In Amazonia (43 page)

21
. Thompson,
The Making
, 819.

22
. Journal entry, February 11, 1864, cited in Edward Clodd, “Memoir,” in Henry Walter Bates,
The Naturalist on the River Amazons: A Record of Adventures, Habits of Animals, Sketches of Brazilian and Indian Life, and Aspects of Nature Under the Equator, During Eleven Years of Travel
, unabridged commemorative ed. (London: John Murray, 1892), lxxiv.

23
. According to Kropotkin, Bates responded enthusiastically to the thesis of
Mutual Aid
, exclaiming: “That is true Darwinism. It is a shame to think what they have made of Darwin's ideas.” Peter Kropotkin,
Memoirs of a Revolutionist
, ed. James Allen Rogers (London: Century Hutchinson, 1988 [1899]), 300. We should note, also, that at one time contradictions within these circles were less apparent, and that Bates had named one of his sons Herbert Spencer Bates (and another Darwin Bates).

24
. Alfred Russel Wallace,
A Narrative of Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro, with an Account of the Native Tribes, and Observations on the Climate, Geology, and Natural History of the Amazon Valley
(London: Reeve, 1853), 231, 232.

25
. Bates,
The Naturalist
, 406.

26
. See Susan Thorne, “‘The Conversion of Englishmen and the Conversion of the World Inseparable': Missionary Imperialism and the Language of Class in Early Industrial Britain,” in
Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Colonial World
, ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 238–62.

27
. Bates,
The Naturalist
, 406–7.

28
. Clifford Geertz,
Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 1–24.

29
. See Antonello Gerbi,
The Dispute of the New World: The History of a Polemic, 1750–1900
, trans. Jeremy Moyle (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh
Press, 1973); and idem,
Nature in the New World: From Christopher Columbus to Gonzalo Fernández de Ovideo
, trans. Jeremy Moyle (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985), on the persistent belief—expounded most famously by Hegel and Buffon—that the New World is inferior to the Old and, specifically, that American animal life (including human) “suffers from degeneration and arrested development” (Gerbi,
Nature
, 3). On ties between race and climate, see David N. Livingstone, “The Moral Discourse of Climate: Historical Considerations on Race, Place and Virtue,”
Journal of Historical Geography
17, no. 4 (1991): 413–34; idem,
The Geographical Tradition: Episodes in the History of a Contested Enterprise
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1993).

30
. Bates,
The Naturalist
, 278. I have suppressed a paragraph break. Racial theorizing in Brazil was indelibly complicated by the hybridity of categories, and Bates was generally disapproving of the existing solution to his race problem. Occasionally, however, he is open to ambivalence: “It is interesting,” he notes in Cametá, “to find the mamelucos displaying talent and enterprise, for it shows that degeneracy does not necessarily result from the mixture of white and Indian blood” (ibid., 77). “Degeneracy” continued to be a preoccupation of Brazilian elites as well as foreign visitors. Nancy Leys Stepan,
The Hour of Eugenics: Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996) provides an important account of the assemblage of race, sex, science, and nation that was to cohere later in the century. For the race politics that animated the Cabanagem, see Cleary, “Lost Altogether”; and, for sharp commentary that follows race and nation into the era of
mestiçagem
, idem, “Race, Nationalism and Social Theory in Brazil: Rethinking Gilberto Freyre,” Economic and Social Research Council Transnational Communities Programme, Working Papers Series: WPTC-99-09, Oxford, 1999.

31
. Bates to Frederick Bates, Ega, May 30, 1856,
Zoologist
15 (1856): 5658–59.

32
. Humboldt and Bonpland,
Personal Narrative
, vol. 1, xxi.

33
. Henry Walter Bates, “Some Account of the Country of the River Solimoens, or Upper Amazons,”
Zoologist
10 (1852): 3592; Bates to Stevens, Santarém, April 12, 1852,
Zoologist
11 (1852): 3726; Bates to Brown, Pará, October 19, 1848,
Zoologist
8 (1849): 2840; Bates to Brown, Pará, June 17, 1848,
Zoologist
8 (1849): 2837; Bates, “Some Account,” 3597.

34
. Bates,
Naturalist
, 197–98. I have suppressed a paragraph break.

35
. Foucault's observation that natural historical modes of representation are characterized by the “nomination of the visible” is apposite here. See Michel Foucault,
The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences
(New York: Vintage, 1994), 132. In this context we can also think about Bates' mobilization of racial typing. Note, for example, the seamless move from observed, surface traits to correlative innate characteristics in the following passage: “The cheek-bones are not generally prominent; the eyes are black, and seldom oblique like those of the Tatar races of Eastern Asia, which are supposed to have sprung from the same original stock as the American red man. The features exhibit scarcely any mobility of expression; this is connected with the apathetic and undemonstrative character of the race. They never betray,
in fact they do not
feel keenly
, the emotions of joy, grief, wonder, fear, and so forth” (Bates,
Naturalist
, 39–40; emphasis added).

36
. Bates,
Naturalist
, 77. It was Wallace who expressed these ideas in their most polemical form and who most clearly theorized the intersection of race and environment. See, particularly, Alfred Russel Wallace, “The Development of Human Races Under the Law of Natural Selection,” in
Natural Selection and Tropical Nature: Essays on Descriptive and Theoretical Biology
(London: Macmillan, 1891 [1864]), 167–85. David Spurr,
The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 61–75, 156–65, discusses scientifically supported racial hierarchization and the malleability of the European tradition of environmental determinism that “identifies non-European peoples with the forces of nature and then places nature in opposition to culture” (158). Wallace, though, was more rigorous in also allowing for the effects of such a binarism on
European
development. He and Bates are able at times to share in the Rousseauian fantasy of the indolent, sensual native as innocent primitive, but they read it through the prism of scientific selection in which intellectual and moral capacity is judged by the ability of a race to transform nature in the name of progress. Spurr finds explicit and convincing links between evolutionary science and the rather non-specific “colonial discourse” he is concerned to delineate. See George W. Stocking Jr.,
Victorian Anthropology
(New York: The Free Press, 1987), 96–102; Nancy Leys Stepan,
Picturing Tropical Nature
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 57–84 (both on Wallace); and Adam Kuper, “On Human Nature: Darwin and the Anthropologists,” in
Nature and Society in Historical Context
, ed. Mikulás Teich, Roy Porter, and Bo Gustafsson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 274–90.

37
. Michael Taussig,
Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses
(New York: Routledge, 1993).

38
. Bates,
Naturalist
, 280.

39
. Bates to Frederick Bates, Ega, May 30, 1856,
Zoologist
15 (1857): 5658.

40
. Bates to Frederick Bates, Ega, September 1, 1855,
Zoologist
14 (1856): 5018. Bates' relativism was not always
positively
humanist in the terms I am suggesting: it could also be inflected by a class snobbery that ascribed negative characteristics to the uneducated.

41
. Controversial, that is, because of the humanity it afforded the child. See Bates,
Naturalist
, 275–77.

42
. Bates,
Naturalist
, 75–76. I have suppressed a paragraph break.

43
. For a useful discussion of Joseph Banks' efforts to establish a global network of botanical collectors during the late eighteenth century, see David MacKay, “Agents of Empire: The Banksian Collectors and Evaluation of New Lands,” in
Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany, and Representations of Nature
, ed. David Philip Miller and Peter Hanns Reill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 38–57. Adequate consideration of Joseph Banks' pivotal role in the story of colonial science would require a supplementary essay. Harold B. Carter,
Sir Joseph Banks, 1743–1820
(London: British Museum [Natural History],
1988), breathed new life into Banks scholarship, rehabilitating a figure that historians of science had tended to overlook largely because he wrote little. Important discussions can be found in Mackay, “A Presiding Genius of Exploration: Banks, Cook and Empire, 1767–1805,” in
Captain James Cook and His Times
, ed. Robin Fisher and Hugh Johnston (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1979), 20–39; idem,
In the Wake of Cook: Exploration, Science, and Empire, 1780–1801
(London: Croom Helm, 1985); and John Gascoigne,
Joseph Banks and the English Enlightenment: Useful Knowledge and Polite Culture
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

44
. Extended fragments of Bates' letters to Stevens as well as of others to his family and friends were published in the
Zoologist
between 1850 and 1857 (vols. 8–15) under the heading “Extracts from the Correspondence of Mr. H. W. Bates Now Forming Entomological Collections in South America,” or the more general “Proceedings of Natural-History Collectors in Foreign Countries.” Bates also submitted (via Stevens) several detailed accounts of short excursions. On Wallace's relations with Stevens, see Jane Camerini, “Wallace in the Field,” in
Science in the Field
, ed. Henrika Kuklick and Robert E. Kohler,
Osiris
11 (1996): 44–65.

45
. Botanist Richard Spruce, for example, in an 1849[?] diary entry, writes: “How often I have regretted that England did not possess the magnificent Amazon valley instead of India! If that booby James, instead of putting Raleigh in prison and finally cutting off his head, had persevered in supplying him with ships, money and men until he had formed a permanent establishment on one of the great American rivers, I have no doubt but that the whole American continent would have been at this moment in the hands of the English race!” (quoted in Smith,
Explorers of the Amazon
, 254–55). Schomburgk's 1848 edition of Ralegh's
Discoverie
was also an inspiration to a generation of North American artists; see Katherine Emma Manthorne,
Tropical Renaissance: North American Artists Exploring Latin America, 1839–1879
(Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1989). The institutional centers I am referring to are the Raleigh Club and the still-flourishing Hakluyt Society.

46
. See Bernard S. Cohn,
Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 3–15. Obviously enough, in an early-nineteenth-century Latin American context of newly independent nation-states, much of the administrative technology Cohn describes for India fell outside a formally colonial context. However, there can be little doubt as to the depth of penetration of British capital into the region, the excited interest of British entrepreneurs and scientists once access became available, and the application of modalities of data collection and management that correspond in large measure to those mobilized in other regions of the world and circulated through the same institutional calculating centers. See Richard Graham,
Britain and the Onset of Modernization in Brazil, 1850–1914
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968); Buarque de Holanda,
História geral
, 64–99. Also: Henry Lister Maw,
Journal of a Passage from the Pacific to the Atlantic, Crossing the Andes in the Northern Provinces of Peru, and Descending the River Marañon or Amazon
(London: John Murray, 1829); William Smyth
and Frederick Lowe,
Narrative of a Journey from Lima to Para, Across the Andes and Down the Amazon, Undertaken with a View of Ascertaining the Practicability of a Navigable Communication with the Atlantic by the Rivers Pachitea, Ucayali, and Amazon
(London: John Murray, 1836); John Dickenson, “Bates, Wallace and Economic Botany in Mid-19th Century Amazonia,” in Seaward and FitzGerald,
Richard Spruce
, 65–80, 66–67.

47
. See the important historiographical recuperation of this work by Antonio Porro,
O povo das águas
(São Paulo: Vozes, 1995), especially 181–98; and David Cleary, “Tristes Trope-iques: Science and the Representation of Nature in Amazonia Since the Eighteenth Century,” paper presented to the Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago, May 11, 2000. The key primary texts—long ignored by English-language scholars—are Padre João Daniel,
Tesouro descoberto no Rio Amazonas
, Anais da Biblioteca Nacional, vol. 95, 2 vols. (Rio de Janeiro: Biblioteca Nacional, 1975), and Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira,
Viagem filosófica pelas Capitanias do Grão-Pará, Rio Negro, Mato Grosso e Cuiabá
(Rio de Janeiro: Conselho Federal de Cultura, 1971–74). Cleary accurately describes the latter's expedition, which lasted from 1783 to 1792, as “the beginning of professionalised natural science in the Amazon basin” (“Tristes Trope-iques,” 5). Daniel was a Jesuit priest resident in the Amazon from 1741 until the Pombaline expulsion of the order in 1757.