In Amazonia

by Raffles, Hugh

  97. Deborah E. Harkness, John Dee’s Conversations With Angels: Cabala, Alchemy, and the End of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Taylor, Tudor Geography, 77; Clulee, John Dee, 179–80.

  98. Agnes M. C. Latham, Sir Walter Ralegh (Writers and Their Work, No. 177. London: The British Council, 1964), 20–26. For a sustained attempt at empirical justification of Ralegh’s claims, see Whitehead, “Introduction.”

  99. Campbell, The Witness, 219–54.

  100. Grafton, New Worlds, 37. See Hakluyt’s marginal note on Keymis’ refusal to describe “a sorte of people more monstrous” than the Ewaipanoma: “They have eminent heads like dogs, and live all the day time in the sea” (Keymis, “Relation,” 465).

  101. Daston and Park, Wonders, 149.

  102. For more detailed publishing histories, see Schomburgk, “Introduction,” Discoverie, lxvii, n. 1, and Whitehead, “Introduction,” 10–11.

  103. Campbell, The Witness, 226.

  104. Whitehead, Discoverie, 176; Campbell, The Witness, 227.

  105. Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (London: Routledge, 1992), 94–101, 99–100.

  106. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture, 93.

  107. Whitehead, Discoverie, 158.

  108. Ibid., 191.

  109. Ibid., 160.

  110. Ibid., 161.

  111. Ibid.

  112. Campbell, The Witness, 247.

  113. On Montaigne and the good savage, see Honour, New Golden Land, 66; on Mandeville and paradise, Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, 28–30.

  114. Whitehead, Discoverie, 161.

  115. David Arnold, The Problem of Nature: Environment, Culture and European Expansion (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). See also Chapter 5 below.

  116. Whitehead, Discoverie, 162.

  117. Ibid.

  118. Ibid., 162–63. For a sustained analysis of the “ecstasis” of encounter, see Johannes Fabian, Out of Our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). Thanks to Annie Gray for making this connection.

  119. Edmund Spenser, The Complete Works in Verse and Prose of Edmund Spenser, 10 vols., ed. Alexander B. Grosart (London: Hazell, Watson, and Viney, 1882–84), vol. IV, 200.

  120. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 22.

  121. Carter, The Road to Botany Bay, 243.

  122. Whitehead, Discoverie, 186–87.

  123. Ibid., 188, 168.

  124. Ibid., 163. This is a complicated moment. Ralegh describes the sacrificial crew member as a “negro.” Whitehead points out that no records mention a “negro” on this voyage, and, following V. S. Naipaul, argues that Ralegh fabricated the incident “to validate [his] experience in Orinoco as truly exotic.” Ibid., 104; V. S. Naipaul, A Way in the World (New York: Knopf, 1994).

  125. Whitehead, “Introduction,” 4–5; idem, Discoverie, 170, 163, n. 70. William M. Denevan, “Aboriginal Drained-field Cultivation in the Americas,” Science 169 (1970): 647–54; William M. Denevan and Alberta Zucchi, “Ridged Field Excavations in the Central Orinoco Llanos,” in Advances in Andean Archaeology, ed. D. L. Browman (The Hague: Mouton, 1978), 235–46.

  126. Michael J. Eden, Ecology and Land Management in Amazonia (London: Belhaven, 1990), 49.

  127. João Murça Pires and Ghillean T. Prance, “The Vegetation Types of the Brazilian Amazon,” in Key Environments: Amazonia, ed. Ghillean T. Prance and Thomas E. Lovejoy (London: Pergamon, 1985), 131–39; Otto Huber, “Significance of Savanna Vegetation in the Amazon Territory of Venezuela,” in Biological Diversification in the Tropics, ed. Ghillean T. Prance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 221–24.

  128. Keymis, “Relation,” 475.

  129. Nineteenth-century British colonists in Australia similarly used Aboriginal tracks and trails as settler roads. However, Aboriginal land management was widely recognized and discussed by Europeans at the time. See Carter, The Road to Botany Bay, 335–45.

  130. Philip Amadas and Arthur Barlow, “The First Voyage Made to the Coasts of America, with Two Barks, Where in Were Captaines M. Philip Amadas, and M. Arthur Barlowe, who Discovered Part of the Countrey now called Virginia, Anno 1584. Written by One of the Said Captaines, and Sent to Sir Walter Ralegh, Knight, At Whose Charge and direction the Said Voyage was Set Forth,” in Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation, ed. David B. Quinn and Raleigh A. Skelton, vol. 3 (Hakluyt Society Extra Series No. 39. London: Hakluyt Society, 1965 [1589]), 728–33, 731. For reasons that remain a mystery to me, this line was excised from the edition of 1600 and consequently does not appear in the definitive modern MacLehose edition of 1903–5.

  131. Michel de Montaigne, Selected Essays, trans. Charles Cotton and William C. Hazlitt, ed. Blanchard Bates (New York: Random House, 1949), 80.

  132. Whitehead, Discoverie, 159.

  133. Ibid., 176.

  134. Williamson, English Colonies, 147.

  135. Lorimer, “Contraband Tobacco.”

  136. Williamson, English Colonies, 147–49; Lorimer, Settlement, 10–59.

  137. John Wilson, “The Relation of Master John Wilson of Wansteed in Essex, One of the Last Ten That Returned into England from Wiapoco in Guiana 1606,” in Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas His Pilgrimes, Contayning a History of the World in Sea Voyages and Lande Travells by Englishmen and Others, 20 vols. (Glasgow: James MacLehose, 1905–7), vol. 16, 349–50.

  138. Lorimer, Settlement, 19–26.

  139. João Capistrano de Abreu, Chapters of Brazil’s Colonial History, 1500–1800, trans. Arthur Brakel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 102–3; Lorimer, Settlement, 56–57.

  140. Antonio Porro, O povo das águas: Ensaios de etno-história Amazônica (São Paulo: Vozes, 1996), 45; Hemming, Red Gold, 213–37; Lorimer, Settlement, 80–102, Dreyfus, “Os empreendimentos coloniais.”

  141. My thanks to Gary Miles for his clarification that “sive” is the nonexclusive “or.” For a detailed, contextualized discussion of the extant English maps of this period, see Sarah Tyacke, “English Charting of the River Amazon c. 1595–c. 1630,” Imago Mundi 32 (1980): 73–89.

  142. “Guiana” persisted in popular geographies into the seventeenth century, past the Treaty of Breda of 1667 at which the colonial boundaries of Suriname and French Guiana were drawn and a lived regionalism made subject to cartographic displacement (see, for example, Aphra Behn’s key novella Oroonoko, or, The Royal Slave, ed. Lore Metzger [New York: Norton Library, 1973 (1688)]). Only much later, with Humboldt and Bonpland’s voyage of 1800 through the Casiquiare Canal—at a moment when the preoccupation with state boundaries had effaced competing spatialities—did Europe discover that the two basins were hydrologically as well as imaginatively conjoined. For cartography, see Isa Adonias, A cartografia da região Amazônica: Catálogo descritivo (1500–1961), 2 vols. (Rio de Janeiro: INPA, 1963); on the regional disciplining that took place around Brazil’s border with French Guiana, see Arthur Cézar Ferreira Reis, Limites e demarcações na Amazônia Brasileira, 2 vols. (Rio de Janeiro: Imprensa Nacional, 1947); and for the ethnohistorical unit, see John Gillin, “Tribes of the Guianas,” in Handbook of South American Indians, ed. Julian Steward (Bureau of American Ethnology, bulletin no. 143. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1948), vol. 3, 699–860. As David Cleary points out, Guyana, French Guiana, and Suriname are today considered Amazonian countries in geopolitical discourse “even though regional hydrography clearly shows that between them they do not muster a single river which drains into the Amazon” (“Towards an Environmental History of the Amazon: From Prehistory to the Nineteenth Century,” Latin American Research Review 36, no. 2 [2001]: 65–96, 66).

  CHAPTER 5

  1. David Cleary, “‘Lost Altogether to the Civilized World’: Race and the Cabanagem in Northern Brazil, 1750 to 1850,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 40 (1998): 109�
��35, 114.

  2. Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland, Voyage aux régions équinoxiales du nouveau continent, fait en 1799, 1800, 1801, 1802, 1803 et 1804, 12 vols. (Paris, 1816–34). Citations below are from the abridged English translation of 1895: Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent During the Years 1799–1804, 3 vols., trans. and ed. Thomasina Ross (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1895). Humboldt’s title was not merely formulaic. As he wrote to his brother Wilhelm, the philologist, in July 1799, the excitement of arrival amid such novelty had Bonpland and him “running around like a couple of mad things.” Quoted in Douglas Botting, Humboldt and the Cosmos (London: Sphere Books, 1973), 76.

  3. More than 20,000 people were to die in the six years it took for the Rio government’s brutal pacification campaign finally to take hold, and I would not want to gloss the very real and decisive intraregional contradictions of race and class around which the Cabanagem coalesced (see Luís Balkar Pinheiro, “Do Mocambeiro a Cabano: Notas sobre a presença negra na Amazônia na primeira metade do século XIX,” Terra das águas 1 [1999]: 148–72; Cleary, “‘Lost Altogether’”). Nevertheless, it also stands as a rare moment of northern political assertion in a tense history of national ambition and regional recalcitrance. The regional consciousness (in the region-for-itself sense) presupposed by the early moments of the Cabanagem may well have been a preoccupation primarily of the liberal elite, but it quickly generalized, and in radicalized form. Although strongly derivative of European republicanism, such politics had a distinctively local cast and are an important reminder that my concern with the dynamics of metropolitan region-making does not substitute for analyses focused more squarely on the development of regional identities and region-making practices among elite and subaltern Amazonian populations. Political and cultural regionalisms in Amazonia were made and remade in oblique and reciprocal relation to metropolitan projects, not simply through them or in response to them. On the centrifugal tendencies of this period, see Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, História geral da civilização Brasileira, 3rd ed. (São Paulo: Difusão Européia do Livro, 1970), tomo II, vol. 1, 9–39.

  4. Carolus Linnaeus, Systema naturae, 2 vols. (New York: Stechert-Hafner, 1964 [1735]). See, inter alia, Clarence J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967); Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility (New York: Pantheon, 1983); Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (New York: Harper & Row, 1980); Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Literature and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992); and Harriet Ritvo, “At the Edge of the Garden: Nature and Domestication in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain,” Huntington Library Quarterly 55, no. 3 (1992): 363–78.

  5. For productive links among zoological taxonomy, race, and empire, see Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987); idem, The Platypus and the Mermaid and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998).

  6. Bates to Brown, Pará, June 17, 1848, Zoologist 8 (1849): 2837.

  7. Until very recently, there has been little writing on this topic that has escaped a pervasively heroic mode of presentation. As prominent examples, see Victor Wolfgang von Hagen, South America Called Them: Explorations of the Great Naturalists; La Condamine, Darwin, Humboldt, Spruce (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1945); John Ure, Trespassers of the Amazon (London: Constable, 1990); Anthony Smith, Explorers of the Amazon (London: Viking, 1986); Peter Raby, Bright Paradise: Victorian Scientific Travellers (London: Pimlico Press, 1996); George Woodcock, Henry Walter Bates, Naturalist of the Amazons (London: Faber, 1968); and, although couched in a more natural-scientific register, many of the papers collected in Mark R. D. Seaward and Sylvia M. D. FitzGerald, eds., Richard Spruce (1817–1893): Botanist and Explorer (London: Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 1996).

  8. Henry Walter Bates, “Contributions to an Insect Fauna of the Amazon Valley. Lepidoptera: Heliconidae,” Transactions of the Linnaean Society 23 (1862): 495–566, 513. Darwin’s enthusiastic response to this paper was expressed in his correspondence with Bates. See Robert M. Stecher, “The Darwin–Bates Letters: Correspondence Between Two Nineteenth-Century Travellers and Naturalists,” Annals of Science 25, no. 1 (1969): 1–47, no. 2 (1969): 95–125. For recent assessments, see Stephen Jay Gould, “Here Goes Nothing,” Natural History 94, no. 7 (1985): 12–19; and James Mallet and Mathieu Joron, “Evolution of Diversity in Warning Color and Mimicry: Polymorphisms, Shifting Balance, and Speciation,” Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 30 (1999): 201–33.

  9. Even though professional training in science did not exist at the time in Britain, the scientific establishment was, inevitably, filled by men with Oxbridge credentials. Academic training opened careers in medicine, law, or the clergy. Darwin, for instance, had studied medicine and then switched to theology. Hooker and Huxley were both trained in medicine, Lyell in law. An additional restriction was the imposition of orthodox religious examinations for matriculation or fellowships. Barbara G. Beddall, ed., Wallace and Bates in the Tropics: An Introduction to the Theory of Natural Selection (London: Macmillan, 1969), 6–7.

  10. Frederick Bates in M. E. Grant Duff, “Obituary. Henry Walter Bates, F.R.S.,” Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society 14 (1892): 245–57, 245–46.

