Alfred Russel Wallace

by Peter Raby

  In Barra, Wallace and Bates discussed their future plans, like politicians parcelling out spheres of influence. ‘Mr Wallace chose the Rio Negro for his next trip, and I agreed to take the Solimões’ – that is, the upper Amazon.49 The division seems logical, and amicable. Wallace had been planning the trip for months, ever since he reached Santarem. They had the opportunity, too, to continue their discussions about species. Bates was content, temporarily, to defer to Wallace. He left for Ega, four hundred miles up river, on 26 March. At the end of the year, isolated and a little disheartened, he was ready to cede the whole continent to his competitor. ‘Mr Wallace, I suppose, will follow up the profession,’ he wrote generously to Stevens, ‘and probably will adopt the track I have planned out to Peru; he is now in a glorious country, and you must expect great things from him. In perseverance and real knowledge of the subject, he goes ahead of me, and is worthy of all success.’50

  Wallace, still waiting for letters and money from England, was not going anywhere much. Unwilling to be unproductive, he spent two months a hundred miles or so up the Amazon – presumably, this minor expedition did not count – staying with Henrique’s father-in-law, Senhor Brandão, a well-educated Portuguese settler who appealed to Wallace’s views on economy because he was farming in a systematic way. There was something ‘racy and refreshing’ in his conversation – ‘such an absence of information, but such a fertility of ideas’; he had planted fruit trees, stocked his pastures with cattle, sheep, pigs and poultry, and cultivated tobacco.51 Wallace sent for his hunter, and collected what he could.

  Back at Barra, the weeks passed wearily. Herbert had discovered that, like his elder brother, he had the ability to mesmerise people, and he would call little Indian boys from the street, give them a copper ‘and by a little gazing and a few passes send them into the trance state’. On another occasion when they were out collecting, Herbert ‘quietly began mesmerising a young man nearly his own age. He did not entrance him, but obtained enough influence to render his arm rigid. This he instantly relaxed, and asked the Indian to lie down on the floor, which he did. My brother then made a pass along his body, and said, “Lie there till we return.”’ They walked out, assuming that the influence would fade, but two hours later found the man still on the ground. Herbert released him, and they gave him a small present, ‘but he did not seem much surprised or disturbed, evidently thinking we were white medicine-men’.52 This sort of incident helped to convince Wallace about the universality of such phenomena.

  Senhor Lima, a Portuguese trader generally considered ‘a very good sort of fellow’, had promised to take Wallace at least as far as the falls of the Rio Negro, and was persuaded to wait. At last, on the evening of 30 August, Bradley’s boat arrived: letters from Pará, letters from his Wilson cousins in Australia and his brother John in California, letters from his family in England, and, crucially, letters of credit from Stevens. Wallace sat up most of the night, answering them, then went out and bought additional essentials for his projected voyage: he was preparing for a seven-hundred-mile trip, and for an absence of twelve months. His brother was to stay at Barra. Herbert had decided that he was not cut out to be a collector, though he wrote cheerfully enough on the subject to Spruce:

  A Lodge is gained at last – here we are in a Barra!! – ‘Here we work with Net and Trigger/By the famous river Nigger …’ – o’er whose midnight waters never is heard the hum of the sanguinary Carapana – where ‘sleep which knits up the ravelled sleeve of care’ hath no intruder –53

  All the same, he intended to do enough to pay for his passage home. His elder brother lent him £10, all he could spare from the money Stevens had forwarded – ‘and I have given him a receipt to pay him when able’, he informed Fanny and his mother in August. ‘I am a thousand miles from Pará, and my present plan is as follows; to hire a hunter immediately, and go for a couple of months into the country to make a collection of Birds and Insects which will be sufficient to pay my voyage to England, and I hope leave a few pounds in my pocket besides.’ In place of the naturalist’s life, his family suggested he try California – but that theme did not appeal. ‘I wish I was a little more unpoetical; but as I am what I am, I must try and do the best for myself I can. “Trifles light as air” begone!! I have business before me – and must look sharp –’ (a favourite phrase, probably, of his sister). ‘P.S. You may expect me home at Christmas.’54

  At two o’clock on a fine bright afternoon, from the relative comfort of a ‘tolerably roomy’ canoe, Alfred Wallace waved farewell to his brother, and left Barra looking forward ‘with hope and expectation to the distant and little-known regions’ of the upper Rio Negro. At last he felt wholly independent, heading into the forest on his own.

