What could be nicer than traveling far away with friends? Welsh-born Scot Alfred Russel Wallace and Englishman Henry Walter Bates were friends. They were also interested in the same things: tropical plants and animals. And you could only get close to them from afar.
What they lacked, as so often, was the wherewithal. Her idea of solving this problem was an early form of “work and travel”: take a ship to the tropics, collect tropical plants and animals there and send back home what you don’t need for your own collection and research and sell there.
They were young and they needed the money
The mid-19th century was a good time for this in the British Isles. Natural research was booming in Queen Victoria’s time, and museums wanted to increase their collections accordingly, if possible with new, exotic species. And well-to-do private collectors were added as wealthy buyers.
So the two, 23 and 25 years young, embarked for Brazil on April 26, 1848, 175 years ago today.
The bill paid off. In part at least. When Wallace was the first to return by ship in 1852, he lost his entire collection and almost his life.
Because the “Helen” burst into flames in the Atlantic, Wallace and the crew spent ten days in an open lifeboat before another ship sighted and picked them up. At least the cargo was insured. Wallace had also lost most of his records, but in London he nevertheless wrote scientific articles and books from his head.
Legends of Natural Science
Bates then sent his collection, spreading the risk, with several ships to England. He later earned reliable money as secretary of the Royal Geographical Society. Wallace never got a steady job after the collectibles of his later expedition to the Malay Archipelago were sold and was very short of money for a long time.
Both have gone down in history as important explorers. Wallace co-founded the theory of evolution by natural selection with Charles Darwin. Bates is in every textbook on evolution with the mimicry he describes, in which flies, for example, acquire the warning pattern of wasps to deter predators.
Both remained friends for life. Bates died in 1892 at the age of 67. Wallace paid tribute to him in one Obituary in “Nature” as an epoch-making natural scientist whose life was certainly shortened by the “drudgery” as a secretary in the office.
In the end, at Darwin’s instigation, Wallace received an adequate pension from the royal family because of his merits. He died, more than 60 years after that shipwreck, in 1913 at the age of 90.
Read all the episodes of the “Tagesrückspiegel” column that have been published so far here.
