There was no breeze that night. The sea, lit by the full moon, shone smooth and silver; the Southern Cross turned above the ship and below it squid slipped invisibly through the depths. Between sky and sea lay Alec Carrière, sprawled like a starfish in his hammock and imagining how the treasures packed in the holds were about to change his life.
Beetles and butterflies and spiders and moths, bird skins and snakeskins and bones: these were what he’d collected along the Amazon and then guarded against the omnivorous ants. Mr. Barton, his agent back home in Philadelphia, had sold Alec’s first specimens for a good price, and Alec expected this shipment would finally set him free to pursue his studies in peace. He was a few months shy of twenty-one, and dreaming a young man’s dreams.
Until he’d sailed for the Amazon, he’d worked in a shop making leather valises, not far from the tavern his parents ran in Germantown. But like the young English collector he’d met in Barra, near the flooded islands of the Rio Negro, he’d been saved from a squalid and unremarkable life by a few kind men and a book. With his uncle’s ornithology text in his pocket he’d wandered the banks of the Wissahickon, teaching himself the names of birds and imagining wild places. His brother Frank had taught him to shoot, and behind the outhouse he’d prepared his first clumsy skins and mounts. Even then he’d known that other naturalists had taught themselves their trade. Others had risen from just such humble beginnings, and he’d seen nothing extraordinary in his ambitions.
Once every few months he went into downtown Philadelphia to visit the Academy of Natural Sciences, where a few of the members corrected his malformed preparations and taught him what they could. His interests spread from birds to other species. Titian Peale showed him an excellent way to pin and display his moths. Two of the Wells brothers, Copernicus and Erasmus, taught him how to prepare skeletons. All this gave Alec great pleasure but annoyed his father; by the time he was sixteen his father was pressing him to abandon this childish hobby and take his work more seriously. He almost gave up. But in 1850 Peale made him a gift of William Edwards’s small and wonderful book, A Voyage Up the River Amazon.
When Alec read it a door seemed to open. What was there to keep him in Philadelphia? Edwards had been only a few years older than him when he’d set off; Alec was strong and healthy and his three brothers could look after their parents. And he had a most earnest desire to behold the luxuriant life of the tropics. Mr. Barton, a natural history auctioneer whom he’d met at the Academy, assured him that all of northern Brazil was little known, that Edwards had brought back only small collections, and that Alec might easily pay the expenses of his trip by gathering birds, small mammals, land-shells, and all the orders of insects. Among the wealthy, Mr. Barton said, glass cases filled with tropical creatures arranged by genus or poised in tableaux were wildly fashionable. And so few specimens had reached North America from the Amazon that high prices were guaranteed.
With the brashness of youth Alec wrote to Mr. Edwards himself, who provided him with letters of introduction to several traders. Then he packed his things and used his small savings to book passage on a merchant ship. His father was angry with him; his mother wept. But he saw miracles.
The mouth of the Amazon was like a sea, and could be distinguished from the ocean only by its extraordinary deep-yellow color. The Rio Negro was as black as the river Styx. Jet-black jaguars and massive turtle’s nests, agoutis and giant serpents; below Baião, a crowd of Indians gathered, laughing and curious, to watch Alec skinning parrots. Driven to gather as much as he could, Alec shrugged off the heat and the poor food and the fevers that plagued him intermittently. His persistence was rewarded in Barra, where Alfred Wallace greeted him like a brother.
Wallace wasn’t famous then. Except for the light that burned in him and lit a similar flame in Alec, he was just another collector, exceedingly tall, with a thatch of yellow hair and clothes as shabby as Alec’s own. On the day they met the sun dropped like a shot bird, and in the sudden tropical night they compared skins and guns.
