by Peter Raby
After a month, they arrived at Santarem, situated at the mouth of the clear blue waters (olive green, according to Bates) of the Tapajóz, four hundred miles from the sea. The town, slightly elevated, had a clean, cheerful appearance: whitewashed, red-tiled houses, above a fine sandy beach, with a fresh breeze blowing up river. In fact, the wind was sometimes so strong that it could be difficult to make one’s way against it. The population was about 2,500: ‘Not quite a modern Babalon [sic],’ Herbert reported to Fanny, ‘about the size of Neath, although the grass growing in the streets might remind you of some deserted city of the ancients.’31 (Three years later, the American naval officer Herndon reported that Santarem boasted a billiard table.) In Santarem, he teased her, he had made a ‘Zoological discovery’: at Neath there was a ‘Blue Pig’ on an inn sign, considered an eccentric whim of the sign-painter: ‘Let the people of Neath know that I have seen in Brazil, a living breathing, live Blue Pig.’ Wallace had letters of introduction to Captain Hislop, a ‘sturdy, rosy Scotsman’, who had been trading on the Amazon for forty-five years. He kept files and files of old newspapers, though apart from these he claimed to read only two books: Constantin Volney’s Ruins of Empires, and the Bible. After a few glasses of port, he liked to talk about Moses, ‘a great general, and a great lawgiver, but a great impostor’.32 Hislop organised a house for them – mud walls and floors, with a high, tiled roof, ‘all very dusty and ruinous’ – but it would do for a while, and they moved in, accepting the captain’s invitation to take dinner with him, in his house overlooking the river. In the evening, the local-government officials and the principal traders would gather in front of Hislop’s place, to smoke and take snuff and talk politics. Wallace thought poorly of the prevailing mores: ‘There are here, as in Pará, many persons who live an idle life, entirely supported by the labours of a few slaves which they have inherited.’33 However, he was glad to be introduced to the commandante militar, the delegado de policia, and the juiz de direito. He had met the judge before, in Pará, who now offered to lend him his canoe – and an Indian – to go to Montealegra, two days downstream on the northern bank. The hills there were nearly a thousand feet high, and might prove better territory for Coleoptera.
Richard Spruce, View of Santarem
Wallace was full of energy and enthusiasm. His initial walks round Santarem suggested that it would prove a good station for butterflies, at least; but suddenly, fired by his conversations with Hislop, the whole continent seemed accessible. What about Matto Grosso in the province of Cuyaba as a locality, he asked Stevens. Was Bolivia at all known? There were only five or six Erycinidae in the British Museum catalogue, so there was plenty of scope. Either of these areas would be as easily reached as the Andes by way of the Amazon. Meanwhile, he was already planning to go up the Rio Negro towards the sources of the Orinoco; and the bathing in the Tapajoz was luxurious, and oranges were fourpence a bushel. ‘The more I see of the country, the more I want to; and I can see no end of, the species of butterflies when the whole country is well explored.’34 It looked wonderfully straightforward on a large-scale map.
