by Peter Raby
32. For Bates, see Edward Clodd’s memoir introducing Bates’s The Naturalist on the River Amazons (Murray, 1892); H. P. Moon, Henry Walter Bates FRS: 1825–1892: explorer, scientist and Darwinian (Leicestershire Museums, 1976), and G. Woodcock, Henry Walter Bates, naturalist of the Amazons (Faber and Faber, 1969). See also John Dickenson, ‘The naturalist on the River Amazons and a wider world: reflections on the centenary of Henry Walter Bates’, Geographical Journal, 158, 2 (July 1992), 207–14.
33. ML, 125.
34. ML, 127.
35. ML, 131.
36. Ibid.
37. See R. Elwyn Hughes, note 24. Hughes argues that Wallace identified his 1855 Sarawak paper with his intellectual enquiries at Neath: ‘It is about 10 years since the idea of such a law suggested itself to the writer of this essay.’ It was on 28 December 1845 that Wallace asked Bates if he had read Vestiges.
38. ARW to Bates, 11 April 1846 (WFA).
39. Zoologist, 5, 1676 (? April, 1847).
40. ML, 139.
41. ARW to Bates, 28 December 1845 (WFA); letter reproduced in ML, and also, with amendments drawn from the original, by McKinney (1972).
42. [Robert Chambers], Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844).
43. ARW to Bates, 28 December 1845; see note 41.
44. Charles Darwin, Journal of Researches, 2nd edn (John Murray, 1909), 382.
45. Ibid., 384.
46. ARW to Bates, 11 April 1846 (WFA).
47. ARW to Bates; ML, 144. Wallace omitted his specific question to Bates: ‘Can you assist me in choosing one that it will be [sic] not be difficult to obtain the greater number of the known species.’
48. ARW to Bates, 11 October 1847 (WFA).
49. W. H. Edwards, A Voyage up the River Amazon (John Murray, 1847).
50. ARW and Henry Walter Bates to Sir William Hooker, 30 March 1848; Wallace wrote again on 3 April, acknowledging the letter of recommendation and valuable information (RBG, Kew).
3 APPRENTICESHIP ON THE AMAZON
1. TA, 1.
2. NA, 1–2.
3. TA, 2.
4. NA, 3.
5. ARW to George Silk, ML (1905), 1, 268–9.
6. NA, 3.
7. NA, 4.
8. ARW to George Silk, ML (1905), 1, 268–9.
9. The botanists Johann Baptist von Spix (1781–1826) and Karl (Carl) Friedrich von Martius (1796–1868) collected in Brazil from 1817–20, sometimes in tandem, sometimes separately. Martius, professor of botany and director of the botanic gardens at Munich, was Europe’s leading specialist on palms. He was on the distribution list for the specimens collected by Richard Spruce. Spix, a zoologist, explored the Rio Negro. They arrived in Munich with a huge collection of plants and animals (350 species of birds, 2,700 of insects), and, unlike Wallace, brought 57 living animals with them.
10. NA, 26–7.
11. Bates, letter to Edwin Brown, 17 June 1848, Zoologist, 8, 2838.
12. TA, 22.
13. ARW to William Hooker, 20 August 1848 (RBG, Kew).
14. TA, 33.
15. TA, 29.
16. ARW to William Hooker, 20 August 1848 (RBG, Kew).
17. See TA, ch. 3, 35–56, and NA, ch. 4, 56–76, for this expedition.
18. TA, 38.
19. TA, 42.
20. NA, 61.
21. TA, 50.
22. NA, 70.
23. Richard Spruce, diary (RBG, Kew).
24. TA, 47.
25. TA, 54.
26. This advertisement appeared in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History (1850), 2nd ser. 5. See J. L. Brooks (1984), ch. 2, Amazonian Venture’.
27. TA, 58. This reflection, though clearly based on Wallace’s Amazon experience, seems more likely to have been formulated when he was writing up his travels in 1853.
28. TA, 83–4.
29. Herbert Edward Wallace to Fanny (Frances) Sims, ‘Monday 7th’ (May 1849) (WFA). Herbert, disliking his first name, often referred to himself as Edward – he signs this letter ‘Edward Wallace’ – but I have used ‘Herbert’ for clarity.
30. TA, 93–4.
31. Herbert Wallace to Fanny Sims, September 1849 (WFA).
32. Richard Spruce’s Notes of a Botanist on the Amazon and Andes, 2 vols. (Macmillan, 1908), was edited by Wallace. See 1, 62–3, and TA, 95–7.
33. TA, 96.
34. ARW to Stevens, 12 September 1849, published in Annals and Magazine of Natural History, 5, February 1850.
35. TA, 108.
36. NA, 126.
37. Quoted in David Elliston Allen, The Naturalist in Britain: A Social History (Princeton University Press, 1994), 91. This is a hugely informative and entertaining study of the subject (though it does not refer, remarkably, to Bates, Spruce or Wallace).
38. ARW to Stevens, 15 November 1849, Annals and Magazine of Natural History, 6, December 1850.
39. TA, 110.
40. ARW to Stevens, 20 March 1850, Annals and Magazine of Natural History, 6, December 1850.
41. NA, 168. Wallace spells him ‘Henrique’. W. Lewis Herndon, an American naval lieutenant, comes up with ‘Enrique Antonii’, and provides the description of his wife. See W. L. Herndon, Exploration of the Valley of the Amazon (Taylor and Murray, 1854). Herndon mentions two English botanists ‘whose names I have forgotten’, one of whom had been very sick, and was given a box of butterflies by Bates at Santarem. His account reveals the Amazon at a point of change.
42. TA, 113.
43. TA, 115.
44. TA, 116.
45. NA, 311.
46. ARW to Stevens, 20 March 1850. Wallace’s paper ‘On the Umbrella Bird (Cephalopterus ornatus), “Ueramimbé,” L.G. [Lingoa Geral]’ was communicated to the Zoological Society of London’s meeting of 23 July 1850, and reprinted in Annals and Magazine of Natural History, 8, November 1851.
47. NA, 170.
48. Letter from Mr and Mrs Henry Bates to Henry Walter Bates, 28 July 1850 (Leicester County Archives).
49. NA, 170.
50. H. W. Bates to Stevens, 31 December 1850 (Zoologist, 9, 3144).
51. TA, 129.
52. ML (1905), 2, 275–6.
53. Herbert Wallace to Spruce, 15 March 1850 (WFA).
54. Herbert Wallace to Fanny Sims and Mrs Mary Wallace, 30 August 1850 (WFA).
4 HUNTING THE WHITE UMBRELLA BIRD
1. TA, 134.
2. Robert Hermann Schomburgk’s Travels in Guiana and on the Orinoco during the years 1835–1839, edited by O. A. Schomburgk with a Preface by Alexander von Humboldt (this is the short version of the title-page) was published in Leipzig by George Wigand in 1841, and translated by Walter E. Roth (‘The Argosy’ Company, Ltd, Georgetown, British Guiana, 1931). See here for Schomburgk’s account of the region in March 1839. Schomburgk, a botanist and zoologist, undertook his expedition under the auspices of the Royal Geographical Society of London, and it involved an immense round trip from Georgetown to the upper waters of the Orinoco at Esmeralda, through the Cassiquiare, down the Rio Negro, and then up the Rio Branco and back to Guiana. Wallace makes no mention of the expedition. Schomburgk passed the mouth of the river Vaupés, and has much to say of interest on the Indians, on the topography, and the natural history of the region. His steersman for this stretch of the river was Bernardo, well known to Wallace and Spruce.
3. TA, 145.
4. TA, 149.
5. TA, 152. See Schomburgk (note 2), 164, for a wonderful description of the cock-of-the-rock’s dance, and the dancing grounds. ‘It was on this spot that we saw one of the birds dancing and hopping around while the others apparently constituted the wondering spectators. He now spread out his wings, threw his head in the air or spread his tail like a peacock: he then strutted around and scratched the ground up, all accompanied with a hopping gait, until exhausted he uttered a peculiar note, and another bird took his place.’ And much more.
6. TA, 154.
7. TA, 157–8.
8. ARW to Thomas Sims, 20 January 1851 (WFA).
10. TA, 164.
11. TA, 166.
12. TA, 176–80.
13. Richard Spruce to Sir William Hooker, 27 June 1853; Hooker’s Journal of Botany, 1854, 6, 40.
14. TA, 181–2.
15. TA, 193–4.
16. TA, 200.
17. TA, 203–4.
18. Wallace’s pencilled notes, quite hard to decipher, are written in the back of the notebook in which he made his drawings of fishes (Natural History Museum).
19. TA, 223.
20. Henry Walter Bates to Mrs Mary Wallace, 13 June 1851 (WFA).
21. Bates to Mrs Mary Wallace, 18 October 1851 (WFA).
22. TA, 226.
23. Spruce to John Smith, 28 December 1851 (RBG, Kew).
24. Spruce to Wallace, 21 November 1863 (WFA).
25. Spruce, ‘Note on the Theory of Evolution’, in a letter to W. Wilson, 28 May 1870 (RBG, Kew).
26. Spruce, ‘Note on the Theory of Evolution’.
27. TA, 211.
28. TA, 271. Wallace’s factual narrative in TA is expanded, less discreetly, in ML, where he draws on his long letter to Spruce, and adds more details on the seaworthiness of the Jordeson which later picked them up. There are also graphic accounts in the proceedings of the Entomological Society.
29. ML, 156.
30. ML, 162.
31. ML, 160.
5 PLANNING THE NEXT EXPEDITION
1. ML, 163.
2. ML, 159–60.
3. References to Wallace and/or Bates in the Transactions of the Entomological Society occur on, inter alia, 1 June 1849, 6 August 1849, 4 February 1850,? April 1850, 7 October 1850, 17 April 1851, 5 May 1851 (when Stevens reported, inaccurately, that Bates was on his way home) and 4 August 1851.
4. Bates to Stevens, 23 and 31 December 1850; Zoologist, 1851, 3230–32. Bates’s own decision about returning to England seems to have been changed by the arrival of money from Stevens, though at one point he calculated that his profit was £26 19s after one year and eight months.
5. Edward Newman, presidential address for 1853 to the Entomological Society (n.s. 2, 142–54). Wallace’s two papers were ‘On the insects used for food by the Indians of the Amazon’ (Transactions of the Entomological Society of London, n.s. 2, 241–4), and ‘On the habits of the butterflies of the Amazon Valley’ (n.s. 2, 253–64). See Brooks (1984), 36–41.
6. ML, 168 and ML (1905), 1, 377. See McKinney (1972), 25–6. Both McKinney and Brooks offer detailed commentary on the implications of Wallace’s papers at this period. Brooks suggests that Wallace became aware of Herbert Spencer’s speculative paper ‘The Developmental Hypothesis’, ‘The Haythorne Papers’, No. 2, Leader, 20 March 1852.
7. ML, 166.
8. ML, 165.
9. Sir James Brooke to ARW, 1 April 1853 (BL, Add. Mss. 46411).
10. ARW’s proposal, ‘To the President and Council of the Royal Geographical Society of London’, is in the archives of the RGS. Wallace was not as wholly destitute as he maintained. He had, in fact, kept back a considerable quantity of South American birds for private sale, forwarded to Fanny Sims by Stevens.
11. Minute Book, RGS.
12. ARW to Dr Norton Shaw, 27 August 1853 (RGS). Petermann had published the map of the Rio Negro for the RGS journal.
13. Hooker’s Journal of Botany, 6 (1854), 61–2.
14. See McKinney (1972), 15–21, and Sandra Knapp (1999), 86.
15. Spruce in Hooker’s Journal of Botany, 7 (1855), 213.
16. Newman’s address, see note 5.
17. ARW to Norton Shaw, 9 February 1854 (RGS).
18. ML, 172–3
19. ML, 175–6.
20. MA, 36.
21. MA, 44–5.
22. MA, 45.
23. ‘Extracts of a letter from Mr Wallace’, Hooker’s Journal of Botany, 7, New Series, vol. III (1854–55), 200–209.
6 THE LAND OF THE ORANG-UTAN
1. MA, 34, 46; ML, 177.
2. Odoardo Beccari, Wanderings in the Great Forests of Borneo. Travels and Researches of a Naturalist in Sarawak (1904; reprinted in Asia Hardback Reprints, Oxford, 1986), 1–2.
3. ARW to Norton Shaw, 1 November 1854 (RGS). The short paper on Mount Ophir is in the archives of the RGS.
4. ‘On the Law which has Regulated the Introduction of New Species’, dated February 1855, Sarawak, Borneo, appeared in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History, 16 (2nd ser.), 184–96, in the September 1855 number.
5. ARW to Bates, 4 January 1858; ML, 184.
6. Quotations from Wallace, Natural Selection and Tropical Nature, essays on descriptive and theoretical biology (Macmillan, 1891).
7. The notebook, in the collection of the Linnean Society, was referred to by McKinney as the ‘Species Notebook’.
8. MA, 46–9, and Notebook 1855–9, entry for 12 March 1855. In MA, Wallace states that he arrived at the mines on 14 March. There are numerous small discrepancies between the notebooks and journals, and the more polished published accounts.
9. ARW to Fanny Sims, 25 June 1855 (WFA).
10. Ibid.
11. MA, 49.
12. Notebook 1855–9 (Linnean Society).
13. Ibid.
14. MA, 67.
15. MA, 53–7. Also details in Notebook (Linnean Society).
16. ‘A New Kind of Baby’, Chambers’s Journal, 8 (3rd ser.), 201–4, 26 September 1857. See also ARW to Fanny Sims, 25 June 1855; ML, 178–80.
17. Notebook 1855–9 (Linnean Society).
18. ARW to Fanny Sims, 28 September 1855 (WFA).
19. MA, 87.
20. See Spencer St John, The Life of Sir James Brooke, Rajah of Sarawak (Edinburgh and London, Blackwood, 1879), 274–5.
21. ARW to Fanny Sims, 20 February 1856; LR, 1, 60–61.
22. ARW to Stevens, 10 March 1856 (CUL).
23. Proceedings of the Entomological Society.
24. For Darwin’s annotations, and commentary, see Desmond and Moore (1991) 437–40, and Browne (1995) 537–8.
25. See Desmond and Moore (1991), 438. Also Leonard G. Wilson (1970).
26. ARW to Stevens, 10 March 1856 (CUL).
27. ARW to Stevens, 12 May 1856 (CUL).
28. ARW to Stevens, 21 August 1856 (CUL).
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid.
31. MA, 167–8.
32. MA, 169.
33. ARW to Stevens, 21 August 1856 (CUL).
34. ARW to Stevens, 27 September 1856 (CUL).
35. MA, 222.
36. Sir James Brooke to ARW, 4 July 1856 (BL, Add. Mss. 46411).
37. ARW to Fanny Sims, 20 February 1856 (WFA).
38. MA, 409.
7 HEADING EAST
1. MA, 411.
2. MA, 419.
3. MA, 430.
4. MA, 434.
5. MA, 445.
6. MA, 447–8.
7. MA, 448–9.
8. Quoted from Wallace’s Notebook 1855–9 (Linnean Society). See MA, 467, where he omits the comment about ‘the free development of every limb seems wholly admirable, and made to be admired’.
9. MA, 474.
10. MA, 486.
11. ARW to Norton Shaw, August 1857 (RGS).
12. Charles Darwin to ARW, 1 May 1857 (CCD, 6, 387).
13. Desmond and Moore (1991), 455.
14. ARW to Darwin, 27 September 1857 (CCD, 6, 457).
15. Bates to ARW, 19 November 1856 (WFA).
16. MA, 301.
17. MA, 303–4.
18. ARW to Bates, 4 January 1858; ML, 184 (WFA). The letter was completed on 25 January 1858. See note 25.
19. Entry 127, Field Journal (Linnean Society); MA, 323. See McKinney (1972) 134–5, and Brooks (1984), 178–80.
20. ML, 189.
21. ML, 191–2. For Wallace’s various accounts of this sequence, see McKinney (1972), 160–63. His versions were published in The Wonderful Century (1898), 139; in ‘My Relations with Darwin in Reference to the Theory of Natural Selection’, in Black a
nd White, 17 January 1903, 78; in ML; and, for the Linnean Society, The Darwin–Wallace Celebration (1908), 117–18.
22. The Darwin–Wallace Celebration Held on Thursday, 1st July 1908, by the Linnean Society of London (February 1909), 5–11.
23. See Nora Barlow (ed.), The Autobiography of Charles Darwin 1809–1882 (Collins, 1958).
24. ML, 191.
25. Ibid. The letter to Bates was sent to Bates’s brother Frederick, in Leicester. The envelope, with its various postmarks, survives, to shed doubt on the timing of the arrival of Wallace’s letter, and essay, at Darwin’s house.
26. Darwin to ARW, 22 December 1857 (CCD, 6, 514–15).
8 IN SEARCH OF PARADISE BIRDS
1. MA, 497.
2. MA, 499.
3. ML, 192.
4. Darwin to Charles Lyell, 18 [June 1858] (CCD, 7, 107).
5. Darwin to Lyell, [25 June] 1858 (CCD, 7, 117–19).
6. ‘On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type’ dated Ternate, February 1858, was published in the Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society, 3 (9), 45–62 (20 August 1858).
7. Hooker’s account was written for Francis Darwin (ed.), The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, 3 vols. (Murray, 1887), ii, 126.
8. A. F. R. Wollaston, Life of Alfred Newton (Murray, 1921), 112–13.
9. MA, 515.
10. ARW to Mrs Mary Wallace, 6 October 1858 (WFA); ML, 195.
11. ML, 193–4.
12. ARW to Stevens, 29 October 1858 (CUL).
13. ARW to Mrs Mary Wallace, 6 October 1858 (WFA).
14. MA, 335–6.
15. ARW to Stevens, 29 October 1858 (CUL).
16. MA, 354.
17. ARW to Thomas Sims, 25 April 1859 (WFA).
18. MA, 262–3.
19. MA, 264.
