In Amazonia (24 page)

—Bates to Stevens, Pará, August 30, 1849

Metropolitan science—its theorizings, its literatures, its spectacular collections, its popular showcases—relied on an insistent stream of material, much of which flowed through still embryonic channels originating in distant territories.
⁷⁹
As we have seen, commerce and aesthetics combined to influence the shape of its production in fundamental ways. Bates' struggle to control a space within the imperial-scientific networks—his dogged attempts to carve out autonomy through on-site taxonomy—can be interpreted as an effort to capture more and more of the analytical activities associated with particular prestigious nodes. This was critical to his destabilization of the hierarchy of professionalizing science. We can see him striving to insert himself at what were structured as progressively higher levels, where advancing status corresponded to the increasingly manipulated character of the data being handled.

Although it was with deep misgivings that Bates enfolded himself in
the embrace of the metropolitan species grubbers, it was perhaps even more unsettling to be caught in the bonds of dependency that tied him to his Amazonian porters, guides, cooks, canoeists, pilots, nurses, hunters, collectors, protectors, translators, advisors, informants, companions, hosts, and local experts like Vicenti, a “dreadfully independent and shrewd” character, who, nonetheless, “is an excellent assistant to us”:

[H]e is better acquainted with the names and properties of plants and trees than any man in Pará, and is a glorious fellow to get wasps'-nests, and to dig out the holes of monstrous spiders.
⁸⁰

Bates' on-the-ground interaction with Vicenti and the other rural Amazonians with whom he worked offers one more way to think about the making of the region. There were, we know, commercial and institutional imperatives shaping his traveling practice, and we have already seen enough of the materialities of exploration to realize that this story is not entirely about an Anglophone siting of Amazonia. But what happened to Bates' natural science in the moment of encounter with Amazonians and this hyperbolic nature? What mimetics and hybridities ensued from the field politics of intersubjectivity?
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European travelers had complained of labor shortages in the Amazon well before the Cabanagem. But Bates' ability to travel was wholly predicated on the availability of people prepared to fulfill the overlapping functions of crew member, porter, and guide. Even when he closely follows the emerging hospitality trails of European assistance and local political authority, moving along a network of planters, merchants, and municipal officials assembled through letters of introduction arranged in London, Pará, and Santarém, his progress can be held up for days or weeks or even entirely halted by the inability to secure assistance.
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Despite their own divisions, there are times when elites and subalterns appear to conspire in obstructing him. Considerably delayed in making a planned trip to the upper Tapajós in 1852, he finally sails in June, a season of treacherous tides and unpredictable storms:

In arranging my voyage, I found the usual difficulty in finding men. Indians only understand the management of canoes; and these are so few in number in comparison to the demand for them, that they are not to be found. The authorities only can
assist a stranger, but these parties in Santarém are not at all obliging, and I was compelled to hire two mulattoes,—one, a coarse specimen from the South of Brazil, the other, a harmless young fellow of very little use to me. The bigger one proved a great annoyance. I soon found that he understood less of navigation than myself; but he was insolent, and would have his own way. Our first day's voyage was very inauspicious. We weighed anchor at Santarém at 8,
A.M.
, after a good deal of trouble with the police officers, who would not let this fellow go until I had paid his debts.
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They arrived in Aveyros after running aground and coming close to death. Bates at once dismissed the two men and used his prior acquaintance with the town authorities to secure the Indian crewmen on whom he placed such value. Within days, he was off again, but in his next letter he tells a familiar, if ironic, tale:

Altogether [this voyage on the Tapajós] has been the most labourious excursion I have made…. The two Indians I obtained with great difficulty of the Commandant of Aveyros, gave me constant trouble and anxiety,—two lazy, insolent young lads, who at last, when I wished to ascend the river to Curé, refused to accompany me any further.
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This is one native response to the work of imperial science. It can force the naturalist to surrender zoological specimens that his hungry boatmen would rather eat. It can leave him staring wistfully landward as impatient oarsmen whisk him away from a rich collecting site. It can take him on interminable diversions as his employees ferry relatives and friends between distant riverine settlements. It can see to it that the store of cane liquor he brings along as a preservative is hijacked for more democratic ends.
⁸⁵
It can render valued objects worthless—an alligator's head with its teeth pilloried for “charms,” in one instance.
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And it can at times create a tenseness that hovers over these travels like a sickly pall to burst into a sudden shower of violence—as when the botanist Richard Spruce narrowly thwarts a murder plot by his four Indian companions.
⁸⁷

Explorer-scientists were vulnerable and dependent, a resource as well as a burden. The lack of direct coercive sanctions available to the naturalists, their acute physical vulnerability on sparsely inhabited, poorly
mapped, and unpredictable rivers, and the generalized labor shortage with which foreign travelers were confronted, all gave local workers unusual relative strength. They were often in the gratifying position of being able to demand payment in advance for a journey and then, on receipt of the money, to abscond or, on occasion, to spend it and then win more before setting out.

