Among the other Germans who collected in the tropical or exotic regions was Hans Fruhstorfer, whom Doherty would befriend and who was self-taught in five languages. Fruhstorfer bought and sold butterflies to support his systematic studies. By the early twentieth century, he would become an admired authority on tropical butterflies.54 Fruhstorfer commanded the arc of tropical trade, from Brazil to Java, as few ever did. As a youth he had looked at pictures of morphos and read about them in travel books, but he wanted to see for himself those living “shimmering light-blue mirrors,” as Vladimir Nabokov would later call them, the apex for Fruhstorfer of all that was good in nature, flying most abundantly in southern Brazil “in the height of the tropical summer.”55 As a youth of twenty, he collected in 1886 along the Capivari River near Rio, where, in a “lonely” valley, he saw hundreds of morphos “floating along as if lost in a dream,” searching for the “tangled shores of a crystal waterfall,” where they briefly settled down among other “butterflies of all sorts.” “Just as wild animals tread down regular tracks in order to reach water,” Fruhstorfer wrote, “so the Morphids assembled here daily. They did not come in crowds but singly, floating along quietly. And how patiently one waited, until after some minutes of silent expectation a second iridescent form appeared, to be captured with the almost unfailing certainty of long practice as soon as it ventured within reach of the net.” Sometimes, in the course of a single day, he took easily one hundred morphos.56 He made a big profit selling them through his father’s business in Berlin, enough to finance the next stage in his career, in Ceylon and Java, by which time he was doing a profitable business directly with Berlin’s Royal Museum of Natural History.57 “I collect only to make money from the butterflies,” he wrote Strecker, but “I am not a dealer of the size of Staudinger.”58
The tropical butterfly business also attracted Americans, who benefited immensely from the British and German achievements. After 1885, the appeal of exotics grew, expressed best by Henry Skinner, the editor of the popular Entomological News, whose enthusiasm for butterflies beyond American shores was intense. In 1889, the year the News first appeared, he wrote Strecker that the journal would be “devoted to the species of the world,” far beyond anything known before in the United States.59 And when the American assault on the Philippines began in 1898, he glimpsed exciting prospects for collectors. “Now that the U.S. will add to its territory, the question arises what will entomologists do in the matter?” Oppose the war? No. Stick to American fauna? No. “The proper plan for students to adopt would be to ignore political and geographical lines and take up for study some genus, family, or order of the world.”60
Long before this time, a few brave Americans had sought butterflies below the equator, notably, Titian Peale from Philadelphia and also Thomas Horsfield of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, who, in the 1820s, had traveled to Java under the aegis of England’s East India Company to make the first major collection by a Westerner of Javanese butterflies.61 But neither he nor Peale cared about making money from insects. Not until the 1880s did such a quest for gold begin, when some Americans, risking body and mind, set out for South America, where “trained collectors” from England and Europe had “made thousands of the dollars from collecting,” as Willis Weaver from Salem, Ohio, told Strecker in 1878.62
Weaver, untrained and naive, could not bear “the difficulties of climate and climbs.” “Heat, fatigue, hunger, and the desire of finding a night’s lodgings swallow a man up so that he is no longer a responsible being,” he wrote.63 Fred Knab, a young German-American from Chicopee, Massachusetts, funded by subscribers, took a steamer to Brazil, but he suffered from “clouds of mosquitoes” that tortured him at every turn, and stinging ants that hid in his shoes and clothing.64 Lacking a compass, he lost his way in a pathless woods on a cloudy day, getting out only by following a streambed. But in two years he captured two-thousand specimens, many in the towns, where butterflies clustered “everywhere about the houses,” “alighting under the verandas and often entering rooms,” in a rainbow of colors.65 In the town square of Santarém, where some Americans ran a distillery that catered to a large German population, he once saw hundreds of morphos—“die grossen Blauen”—pooled on a spot on the road so saturated in schnapps, a strong ginlike drink flavored with fruit, that he could pick the lovely insects up with his fingers.66 Another, even more successful, German-American collector was Oscar T. Baron, who worked episodically as a railroad field engineer in California, selling insects as a sometime lucrative backup. He knew a lot about the food plants, habits, butterfly life histories, and “would raise all [he] could merely for the love of the matter.”67 In the Andes Mountains, crossing a “summit range of about 13,000 feet,” Baron netted numerous butterflies, which, combined with his haul from Mexico and elsewhere, reaped $4,000.68
