WHO IS EDWIN RIST?
Genius or Narcissist? Mastermind or Pawn?
One summer evening in 2009, twenty-year-old musical prodigy Edwin Rist broke into the Natural History Museum at Tring. Hours later, he slipped away with a suitcase full of rare bird specimens collected over the centuries from across the world, all featuring a dazzling array of priceless feathers.
Kirk Wallace Johnson was waist-deep in a river in New Mexico when his fly-fishing guide first told him about the heist. When he discovered that the thief evaded prison, and that many of the birds were never recovered, Johnson embarked upon an international investigation which led him deep into the fiercely secretive underground community obsessed with the Victorian art of salmon fly-tying.
A page-turning story of a bizarre and shocking crime, The Feather Thief shines a light on our fraught relationship with the natural world’s most beautiful and valuable wonders, and one man’s relentless quest for justice.
Kirk Wallace Johnson served in Iraq as the US Agency for International Development’s first co-ordinator for reconstruction in the war-torn city of Fallujah. He went on to found The List Project to Resettle Iraqi Allies. His work on behalf of Iraqi refugees was profiled by This American Life, 60 Minutes and the Today Show, and was the subject of a feature-length documentary, The List, and a memoir, To Be a Friend is Fatal.
A Senior Fellow at the USC Annenberg Center, and the recipient of fellowships from the American Academy in Berlin, Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and the Wurlitzer Foundation, his writing has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times and the Washington Post. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, son and daughter.
ALSO BY KIRK WALLACE JOHNSON
To Be a Friend is Fatal
For Marie-Josée:
c’était tout noir et blanc avant que tu aies volé et atterri dans mon arbre
Man is seldom content to witness beauty. He must possess it.
Grand Chief Sir Michael Somare
Prime Minister of Papua New Guinea
1979
BY THE TIME Edwin Rist stepped off the train on to the platform at Tring, forty miles north of London, it was already quite late. The residents of the sleepy town had finished their suppers; the little ones were in bed. As he began the long walk into town, the Midland line train glided off into darkness.
A few hours earlier Edwin had performed in the Royal Academy of Music’s ‘London Soundscapes’, a celebration of Haydn, Handel, and Mendelssohn. Before the concert, he’d packed a pair of latex gloves, a miniature LED torch, a wire cutter, and a diamond-blade glass cutter in a large rolling suitcase, and stowed it in his concert hall locker. He bore a passing resemblance to a lanky Pete Townshend: intense eyes, prominent nose, and a mop of hair, although instead of shredding a Fender, Edwin played the flute.
There was a new moon that evening, making the already-gloomy stretch of road even darker. For nearly an hour, he dragged his suitcase through the mud and gravel skirting the road, under gnarly old trees strangled with ivy. Turlhanger’s Wood slept to the north, Chestnut Wood to the south, fallow fields and the occasional copse in between.
A car blasted by, its headlights blinding. Adrenaline coursing, he knew he was getting close.
The entrance to the market town of Tring is guarded by a sixteenth-century pub called the Robin Hood. A few roads beyond, nestled between the old Tring Brewery and an HSBC branch, lies the entrance to Public Footpath 37. Known to locals as Bank Alley, the footpath isn’t more than eight feet wide and is framed by seven-foot-high brick walls.
Edwin slipped into the alley, into total darkness. He groped his way along until he was standing directly behind the building he’d spent months casing.
All that separated him from it was the wall. Capped with three rusted strands of barbed wire, it might have thwarted his plans were it not for the wire cutter. After clearing an opening, he lifted the suitcase to the ledge, hoisted himself up, and glanced anxiously about. No sign of the guard. A space of several feet between his perch on the wall and the building’s nearest window formed a small ravine. If he fell, he could injure himself – or worse, make a clamour that would summon security. But he’d known this part wouldn’t be easy.
Crouched on top of the wall, he reached towards the window with the glass cutter and began to grind it along the pane. Cutting glass was harder than he had anticipated, though, and as he struggled to carve an opening, the glass cutter slipped from his hand and fell into the ravine. His mind raced. Was this a sign? He was thinking about bailing out of the whole crazy scheme when that voice, the one that had urged him onward these past months, shouted Wait a minute! You can’t give up now. You’ve come all this way!1
He crawled back down and picked up a rock. Steadying himself atop the wall, he peered around in search of guards before bashing the window out, wedging his suitcase through the shard-strewn opening, and climbing into the Natural History Museum.
Unaware that he had just tripped an alarm in the security guard’s office, Edwin pulled out the LED light, which cast a faint glow in front of him as he made his way down the hallways towards the vault, just as he’d rehearsed in his mind.
He wheeled his suitcase quietly through corridor after corridor, drawing ever closer to the most beautiful things he had ever seen. If he pulled this off, they would bring him fame, wealth and prestige. They would solve his problems. He deserved them.
