‘The flesh [of Hoatzins, locally called Ciganas] has an unpleasant odour of musk combined with wet hides - a smell called by the Brazilians catinga; it is, therefore, uneatable. If it be as unpalateable to carnivorous animals as it is to man, the immunity from persecution which it would thereby enjoy would account for its existing in such great numbers throughout the country.’ This is from the much-revered natural history journals written by Henry Walter Bates - born two centuries ago today - after spending 11 years in the Amazon. His observations and research, like that of his friend Russell Wallace, supported the new theories, at the time, being put forward by Charles Darwin.
Bates was born on 8 February 1825, in Leicester, England, into a family of modest means, his father being a stocking maker. Despite limited formal education, he attended local schools and became proficient in Latin and French, which later helped him access scientific literature. At age 13, he became an apprentice to a hosier but continued pursuing a passion for entomology in his spare time. He joined the Mechanics’ Institute (which had a library), studied in his spare time and collected insects in Charnwood Forest. In 1843 he had a short paper on beetles published in the journal
Zoologist. He met Wallace, a keen entomologist, who had taken a teaching post in the Leicester Collegiate School. The two men shared a passion to explore exotic lands.
Inspired particularly by Alexander von Humboldt’s accounts of the Amazon (see Humboldt’s genius), Bates and Wallace embarked on an expedition to South America in 1848 to study the region’s biodiversity. They intended to fund their trip by collecting and selling specimens of plants and animals. Though Wallace returned to England in 1852, Bates went on to spend 11 years (1848-1859) in the Amazon, a period marked by much hardship and astonishing discoveries: during this period, he collected over 14,000 species, of which approximately 8,000 were new to science.
On his return, Bates spent the next three years writing an account of the trip, This was published as The Naturalist on the River Amazons in 1863, and would soon become widely regarded as one of the finest accounts of natural history travels. In the work, he details his discovery of what would become named as Batesian mimicry - a phenomenon whereby harmless species evolve to imitate the warning signals of harmful species to avoid predators. The idea proved a significant contribution to the then emerging theory of natural selection.
Also in 1863, Bates married Sarah Ann Mason with whom he had several children. From 1864 onwards, he worked as assistant secretary of the Royal Geographical Society (though effectively he acted as secretary - the senior post being occupied by a noble figurehead). He sold his personal Lepidoptera collection, and began to work mostly on beetles. From 1868 to 1869 and in 1878 he was president of the Entomological Society of London. In 1871 he was elected a fellow of the Linnaean Society, and in 1881 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society. He died in 1892. Further information is available from Wikipedia, Encyclopaedia Britannica, and The Natural History Museum (which today holds most of his collection).
Bates’ original 1863 work, in two volumes, can be freely read online at
Internet Archive. However, much more recently, in 2020, The Natural History Museum published
The Naturalist on the River Amazon: The Journals & Writings of Henry Walter Bates. According to the museum, the book includes pages from Bates’ illustrated notebooks and excerpts from, in the words of Charles Darwin, ‘the best book of natural history travels ever published’.
Most of The Naturalist on the River Amazons reads more like a memoir than a journal or diary, but there are a few dated extracts. Here are two.
29 August 1848
‘The Mojú, a stream little inferior to the Thames in size, is connected about 20 miles from its mouth by means of a short artificial canal with a small stream, the Igarapé-mirim, which flows the opposite way into the water-system of the Tocantins. Small vessels like ours take this route in preference to the stormy passage by way of the main river, although the distance is considerably greater. We passed through the canal yesterday, and to-day have been threading our way through a labyrinth of narrow channels; their banks all clothed with the same magnificent forest; but agreeably varied by houses of planters and settlers. We passed many quite large establishments, besides one pretty little village, called Santa Anna. All these channels are washed through by the tides, - the ebb, contrary to what takes place in the short canal, setting towards the Tocantins. The water is almost tepid (77° Fahr.), and the rank vegetation all around seems reeking with moisture. The country however, as we were told, is perfectly healthy. Some of the houses are built on wooden piles driven into the mud of the swamp.
In the afternoon we reached the end of the last channel, called the Anapú, which runs for several miles between two unbroken lilies of fan-leaved palms, forming with their straight stems colossal palisades. On rounding a point of land we came in full view of the Tocantins. The event was announced by one of our Indians, who was on the look-out at the prow, shouting, “La esta o Paraná-uassú!” “Behold, the great river!” It was a grand sight - a broad expanse of dark waters dancing merrily to the breeze; the opposite shore, a narrow blue line, miles away. We went ashore on an island covered with palm-trees, to make a fire and boil our kettle for tea. I wandered a short way inland, and was astounded at the prospect. The land lay below the upper level of the daily tides, so that there was no underwood, and the ground was bare. The trees were almost all of one species of Palm, the gigantic fan-leaved Mauritia flexuosa; on the borders only was there a small number of a second kind, the equally remarkable Ubussú palm, Manicaria saccifera. The Ubussú has erect, uncut leaves, twenty-five feet long, and six feet wide, all arranged round the top of a four-feet high stem, so as to form a figure like that of a colossal shuttlecock. The fan-leaved palms, which clothed nearly the entire islet, had huge cylindrical smooth stems, three feet in diameter, and about a hundred feet high. The crowns were formed of enormous clusters of fan-shaped leaves, the stalks alone of which measured seven to ten feet in length. Nothing in the vegetable world could be more imposing than this grove of palms. There was no underwood to obstruct the view of the long perspective of towering columns. The crowns, which were densely packed together at an immense height overhead, shut out the rays of the sun; and the gloomy solitude beneath, through which the sound of our voices seemed to reverberate, could be compared to nothing so well as a solemn temple. The fruits of the two palms were scattered over the ground; those of the Ubussú adhere together by twos and threes, and have a rough, brown-coloured shell; the fruit of the Mauritia, on the contrary, is of a bright red hue, and the skin is impressed with deep crossing lines, which give it a resemblance to a quilted cricket-ball.
About midnight, the tide being favourable and the breeze strong, we crossed the river, taking it in a slanting direction, a distance of sixteen miles, and arrived at eight o’clock the following morning at Cametá. This is a town of some importance, pleasantly situated on the somewhat high terra firma of the left bank of the Tocantins. I will defer giving an account of the place till the end of this narrative of our Tocantins voyage. We lost here another of our men, who got drinking with some old companions ashore, and were obliged to start on the difficult journey up the river with two hands only, and they in a very dissatisfied humour with the prospect.
The river view from Cametá is magnificent. The town is situated, as already mentioned, on a high bank, which forms quite a considerable elevation for this fiat country, and the broad expanse of dark-green waters is studded with low, palm-clad islands, the prospect down river, however, being clear, or bounded only by a sealike horizon of water and sky. The shores are washed by the breeze-tossed waters into little bays and creeks, fringed with sandy beaches. The Tocantins has been likened, by Prince Adalbert of Prussia, who crossed its mouth in 1846, to the Ganges. It is upwards of ten miles in breadth at its mouth; opposite Cametá it is five miles broad. Mr. Burchell, the well- known English traveller, descended the river from the mining provinces of interior Brazil some years before our visit. Unfortunately, the utility of this fine stream is impaired by the numerous obstructions to its navigation in the shape of cataracts and rapids, which commence, in ascending, at about 120 miles above Cametá, as will be seen in the sequel.’
30 August 1848
‘Arrived, in company with Senhor Laroque, an intelligent Portuguese merchant, at Vista Alegre, fifteen miles above Cameta. This was the residence of Senhor Antonio Ferreira Gomez, and was a fair sample of a Brazilian planter’s establishment in this part of the country. The buildings covered a wide space, the dwelling-house being separated from the place of business, and as both were built on low, flooded ground, the communication between the two was by means of a long wooden bridge. From the office and visitors’ apartments a wooden pier extended into the river. The whole was raised on piles above high-water mark. There was a rude mill for grinding sugar-cane, worked by bullocks, but cashaça, or rum, was the only article manufactured from the juice. Behind the buildings was a small piece of ground cleared from the forest, and planted with fruit-trees, orange, lemon, genipapa, goyava, and others; and beyond this, a broad path through a neglected plantation of coffee and cacao, led to several large sheds, where the farinha, or mandiocca meal, was manufactured.
The plantations of mandiocca are always scattered about in the forest, some of them being on islands in the middle of the river. Land being plentiful, and the plough, as well as, indeed, nearly all other agricultural implements, unknown, the same ground is not planted three years together; but a new piece of forest is cleared every alternate year, and the old clearing suffered to relapse into jungle.
We stayed here two days, sleeping ashore in the apartment devoted to strangers. As usual in Brazilian houses of the middle class, we were not introduced to the female members of the family, and, indeed, saw nothing of them except at a distance. In the forest and thickets about the place we were tolerably successful in collecting, finding a number of birds and insects which do not occur at Para. I saw here, for the first time, the sky-blue Chatterer (Ampelis cotinga). It was on the topmost bough of a very lofty tree, and completely out of the reach of an ordinary fowling-piece. The beautiful light-blue colour of its plumage was plainly discernible at that distance. It is a dull, quiet bird. A much commoner species was the Cigana or Gipsy (Opisthocomus cristatus), a bird belonging to the same order, Gallinacea, as our domestic fowl. It is about the size of a pheasant; the plumage is dark brown, varied with reddish, and the head is adorned with a crest of long feathers. It is a remarkable bird in many respects. The hind toe is not placed high above the level of the other toes, as it is in the fowl-order generally, but lies on the same plane with them; the shape of the foot becomes thus suited to the purely arboreal habits of the bird, enabling it to grasp firmly the branches of trees. This is a distinguishing character of all the birds in equinoctial America which represent the fowl and pheasant tribes of the old world, and affords another proof of the adaptation of the Fauna to a forest region. The Cigana lives in considerable flocks on the lower trees and bushes bordering the streams and lagoons, and feeds on various wild fruits, especially the sour Goyava (Psidium sp.). The natives say it devours the fruit of arborescent Arums (Caladium arborescens), which grow in crowded masses around the swampy banks of lagoons. Its voice is a harsh, grating hiss; it makes the noise when alarmed, all the individuals sibilating as they fly heavily away from tree to tree, when disturbed by passing canoes. It is polygamous, like other members of the same order. It is never, however, by any chance, seen on the ground, and is nowhere domesticated. The flesh has an unpleasant odour of musk combined with wet hides - a smell called by the Brazilians catinga; it is, therefore, uneatable. If it be as unpalateable to carnivorous animals as it is to man, the immunity from persecution which it would thereby enjoy would account for its existing in such great numbers throughout the country.
A great number of the insects which we found here were different from those of Para. Species characteristic of the one locality were replaced by allied species in the other, a fact which would tend to the conclusion that the Tocantins serves, to some extent, as a barrier to migration. This was especially the case with the Papilios of the group which wear a livery of black, green, and red. P. Echelus of this group, which is so common at Para, was here absent, and its place supplied by the closely related P. Æneides. Both have the same habits, and seem to fill similar spheres in the natural economy of the two districts. Another handsome butterfly taken here was a member of the Erycinidæ family, the Alesa Prema, which is of a dazzling emerald-green colour chequered with black. I caught here a young Iguana; Iguanas, however, are extremely common everywhere throughout the country. They are especially numerous in the neighbourhood of villages, where they climb about fruit-trees overrun with creepers. The eggs, which are oblong, and about an inch and a half in length, are laid in hollow trees, and are very pleasant eating taken raw and mixed with farinha. The colour of the skin in the Iguana changes like that of the chameleon; in fact, it is called chameleon by the Portuguese. It grows to a length of five feet, and becomes enormously fat. This lizard is interesting to English readers on account of its relationship to the colossal fossil reptile of the Wealden, the Iguanodon. The Iguana is one of the stupidest animals I ever met with. The one I caught dropped helplessly from a tree just ahead of me; it turned round for a moment to have an idiotic stare at the intruder, and then set off running along the pathway. I ran after it, and it then stopped as a timid dog would do, crouching down, and permitting me to seize it by the neck and carry it off.
We lost here another of our crew; and thus, at the commencement of our voyage, had before us the prospect of being forced to return, from sheer want of hands to manage the canoe. Senhor Gomez, to whom we had brought letters of introduction from Senhor Joao Augusto Correia, a Brazilian gentleman of high standing at Para, tried what he could do to induce the canoe-men of his neighbourhood to engage with us, but it was a vain endeavour. The people of these parts seemed to be above working for wages. They are naturally indolent, and besides, have all some little business or plantation of their own, which gives them a livelihood with independence. It is difficult to obtain hands under any circumstances, but it was particularly so in our case, from being foreigners, and suspected, as was natural amongst ignorant people, of being strange in our habits. At length, our host lent us two of his slaves to help us on another stage, namely, to the village of Baiaō, where we had great hopes of having this, our urgent want, supplied by the military commandant of the district.’
