Alfred Russel Wallace

by Peter Raby

  Those two weeks in London and Paris greatly strengthened Wallace’s determination to become a professional collector, or, rather, to use the profession of collecting in order to pursue his growing preoccupation with species and their origin. Three years before, he had been a raw amateur. Now he had been cited in the Zoologist, and, when the British Association came to Swansea in 1848, Lewis Dillwyn added a generous note to his ‘Materials for a Fauna and Flora of Swansea’: ‘I have been favoured by Mr Alfred Wallace with the following list of Coleoptera which he has added to the catalogue I printed in 1829, and which are placed in the Museum at Neath.’ Wallace proudly took Fanny to a conversazione of the Swansea Literary and Scientific Society, held to coincide with the British Association meeting.

  Wallace’s purchase of American Coleoptera had been made with a view to preparing himself for the next stage. From the Bloomsbury Street natural history agent and dealer, Samuel Stevens, he learnt about the opportunities and the economics of the specimen trade. Edward Doubleday, at the British Museum, showed him the insect collection – a hasty glance at the butterflies intrigued but slightly fazed Wallace: ‘The differences between genera appear so slight & arbitrary while the actual number of sp. is so great as to render them quite bewildering.’48 But beetles had been equally bewildering until he met Bates.

  Slowly that winter, as Wallace continued his science lectures – and added another on his week in Paris – his plans began to take shape. His family responsibilities were eased, now that Fanny was back, and living in Neath with their mother, and Herbert. She was, too, forming a promisingly close relationship with Thomas Sims, elder son of the family with whom he had lodged in Neath. John, as restless and enterprising as his brother, was prepared to have one last attempt at a British career, by trying his hand at dairy farming. Wallace and Bates were poised to travel; but to which country? Wallace had £100 saved from his railway surveying fees, enough to pay for passage and equipment, and still leave a little to live on until he could earn some income from collecting. Bates, with a secure family business behind him, had different family pressures to contend with: his father clearly thought the scheme ridiculous, but agreed to advance him the money. Even so, their budget was tight. Sir William Hooker calculated that the total annual cost to Kew of supporting an overseas plant hunter in the field was £600, including a salary of £100. That was the most straightforward method. More independent was the approach of Richard Spruce. When he went to the Amazon in 1849, he, like Wallace and Bates, was unsalaried, but unlike them he had secured commitments from eleven initial subscribers who agreed in advance to pay for sets of botanical specimens; while George Bentham undertook the task of identifying and sorting the consignments, distributing them to museums and private collectors, obtaining payment, and then sending the proceeds off to Spruce in the form of a letter of credit via Messrs Singlehurst, the shipping agents at Liverpool. But Spruce, after a successful expedition to the Pyrenees, was in a different league from Wallace and Bates: he was a proven specialist and collector, with a close network of botanical contacts. The two young men did not yet have the benefit of official or even semi-official support systems. They would be totally dependent on results, and on the market.

  A book, naturally, clinched the issue of where to go. William Edwards, an American, published A Voyage up the Amazon in 1847. Edwards was engagingly enthusiastic about the freshness and beauty of the Amazon – ‘where the mightiest of rivers rolls majestically through primeval forests of boundless extent, concealing, yet bringing forth the most beautiful and varied forms of animal and vegetable existence’.49 Although Edwards, with only a touch of irony, invoked the full range of traveller’s tales – including Amazonian women, cannibal Indians and epicurean anacondas, as well as roguish descriptions of mermaids with long floating hair, darting through the surf like brown sea-nymphs – he was a serious entomologist, and he painted an attractive picture: the people were friendly, the living was cheap, the climate agreeable. According to Bates, the Amazon was Wallace’s suggestion. They checked with Doubleday: northern Brazil had wonderful insects, and was relatively uncollected. They re-read the descriptions of Humboldt and Darwin, settled on Pará (modern Belém), at the mouth of the Amazon, as their first destination, and moved to London to make final preparations. There they re-scrutinised the collections of American insects at the British Museum. They met Edwards, who gave them letters of introduction to American traders at Pará. They cross-questioned Thomas Horsfield, an experienced tropical traveller, at the British East India Company’s museum. They trekked out to Kew to study tropical vegetation, and secured an interview with Sir William Hooker, who gave them an idea of what would be acceptable for the collection there, and promised to send them a copy of the printed instructions Kew issued to collectors. They wrote courteously, deferentially, to jog his memory, and to obtain something in writing:

  We think an official letter from you, referring to what you wish us to obtain for the Kew Museum, and accompanying the printed instructions you were so kind as to offer to send us, would be of great service to us. It would serve to shew that we were the persons we should represent ourselves to be, and might facilitate our progress into the interior.50

  Sir William obliged, and the innocents duly thanked him – the letter helped them obtain their passports. Wallace had himself vaccinated, and bought spare spectacles. Then they set off north, via Bates’s home at Leicester. They spent a week practising shooting and skinning birds, and made a detour to Chatsworth, which gave them another chance to inspect more palm trees and orchids in the hothouses. Wallace was twenty-five, Bates twenty-three, when they left Liverpool on 26 April 1848, the only two paying passengers aboard the sailing barge Mischief.

  The Amazon and the Rio Negro

  3 Apprenticeship on the Amazon

  AFTER AN UNPLEASANT passage through the Bay of Biscay, during which Wallace stayed put in his berth, the Mischief made good time to reach the Brazilian coast at Salinas on 26 May 1848, thirty days out from Liverpool. Once a pilot had been taken on board, the ship glided up river, and finally anchored two days later: ‘and when the sun rose in a cloudless sky, the city of Pará, surrounded by the dense forest, and overtopped by palms and plantains, greeted our sight, appearing doubly beautiful from the presence of those luxuriant tropical productions in a state of nature, which we had so often admired,’ Wallace commented with some exaggeration, ‘in the conservatories of Kew and Chatsworth’.1

  The two young naturalists, poised to enter a new world and a new profession, borrowed the captain’s telescope; to the east, the country seemed unremarkable, slightly undulating, with bare sand hills and scattered trees; but to the west they could see ‘a long line of forest, rising apparently out of the water; a densely packed mass of tall trees, broken into groups, and finally into single trees, as it dwindled away in the distance’. This was the frontier of the great primeval forest, ‘which contains so many wonders in its recesses, and clothes the whole surface of the country for two thousand miles from this point to the foot of the Andes’.2 Here Bates would pass ‘eleven of the best years’ of his life; Wallace was to spend just over four years, with more mixed reactions.

  They saw ships, large and small, canoes moving along the shore, vultures in the sky, white buildings with red-tiled roofs, towers and cupolas of churches and convents sharply defined against the clear blue sky – and then they heard the ringing of bells and firing of rockets which greeted a Roman Catholic festival day. Even within the city – with a population of fifteen thousand, it was the largest city on the Amazon – there was vegetation everywhere, sprouting from ledges and mouldings, growing on the tops of walls and from the window openings of the churches, while the squares and public areas were more like village greens than urban spaces – and everywhere, ‘above and below and behind the city’, the unbroken forest.3

  On landing, they went to call on Mr Miller, the Mischief’s consignee and also the British Vice-Consul, who invited them to stay until they could find the
ir own accommodation. They soon met the few English and American residents, all traders, and began to familiarise themselves with the city and the immediate surroundings.

  After traversing the few streets of tall, gloomy, convent-looking buildings near the port, inhabited chiefly by merchants and shopkeepers; along which idle soldiers, dressed in shabby uniforms, carrying their muskets carelessly over their arms, priests, Negresses with red water-jars on their heads, sad-looking Indian women carrying their naked children astride on their hips, and other samples of the motley life of the place, were seen; we passed down a long narrow street leading to the suburbs. Beyond this, our road lay across a grassy common into a picturesque lane leading to the virgin forest. The long street was inhabited by the poorer class of the population. The houses were of one storey only, and had an irregular and mean appearance. The windows were without glass, having, instead, projecting lattice casements. The street was unpaved, and inches deep in loose sand. Groups of people were cooling themselves outside their doors – people of all shades in colour of skin, European, Negro and Indian, but chiefly an uncertain mixture of the three. Amongst them were several handsome women, dressed in a slovenly manner, barefoot or shod in loose slippers; but wearing richly decorated ear-rings, and around their necks strings of very large gold beads. They had dark expressive eyes, and remarkably rich heads of hair. It was a mere fancy, but I thought the mingled squalor, luxuriance and beauty of these women were pointedly in harmony with the rest of the scene; so striking, in the view, was the mixture of natural riches and human poverty.4

  It is characteristic for Bates and Wallace to walk immediately away from the ‘convent-looking buildings’, from the government and commercial areas, towards the virgin forest; and to embrace the human and natural beauty and riches that met them, amidst the dilapidated houses and weed-grown gardens, with hogs and goats and ill-fed poultry wandering in and out through the broken wooden palings. It is more characteristic of Bates to write about the beauty of the women in the city; Wallace tended to be less expansive in such descriptions, except in a strictly anthropological context: ‘Every shade of colour is seen here in the people,’ he commented, ‘from white to yellow, brown and black – Negroes, Indians, Brazilians, and Europeans, with every intermediate mixture.’5 But each was drawn, as if by a magnet, to the surrounding forest. Amidst all, ‘and compensating every defect, rose the overpowering beauty of the vegetation’.6

  Initially, both Bates and Wallace seem to be writing relatively standard descriptions of their first impressions: ‘The massive dark crowns of shady mangoes were seen everywhere amongst the dwellings, amidst fragrant blossoming orange, lemon, and many other tropical fruit trees; some in flower, others in fruit, at varying stages of ripeness.’ Yet, as they expand, you realise that even in their notes on Pará each is writing with a professional naturalist’s eye:

  Here and there, shooting above the more dome-like and sombre trees, were the smooth columnar stems of palms, bearing aloft their magnificent crops of finely cut fronds. Amongst the latter the slim assai-palm was especially noticeable, growing in groups of four and five; its smooth, gently curving stem, twenty to thirty feet high, terminating in a head of feathery foliage, inexpressibly light and elegant in outline. On the boughs of the taller and more ordinary-looking trees sat tufts of curiously leaved parasites. Slender woody lianas hung in festoons from the branches, or were suspended in the form of cords and ribbons; whilst luxuriant creeping plants overran alike tree-trunks, roofs and walls, or toppled over palings in copious profusion of foliage. The superb banana (Musa paradisiaca), of which I had always read as forming one of the charms of tropical vegetation, here grew with great luxuriance: its glossy velvety-green leaves, twelve feet in length, curving over the roofs of verandas in the rear of every house. The shape of the leaves, the varying shades of green which they present when lightly moved by the wind, and especially the contrast they afford in colour and form to the more sombre hues and more rounded outline of the other trees, are quite sufficient to account for the charm of this glorious tree. Strange forms of vegetation drew our attention at almost every step.

  The luxuriance, the diversity, the anticipated, the unexpected, hit their senses – overwhelmingly attractive to newcomers, as Bates commented, whose last and quite recent country ramble ‘was over the bleak moors of Derbyshire on a sleety morning in April’. And when the brief twilight began, there came the whirring of cicadas, the shrill stridulation of a vast variety of field crickets and grasshoppers, the plaintive hooting of tree frogs: ‘the audible expression of the teeming profusion of Nature’, to be joined, as night came on, by the croaking and drumming of many species of frogs and toads – the ‘uproar of life’.7 This was what they had come to find: the amazing variety of species assaulting their eyes and ears, thrusting towards them as they walked towards the forest; and the climate was beautiful, 75° Fahrenheit before sunrise, 85 to 87 in the afternoon: hot, but by no means oppressive. ‘I enjoy it as much as the finest summer weather in England,’ Wallace reported to Silk.8

  The first flush of ecstasy was followed by a slight sense of disappointment, or at least adjustment. Pará itself was not the rain-forest; the birds were less spectacular than either had imagined, the butterflies less numerous. The lamplighter knocked on the door to show them a boa-constrictor he had met making its way down the street, but the only vertebrates in large numbers were lizards, which they found difficult to catch. They set the local boys to go after them with bows and arrows. At least there were plenty of ants, intensely interesting to Bates in particular.

  They could not initially find a suitable house, so Miller lent them his rocinha, his country house, half a mile from the city. They bought a few essentials, such as a table and chairs and hammocks, hired an old cook, Isidoro, and got down to work, learning Portuguese when they were not ‘investigating the natural productions of the country’. After a fortnight, they heard of a rocinha available to rent a mile and a half from the city, at Nazaré, and moved in for a stay of several months. (The Portuguese merchants had not fully recovered confidence after a series of revolutions, and many had abandoned their country houses for the greater security of the city.) The house had four good-sized rooms, with a cool veranda all round it under a projecting tiled roof, excellent for sitting and working. On one side lay the small village square, with the shrine of Our Lady of Nazaré, a centre of devotion, opposite their gate; on the other three sides lay the forest, and behind the house ran the main forest road, with paths leading off it into the woods, badly overgrown but quite passable to determined collectors. Not far away was the house where the German naturalists Johann Baptist von Spix and Karl Friedrich von Martius had lived in 1819: to be following the trail of such famous predecessors boosted their self-esteem.9 They would rise soon after dawn, for coffee, and then spend two hours on ornithology, under a cloudless sky, and in a pleasant temperature.

  All nature was fresh, new leaf and flower-buds expanding rapidly. Some mornings a single tree would appear in flower amidst what was the preceding evening a uniform green mass of forest – a dome of blossom suddenly created as if by magic. The birds were all active …

  Ornithology, of course, meant not primarily observation, but capture. Then they had breakfast, after Isidoro had come back from Pará with fresh provisions for the day, followed by entomology, from ten until two or three in the afternoon, ‘the best time for insects in the forest being a little before the greatest heat of the day’. The temperature rose, and when Wallace and Bates returned tired from their ‘ramble’, they would see their neighbours asleep in hammocks, or resting in the shade. The clouds would build up, the wind would rise, and a late-afternoon rainstorm would deluge down. Then life would revive, and the ‘ringing uproar’ from bush and tree would resume: ‘The following morning the sun again rises in a cloudless sky, and so the cycle is completed; spring, summer, and autumn, as it were, in one tropical day.’10 They dined at four, took tea at seven, and spent their evenings preserving their coll
ections, and making notes. Occasionally they might walk to Pará, to watch the night life of the city, or spend a few hours with the European or American residents. Their house proved an ideal location. Humming-birds ‘vibrated their gilded plumes’ at the blossoms on the neighbouring trees. The black-eyed Indian girls came into their garden to gather flowers for their hair. There were three labourers at the house, employed to tend the coffee and fruit trees in the garden. One of them, Vincente, had a high reputation as an insect- and reptile-catcher. He soon presented Bates with a mygale (tarantula), a huge bird-eating spider half a foot across, and proved an excellent ally; the taciturn Isidoro was more knowledgeable about the names and properties of plants and trees than any man in Pará, and Vincente was a ‘glorious fellow to get wasps’ nests and to dig out the holes of monstrous spiders’.11 Wallace was highly impressed by Isidoro’s knowledge of the trees, of their uses and properties.