Grove Koger
As I expand and update When the Going Was Good, I’m posting revised entries from the first edition. Today’s deals with an influential account by Henry Walter Bates, who was born on February 8, 1825.
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The Naturalist on the River Amazons: A Record of Adventures, Habits of Animals, Sketches of Brazilian and Indian Life, and Aspects of Nature under the Equator, during Eleven Years of Travel (London: John Murray, 1863)
Although he would eventually become the world’s leading authority on beetles, Henry Walter Bates had little formal education. Apprenticed to a hosiery manufacturer in Leicester, England, he nevertheless developed an interest in zoology and published a scientific paper on beetles when he was only eighteen. His meeting with naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace in 1844 marked a turning point in his life.
Inspired by William H. Edwards’s A Voyage up the River Amazon (1847), Bates and Wallace traveled to the Amazon Basin in 1848 to collect insects. The two separated after eighteen months to gather specimens independently, meeting again in 1852. During the interval, Bates had been robbed and had fallen seriously ill. Yet he stayed on when Wallace sailed for England, returning only in 1859 when he became ill once again. His travels had taken him up the Amazon itself as well as a number of its tributaries.
Bates wrote his account of the Amazon Basin at the behest of another prominent naturalist, Charles Darwin. Besides recounting a series of colorful if often debilitating experiences (Bates suffered from depression and was at one juncture barefoot and in rags), the work celebrates one of the richest zoological regions on the planet. During his eleven years in the area, Bates collected specimens of 14,712 species, most of them insects and more than half of them unrecorded. The Naturalist on the River Amazons also touches upon a zoological principle (known today as Batesian mimicry) that quickly became a bulwark of the theory of evolution by natural selection as propounded by Wallace and Darwin. Although it is Bates’s only book, the work became one of the most popular travel accounts of the nineteenth century.
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The University of California Press edition of The Naturalist on the River Amazons (1962) includes a foreword by Robert L. Usinger, the Everyman’s Library edition (Dent; Dutton, 1969) includes an introduction by famed traveler Peter Fleming, and the Penguin edition (1989) includes an introduction by Alex Shoumatoff.
For more information about Bates himself, see John Hemming, Naturalists in Paradise: Wallace, Bates and Spruce in the Amazon (Thames & Hudson, 2015) and Anthony Crawforth, The Butterfly Hunter: Henry Walter Bates FRS, 1825-1892 (University of Buckingham Press, 2009).
World Enough 