  4 Hunting the White Umbrella Bird

  WALLACE SAILED OFF for the upper Rio Negro with high hopes of what these little-known regions might offer. Two years in Brazil had given him confidence, and even his enforced stay at Barra had been useful, in that he had been compelled to become more familiar with the trading community, and able to integrate smoothly – if not always comfortably – with their way of life. Senhor João Antonio de Lima was a middle-sized, grizzly man with a face ‘something like that of the banished lord in the National Gallery’, who graciously placed his boat at Wallace’s service.1 The vessel was crammed with trading goods: bales of brilliantly coloured cloth and calico, cottons and handkerchiefs, axes and cutlasses, knives and fish hooks, gunpowder and shot, beads and mirrors, as well as six months’ supplies for Lima’s family: rum and wine, tea, coffee, sugar, cooking oil, butter, garlic, pepper. In the evening, Wallace and Lima would stand on a plank at the entrance to the palm-leaved roof of their tolda, or shelter, or perch on it to sip their coffee and enjoy the fresh air and the cool, dark waters around them, while the goat-suckers hunted for insects, the tree frogs started up, and the monkeys filled the night with their howlings. Sometimes they might moor, hanging their hammocks from a tree on shore, or Wallace would roll up under the tolda, while Lima slept outside. They ate off the land, buying a fowl or eggs, oranges and bananas, from a cottage, or feeding off a turkey-like curassow or a guan shot in the forest, or a twenty-pound pirahiba hooked during the night. Many of the villages they passed were almost deserted, but Lima knew someone in most of the places where they stopped, and Wallace would find himself dining on turtle with silver knives and forks, but sitting cross-legged on a mat spread over the bare earth.

  The weather was fine. More often than not, there was a sharp afternoon storm, which passed in an hour or two and left the atmosphere mild and clear; and – a great luxury – there were no mosquitoes. Often two men would be sent off to fish early in the morning, and Wallace began to take a closer interest in what they caught. He made accurate drawings and descriptions, and this became a major source of interest, and a fresh focus for his collecting, during the following year.

  A month passed before they could see the opposite side of the river clearly once more and the landscape began to change, with slabs of granite conspicuous, and rocky islands in the river. After three more weeks, Wallace was excited to have a clear view of the Curicuríarí Serras, three thousand feet high, irregular conical masses of granite, jagged and peaked, covered in forest but with bare precipices shining with quartz.

  They entered the falls, a new adventure. Their first boat had been exchanged for two smaller canoes because of the increasingly difficult passage, and now they were reduced to one. Sometimes the Indians dragged or pushed it through narrow channels, plunging through the water themselves like fish; sometimes everyone clambered out on to the rocks, and the canoe was hauled a little further round some projecting obstacle with a tow rope; sometimes they paddled furiously, using the shelter of an island, or a rock, to make a few yards’ headway, zigzagging from bank to bank. At São Gabriel, the canoe had to be completely unloaded, while Lima and Wallace dressed formally to call on the commandante at the fort. Official permission was needed before anyone could proceed further up river
. Wallace brought the customary letter of introduction, and was invited to breakfast the following morning: they spent the evening with an old Portuguese trader Wallace had met at Barra.

