In Amazonia (23 page)

Bates' criticism of Brown expressed the simmering antagonism between a resurgent English “natural” natural history that drew on native authorities (John Ray in particular) and what he and other Humboldtian Darwinians concurred was a listlessly mechanical classificatory impulse descended from Linnaeus.
⁶⁰
Linnaean taxonomy had transformed both the plant and animal sciences, introducing an absorbing focus on the minutiae of taxonomic organization. The natural historical modes
of representation through which methodological imperatives came to be expressed worked to flatten the specificities of geographical, cultural, and historical location in a regime of recontextualization and distinction.
⁶¹
Darwin and his circle self-consciously distinguished themselves from this segmenting optic by the development of a theory of origins the force of which was understood as issuing from its holism. Nonetheless, it was systematics that underwrote evolutionary theorizing, and the theoretical urge was constantly in tension with the demands of laborious taxonomy.
⁶²
Moreover, this routinized practice had its own financial and aesthetic charms. There is a false note in Bates' contempt for the mere collector, with its denial of his own seduction by the appeals of classification.

The assembly of a private collection was one of Bates' principal goals in traveling to Pará. An impressive natural history cabinet filled with rarities was a recognized form of capital in the appropriate circuit, with significant exchange value and an indispensable prestige function that could catapult its owner into the ranks of the learned.
⁶³
But the question posed by Bates' comment on Brown was that of the collection's immediate purpose, and, in this, it is clear that notwithstanding the actualities of his situation, Bates saw himself as the heir of Humboldt, rather than of the journeymen Banksian collectors. Indeed, it is as an instance of a new social actor—perhaps Humboldt's most significant invention—that he steps onto the historical stage: the post-Linnaean (post-Banksian) explorer-scientist, a subject with many counterparts in colonial service.
⁶⁴

It is through his work in refashioning and overcoming the undervalued figure of the natural history collector that Bates maps his scientific and social aspirations and opens the routes through which his Amazons will travel. Back from the field, he haltingly forged relationships with senior scientific figures. In particular, as his correspondence clearly shows, both Darwin and Joseph Hooker acted toward him as solicitous and sensitive mentors. He, in turn, armed with the authority of travel, reciprocated with perceptive insight into the relationship between tropical entomology and natural selection, providing apparently endless data tapped by Darwin through precise and persistent questioning. With Bates unable to find work among the very limited opportunities then available in London professional science, it was Darwin who suggested he write
The Naturalist
, arranged introductions, advised him on contract negotiations with John Murray (London's leading publisher of
travel books), nursed him through periods of despondency, encouraged his theoretical development, and guided him across the inhospitable terrain of the capital's scientific establishment. Through Darwin, Bates established his connection with Hooker, a powerful scientific patron who, in late 1865, succeeded his father as director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew.

In casting his lot with the Darwinians, Bates inevitably attracted hostility from their opponents, especially among the systematists at the British Museum, where his job applications were rejected and his claims about the number of new species contained in his collection were held up to ridicule. In a series of paternal letters, Hooker coached him on the mores of the scholarly upper class, explicitly situating his comments in terms of Bates' future career prospects. “It is,” he advised, “extremely difficult to
establish a footing
in London scientific society: it is all along of [
sic
] the law of the struggle for life! You are instinctively regarded as an interloper, and it must be so in the nature of things. Do, I entreat you, smile at their sneers.”
⁶⁵
Finally, of his new set, it was Murray who convinced the RGS to hire as their senior administrator the young entomologist with no executive experience.
⁶⁶
It was an apt decision made possible by the persistence of amateurism in British science: to organize their insect collection, the trustees of the British Museum had appointed a well-connected poet.
⁶⁷

As Distant pointed out, it was through the collection that “the banks of the great river were at last telling the tale of their inhabitants.” Removed from their “wild” context and resituated in collections physically organized to express hierarchical principles, natural history specimens became narrativized as tactile metonyms, not only for a generalized natural world, but, more specifically, for the region. The collection marked region within an encompassing story of imperial destiny and masculine daring. Allied to the travel narratives of prominent collectors, the contextual particularity of provenance became a critical supplement by which the identity of the specimen could be produced.
⁶⁸
Part of Stevens' job as agent was to breathe life into these dead insects with both history and the associative power of the local, and one of his tactics was to circulate selections from Bates' letters and essays from the Amazon, adding biographical substance to both the author and the non-humans who were his victims and allies.

Stevens and Bates collaborated to exploit the plasticity of tropical nature by drawing on and raising the nascent symbolic capital of Amazonia.
The agent's chummy note to
Zoologist
readers that introduced the first extract from Bates' correspondence gives some insight into his sophisticated management of the gentlemanly codes smoothing the paths of commerce:

Thinking some of the readers of the ‘Zoologist' who are acquainted with Mr. H. W. Bates would like to hear how he is getting on in his rambles of South America … I have the pleasure of sending extracts from some of his letters to me; and notwithstanding the many hardships he has undergone his health continues most excellent, the climate being fortunately very delightful and healthy. Among the many charming things now received are several specimens of the remarkable and lovely Hectera Esmeralda, and an extraordinary number of beautiful species of Erycinidæ, many quite new, and others only known by the figures of Cramer and Stoll.
⁶⁹

Bates' first letter follows immediately, and Stevens, with a canny eye to the authenticity of the primitive, edited it to begin: “I get on very well with the Indians.”

A great deal of Bates' activity was driven by demand. He conferred with Stevens over the preferences of individual savants, and carefully chose specimens to whet their appetites and induce them into signing on as subscribers. Despite his expertise and Stevens' supplies of taxonomic monographs, however, Bates' letters reveal that he frequently had only an approximate idea of what it was that he was shipping.
⁷⁰
Novelty was not a negotiable character, but neither was it readily apparent. Revealingly—as an insight into the historicized and ideological underpinnings of foundational scientific activity—the selection criteria Bates was forced to apply in lieu of precise inventory were almost entirely aesthetic, based on the attractiveness and size of the organism. This was shrewd, if necessary, practice. Metropolitan demand was based as much on taste as on gaps in the systematic grid.
⁷¹
Given the latitude presented by the vast spaces existing in biological taxonomies, buyers wanted their novelties to satisfy as both aesthetic objects
and
natural historical icons.

A typical passage from Bates' letters in the
Zoologist
—exotic and anecdotal—ties identifiable specimens to a particular collecting practice, offering insight into the daily life of the field scientist abroad while revealing how the inclinations of metropolitan savants set the terms for
his spatial practice, with his response to their needs determining his work rhythm.
⁷²
On shipping a consignment of “the beautiful Sapphira, which you wished for more particularly,” he cautioned Stevens:

I hope what I send will satisfy you…. Do not think it an abundant species because I now send you so many; it is because I devoted myself
one month
to them, working six days a-week with a youth hired to assist me, both of us with net-poles 12 feet long.
⁷³

Metropolitan demand for a particular item also often dictated Bates' destination. Once there, he might find himself filling orders for items of distractingly peripheral, though symptomatic interest—the human hair referred to earlier or precise matches of Indian skin tone, for example. In this way, the purity of his science became subject to diverse corruptions, of which he himself was only too aware. No matter how far his wanderings took him from the metropolitan hearth, he never managed to shake off his dependence on the lifeline of the imperial-scientific network, nor make the leap of faith into that life of “liberty and independence” about which he had written so elatedly to Frederick. He demurred, fighting to carve out areas of autonomy by prioritizing the search for insects and carefully tending to his private stock, selling only duplicates and keeping as full a set as possible at his side for reference.
⁷⁴

Even more than the celebrated butterfly mimics, it was the beetles of Ega that guaranteed Bates' fame among his entomologist peers. His astonishing haul from that site alone included 3,000 species new to Europeans. This was the climactic event that transformed the obscure naturalist and fulfilled the promise of travel. It shows the collection to be a site where the rich particularity of the local was simultaneously evoked and unmoored and a regional identity reinforced. Bates and Stevens' textual framings marked the biological exuberance captured in Ega as both local and transcendent, placed yet symptomatic. In contrast to now-standard arguments about the stripping of context and social meaning (i.e., culture and locality) from organisms in their incorporation in the circuits and projects of metropolitan science, it is clear that systematics here involved considerably more than a practice of decontextualization.
⁷⁵
The extraction of insects from the forest and their reinvention as specimens in the collection demanded persistent, manufactured traces of locality as key components of value at every point. At
the same time, scientific practice participated actively in a narrativizing of geography.

It is as his day closes and the tropical night shutters down that we meet this naturalist on the Amazon. When we read through his letters and notebooks today, we find him hunched over a cluttered table in an empty room on the outskirts of an isolated forest settlement, ceaselessly numbering species by the smoky glow of his oil lamp—totaling and bracketing, calculating and parsing, until the fine balance between time devoted to other people's requirements in order to support his personal project and that tenacious project itself is lost, and the activity becomes its singular justification. His status, his identity as traveler, explorer, and, most important, scientist, becomes inseparable from the numbers. And, when he finally publishes
The Naturalist
, the first data he presents, on the second page of the preface, are a species count, the bald enumeration of his outrageously massive collection:

The theatricality of this rather Conradian image of Bates—deep in the jungle fastness, isolation nibbling at his rationality, forsaken at the distant terminus of a precarious but confining imperial network—should not distract from the point at issue: Bates' collection had a heavy load to bear. It explicitly signaled the abundance of Amazonian biology. But it also wracked his already frail constitution and—in the tales of hardship and tribulation—collapsed into itself that commonplace bifurcation between the ecstatic profusion of tropical nature and its pervasive menace. Moreover, although his collection was the emblem of his social and professional aspiration, in the act of assembling it he was
irreducibly marked (once again) as plebeian. It is in this light, as much as in terms of his hopes about employment and the aggressive contemporary contest to define science, that we should understand his distressed reaction when John Gray, the keeper of the Department of Zoology at the British Museum, raised demeaning, calculated queries about the material he had brought back from his travels.

Unlike Conrad's incarnation of the colonial nightmare, Bates made it home to the “inanities of ‘society'” that his friend, the banker and essayist Edward Clodd, tells us he loathed.
⁷⁷
Not only was a new Bates, the translator of butterflies and beetles, making his appearance in London. With him came the Amazons—where an inexperienced Leicester naturalist could find nearly 15,000 species, “no less than 8000 …
new to science
,” and an emerging site of unrestrained hyperbole.
⁷⁸

I
MPUNITY AND
I
MPURITIES

I should have liked a sympathizing companion better than being alone, but that in this barbarous country is not to be had. I have got a half-wild coloured youth, who is an expert entomologist, and have clothed him with the intention of taking him with me as assistant: if he does not give me the slip he will be a valuable help to me.