Angels and Insects (3 page)

And then he discovered his ruling passion, the social insects. He peered into the regular cells of beehives, he observed trails of ants passing messages to each other with fine feelers, working together to shift butterfly-wings and slivers of strawberry-flesh. He stood like a stupid giant and saw incomprehensible, purposefully intelligent beings building and destroying in cracks of his own paving stones. Here was the clue to the world. His journal became the journal of an ant-watcher. This was in 1847, when he was twenty-two. In that year, in the Mechanics’ Institute at Rotherham, he met a fellow amateur entomologist who showed him the reports of Henry Walter Bates in the
Zoologist
, on Coleoptera and other matters. He wrote to Bates, including some of his own observations about ant societies, and received a kind reply, encouraging his work, and adding that Bates himself ‘with my friend and co-worker in the field, Alfred Wallace’ was planning an expedition to the Amazons in search of undiscovered creatures. William had already read Humboldt and W. H. Edwards’ highly coloured account of the wild luxuriance, the frolicking and joyous coatis, agoutis and sloths, the gaudy trogons, motmots, woodpeckers, chiming thrushes, parrots, manakins and butterflies ‘the bigness of a hand and of the richest metallic blue’. There were millions of miles of unexplored forest—it could lose in its brilliant virgin depths another English entomologist beside Wallace and Bates. There would be new species of ants, to be named perhaps adamsonii, there would be space for a butcher’s son to achieve greatness.

The journals began to intermingle a rapt, visionary note with detailed practical sums for outfitting, for specimen boxes, with names of ships, with useful addresses. William set out in 1849, one year later than Wallace and Bates, and returned in 1859. Bates had given him the address of his agent, Samuel Stevens, who had handled and sold the specimens shipped back by all three collectors. It was Stevens who had introduced William to the Reverend Harald Alabaster, who had inherited his baronetcy and his Gothic
mansion only on the death of his childless brother in 1848. Alabaster was an obsessive collector, who wrote long letters to his unknown friend, which arrived at infrequent intervals, and asked about the religious beliefs of the Natives as well as the habits of the hummingbird hawk-moth and the Saüba ant. William wrote back to him, the letters of a great naturalist from an untrodden wilderness, spiced with an attractive self-deprecating humour. It was Harald Alabaster who had told him of Wallace’s calamitous fire at sea in 1852, in a letter that had taken almost a year to reach him. William had somehow supposed that this was a statistical insurance against another naturalist being wrecked on the return voyage, but it had not been so. The brig,
Fleur-de-Lys
, had been rotten and unseaworthy, and William Adamson, unlike the vaguer Wallace, had not been properly insured against the loss of his collection. He was still full of the survivor’s simple pleasure in being alive when Harald Alabaster’s invitation reached him. He packed up what he had saved, which included his tropical journals and the most valuable butterflies, and set off for Bredely Hall.

His tropical journals were much stained—by the paraffin in which their box had once been doused to prevent their being eaten by ants and termites, by traces of mud and crushed leaves from canoe accidents, by salt water like floods of tears. He had sat alone under a roof woven of leaves in an earth-floored hut, and scribbled descriptions of everything: the devouring hordes of army ants, the cries of frogs and alligators, the murderous designs of his crew, the monotonous sinister cries of the howler monkeys, the languages of various tribes he had stayed with, the variable markings of butterflies, the plagues of biting flies, the unbalancing of his own soul in this green world of vast waste, murderous growth, and lazily aimless mere existence. He had peered into these pages by the light of burning turtle oil, and had recorded his solitude, his smallness in the face of the river and the forest, his determination to survive, whilst
comparing himself to a dancing midge in a collecting bottle. He had come to be addicted to the written form of his own language, which he spoke hardly at all, although he was fluent in Portuguese, the
lingoa geral
spoken by most of the natives, and several tribal tongues. Latin and Greek had given him a taste for languages. Writing gave him a taste for poetry. He read and reread
Paradise Lost
and
Paradise Regained
, which he had by him, and an anthology of
Choice Beauties of our Elder Poets
. It was to this he turned now. It must have been one in the morning, but his blood and his mind were racing. He was not ready for sleep. He had bought a new notebook, an elegant green with marbled covers, in Liverpool, and now opened its first blank page. On this he copied out a poem by Ben Jonson which had always intrigued him and had now suddenly taken on a new urgency.

That was what he wanted to set down, exactly. O so white! O so soft! O so sweet, he wanted to say.

Beyond that was unknown territory. He remembered a sentence from a fairy story of his childhood, a sentence spoken by a Prince of Araby about the lovely Princess of China, brought briefly to him in her sleep by mischievous spirits. ‘I shall die if I cannot have her,’ the Prince had said, to his servant, to his father and mother. William poised his pen above his paper and wrote,

‘ “I shall die if I cannot have her.” ’

He thought for some time, pen in hand, and then wrote again, under the first line,

‘ “I shall die if I cannot have her.” ’

He added,

He thought for a moment, and then wrote for a third time,

‘ “I shall die if I cannot have her.” ’

He slept well, and dreamed that he was pursuing a flock of golden birds through the forest, which settled and preened and allowed him to approach, and then rose and wheeled away, crying in high voices, only to settle again, just out of reach.