  Above the rapids, the water was smooth as they approached the Equator, and they passed the mouth of the Vaupés river, three hundred yards wide with a stronger current than the Rio Negro, and also a ‘black’-water river. Then on 24 October, nearly eight weeks after setting off from Barra, they reached the small village of Nossa Senhora de Guía, which was Lima’s home: fifteen houses with a church, according to Robert Schomburgk in 1839.2 Wallace recorded a row of thatched mud huts, some of them whitewashed, others the colour of the native earth. He met Lima’s children, four daughters, two of them grown up, and a little boy of eight; a good-looking half-Indian woman was introduced by Lima as ‘the mother of his younger children’. The mother of the elder girls had been turned out, it transpired, because she was an Indian, and could speak only her own language, and so the children would never learn Portuguese. Wallace noted that the family welcomed the patriarch ‘in a very cold and timid way’, coming up and asking his blessing ‘as if they had parted from him the evening before, instead of three months since’. Wallace found himself in a slightly awkward position: he was wholly reliant on Lima’s good will and assistance, yet found it difficult to condone his attitude. He was offered a little house opposite Lima’s. He hung up his hammock, arranged his boxes, and set off to explore the immediate neighbourhood. While the village celebrated the return of the crew with drinking and dancing, Wallace had unpacked his gun and was busy shooting chatterers in the fruit trees. There seemed relatively few insects in the forest, but he soon discovered some rare butterflies near the riverbank. A couple of Indian hunters were procured for him by Lima, and they brought him a few birds killed by their blowpipes, but in a rather half-hearted way: they frequently returned without any birds, Wallace complained, ‘telling me that they could not find any, when I had very good reason to believe that they had spent the day at some neighbouring sitio’.3 Annoyingly, there were no good paths in the forest, so he could not go far himself. Fishes, however, were much more easily come by, and he was able to add to his notebook of drawings, and even preserve a few of the smaller species in spirits. Clearly Guía was not ideal as a permanent base, and Wallace began to plan a longer expedition, to the granite Serra, just north of Guía, where the gallo de Serra, the ‘cock-of-the-rock’, was said to breed.

  This was more challenging, another step closer to ‘unknown territory’ – unknown, that is, to European scientific naturalists and explorers, though wholly familiar to Brazilian and Venezuelan traders and priests. On the upper Rio Negro, Wallace was following a highway travelled by a select band of famous predecessors. In 1800, Humboldt and Bonpland had passed through a hundred miles to the north, exploring the junction between the Rio Negro and the Orinoco. Dr Johann Natterer of Vienna, who collected in Brazil from 1817 to 1835, travelled up the Rio Negro as far as its junction with the Cassiquiare, which linked it to the Orinoco. (At Guía, Wallace encountered a beautiful seventeen-year-old girl, whom he realised must be Natterer’s daughter.) Robert Schomburgk had come down river in 1839, on his two-thousand-mile round trip from Guyana.

  Now Wallace could begin to explore genuinely. He borrowed a canoe from Lima, and set off with an Indian who was returning to his village, together with his two hunters. They turned into the Isanna, half a mile wide, and from there followed a smaller stream on the south bank. Each night they camped, slinging their hammocks from stakes driven into the ground. On the third day the landscape changed, with moss-covered rocks, and virgin forest sloping up from the riverbanks. Wallace was led to the village, five or six huts embedded in the forest, and offered one for his own use: three doors, no windows. He placed his bird box as a table, slung his hammock, and was ready to explore the forest. Wherever he went, he was followed by the village boys, who either acted as ‘spotters’ and ‘pointers’, or supplemented his shooting with their blowpipes.

  Learning that there were no gallos in the immediate vicinity, Wallace proposed a trip to the Serra de Cobati, ten or twelve miles away through the forest, and by offering generous payment persuaded the whole male population to go with him. For provisions, they took just flour and salt, intending to live off what they caught. Wallace found his clothes and equipment a nuisance: his gun would catch on overhanging branches, and the hooked spines of the climbing plants caught in his shirt-sleeves, or knocked his cap off. ‘The Indians were all naked, or, if they had a shirt or trousers, carried them in a bundle on their heads, and I have no doubt looked upon me as a good illustration of the uselessness and bad consequences of wearing clothes upon a forest journey.’4 After five hours walking at a pace that would have been impressive on level ground, they were enjoying a rest, and a drink from a small stream, when they heard a distant grunt. The Indians prepared their blowpipes, grasped their knives, and disappeared, leaving Wallace with the youngest boys. He cocked his gun, heard crashing and gnashing, but no wild pigs appeared. The men returned and directed the boys to lead Wallace to the Serra, while they continued the hunt. They took him to a cave at the foot of the mountain, and soon three men joined them with a hog slung on a pole, which they proceeded to skin, cut up, stew and smoke.