Wallace did some exploring, as well as collecting, from Montealegra, though he found it less attractive than he anticipated, as the village was plagued by mosquitoes. He went off to inspect some Indian picture-writings on a mountain a few miles away: his interest in the lives and habits of the local population was beginning to grow, now that he was increasingly removed from European culture. He was, too, beginning to accept, with reluctance, the different customs and priorities of Brazil. There was a festa in Montealegra during their stay, and ‘their’ Indian was needed to play the violin; he ‘did not think it at all necessary to ask us in order to absent himself two days’, recalled Wallace, more as a comment than a complaint – he and Herbert simply accepted the situation, and cooked their own meals. Wallace was successful in buying a canoe: it was a bit leaky, and they had to carry out a number of impromptu repairs on subsequent trips, but at least it provided more independence. They sailed it back to Santarem, and now settled down to a pleasant routine. It was the dry season, with very little rain, and a cloudless sky for weeks together, with the heat moderated by the fresh breeze. They rose at six, to sort out their nets and collecting-boxes; breakfast at seven, prepared by an old village woman; off at eight, for a three-mile walk to a good area just below the town; then collecting until two or three, especially butterflies – the beautiful Callithea sapphira, and brilliant Erycinidae; a refreshing bathe in the Tapajoz on the way home, with no fear of alligators because of the swiftness of the current, followed by a snack of watermelon; then a change of clothing, dinner, and a session of insect-setting; finally, in the cool of the evening, tea and social calls. Even better, Richard Spruce, with his young assistant Robert King, had arrived in Santarem. This was Wallace’s dream: exercise, pure air, good simple living – beef, fish, milk, fresh bread supplied by Louis the French baker; wonderful collecting-grounds within an easy stroll; and congenial company: ‘I have never altogether enjoyed myself so much.’35
Spruce had been partly encouraged to go to the Amazon from hearing about the collecting success of Wallace and Bates. The son of a Yorkshire schoolmaster, and himself a reluctant teacher for a few years, he had already carried out a year-long expedition in the French Pyrenees. Now, with William Hooker’s encouragement and with George Bentham offering to act as his distributor, he committed himself to serious plant-hunting at the age of thirty-two with truly vocational zeal. Wallace was delighted to have again a sympathetic friend, and an intellectual companion whose general approach to life, and collecting, complemented his own. Spruce was philosophical, questioning, agnostic; dedicated, persistent, methodical; unstuffy, and with a minimum of social and racial prejudices. Perhaps, too, because Spruce was principally a botanist, Wallace did not feel that he was in direct competition with him, as he was with Bates. The two men became life-long friends and in those relaxed, balmy days at Santarem Wallace was able to expand on his own theoretical lines of enquiry, especially those concerning the distribution and definition of species, including man. He also began to speculate on species distribution, now that he had collected on both sides of the Amazon, and had begun to suspect that the river itself formed the boundary for some species.
While Wallace and his brother had been at Montealegra, Bates sailed past to Santarem. He paused there for the night, dining, no doubt, with Captain Hislop, meeting, presumably, Richard Spruce, and discovering that Wallace would be returning shortly. His narrative comments: ‘From information obtained here, I fixed upon the next town, Obydos, as the best place to stay at a few weeks, in order to investigate the natural productions of the north side of the Lower Amazons.’36 Later in his travels he would make it his headquarters for three and a half years; for the moment, Santarem may have held too many competing collectors. Bates left for Obydos, fifty miles away, at sunrise the next morning, and would not meet up with Wallace until the end of January 1850. All the same, on this one short stretch of the Amazon were three of the greatest naturalists of their time, members of the new species of freelance, self-financing, collectors. The Reverend Leonard Jenyns, recalling the enthusiasm for natural history in Cambridge in the late 1820s, commented that the entomologists, in particular, were so numerous ‘that several persons among the lower classes derived a part of their livelihood during the summer months from collecting insects for sale’.37 With the Amazon as a glorious substitute for the Cambridgeshire fens, these three men were poised to emerge triumphantly from their relatively lowly status.
Wallace sent three boxes from Santarem to Stevens, mostly Lepidoptera, as the beetles would not make their appearance until the rainy season. One, a rare Callithea sapphira, he described as ‘the most beautiful thing I have yet taken’:
It is very difficult to capture, settling almost invariably high up in trees; two specimens I climbed up after and waited for; I then adopted a long pole which I left at a tree they frequented, and by means of persevering with it every day
for near a month have got a good series: the sexes I have no doubt whatever about, though I have not taken them in copula; the female flies lower and is easier to take than the male.
He also included a small stuffed alligator, ‘a species I think they have not in the Museum; it is the Jacare tinga, of which the tail is eaten and is very good; they are an immense deal of trouble in skinning’.38 Another larger alligator, and some extra vertebrae, made up the parcel, with two Indian calabashes as a present for his agent, sent down river with a request for volume IX of Godard’s Encyclopédie Méthodique. But now the weather was changing; the skies were overcast, and the rain was setting in. The naturalists were on the move. Spruce was offered a passage in a trading vessel. It was time for Wallace to head upstream towards the Rio Negro, but first he had to organise repairs to his own canoe, plugging the cracks with cotton dipped in hot pitch, and collecting a crew.
For the next two months, November and December 1849, the three parties leapfrogged each other up the Amazon. Wallace reached Obydos to find Bates already gone, while Spruce, who had left Santarem a week before him, had arrived only the evening before. At Obydos, there was more canoe-repairing and crew-hunting: the Santarem Indians returned home, and eventually Wallace found two replacements for the next stage. At the next settlement of Villa Nova the same problem occurred. Wallace enjoyed the company of the padre, but a week in the rains translating English conundrums into Portuguese was wearing. Letters requesting help were sent to the commandante, who was at his country house. Eventually, the padre negotiated a complicated deal, by which a trader would ‘lend’ Wallace three of his Indians, in exchange for the ones the commandante would surely send in the course of time.
One of the Indians, however, did not choose to come, and was driven to the canoe by severe lashes, and at the point of the bayonet. He was very furious and sullen when he came on board, vowing that he would not go with me, and would take vengeance on those who had forced him on board.
Wallace offered him good pay and food, but the man was adamant – and at the same time ‘very civil’, assuring Wallace that he bore him no ill will personally.39 At the first stopping place, he politely wished Wallace goodbye, and returned home to his village by way of the forest. A replacement was eventually found, and they slowly moved up river, sailing sometimes but more often rowing, soaked with the almost incessant rain, and tormented by mosquitoes. On 30 December 1849, they reached the junction of the Amazon with the Rio Negro:
After the muddy, monotonous, mosquito-swarming Amazon, it was with great pleasure we found ourselves in the black waters – black as ink they are, and well deserve their name; the shores are rugged and picturesque – and greatest luxury of all, mosquitoes are unknown except in the islands.40
Twelve miles further, on the east bank of the Rio Negro, was the city of Barra (now Manaos), named after the fort that formed the original settlement. They went at once to present their letter of introduction to the leading Italian businessman, Senhor Henrique Antony, the warm-hearted and ‘never-failing friend of stray travellers’: he immediately offered them two large rooms in a new house he was building, as well as the hospitality of his own.41
Senhor Henrique was welcoming, as he had been to Edwards before, and to Bates and Spruce in turn, and he had a pretty, clever and amiable wife in Donna Leocadia. But Barra, although larger than Santarem with a population of five or six thousand, had little to recommend it to Wallace. The more civilised inhabitants had ‘literally no amusements whatever’, unless you counted drinking and small-scale gambling. Few of them ever opened a book, or had any mental occupation; and the morals were ‘perhaps at the lowest ebb possible in any civilised community’.42 The wet season had set in properly, and a few days in the surrounding area soon proved that Barra was little use for collecting birds, or even insects: it was almost impossible ‘to get half a dozen in a day worth bringing home’. Wallace had not clawed his way a thousand miles from Pará to be idle, and each unproductive day was a debit entry on his balance sheet. More Indians were procured. Herbert was dispatched to visit a neighbouring estate, to see what he could do independently. Wallace headed off in his own canoe for some islands three days’ voyage up the Rio Negro, where he hoped to find the umbrella chatterers in plumage.
