Alfred Russel Wallace

by Peter Raby

  Even when they were picked up by the Jordeson, two hundred miles short of Bermuda, their anxieties were not over. The Jordeson was old, slow, cumbersome and leaky; Wallace was not reassured when the captain one night slept with an axe close at hand – ‘to cut away the masts in case we capsize’; and with all the extra men aboard, provisions ran short. There was no spare water for washing, and Wallace’s shirts were in a state ‘of most uncomfortable dirtiness’. They caught a few dolphins, which were not bad eating, but one by one the staples were exhausted – first the cheese and ham, then the peas, the butter, and finally the pork, to leave them on a diet of biscuit and water. Almost the worst experience was a violent gale in the Channel on 29 September. Wallace was sitting on the poop with Captain Turner at the height of the storm, and as they rolled with a bigger wave than usual the captain said quietly, ‘If we are pooped by one of those waves we shall go to the bottom’, adding that he would rather be back in the two small ship’s boats ‘than in this rotten old tub’.30

  However, they survived the fearful storm, which left them with four feet of water in the hold, and 1 October was a glorious day, eighty days out from Pará, on shore at last in a Deal inn: a glorious warm bath, and ‘Such a dinner, with our two captains! Oh, beef-steaks and damson tart, a paradise for hungry sinners.’ But even as the solid comforts of England wrapped him round, he was beginning to envy Spruce, still in ‘that glorious country where “the sun shines for ever unchangeably bright”, where farinha abounds, and of bananas and plantains there is no lack!’31 This was not quite the triumphant homecoming Wallace had dreamed of in the upper reaches of the Vaupés.

  5 Planning the Next Expedition

  WALLACE, SHIVERING IN his calico suit and weak in the legs after the eighty-day voyage, was welcomed by his agent. Stevens took him to a ready-made clothes shop for his immediate needs, had him measured for a new suit by his tailor, and invited him to his own home in Norwood, where Mrs Stevens senior fussed over him, and in a week fed him back to his ‘usual health and vigour’.1 Stevens had also saved his client from complete financial disaster by insuring the cargo for £200. (The true loss of the collections was probably more intellectual than financial: Bates calculated his own overall profit for one 20-month period at £26 19s.) Wallace was alive, and well, and ready to plan his next trip. During the gloomy days and nights in the Helen’s long boat, and the damp, cramped misery on board the Jordeson, he had vowed never to trust himself to the ocean again. But good resolutions soon fade: would it be a second westward journey up the Amazon to the Andes, or east to the Philippines? Meanwhile, he would need to be a fixture in London for at least six months and was determined to make up for lost time by enjoying himself as much as possible for a while, he informed Spruce. He brought him up to date with the latest news. Wellington, the Iron Duke, was dead, and the Crystal Palace was being pulled down and rebuilt: the Hackney nurserymen Loddiges’ collection of plants had been bought to stock it, and thanks to Sir Joseph Paxton’s ingenious heating plan the whole world’s plants, temperate and tropical, could be displayed in one undivided building.2 A thriving exhibition and museum industry was vital for the collecting profession.

  On 4 October, Wallace attended the Entomological Society’s meeting as a visitor. By this time, his name, if not his face, was well known in London scientific circles. Stevens had already published extracts of his letters in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History, just as he published those of Bates in the columns of the Zoologist. At the Entomological Society’s meetings, he would regularly show some of the new species he received from Wallace and Bates; for example, on 7 April 1851, ‘Mr Stevens exhibited, from a collection just received from Mr Wallace, Papilio Columbus’; on 5 May, there were Lepidoptera and Coleoptera from Mr Bates in Ega, ‘now on his way home’; and again, on 4 August, more specimens from Bates in Ega and from Wallace in Guía. Significantly, on 1 September 1851, at a Special General Meeting, a revision of the by-laws created a new class of members, Associates, ‘to admit working entomologists to the advantage offered by the Society’s meetings, Library, and Collection’. Samuel Stevens became a member of the Council in 1851, and Treasurer the following year. It was natural for him to take Wallace along, a living specimen of a working entomologist, and his plight was fully recorded in the Society’s minutes – both the fact that he had lost ‘the whole’ of his valuable collections, and, in rather more graphic terms than Wallace himself used, that he had ‘narrowly escaped death in an open boat, from which, after long privation and suspense, and while yet in the midst of the Atlantic Ocean, he and others were taken up by a vessel bound for London’.3 Bates, hearing of Wallace’s loss, expressed heart-felt sympathy: ‘Had it been my case I think I should have gone desperate, because, so far as regards the unique specimens, the journal &c., such a loss is irreparable.’4