But Baron, Knab, and Weaver could not hold a candle to three other collectors: a married couple, Herbert and Daisy Smith, and Will Doherty. Herbert Smith, an all-around naturalist, explored the Amazon in the early 1870s. In 1879, in his mid-twenties, he married Daisy (her full name was Amelia Woolworth), a lively inquisitive Yankee born in Brooklyn who shared his yen for nature. An expert on tropical birds and a good taxidermist, Daisy, like Theodore Mead, felt no pangs about slicing up or boiling birds. For two years just after their marriage, they traveled the Amazon region, supported by subscriptions, and with Daisy shielding her husband, who was deaf, from the possible depredations of jungle prowlers, they accumulated a great mass of faunal material, including 15,000 butterflies and moths of 1,800 species.69 Two years later they were back again, this time serving two wealthy Englishmen, Osbert Salvin and Frederick Godman, for a massive biogeography of Mexico and Central America, with subcategories (insects, mammals, fishes, and so on). Biologia Centrali-Americana would reach sixty-three volumes to become one of the great studies of faunal life; its data on many groups have not been superceded to this day.70 Near the Veracruz mountains in Mexico, the Smiths took 250 new species of Hesperiidae (skippers), the most abundant of all butterflies.71 Henry Elwes called them “the two best collectors in the world.”72
Will Doherty thought of himself as “first and foremost a lepidopterist” who specialized in exotics, on which no one could beat him.73 As complex a man as any of America’s complex butterfly people, Doherty was fluent in many languages and had an impassioned interest in classical music and in the great literature of the West, nurtured by a mother who raised all her children to be readers. Doherty, though a generation younger than America’s foremost butterfly people, was really one of them, as much a Romantic as Strecker or Grote, and as talented a naturalist as Edwards or Scudder. Had he stayed home, he would have much enlarged the American achievement, but he lived and published mostly abroad, and in 1886, in a fateful decision to become a commercial dealer, he virtually ended his career as a naturalist. This decision would one day cost him his life.
Doherty’s father, James Monroe Doherty, the director of a railroad company and a naturalist, had helped introduce Cincinnati to both the first successful electric transport and the Linnaean Society, the city’s first natural history institution. Will was a sickly child, and stayed at home under his mother’s care until 1868, when he was eleven; she tutored him and watched over him more than she did her other five children. He attended the University of Cincinnati for three years, and then, at twenty-one, about to matriculate to Yale, he managed to get invited to the 1878 Paris Exposition as an attaché to an entomological exhibit organized by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Soon thereafter—around 1879 or ’80—he went off alone on a fateful tour, carrying letters of introduction and his father’s promise of financial support. In three months, on foot or horseback, he traversed Holland, Belgium, and Germany, crossed the Alps, much of southern Europe, and ended up for a time in Persia (present-day Iran). There he met Wilhelm Petersen, a young cosmopolitan German naturalist, who would one day write a respected catalog on the butterflies of Estonia. Petersen taught Doherty how to identify, collect, o
rganize, and preserve butterflies.74
These two photos were taken in 1900, at the end of Doherty’s life, near or in an encampment along the Uganda Railway, the main means of transport to his collecting grounds. Left, he overlooks a ravine, armed against lions that threatened him and his men; right, he sits in his tent, holding a cigarette in his right hand, with his left hand gently on the neck of a (probably blind) young woman, likely one of the many hangers-on who trailed along behind explorers or collectors like Doherty, appealing or waiting for a handout. Courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London, England.
Collecting draws people into the world, and even the most sedentary or homebound by instinct are exposed to new life, new experiences. This was profoundly true of Doherty, who carried his net throughout southeast Asia, into Malaysia, and down, finally, to Africa. Around 1882 he first entered India and found a “fairyland.” “I leave a sort of train of butterfly catchers behind me wherever I go, like a comet,” he wrote his mother.75 Once he ran barefoot after a rare satyrid in a streambed flowing through bamboo thickets, “the confounded insect disappearing as if by magic, among the impenetrable inter-lacings of the bamboo stems.” In a dense forest, just as he prepared to pounce with his net “on one of the most beautiful of all butterflies, a Thaumantis” with wings of purple and Prussian blue, an “awful dog” dashed out from nowhere “with such a scattering of leaves that I never saw where the Thaumantis went to.” Near Animudi, the tallest peak in southern India, he found what he thought to be “new species every day or two.” “It is impossible to describe to you how glorious it is when one finds an absolutely new organism,” he wrote his mother, in that extended correspondence of a lifetime.76 He boasted he could “distinguish every genus of butterflies in South India by some peculiarity of flight alone.” In 1883, he settled in Calcutta; visited the Calcutta Museum of Natural History, built by the British in 1814, the oldest museum in Asia; and became acquainted with the gifted Lionel de Nicéville, the museum’s naturalist and the coauthor of The Butterflies of India, Burma, and Ceylon, the first catalog on subcontinental butterflies, one indebted to Agassiz, Scudder, and Edwards.77 De Nicéville taught Doherty about the life histories of butterflies, about geographical conditions and distribution, and how to use a microscope.
