by Peter Raby
The post arrived at Guía, bringing letters from home of May and July 1850: it was now 17 January 1851. There was one from Stevens, acknowledging safe receipt of the umbrella birds; three letters from his brother John Wallace, now in California; and a ‘most acceptable’ packet of the Illustrated London News. John had received a tough initiation. He had reached San Francisco at the wrong season to travel to the mines, and had become involved instead in an unsuccessful woodcutting venture: ‘His only choice was to work or be idle, and I think he did perfectly right to undertake it,’ Alfred, working continuously if not very profitably, pronounced. But if his collections were not yet very successful, he told his brother-in-law Thomas Sims, he had certainly not been idle, and was forwarding a small box to Stevens, containing the celebrated cocks-of-the-rocks: only a dozen, he complained, instead of the fifty he had been expecting. The magical, idealised atmosphere of the account he afterwards gave in his Travels is suppressed in this particular letter, in favour of the hardship and inconveniences he suffered.
Something had happened on this journey that allowed him to see himself as a professional traveller, and potential writer, rather than just a struggling, self-financed collector. Now that he was firmly established on the upper Rio Negro, he had earned the right to become part of a different, more classical tradition. He outlined his plans to Sims: first, the trip up to Venezuela, in which he would be following in the tracks of Humboldt, Natterer and Schomburgk; then a voyage up the ‘great river Vaupés’, and another up the Isánna:
… not so much for my collections which I do not expect to be very profitable there, but because I am so much interested in the country and the people that I am determined to see and know more of it and them than any other traveller. If I do not get profit I hope at least to get some credit as an industrious and persevering traveller.8
On the subject of his writing, he set out his publication plans: it makes an impressive list. Firstly, there would be his journal – Sims had already received the first part, but the extension went on steadily, better written and more interesting. Secondly, a work on fishes, with figures of all the species: ‘I am very interested in them and have already made drawings of one hundred different kinds’ – almost all since he left Barra. The fish in the black waters were different from those in the Amazon, and those from the temperate regions of the Andes different again. Thirdly, he was making sketches and notes of the palms: he had already drawn thirty, so that should make another volume. Then he was collecting information and thinking about a work on the physical history of the Great Amazon valley – geography, geology, distribution of animals and plants (always a key concept for Wallace), meteorology, and the history and languages of the aboriginal tribes. Fifthly, he thought he might have enough information, ‘from personal observation and from the Indians’, for a separate little work on the habits and natural history of the animals. Lastly, there would be his collection of butterflies, and all the work involved in describing the numerous new species. This would keep him occupied for two or three years, he estimated optimistically – but he asked Sims not to make his plans public, as he knew he might not accomplish half his programme. If Sims assumed, wrote Wallace, by his blithe talk of journeys to the Andes that he did not wish to return home, he was greatly mistaken: ‘Not a day or a night passes that I do not think of you all.’ But it was only because he was determined to return with satisfaction and credit both to himself and them that he was resolved ‘on thoroughly investigating this wonderful country, not merely seeing and doing what others have done before me, but adding something to the stores of science, and giving some information to the world that I alone shall be able to do – It is this that impels me.’9 Wallace was transferring himself in his imagination from collector to scientific traveller: he was buoyed up by his vision of the opportunities before him, and fired by the will to succeed.
Once Frei José had left the village, Wallace could gather together his group for the journey north, not exactly into the unknown, but to locations that held significance for European readers. In a borrowed, rather leaky, canoe, with four Indians, only one of whom had a smattering of Portuguese, Wallace was able to travel lightly – lightly, that is, for a Victorian naturalist. He lists his essential equipment: watch, sextant and compass, insect and bird boxes, gun and ammunition, salt, beads, fish hooks, calico and cotton cloth. But the basket of salt weighed a hundred pounds, and there were four baskets of farinha, a jar of oil, a demi-john of molasses: at Javíta, all this would translate into at least a dozen loads for the porters. The Indians, he noted, had a more refined baggage: gravatánas (blowpipes) and poisoned arrows, shirt and trousers, paddle, knife, tinderbox and rédé (hammock).