  In the course of the following year, 1853, Wallace read two papers to the Society. It was an excellent base, both for meeting naturalists, and for getting his name known through the journal. Darwin was a member, though he seldom attended meetings; so were Thomas Bell, the President of the Linnean Society; George Waterhouse and J. E. Gray, both on the staff of the British Museum; Richard Owen, at that time Hunterian Professor at the Royal College of Surgeons; Darwin’s neighbour the anthropologist John Lubbock; the insect and shell specialist Thomas Wollaston; ornithologist and taxidermist to the Zoological Society John Gould; entomologist and artist John Curtis; and the natural-history writer and enthusiast Edward Newman. Working entomologists such as Wallace, however, were not accepted without a slight struggle. Newman, in his presidential address of January 1854, had to underline the value of the ‘actual collector’, as opposed to the professional experts in the museums of London, and the connoisseurs of the rectories and country houses:

  The monographer cannot say to the collector, he specified, I have no need of you; the very admission of such a thought is a stumbling-block … I wish to be understood as applying this last observation especially and emphatically to the case of the actual collector; to the man who, in whatever station of life, devotes his time, by night and by day; at all seasons, in all weathers; at home and abroad, to the positive capture and preservation of those specimens which serve as the objects for all our observations: he is the real labourer in the field, and if we would keep the lamp of our science constantly burning, it is to him alone that we can look for fuel to feed its flame.

  Newman had in mind professional collectors based in Britain, such as Bouchard and Foxcroft, and those working abroad, such as Wallace and Bates, both of whom he alludes to at length.

  Such men do great, permanent and continual good: they render our science an unquestionable service, and their motives are no more to be called in question than those of the artist or the author, who receives the just reward for his well-directed labours.

  But to work abroad entailed substantial costs. Newman outlined these, and reminded his audience that both Bates and Wallace were more than simple collectors, contributing ‘observation as well as manual industry’, never failing to make the needful commentary on the habits and manners, food and metamorphoses of the specimens.5 That Newman found it necessary to make his appeal is a sign of the lingering prejudice against the working collector. But a breach had been made in the closed circle, and Stevens led Wallace through it. In 1854, both Wallace and Bates were elected corresponding members of the society.

  Meanwhile, Wallace had to rebuild his personal life. His only surviving brother John had come back to England in the winter of 1850–51, married Mary Webster, the daughter of the master-builder to whom he had been apprenticed, and returned to California. With John abroad indefinitely, and Fanny married to a not very successful photographer, Wallace saw himself as the head of the family. He could not afford to go far from London, so he invited his mother, and Fanny and Thomas Sims, to join him there. He took a house at 44 Upper Albany Street, close to Regent’s Park, and by Christmas they were all installed. There was the opportunity now to read o
ver Herbert’s Amazon letters to Fanny, and to his mother, as well as Bates’s poignant description of his final illness.