Even though a European traveler was more or less entirely invested with the protective prestige of the Amazonian elite, such social relations were rather different from those that actually obtained between native labor and the local or provincial authorities. Punitive unpaid forced expedition, conscription into the abusive
Corpo de Trabalhadores
, aggressive press-ganging for provincial militias, routine and sadistic brutality—the intensified state regulation of Indian and
ribeirinho
labor imposed following the suppression of the Cabanagem radically changed conditions in the interior by extending and deepening racialized forms of control that had previously been limited to the area around Belém.
⁸⁸
While never succeeding in ignoring these disagreeable goings-on, the responses of travelers varied considerably. Some, the North American Edwards, for example, endorsed such arrangements as normalizing an otherwise impossible transport situation.
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For Bates, the situation was more problematic, and at times the post-Cabanagem upheavals seem to echo the industrial revolution transfiguring the rolling Midlands landscape he had only recently scoured for his first butterfly specimens.

In similar ways but often in contradiction to the demands of metropolitan buyers, native involvement in the naturalists' progress strongly influenced these explorers' spatial practices by restricting where they were able to travel, how long they would remain in a particular location, and, frequently, the extent of their investigations once they were settled. In addition, more effectively even than topographical obstacles, the desertions of crew members and servants, or their refusal to enter areas occupied by hostile, undefeated Indian groups, would—just as much as the resilience of those groups themselves—temporarily close off whole sections of Amazonia to scientific enterprise.
⁹⁰

In general, though, positive support was as frequent as obstruction and as readily forthcoming from rural Indians and ribeirinhos as from members of the elite. The daily logistical assistance given to the visiting naturalists—the sheltering, canoeing, portering, hunting, and fishing that enabled travel—was critical to their success. So, too, was the contribution of the
regatões
, the itinerant river traders who carried Bates'
collections unescorted, without incident, and often without charge to Pará for shipment to England. Just as the pliability of the relations between Bates and the people who performed many of these services offered room for maneuver on the part of the latter, so for some, this same space, and the favorable wages and novel conditions Bates was forced to offer, made such work inviting.
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Less mundane, though, were the activities of those individuals who worked for him as collectors. Many of these supplied specimens on approval, and his arrival in a village prompted a procession of hunters, young and old, male and female, to emerge from the forest bearing animals for sale. Some helped by training him in specific technologies: the use of blowpipes for killing birds perched high in the forest canopy, for example. Boys accompanied him into hunting grounds, silently indicating animals that he would attempt to shoot and they retrieve in seemingly impenetrable undergrowth. Men allowed him to tag along on hunting trips. Other people—like Vicenti—established more formalized, less transient relationships as assistants. Bates' 1851 description of his first visit to Ega is helpful here:

I worked very hard for Coleoptera in Ega from the 1st of January to the 20th of March, being the showery and sunny season, before the constant rains set in. Whenever I heard of beetles seen at a distance, I would get a boat and go many miles after them, and employed a man (the only one disposed for such work in the whole village) with his family, who worked in some clearing in the forest, to hunt for me. Every day he brought me from ten to twenty Coleoptera, and thus I got some of my best things: so that I think I looked Ega pretty well, and the results may be taken as representing the products of the Upper Amazons.
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Relationships of this type throw questions of authorship into sharp relief,
⁹³
and examples from other imperial contexts are not hard to find.
⁹⁴
Take Albert Howard, a sensitive colonial official impressed by the indigenous agriculture he had witnessed in India, who returned to England to found the European organic farming movement.
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Or there is that on which Mary Pratt muses when she wonders if Humboldt's native guides communicated “their own knowledge of the ecosystem and their reverence for it” during the ascent of Chimborazo that led to the influential planar zonation of the Andes depicted in the
Essai sur la géographie des
plantes
(1807). As Pratt points out, this was an indigenous mental topography that was to reappear in John Murra's influential “verticality thesis” of Andean resource management and spatio-social organization.
⁹⁶

Scientific practice turns out to be a conjunctural negotiation of emergent and relational knowledges. Amazonians' understandings of the forest mediated by their assessments of the institutional resources and priorities of the visitor enter into fluid dialogue with Bates' own conflicted allegiance to natural historical systematics as mediated by all the complications stirred up in his Amazon experience. This needs underlining: at stake is the making of spatial categories, metropolitan natural science, differentiated subjects, and local materiality. Although Bates' training was ever toward the abstraction of the general from the specific, these field interactions constantly pulled him back to locality, and again, we see the critical importance of particularity.

Not surprisingly, Bates understood his science as being of a different order of rationality from what is now often called indigenous knowledge. Although his collecting relied on local expertise and his future career rested on the ability of informants to trap large numbers of diverse organisms, he was confused by any sign of native familiarity with the science of physiological process.
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Yet, this knowledge hierarchy was difficult to sustain. The assignment of local people's ingenuity
in the manipulation of plant materials (by which he was enduringly fascinated) to a category prior to science was undermined by the high status of the instrumental imperial science of economic botany. Applied local knowledge formed an intellectual resource of which he was fully aware and a pool of commercial data to which he was directed by metropolitan demand.
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Yet it was methodologically treacherous.

All too often, and particularly when working with botanical specimens, Bates was forced to suspend the normal rules by which objects collected in their habitat are situated in taxonomic relationships. The standard procedure did not apply. Rather than reinventing a natural object as a cultural artifact, Bates started out with the discovery of a cultural object—a plant derivative, perhaps a medicine or a household implement—and then, through fieldwork, tried to track back to reconstruct its natural form. Only in this way could he break down the specimen into the definitive morphological elements through which it would reveal its secrets. This procedure greatly increased his dependency on local informants: