In December 1848, a case of specimens from Brazil arrived at the gates of Kew Gardens. The box was addressed to William Hooker, England鈥檚 most eminent botanist. Hooker remembered the young man who had sent them. Alfred Russel Wallace had asked for a letter of introduction before he set off for South America and Hooker had obliged. But Wallace had no track record as a collector and Hooker might well have taken one look and thrown the whole lot out. How could he know that Wallace would soon become one of the most famous naturalists of the age? Or that these poor plants might be the only ones to reach England from Wallace鈥檚 expedition to the Amazon.
More than 150 years later, three botanical detectives have discovered nine peculiar pieces of palm from Wallace鈥檚 box, including this huge specimen held by Kew botanist Bill Baker. These palms offer a rare glimpse of the young Wallace on his first excursion to the tropics, when he was just beginning to marshall his thoughts on the origin of species.
鈥淲E HOPE you will find the contents of the box worth 拢10 and the freight &c.鈥� Alfred Russel Wallace was optimistic. William Hooker, the director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, had been civil enough to provide him with the letter that smoothed his journey to the Amazon. But would Hooker pay for the specimens he was about to despatch? Wallace and his friend Henry Bates had been in Brazil for three months. They needed more cash if they were to continue their exploration.
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Wallace and Bates arrived in Par谩 鈥� now Bel茅m 鈥� in May 1848. They had no sponsors, little money and no guarantee that anyone would buy what they collected. Neither Wallace nor Bates was a trained botanist or zoologist: what skills and knowledge they had came from long hours spent in the local library and regular forays into the English countryside.
Wallace was a surveyor; Bates worked in a brewery. But both were mad keen on natural history, and when Wallace suggested an expedition to the Amazon, Bates jumped at the chance. The main aim of the trip was to look for evidence that might solve the puzzle of how species arose. They planned to finance their trip by collecting specimens to sell back home. If Hooker liked what they sent, word would soon spread. But just now 拢10 would be handy.
In the event Bates stayed 11 years and is always associated with the Amazon and insects. Wallace stayed four years, travelling to parts of the Amazon no European had ever been, all the while collecting, sketching and making meticulous notes of everything he saw.
Yet Wallace is always associated with quite another part of the world, the Malay Archipelago. His reputation rests on his studies of bird-winged butterflies and birds of paradise. Most of all, he is remembered for the explosive essay he sent to Charles Darwin from the Spice Islands in Indonesia, in which he outlined his ideas about the origin of species and so prompted Darwin to rush out his own theory. But it was the four years Wallace spent in the forests of the Amazon that were the making of him. There he learned to observe and identify, and the profusion of plants and animals in the forest set him thinking about natural selection.
For anyone interested in how Wallace metamorphosed from amateur to one of natural history鈥檚 greatest heroes, there is precious little to go on. In 1852, Wallace decided to leave Brazil and go home. He was frustrated to find that although he had arranged for most of his collections to be shipped out earlier, they had never left the country and were languishing in customs. Now he was forced to take the whole lot himself 鈥� dried and pickled specimens, notebooks, diaries and drawings, including all his private collections as well as those intended for sale.
On 12 July, he boarded the brig Helen. The ship was carrying a highly flammable cargo of palm fibres, rubber and balsam and halfway home it caught fire. The men took to the boats; they were rescued nine days later. All Wallace could save was a tin box containing his sketches of fish and palm trees.
Determined to salvage something from the past four years, Wallace wrote a popular guide to the palm trees of the Amazon, illustrating it with his sketches, and a travelogue, written from memory. The following year, he set off for the Malay Archipelago. 鈥淚f he hadn鈥檛 lost his collections he鈥檇 have spent the next 20 years pottering about working on them,鈥� says Sandra Knapp, a botanist at the Natural History Museum. 鈥淚nstead he went to Malaya 鈥� with all that experience gained in the Amazon. When he got there, he hit the ground running.鈥�
Knapp, who specialises in plants from South America, was intrigued to learn that Wallace and Bates had sent plant specimens to Kew at the start of their Amazon trip. For although they had intended to collect every sort of plant and animal, they found themselves stretched just working on insects and birds. They quickly gave up on the plants.
If the palms and ferns sent to Hooker still existed, they would be rare relics of Wallace鈥檚 first visit to the tropics. Knapp and her colleague Lynn Sanders decided to hunt for them 鈥� or more particularly the palms. The obvious place to start was Kew鈥檚 herbarium, which houses 7 million botanical specimens. At Kew, there鈥檚 no special treatment for celebrity collectors and Wallace鈥檚 palms could be anywhere among 30,000 others. 鈥淏ut we knew the collection well enough to say we鈥檇 never seen a Wallace specimen,鈥� says Bill Baker, one of Kew鈥檚 palm specialists.
In 1848, Hooker鈥檚 great enthusiasm was his new museum which displayed useful plants that could be turned into medicine, foods and fibres. The search shifted to Kew鈥檚 economic botany collection. No luck there either. But Knapp wasn鈥檛 about to give up.
Every item in the economic botany collection is recorded in an electronic database. Tapping out Wallace鈥檚 name threw up nine entries. Wallace鈥檚 specimens had surfaced a few years earlier during a sort-out of the collection. 鈥淏ut they didn鈥檛 look like something that was likely to be processed into products,鈥� says Baker. 鈥淎nd so they were sent to the herbarium.鈥� The records revealed something else. 鈥淭hey were huge chunks of stuff,鈥� says Baker. 鈥淣ow we knew what we were looking for I knew exactly where to search.鈥� The missing palms were in a cupboard set apart for outsized specimens.
None belonged to any of the new species Wallace had discovered and named. But they do reveal his early fascination with palms. Within weeks of setting foot in Brazil he had learned to distinguish one from another and discovered the many uses people had for each species. He clearly wasn鈥檛 faint-hearted. 鈥淐ollecting palms is hard, heavy work,鈥� says Baker. Even a specialist can manage only three or four in a day. When he gave up collecting plants, he continued sketching and making notes about palms. He identified the source of a fibre then being shipped to Britain to make brooms and brushes. It was a new species and, showing the first signs of what became an obsession with the distribution of species, he mapped exactly where it grew.
To a botanist, the specimens seem a tad strange. 鈥淭hey don鈥檛 show those things a botanist would want to know,鈥� says Knapp. Yet this doesn鈥檛 reflect on Wallace鈥檚 skills. Hooker鈥檚 pet project was his museum, and Wallace had chosen huge showy pieces 鈥� half a trunk, a whole huge inflorescence laden with fruit, a flower bud a metre long which would have looked like a vegetable torpedo. 鈥淗e was obviously trying to impress Hooker,鈥� says Baker. 鈥淗is whole career might have depended on it.鈥�
With one mystery solved, two remain. Where are Wallace鈥檚 ferns? And did Hooker pay up?