  Of the three brothers who had emigrated, Alfred had come close enough to success to be convinced that the instincts that first prompted his visit to the Amazon were sound. He had been given a ticket for the Zoological Gardens – Stevens was a fellow of that society too – and was invited to attend the Zoological’s scientific meetings: in December, he gave a paper ‘On the Monkeys of the Amazon’, and heard T. H. Huxley lecture on ‘The Anatomy and Development of Echinococci in the Liver of a Zebra’.6 He was so impressed by Huxley’s fluent, confident style that he assumed he must be a much older man than himself – in fact, Huxley was two years younger. At the meeting on 8 February 1853, G. W. Earl gave notes on the zoology of the Malay Peninsula; Wallace said that he attended these meetings very regularly, so there is every chance he was present on this occasion. The Royal Geographical Society, too, opened its doors to him. His notes and readings on the Upper Rio Negro and the Vaupés, however imperfect, had been preserved, and he duly presented them: they offered clear proof of his credentials as an explorer.

  Wallace’s reputation as a traveller and a naturalist had risen as a result of his American expedition. He obtained an introduction to the philologist, Robert Latham, and consulted him about the South American Indian vocabularies he had collected. Latham was also in charge of the Ethnological Department at the Crystal Palace, and Wallace went there to advise on the life-size clay models of Indians. The head modellers were Italians, and tended to give the figures the attitudes and expressions of Roman statuary. Wallace was able to nudge them in the direction of realism.7 This was all interesting enough, but there were few material rewards, and Wallace’s transference from field collector to recognised writer and naturalist was tentative and precarious. Of all that heady list of projects conceived on the river Vaupés, only two materialised. Palms of the Amazon and Rio Negro, a small, popular volume, in the author’s self-disparaging words, was published at his own expense, much of which was taken up with commissioning illustrations from Walter Fitch.8 The print run was limited to 250 copies, and Wallace just about covered his costs. Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro, ‘that absurd book’ as he later described it to George Silk, was put together with the help of letters and scraps of notes after the loss of two years’ journals in the ship’s fire, and he arranged for its publication on a shared-profit basis. It was nine years before there was anything to share. Clearly, he needed to make another major expedition.

  Wallace called his eight years of wandering through the Malay Archipelago ‘the central and controlling incident’ of his life, and in his autobiographical account he gives the impression that the choice of destination came about through a logical and systematic process of elimination. He had listened attentively at meetings of the learned societies, he had studied the collections at the British Museum. Most expeditiously, he made the acquaintance of Rajah Brooke, the first white rajah of Sarawak, a contact that promised safe access to part of Borneo: Brooke, on the point of leaving England, wrote in April 1853 to assure Wallace that he would be very glad to see him at Sarawak.9 The Archipelago was relatively unexplored by naturalists, while the Dutch administration that controlled much of it would provide a logistical safety net. There were always, of course, the rich natural resources of South America, but across the Atlantic Bates, having finally decided to remain in Brazil, was firmly established in the insect line, and there was already a successful bird-collector, Hauxwell, on the upper Amazon. Everything pointed him towards the East. Wallace began to make notes and sketches of the rarer – and more valuable – species of birds, butterflies and beetles.

  For all his apparent naïvety, Wallace was never reluctant to ask for assistance, especially when he believed that he had earned the right to it. He had met Sir Roderick Murchison when he made his presentation on the Rio Negro to the Royal Geographical Society. In June 1853, he put together an extremely impressive proposal about his plans, and asked for the Society’s services in obtaining a free passage.

  He proposes leaving England in the Autumn or Winter of the present year, and, making Singapore his headquarters, to visit in succession Borneo, the Philippines, Celebes, Timor, the Moluccas and New Guinea, or such of them as may prove most accessible, remaining one or more years in each as circumstances may determine.

  His chief object is the investigation of the Natural History of the Eastern Archipelago in a more complete manner than has hitherto been attempted; but he will also pay much attention to Geography, & hopes to add considerably to our knowledge of such of the islands as he may visit.10

  He emphasised that he intended to carry out a substantial amount of geographical readings and measurement – in fact, he implied that he could not afford the instruments as well as the fare, and ended his appeal by reminding the Council that he had lost an extensive and valuable collection as well as his books and instruments in the mid-Atlantic fire. On 22 July, Wallace’s application was read before the Committee on Expeditions, in the Society’s premises in Waterloo Place. Wallace joined the meeting, and after some discussion it was resolved

  that in order to enable Mr Wallace to prosecute with success the scientific objects of his voyage, Sir Roderick Murchison be requested to apply to HM’s Government to grant Mr Wallace a free passage to Singapore and to procure letters of introduction for him from the Governments of Spain and Holland to their East India Colonies.11

  Wallace, having set the wheels in motion, delivered the manuscript of Travels on the Amazon to his publisher and went off to France and Switzerland for a holiday with George Silk. He failed to estimate the speed at which Sir Roderick Murchison could work. A passage to Trincomalee was offered, and Wallace found himself in the embarrassing position of turning it down, when the letter from the Geographical eventually reached him in France. ‘The journey from Trincomalee to Singapore & from Singapore to Borneo would entail considerable expense & loss of time,’ he explained unconvincingly to Norton Shaw, the secretary of the RGS, on 27 August. But, in the same breath, conscious that he might have sounded ungracious, he floated an alternative plan, ‘to attempt the exploration of the snowy mountains in Eastern Africa, instead of going to Borneo’. This was the suggestion of August Petermann, and he was ‘quite ready to give it up or go with it as the Geographical Society may think best’; he left it to Shaw and the Society to decide ‘which journey they would find most interest in’. He would be back in a fortnight; meanwhile, Shaw could reach him at Chamonix.12 Wallace was in no mood to break off his excursion. He and Silk travelled on to Geneva, gazed at Mont Blanc, and then explored the Alps from Chamonix, Le Montenvert and Flegère. From there they walked over the Tête Noir pass and down to Martigny, took a chaise along the Rhône valley to Leuk, trekked up to Leukerbad (having hired a porter to carry their luggage), stayed at the inn at the top of the Gemmi pass, and strolled down to Thun. This was Wallace’s first of many visits to Switzerland, and it sharpened the appetite for geology as well as for mountain botanising he had acquired in Wales.

  Sugar palm

  The autumn passed. Loss of time no longer seemed an issue. The two Amazon books were published to modest interest. The Annals and Magazine of Natural History praised them both – the book on palms was ‘a highly valuable companion to the great work on Palms by Martius’. Sir William Hooker was magisterial, sarcastic, and caustic, leaping on errors and questioning the identification of the piassaba palm, where the author had the temerity to disagree with the great von Martius:

  We do not in the least call in question the accuracy of Mr Wallace’s statement that his is the tree which now furnishes, on so large a scale, the brooms and brushes of modern days; nor are we able to deny its being a Palm hitherto unknown to Botanists; but we do complain that a Naturalist who is able ‘to make out its geographical range so exactly, from having resided more than two years among people whose principal occupation consisted in obtaining the fibrous covering of this tree,
and from whom no locality of it can have remained undiscovered’, should never have been at the pains to procure flowers and fruit for the illustration of so interesting a plant.

  ‘We trust,’ Hooker added, twisting the knife dextrously, that ‘Mr Spruce, now in that country, will make up for this deficiency.’13 As a final thrust, he concluded that the work was ‘certainly more suited to the drawing-room table than to the library of the botanist’. This was brutal treatment from the man whose letter of recommendation Wallace and Bates had flourished on their arrival in Pará, and a useful warning for Wallace on the need for accuracy – he had certainly not spent two continuous years in piassaba country.

  Fortunately for Wallace’s confidence, this particular review did not appear until he was out of the country. The lithographic plates were not as accurate as Wallace’s original pencil sketches, and Wallace was not so expert in plants as in other fields; even so, five species of Amazonian palms are still known by the scientific names Wallace gave them,14 and the book’s main focus is on the economic uses that the Indians made of different kinds and parts of palm, for their houses, weapons and food. Hooker, fierce but fair, partly made up for things later by publishing a letter suggesting that there were two commercially exploited piassabas, the Attalea funifera of von Martius, and the Leopoldinia piassaba of Wallace. At the same time, he revealed something of the palm project’s genesis, by printing a letter from Spruce, who had been sent a copy of the book by the author: