10 Alfred Russel Wallace – The Voyages on the Amazon
In April 1848 the twenty-five-year-old Alfred Russel Wallace and the twenty-three-
year-old Henry Walter Bates embarked from Liverpool, ready to fulfil their dream
of collecting natural history specimens on the Amazon, mainly beetles, butterflies
and birds to be sent to museums and collectors in Britain. They had arranged a low-
cost sea passage on the small trading barque Mischief on which they were the only
passengers. After a twenty-nine-day voyage they reached Belém do Pará at the mouth
of the Amazon and their adventure could begin. Wallace found the town did not meet
the picturesque descriptions provided by William Edwards in A Voyage up the Amazon.
The public buildings badly needed repair, some were completely in ruins, and he
complains of the images created by ‘picture-drawing travellers’ that only describe ‘the
beautiful, the picturesque, and the magnificent’. However, in his descriptions, Bates
certainly found the women of the town ‘beautiful and picturesque’:
The impressions received during this first walk can never wholly fade from my mind ...
Amongst them were several handsome women, dressed in a slovenly manner, barefoot
or shod in loose slippers; but wearing richly-decorated ear-rings, and around their necks
strings of very large gold beads. They had dark expressive eyes, and remarkably rich heads
of hair. It was a mere fancy, but I thought the mingled squalor, luxuriance and beauty of
these women were pointedly in harmony with the rest of the scene; so striking, in the view,
was the mixture of natural riches and human poverty.Wallace and Bates found a house on the outskirts of town from where they could
start collecting. When a naturalist enters a tropical forest for the first time it is a life-
changing experience, and Wallace describes this event with the same awe as his heroes
Alexander von Humboldt and Charles Darwin before him:
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