Harald Alabaster’s study, or den, was next to Bredely’s small chapel. It was hexagonal in shape, with wood-panelled walls and two deep windows, carved in stone in the Perpendicular style: the ceiling too was carved stone, pale grey-gold in colour, a honey-comb of smaller hexagons. There was an unusual roof-light at the centre of this, reminiscent of the Lantern of Ely Cathedral, under which the large Gothic desk was imposingly set, giving the room the appearance of a chapter house. Round the walls were both tall, arched bookcases full of polished leather, and deep-drawered cabinets. There were also three free-standing hexagonal, glass-topped display cabinets, in lustrous mahogany, inside one of which reposed, on their pins, several of William’s earlier captures, the Heliconeae, the Papilionidae, the Danaidae, the Ithomiidae. Above the cases hung texts, written out with careful penmanship in Gothic script, and bordered with charming designs of fruit, flowers, foliage, birds and butterflies. Harald Alabaster pointed them out to William Adamson.

‘My daughter Eugenia takes pleasure in working these designs for me. I think they are very pleasing—prettily penned, and carefully executed.’

William read aloud,

‘It is Eugenia who made this elegant arrangement of the Lepidoptera also. I fear it is not done upon quite scientific principles, but it has the intricacy of a rose window made of living forms, and does show forth the extraordinary brilliance and
beauty
of the insect creation. I am particularly taken with the idea of punctuating the rows of butterflies with the little iridescent green scarabs. Eugenia says she got the idea from silk knots in embroidery.’

‘She was describing the work to me last night. She obviously has a very precise hand in handling specimens. And the result is very fine, very delightful.’

‘She is a good girl.’

‘She is very beautiful.’

‘I hope she will also be very happy,’ said Harald Alabaster. He did not sound, William thought, listening for every nuance of meaning,
entirely
convinced that this would be the case.

Harald Alabaster was tall, gaunt, and slightly stooping. He had a bony, ivory version of the family face, the blue eyes a little watery, the lips buried in the fronds of a patriarchal beard. The beard, and his abundant hair, were largely white, but the original blond lingered here and there, giving the white a stained, brassy look, a paradoxical tarnish. He wore a clerical collar and a black loose jacket over baggy trousers. Over this he wore a kind of monkish
gown, black and woollen, with long sleeves and a sort of cowl. This could have had a practical purpose—the far reaches of the hall were bitterly cold, even with fires lit in all the fireplaces, which they mostly were not. William, who had corresponded with him for many years, but was now meeting him for the first time, had imagined a younger, more substantial man, solid and cheerful like the collectors he had met in London and Liverpool, men of business and intellectual adventure together. He had brought down his salvaged treasures, which he now laid out on Alabaster’s desk, unopened.

Harald Alabaster pulled a kind of dangling bell-rope by his desk, and a soft-footed servant came in with a coffee tray, poured the coffee, and went out.

‘You are fortunate to have escaped with your life; we must give thanks for that—but the loss of your specimens must have been a very severe setback. What will you do, Mr Adamson, if you do not think it impertinent to ask?’

‘I have hardly had time to think. I had hoped to sell enough to be able to stay in England for some time, write about my travels perhaps—I kept extensive journals—and earn enough money to equip myself to return to the Amazon. We have barely begun to pick up twigs, Sir, those of us who have worked there—there are millions of unexplored miles, unknown creatures … I have particular problems I propose to solve—I have come to be particularly interested in ants and termites—I should like to make a prolonged study of certain aspects of their life. I believe for instance that I may have a better explanation for the curious habits of the leafcutter ants than that put forward by Mr Bates, and I should like also to find the next of the army ants—the Eciton burchelli—which has never been done. I have even wondered if they are perhaps perpetual travellers who form only
temporary encampments
—this is not the nature of the ants we know—but these forage so extensively, so ferociously, it may be that they
must
be perpetually on the move in
order to survive. And then there is the interesting problem of the way in which—and this would reinforce the observations of Mr Darwin—certain ants that inhabit certain Bromeliads appear to have affected the form of the plants over the millennia, so that the plants actually seem to build chambers and corridors for their insect guests in the natural process of growth. I should like to see if this can be demonstrated; I should like—I am sorry, I am talking disjointedly on and on—I forget my manners. You have been so kind in your letters, Sir, the receipt of which was one of the very rare moments of luxury in my time in the forest. Your letters, Sir, came with necessities like butter and sugar, wheat and flour which we never saw—and were more welcome. I rationed the reading, so as to savour them longer, as I rationed the sugar and flour.’