He entered the vault, its hundreds of large white steel cabinets standing in rows like sentries, and got to work. He pulled out the first drawer, catching a waft of mothballs. Quivering beneath his fingertips were a dozen Red-ruffed Fruitcrows, gathered by naturalists and biologists over hundreds of years from the forests and jungles of South America and fastidiously preserved by generations of curators for the benefit of future research. Their coppery orange feathers glimmered despite the faint light. Each bird, maybe a foot and a half from beak to tail, lay on its back in funerary repose, eye sockets filled with cotton, feet folded close against the body. Tied around their legs were biodata labels: faded, handwritten records of the date, altitude, latitude and longitude of their capture, along with other vital details.
He unzipped the suitcase and began to fill it with the birds, emptying one drawer after another. The occidentalis subspecies that he snatched by the handful had been gathered a century earlier from the Quindío Andes region of western Colombia. He didn’t know exactly how many he’d be able to fit into his suitcase, but he managed forty-seven of the museum’s forty-eight male specimens before wheeling his bag on to the next cabinet.
Down in the security office, the guard was fixated on a small television screen. Engrossed in a football match, he hadn’t yet noticed the alarm indicator blinking on a nearby panel.2
Edwin opened the next cabinet to reveal dozens of Resplendent Quetzal skins gathered in the 1880s from the Chiriquí cloud forests of western Panama, a species now threatened by widespread deforestation and protected by international treaties. At nearly four feet in length, the birds were particularly difficult to stuff into his suitcase, but he manoeuvred thirty-nine of them inside by gently curling their sweeping tails into tight coils.
Moving down the corridor, he swung open the doors of another cabinet, this one housing species of the Cotinga birds of South and Central America. He swiped fourteen one-hundred-year-old skins of the Lovely Cotinga, a small turquoise bird with a reddish-purple breast endemic to Central America, before relieving the museum of thirty-seven specimens of the Purple-breasted Cotinga, twenty-one skins of the Spangled Cotinga, and another ten skins of the endangered Banded Cotinga, of which as few as 250 mature individuals are estimated to be alive today.3
The Galápagos island Finches and Mockingbirds gathered by Charles Darwin in 1835 during the voyage of HMS Beagle – which had been instrumental in developing his theory of evolution through natural selection – were resting in nearby drawers. Among the museum’s most valuable holdings were skeletons and skins of extinct birds, including the Dodo, the Great Auk, and the Passenger Pigeon. Overall, the museum houses one of the world’s largest collection of ornithological specimens: 750,000 bird skins, 15,000 skeletons, 17,000 birds preserved in spirit, 4,000 nests, and 400,000 sets of eggs, gathered over the centuries from the world’s most remote forests, mountainsides, jungles and swamps.
But Edwin hadn’t broken into the museum for a drab-coloured finch. He had lost track of how long he’d been in the vault when he finally wheeled his suitcase to a stop before a large cabinet. A small plaque indicated its contents: PARADISAEIDAE. Thirty-seven King Birds of Paradise, swiped in seconds. Twenty-four Magnificent Riflebirds. Twelve Superb Birds of Paradise. Four Blue Birds of Paradise. Seventeen Flame Bowerbirds. These flawless specimens, gathered against almost impossible odds from virgin forests of New Guinea and the Malay Archipelago 150 years earlier, went into Edwin’s bag, their tags bearing the name of a self-taught naturalist whose breakthrough had given Darwin the scare of his life: A. R. WALLACE.
The guard glanced at the CCTV feed, an array of shots of the parking lot and the museum campus. He began his round, pacing the hallways, checking the doors, scanning for anything awry.
Edwin had long since lost count of the number of birds that passed through his hands. He had originally planned to choose only the best of each species, but in the excitement of the plunder, he grabbed and stuffed until his suitcase could hold no more.
The guard stepped outside to begin a perimeter check, glancing up at the windows and beaming his torch on to the section abutting the brick wall of Bank Alley.
Edwin stood before the broken window, now framed with shards of glass. So far everything had gone according to plan, with the exception of the missing glass cutter. All that remained was to climb back out of the window without slicing himself open, and melt into the anonymity of the street.
I was waist-high in the Red River, which slices through the Sangre de Cristo Mountains just north of Taos, New Mexico, when I first heard the name Edwin Rist. My fly-line was mid-cast, hovering energetically over the current behind me, ready to shoot forward in pursuit of the golden-bellied trout that Spencer Seim, my fly-fishing guide, had assured me was hiding behind a car-size boulder in the middle of the stream. Spencer could sense fish behind logs, through the white froth of fast currents, in the blackness of deep pools, and in the chaos of swirling eddies. He was certain that a fourteen-incher was fanning a foot below the surface, waiting for the perfect fly if I could cast it right.
‘He broke into a museum to steal what?’
Distracted by what I’d just heard, I blew the cast, slapping the line against the water and sending any trout below darting off. ‘Dead birds?’ Until that moment, we’d spoken only in hushed tones so as not to scare off the fish, approaching each hole as deftly as possible, mindful of the sun and where it might throw our shadows, but I couldn’t contain my disbelief. I’d just heard one of the strangest stories of my life, and Spencer was only at the beginning of it.
