At Home - Bill Bryson [144]
The dangers of plant hunting were considerable. Joseph Paxton dispatched two men to North America to see what they could find; both drowned when their heavily laden boat overturned on a foaming river in British Columbia. The son of André Michaux, a French hunter, was hideously mangled by a bear. In Hawaii, David Douglas, discoverer of the Douglas fir, fell into an animal trap at a particularly unpropitious moment: it was already occupied by a wild bull, which proceeded to trample him to death. Others got lost and starved, died of malaria, yellow fever, or other diseases, or were killed by suspicious natives. Those who succeeded, however, often acquired considerable wealth—perhaps none more notably (or more aptly named, come to that) than Robert Fortune, last encountered in Chapter VIII traveling riskily around China disguised as a native to discover how tea was produced. His introduction of tea growing to India possibly saved the British Empire, but it was the bringing of chrysanthemums and azaleas to British nurseries that allowed him to die wealthy.
Others were driven by a simple quest for adventure—sometimes dangerously misguided, it would seem. Perhaps the most notable—and on the face of it most unlikely—in this category were the young friends Alfred Russel Wallace and Henry Walter Bates, both the sons of English businessmen of modest means. Though neither had ever even been abroad, they decided in 1848 to voyage to Amazonia to search for botanical specimens. Soon afterward, they were joined by Wallace’s brother Herbert and by another keen amateur, Richard Spruce, a schoolmaster on the Castle Howard estate in Yorkshire who had never tackled anything more challenging than an English meadow. None seemed remotely prepared for life in the tropics, and poor Herbert demonstrated as much by catching yellow fever and expiring almost as soon as he was ashore. The others, however, persevered, though for reasons unknown they elected to split up and head off in different directions.
Wallace plunged into the jungles along the Rio Negro and spent the next four years doggedly collecting specimens. The challenges he faced were numberless. Insects made his life a torment. He broke his glasses, on which he was highly dependent, during a lively encounter with a hornets’ nest, and lost a boot in some other moment of mayhem and for some time had to clomp around the jungles half shod. He bewildered his Indian guides by preserving his specimens in jars of caxaca, an alcohol fermented from sugarcane, instead of drinking it as any sensible man would. Thinking him mad, they appropriated the remaining caxaca and melted into the forest. Undeterred—undeterrable—Wallace pressed on.
After four years, he stumbled from the steamy jungles exhausted, his clothes in tatters, trembling and half delirious from a recurrent fever, but with a rare collection of specimens. In the Brazilian port city of Pará, he secured passage home on a barque called the Helen. Midway across the Atlantic, however, the Helen caught fire and Wallace had to scramble into a lifeboat, leaving his precious cargo behind. He watched as the ship, consumed by flames, slid beneath the waves, taking his treasures with it. Undaunted (well, perhaps just a little daunted), Wallace allowed himself a spell of convalescence, then sailed to the other ends of the Earth, to the Malay Archipelago, where he roamed ceaselessly for eight years and collected a staggering 127,000 specimens, including 1,000 insects and 200 species of birds never before recorded, all of which he managed to get safely back to England.
Bates, meanwhile, stayed on in South America for seven years after Wallace’s departure, exploring mostly by boat on the Amazon and its tributaries, and eventually brought home almost 15,000 specimens of animals and insects, which seems a modest number compared with Wallace’s 127,000, but some 8,000 of his—more than half, a phenomenal proportion—were new to science.
But the most remarkable of all in many ways was Richard Spruce. He stayed on in South America for a full