“I feel wonderfully privileged to have all this before me, and go about in a mild ecstasy,” Doherty rejoiced. He got up every day at five-thirty and worked eight hours straight through, “studying and dissecting in the insect room with de Nicéville,” with two hours for exercise. He learned Darwinian theory and began “original work” on the “eggs of butterflies,” with “a very strong bearing on the theory of Descent.”78 He felt, he wrote, “like a Naturalist”; “I have passed my apprenticeship.” He aimed to “enter life as a professor of Natural History” and write books and articles, including for Scudder’s Boston Museum of Natural History. Money didn’t matter. “My habits are simple and I don’t mind that,” he told his father. The key thing was “not to throw away my gift.”79
Over the next two years, from 1883 to 1885, Doherty explored northern India, though repeatedly ill, once gulping down bottles of quinine. Yet, “you see,” he wrote his mother, “so long as I am at my entomology I never know an idle or unhappy moment.”80 Setting up camp in the Chittagong Hill Tracts in what is now Bangladesh, he studied eggs under a microscope; in Kumaon, he sought out butterflies at all elevations, including Papilio machaon, the swallowtail with nearly global distribution that William Henry Edwards had wondered about a year or two before in the journal Papilio. It stunned Doherty, as it had Edwards, to encounter P. machaon at many “zoological zones,” from 2,000 to 14,000 feet. He was even more surprised to find a “painted lady” butterfly of the genus Vanessa sipping nectar at 2,500 feet in the Kali Valley and on the summit of the Lepu Lek, far above the snow line at 18,000 feet, thus contradicting “all laws of distribution.”81 In a meadow near Almora, he plucked the caterpillar of a mineus (probably Mycalesis mineus) off some grasses after observing it “resting for hours with its chin strongly retracted, and its short, ear-like horns bending forwards looking much like a cat.” He took it back to his Almora bungalow and for five days watched it slowly metamorphose into “a clear, transparent green [chrysalis], unmarked except by the black dots of the spiracles.”82 “It’s quite surprising how the most elementary points of structure of butterflies have been neglected, owing to men studying only the dried cabinet specimens instead of those just caught,” he wrote. “I am achieving great things with the microscope.”83
Back in Calcutta, Doherty wrote a long paper called, rather dryly and misleadingly, “A List of Butterflies Taken in Kumaon,” soon published in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, the most admired science periodical in India, founded by the British, a showcase for the best work of both British and Indian naturalists.84 Doherty’s list dealt with themes that preoccupied Edwards and Scudder in the 1880s: seasonal polymorphism and sexual dimorphism, geographical distribution, ecological zones, symbiosis and mimicry.85 An original blend of natural history and biology, the paper made Doherty famous, if mainly in Germany and England.
Doherty compared himself to American businessmen who made “millions and employed thousands.” What he did “seemed trivial,” of course, but he favored people who “bent heart and soul in purposes still vaguer and more impractical than mine.” “I recognize them as brothers.”86 But in 1886, when he was twenty-nine, a crisis tested the limits of Doherty’s philosophy. After years of apprenticeship, spending hours peering through lenses in museums or in the field alone in his tent, he chose, out of pressing necessity, a path other than becoming a naturalist. His father had lost his job and could no longer support his family in Cincinnati or send his son money, as he had been doing since 1878, even borrowing to do so. Doherty had hated the paternal dole, and he now scraped by, writing articles for American magazines to meet his own “simple needs.” Yet it distressed him that his family at home might be impoverished. Then, suddenly, he had a flash of insight. In Penang, a central port city on the Malay Peninsula, he had heard about a man named Kunstler, a German butterfly merchant in nearby Perak Province who made thousands of dollars selling butterflies to well-off collectors and scientific societies, and to other persons as “parlor ornaments” (butterflies in glass cases). He learned, too, that Eduard Honrath, a wealthy Berlin art dealer who had built a villa in the city explicitly to house his collection of tropical butterflies, financed many of Kunstler’s ventures.87 Doherty sailed off to Perak to introduce himself and found out immediately that all he had heard was true. Kunstler was an affluent man who “kept” his wife and children “in good style,” Doherty wrote his mother.
