species to closely allied species & varieties cannot, I think, be thoroughly understood without personal observation in different countries.55

  Bates later referred to Brown’s kind of naturalist as a “species grubber” to be “ranked with collectors of postage stamps & crockery,” and there were important distinctions being shored up by this disdain.56 Not only did he wish to separate those who traveled from those who stayed at home, but also, and more enduringly, he was dividing what he saw as the inconsequential journeymen who collected without reflection from the scientists whose theorizings imbued their collecting activity with real meaning.

  In this aspiration toward the larger questions, both the ideas and style of inquiry developed in Humboldt’s Personal Narrative are quite explicit.57 Humboldt’s Kantian distinction between “a true history of nature and a mere description of nature” (the latter, in his view, being symptomatic of Linnaean natural history) involved the application of a rigorous and technologically bolstered empiricism.58 He traveled with the declared intent of confronting natural phenomena in all their vital complexity and affective detail and precisely to transcend dependence on the lifeless extractions of the herbarium and cabinet. A true natural history would be revealed only through a study of the inter-relationship of all of nature’s aspects in a grand synthetic enterprise. Conspicuous among these relationships were personal emotional and aesthetic responses: legitimate, valued data that, in this age of the sublime, introduced a Romantic variant of a familiar (environmental) determinism in which an empathetic emotional response could indicate the effect of particular types of natural environment on human society. There is, then, considerable friction between the pulls of empiricism and Romanticism, and we find the mutual indispensability of reason and aesthetics provoking perspectives at odds with disciplinary compartmentalization. Malcolm Nicolson has put it nicely: “The mathematical precision of the stars’ orbits,” he writes, “was just as valid a topic for study as their sparkle and its associated delights.”59 By the time the Darwinians had finished digesting Humboldt most of the sparkle had fizzled out. But this does not mean that Bates’ occasionally anodyne prose should be read as a detached stylistic analogue of a narrowly investigative empiricism. Feelings still mattered. As did Beauty and Truth. A collection of quality and elegance, and the rare and delicate creatures of which it was composed, was a vessel deep enough and wide enough to hold all these absolutes, and more besides.

  Bates’ criticism of Brown expressed the simmering antagonism between a resurgent English “natural” natural history that drew on native authorities (John Ray in particular) and what he and other Humboldtian Darwinians concurred was a listlessly mechanical classificatory impulse descended from Linnaeus.60 Linnaean taxonomy had transformed both the plant and animal sciences, introducing an absorbing focus on the minutiae of taxonomic organization. The natural historical modes of representation through which methodological imperatives came to be expressed worked to flatten the specificities of geographical, cultural, and historical location in a regime of recontextualization and distinction.61 Darwin and his circle self-consciously distinguished themselves from this segmenting optic by the development of a theory of origins the force of which was understood as issuing from its holism. Nonetheless, it was systematics that underwrote evolutionary theorizing, and the theoretical urge was constantly in tension with the demands of laborious taxonomy.62 Moreover, this routinized practice had its own financial and aesthetic charms. There is a false note in Bates’ contempt for the mere collector, with its denial of his own seduction by the appeals of classification.

  The assembly of a private collection was one of Bates’ principal goals in traveling to Pará. An impressive natural history cabinet filled with rarities was a recognized form of capital in the appropriate circuit, with significant exchange value and an indispensable prestige function that could catapult its owner into the ranks of the learned.63 But the question posed by Bates’ comment on Brown was that of the collection’s immediate purpose, and, in this, it is clear that notwithstanding the actualities of his situation, Bates saw himself as the heir of Humboldt, rather than of the journeymen Banksian collectors. Indeed, it is as an instance of a new social actor—perhaps Humboldt’s most significant invention—that he steps onto the historical stage: the post-Linnaean (post-Banksian) explorer-scientist, a subject with many counterparts in colonial service.64

  It is through his work in refashioning and overcoming the undervalued figure of the natural history collector that Bates maps his scientific and social aspirations and opens the routes through which his Amazons will travel. Back from the field, he haltingly forged relationships with senior scientific figures. In particular, as his correspondence clearly shows, both Darwin and Joseph Hooker acted toward him as solicitous and sensitive mentors. He, in turn, armed with the authority of travel, reciprocated with perceptive insight into the relationship between tropical entomology and natural selection, providing apparently endless data tapped by Darwin through precise and persistent questioning. With Bates unable to find work among the very limited opportunities then available in London professional science, it was Darwin who suggested he write The Naturalist, arranged introductions, advised him on contract negotiations with John Murray (London’s leading publisher of travel books), nursed him through periods of despondency, encouraged his theoretical development, and guided him across the inhospitable terrain of the capital’s scientific establishment. Through Darwin, Bates established his connection with Hooker, a powerful scientific patron who, in late 1865, succeeded his father as director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew.

  In casting his lot with the Darwinians, Bates inevitably attracted hostility from their opponents, especially among the systematists at the British Museum, where his job applications were rejected and his claims about the number of new species contained in his collection were held up to ridicule. In a series of paternal letters, Hooker coached him on the mores of the scholarly upper class, explicitly situating his comments in terms of Bates’ future career prospects. “It is,” he advised, “extremely difficult to establish a footing in London scientific society: it is all along of [sic] the law of the struggle for life! You are instinctively regarded as an interloper, and it must be so in the nature of things. Do, I entreat you, smile at their sneers.”65 Finally, of his new set, it was Murray who convinced the RGS to hire as their senior administrator the young entomologist with no executive experience.66 It was an apt decision made possible by the persistence of amateurism in British science: to organize their insect collection, the trustees of the British Museum had appointed a well-connected poet.67

  As Distant pointed out, it was through the collection that “the banks of the great river were at last telling the tal
e of their inhabitants.” Removed from their “wild” context and resituated in collections physically organized to express hierarchical principles, natural history specimens became narrativized as tactile metonyms, not only for a generalized natural world, but, more specifically, for the region. The collection marked region within an encompassing story of imperial destiny and masculine daring. Allied to the travel narratives of prominent collectors, the contextual particularity of provenance became a critical supplement by which the identity of the specimen could be produced.68 Part of Stevens’ job as agent was to breathe life into these dead insects with both history and the associative power of the local, and one of his tactics was to circulate selections from Bates’ letters and essays from the Amazon, adding biographical substance to both the author and the non-humans who were his victims and allies.