The 'music box' bird whose song gave hope to a hero lost in the wilderness - and how you can hear its joyous voice today
- Naturalists In Paradise tells the tale of an early trio of British explorers
- In 1961 the young Oxford graduates set off to explore the Iriri river
- Alfred Russel Wallace, Henry Bates and Richard Spruce found a paradise
Book of the week
NATURALISTS IN PARADISE: WALLACE , BATES AND SPRUCE IN THE AMAZON
By John Hemming
(Thames & Hudson £19.95)
Back in 1961 three young Oxford graduates set off to explore the Iriri river in a remote part of the Amazon. One of them, Richard Mason, became the last Englishman to be killed by an uncontacted tribe, when he was murdered with bows and arrows.
The second, Kit Lambert, went on to manage The Who. But for the third, John Hemming, the trip was the beginning of a lifelong fascination with the region, and a distinguished career writing about it.
Bird of paradise: A musician wren
More than 50 years on, that same fascination still shines out of every page of Naturalists In Paradise, the compelling story of an earlier trio of young British explorers.
At first sight - and several subsequent ones - 'paradise' mightn't seem the obvious word to describe the Amazon basin in the mid 19th century. A huge anti-government uprising had destroyed much of whatever infrastructure there had been.
River transport, the only kind available, still relied on getting the local Indians to do the paddling - or, when faced with waterfalls and rapids, the heavy lifting. Flooding could cause chunks of land, some of several acres, to come hurtling down the river, smashing everything in their way.
And of course, there was a spectacular array of biting and stinging insects - including mosquitoes, which nobody had yet linked to malaria.
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Nonetheless, for naturalists as driven as Alfred Russel Wallace, Henry Bates and Richard Spruce, a paradise is exactly what the Amazon was. Even after being attacked by a particularly nasty species of wasp, Spruce wrote of his admiration for 'their beauty, ingenuity and heroic ferocity'.
These days, the image of 19th-century British travellers is perhaps of public-school types airily bossing the natives about, possibly from a sedan chair. Well, not in this case - because Wallace, Bates and Spruce were all classic examples of Victorian self-improvement.
None was from a rich family and none went to school beyond 14. All, however, soon set about the urgent task of educating themselves. At 15, Bates was working 13 hours a day, six days a week, as a hosiery apprentice.
Fortunately, that didn't prevent him from learning Greek, Latin, French, Drawing and Composition at the local Mechanics' Institute in Leicester, or from developing a passion for natural history.
Naturalist Richard Spruce
The young Wallace loved nothing better than to curl up with the poetry of Milton or Dante - until he discovered the joys of plant classification. Aged 17, Spruce carefully listed 403 species of plants near his Yorkshire home, before surrendering to the seemingly irresistible appeal of mosses and liverworts.
When Wallace and Bates met in Leicester in 1844, apparently at the public library, they immediately realised they were kindred spirits.
Four years later, still in their early 20s and having found a London agent to sell any specimens they sent back, they sailed to Brazil, which was already recognised as an ecological treasure-trove.
In fact, after a few months together, the pair amicably separated. (Bates preferred to stay in one place for months at a time, while Wallace liked to go wherever his more impulsive nose led him.) A year later, Spruce arrived to begin his own Amazon adventures, bumping into the others only occasionally. What followed was a story - or three stories - of quietly stirring heroism.
Sad to say, in the port of Bélem where they landed, the biggest difference from England that Wallace and Bates noticed was the comparative lack of drunkenness. Once they headed inland, though, they were in another world entirely. They were also among people either puzzled or amused that they had come so far just to collect some plants and animals.
In general, the Indians proved remarkably hospitable, as well as astonishingly skilful boatmen. Not all tribal traditions were to English tastes - including the one where the dead were buried in the village's huts, dug up a month later, cooked, pounded into a powder, mixed with alcohol and drunk by the assembled company.
The non-Indian locals, meanwhile, were a distinctly mixed bunch. In one village, Bates was amazed to come across a man whose mud-hut contained a library of well-thumbed Latin classics. In another, Wallace was both shocked and delighted by a cheerfully dissolute priest.
As an Amazon explorer himself, Hemming describes the endless hardships almost matter-of-factly, which only makes it clearer how hair-raising they were.
Even so, when it comes to understatement, he's still no match for the three Victorians. After Wallace shot part of his own hand off, he confessed to feeling 'rather miserable'. Later, he described the ants eating him alive as 'not the most agreeable companions'.
Above all, though, these men collected: gathering specimens of every conceivable type, no matter what condition they were in. 'With bleeding feet and an empty stomach, I found the journey sufficiently toilsome,' wrote Spruce of one trip. 'But this did not prevent me gathering plants' - although, on a wimpier note, when he was 'near dying of hunger' he did collect only in the afternoons.
Then there was the equally tricky business of preserving the specimens in wet jungle conditions until they could be packaged up for the journey to London. As Hemming emphasises, it's almost miraculous that so much of what the three collected made it back in such good condition.
Bates alone managed to send 14,712 species, with the number of specimens naturally far higher.
The biggest loss, in fact, came when the boat on which Wallace was travelling home in 1852 caught fire, destroying his notebooks and the live animals he'd brought with him. Happily, he was rescued after only a week in an open boat 700 miles from land.
A lesser man might well have been discouraged by the experience. Yet within two years, Wallace was off again, this time for eight years of collecting in Asia. There, he also developed a theory of natural selection that Charles Darwin realised was virtually the same as the one he himself had been sitting on for two decades - and so quickly set about writing The Origin Of Species.
'I could never have approached the completeness of his book,' Wallace generously declared when it was published. Meanwhile, back in Amazonia, Bates and Spruce were still collecting away...
Hemming tells the story of this extraordinary trio without hype, wisely content to let the facts and their own reflections speak largely for themselves. He does, however, add the occasional telling update: we learn that some of the tribes that helped the three men are sadly now extinct.
But perhaps the most striking moment of all comes with a short footnote on page 106 that reminds us how much the world has changed.
Having sailed through a series of thunderstorms, Spruce gets separated from his companions on a jungle trek and fears he's going to die. But then, deep in the lonely forest, he hears something he's long dreamed of hearing: a musician wren, which sings like a music box.
'Modern readers,' the footnote reads, 'can hear this bird by visiting www.xeno-canto.org and searching for “musician wren”.'
Try it. I guarantee that it will brighten your day.