  Channel among granite rocks

  The next morning, the rest of the party turned up with the prime pieces of three more hogs carefully packed in palm leaves. They now split into groups, to tackle the Serra – ‘an ascent up rocky gorges, over huge fragments, and through gloomy caverns’ – sometimes hauling themselves up precipices by roots and creepers, sometimes crawling over a surface composed of gigantic, serrated blocks of stone. At last, an old Indian took Wallace by the arm and, pointing into a thicket, whispered quietly, ‘Gallo!’ After looking intently for a while, Wallace ‘caught a glimpse of the magnificent bird sitting amidst the gloom, shining out like a mass of brilliant flame’. He shot and missed. The bird flew off, but Wallace soon had another shot at it, and brought it down. When it was given to him, he was ‘lost in admiration of the dazzling brilliancy of its soft downy feathers. Not a spot of blood was visible, not a feather was ruffled, and the soft, warm, flexible body set off the fresh swelling plumage, in a manner which no stuffed specimen can approach.’5 It was a defining moment, described with an intensity that foreshadows his future encounters with the birds of paradise. Time seems to stop in his memory of the event, as he holds the brilliantly plumaged bird, as though it is still alive. But at the end of the day, he skinned it, before night fell. Then the fires were made up, and the joints of pork hung over them to smoke; and around him were thirteen naked Indians, talking in unknown tongues:

  Two only could speak a little Portuguese, and with them I conversed, answering their various questions about where iron came from, and how calico was made, and if paper grew in my country, and if we had much mandiocca and plantains; and they were greatly astonished to hear that all were white men there, and could not imagine how white men could work, or how there could be a country without forest. They would ask strange questions about where the wind came from, and the rain, and how the sun and moon got back to their places after disappearing from us; and when I had tried to satisfy them on these points, they would tell me forest tales of jaguars and pumas, and of the fierce wild hogs, and of the dreadful curupurí, the demon of the woods, and of the wild man with a long tail, found far in the centre of the forest.6

  Wallace spent nine days on this expedition to the Serra: his twelve hunters produced ten gallos, while he shot two himself. In addition, he captured numerous birds: two trogons, several blue-capped manikins, barbets, and ant-thrushes. Back at the village, where he spent another fortnight, he added to his bird collection, and made more drawings of fish, before making his way up river again to Guía. He was eager now to leave for the upper Rio Negro. The padre, however, Frei José, was in the area, and no one would set off until his visit, for there were baptisms and weddings to be conducted. Frei José dos S
antos Innocentos arrived eventually, carried up the hill in a hammock: ‘a tall, thin, prematurely old man, thoroughly worn out by every kind of debauchery’, according to Wallace, who commented that Don Juan was an innocent by comparison. He had a fund of anecdotes, ‘disgustingly coarse’, but so cleverly told that they were irresistibly ludicrous. Wallace’s Portuguese was improving rapidly, and he could appreciate Frei José’s use of idiom. Wallace, sturdily agnostic at this point in his life, noted that the ‘seven or eight distinct processes’ in the rite of baptism were sufficiently like the complicated operations of the Indians’ own ceremonies ‘to make them think they had got something very good in return for their shilling’.7 A few weddings followed the baptisms, and Frei José delivered a practical homily ‘which might have done some good, had the parties to whom it was addressed understood it’; but as the homily was given in Portuguese, they did not. The only two white men present, besides Wallace and Frei José, were Lima and the local commandante, who both had large families without benefit of marriage. The padre’s response was: ‘Never mind what these white people do, they will all go to purgatory, but don’t you be such fools as to go too!’ Wallace reported that, while the white men roared with laughter, the Indians ‘looked much astonished’; he, like Spruce, remained highly sceptical about the imposition of Christian ritual on the local people.

  The forest expedition, hunting for gallos, had been important for Wallace. Just by making that twelve-mile trek, he was shifting himself beyond the trading and Christianity culture mapped out by the great river systems, towards a way of life that he was beginning to understand and appreciate on its own terms. The story about his clothes is significant: the Indian ways were more appropriate, and he was able to see himself partly from their perspective. He had stumbled on a far more effective method of hunting, by attaching himself to a hunting party, and taking on a much less directive role. There is, rarely for him, no hint of impatience when the men break off for a pig hunt. He was beginning to adjust to the rhythms of forest life, and to examine the tribes with different eyes.