Alec was lonely, and glad for the company after months among Indians whose language he couldn’t speak. He talked too much the night he met Wallace, he knew he did. But although Wallace was a decade older, wracked with fever and ready to leave for home after three hard years in the jungle, he never laughed at Alec’s chatter or made him feel less than an equal. He showed Alec the blow-pipes his Indian hunters used, and the bitter vegetable oil with which he coated the ropes of his specimen-drying racks. Alec showed him the glorious umbrella-birds he’d captured in the flooded forest of the igapo. Standing by the side of this long, lean, wasted man, Alec took pleasure in his own youth and compact sturdiness; how his hands, next to Wallace’s fine bones, were all broad palm and spatulate thumb. Around them the toucans yelped and the parrots chattered and the palms went swish, swish in the evening breeze. They ate fish and farinha and turtle. Later they traded stories about the books that had saved them. When Alec learned that Wallace was no gentleman scientist but was, like Alec himself, solely dependent on selling specimens to pay his way, he felt an immediate bond.
After they parted, Alec collected with even more fervor. Now the results lay snugly packed below him, and as the ship rocked sluggishly he was imagining how he’d drive up to his parents’ tavern, dressed in a new suit and laden with more money than they’d ever seen.
They would be thrilled, Alec thought. As would everyone who’d helped him. How surprised the Wells brothers and Titian Peale would be, when Alec made them gifts of the especially amazing butterflies he’d set aside for them! And then the hush inside the Academy, as he lectured to the men who’d taught him. Holding up a perfect skin from one of those rare umbrella-birds, he would point out the glossy blue tufts on the crest-feathers. “When the bird is resting,” he would say, “the raised crest forms a deep blue dome, which completely hides the head and beak.” The men would give him a desk, Alec thought, where he might catalogue his treasures. And he might marry, were he to meet someone appealing.
He was happy; he was half-asleep. Then the cabin-boy ran up to Alec’s hammock and shook him and said, “Mr. Carrière! The captain says to come immediately. There seems to be a fire!” And Alec, still dreaming of his wonderful future, stumbled from his cabin with only the most recent volume of his journal and the clothes on his back.
The scene on deck was pure chaos: smoke rising through the masts, a sheet of flame shooting up from the galley, crew members hurling water along the deck and onto the sails. Captain Longwood was shouting orders and several of the men were unlashing the boats and preparing to lower them, while others hurriedly gathered casks of water and biscuit.
“What’s happened?” Alec shouted. “What can I do?”
“Save what you can!” Captain Longwood shouted back. “I fear we may lose the ship.”
Even as Alec headed for the forecastle, he could not believe this was happening. Some months after his meeting with Wallace, he’d heard that the brig carrying Wallace home had burned to the waterline, destroying all his collections and casting him adrift on the sea for several weeks. This news had filled Alec with genuine horror. Yet at the same time he’d also felt a small, mean sense of superstitious relief: such a disaster, having happened once, could surely never happen again. Although Alec’s own collections were not insured, since he could not afford the fees, Wallace’s bad luck had seemed to guarantee Alec’s safe passage home.
All this passed through his mind as he fought his way forward. Then every thought but panic was driven away when he saw the plight of his animals.
In the holds below him was a fortune in things dead and preserved—but in the forecastle was the living menagerie he was also bringing home. His sweet sloth, no bigger than a rabbit, with his charming habit of hanging upside down on the back of a chair and his melancholy expression; the parrots and parakeets and the forest-dog; the toucans; the monkeys: already they were calling through the smoke. And before Alec could reach them a spout of flame rose like a wall through the hatchway in front of him.
Wallace’s ship, he knew, had caught fire through the spontaneous combustion of kegs of balsam-capivi, but their own fire had no such exotic cause. The cook had knocked over a lamp, which had ignited a keg of grease, which had dripped, burning, through the floorboards and set fire to the cargo of rubber and lumber just below. From there the fire licked forward, downward, upward; and when the hatches were opened the draft made the fire jump and sing.
Alec was driven back to the quarterdeck and stood there, helpless, while the men prepared the boats and hurriedly gathered spars and oars and sails. The captain flew by, still shouting, his hands bristling with charts and compasses; they were five days out of Para and no longer within sight of land. The skylight exploded with a great roar, and the burning berths crackled below them. Terrible noises rose from the bow where the animals were confined. His lovely purple-breasted cotingas, roasting; the handsome pair of big-bellied monkeys, which the Brazilians called barraidugo—his entire life, until that moment, had contained nothing so distressing.
For a moment he thought the birds at least might be saved. One of the men dropped from his perch on the cross-trees and smashed in the forecastle door with an axe. Then the toucans, kept unconfined, flew out, and also a flock of parakeets. The cloud of birds seemed to head for the cloud of smoke but then swooped low and settled on the bowsprit, as far from the fire as they could get. They were joined by the sloth, who had magically crept up the ironwork. But meanwhile the mate was shouting, “Go! Now!” and hands were pushing against Alec’s back, men were tumbling over the stern and he tumbled with them, falling into one of the leaky boats. Someone thrust a dipper into his hands and he began to bale, while men he had never noticed before barked and struggled to fit the oars in the oarlocks. The man pressed against his knee dripped blood from a scratch on his cheek and gagged, as did Alec, on the smoke from the rubber seething in the wreck.
The shrouds and sails burned briskly; then the masts began to catch. Soon enough the main-mast toppled and the moon-lit water filled with charred remains.
“Please,” Alec begged Captain Longwood. “Can we row toward the bow? Can we try to save some of them?” His animals were lined along the last scrap of solid wood.
Captain Longwood hesitated, but then agreed. “Two minutes,” he said sternly.
But when they approached the bow Alec found that the creatures would not abandon their perches. As the flames advanced, the birds seemed to dive into them, disappearing in sudden brilliant puffs that hung like stars. Only the sloth escaped; and he only because the section of bowsprit from which he hung upside down burned at the base and plopped into the water. When Alec picked him up, his feet still clung to the wood.
They were three days drifting in their leaky boats before they saw a sail in the distance: the Alexandra, headed for New Orleans. A fortunate rescue. Alec was grateful. But a year and a half of hard work, on which his whole future depended, was destroyed; as was the sloth, who died on the voyage. Alec reached home in one piece, but with hardly more to his name than when he’d left. As a souvenir he was given nightmares, in which the smell of singeing feathers filled his nostrils and his sloth curled smaller and smaller, and closed his eyes, and died again and again.
In November, recuperating at his uncle’s house as his father would not have him at his, Alec learned that his acquaintance from Barra had written two books, one about his travels and the other about the exotic palms. Alec read both and liked them very much. They had shared a rare and terrible thing, Alec thought: all they’d gathered of the astonishing fauna of the Amazon, both quick and dead, turned into ash on the sea. Alec wrote to him, in England.
Dear Mr. Wallace: I expect you will not remember me, but we passed a pleasant evening together in Barra in September 1851. I was the young American man heading up the Rio Negro in search of specimens. I write both to express my admiration for your recent books, and to record an astonishing coincidence. You will hardly believe what happened to me on my journey home…
Wallace wrote back.
Dear Alec: My sympathies on the distressing loss of your collections. No one who has not been through this himself can understand. Beyond the horrors of the fire itself, the terrible loss of animal life, and the substantial financial blow is this fact, so difficult to explain: That each specimen lost represents a double death. Our hunting always had a point; each bird we shot and butterfly we netted was in the service of science. But burnt, they now serve no one. It is very hard. I thank you for your kind words about my books. I plan to head, this coming spring, for the Malay Archipelago: an area hardly explored at all, which should prove extremely rich for our purposes. Perhaps you might like to consider this yourself?
Alec’s mother, who had faithfully written to him during his absence, without understanding that he would get her letters only in one great batch when he returned to Para, was during this hard time very kind to him. She visited Alec weekly at his uncle’s. And when he told her what he planned to do next, she encouraged him and secretly bought him two suits of clothes.
It was not as if Wallace and Alec traveled together throughout the Malay Archipelago, nor as if Wallace took Alec under his wing in any practical way. Alec was in Macassar when Wallace was in Bali; Wallace was in Lombok when Alec was in Timor; they both visited the Aru Islands, but in different years. And their situations were no longer as similar as they’d been in the Amazon. Wallace was still strapped for money, but his books had made him a reputation and the Royal Geographical Society had paid his first-class passage to Singapore aboard a fast steamer. Alec made a slow and uncomfortable voyage on three merchant ships and a filthy whaler. Wallace had with him an assistant, 16-year-old Charles, who helped capture, preserve, and catalog specimens, whereas Alec was all alone, and often overcome by details.
During the wet season of 1855, Alec was in Sarawak, in north-western Borneo. He’d heard tales of a lively Christmas house-party at the bungalow of Sir John Brooke, the English Rajah of the territory—all the Europeans in the out-stations being invited to enjoy the Rajah’s fabled hospitality, and so forth. But he had not been asked to join the party, and he never suspected that Wallace was there. Over that Christmas, and into January, Alec was miles east of the Rajah’s bungalow, collecting beetles and hunting orangutans in the swamps along the Sadong River.
For some weeks he’d been blessed with astonishing luck. Moving through the dense foliage he would hear a rustling overhead, then glimpse one of the reddish-brown apes swinging. Branch to branch, tree to tree, never touching the ground. His desire for possession seemed to carve a line in the air between his gun and his target; he aimed and a moment later the orangutan was his. Retrieving the body was more difficult, but here the native Dyaks helped him. As the orangutans fed on the fruit of the durian tree, of which the Dyaks were very fond, the Dyaks were happy to guide Alec to them and then, after the shooting, to fell the trees in which the bodies were trapped, or climb the trunks and lower the bodies down. With their help Alec obtained four full-grown males, three females, and several juveniles. Just before the ague hit again, he also shot another female high in a giant tree. While lashing the body to the carrying poles, one of his Dyak hunters found the orangutan’s little infant face-down in the swamp, crying piteously.
This orphan Alec brought back to camp with him. He could not feel guilty about shooting the infant’s mother; this was part of his work, what he was meant to do. But neither could he abandon the small creature who’d become his responsibility. While he lay on his cot, alternately burning and chilled, the infant orangutan clung to his clothes and beard and sucked on his fingers as he might at his mother’s breast. For a long time no one had touched Alec. He gave the infant sugar-water and rice-water and coconut milk through a quill, and later offered bits of fruit and sweet potato. The orangutan insisted on clinging to some part of his body at all times. And Alec found this peculiarly touching, despite the weakness and lassitude brought on by his fever. When a pair of strangers walked into his hut, he was flat on his back, in a violent sweat, with the infant curled like a cap around his head.
Wallace, Alec learned from the strangers, had been at the Rajah’s bungalow this whole time, staying on alone but for Charles and a Malay cook after the holidays had passed and the Rajah and his entourage had left. Having heard of Alec’s plight through some visiting Dyaks, Wallace had sent these two back to fetch him. The pair carried Alec through the swamp and the forest, on a litter made of bamboo poles. Some of his helpers followed with his belongings, including all his crates of insect specimens and the skins and skeletons of the orangutans. The infant rode on his chest.
Wallace had the ague as well. When Alec arrived at the Rajah’s bungalow, and first caught sight of the veranda and the huge teak beams, the wicker chairs and the spacious library, Wallace was desperately ill, and in bed. A few days later, when Wallace could get up, Alec was delirious. For ten days the men alternated bouts of fever as if they were playing lawn-tennis, but then finally, after large doses of quinine, both were well at the same time. In their weakened state they sat on the veranda, sipping arrack from narrow bamboos and talking. Wallace claimed that the bouts of ague stimulated his brain.
“Aren’t these beetles astonishing?” Alec said, pawing through the box at his feet. His clothes and person were clean, he had had a good dinner, he’d slept on a real bed. He felt wonderful. This Brooke, he thought, truly lived like a king. And even though the Rajah had welcomed Wallace and not Alec, Alec was consoled by the beautiful things he had to show for his isolation.
“In two weeks I collected more than 600 different kinds, sometimes a dozen new species a day—it’s bewildering,” Alec said. He held out a beetle with horns twice the length of its body. “Have you come across this one? And what do you make of the remarkable multitude of species here?”
Wallace smiled and turned the beetle delicately on its back. He said, “I have several of these; they’re charming. I do not see how a reasonable man can believe any longer in the permanence of species. All species, as you have seen yourself, constantly produce varieties. If this process goes on indefinitely, the varieties must move farther and farther from the original species, and some of these must, in time, develop into new species—but how and when does this happen? What is the method by which species undergo a natural process of gradual extinction and creation?”
“The method?” Alec said. Wallace passed the beetle back to Alec and Alec held it cupped in his palm. Since his first day in the archipelago he’d been haunted, vaguely, by the question Wallace now posed clearly: where had all these creatures come from? But Alec had had no time to theorize, caught up as he was in the urgency of trying to capture and name everything he saw.
“There must be a mechanism,” Wallace said.
The rain was falling steadily. From the trees three Dyaks emerged and joined the men on the veranda; Wallace produced a piece of string and tried to show them how to play the child’s game of cat’s cradle. Much to Alec’s astonishment the Dyaks knew it better than he did. The three of them stood in a close circle, weaving figures he’d never seen before on each other’s hands and passing the cradle back and forth. When Alec joined them they netted his fingers together.
Later Wallace showed Alec the lone specimen he’d found of a huge new butterfly, which had brilliant green spots arrayed against the black velvet of its wings. “I have named it Ornithoptera Brookeana,” Wallace said. “After our host.” In return Alec showed Wallace how happily his little orangutan, whom he’d named Ali, lay in his arms as he brushed its long brown hair. He tried not to feel jealous when Ali leapt into Wallace’s lap and licked his cheek. Wallace was Alec’s friend, but also his rival, and sometimes Alec longed for Wallace to have some failing. A certain coldness, say. Or an absent-mindedness, brought on by deep thinking. But it seemed there was no part of their lives in which Wallace could not surpass him.
The ague struck them both again on the following day—and to their great sorrow, it also struck Ali. Wallace, too weak himself to rise from bed, had Charles give the infant castor-oil to cure its diarrhea, but although this worked the other symptoms of fever continued; Ali’s head and feet swelled; and then he died. Everyone at the bungalow much regretted the loss of the little pet. When Alec’s own strength returned, he wept over Ali’s body and then decided to bring the skin and skeleton home with him. Ali was sixteen inches tall, four pounds in weight, with an arm-spread of twenty-four inches. Alec made these measurements, but he shrank from the task of preparing the specimen and thought to have Wallace’s Charles help him out. Wallace discouraged that.
“Charles is a nice boy,” he said. “But quite incapable—look what he has done with this bird.”
He showed Alec a bee-eater Charles had been putting up, which resembled Alec’s own first specimens. The head was crooked, a lump of cotton bulged from the breast, and the bird’s feet had somehow been twisted soles uppermost. Alec looked at this, sighed, and steeled himself to prepare Ali’s remains alone. Separating the skin from the bone and muscle beneath, he reminded himself that, in so doing, he served science. Was this science? That night he was unable to sleep. Some hours after the bungalow had lapsed into silence, he found himself outside, in the dripping forest, slashing savagely at a tangle of lianas.
Not until later did he learn that somewhere during this long run of fever-soaked days, Wallace had written a paper on the possible origin of species by, as he put it, natural succession and descent—one species becoming changed either slowly or rapidly into another…Every species has come into existence coincident both in time and space with a pre-existing closely allied species. His paper caused a stir when it was published in England that September, bringing him to the notice of such eminent men as Lyell and Darwin.
What was Alec doing while Wallace was writing? Tossing on his sweaty bed; mourning his little orangutan as he sorted and arranged his insect collections. He prepared a shipment for Mr. Barton, with a long anxious letter about the difficulty of his finances, and how much he needed to receive a good price for this batch of specimens. He wrote,
Enclosed please find:
| Beetles | 600 species |
| Moths | 520 species |
| Butterflies | 500 species |
| Bees and wasps | 480 species |
| Flies | 470 species |
| Locusts, etc. | 450 species |
| Dragonflies, etc. | 90 species |
| Earwigs, etc. | 45 species |
| Total: | 3155 species of insects |
(note: multiple specimens enclosed of many species)
Alec never claimed that his financial difficulties kept him from such fruitful speculations as Wallace made; he knew that Wallace, like himself, spent precious hours sorting and crating specimens and was largely dependent on the income from the sale of same. Alec merely noted that Wallace had Charles, however incapable; a bungalow-palace where he might return from time to time to regain his strength; and powerful friends.
Here is one: Two human beings, coincident in time and space, cannot simultaneously think the same thought; one always precedes the other. As Wallace always preceded Alec, except in a single case. For consolation Alec had this: that he was the first to bring living specimens of paradise birds to the western world. And he believed he was the first American to see these creatures in their native forests.
Although Alec thought of Wallace often, and longed to see him, the Malay Archipelago is a very big place and they never crossed paths again. Not until the winter of 1860, while Alec was on Sumatra plowing stupefied through a year’s accumulation of letters—his mother was ill, or had been the previous May; his brother Frank had married; Mr. Barton had sold his last shipment of insect specimens for a gratifying sum, but had advanced all the money save for a pittance to his father, at his father’s request—did he again hear news of Wallace.
In a letter Mr. Barton, who kept up with the natural history journals in both England and America, recounted to Alec how at Ternate, while suffering again from the ague, Wallace had written a further essay on the origin of species and mailed it to Darwin for comments. The essay had caused a sensation, Mr. Barton said, summarizing its main points for Alec. It had been read at a meeting of the Linnaean Society, along with some notes of Darwin’s expressing a similar idea.
Genius, Alec thought, sitting stunned on his wooden stool. That’s what had come of Wallace’s ague. Of his own, which was upon him again, there were only incoherent letters begging to know the true state of his finances. He would not repeat to anyone what he wrote to his family. To Mr. Barton he wrote,
Thank you for your last, and for the most interesting news of Wallace’s essay. You cannot imagine how tired I am after my last year’s voyages. During the recent months, when I might have been resting, I have been cleaning, labeling, arranging and packing the enclosed: some 10,000 insects, shells, birds, and skeletons. Also hiring men and obtaining stores for my trip to Celebes and the Aru Islands—none of this made any easier by the fact that you have sent me hardly enough money to live on. Do not give the proceeds of this shipment to my family, but forward a full statement directly to me.
Perhaps this is when Alec first wondered why his journal had deteriorated into little more than a tally of species, interspersed with fumbling descriptions of places and people. Why all he’d observed and learned had not crystallized in his mind into some shimmering structure. Certainly he’d never lacked for facts—but he was caught like a fly in the richness around him, drowning in detail, spread too thin. If he were to narrow his gaze, perhaps? Focus on one small group of species, contemplate only them? Then he might make both his reputation and his fortune.
As a boy he’d spent hours in the Philadelphia museum staring at a skin labeled Magnificent Bird of Paradise: red wings, dark green breast-plumes, cobalt-blue head, a stunning yellow ruff or mantle, and behind that a second mantle of glossy pure red. Sprouting from the tail were two long spires of steely blue. He had stared not only because the skin was so beautiful, but because it had no wings or feet.
Birds with no feet—could there be such a thing? From a book in the museum’s library, he’d learned that Linnaeus had labeled the skin he’d seen Paradisea apoda, or the footless paradise bird. A Dutch naturalist wrote that the paradise birds, wingless and footless, were buoyed up by the beams of the sun and never touched the earth till they died. How tantalizing, Alec thought now, looking up from his papers and crates. They were elusive, irresistible; and their skins were so rare as to be very valuable. Money crossed his mind, as it always had. Nearly penniless, and still without a wife or any possibility of supporting one, he seized on the prospect that the paradise birds might save him. Had Wallace married yet? He thought not. Once more he gathered the necessary supplies and prepared to disappear from sight.
After a long journey in a native prau from Celebes, during which his life was often in grave danger, he arrived in the Aru Islands. He shut his eyes to the fabulous trees, the astonishing moths and ants, and sought singlemindedly the Great Paradise Bird, with its dense tufts of long golden plumes raised to hide the whole body; the King Paradise Bird, so small and red, with its beautiful, emerald-green, spiral disks lifted high on slender paired shafts. The islanders with whom he was staying took him to see the sacaleli, or dancing-party, of the Great Paradise Birds.
In a huge tree, deep in the forest, he saw several dozen gather together. They raised their wings, they arched their necks, they lifted their long, flowing plumes and shivered them as if to music, darting now and then between the branches in great excitement. Their beauty and strangeness beggared even that of the lyre-tailed drongo-shrike or the Amazonian umbrella-bird. Above the crouching, glossy bodies the plumes formed golden fans. The islanders taught Alec to use a bow, and arrows tipped with blunt knobs. He sat in the trees, dazed by the beauty surrounding him, and shot strongly, so as to stun the birds without rending the skins or staining the plumage with blood. On the ground below him, boys wrung the birds’ necks as they fell.
And of course they had feet, strong and pink and sturdy. The theories about them, Alec learned, had only been misinformation. He was one of the first to see how the islanders, preparing skins for traders, cut off the wings and feet, skinned the body up to the beak and removed the skull, then wrapped the skin around a sturdy stick and a stuffing of leaves and smoked the whole over a fire. This shrank the head and body very much and made the flowing plumage more prominent. Alec prepared his own specimens differently, so that the natural characteristics were preserved. And this absorbed him so completely that only in brief moments, as he fell into sleep, would he wonder about such things as how the golden plumes were related to the emerald disks.
Rain, fungus, aggressive ants, and the ever-ravenous dogs of the region all plagued him. Still, before the fever overcame him and he had to declare his journey at an end, he salvaged four crates of excellent skins and also captured three living specimens. He might not have an hypothesis about the divergence of species, but he knew how these birds lived. At the Smithsonian Institution, where he thought to donate them, he could point to their sturdy pink feet and say, “Look. I was the first to bring these back.”
As he hop-scotched his way across the archipelago to Singapore, he easily found fruit and insects his birds would eat. Little figs they particularly enjoyed, also grasshoppers, locusts, and caterpillars. From Singapore to Bombay he fed the birds boiled rice and bananas, but they drooped in the absence of insect food and after Bombay even the fruit ran out. It was Alec’s good fortune to discover they savored cockroaches, and for him to be aboard a battered old barkentine that swarmed with them. Each morning he scoured the hold and the store-rooms until he’d filled several biscuit-tins, and during the afternoon and evening he doled them out to the birds, a dozen at a time. As the ship headed south to round the Cape he worried that the increasing cold would bother them, but they did fine.
And if, as he learned after being back in Philadelphia for only a month, Wallace had been making his way to England simultaneously, carrying his own birds of paradise; and if Wallace’s trip was shaped by the same quest for cockroaches—what did that matter? Wallace had traveled once more on a comfortable British steamer, aboard which cockroaches were rare; from his forced stops to gather them on land he made amusing anecdotes. But I was the one, Alec thought, who first solved the problem of keeping the birds alive.
From a London paper Alec learned that Wallace had returned to fame, as a result of his Ternate essay. His birds had taken up residence in the Zoological Gardens, where they were much admired. Meanwhile Alec had himself returned, unknown, to a country at war. To a half-country, he thought, which might soon be at war with England. His crates of skins lay uncatalogued at the Academy of Sciences. And the curators at the Smithsonian seemed less than grateful for his beautiful birds. No one had time to look at birds, their eyes were fixed on battles.
Alec wrote to Wallace once more—inappropriately, he knew; their stations had altered, their friendship had lapsed. Still he felt closer to Wallace than to anyone else in the world, and he could not keep from trying to explain himself to this man he’d meant to emulate. After giving the details of his voyage, of his birds and their fate, he wrote:
All of this may be blamed on the war. I cannot explain how bewildering it has been to return, after my long absence, to see what’s become of my country. My mother died during my journey home. All three of my brothers have married, and my father has gone to live with my brother Frank, having lost through improvidence both the tavern and much of the money rightfully mine, which he obtained through trickery from Mr. Barton. Mr. Barton himself is gone, enlisted in the Army. The weather is cold and grey; the streets swarm with pallid people lost in their clothes; the air rings with boys shouting newspaper headlines, over and over again. In the Dyak longhouses, the heads of their enemies hung from the rafters, turning gently as we ate: and I felt more at home with them than here. Do you feel this? When you walk into a drawing-room, do you not feel yourself a stranger?
What I meant to do, what I wanted to do, was to visit Mr. Edwards, whose book sent me off on my life’s work. He is no great thinker himself; only a man who traveled, like me, and described what he saw as I have failed to do. I thought he might help me gather some of my impressions into a book. But now I find that what I must do is abandon my collections, leave home once more, and enlist. The Potomac swarms with a great armada, ready to transport 100,000 men for an attack on Richmond.
As he mailed his letter, he thought about the legend that seemed—even before he left—to be growing up around his presence in the Aru Islands. He’d learned some of the islanders’ language, and had occasionally entertained his companions by lighting fires with a hand-lens, or picking up bits of iron with a magnet, which acts they regarded as magic. And because he asked questions, even laughable questions, about the birds with no feet before he ever saw them; because he knew where beetles might be found and how to lure butterflies to a bit of dried dung; and most of all because he walked alone through the forests, for hours and days, and was comfortable there, and at peace, the islanders ascribed mystical powers to him. The birds, they claimed, came down from the trees to meet him.
One of the boys he hunted with said, “You know everything. You know our birds and animals as well as we do, and the ways of the forest. You are not afraid to walk alone at night. We believe that all the animals you kill and keep will come to life again.”
Alec denied this strenuously. “These animals are dead,” he said, pointing at a cluster of ants preserved in spirits. “Truly, truly dead.”
The boy looked serenely into a golden glade dense with fallen trees. “They will rise,” he said. “When the forest is empty and needs new animals.”
Alec remembers staring at him; how the jar of ants dropped from his hand and rolled into the leafy litter. The suggestion seemed, in that moment, no more likely or unlikely than what Wallace had proposed for the origin of species: another theory of evolution; another theory. In that instant a line from Wallace’s first letter to him returned and pierced like a bamboo shaft through his heart: Each bird we shot and butterfly we netted was in the service of science.
But this was only ever true for Wallace, not for him, he thinks; he has never been the scientist he’d believed himself to be, perhaps is no scientist at all. And that legend is as false as the moment, on the first leg of his first voyage home, when he hung suspended in joy. All the animals he’s collected, sure that more would spring forth from the earth, are gone and will not rise. But as he packs his bags and readies himself for another murderous journey, they are what he thinks of now. The objects of his desire along the Amazon, in Borneo and Sumatra and Celebes, on the Aru Islands; his sloth, his orangutan, his birds with no feet.