From here Wallace found some rare specimens while collecting up the Rio Negro, but
soon the wet season was upon them and they returned to Barra. All travel ceased in
the wet season as the rivers fill with huge torrents of water that ‘roll like ocean waves
and leap up at intervals, forty or fifty feet in the air, as if great subaqueous explosions
were taking place’. It must have been miserable waiting out the four months of the wet
season in Barra with violent thunderstorms, continuous heavy rains, every roof leaking
water, and then the oppressive heat and humidity that followed during the intervals of
sunshine. All Amazon travellers suffer from the mosquitos and Wallace found them a
great torture ‘night after night we were kept in a state of feverish irritation, unable to
close our eyes for a moment’. Some relief was obtained by burning dried cow dung if
this was available, although then there was the stench to put up with. Herbert Wallace
decided that he had enough of this sort of life and was going to return downstream to
Belém do Pará as soon as the wet season finished and there was river transport. Alfred
wrote that:After a year’s experience it was now clear that my brother was not fitted to become a good
natural history collector, as he took little interest in birds or insects ... and would not have
been likely to succeed.Alfred Russel Wallace would continue his collecting up the Rio Negro and Herbert
would make his return to England. When Herbert reached Belém do Pará after a three
week journey the once cheerful and healthy town was desolate. Yellow fever, carried
by the mosquito, had struck, with three-quarters of the population suffering from the
fever and many dead. No scientists had yet made the link between the tiny mosquito
and its transmission of yellow fever or malaria which was still thought to be caused by
bad air or ‘mal aria’. The symptoms of yellow fever are a high temperature, giddiness,
headache and the parched yellow skin that gives the disease its name. After four or
five days of being acutely ill the patient is either dead or at the beginning of a long
convalescence. Herbert Wallace fell ill with the fever and Walter Bates, who had
himself only just recovered from the virus, nursed him for the next five days until
he ‘was taken with the black vomit’ and died. Ironically, Herbert Wallace, that good-
hearted unfortunate young man who had wanted to be a poet, will be remembered by
this verse he wrote while on the Amazon:For here upon the Amazon
The dread mosquito bites –
Inflames the blood with fever,(^110) Where Australia Collides with Asia
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