But in 1877, the acclaimed English evolutionist Alfred Russel Wallace opened his luminous essay “The Colours of Animals and Plants,” published simultaneously in England and the United States, with a litany of all “the natural objects” that had come to human beings “from the hidden recesses of the earth” by the “progress of discovery.” “We have presented to us,” he wrote, “an infinite variety adorned with the most beautiful and most varied hues. Flowers, insects, and birds, are the organisms most generally ornamented in this way; and their symmetry of form, their variety of structure, and the lavish abundance with which they clothe and enliven the earth, cause them to be objects of universal admiration. The relation of this wealth of color to our mental and moral nature is indisputable.”5 Twenty years later, Robert Rippon, a Canadian butterfly man, visited Tring, the personal museum of Walter Rothschild, on a vast landed estate thirty miles northwest of London. Rothschild, a young naturalist of the famed European banking family, possessed an unrivaled collection of tropical lepidoptera. Rippon arrived to study Rothschild’s birdwing butterflies for his great catalog, Icones Ornithopterorum. His account covered all the known species of birdwings, distinguished by Rippon’s own original colorful plates, including one of Ornithoptera dohertyi, almost totally black, the blackest of birdwings, which Will Doherty, America’s greatest tropical collector, had caught in what may have been one of his blackest moods, on Talaud in Malaysia.6 It was endemic only there, and so rare that a skilled German collector sold it to the Royal Museum of Natural History in Berlin for more money than any other butterfly. In 1903 Rippon renamed it Troides dohertyi, and that name still stands.7
Butterflies, Rippon wrote in his catalog, in words more ecstatic than Wallace’s, were “one long vision of beauty in form, variety of pattern, and delicacy and splendor of colour, illustrated by tens of thousands of species ranging from a few millimetres in expanse to ten or eleven or even more inches; their patterns simple in the extreme, or so intricate and complex as to bewilder the eye.” The “splendor of color, varied and wonderful” included “every imaginable tint, from black or white to dazzling crimson, scarlet, blue, green, pearl, silver and gold; with markings sometimes resplendent with apparently pure gold, silver, copper, aluminum, and the colour and flashing of all precious stones—prismatic, silky, velvety, diaphanous, quite transparent, intensely white, or intensely black, or ivory-like; with colour reflections in the most unexpected places; with changes of colour hardly dreamed of by the artist, yet so beautifully harmonized as to create astonishment in any sensitive mind.” “Some of these glorious things” could be “found in all climes and at all altitudes, from far within the Arctic circle to the Equator, and from sea-level to 18,000 feet of mountain height! A truly royal Divine gift to the earth is this one order of animals alone! But the glory of it all is that we only begin to dream of the wealth of creative wonders and beauties as we contemplate these.”8
From the late 1870s, ordinary Germans had been able to buy a single Morpho menelaus for two Prussian talers, or $1.50.9 “Twenty years ago,” observed Otto Staudinger in his own enormous 1889 catalog, Exotische Tagfalter (Exotic Butterflies), “blue Morphos and magnificent birdwings were a rarity in a private collection. Today tropical treasures are accessible to naturalists who have at their disposal only modest means.” Any amateur can now “command an overview of the whole butterfly fauna of the tropics.”10 In the Linnaean age of the mid-1700s, naturalists knew of little more than 270 species of butterflies, and 460 moths, but these numbers were very quickly overturned by the course of events, as explorers and collectors discovered more species. “The number of these beautiful animals is very great, though Linnaeus reckoned” only several hundred, wrote the Comte de Buffon in 1793. “The catalogue is still very incomplete. Every collector of butterflies can show undescribed species; and such as are fond of minute discovery, can here produce animals that have been examined only by himself.”11 By 1880, according to Samuel Scudder, the number of recognized or described butterflies rose to ten thousand.12 The availability of such “creative wonders” to more and more Americans, as well as to people throughout the West, represented something new under the sun.
The market for exotics dawned unexpectedly and rapidly in the last decades of the nineteenth century, as Western powers swallowed up tropical societies in Asia and then in Africa.13 England, the archimperialist, annexed outright, among other places, North Borneo, Brunei, the Malay States, Sarawak, Egypt, and India’s last vestiges of autonomous lands.14 Such a power grab relied on the extended telegraph lines and on new canals (the Suez opened in 1869), on a revolution in small arms weaponry, on the invention of large steamships, and, above all, on the railroad, “the main engine of imperialism,” as historian Ronald E. Robinson has called it. By the 1880s, nearly every significant city in India had its own rail depot.15 The railroad allowed for the rapid and safe shipment of military personnel, managers, goods, money—and butterflies. And with the railroads came the spread of actual roads, built especially by British engineers, who drove them through the densest forests to obtain the mineral wealth of India and Burma. In 1886, Randolph Churchill, secretary of state for India, gave Upper Burma to Victoria as a birthday present; three years later, a British mining company began a sixty-four-mile road from Irrawaddy, Burma, to the Burmese ruby mines, once run by Burmese emperors but taken as booty by the British.16
Many naturalists condemned (and many condemn it even more today) the ecological havoc inflicted by these agencies of improvement, but they readily took advantage of them, and complained when roads were clogged or nonexistent. The American Will Doherty was “quite crazy” about “the grand virgin forest” in northern India near the Himalayas, “its beauty beyond description.” He deplored Malaysia’s “scarcity of true forest” and trees “cut down” in Celebes, “except in the most un-get-able of places.” Yet he told his mother about abandoned coal mines in Pengaron, Borneo, with “numerous roads open to them—an inexpressible advantage to the collector.” And he happily traveled the road from Irrawaddy to the ruby mines seeking butterflies.17
In England, a turning point for butterflies may have come on the day in 1872 when Stevens’s Auction Rooms in Covent Garden put Alfred Russel Wallace’s renowned collection of East Indian butterflies up for sale. Stevens’s, founded in 1776 to sell mostly rare books, had developed into the center for the auctioning of everything from live animals to the skulls of criminals. In the early 1800s, natural history sales took over, insects attracting the affluent naturalists of London, especially the sale of rare British butterflies, which commanded high prices for the rest of the century and beyond. The auction of Wallace’s exotics that day, unusual given the English obsession with native lepidoptera, set off a buzz throughout naturalist circles.18 A few years later, London collectors were fighting “to obtain species from all parts of the world, especially from Africa”—so William F. Kirby, a respected author of the first catalog on world butterflies, wrote to Strecker.19 New merchants prospered, such as Watkins & Doncaster, soon rivaling Janson’s, at 44 Great Russell Street, set up in 1852 to sell natural history materials. London, more than ever, served as the world’s magnet for the exchange and sale of butterflies.20 When Bates and Wallace collected for museums in the 1850s, they never veered from their primary purpose: to learn about the natural world. The new generation of tropical collectors, however, had more interest in selling than learning. William Hewitson may have pioneered this trend by dispatching his own men into Bolivia and Peru, as he and other Londoners fought over rare acquisitions like the female of the Colombian emerald butterfly, a vernacular name then popular for a species costing ten guineas a specimen on the market.21
British naturalists financed their own collecting trips into tropical jungles. Among the most imposing of the amateurs was Henry Elwes: six foot eight, red-bearded, and preposterous, the epitome of the worst of British imperialism, dismissive of the “inferior” peoples and hateful of Jews. (After knowing Berthold Neumoegen for a time
, Elwes “wanted nothing more to do with him,” he wrote Strecker. “He will find plenty of his own kind in Germany, but not here I hope.”)22 In 1879 Elwes invited the Oxford-educated millionaire Frederick Godman, a match in money and lepidoptera, to journey with him to his tea plantation in Darjeeling, in northeastern India on the border of Sikkim, where hundreds of Europeans lived and visited—many, like Elwes, in quest of rhododendrons and azaleas and the insects of the Himalayas.23 Together the two men probed for rarities along the outskirts of the town, with an entourage of two servants, several ponies, a bird collector, a plant collector, and twelve coolies, the cheap manual labor of the day.24
The British market carried living as well as dead insects. One of the leading dealers in pupae and eggs, a self-described expert on the “living insect,” Alfred Wailly of Clapham Road in London, bred moths in his backyard in an “immense number of cages.”25 He “distributed pupae and ova to my many correspondents in Europe and America.” His transatlantic business, specializing in a family of large silk-producing moths, exchanged his progeny for insects bred by foreigners who sent pupae for him to sell. Once, from an American (probably Strecker), he received seven thousand cocoons of spectacular American moths—so many that he had to sell them cheap or destroy them.26 In the summer of 1880, the green luna moth, an American exotic by continental standards, was in such demand that many European dealers tried to breed thousands, threatening to depress the insect’s market value. Wailly reared his own supply, obtained from Americans, and placed the larvae in nut trees near his house to feed, though the bad climate endangered them and the sparrows ate them up.27 He relied on nearly fifty individuals to send him cocoons from Ceylon, Madras, Bombay, Calcutta, and the Cape of Good Hope. He received thousands of one generic group that boasted the world’s largest moth, the Attacus species from the Himalayan forests, where the thick foliage stayed fresh for so long that many caterpillars grew to five to six inches. After an earlier shipment pupated on their way to England and died, Wailly put his “imports” in icehouses aboard ship or packed them in double cases with ice inserted between the sides.28
The Europeans—above all, the Germans—helped build the basis for the market in exotic and tropical lepidoptera.29 The French interest in exotics apparently never went far beyond Paris, and even by the early 1890s, Will Doherty wrote his father, “French traveling collectors scarcely existed.” And to his mother, in 1888: “the French naturalists are not so cosmopolitan as the Germans, that is, they care for the French things only.”30 The Germans, on the other hand, already had a flourishing trade in the late eighteenth century, serving the aristocracy and the early museums; by the mid-1870s the activity had widened, due to international commerce, an influx of missionaries into foreign lands, and the launching of many German scientific expeditions.31 In the port city of Hamburg, the wellspring of the business, firms specialized in exotics. Hans Godeffroy, sold, among other things, Indian and Chinese butterflies, and from Leipzig to Munich, Insectenhändlung, or people who sold insects, cultivated the foreign trade.32 Händler peddled from house to house, hotel to hotel, displaying showy specimens to their potential customers.33
By the 1880s, Otto Staudinger was one of the most respected butterfly men in Europe with a worldwide reputation as a dealer of lepidoptera, “all others guiding themselves more or less by him,” as Strecker said, admiringly.34 He ran a transnational business far removed from his customers and more far-reaching than Godeffroy’s in Hamburg, Deyrolle in Paris, or even Watkins & Doncaster and Janson’s in London. Staudinger published yearly price lists and attempted to standardize prices across boundaries, often visiting London to compare his valuations to those set by the traders in rooms encircling the Natural History Museum at South Kensington. Competitors sometimes undercut him, but all measured the “worth” of their own insects by Staudinger’s determinations. He sold by installments and dispensed generous credit to reliable customers, letting them “pay next year, if it is not now convenient to you,” with discounts up to 50 percent to “all Americans”!35 But he would hound anyone who failed to pay, even beyond the grave. After one American customer died, he wrote to the man’s wife that if “she did not explain things about the settlement of her husband’s Estate he would take other measures.” When, in 1893, Berthold Neumoegen died without having paid up on a sale, Staudinger pursued his wife for the money.
Otto Staudinger.
Staudinger had cultivated special relations with poor but eager clients like Strecker, who would do anything, short of killing, to get a butterfly. Nearing sixty in 1894, Strecker asked Staudinger, “Why did God implant in us unquenchable desires, and then deny the means of gratifying them? Can there be a worse punishment?”36 Strecker tried to resist all offers of credit from Staudinger on the grounds that “I owe not any man anything now and if I can, I want it to remain so.” “I must laugh a little at myself sometimes when I think that in years past when I had nothing in the world except my collection, how I used to run up bills of 100 or so and now, when I am finally fixed with good assets in real estate and other excellent necessities, I watch every dollar I spend.”37 Then, almost in a blink of an eye, Strecker ordered several new birdwings and swallowtails, at more than $100. Staudinger, who had waited, knew his man.
A decade earlier, Staudinger had moved into grand quarters, which he’d named Villa Sphinx, built in a spacious park in the Blasewitz section of Dresden. The family occupied the top floor, while two enormous lower floors were reserved for handling, packaging, display, and storage of his unparalleled collection of insects.38 As his quarters grew, so did his reputation, consolidated, by the early 1890s, by his publications on butterflies and by his close and strategic relationship with Kaiser Wilhelm II. Staudinger sold large quantities of exotic material to the Royal Museum of Natural History in Berlin, among the largest and oldest in the world, founded in 1810.39 The bond with Wilhelm II, more than lucrative, also gave Staudinger access to the Royal Museum’s curators, who advanced their own careers by identifying and describing what he sent. In his last will and testament, he donated his massive collection of Palearctic—chiefly European—butterflies to the Royal Museum, with the stipulation that it remain undivided “bis zum Jahre 2001.” The museum consented; even today, the collection is listed as “the Staudinger collection.”40
Staudinger had, in 1871, introduced exotic butterflies to his catalog, though they consumed only a tiny part of a five-page listing.41 In 1878, a small African section appeared; by 1880, the catalog was nearly one-third exotic, though he still advertised in English journals that he sold “principally Palaearctic” species.42 Reflecting the trend set partly by Alfred Wailly in 1882, he added living pupae and eggs. By 1888, exotics nearly matched the European insects in a now twenty-three-page catalog, and by 1891, they had achieved parity in a catalog thirty pages long. He even issued a price list on insect larvae, many of foreign species.43 Staudinger came close to monopolizing the market in exotics by sending a small brigade of collectors abroad, beginning, in the early 1870s, with Heinrich Ribbe, who went to Panama and Peru, catching for his boss ten thousand butterflies and moths, among Staudinger’s first acquisitions of this magnitude.44 The shift into the non-European and tropical seemed inexorable and would have astonished old-time clients, but it illustrated how many hundreds of new species had been “discovered” and described since 1856, the year of Staudinger’s first catalog.45
Henry Stainton, an admired English naturalist, warned Staudinger that enlarging his business to incorporate the tropical would be too costly and too draining, and Staudinger agreed, in 1880 hiring Andreas Bang-Haas, a young Dane, to buy and sell the butterflies, so he might have time for his systematic work. “I hate very much the Entomological trade,” he told Stainton.46 He was now freed to do “the higher thing”—to locate and describe new species, all tropical or exotic, and to publish scientific catalogs such as his 1889 Exotische Tagfalter. Staudinger still had personal contacts with very select customers (such as the Americans Strecker an
d Neumoegen, as well as Henry Skinner of Philadelphia), extending them credit and tempting them with new “discoveries” at “50 per cent off on $100 lots.”47 But all the while Bang-Haas readied the business catalogs for distribution, carried on his own extensive trade, and proved an excellent salesman in more ways than one; soon he would marry the boss’s eldest daughter, Carmen (named for her birthplace near the Alhambra in Spain).48
Germans pursued and studied nature throughout the world, many molded by a grand liberal cosmopolitan tradition that marked German culture from the late 1700s on and that acted as counterpoise to a late-blooming, strident nationalism.49 A remarkable number of Germans lived throughout Asia and Malaysia, working as civil servants for the Dutch, once a serious colonial power but, after the 1880s, second fiddle to the British, who chose strategically to let them rule the Malay Archipelago.50 The English, too, employed German naturalists in India and elsewhere, out of respect for their scientific education.51 Altogether, they formed a geographical base for European and American collectors and dealers, one sustained in the Asian subcontinent by a string of German hotels and boardinghouses stretching from India into Malaysia, erected near railways and in port cities.52 In Penang, in 1886, Doherty stayed at the Nederland Hotel, run by Germans, staffed by Chinese, and catering to “Europeans,” as “all the white people” were called, by Doherty’s account. At four in the afternoon he had tea and toast; at half past seven, the hotel put him “next to Fraulein Grunberg,” and the dinner guests conversed “in six or seven languages” to the accompaniment of a music box playing “La Donna è mobile” and “Robert, toi que j’aime.”53 Doherty flirted with the Fräulein, as he did with other young Western women who, for whatever reason, trailed along in the wake of imperial rule.
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