  11. Some of their views on Lyell, Chambers, Darwin, and Humboldt can be gauged from letters extracted by Wallace in his autobiography. Humboldt had extended an irresistible challenge: “America offers an ample field for the labours of the naturalist. On no other part of the globe is he called upon more powerfully by nature to raise himself to general ideas on the cause of phenomena and their mutual connection” (Humboldt and Bonpland, Personal Narrative, vol. 1, xxi). Thomas R. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population; or, A View of Its Past and Present Effect on Human Happiness; With an Inquiry into our Prospects Respecting the Future Removal or Mitigation of the Evils which it Occasions, 2nd ed. (London: J. Johnson, 1803); Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology; Being an Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of the Earth’s Surface, by Reference to Causes now in Operation, 3 vols. (London: John Murray, 1830–33); Robert Chambers, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (London: J. Churchill, 1844); Charles Darwin, Journal of Researches into the Geology and Natural History of the Various Countries Visited by H.M.S. Beagle, Under the Command of Captain FitzRoy, R.N., from 1832 to 1836 (London: H. Colburn, 1839); William H. Edwards, A Voyage Up the River Amazon, Including a Residence at Pará (London: John Murray, 1847).

  12. See Arnold Thackray, “The Industrial Revolution and the Image of Science,” in Science and Values, ed. Arnold Thackray and Everett Mendelsohn (New York: Humanities Press, 1974), 5–22.

  13. Extensive Bates bibliographies can be found in John Dickenson, “Henry Walter Bates and the Study of Latin America in the Late Nineteenth Century; A Bibliographic Essay,” Revista interamericana de bibliografía 40 (1990): 570–80; idem, “Henry Walter Bates—The Naturalist of the River Amazons,” Archives of Natural History 19 (1992): 209–18; and James E. O’Hara, “Henry Walter Bates—His Life and Contributions to Biology,” Archives of Natural History 22 (1995): 195–219. On the RGS years, see H. P. Moon, Henry Walter Bates F.R.S. 1825–1892: Explorer, Scientist and Darwinian (Leicester: Leicestershire Museums, 1976), 54–71.

  14. Alfred Russel Wallace, “Obituary: H. W. Bates. The Naturalist of the Amazons,” Nature 45, no. 1165 (1892): 398–99, 399. According to Grant Allen, “Bates of the Amazons,” Fortnightly Review 58 (1892): 798–809, Bates apparently viewed this narrowing of focus as an inevitable accommodation to the increasing specialization of biological science. However, Wallace’s bitter obituary of Bates suggests—as do his own career and those of Darwin and Huxley—that there were alternat
ive intellectual roads for scientists of Bates’ status and talent to walk. As Woodcock, Henry Walter Bates, points out, though, the RGS job was certainly not to be sneered at by a man under pressure to support a growing family.

  15. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 2nd ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 781–82.

  16. David Elliston Allen, The Naturalist in Britain: A Social History, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 145–47. Also, Anne Secord, “Science in the Pub: Artisan Botanists in Early Nineteenth-Century Lancashire,” History of Science 32, no. 3 (1994): 269–315.

  17. Frederick Bates in Grant Duff, “Obituary,” 247.

  18. See John Seed, “Theologies of Power: Unitarianism and the Social Relations of Religious Discourse, 1800–50,” in Class, Power and Social Structure in British Nineteenth-Century Towns, ed. Robert J. Morris (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1986), 107–56; Thackray, “The Industrial Revolution and the Image of Science”; Woodcock, Henry Walter Bates, 16; Thompson, The Making, 28–58, 781ff.

  19. Eric Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire (London: Pelican, 1969), 91.

  20. Ian Inkster, “Aspects of the History of Science and Science Culture in Britain: 1780–1850 and Beyond,” in Metropolis and Province: Science in British Culture, 1780–1850, ed. Ian Inkster and Jack Morrell (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), 11–54, 31–33.

  21. Thompson, The Making, 819.

  22. Journal entry, February 11, 1864, cited in Edward Clodd, “Memoir,” in Henry Walter Bates, The Naturalist on the River Amazons: A Record of Adventures, Habits of Animals, Sketches of Brazilian and Indian Life, and Aspects of Nature Under the Equator, During Eleven Years of Travel, unabridged commemorative ed. (London: John Murray, 1892), lxxiv.

  23. According to Kropotkin, Bates responded enthusiastically to the thesis of Mutual Aid, exclaiming: “That is true Darwinism. It is a shame to think what they have made of Darwin’s ideas.” Peter Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist, ed. James Allen Rogers (London: Century Hutchinson, 1988 [1899]), 300. We should note, also, that at one time contradictions within these circles were less apparent, and that Bates had named one of his sons Herbert Spencer Bates (and another Darwin Bates).