ON MAY 26, 1848, twenty-nine days after leaving England, the Mischief, with its two naturalists aboard, crossed the equator and anchored off the coast of Brazil, six miles from the small village of Salinas, the only port of entry to the vast Amazonian watershed. It had been a rough journey, at least initially. After reaching the Bay of Biscay, just off the southwestern coast of France, the Mischief encountered gale-force winds that nearly swamped it. For five days, Wallace was confined to his cabin, laid low by seasickness (a malady he shared with Darwin). Mercifully, the seas calmed and he was able to venture on deck to admire the vistas and ponder the wonders of the Sargasso Sea, teeming with seaweed and marine life. Shortly before the ship’s arrival at Salinas, the water had begun to lose its blue color, changing from green to olive to olive-yellow as a consequence of the immense quantity of silt carried thousands of miles out to sea from the interior of South America. Although land was still not visible, the water was too shallow to permit a safe approach. A signal was hoisted for a local pilot to guide the Mischief. Pará, its ultimate destination, lay seventy miles inland on the banks of the Rio do Pará, which was not a true mouth of the Amazon—despite what maps at the time indicated—but was connected to it by an intricate network of deep and narrow channels.1
The next morning, the vessel carefully maneuvered southward through the Baia de Marajó, propelled by a light breeze and the tide. To the naked eye, the view was unremarkable. Even with the aid of the captain’s telescope, the southeastern shore to the left revealed nothing more than an undulating terrain of bare sandhills and scattered trees. But to the right, on the northwestern shore some ten miles away, was a mass of densely packed trees, the front of a forest that clothed the surface of the country for two thousand miles, from the coast to the foot of the Andes, within whose recesses many wonders were waiting to be revealed. The air was humid and the sky overcast; lightning flashed on the horizon. In the evening, the ship glided noiselessly up the Pará River past two fishing villages and many native canoes, which looked like toy boats beneath the lofty walls of the jungle. “And when the sun rose in a cloudless sky,” Wallace wrote rapturously about his first morning in the tropics, “the city of Pará, surrounded by dense forest, and overtopped by palms and plantains, greeted our sight, appearing doubly beautiful from the presence of those luxuriant tropical productions in a state of nature, which we had so often admired in the conservatories of Kew and Chatsworth.”2
As Wallace and Bates awaited clearance from the customs officers, they observed canoes conveying the black and Indian passengers to and from town, while clanging church bells and exploding rockets heralded one of the innumerable festivals. Vultures soared overhead, and swallows crowded steeples and housetops. Pará, a city of fifteen thousand inhabitants, was picturesque: low whitewashed houses with red-tiled roofs and numerous towers and cupolas, all interspersed with clusters of feathery palms. It was the largest city in the Amazon basin, the capital of the least known province of a vast empire, a province equal in extent to all of western Europe.
Their first two weeks in Brazil were a profound disappointment. When they got a little inland, Pará was not quite so picturesque. The handsome but ruinous public buildings, the city squares overgrown with grass and weeds, the slivers of gardens and patches of garbage dumps between houses, and the narrow and “horribly rough” streets depressed them. “The general impression of the city to a person fresh from England is not very favourable,” Wallace complained to his boyhood friend George Silk. “There is such a want of neatness and order, such an appearance of neglect and decay, such evidences of apathy and indolence, as to be at first absolutely painful.”3 Bates wrote that although rents were low, people seemed content with lodging “of a quality which would be spurned by paupers in England.”4 To get anything done in Brazil, they would soon discover, one had to cultivate the trait of patiencia, so foreign to the restless Anglo-Saxon mentality.
