In Amazonia (22 page)

It is the sense of disappointment, of trust betrayed and community rebuffed, that makes this moment so troubling—especially so when we realize that these are the very same people whom he has described to Frederick as “taciturn, idle, and phlegmatic; so apathetic that they never appear to feel any of the emotions or affections.”
³⁹
As the closing passage of
The Naturalist
, with its longing invocation of days spent in “gipsy fashion” suggests, his personal engagement is more complex than his theoretical architecture can allow. There is, he had written to his brother, “liberty and independence [in] this kind of life,” and, at times, he is able fluidly to evoke his sense of a hard-won freedom with palpable conviction and an empathy for his Amazonian associates that brings a submerged relativism welling up to the surface of his text.
⁴⁰
We find it in his adoption and subsequent burial—preceded by a controversial public baptism—of a kidnapped Indian child in Ega.
⁴¹
It is there in his undisguised pleasure on his excursions with local hunters, in the intimate camaraderie and his fascination with their skills. It breaks through in his sensitivity to the generosity of poorly provisioned rural hosts who scramble through their minimal resources to assemble meals for an unexpected guest. It has sufficient substance to signify an alternate structure of feeling that endows his account with the layered richness
that can come so powerfully from uncertainty. One such occasion finds him at night sailing on the Rio Tocantins toward the town of Cametá. He has been dozing on deck, wrapped in a sail, listening to the crew talk and sing:

The canoe-men of the Amazons have many songs and choruses, with which they are in the habit of relieving the monotony of their slow voyages, and which are known all over the interior. The choruses consist of a simple strain, repeated almost to weariness, and sung generally in unison, but sometimes with an attempt at harmony. There is a wildness and sadness about the tunes which harmonise well with, and in fact are born of, the circumstances of the canoe-man's life: the echoing channels, the endless gloomy forest, the solemn nights, and the desolate scenes of broad and stormy waters and falling banks…. I fell asleep about ten o'clock, but at four in the morning John Mendez [the pilot] woke me to enjoy the sight of the little schooner tearing through the waves before a spanking breeze. The night was transparently clear and almost cold, the moon appeared sharply defined against the dark blue sky, and a ridge of foam marked where the prow of the vessel was cleaving its way through the water. The men had made a fire in the galley to make tea of an acid herb called
erva cidreira
, a quantity of which they had gathered in the last landing-place, and the flames sparkled cheerily upwards. It is at such times as these that Amazons travelling is enjoyable, and one no longer wonders at the love which many, both natives and strangers, have for this wandering life. The little schooner sped steadily on, with booms bent and sails stretched to the utmost. Just as day dawned, we ran with scarcely slackened speed into the port of Cametá, and cast anchor.
⁴²

There is, for sure, a loneliness in this gipsy life, but it nonetheless has a special appeal for Bates. How should we understand its charms? We need to think again about his feelings on the eve of departure from Pará or, at least, his representation of them as he closes
The Naturalist
and meditates on the appeal of a vagabond existence. In the aftermath of so many complaints about the indolence of Amazonian people, in the midst of his stark vision of industrial England, and as a conclusion to an account that can have left no reader in doubt as to the heroic character
of his collecting efforts, his wistful appeal to another way of life finds him looking both apprehensively forward and fretfully back. On this last evening on the Amazon, Bates' anti-nostalgia draws on the grim figure of the industrial Midlands landscape that embodies so many anxieties about his future prospects. It is a gloom brimming with tentative, defeated forebodings that even should he escape the hosiery workshop for which he has been raised, the scientific reward he craves for these eleven years of Amazonian hardship is no more than a sweetly poisoned chalice, promising only a life forever cut off from the entomologizing pleasures from which he is to sail in the morning. At this moment of crisis, there is—just for an instant—a final chance to reconcile with that transcendent yearning insistently loosening the clutch of his stubborn reproduction of alterity. For one final moment, he frees himself from his disdain for indolence and envies that fabled three-fourths of Amazonians living free of slavish conventionality. Then, with the shudder of presentiment, he hammers the lid down tight on the last of his collection and strides on board the ship for Liverpool.

T
HE
L
IVES OF
S
PECIMENS

When Bates finally left the interior it was at the insistence of a local riverboat owner appalled at the deterioration in his health and at his rapid loss of weight and strength. His sustaining dream—to reach the Andes and maybe the Pacific—was deferred, indeed abandoned. Reading his notebooks, letters, essays, and monograph, the isolation and vulnerability of his experience are striking. From them comes a powerful sense of contradiction: not simply ambivalence, but, as we have seen, articulate, contradictory expressions of attachment and dislocation, of identification and indifference. Yet the crudeness of his racialized caricatures is jarring and seemingly belied by the considered character of his conduct in the field. And it appears that his internal struggle is with conventionality, that his journey, no matter where it takes him, is haunted above all by the commonplaces of middle-class England—by his own institutional aspirations, by the confines of his familiarity with geographical and ethnological thought, and by the anxious letters from home urging his return to the family business, that, despite its audacities, his life is already unfolding as a series of unheroic compromises.

Bates' insecurities were fueled by his continuing status as little more
than a professional collector. We know already that this was the role for which, from an elite perspective, he was best equipped. It is also clear that it was one neither he nor Wallace particularly relished. Despite their reservations, however, it was only through entering the Banksian networks of commercial science that these independent, although not independently wealthy, travelers were able to finance their expedition.
⁴³
Before finally resolving on the Amazon as a destination, they visited William Hooker at Kew and Edward Doubleday in the Lepidoptera Department of the British Museum, arranging commissions for plants and rare insects and receiving assurances that demand for the fauna and flora of the Amazon was still strong despite the work of naturalist predecessors. More important, they engaged an agent, Samuel Stevens, an amateur entomologist and brother to a noted London natural history auctioneer. Stevens earned his commission: he successfully disposed of their collections, reliably forwarded money to Pará, and acted as a local booster, enticing metropolitan savants with extracts from Bates' letters, which he published at regular intervals in the
Zoologist
and other leading journals.
⁴⁴

Clearly, even for such rank amateurs there were locations on the networks of science and geography waiting to be accessed. The key nodes—sites of commercial possibility and social aspiration—were obvious: the institutional centers of metropolitan natural history based in Kew and Bloomsbury. Less transparent but equally material were the cumulative structures of fluvial exploration through which, as we know, northern South America had been accessed since the late sixteenth century. Victorians were self-conscious about their Elizabethan inheritance, and much as Hakluyt had looked to King Arthur and Owen Madoc for legitimating imperial precedent, mid-nineteenth-century British expansionists found their glorious tradition in Ralegh and in Hakluyt himself, both of whom inspired significant institutional centers and whose works were reissued in new and influential editions.
⁴⁵

The English, along with the Dutch, French, and Irish, were shut out of the Amazon by Portugal from the 1630s until the opening of Brazilian ports to friendly foreign vessels in 1808. Deferral, though, as the clamor surrounding Humboldt's pioneering voyage along the Orinoco and Rio Negro in 1799–1804 made clear, only stimulated appetites. Sixteenth-century American expeditions were rediscovered in the midst of the imperial vogue for travel writing, and seized upon as invitations rather than mere precedents. From 1808 on, Amazonian rivers were
flooded with foreign entrepreneurs, spies, and scientists—with most individuals playing multiple roles. Bates and Wallace followed trails established not only by fellow collectors, but also by the repeated attempts of British naval expeditions to map a transcontinental link between the Atlantic and Pacific via the Amazon and Andes, and by the overwhelming domination of Amazonian commerce by British financial institutions.
⁴⁶
Moreover, they were also traveling in the wake of a substantial Portuguese tradition of scientific exploration inaugurated by Jesuits such as Padre João Daniel and given major impulse by the celebrated nine-year expedition of Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira.
⁴⁷
Writing in the RGS house journal following Bates' death, William L. Distant, an old friend and a fellow entomologist, clearly identified this cumulative aspect:

Not only did [Bates'] expedition effect a history of the natural treasures of this interesting zoological province, but it also stimulated the zeal of many private and wealthy collectors, who subsequently promoted and assisted other zoological enterprises.
⁴⁸

William Chandless' RGS surveys of navigable tributaries took place soon after Bates' return, as did Brown and Lidstone's detailed report for the Amazon Steam Navigation Company on the potential of territory ceded to the British firm by the Brazilian state.
⁴⁹
It was through such rapidly proliferating networks that the hospitality trails of sympathetic European merchants and officials came into being. Indeed, the prior existence of logistical support had been one of the factors determining Bates' choice of the Amazon as a collecting site.
⁵⁰

We should not ignore the extent to which apparently benign field activities—collecting, connecting, and circulating rare and exotic species, filling orders from metropolitan savants, communicating systematic observations on botany, zoology, physical geography, linguistics, ethnology, and sociology to interested professionals—were often indistinguishable from the more patently instrumental projects of botanical espionage and transplantation also undertaken through state channels.
⁵¹
Such overlapping projects were of prime importance in configuring the region, and they were dependent on decisive micropolitics. We have seen that natural historical practice was overdetermined by a range of contingencies and orientations—biographical, political, philosophical. Critically, we must also acknowledge that the politics of professionalization in the metropolitan sciences that propelled Bates across the Atlantic
were themselves predicated on disciplinary regimes imposed by commercial and aesthetic codes for the collecting of nature then developing in Europe. This is one reason why the natural history collection is of such interest. Tied more tenaciously to traveling scientific practice than even the published narratives, and equally critical to his career, Bates' vast collection was a key site for the elaboration of identity—both his own and that of the Amazon. Distant, writing in 1892, makes the point most succinctly:

The collections were unrivalled, and one can still hear echoes … of the intense interest with which Bates' consignments were anticipated. The banks of the great river were at last telling the tale of their inhabitants to the zoologists of Europe, for the collections were widely circulated.
⁵²

The collection was a principal locus of anxiety. Marooned in the field with few reference books and incomplete knowledge of the most recent work in systematics, naturalists (no matter how skilled) were often unable to make the fine judgments that enabled species to be described, classified, and slotted into a Linnaean grid.
⁵³
Instead, they supplied the metropolitan expert who, like a bourgeois Adam in his paneled library, simultaneously named and brought the natural world into being, occasionally acknowledging the collector with a Latinate flourish.
⁵⁴
Yet, it was people with the experience of travel behind them—Huxley, Hooker, Darwin, Wallace, and Bates—who were most intimately associated with the Darwinian revolution, and Bates was quite explicit in his belief that this apparent paradox was governed by a causal relationship. In an 1862 letter to Darwin, he notes that his old friend Edwin Brown of Burton-on-Trent

is amassing material (specimens) at a very great expense. He has never traveled: this is a great deficiency for the relations of species to closely allied species & varieties cannot, I think, be thoroughly understood without personal observation in different countries.
⁵⁵

Bates later referred to Brown's kind of naturalist as a “species grubber” to be “ranked with collectors of postage stamps & crockery,” and there were important distinctions being shored up by this disdain.
⁵⁶
Not only did he wish to separate those who traveled from those who stayed at home, but also, and more enduringly, he was dividing what he saw as
the inconsequential journeymen who collected without reflection from the scientists whose theorizings imbued their collecting activity with real meaning.

In this aspiration toward the larger questions, both the ideas and style of inquiry developed in Humboldt's
Personal Narrative
are quite explicit.
⁵⁷
Humboldt's Kantian distinction between “a true history of nature and a mere description of nature” (the latter, in his view, being symptomatic of Linnaean natural history) involved the application of a rigorous and technologically bolstered empiricism.
⁵⁸
He traveled with the declared intent of confronting natural phenomena in all their vital complexity and affective detail and precisely to transcend dependence on the lifeless extractions of the herbarium and cabinet. A true natural history would be revealed only through a study of the inter-relationship of all of nature's aspects in a grand synthetic enterprise. Conspicuous among these relationships were personal emotional and aesthetic responses: legitimate, valued data that, in this age of the sublime, introduced a Romantic variant of a familiar (environmental) determinism in which an empathetic emotional response could indicate the effect of particular types of natural environment on human society. There is, then, considerable friction between the pulls of empiricism and Romanticism, and we find the mutual indispensability of reason and aesthetics provoking perspectives at odds with disciplinary compartmentalization. Malcolm Nicolson has put it nicely: “The mathematical precision of the stars' orbits,” he writes, “was just as valid a topic for study as their sparkle and its associated delights.”
⁵⁹
By the time the Darwinians had finished digesting Humboldt most of the sparkle had fizzled out. But this does not mean that Bates' occasionally anodyne prose should be read as a detached stylistic analogue of a narrowly investigative empiricism. Feelings still mattered. As did Beauty and Truth. A collection of quality and elegance, and the rare and delicate creatures of which it was composed, was a vessel deep enough and wide enough to hold all these absolutes, and more besides.