He gained two important benefits from this month up river. First, he learned to rough it. The lodging he was found was a small room in a hut, itself part of a very small settlement in the forest. There were three openings hung with palm-leaf mats, and the floor was at such a steep angle that everything tended to slide off it. Second, he was forced to improve his languages. Only one man in the settlement spoke Portuguese, but the boy sent with him by Henrique could interpret, and Wallace set himself to learn as much of the Lingoa Geral, the common Indian language, as he could. The two other rooms in his hut housed three families, so he was able to observe the Indians’ way of life at close quarters, and was astonished to note how hard they all worked, and how little they ate. The four huts were ‘imbedded in the forest’ – they were less than twenty yards apart, but invisible from each other.43
Wallace’s hard-working hunter arrived, and immediately set off for the islands, the habitat of the umbrella birds which, Wallace believed, never appeared on the mainland. Over the next weeks he produced twenty-five specimens: not a huge return by Wallace’s standards, but quite a challenge, since the whole of the bird’s neck was ‘covered internally with a thick coat of hard, muscular fat, very difficult to be cleaned away’.44 The umbrella bird is about as big as a raven (or, according to Bates, a common crow), and much the same colour. It has a thick crest of feathers which, when raised, curve over its head like a fringed sunshade, and another ornamental plume on its breast. Wallace gave the bird’s Indian name as ‘ueramimbe’, ‘trumpet bird’, Bates as ‘uira-mimbeu’, ‘fife’ or ‘panpipe bird’. Bates later described a performance he saw: ‘It drew itself up on its perch, spread widely the umbrella-formed crest, dilated and waved its glossy breast-lappet, and then, in giving vent to its loud piping note, bowed its head slowly forwards.’45 On the last day, the hunter presented Wallace with a live male bird, shot but apparently only stunned. Wallace fed it cautiously with bits of banana and fruit, and it survived a fortnight, which gave him the opportunity to observe it closely, and note its method of expanding and closing its beautiful crest and neck plume.
The umbrella birds formed the pick of a consignment of birds and insects Wallace sent to Stevens on 20 March. There were also a little bristle-tailed manikin, and two ‘bad’ specimens of the ‘bell bird’ – bad because they needed five or six shots to bring them down from the treetops. But his concentration on the umbrella birds helped to shift Wallace from collector to observer, and formed the subject of his first scientific paper from the Amazon, short enough, but even so something more than a mere catalogue of captures and locations.46
By the time Wallace returned to Barra, with his prize umbrella bird, Bates had arrived from Obydos, to be received as part of the extended family by Senhor Henrique. Their two accounts present a sharp contrast. Wallace complained that he now had a ‘dull time of it’ – by which he meant that the rain, and the humidity, made collecting extremely difficult. Bates’s presence was welcome, but Wallace was impatient to be gone. His initial plan, he told Stevens, was to have been up the Rio Negro by March, where he intended to get as many live animals as he could, take them with him to Pará, and be back in England by Christmas. But the weather and lack of funding was keeping him boxed up at Barra. For Bates, on the other hand, these weeks provided an interlude of ‘pleasant society’. There were half-a-dozen foreigners, English, American, German, all of them traders, besides Wallace and another naturalist, the bird-collector Hauxwell. After a frustrating voyage from Obydos, sodden by the rain and plagued by mosquitoes and the dreaded ‘piums’, it was a pleasure to ramble through the neighbouring forest in the dry spells, and especially along a beautiful road that ran to a waterfall:
The waters of one of the largest r
ivulets which traverse the gloomy wilderness here fall over a ledge of rock about ten feet high. It is not the cascade itself, but the noiseless solitude, and the marvellous diversity and richness of trees, foliage, and flowers, encircling the water basin, that form the attraction of the place. Families make picnic excursions to the spot; and the gentlemen – it is said the ladies also – spend the sultry hours of midday bathing in the cold and bracing waters.47
(Bates had an eye for the ladies, and was prepared to admit it.) The waterfall had been, too, a favourite spot of Spix and Martius in 1820, and so ‘classic ground to the naturalist’. Bates was able to relax and make the most of the opportunities offered by the little European community: ‘We’, he recalled, generously including his former companion, ‘passed a delightful time.’
At this point in his long stay Bates was having second thoughts about the Amazon, and was under considerable pressure from his parents to return home. His father and mother had called on Stevens in London, where Mr Bates quizzed Stevens on the financial rewards, and ‘stated to him my opinion that your time would be much safer and more profitably employed as a manufacturer than in your present occupation’. The hosiery business was booming; free-trade measures had resulted in a ‘splendid’ export market – ‘& that makes the home trade good as well’. Mr Bates senior made his opinion of collecting very clear, informing Stevens ‘that the occupation might do very well as a dernier resort to one who had tried other things and they had proved failures & instanced Mr Wallace’.48