Most disturbing of all was the scarcity of visible wildlife. On their first walk into the forest, Wallace and Bates looked about, expecting to see monkeys as plentiful as at the London Zoo and hummingbirds and parrots in profusion. But for several days, they did not see a single monkey, and the number and beauty of birds and insects fell far short of their expectations. The majority of birds were small and dull-colored, no more exotic than the birds of England, and few had pleasing songs. The only vertebrates they encountered in great numbers were lizards, and then not in the forest but in Pará, camouflaged by the dilapidated stone and mud walls they seemed to favor. Wallace realized too late that travelers crowded into one description all the wonders and novelties they had observed over weeks and months, inadvertently giving their readers an erroneous impression of abundant variety (though animals of all sorts were indeed plentiful when he knew how and where to look for them). He summarized his initial disenchantment in his travel narrative, noting that the weather was not as hot, the people not as strange, and the vegetation not as striking as the picture he had conjured in his imagination.5
In part, William Edwards could be blamed for this disenchantment. Having arrived at the end of the wet season (on Edwards’s advice), Wallace missed the “glories” of the vegetation. Moreover—and this was his own fault—he mistook secondary growth for primary rain forest, which in the environs of Pará had been hacked and burned long before to make way for human habitation and cultivation. Gradually—like eyes adjusting to the darkness—the beauty and majesty of the rain forest became apparent to him. Even in damaged areas overrun by weeds as commonplace as any back home there were many beautiful flowers and flowering vines, though not in the profusion he had anticipated from the accounts of other travelers. It was the relative paucity of flowers, however, that amazed Wallace. Later he would remark that he had never seen in the dank, shady forests of Brazil anything to match the beauty of the expansive, colorful English countryside, where blooming crabapples and fields of buttercups and daisies abounded. The greater proportion of plants in the Amazon, he learned, had inconspicuous green or white flowers or were like the Melastomas, whose magnificent purple blooms fell to the ground within hours of opening, while the tree remained flowerless for the rest of the year. It was not uncommon for him to travel for a week upriver without seeing a single impressive flowering tree or shrub.6
When he finally experienced true virgin equatorial forest several weeks after his arrival, Wallace was astonished; as his analytical powers began to sharpen, his disappointment faded. He wrote that “the observer new to the scene would perhaps be first struck by the varied yet symmetrical trunks, which rise up with perfect straightness to a great height without a branch, and which, being placed at a considerable average distance apart, give an impression similar to that produced by the columns of some enormous building.” Overhead, perhaps a hundred feet up, was an unbroken canopy of leaves and branches, dense enough to block out the sun. “There is a weird gloom and a solemn silence, which combine to produce a sense of the vast—the primeval—almost of the infinite,” he continued in a more philosophical vein. “It is a world in which man seems an intruder, and where he feels overwhelmed by the contemplation of the ever-acting forces, which, from the simple elements of the atmosphere, build up the great mass of vegetation which overshadows, and almost seems to oppress the earth.”7 In botanical diversity, the Amazonian forests surpassed those of northern Europe, even if the flowery show did not. Instead of extensive tracts of pine, oak, or beech, one rarely found two trees of the same species in close proximity, with the exception of palms. Despite a painstaking search along a road extending ten miles into the forest through unchanging terrain, Wallace identified only two specimens of the massaranduba—referred to by the locals as the cow tree because its bark produced a copious supply of a substance that to the natives was as pleasant to drink as cow’s milk but that to Wallace and Bates was rank and thick as glue. Such a phenomenon was difficult to explain according to the creationist doctrine of geographic distribution and speciation, but it was a tantalizing fact that Wallace recorded in an appendix to his travel narrative, though without proposing any alternative hypothesis.8
Wallace and Bates spent the first few weeks at the country home of Daniel Miller, the British vice consul in Pará. After many inquiries, they found a house of their own in the nearby village of Nazaré. What convinced them to take this house was its proximity to virgin forest. On their initial inspection, they approached Nazaré by a circuitous jungle route three miles in length. Beyond the swampy suburbs of Pará lay the lofty forest, with its hundred-foot trees whose trunks were enveloped in the dense greenery of clambering plants. Creepers and climbers hung in long festoons, sometimes curling and twisting on the ground like monstrous serpents. The forest floor was a tangled mass of bushes and shrubs, brightened by the rare flower and numerous brilliantly colored butterflies. Repeatedly they stopped “to examine and admire.” As they forged ahead, the landscape abruptly changed: the gloom and shade of the forest retreated, and they could feel the powerful sun beating down on their heads from a cloudless sky. The ground was warm beneath their feet, and the intense tropical heat silenced the cries of birds and animals. Then they entered forest terrain once again, the cool air and the moldy smell of rotting vegetation a welcome balm for the senses. Soon the track was swampy and difficult to negotiate. Wild banana palms with swordlike blades some eight feet long obstructed their path, along with other exotic trees and dense shrubs. The mucky terrain alarmed them; with each step, they knew that they might tread on a “venomous reptile.” Despite the hazards, they would spend a lot of time in this part of the forest, which became one of their best hunting grounds for birds and insects.
