Alfred Russel Wallace’s Belém Curse

Naturalist’s Brazilian Adventure Began Here; Four Years Later, It Was the Scene of Heartbreak

Ah, yet another international gathering to discuss progress in addressing the problem of climate change. This year, it will be held in Belém, Brazil, and the participants will also focus on nature conservation in the country, including the vast Amazon region.

I’ve been following Victorian naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace for some 50 years, including a long river voyage far up the Rio Negro in Brazil, where Wallace spent several years collecting natural history specimens. The coastal city of Belém (which Wallace identifies as Pará) figures prominently in one of the most emotional episodes in Wallace’s life. Here’s the story:

Opening of COP 30 of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change — November 10

Belém, Brazil

Consider the youthful audacity.

The year was 1848. Alfred Russel Wallace, 25, and his beetle-collecting friend Henry Walter Bates, 23, were in the English Midlands and, in effect, said: Hey, let’s go to the Amazon and collect stuff and have an adventure. Neither had ever left the UK. They spoke no Portuguese and had no contacts and little money. Neither had academic training in biology or taxonomy (Wallace left school at 14), and only basic taxidermy skills. And they lacked the diplomatic, military, and social-class-support networks of other Victorian-era explorers.

Yet Wallace had big ambitions. He intended to finance the journey by selling natural history specimens to collectors in Europe and expand his own private collection of natural curiosities. And he had a desire to try to understand the mechanics of evolution, writing to Bates before departure: “[I intend to] take one family, to study thoroughly — principally with a view to the theory of the origin of species.”

Against the odds, they were hugely successful, collecting thousands of exotic natural history specimens, many new to Western science. And Wallace had begun to gather evidence for his theory of evolution by natural selection that later became known as the Ternate Paper, written while he was in eastern Indonesia on a subsequent expedition.

“A stream in the forest.” Drawing by Sargent in A Narrative of Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro, Alfred Russel Wallace.

Wikipedia: The port of Pará (Belém) in 1825, by Johann Baptist von Spix & Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius

The first incident in what we might call the Pará Curse involved Alfred Russel Wallace’s younger brother.

Wallace had invited his brother, Herbert Edward Wallace, to join him in Brazil. Herbert had little enthusiasm for the work in the steamy tropics, and after about a year of chasing butterflies with his brother decided to return to the UK. He headed downriver to the port city of Pará where he contracted yellow fever while waiting for passage back to England. He died on June 8, 1851, at the age of 22. Adding to the heartbreak, Alfred Russel Wallace did not learn of his brother’s death until months later, after he also had journeyed downriver to Pará to return to England after spending four years on the Amazon and Rio Negro.

After four years of arduous travel in Brazil, a weakened and sickly Wallace, unaware of his brother’s death, decided to return to England. He went downriver:

On the 2nd of July of the present year, I arrived in Pará [now Belém] from the river Uaupés, an unexplored branch of the upper Rio Negro. I had with me a considerable collection of birds, insects, reptiles and fishes, and a large quantity of miscellaneous articles, consisting of about twenty cases and packages. Nearly half of these had been left by me at Barra [Pará] a year before to be sent home; but a new government, arriving there shortly after I left, took it into their heads that I was engaged in a contraband trade, and so I found them still there on my way down, in the present year, and had to bring them all with me.

He booked passage for himself and his collection on the brig Helen, adding his “twenty cases and packages of birds, insects, reptiles and fishes,” to the ship’s cargo of “ India-rubber, cocoa, arnatto [orange condiment, food die, and cosmetic from Bixa orellana shrub, sometimes called the lipstick tree], balsam of copaiba, and Piassaba [fibrous palm used for making brooms].”

Twenty-six days out of port, on the morning of August 6, 1852, the captain of the Helen knocked on Wallace’s cabin and said, “I’m afraid the ship’s on fire; come and see what you think of it.” Wallace recalls the shocking scene:

The decks were now a mass of fire, and the bulwarks partly burnt away. Many of the parrots, monkeys, and other animals we had on board, were already burnt or suffocated; but several had retreated to the bowsprit out of reach of the flames, appearing to wonder what was going on, and quite unconscious of the fate that awaited them. We tried to get some of them into the boats, by going as near as we could venture; but they did not seem at all aware of the danger they were in, and would not make any attempt to reach us. As the flames caught the base of the bowsprit, some of them ran back and jumped into the midst of the fire. Only one parrot escaped: he was sitting on a rope hanging from the bowsprit, and this burning above him let him fall into the water, where, after floating a little way, we picked him up.

Trustees of Natural History Museum, London

Orange-winged parrot — Amazona amazonica in the Natural History Museum in London. It is possible (but there is no proof) that this could be the bird Wallace saved when the brig Helen caught fire and sank.

Wallace biographer Arnold Brackman narrated Wallace’s reaction when the Helen caught fire on his return from four years exploring the Amazon. “Wallace raced to his cabin and snatched up a small box... which [was] luckily at hand.” The box contained a set of pencil drawings of different palm species, together with notes on their distribution and characteristics; a collection of sketches, drawn to scale, of fishes, with notes on their color, dentition, and scale structure; and a Portuguese folio notebook containing his Rio Negro diary and notes made while mapping both the Rio Negro and Uaupés. Everything else [most of his collection], the labor of four years, was smoldering and burning in the hold beneath the cabin. Wallace, who wrote that at the time he was ‘still suffering from fever and ague, which had nearly killed me ten months before on the upper Rio Negro,’ also grabbed his watch and a purse containing a few sovereigns, the only money he possessed.”

Wallace and the crew struggled to survive in a pair of badly leaking lifeboats. He describes how he was “scorched by the sun, [his] hands, nose and ears being completely skinned, and [was] drenched every day by the seas and spray.”

© Look and Learn – Anonymous Student Drawing

Alfred Russel Wallace helplessly watches the Helen burn. He spent 10 days in a lifeboat before being rescued.

Then, after drifting for 10 days in the open sea, they were saved by the brig Jordeson, sailing from Cuba to England.

I cannot attempt to describe my feelings and thoughts during these events [the burning of the Helen]. I was surprised to find myself cool and collected. I hardly thought it possible we should escape, and I remember thinking it almost foolish to save my watch and the little money I had...My collections, however, were in the hold and were irretrievably lost. And now I began to think that almost all the reward of my four years of privation and danger was gone. What I had hitherto sent home had little more than paid my expenses, and what I had with me in the Helen I estimated would have realized about £500. But even all this might have gone with little regret had not by far the richest part of my own private collection gone also. All my private collection of insects and birds since I left Para was with me, and comprised hundreds of new and beautiful specimens which would have rendered (I had fondly hoped) my cabinet, so far as regards American species, one of the finest in Europe.

They were rescued, but bad luck continued to plague Wallace.

We now had a very tedious voyage, and soon got to be very short of provisions, the crew being doubled by our arrival: in fact, had not two vessels assisted us with provisions at different times, we should actually have starved; and as it was, for a considerable time we had nothing but biscuit and water. We encountered three very heavy gales, which split and carried away some of the strongest sails in the ship, and made her leak so much that the pumps could with difficulty keep her free.

And then, in the English channel the night before they anchored, relieved that they were just hours away from dry land, the passengers of the Jordeson had to endure severe gales in which “many vessels were lost.”

They finally made landfall in Kent, on October 1, with Wallace rejoicing in a letter to his friend botanist Richard Spruce:

Oh! Glorious day! Here we are on shore at Deal where the ship is at anchor. Such a dinner! Oh! Beef steaks and damson tart, a paradise for hungry sinners.

On returning to London, Wallace was greeted by a welcome piece of good news. His agent, Samuel Stevens, had insured his collection for £200, enough for Wallace to live on for 18 months.

Wallace swore never to go on another ocean voyage.

But, of course, he did, leaving for the Malay Archipelago in 1854. But that, as they say, is another story.

Despite losing most of his collection and notes, Wallace managed to write two books and six scientific articles about his travels and discoveries in Brazil.

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This article is expanded from a chapter in An Inordinate Fondness for Beetles.

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