After five days they reached the Serra of Cocoí, which marked the boundary between Brazil and Venezuela. The piums were out in force, but the weather was fine, and Wallace identified his ‘old friend, the pole star’ on the clear horizon up river. On 4 February, they arrived at São Carlos, the most southerly point on Humboldt’s journey fifty years earlier: sacred ground to Wallace, who had read Humboldt’s journey ten years or so before. Wallace did his best to add some Spanish vocabulary to his Portuguese. They paddled on, passing the mouth of the Cassiquiare, the link between the river systems, and found that they had at least progressed beyond the pium sector. The weather was hot, the river low, and sometimes they had to drag the boat over the rocks. At Tómo, Wallace met Antonio Dias, a boat-builder, of whom he had heard a good deal, a man ‘rather notorious, even in this country of loose morals, for his patriarchal propensities’.10 Tómo was a boat-building centre: boats of up to 200 tons were built in the region. They would go downstream, laden with bulky produce – farinha, piassaba, pitch – in the high water, descend the falls, and there be sold for the Rio Negro and Amazon trade. Wallace’s canoe was too large to proceed further. Dias organised a replacement for him, an oba, made from a single piece of timber, and in this he reached Pimichin, a ‘village’ of only two houses. Taking possession of an old shed – the ‘travellers’ house’ – Wallace set out on foot to explore the forest road, which here ran for ten miles through the forest to Javíta, a village on a river which formed part of the Orinoco system. He was, in fact, at the watershed. Walking in the evening with his gun, he strolled along the road a little way into the forest, at this place he had so long looked forward to reaching – ‘and was rewarded by falling in with one of the lords of the soil, which I had long wished to encounter’:
As I was walking quietly along I saw a large jet-black animal come out of the forest about twenty yards before me, which took me so much by surprise that I did not at first imagine what it was. As it moved slowly on, and its whole body and long curving tail came into full view in the middle of the road, I saw that it was a fine black jaguar. I involuntarily raised my gun to my shoulder, but remembering that both barrels were loaded with small shot, and that to fire would exasperate without killing him, I stood silently gazing. In the middle of the road he turned his head, and for an instant paused and gazed at me, but having, I suppose, other business of his own to attend to, walked steadily on, and disappeared in the thicket. As he advanced, I heard the scampering of small animals, and the whizzing flight of ground birds, clearing the path for their dreaded enemy.
This encounter pleased me much. I was too much surprised, and occupied too much with admiration, to feel fear. I had at length had a full view, in his native wilds, of the rarest variety of the most powerful and dangerous animal inhabiting the American continent.11
Dazzled by this epiphany from the forests of the night, Wallace returned to his shed. The next day he walked the length of the Estrada de Javíta, until he met an Indian planting cassava, who turned out to be the village capitaão. Wallace, in his imperfect Spanish, convinced the man that he was a harmless ‘naturalista’, and arranged for porters to transfer his luggage. The porters duly turned up: one man, and ten women and girls. But Wallace’s Indians could not keep up with the pace, and there was a confusion of loads bein
g hastily dumped in the forest, and gropings around in the dark – visions of a jaguar’s glaring eyes, or the deadly fangs of a jararáca in his leg – before Wallace was finally installed in the old priest’s house. Javíta promised well, with the convenient road offering easy access to the forest: an ideal spot for a collector.
One factor told against him. The rains set in the very night he stumbled into Javíta. The seasons were different from the Rio Negro, and he had arrived on the last day of summer. This was a blow, but not a disastrous one. Insects – collectable insects – were less numerous, and the processes of drying and preserving made difficult. But he still found forty species of butterflies that were new to him, and the great blue butterflies, such as Morpho menelaus and Morpho hellenor, were prolific, sitting in dozens on twigs by the roadside. During his forest excursions, he saw wild pigs, agoutis, coatis, monkeys, many beautiful trogons, and numerous snakes; and he was brought a curious little alligator, Caiman gibbus, which he skinned and stuffed to the amusement of the spectators. He also continued to add to his collection of fish, preserving the smaller kinds in spirits, and drawing any specimens in the late afternoon after his return from the forest. At this hour he was set on by sandflies, till his hands were as swollen, rough and red as a pair of boiled lobsters, and he was forced to soak them in water to bring down the swelling. Even so, their bites were more tolerable than those of the pium or the mosquito.