The house they rented in Nazaré consisted of four rooms of moderate size, with a roofed veranda extending around it that provided shade from the punishing afternoon sun and an escape from the sweltering interior. They worked and ate their meals on the veranda; at night they slept inside, native style, in comfortable hammocks. The cultivated grounds contained orange, banana, and other fruit trees, as well as small plots of coffee and cassava. On three sides of their property the forest beckoned, with its promise of zoological and botanical rewards. Settling in for a few months’ work, they quickly established a schedule. At dawn they drank a cup of coffee and then immediately set off into the forest to search for birds, which were most active at that time of day. While they were thus engaged, the servant they had hired headed to Pará to buy provisions, returning in time to prepare their breakfast. Between ten and three o’clock, they reentered the forest, this time dedicating themselves to entomology. As the temperature rose into the nineties and it became too hot for outdoor work, the two men returned home for a midafternoon siesta, like everyone else. In June and July, heavy afternoon showers brought refreshing coolness. First there was a dramatic gathering of black clouds and a rush of wind through the trees that tore off leaves and flowers, followed by flashes of lightning and crashing thunder; then came torrents of rain. At four they dined. Then they attended to the preservation of whatever specimens they had collected that day. After tea at seven, they sometimes walked into Pará to observe the Brazilian street life or socialize with the European and American expatriates, who gave frequent parties.
The greatest treasure they captured in those early weeks was a specimen of Haetera esmeralda (now Cithaerias esmeralda), a butterfly whose wings were transparent except for a bright violet patch on the hind wing. (Samuel Stevens would show it off at the August 6, 1849, meeting of the Entomological Society.) They were less successful in capturing the gigantic blue Morpho butterflies—the jewels in any lepidopterist’s cabinet—which floated by frequently, but whose flight tactics were maddeningly evasive. In one of his journals Bates writes, “On Tuesday, collected 46 specimens [of butterflies] of 39 species. On Wednesday, 37 specimens of 33 species, 27 of which are different from those taken the preceding day.”9 At a profit of only 3 pence a specimen, the risk of failure nagged at them constantly.
Although their adventure had begun inauspiciously, the first two months ended with great success. Together they forwarded 3,635 insects packed into a large chest—553 species of butterflies and moths, 450 beetles, and 400 belonging to other orders—in addition to twelve chests of native plants. Among the flora were very few orchids, but Wallace sent 100 dried plants—principally ferns—to Kew. Ferns were “tolerably abundant,” he told Sir William Hooker in a letter dated August 20, 1848. “There are many minute species. There may probably be one hundred species altogether found near Pará.” He offered to send the base of the stem of an unusual palm he had discovered, as well as living specimens of any plants that Hooker desired. To their agent, Stevens, he wrote that what had most impressed him thus far was the immense diversity of life and the “strange forms and beautiful colours” of the insects and birds, whose numbers were “truly astonishing.”10
In late August 1848, Wallace and Bates left Nazaré for an expedition up the Tocantíns River. Joining the Pará River forty-five miles southwest of Pará, the Tocantíns was the third largest river in the Amazon system and reached sixteen hundred miles into the interior of Brazil. The vessel they sailed in was called a vigilinga (country canoe). It had two masts and was less than thirty feet long. Over the stern, creating a cabin, was a palm-thatched roof that reminded Wallace of a gypsy tent; over the prow was a smaller and lower thatched roof, under which provisions and baggage could be stowed for a journey of up to three months. The vigilinga had to be sturdy enough to survive in heavy seas—the Tocantíns, though a river, had “vast sealike expanses of water to traverse.”11 Their captain was an American expatriate named Leavens who managed some rice mills near Pará. An excellent marksman, amateur naturalist, expert taxidermist, and fluent in Portuguese, Leavens was the perfect guide and no doubt helped his passengers to find, capture, and preserve their specimens.
As they moved upriver in their country canoe, they noted the difference between the fauna here and that near Pará, including two new species of butterfly and a different species of sloth, which was caught swimming across the river and stewed for dinner. Difficulty finding a crew prevented them from sailing as far as they would have liked, and after less than three weeks on the river they were forced to turn back. Before returning to Pará, they convinced Leavens to proceed a little farther to some spectacular waterfalls. On their way to and from the falls, they passed through the habitat of the hyacinthine macaw (Macrocercus hyacinthinus, now Anodorhynchus hyacinthus), or blue macaw, as Wallace referred to it. Three feet long from the tip of its beak to the end of its tail and covered with feathers of a soft indigo blue, it was the largest and one of the most beautiful species of the parrot family—and it was rare, which made it a prize catch for the lucky naturalist. In the morning and evening, Wallace caught sight of the birds flying off in pairs or feeding on the rocklike nuts of the mucuja palm, but he failed to get a single specimen. Beyond the cataracts, a region he would never visit, these macaws were said to be common. The sharply restricted territory of this elegant macaw raised a question: What limited the range of such a strong flier? According to principles laid down by men like William Swainson and Sir Charles Lyell, the macaw should have been found everywhere in the Amazon basin. Why would the Almighty so “exactly” restrict the macaw’s geographic distribution? “It appears with the rock,” Wallace concluded, “and with this there is no doubt a corresponding change in the fruits on which the birds feed.” It was another one of those puzzles that required some scientific explanation, not the invocation of creationism.12
Not long after returning to Nazaré, Wallace was incapacitated by an infection of his hand, the result of an accidental gunshot wound he had received when his gun misfired. Advised by a doctor to put his arm in a sling, he was unable to do anything for two weeks—not even pin an insect. Once he had recovered, he assisted Bates in packing their specimens for England. Accompanying this shipment was a letter to Stevens describing their adventure up the Tocantíns, portions of which Stevens published in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History, prefaced by an advertisement to collectors proclaiming the two naturalists as “enterprising and deserving young men” who had set out on an expedition to South America to explore “the vast and unexamined regions of the province of Pará.”13 Stevens exhibited the collections at the January 1, 1849, meeting of the Entomological Society, declaring that Wallace and Bates had sent a box containing “many rare and valuable specimens.”14
The September 1848 shipment, however, would be their last together. After only four months, the partnership abruptly ended in an argument over an unspecified matter. If they had envisioned themselves as a latter-day Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland, that dream also ended. The details of the argument were never discussed publicly, and no clues to its exact nature can be found in extant letters or memoirs. The rancor was so deep that Wallace barely mentions Bates in his travel narrative; Bates, for his part, glosses over the incident in his own account. In later years, the episode was denied completely, no doubt to preserve a Victorian veneer of civility. But in a letter to Hooker, Richard Spruce, an explorer who arrived in the Amazon in the summer of 1849, confirmed that a serious disagreement between the two men had occurred.15 Whatever the cause, whether scientific or personal, it was serious enough that Wallace and Bates avoided each other for more than a year.
Wallace now faced the prospect of exploring an unknown country alone. Someone with less self-assurance would have returned home, but he was committed to his original plan, with or without Bates. Leaving Bates to fend for himself, he temporarily lodged in the rocinha (country house) of the Swiss consul, whom he had met in June during one of his “exploratory rambles.” There he remained for several weeks, waiting for transportation to the island of Marajó, the place he had selected as his next destination. Marajó was said to harbor rare and unusual waterbirds, which was just what Wallace needed to offset the unforeseen expenses he would incur as an independent traveler.
A delay in his departure to Marajó gave Wallace an opportunity to observe and collect the many small birds that inhabited the region around Pará. Among the most common was the bush shrike, an attractive bird with long silky feathers banded or spotted in black and white that hid in thick and impenetrable vegetation, hopping from branch to branch as it picked off insects. Shotgun in hand, and with the stealth of a native, Wallace crept up within a few yards of the bird, but only after several attempts did he succeed in bagging one instead of blowing it to pieces. The ant thrush was another common bird he had difficulty procuring. Each time he tried to retrieve his downed specimen, he was invariably forced to beat a hasty retreat while powerful-jawed ants, the bird’s chief prey, attacked him in ferocious swarms, biting and stinging as they crawled up his arms and legs with a rapidity that amazed him.
But there were revelations that compensated for his troubles. Goatsuckers, swallows, tyrant flycatchers, and jacamars—birds with scarcely any resemblance to one another—all competed for the same food, seizing their prey on the wing. Ibis, spoonbills, and herons foraged side by side, selecting the same food from the shallow water along the beach. Pigeons, parrots, toucans, and chatterers—all fruit-eating birds from distinct and widely separated avian families—often fed on the same tree, vying for the same fruits, while avoiding the fruit of certain trees that no bird fed on. These facts he discovered during his dissections, when he found the same insect parts or the same small crustacea or the same seeds in the stomachs of his specimens. Such findings contradicted the beliefs of most naturalists of the day, who held that the varied forms and structures of birds’ bills, for example, were specially created to accommodate the food each species was appointed to eat. “In all works on Natural History, we constantly find details of the marvelous adaptation of animals to their food, their habits, and the localities in which they are found,” Wallace remarked five years later as he reflected on these early experiences, “but … it must strike every one, that the numbers of birds and insects of different groups, having scarcely any resemblance to each other, which yet feed on the same food and inhabit the same localities, cannot have been so differently constructed and adorned for that purpose alone.” Some other principle seemed to be regulating the infinitely varied forms of animal life, Wallace thought, but that principle was still a mystery to him in 1853.16
In early November 1848, Wallace finally sailed for Marajó, which was wedged like an enormous stone in the mouth of the Amazon delta, but he returned to Pará in February 1849 with little that was new or rare. Bates, meanwhile, had left for a large estate in Caripi, twenty-three miles northeast, where, having better luck than Wallace, he collected nearly twelve hundred species of insects and numerous birds, reptiles, and shells that local people caught for him. He arrived back in Pará about the same time as Wallace, but the two avoided each other even though they rented neighboring houses in Nazaré. Wallace did better there. Aided by an experienced hunter who was once the slave of the German naturalist Johann Natterer, he acquired a number of novel specimens, including toucans and trogons. Boys from the neighborhood quickly learned that he would pay for all kinds of bichos, as his specimens were called by the locals, and nearly every day they brought him snakes, which he preserved in spirits.
By July 1849, Wallace was ready to set out for the heart of the Amazon. Based on information he had obtained from the locals and expatriates, he was determined to go as far as the trading town of Santarém, about five hundred miles upriver at the confluence of the Amazon and the Rio Tapajós. The year in Pará had been an apprenticeship, a time for honing his craft. Now adept at shooting, skinning, and preserving his specimens, and fluent in the lingua franca of the country, he had acquired the skills necessary for making a successful foray into the unexplored interior. But without Bates, he lacked a trusted English-speaking companion. It was perhaps for this reason that he—or perhaps his mother—made arrangements for his younger brother, twenty-one-year-old Herbert, who had been somewhat adrift for the past seven years, to come to Brazil as his assistant. Eager or not, Herbert, who now preferred to be called by his middle name of Edward, agreed and arrived in Pará in June 1849.
Wallace barely knew him, having left Hertford when Edward was only seven and a half. Edward had been educated at home by their father and then sent for a year or two to a cheap boarding school in Essex. The London trunk maker to whom he was apprenticed at the age of fourteen gave him a job as a shop assistant, but he had little interest in making or selling trunks and he lasted for only a year. He then moved to Neath after William found him employment as a pattern maker at the Neath Abbey Iron Works, a job that he found equally deplorable but endured for the next four years until being invited to Brazil. Edward had no mechanical aptitude or inclination for the kinds of work available in the nineteenth century to a young man without skills, advanced education, or money. He was a self-styled intellectual, with a love of poetry and a distaste for manual labor. His dream was to be a poet; indeed, his talents were recognized by local newspapers, which published his verses. But a poet could not survive on verses alone. Edward’s misfortune, Wallace wrote in his autobiography, “was that he … was not possessed of sufficient energy to overcome these deficiencies of nature and nurture.”17
After Edward’s arrival in Pará, Wallace could not leave at once. One of the items he awaited from England was a letter from the Foreign Office in response to a request he had made in May to facilitate his journey into the interior. Johannes Baptist von Spix and Carl Friedrich von Martius had penetrated the interior with just such government endorsements, he reminded Stevens, his agent. Stevens wrote a letter to the Foreign Office stating that Wallace had sent “several valuable consignments containing numbers of novelties, especially in the Insect tribe, portions of which have been purchased by Mr. Gray for our National Collection at the British Museum.” With backing from John Edward Gray, the director of the museum, Stevens appealed to the Foreign Office for assistance, and a memorandum was finally drafted under the direction of Viscount (Lord) Palmerston, the foreign secretary, instructing the British consulate in Pará to obtain the necessary documents for Wallace from the Brazilian authorities.18
Anxious to leave Pará for Santarém before the onset of the rains and already vexed by the unnecessary delay, Wallace decided to take the chance that the papers would be awaiting him at Santarém or farther upriver. He and Edward departed in early August, a month later than he had planned. Their craft, a small sailing vessel with just enough room for their equipment and food stores, reeked of rotting fish and decaying animal hides. The deck was uneven and leaky, and water drenched their clothes and hammocks. But they soon adapted to the inconveniences and unpleasantness of river travel in a primitive country, passing the time with books borrowed from their English and American friends in Pará.
For the first ten days, the Wallace brothers followed a labyrinth of narrow channels, a slow and tedious journey dependent on the fluxes of the tide (no wind ever filled the sails), before joining the swifter waters of the mighty Amazon. It was the first time that Wallace had actually seen the main body of the river itself, and its immensity awed him. The distance from shore to shore was so great that the river’s banks were often invisible. He let his imagination wander to the sources of the Amazon in the distant Andes, to the ancient Incas who once reigned over half the continent, to the silver-laden mountains of Potosí, to the gold-seeking Spaniards and wild Indian inhabitants of Ecuador and Peru. “What a grand idea it was to think that we now saw the accumulated waters of a course of three thousand miles,” Wallace wrote in a moment of poetic abandon, “that all the streams that for a length of twelve hundred miles drained from the snow-clad Andes and were here congregated in the wide extent of ochre-coloured water spread out before us!”19
In 1849 the general course of the river, its important bends and main tributaries, were accurately laid down, a fact Wallace noted in the appendix of his travel narrative. Its extent, in a straight line from east to west, was approximately 2,050 miles; from north to south, its tributaries covered another 1,720 miles. From four degrees north latitude to twenty degrees south, every stream flowing down from the Andes emptied into the Amazon. To convey its massive dimensions, he imagined uniting every river from Saint Petersburg to Madrid into a single mighty flood. But he discovered that the details of the Amazon’s course were incorrect. The numerous islands and parallel channels, the deep bays and great lakes, and the varying widths of the river were unknown. Geographers at the time even disputed whether the Pará River, on which Wallace had set sail, was or was not a tributary of the Amazon. Wallace therefore set out to survey as much of the Amazon as he could while slowly making his way to Santarém.
Over the next two and a half weeks, thunderstorms and violent squalls pushed them swiftly toward their destination. The Amazon was a vast, silt-choked expanse, littered with floating islands of vegetation detached from the shoreline and enormous tree trunks ripped up by the roots and driven by the currents like twigs in a stream, sometimes carrying with them birds and animals. Flocks of parrots, macaws, herons, and ducks ascended in bursts of color from the thick forests along the banks into the gray, cloudy skies. Twenty-eight days and 474 miles after leaving Pará, Wallace and Edward arrived in Santarém, at the mouth of the blue, transparent waters of the Rio Tapajós.
Life moved at a languorous pace in Santarém. In the evening, the local potentates and world travelers assembled at the house of Captain Hislop, an eccentric Scotsman who had lived on the Amazon for forty-five years, where they smoked, took snuff, and talked politics, science, and philosophy well into the night. Wildlife around Santarém was plentiful, and a few excursions shortly after their arrival were highly productive. On September 12, Wallace wrote another letter to Stevens in which he complained that the main difficulty was getting men to accompany him short distances and mentioned that he had not yet received any papers from the Foreign Office. He also wanted some guidance in choosing future destinations. Monte Alegre, teeming with beetles in its thousand-foot-high hills, was to be his next stop, but after that he was open to suggestions. He could go up the Rio Negro, which branched off from the main body of the Amazon at the town of Barra (Manaus), toward the sources of the Orinoco—though he feared that the northernmost region of Brazil was poor in coleoptera—or he could go up the Rio Madeira, another major tributary of the Amazon, into Bolivia. In a letter written two days later, Wallace pleaded: “Pray write whenever you can, and give me all the information you may be able to obtain, both as to what things are wanted in any class or order and as to localities.”20
In mid-September, Wallace and Edward sailed to Monte Alegre, a town several miles east of Santarém on the northern bank of the Amazon. Santarém was on the southern bank, and from a natural history perspective Wallace would soon discover that the distinction was important. Monte Alegre had been built on a hill one-quarter of a mile from a tributary and was reached by an arduous walk through deep sand. Cacti twenty to thirty feet tall and branching like candelabra grew in a desert landscape that strikingly contrasted with the humid opulence of the rain forest everywhere else along the Amazon. In the distance and not easily accessible were the lofty hills, the home of beetles. But the best collecting grounds for insects, he found, were closer to town, in the shady groves on rocky slopes above the river, where numerous springs gushed and ferns, mosses, and creeping plants grew on the wet rocks. The trip was marred when Edward sprained his leg, which swelled and abscessed above the knee, incapacitating him for two weeks.
While Wallace and Edward languished in Monte Alegre, Bates was making his way upriver. He passed the village in early October, unaware that the Wallaces were so close by. He arrived in Santarém on October 9, but remained only briefly before proceeding to Obydos, fifty miles upstream. A few days later, Wallace and Edward returned to Santarém. On October 27, Richard Spruce disembarked from one of Captain Hislop’s vessels and occupied a house near the Wallaces, though he initially kept his distance. The Amazon buzzed with the activity of English naturalists, who seemed to be avoiding one another like bees belonging to competing hives. Spruce had met Wallace earlier in Pará, having sailed to Brazil with an assistant on the same ship that brought Edward from Liverpool. But Wallace was wary of other traveling naturalists following his estrangement from Bates. “I forgot to mention that we have several times seen Mr. Wallace senior—when we arrived he had made up his mind to go to the Rio Negro, but hearing me talk of Monte Alegre put it into his head to go thither and he is preparing to start in a few days,” Spruce had written to Hooker on August 3, 1849. “He does not appear to wish for our company either now or at the time when we ourselves propose starting.”21 Between August and October, Wallace’s Anglophobia had softened. Perhaps it was the effect of Captain Hislop’s wine-soaked evening gatherings, which elevated everyone’s spirits and broke down barriers. On one such evening Wallace and Spruce struck up what was to become a lifelong friendship.
Spruce was born in 1817 near the city of York. Although trained to be a schoolmaster like his father, he felt unsuited to the stresses of teaching and decided to devote himself to his great passion, botany. Despite suffering from a number of unspecified but debilitating illnesses, he wandered for several months in the Pyrenees, sometimes at elevations greater than ten thousand feet. He gathered some of the rarest flowers known from that region and a larger number of mosses than he had been led to believe existed, doubling the quantity of species previously reported. His work came to the attention of Sir William Hooker and George Bentham, another botanist at Kew, and he determined—perhaps hearing of the success of Wallace and Bates in Brazil—to undertake the botanical exploration of the Amazon valley with Kew’s support. Bentham agreed to act as his agent, identifying his specimens and selling his collections, and Spruce set off for Brazil on the same vessel that carried Edward Wallace.
Spruce was a first-rate botanist, with a keen eye, and became an invaluable resource for Wallace, who later regarded him as one of the greatest but least known naturalists of the nineteenth century. Few have surpassed him in terms of accurate and vivid description, while his accounts of the pharmacological properties of many of the Amazon’s indigenous plants anticipated research more than a century later. Spruce, however, lacked the inclination to theorize, a quality his new friend had in abundance. Their missions also differed. Wallace’s primary purpose in coming to South America was to find a solution to the most important scientific problem of the time: the origin of species. Spruce’s goal was narrower. As an emissary of the Royal Botanic Gardens, he was in Brazil to acquire an intimate knowledge of the flora of the Amazon valley and the Andes. His greatest contribution to the British Empire would be his procurement of seedlings and cuttings from the cinchona tree, the source of quinine and the only treatment at the time for malaria, which he shipped to India, where the Raj established extensive plantations for harvesting the bark containing the life-saving drug.
Spruce’s comportment reflected his intellectual acumen. Neatness was a virtue he prized. His clothes were neat; his handwriting was impeccable; and his writing materials, books, herbaria, microscope, stores of food, and clothing all had their appointed places. Meticulous and exacting, he was a model scientist. But he had other virtues that cemented the friendship between the two men. Like Wallace, he was fond of literature and was an “advanced Liberal” in politics, empathizing with the struggles of the working class. “Nothing more excited his personal indignation,” Wallace reported, “than to hear of the petty, but cruel, persecutions to which they [the working classes] are often subjected.”22
Spruce enjoyed Wallace’s company, especially the “animated and thoughtful conversation in the evenings,” which would not last long, as both found it difficult to keep their eyes open after eight o’clock, fatigued from their long investigations during the day.23 Wallace acted as guide, acquainting Spruce with the paths across the campo (savanna). Wallace told Spruce about the famed Amazon water lily (Victoria amazonica), which he had seen near Monte Alegre, and produced a fragment of its leaf; the whole was more than four feet in diameter. This plant, which grew in Amazonian lakes and side channels but not in the main river, was still a novelty in 1849, though a specimen had been successfully cultivated at Chatsworth in 1848; a famous photograph of the time shows the daughter of Chatsworth’s ingenious gardener standing on a colossal leafy platform in the middle of a pond. From the native Indians, Spruce had heard of a water plant near Santarém that they nicknamed forno (oven) because of its resemblance to the circular oven used for baking farinha, the chief item of the native diet. To confirm that forno and V. amazonica were one and the same, Wallace and Spruce took a boat across the Amazon to a large island. After walking two miles, they found a patch of these enormous water lilies, growing in barely two feet of water, with deep, tenacious roots and the classic floating leaves.24
The geography and vegetation of Santarém and Monte Alegre were unique to Amazonia. Instead of dense, impenetrable forest, the landscape was open, punctuated by rocky hills dotted with shrubs and stunted trees. Insects—especially butterflies—differed from almost every species Wallace had found near Pará. Spruce was similarly puzzled by the marked difference between the flora of Santarém and that of the rest of the Amazon. Nearly every plant he collected was a species new to him, though he had examined numerous specimens in the Kew herbarium before leaving England. It was in Santarém that Wallace first obtained direct evidence that a great river could limit the range of a species, a fact that was to influence his thinking about the relationship of geographic distribution and evolution. The phenomenon of an unexpected restriction of habitat was not limited to the blue macaw. On one side of the Amazon, for instance, he found Callithea sapphirina, a butterfly with wings of a velvety sky-blue; on the opposite bank was the closely allied species C. leprieurii, indigo-hued and with different markings on its underside. Neither species ever seemed to commingle with its sister species across the water. Several months would pass before he truly grasped the significance of this finding, for he continued to send home specimens to England without clearly denoting on which side of the river they had been captured.
In A Narrative of Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro, written four years later, he speculated on this interesting finding. Places no more than fifty or a hundred miles apart often had distinctly different species of insects and birds. It was understandable, he said, that Europe and North America or tropical America and equatorial Africa—continents widely separated by seas—might have few species in common. But in all parts of the world could be found animals distributed among smaller local groups, with almost every district having peculiar species found nowhere else. Great mountain chains might serve as barriers to the mingling of species; for example, the Rocky Mountains and the Andes separate two distinct climatic and zoological zones. But what if no such obvious barriers existed? He reasoned that there must be many other kinds of boundaries that limited the range of animals despite similarities of climate and soil type. Small rivers rarely prevented animals from passing, especially birds and insects. Very large rivers, like the Amazon and the Tocantíns, however, seemed to affect the range of animals of many orders. And it was this natural cause, not creationism, that he later believed accounted for the separation of two species of butterflies. Only after discovering that the Amazon and its larger tributaries served as barriers to the ranges of various orders of animals of all classes—especially birds, mammals, and insects—did he begin to keep an accurate record of the precise geographic location of every specimen he collected.25 As meticulous as other naturalists had been, few had ever been so precise, and virtually no one (as far as he knew) comprehended the contribution of such isolating mechanisms to the formation of species.