He had “found his vocation,” as he called it.88 Doherty knew plenty about butterflies, rarely tired, and, unlike Kunstler, who refused to collect beyond Perak, feared going nowhere. Back in Penang, he walked about for hours in a high state of elation. Six months later he was writing to Arthur Butler, the curator of insects at London’s Natural History Museum and a potential buyer, that he planned to “sacrifice the privilege of writing myself naturalist and gentleman and become a mere dealer.” The decision was extraordinary considering that, only a year or two earlier, he had insisted that he would never “throw away my gift,” declaring that “selling my butterflies would be like selling my own toes.” Privately, he still had misgivings about selling his toes (only “duplicates,” he now insisted) and seemed certain he would go on writing scholarly essays on butterflies. But the die had been cast: to save his family he would sacrifice the world of value for the world of price. “If Kunstler could get money,” he wrote, “imagine what I could do.”89 Butterflies contained a new elixir, “dollar bills waving their green wings.”90
Doherty began his new life within weeks of writing Butler. It was a propitious moment. The demand for exotic and tropical lepidoptera was at a high point in the West. At first, he did his own collecting, learning quickly how to mount and pack insects and how to protect the
m from pests and molds. He experimented with net sizes and invented traps and baits as clever as anything Theodore Mead came up with in America; one of his best, “a dreadful thing,” “the Quintessence of Putrescence,” attracted many unusual moth species.91 He hunted in gorges, on plains thick with elephant grass that punctured his skin, in marshes glutted with leeches, and, in Macassar, “in the beds of the mountain torrents”: “I acquired the quite goat-like facility of jumping like a goat from boulder to boulder.”92 Once, he pitched into a deep, cisternlike, tiger pit set by natives; it was covered with logs, except for a single treacherous opening.93 While his competitors usually resided in one place for a year or two at a time, he rarely stayed anywhere for more than two or three months. He was the first Westerner to collect in Engano, Sumba, Sumbawa, and Biak Island, the first in Humboldt Bay, or northern New Guinea, and among the first in northern Burma.94 He visited the eastern Himalayas, “richer in butterflies than any other spot in the Old World.” By early 1888, when he was still only thirty-one, tens of thousands of butterflies had fallen to his net, with more than two hundred species and in “considerable duplicate” for sale to collectors.95
But Doherty had even more daring plans, and to execute them he needed to draw on a range of resources to overtake his chief competitors, the Germans. He beat them all, partly because he sold to anyone with a buck, with no reservation about person or place.96 “I sell in the best market and do not mix politics and business,” he told his father.97 He excelled, too, because he used better than anyone else the imperialist grid of hotels, boardinghouses, roads, and railroads, and he depended on the most skilled native collectors on the subcontinent, the Lepchas of Sikkim, people with authoritative knowledge of the natural world. Henry Elwes had recommended the Lepchas, who gave names to more living things “than nearly any other” people, creating a sophisticated non-Linnaean taxonomy steeped in religious and totemic meaning, which an English colonel transcribed and published in the Dictionary of the Lepcha-Language. Butterfly names filled more space than any other word, save one: “demon” (for every demon, perhaps a butterfly existed to counteract the demon’s evil power).98 Naming had a spiritual purpose, but with the side effect of helping Lepchas discriminate among various butterflies, Doherty reaped an enormous benefit. He hired three Lepchas and a fourth native, not a Lepcha, who served him for years as a majordomo and cook. “Everything depends on these Lepchas of mine,” he wrote his mother.99 When he decided to collect in Malaysia and found that two Lepchas—Pambu and Kanchu—were unwilling to go far away from home, he gave them big advances, higher wages, and pensions to cover burials and funeral feasts should they die on the job. He also honored their customs and religion. Together the men collected five thousand specimens in Celebes, and twenty-five hundred on the remote island of Wetter, many of rare or new species, and all preserved in perfect condition. They surveyed the entire extent of the Malay Archipelago, from Penang to New Guinea. Pambu, whom Doherty much admired, would stay with him for another seven years.
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