Rain and sandflies apart, Wallace enjoyed his time at Javíta, living in a village of some two hundred inhabitants, all of them, so far as he could tell, Indians of ‘pure blood’. Their industry, and sense of community, appealed to his work ethic. They had two main sources of income: cutting piassaba in the forest, which was either exported raw, or turned into cables and cordage; and portering goods from one river system to the other along the Estrada – although traffic was intermittent, and had not recovered from the civil unrest, the trade route was well established. Every week, the whole village would be hoed and weeded, and each morning and evening the girls and boys met at the church for a hymn or a psalm. It was a kind of Owenite Utopia, all the more appealing for its rain-forest setting. Wallace observed, and admired, but beyond attending one or two festas, he spent the long evenings on his own, without company or even books. His Spanish was limited, and the Indians’ language new to him. In a state of ‘excited indignation against civilised life’, he wrote a blank-verse description of the village. The perhaps unconscious model was William Cowper’s 1785 poem The Task, well known to the Wallace family, and quoted by Herbert in his letters. Book Two begins:
Oh for a lodge in some vast wilderness,
Some boundless contiguity of shade,
Where rumour of oppression and deceit
Of unsuccessful or successful war,
Might never reach me more!
Where Cowper imagines the ‘gentle’ – and noble – savage Omai back in the South Seas after his trip to Europe, straying along the beach and wondering whether the waves at his feet have ever washed England’s distant shore, Wallace draws a direct comparison between the constrictions of England and the freedom of the Indian girls, sporting like mermaids in the sparkling wave, or the boys, whose every motion is full of grace and health:
And as they run, and race, and shout, and leap,
Or swim and dive beneath the rapid stream,
Or, all bareheaded in the noonday sun,
Creep stealthily, with blowpipe or with bow,
To shoot small birds or swiftly gliding fish,
I pity English boys; their active limbs
Cramp’d and confined in tightly fitting clothes;
Their toes distorted by the shoemaker,
Their foreheads aching under heavy hats,
And all their frame by luxury enervate.
But how much more I pity English maids,
Their waist, and chest, and bosom all confined
By that vile torturing instrument called stays!
It is not, he argues, that he places the ‘civilised’ below the ‘savage man’:
The thousand curses that gold brings upon us,
The long death-struggle for the means to live …
The savage man is spared these competitive pressures.
But then the joys, the pleasures and delights,
That the well-cultivated mind enjoys;
The appreciation of the beautiful
In nature and in art; the boundless range
Of pleasure and of knowledge books afford;
The constant change of incident and scene
That makes us live a life in every year; –
All these the savage knows not and enjoys not.12
Yet these pleasures, reasons the embryonic socialist, are bought at a terrible cost: millions suffer while only a few enjoy the fruit. Millions of Europeans live a ‘lower’ life – lower in physical and moral health – than the Red Indian. Where Cowper saw the city, and London, as the symbol of all that was wrong in society, Wallace more simplistically – and slightly illogically, considering that he was busy trying to convert Morpho ulysses into money – ascribes the failure of ‘civilised’ man to the joy of getting gold. The wonders of nature, philosophy, poetry, history, immortal deeds, noble sacrifices, all the things that Wallace himself cherished, were relegated in favour of wealth and property: profit, rather than credit. He turned his back – in his verses – on materialism, and committed himself to the simple life:
Rather than live a man like one of these,
I’d be an Indian here, and live content
To fish, and hunt, and paddle my canoe,
And see my children grow, like young wild fawns,
In health of body and in peace of mind,
Rich without wealth, and happy without gold!
Wallace was fully aware of the skewed perspective encouraged by this temporary idyll. He confessed that the sentiments in the poem did not entirely match his sober and matter-of-fact judgement when he sat down to write Travels on the Amazon in 1853, in a London whose streets were swept with piassaba brushes. But Javíta provided him with one striking model of ideal community life, in which the Indians seemed to him largely self-governing, yet able to benefit from their favourable location by trading with the rest of the world without apparently being exploited. It was a model to which he would return again and again in his later writing, in which he remained convinced that it was possible to re-create a version of Rousseau’s Social Contract based on the example of natural, forest life. Spruce, writing to Sir William Hooker two years later, saw the country through less rose-tinted lenses:
A country without priests, lawyers, doctors, police, and soldiers, is not quite so happy as Rousseau dreamt it ought to be; and this, in which I now am, has been in a state of gradual decadence ever since the separation from Spain, at which period (or shortly after) the inhabitants rid themselves of these functionaries in the most unscrupulous manner. San Carlos seems to have fallen off much since Humboldt visited it.13
Spruce, although quite as skilled as Wallace in maintaining good relations with the peoples he moved among, escaped with his life only after great difficulty in this very same area.
Wallace’s idyll ended abruptly. One morning, he woke to find his comforting routine at an end: there was no fire on his veranda, and no sign of his Indians. They had been growing progressively uneasy, living among a different people, and had been eating up the supplies of farinha at a great rate, Wallace thought, hoping to precipitate a move. Now that he had just bought another basketful to block that excuse, they had obviously decided to take independent action. Wallace, unfazed, set off as usual with his insect net. The Javíta Indians who called round that evening were slightly surprised to find the ‘rationale’ preparing his own dinner. He tried, unsuccessfully and to his obvious disappointment, to persuade one of the ‘brown damsels of the village’ to take over these duties – in other villages of the Rio Negro, he complained, ‘I might at any moment have had my claim of half a dozen’ – and
went on doing his own housekeeping for a fortnight, living luxuriously on Venezuelan dried beef and cheese, roasted plantains and cassava bread.14 Then his coffee supplies ran out. This was more serious, so he went and begged an old Indian ‘por amor de Dios’ to spare him some from his little plantation. When Wallace returned from the forest six hours later, the beans had been picked, washed, dried, husked, roasted, and pounded in a mortar, and he was able to enjoy one of the most delicious cups of coffee he had ever tasted.
Now the rains set in properly, whole days and nights of rain, and breaks of even a few hours’ sunshine grew rarer. Drying specimens became almost impossible – most annoying, because Wallace had recently initiated the village boys into beetle-catching, rewarding them with a fish hook per specimen. It was time to move. He had already planned an expedition up the Vaupes with Lima; and even his loose talk would be a welcome contrast.
Wallace was away from his main base at Guía for about three months on this occasion. In spite of the enforced solitude, and the lack of ‘civilised’ conversation, he left Javíta with much regret. He had done well in terms of collecting, though, as always, he was acutely conscious that he might have achieved more; and he had felt at ease with the Indian community, able at least to imagine what it would be like to be a more integrated part of it.
There were the usual annoying delays at Guía, but on 3 June they started for São Joaquim, at the mouth of the Vaupés. They made slow progress against the current, and because the waters were so high had difficulty in finding suitable stopping places to make a fire, and cook food, though Wallace was initiated into roast anaconda one evening – excessively tough and glutinous. After four days, however, they reached a malocca, a hundred feet long, by forty wide and thirty high, with a broad aisle, and, projecting inwards from the walls on each side, palm-thatch partitions ‘exactly similar in arrangement to the boxes in a London eating-house, or those of a theatre’: each the private apartment of a separate family. On entering, Wallace was delighted to find himself ‘at length in the presence of the true denizens of the forest’. They were so different from the ‘half-civilised races’ among whom he had been living that it was as if he had been suddenly transported to another quarter of the globe. Two days later, they arrived at a village where a dance was taking place, and entered the malocca:
