In Amazonia (44 page)

48
. Distant in Grant Duff, “Obituary,” 251.

49
. I am drawing here on Bruno Latour's notion of “cycles of accumulation,”
Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 215–57. Also, Bruce Braun, “Producing Vertical Territory: Geology and Governmentality in Late Victorian Canada,”
Ecumene
7 (2000): 7–46. See C. Barrington Brown and William Lidstone,
Fifteen Thousand Miles on the Amazon and Its Tributaries
(London: Edward Stanford, 1878); William Chandless, “Ascent of the River Purûs, and Notes on the River Aquiry,”
Journal of the Royal Geographical Society
35 (1866): 86–118; idem, “Notes on a Journey up the River Jurúa,”
Journal of the Royal Geographical Society
39 (1869): 296–310; idem, “Notes on the Rivers Maué-Assú, Abacaxis and Canuma,”
Journal of the Royal Geographical Society
40 (1870): 411–32.

50
. Prior to leaving London, Bates and Wallace met with William H. Edwards—a recent graduate of the new “natural history” courses at Williams College and author of
A Voyage Up the River Amazon
. Edwards provided valuable letters of introduction to Europeans and North Americans in Belém and the interior. The book had made a powerful impression on the two friends. In his autobiography, Wallace writes that “[it] gave such a pleasing account of the people, their kindness and hospitality to strangers, and especially of the English and American merchants in Pará, while expenses of living and of travelling were both very moderate, that Bates and myself at once agreed that this was the very place to go to” (Alfred Russel Wallace,
My Life: A Record of Events and Opinions
, vol. 1 [New York: Dodd, Mead, 1905], 264).

51
. On the often clandestine instrumentalities of British botany in Latin America—the most notorious South American examples of which were the
transfer of rubber and cinchona to Asia—see Richard Drayton,
Nature's Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the ‘Improvement' of the World
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); and Lucile H. Brockway,
Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens
(New York: Academic Press, 1979). The professionalization of botany and zoology occurred concurrently with that of other emerging sciences. See, for example, Robert A. Stafford,
Scientist of Empire: Sir Roderick Murchison, Scientific Exploration and Victorian Imperialism
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

52
. Distant in Grant Duff, “Obituary,” 251.

53
. For example, a cataloguing entry from his field notebooks: “Probably new species of the genus—at any rate I have the descriptions of 5 out of the 7 sp
^s
known and it does not agree,” Bates, [
The Amazon Expeditions
], manuscript in collections of Entomology Library of the British Museum of Natural History, London, 1851–59), vol. 1, 183. Or, Bates to Stevens, April 30, 1851,
Zoologist
9 (1852): 3232: “My great objection is, that I cannot mention any animal, or insect, or plant, under a name by which it will be recognized.”

54
. Linnaeus cast himself as Adam in the frontispiece of the 1760 edition of the
Systema naturae
. Interestingly, the trope points to the restricted nature of the field collectors' Eden: they could wander there, but the political economy of natural history prevented them from exercising the critical authority. This hierarchical division of labor between collector and theorist is present even in Bacon's
Novum organum
of 1620 (Francis Bacon,
The New Organon
, ed. Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverthorne [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000]). See Mary Poovey,
A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 99.

55
. Bates to Darwin, October 17, 1862; in Stecher, “Darwin–Bates Letters,” 35 [letter 32]. Contemporary social scientists find themselves making a very similar case in relation to the hermeneutics of fieldwork: see, for example, Geertz,
Works and Lives
.

56
. Bates to Darwin, May 2, 1863; in Stecher, “Darwin–Bates Letters,” 45 [letter 48]; idem, November 24, 1862(?); in ibid., 38 [letter 35].

57
. For an introduction to Humboldt's geography, see the lucid discussion by Malcolm Nicolson, “Alexander von Humboldt and the Geography of Vegetation,” in
Romanticism and the Sciences
, ed. Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 169–85. Susan Cannon,
Science in Culture: The Early Victorian Period
(New York: Neale Watson, 1978), was responsible for the rediscovery and configuration of “Humboldtian science” in the history of science and includes a useful commentary on Darwin. For an important recent reassessment, see Michael Dettelbach, “Humboldtian Science,” in
Cultures of Natural History
, ed. Nicholas Jardine, James A. Secord, and Emma C. Spary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 287–304.

58
. Nicolson, “Humboldt,” 170.

59
. Ibid., 180. For a discussion of the inverse relationship—the impact of voyages of exploration such as Humboldt's on the Romantic poets—see Alan
Frost, “New Geographical Perspectives and the Emergence of the Romantic Imagination,” in Fisher and Johnston,
Captain James Cook and His Times
, 5–19.

60
. See Cannon,
Science in Culture
, 16–24, for an elegant discussion of Ruskin and Dickens in this context.

61
. The key work here remains Foucault,
The Order of Things
. As I argue below, however, there were contradictory imperatives enforcing a reliance on these very specificities, and locality—in a broad sense—was a crucial supplement to the specimen.

62
. A point made by Humboldt himself: “The progress of the geography of plants depends in a great measure on that of descriptive botany; and it would be injurious to the advancement of science, to attempt rising to general ideas, whilst neglecting the knowledge of particular facts,” Humboldt and Bonpland,
Personal Narrative
, vol. 1, x.

63
. On competition between the state and collectors, see Satpal Sangwan, “The Strength of a Scientific Culture: Interpreting Disorder in Colonial Science,”
The Indian Economic and Social History Review
34 (1997): 217–50.

64
. For example, the colonial foresters described by K. Sivaramakrishnan,
Modern Forests: Statemaking and Environmental Change in Colonial Eastern India
(Stanford: Stanford Univesity Press, 1999).

65
. Hooker to Bates, May 13, 1863, cited by Clodd, “Memoir,” lxvi; emphasis in original.

66
. Francis Galton, “Reminiscences of Mr. H. W. Bates,”
Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society
14 (1892): 256. Moon,
Henry Walter Bates
, 63, suggests that Darwin was also a key player in this appointment, for which the only other candidate was Wallace.

67
. See William D. Paden, “Arthur O'Shaughnessy in the British Museum; Or, The Case of the Misplaced Fusees and the Reluctant Zoologist,”
Victorian Studies
8 (1964): 7–30.

68
. See Jacques Derrida,
Of Grammatology
, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), for a discussion of the double function of the supplement as something that completes at the same time as it betrays inadequacy.

69
. Stevens,
Zoologist
8 (1849): 2663–64.

70
. For example, in a note attached to one shipment to Stevens, Bates writes: “You can send me the names &c. of the species; say whether rare, the price of each specimen, and if I should send more.” Bates to Stevens, Santarém, January 8, 1852,
Zoologist
10 (1852): 3449–50.

71
. E.g., Ritvo, “At the Edge of the Garden,” 371–75.

72
. On spatial practice, see Henri Lefebvre,
The Production of Space
, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991); and Donald Moore, “Subaltern Struggles and the Politics of Place: Remapping Resistance in Zimbabwe's Eastern Highlands,”
Cultural Anthropology
13 (1998): 344–75.

73
. Bates to Stevens, Santarém, January 8, 1852,
Zoologist
10 (1852): 3450; emphasis in original.

74
. And by depending on Stevens' efficiency: “I now see by the books sent,
how little is known of Diurnes, &c. Besides the notes sent, I find I can add a great deal of information from memory; thus you see it is important that I should find my collection complete, with all the Nos. attached, when I return,” Bates to Stevens, Santarém, June 4, 1852,
Zoologist
11 (1853): 3728.

75
. Cf. Pratt,
Imperial Eyes
, following Foucault.

76
. Bates, “Preface,” in
Naturalist
, viii. Mary Poovey has tracked the ambiguity of the statistical fact in the mid-nineteenth century: its deracinated facticity and its contradictory status as evidence, necessarily theorized. Bates' practice can be read usefully in relation to this tension. An inductionist with an activist commitment to theory, he relies on the evidentiary fact, yet also finds himself and his Amazons caught up in the deductive logic and representational aesthetics of number. One way to understand this tension more specifically is in light of the long-term struggle between natural history (as aggregation of the deracinated particular) and natural philosophy (as systematic knowledge)—and as an indication of the persistence of the former. Poovey,
The Modern Fact
, especially 9, 315–17, and
Chapter 4
above. My thanks to Bill Maurer for encouraging this line of inquiry.

77
. Clodd, “Memoir,” lxxxiv.

78
. Ibid., ix; emphasis in original.

79
. Which is not to ignore the domestic vernacular sources. See, for example, Gillian Feeley-Harnik, “‘Pigeons, If You Please': An Avian Perspective on Darwin and
The Origin of Species
,” paper presented to the 99th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, San Francisco, Calif., November 15–19, 2000.

80
. Bates to Brown, Pará, June 17, 1848,
Zoologist
8 (1849): 2838.

81
. Homi Bhabha has argued that we should look for the effects of colonial power in “the production of hybridization rather than the noisy command of colonialist authority or the silent repression of native traditions.” Homi K. Bhabha,
The Location of Culture
(New York: Routledge, 1994), 112; emphasis removed. Hybridization, a process of subjectivation and appropriation within a complexly overdetermined field of power, does not imply the joining of stable, unitary, or equivalent objects, nor the absence of domination. In this sense, Bhabha's insight undergirds my understanding of Bates' representational practice as a site in which non-Europeans participated in the metropolitan regionalization of the Amazon and intervened in the emergent logics of metropolitan science. However, this is not to privilege hybridity in the process of encounter, nor to displace attention from mimesis and the work of a clutch of simultaneous traveling practices, including dialogue, performance, parody, and articulation.

82
. Perhaps it is this preoccupying difficulty which forces Bates to confront Amazonian politics and devote extensive passages to discussions of the Cabanagem and other issues of regional history. However, we should also acknowledge his self-consciously wide-ranging intellectual interests. Bates' encompassing strategy of investigation could be contrasted with the narrowly commercial and dehistoricizing narratives of his contemporaries traveling in Argentina. Kristine L. Jones, “Nineteenth Century British Travel Accounts of Argentina,”
Ethnohistory
33 (1986): 195–211.

83
.
Bates to Stevens, Aveyros, August 1, 1852,
Zoologist
11 (1853): 3801–2.

84
. Bates to Stevens, Santarém, October 18, 1852,
Zoologist
11 (1853): 3841.

85
. E.g., Alfred Russel Wallace,
Travels
, 237: “The temptation of being left alone for nearly a day, with a garafão of caxaça, was too strong for them. Of course I passed all over in silence, appearing to be perfectly ignorant of what had taken place, as, had I done otherwise, they would probably both have left me, after having received the greater part of their payment beforehand, and I should have been unable to proceed on my voyage.”

86
. Bates to Stevens, June 3, 1851,
Zoologist
10 (1852): 3321; emphasis in original.

87
. Or so Spruce tells it. He certainly does seem to have provoked considerable hostility, including that of an elderly and rather Shakespearean nurse who—he reports—would shout at her near-to-death patient, that is, at Spruce: “Die, you English dog, that we might have a merry watch-night with your dollars!” Richard Spruce,
Notes of a Botanist on the Amazon and Andes. Being Records of Travel on the Amazon and Its Tributaries, the Trombetas, Rio Negro, Uaupés, Casiquiari, Pacimoni, Huallaga, and Pastasa; as also to the Cataract of the Orinoco, along the Eastern Side of the Andes of Peru and Ecuador, and the Shore of the Pacific, During the Years 1849–1864
, ed. A. R. Wallace (London: Macmillan, 1908), vol. 1, 487–93, 465.

88
. Thanks to David Cleary for clarifying this point. In the period from the disintegration of the Directorate in 1798 until the 1830s, conditions for populations of the Amazon interior were notable for their autarkic lack of regulation. See Cleary, “‘Lost Altogether'”; Pinheiro, “Do Mocambeiro a Cabano”; Pasquale di Paolo,
Cabanagem: A revolução popular da Amazônia
(Belém: CEJUP 1986).