Normally, nothing could break my concentration on the river. When I wasn’t fishing, I’d count the weeks and the days until I could pull on a pair of waders and slosh into the water. I’d leave my cellphone in the trunk of the car to buzz until its battery died, keep a fistful of almonds in my pocket to ward off hunger, and drink from the stream when thirsty. On good days, I’d spend eight straight hours working my way up a river without seeing another human being. It was the only thing that brought calm amid the storm of stress that had become my life.
Seven years earlier, while on vacation from my job coordinating the reconstruction of the Iraqi city of Fallujah for USAID, I sleepwalked out of a window in a PTSD-triggered fugue state and nearly died. I was left with broken wrists, a shattered jaw, broken nose, and a cracked skull, with scores of stitches across my face, to say nothing of a newfound fear of sleep and the tricks my brain might play on me in the night.
During my recovery, I realised that many of my Iraqi colleagues – translators, civil engineers, teachers and doctors – were being hunted and killed by their own countrymen because they had ‘collaborated’ with the United States. I spoke out on their behalf in an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, naïvely thinking that someone in power would swiftly fix things by granting them visas. I hadn’t anticipated the thousands of emails that would soon flood in from Iraqis imploring me for help. I was unemployed, sleeping on a futon in my aunt’s basement. I didn’t know the first thing about helping refugees, but I started a list to track the names of everyone who wrote to me.
Within months, I launched a non-profit organisation, the List Project. For several years, I wrestled with the White House, cajoled senators, rallied volunteers, and begged for donations to keep my staff paid. Though we managed to bring thousands of refugees to safety in the United States over the years, it was clear that we would never be able to help everyone. For every victory, there were fifty cases stalled in a federal bureaucracy that treated these interpreters, the moment they fled Iraq, as potential terrorists. By autumn 2011, as the official end to the war was drawing near, I felt trapped in a cage of my own creation. There were still tens of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans running for their lives. It could take a decade, maybe several, to get them out, but I never managed to raise enough funds for more than a year down the road. Once the war was ‘over’ in the minds of the American public, it would only be harder.
Whenever I felt like giving up, I’d get another desperate appeal from a former Iraqi colleague and grow ashamed of my weakness. But the truth was, I was exhausted. Ever since the accident, I couldn’t fall asleep without distracting myself, so I lined up an endless sequence of the most boring shows I could find on Netflix. Every morning I woke to a new tide of refugee petitions.
Unexpectedly, fly-fishing became a kind of release. Out on the river, there were no journalists to call or donors to beseech, just currents and insects to study and rising trout to tempt. Time took on an unusual quality: five hours would pass in what felt like thirty minutes. After a day in my waders, I would close my eyes and see faint outlines of fish fanning dreamily upstream as I drifted into a deep sleep.
It was one such act of escapism that had deposited me on that mountain stream in northern New Mexico. I’d hopped into my beat-up Sebring convertible and driven from Boston to Taos to work on a book about my experiences in Iraq at a small artists’ colony in town. Writer’s block rolled in on the first day. I didn’t have a book deal; I had never written a book before; and my narcoleptic literary agent was ignoring my increasingly anxious requests for guidance. Meanwhile the list of refugees kept growing. I had just turned thirty-one and didn’t know why the hell I was in Taos, much less what I was supposed to do next. When my stress peaked, I searched for someone to show me around the local rivers.
I met Spencer at dawn at a gas station just off State Highway 522. He was leaning against his tan 4Runner, its BIG LEBOWSKI bumper sticker faintly visible beneath the mud: ‘Not on the rug, man.’
In his late thirties, Spencer kept his sideburns long and his hair short. He had an infectious laugh and, like the best guides, an easy way of conversing. We hit it off immediately. As we worked the river, he refined my cast and went on at length about the life cycle of the various insects in the area. There wasn’t a scrub or mineral or bird or bug the former Eagle Scout couldn’t identify, and he seemed to know every trout on a personal basis. Caught that bastard last month on the same rig, can’t believe he fell for it again!
When I snagged a fly in a juniper tree on the riverbank, I winced. I’d already spent a small fortune on trout flies – little bits of elk hair, rabbit fur and rooster hackle feathers threaded around a tiny hook, made to mimic a wide range of aquatic insects in order to fool the fish into biting.
Spencer just laughed. ‘Shoot, I tied all these myself!’ He flipped open his fly box to reveal hundreds of tiny floaters, spinners, streamers, nymphs, emerges, stimulators, parachutes and terrestrials. He had locally themed flies like the San Juan worm and the Breaking-Bad-inspired crystal meth egg. He deployed subtle variations in thread colour or hook size to match the insect hatches in each river or stream he fished. The flies he carried in May were different from those he used in August.
Sensing my curiosity, he opened up a separate fly box and pulled out one of the most strangely beautiful things I’d ever seen: a Jock Scott salmon fly, which, he explained, had been tied according to a 150-year-old recipe. It bore the feathers of a dozen different birds, flashing crimson and canary yellow, turquoise and setting-sun orange as he turned it this way and that. It was finished with a dizzying spiral of gold thread around the hook shank, and it was capped with an eyelet made from the gut of silkworms.
‘What the hell is that?!’
‘This here’s a Victorian salmon fly. Calls for some of the rarest feathers in the world.’
‘Where do you get them from?’
‘There’s a little community of us online that tie ’em,’ he said.
‘Do you fish with these things?’ I asked.
‘Not really. Most guys that tie have no idea how to fish. It’s more of an art form.’
We pushed upstream, crouching low as we approached a fishy-looking stretch. The hobby seemed strange, searching for rare feathers to tie a fly you don’t know how to cast.
‘You think that’s strange – you should look up this kid Edwin Rist! He’s one of the best tiers on the planet. Broke into the British Museum of Natural History just to get birds for these flies.’
I don’t know if it was Edwin’s Victorian-sounding name, the sheer weirdness of the story, or the fact that I was in desperate need of a new direction in life, but I became obsessed with the crime within moments. For the rest of the afternoon, as Spencer did his best to get fish on my line, I was unable to focus on anything except learning about what happened that night in Tring.
But the more I found out, the greater the mystery grew, and with it, my own compulsion to solve it. Little did I know that my pursuit of justice would mean journeying deep into the feather underground, a world of fanatical fly-tiers and plume peddlers, cokeheads and big game hunters, ex-detectives and shady dentists. From the lies and threats, rumours and half-truths, revelations and frustrations, I came to understand something about the devilish relationship between man and nature and his unrelenting desire to lay claim to its beauty, whatever the cost.
It would be five consuming years before I finally discovered what happened to the lost birds of Tring.
ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE stood on the quarterdeck of a burning ship, seven hundred miles off the coast of Bermuda, the planks heating beneath his feet, yellow smoke curling up through the cracks.1 Sweat and sea spray clung to him as the balsam and rubber boiled and hissed below deck. He sensed the flames would soon burst through. The crew of the Helen raced frantically around him, heaving belongings and supplies into the two small lifeboats that were being lowered down the ship’s flank.
The lifeboats had been baking in the sun above deck for so long that the wood had contracted; water began to seep in as soon as they hit the ocean. The cook bolted off in search of corks to plug the gaps, while panicked crewmen searched for oars and a rudder. Captain John Turner hurriedly bagged up his chronometer and nautical charts as his men lowered casks filled with raw pork and bread and water into the boats. They had no idea how long they might drift before being rescued – if they were to be rescued at all. Hundreds of miles of sea spread in every direction.
Four years of being soaked to the bone beneath the ceaseless downpour of the Amazonian rainforest, with malaria, dysentery and yellow fever tugging at his mortal coil – and the element that would bring Wallace’s mission to ruin was not water but fire. It must have seemed a terrible dream: the small menagerie of monkeys and parrots he’d painstakingly shielded from the damp cold were now sprung from their cages, scurrying and flapping away from the flames to the bowsprit that poked like a needle nose from the prow of the 235-ton Helen.
Wallace stood there, squinting through wire-rimmed glasses at the panicked birds as chaos engulfed him. He was so depleted of vitality, leeched by vampire bats, and inflamed by the chigoe fleas that had burrowed under his toenails to deposit their eggs, that he wasn’t thinking clearly. All his notebooks, containing years’ worth of research on the wildlife along the ink-black Rio Negro, were in his cabin.
As the fire danced towards the parrots, below deck it lapped at the edges of cartons filled with the true bounty of his expedition into the Amazon: the skins of nearly ten thousand birds, each meticulously preserved.2 There were river tortoises, pinned butterflies, bottled ants and beetles, skeletons of anteaters and manatees, sheaves of drawings illustrating the transformation of strange, unknown insects, and a herbarium of Brazilian fauna that included a fifty-foot leaf of the Jupaté palm. The notebooks, skins and specimens represented a career-establishing body of research. He’d left England an unknown land surveyor with only a few years of formal education, and now, at the age of twenty-nine, he was on the brink of a triumphant return as a bona fide naturalist, with hundreds of unidentified species to name. If the flames were not extinguished, he would return a nobody.
The eighth of nine children, Wallace was born in 1823 in the Welsh village of Llanbadoc on the west bank of the River Usk, which ribbons south from the Black Mountains of mid-Wales into the estuary of the Severn. Thirteen years earlier Charles Darwin had been born on the banks of the Severn, ninety miles north, but it would be decades before the two men’s lives collided in one of the most astonishing coincidences in scientific history.
After a series of foolish investments by his father put tuition beyond reach, Wallace was withdrawn from school at thirteen and sent off to his older brother to work as a surveyor’s apprentice. The arrival of the steam engine, which precipitated a railway boom that saw thousands of miles of tracks laid across the British Isles, meant that surveyors were in high demand.3 While other boys his age translated Virgil and studied algebra, surveying turned the countryside into a classroom for young Wallace, who scampered through valleys and forests, learning the principles of trigonometry as he helped map out future train routes. As the earth was carved open, he had his first lessons in geology as vanished species like belemnites – fossilised sixty-six million years ago – were revealed in the deep history of the earth.4 The precocious boy devoured introductory works on mechanics and optics and located the satellites of Jupiter using a telescope he’d fashioned out of a paper tube, an opera glass and an optician’s lens.
Wallace’s informal education happened in the midst of a great back-to-nature movement, the result of a century of industrialisation and urbanisation. Crammed in sooty, squalid cities, people began longing for the rustic idyll of their ancestors, but a trip over rutted roads to the coasts or distant stretches of the British Isles was uncomfortable and prohibitively expensive. It wasn’t until the arrival of the trains that Britain’s overworked city dwellers were finally able to escape.5 Embracing the proverb that ‘idle hands are the devil’s workshop’, the Victorians promoted natural history collecting as the ideal form of recreation, and stalls at train stations were packed with popular magazines and books on building a private collection.6
Mosses and seaweeds were pressed and dried; corals, seashells and sea anemones were dredged up and bottled. Hats were designed with special compartments for storing specimens gathered on a stroll.7 Microscopes became more powerful and affordable, exacerbating the frenzy: what was once common and unremarkable to the naked eye – a garden leaf or a beetle – suddenly revealed an intricate beauty under the lens. Crazes spread like fire: the French led the way with conchlyomania, with conch shells fetching obscene prices.8 Pteridomania followed, as the British obsessively uprooted ferns from every corner of the isles for their fern albums.9 There was status in owning something rare, and parlour room vitrines laden with natural curios became ‘regarded as one of the essential furnishings of every member of the leisured classes with claims to be considered cultivated,’ according to the historian D. E. Allen.10
When young Wallace overheard a wealthy governess in Hertford brag to her friends about finding a rare plant known as the Monotropa, his curiosity was piqued.11 He was unaware that systematic botany was a science, or ‘that there was any kind of … order in the endless variety of plants and animals’.12 He soon discovered an insatiable need to classify, to know the names of everything living within the planes of his surveying maps. He snipped specimens of flowers and dried them back in the room he shared with his brother. He started a herbarium and graduated to entomology, flipping stones to see what wriggled underneath, trapping beetles in little glass jars.
In his early twenties, after reading Charles Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle, Wallace began to dream of an expedition of his own. Having already catalogued every creeping and flowering thing he could find in England, he was eager for new species to examine. When the railway bubble burst and surveying work dried up, he began searching for an unexplored part of the world that might help him unlock the greatest scientific mysteries of the day: How did new species form? Why did others, like those he had found while surveying, die off? Was it such a crazy thought that he might set sail for South America in the footsteps of Darwin?
Throughout 1846, he corresponded about the prospect of a voyage with a young entomologist he’d befriended named Henry Bates. After a visit to the insect room at the British Museum, Wallace told Bates that he had been underwhelmed by the number of beetles and butterflies he’d been permitted to examine: ‘I should like to take some one family to study thoroughly, principally with a view to the theory of the origin of species. By that means I am strongly of the opinion that some definite results might be arrived at.’13
Their minds settled on a destination following the publication that year of A Voyage Up the River Amazon, by an American entomologist named William Henry Edwards, who opened with a tantalising preface: ‘Promising indeed to lovers of the marvelous is that land … where the mightiest of rivers roll majestically through primeval forests of boundless extent, concealing, yet bringing forth, the most beautiful and varied forms of animals and vegetable existence; where Peruvian gold has tempted, and Amazonian women have repulsed, the unprincipled adventurer; and where Jesuit missionaries, and luckless traders, have fallen victims to cannibal Indians and epicurean anacondas.’14
They would start at the Brazilian port city of Pará and work their way into the Amazon, shipping specimens back to London throughout their expedition. Samuel Stevens, their specimen agent, would fund their way by selling off ‘duplicate’ skins and insects to museums and collectors. In the week before their departure to northern Brazil, Wallace travelled to the Bates estate in Leicester to learn how to shoot and skin birds.
On 20 April 1848, Wallace and Bates boarded the HMS Mischief for a twenty-nine-day voyage to Pará, most of which Wallace spent doubled over in his berth with seasickness. From there, they ventured into the heart of the Amazon, netting butterflies and shooting rapids in crude canoes. They ate alligators, monkeys, turtles and ants, and they sucked the juice from fresh pineapples.15 In a letter to Stevens, Wallace recalled the constant threat of jaguars, bloodsucking vampire bats and deadly serpents: ‘at every step I almost expected to feel a cold gliding body under my feet, or deadly fangs in my leg’.16
Two years and a thousand miles into the journey, Wallace and Bates decided to part ways: unless they started collecting unique specimens, they were, in effect, competing with each other. Wallace would head up the Rio Negro, while Bates headed towards the Andes. Periodically, Wallace sent boxes of specimens downriver, intending that they be shipped by intermediaries to London.
In 1851 Wallace was stricken with yellow fever, which lasted for several months. He struggled to prepare doses of quinine and cream of tartar water. ‘While in that apathetic state,’ he wrote, ‘I was constantly half-thinking, half-dreaming, of all my past life and future hopes, and that they were perhaps all doomed to end here on the Rio Negro.’17 In 1852 he decided to cut short his voyage by a year.
He loaded the canoe that would take him back to Pará with crates of preserved specimens and makeshift cages containing thirty-four live animals: monkeys, parrots, toucans, parakeets, and a white-crested pheasant.18 At stops along the way, he was startled to discover that many of his previous shipments had been held up by customs officials as suspected contraband. He paid a small fortune to liberate them and loaded them on to the Helen, which set sail on 12 July, four years after he had first arrived in Brazil.19
Now, ten thousand bird skins, eggs, plants, fish, and beetles, more than enough to establish him as a leading naturalist and burnish a lifetime of research, were cooking in the belly of the Helen, seven hundred miles east of Bermuda. There was still hope that the fire might be extinguished, as Captain Turner’s men jettisoned cargo and hacked away at the planks, pushing desperately against suffocating plumes of smoke in search of the hissing heart of the blaze. Down in the cabin, the smoke was so thick that each man could manage only a few swings of the axe before fleeing for fresh air.20
When the captain finally gave the order to abandon ship, the crew descended the thick-braided ropes mooring the leaky lifeboats to the Helen. Wallace finally sprang into action, hurrying down to his cabin, ‘now suffocatingly hot and full of smoke,’ to see what might be saved.21 He grabbed a watch and some drawings he’d made of fish and palm varieties. He felt ‘a kind of apathy,’ perhaps a result of shock and physical depletion, and failed to take his notebooks full of observations he’d risked his life many times over to gather.22 All the bird skins, plants, insects and other specimens trapped in the cargo hold were gone.
As the emaciated Wallace began to lower himself from the Helen, his grip slipped from the rope, flaying his palms as he tumbled into the half-submerged lifeboat. The salt water burned at his flesh as he began to bail.
Most of the parrots and monkeys were asphyxiated on the deck, but a few survivors were still huddled on the bowsprit.23 Wallace tried to coax them into the lifeboat, but when the bowsprit finally caught fire, all but one of his parrots flew into the flames. The last parrot tumbled into the sea after the rope it was perched upon went up in flames.
From the lifeboats, Wallace and the crew watched the fire consume the Helen, the frenzy of evacuating replaced by the monotony of bailing. Every now and then, they pushed back flaming wreckage that drifted close enough to pose a danger. When the sails, which had the effect of steadying the ship, finally caught fire, the vessel capsized and splintered, presenting ‘a magnificent and awful sight as it rolled over … the whole cargo forming a fuming mass at the bottom’.24
They waited for rescue as the sun set. Their intention was to stick as close to the ship as possible without getting burned for as long as the flames gave off light: if they were lucky, a passing ship would see the fire and come to their rescue. Whenever Wallace shut his eyes and began to drift off, he almost immediately jerked awake under the red glare of the Helen, searching vainly for signs of salvation.
By morning, the ship was a charred husk. Mercifully, the wooden planks of the lifeboats had become swollen enough to seal off the leaks. Captain Turner surveyed his charts. Under favourable conditions, they might reach Bermuda in a week. With no other ships in sight, the dilapidated flotilla hoisted sail and headed for land.
They sailed west, through squalls and storms, rationing a dwindling supply of water and raw pork. After ten days, hands and faces skinned by the sun, they crossed paths with a lumber ship en route to England. That night, in comfort aboard the Jordeson, Wallace’s survival instincts gave way to a profound sense of grief. ‘It was now, when the danger appeared past, that I began to feel fully the greatness of my loss,’ he wrote to a friend. ‘How many times, when almost overcome … had I crawled into the forest and been rewarded by some unknown and beautiful species!’25
But he was soon wrenched back into survival mode. The Jordeson – one of the slowest ships in the world, averaging two knots under good conditions – was dangerously overloaded and underprovisioned.26 By the time the English port of Deal was sighted, the crew had been reduced to eating rats. Eighty days after emerging triumphantly from the mouth of the Amazon with a small museum’s worth of specimens, Wallace descended from the half-sunk ship threadbare, drenched, hungry and empty-handed, his ankles so swollen he could barely walk.
In the wake of the disaster, a bedridden Wallace took stock of what he had to show for his years in the Amazon. A handful of drawings of tropical fish and palm trees. His watch. Of all the things to save from the fire! Wallace never managed to explain his thought process in the fateful final moments aboard the Helen.
Samuel Stevens had taken out a £200 insurance policy – roughly $30,000 today – on the specimen collection in the event of its destruction, but the money was little consolation.27 There was no way to file a claim on lost scientific insights, not to mention stories for a book of his own, in the spirit of Darwin.
What was he to do? To tackle the subject of the origin of species, Wallace would need new specimens, which required another expedition. But his resources were limited, his body depleted, and his reputation non-existent. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the terra incognita that had once hazily marked unexplored forests and islands was rapidly vanishing from maps. The gunships of the British Navy, now dominant, sailed into ports and harbours to seize virgin territories and prise colonies from senescent empires such as those of the Dutch and Portuguese. More often than not, they travelled with a naturalist on board. Darwin’s Cambridge professor had recommended him for the voyage of the HMS Beagle, a Royal Navy ship tasked with opening up much of South America’s west coast and the Galápagos Islands, and his father covered all incidental expenses over the five-year journey.28 The botanist J. D. Hooker, Darwin’s close friend, boarded the HMS Erebus in 1839 for a four-year expedition in the Antarctic, and then the HMS Sidon for several years in the Himalayas and India. These were men of Royal Societies, from great families with deep pockets, and they were naming hundreds of new species each year. Wallace didn’t have any Cambridge dons to recommend him for berths on upcoming expeditions.
If Wallace was to leave his mark, he had little time to wallow. As soon as he regained his health, he began to write his way into the hallowed rooms of London’s scientific societies, drawing upon his recollections and the few sketches he’d saved. Only five weeks after his return, he read a paper on Amazonian butterflies before the Entomological Society.29 He went to the Zoological Society with a presentation on the monkeys of the Amazon, theorising that when a great ocean once covering the region receded, three rivers – the Amazon, the Rio Madeira and the Rio Negro – had divided the land into four parts. The ‘great divisions’ that resulted explained the variation and distribution of the twenty-one species of monkeys he’d observed there.30
Wallace didn’t have an answer to the origin of species, but he knew that geography was an essential instrument in the search. He railed against the sloppy way in which other naturalists recorded geographical data: ‘In the various works on natural history and in our museums, we have generally but the vaguest statements of locality. S. America, Brazil, Guiana, Peru, are among the most common; and if we have “River Amazon” or “Quito” attached to a specimen … we have nothing to tell us whether the one came from the north or south of the Amazon.’31 Without precise information on the range of different species, it would be impossible to know how or why species diverged. The tags, in his view, were nearly as important as the specimens to which they were attached.
In the months after returning, Wallace became a fixture in London’s scientific societies, but his true priority was selecting the site of his next adventure. A return to the Amazon, though, was pointless – his friend Bates was still there building a massive collection and by now was so far ahead of him that it would defeat the purpose. It hardly made sense to retread Darwin’s route, and Alexander von Humboldt had already summited the mountains of Central America, Cuba and Colombia. Wallace needed to find a gap in the record, a stretch of the map that hadn’t yet been combed over by a rival naturalist.
After reading a description of ‘a new world’ with an ‘animal kingdom unlike that of all other countries,’ Wallace settled on the Malay Archipelago, which had yet to be explored by a natural historian.32 In June 1853, with his reputation growing, Wallace took a proposal to Sir Roderick Murchison, president of the Royal Geographical Society, describing an itinerary as ambitious as it was protracted: Borneo, the Philippines, the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, Timor, the Moluccas and New Guinea.33 Wallace planned to spend a year or two in each location – an expedition that could easily demand a dozen years. Murchison agreed to find Wallace passage on the next ship travelling to the region and to broker valuable introductions to colonial authorities.
In preparation, Wallace frequented the insect and bird rooms at the British Museum in London, lugging along his copy of Prince Lucien Bonaparte’s Conspectus generum avium, an eight-hundred-page volume that described every known species of bird up to 1850, and making meticulous notes in its margins.34 He soon realised the museum had an incomplete collection of the strangest and most beautiful birds on the planet: the Birds of Paradise.
The Birds of Paradise occupied a perch in the Western public’s imagination worthy of their mythical name. The first skins, brought to Europe by Magellan’s crew as a gift for the king of Spain in 1522, were missing their feet – such was the skinning practice of early Bird of Paradise hunters – leading Carolus Linnaeus, the father of modern taxonomy, to name the species Paradisaea apoda: the ‘footless Bird of Paradise’.35 Many Europeans thus believed that the birds were inhabitants of a heavenly realm, always turning towards the sun, feeding on ambrosia and never descending to earth until their death. They thought the female laid her eggs on the back of her mate, incubating them as they soared through the clouds.36 The Malayans called them manuk dewata, ‘God’s birds’; the Portuguese referred to them as passaros de col, ‘birds of the sun’.37 Linnaeus described nine species that had never been spotted since, known to the traders in the archipelago as burong coati, ‘dead birds’.
Pope Clement VII owned a pair of the heavenly skins. Young King Charles I, posing for his portrait in 1610, stood confidently next to a hat bedecked with a stuffed Bird of Paradise.38 Rembrandt, Rubens and Bruegel the Elder captured their undulating plumes in oil on canvas.39 Entranced as the West was by these supposedly celestial beings, no trained naturalist had ever observed them in the wild.
On 4 March 1854, eighteen months after his calamitous return from South America, Wallace boarded a Peninsular & Oriental steamer that ferried him through the Strait of Gibraltar, past the citadels of Malta to Alexandria, where he boarded a barge that travelled up the Nile to Cairo; here he loaded his gear on to horse-drawn wagons caravanning across the eastern desert toward Suez. The Bengal, a 123-foot cargo barque, took him the next leg, stopping in Yemen, Sri Lanka, and the ‘richly wooded shores’ of the Strait of Malacca before depositing him in Singapore.40
Within a month of arriving, Wallace sent nearly a thousand beetles from more than seven hundred species to Stevens.41 To gather such a haul, he kept to a gruelling schedule. Each morning he was up at five-thirty to analyse and store the insects collected the previous day.42 Guns and ammunition were readied, and insect nets repaired. He’d have breakfast at eight, then head into the jungle for four or five hours of collecting, after which he would return home to kill and pin insects until 4 p.m., when dinner was served. Every night before bed, he’d spend an hour or two recording specimens in his registry.
The British Museum was buying up nearly everything Wallace sent home. Stevens, wanting more of anything that could be captured and sold, asked if he might speed up his collecting by also heading out at night; this triggered an irate reply: ‘Certainly not … night work may be very well for amateurs, but not for the man who works twelve hours every day at his collection.’43
Gathering specimens was taxing, but protecting them against the constant threat of scavengers was maddening. Small black ants routinely ‘took possession’ of his house, spiralling down papery tunnels on to his work desk and carrying off insects from under his nose.44 Bluebottle flies arrived by the swarm and deposited masses of eggs in his bird skins: unless they were swiftly cleaned, the eggs would hatch into maggots and feast on the bird. But Wallace’s greatest enemies were the lean, hungry dogs pacing outside: if he left a bird he was in the midst of skinning for an instant, ‘it was sure to be carried off’.45 He hung bird skins from the rafters to dry, but if he left a stepladder too close, the dogs would climb up and make off with his most cherished specimens.
The passage of time also presented a unique danger. For centuries, taxidermists had struggled to determine the best method to preserve birds for future research. They’d tried pickling them, drowning them in spirits, bathing them in ammonia, shellacking them, and even baking them in ovens, but each of these techniques led to the ruination of the skin or damaged the beauty of the feathers. It was only in the previous few decades that naturalists had perfected the art of skinning birds, by making a fine incision from the belly to the anus, stripping out their guts, scooping their brains out with a quill, cutting out the roots of the ears, extracting their eyeballs and replacing them with cotton, and applying a coating of arsenical soap to the skin.46 By the middle of the nineteenth century, guidebooks with ghastly tips abounded: fashion a noose out of a pocket handkerchief to strangle maimed birds, use No. 8 shot when hunting birds smaller than Pigeons, No. 5 for those of ‘greater hulk’, and knock a wounded and aggressive Heron firmly on the head with a walking stick in order to subdue it.47 Tendons should be cut from the feet of larger birds of prey. Grebes should be skinned from the back instead of the gut. Toucans’ tongues should be left in their skulls. Instead of being sliced open, Hummingbirds could be dried over a stove and packed with camphor.
Losing a poorly preserved bird skin to insects or a mangy dog was nearly as bad as seeing it go up in flames. To help with the quotidian tasks of specimen collecting, Wallace had brought along a sixteen-year-old named Charles Allen.48 Early in their expedition, he happily informed his mother that Charles ‘can now shoot pretty well.… He will soon be very useful, if I can cure him of his incorrigible carelessness.’49 But within a year, Wallace had lost all patience and begged his sister to find a replacement: ‘I could not be troubled with another like him for any consideration whatever.… If he puts up a bird, the head is on one side, there is a great lump of cotton on one side of the neck like a wen, the feet are twisted soles uppermost, or something else. In everything it is the same, what ought to be straight is crooked.’50
After eighteen months, Wallace and young Allen parted ways. To ensure that his specimens would survive into posterity, he recruited a young Malay assistant named Ali, whose attention to detail was a welcome change. In the first two years of his voyage, Wallace sailed from Singapore to Malacca, Borneo, Bali, Lombok and Makassar, gathering some thirty thousand specimens, six thousand of which were distinct species. Perhaps mindful of the lessons of the Helen, he routinely dispatched crates of skins to Stevens. The Peninsular & Oriental’s ‘Overland’ route was the swiftest but costliest: seven thousand miles by sea to Suez, a sweltering caravan to Alexandria, and a steamer to London – a journey of seventy-seven days.51 Otherwise he sent his cases on a four-month voyage stowed aboard ships sailing around the Cape of Good Hope.
Nearly three years into his expedition, though, he had yet to see the Birds of Paradise.
In December 1856, when a half-Dutch, half-Malay captain told Wallace of a place where the coveted birds might be caught, Wallace and Ali eagerly set sail on a ramshackle prau for a tiny cluster of islets a thousand miles to the east known as the Aru Islands.52 Before him lay roving bands of pirates, impassable jungles of towering mahogany and nutmeg, malaria and venom, and thousands of unknown species to discover. Fluttering somewhere in its depths were the elusive Birds of Paradise and one of the greatest scientific breakthroughs in history.
As the prau inched east across the Flores and Banda Seas, Wallace took stock of his supplies: a pair of shotguns, a bag of shot, and a hunting knife.53 His specimen boxes were stacked neatly in the corner of his bamboo hut tethered to the prau’s deck, along with a pouch of tobacco and a collection of small knives and beads to use as payment to local bird and insect hunters. In bottles and pouches, he carried arsenic, pepper and alum for preserving specimens, and hundreds of labels, upon which were printed the words COLLECTED BY A. R. WALLACE. Drawing ever closer to the Birds of the Gods, he measured his food stock in periods of time: a three-month supply of sugar, eight months’ worth of butter, nine months of coffee, and a year of tea.
Time was the key to understanding how Aru and the nearby island of New Guinea first produced the mysterious Birds of Paradise. One hundred and forty million years ago, a supercontinent in the southern hemisphere known as Gondwana began to break apart.5455