Wrestling with the Amazons

I went to East Finchley cemetery a while ago. It was cold and damp. A few dead leaves clung soggily to the grass. It felt pretty forsaken. I stood in front of a tomb: a stolid stone pillar with a globe on top. It had been mounted so that the continent of Latin America would face the viewer. This is the monument to Henry Walter Bates, the great Victorian naturalist who, in 1848, set sail for the Amazon and remained in its ‘glorious forests’ for eleven years.

I couldn’t help but be reminded of the images of England that had risen into his mind on the eve of his eventual return: ‘pictures of startling clearness’, he wrote, ‘of the gloomy winters, the long grey twilights, murky atmosphere of factory chimneys and crowds of grimy operatives, rung to work in early mornings by factory bells; of union workhouses, confined rooms, artificial cares and slavish conventionalities’. How far his last resting place amid London suburbs feels from that ‘land of perpetual summer’ in which he passed what he thought of as the best years of his life. The real monument to Bates is not this stolid pillar. It is the memoir which, encouraged by Darwin (whom Bates helped enormously – not least with his theory of mimicry which provided evidence of evolution by natural selection), he wrote of his time in Brazil. The Naturalist on the River Amazons, first published by John Murray in 1863, was, Darwin declared, ‘the best work of natural history travels ever published in England’. The mid-nineteenth century was a remarkable era for the naturalist. No one had yet explained how life on earth, in all its eye-stretching diversity, had evolved. The tropical rain forests, the world’s richest and most intricate terrestrial ecosystem, remained a teeming mystery. Imagine what it must have been like for the 23-year-old Bates, a hosier’s apprentice from Leicester with a passion for beetles but no academic credentials (bar a short paper ‘On Coleopterous insects frequenting damp places’), to be embarking in the company of a fellow enthusiast, Alfred Russell Wallace, for the forests of Brazil. The reader can experience a similar thrill of anticipation as he opens Bates’s account and finds in the list of contents such intriguing promises as ‘Adventure with Anaconda – Smoke-dried Monkey – Boa Constrictor – Incursion of a Wild Tribe – Falls of the Cuparí – Hyancinthine Macaw’ – all in less than one chapter. Bates, who unlike Darwin had no private means, intended to pay for his trip by collecting specimens. And he set about the business with voracious assiduity. He returned, Darwin informs us in an ‘appreciation’ which prefaces this memoir, with a bag of 14,712 species of which more than half were previously unknown. In the pages of this book, the reader meets a quite extraordinary assemblage of jungle denizens: anything from myriad beetles to a boa constrictor (‘the rapidly moving and shining body looked like a stream of brown liquid flowing over the thick bed of fallen leaves’); from swarming piranha (‘as soon as any offal fell from the canoe, the water was blackened with the shoals that rushed instantaneously to the spot’) to the sloth (‘it is a strange sight to watch the uncouth creature, fit production of these silent shades, lazily moving from branch to branch’). But the wider charm of this book is that Bates does not restrict himself to natural history. This was not the era of the specialist. His records expand to include anything and everything – and often observed from the most curious aspects. A manatee – despite being ‘one of the few objects which excite the dull wonder of the Indians’ – ends up on a barbecue and looks, he informs us, like ‘one of those Egyptian tombs which are made of dark, smooth stone and shaped to the human figure’. The reader learns about flowers, trees and bushes; about religious festivals, food crops, the songs of canoe paddlers, cannibalistic customs and native legends. Bates and Wallace parted company after two years – ostensibly so that between them they could cover more territory, but perhaps because differences in personality loomed large in that claustrophobic atmosphere. (In 1852, racked with fever, Wallace set sail for England with his vast specimen collection. But his ship caught fire off the Guianas and he lost everything he had.) Bates – ‘a solitary stranger on a strange errand’ – travels on up the Tapajós River into Upper Amazonia. But as he journeys ever deeper, the reader begins to suspect that the Victorian naturalist is not the least bizarre of the many creatures that he meets. The relationship grows ever more intimate. We are there, peering over Bates’s shoulder, as he pries a finch ‘smeared with the filthy liquor exuded by the monster’ from the jaws of a bird-eating spider. We are watching as he wages war against marauding Saüba ants (‘I was obliged to lay trains of gunpowder along their line and blow them up’) or lays about impertinent toucans. We share with him anything from the maddening itch of insect bites (‘they seem to attack persons out of sheer malice’) to the most entrancing wonder. ‘It is at such moments as this,’ he exclaims as he watches the dawn, ‘when one feels how beautiful our world truly is!’ We feel the thrill of his sexual desires. The native women had ‘dark, expressive eyes and remarkably rich heads of hair . . . It was mere fancy, but I thought the mingled squalor, luxuriance and beauty of these women were pointedly in harmony with the rest of the scene.’ And in one of the most moving passages we experience with him a moment of heartbreaking loneliness when, after four and a half years, and more than fourteen hundred miles upriver, he finds himself living in a tiny village. He has been robbed. His clothes are in rags and he is barefoot. His servant has abandoned him and he has not received a parcel from England for months. He reads his back copies of the Athenaeum over and over, poring over even the advertisements by the end. ‘I was obliged at last’, he says with a stiff upper lip, ‘to come to the conclusion that the contemplation of Nature alone is not sufficient to fill the human heart and mind.’ If he had had a book such as his own, he would not have felt such despair. This is a volume that can both fascinate with its minute, scientific scrutiny and enchant with descriptions of such beguiling lyricism that the reader is carried into a dream world. Even then, it was a dream under threat. When Bates returns to a small town after several years in the wilderness, he is anguished to discover that ‘the noble forest trees had been cut down, and their naked half-burnt stems remained in the midst of ashes, muddy puddles and heaps of broken branches’. And perhaps this is the real contemporary relevance of this memoir. ‘Bates, I have read your book – I have seen the Amazons,’ pronounced the great American ornithologist John Gould. The same can still be said today. Who, having lived through its pages, would not lament the destruction of their world? Bates – eventually – finds contentment in his home country. ‘Now, after three years of renewed experience of England,’ he tells us, ‘I find how incomparably superior is civilised life.’ And yet, he concludes, with a prophecy whose yearning echoes down the years, ‘it is under the equator alone that the perfect race of the future will attain to complete fruition of man’s beautiful heritage, the earth.’

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 10 © Rachel Campbell-Johnston 2006