Rocky Road: Henry Walter Bates

Henry Walter Bates

From Voyages of Discovery by Tony Rice © The Natural History Museum, London

When the young Alfred Russel Wallace dreamed of journeying to the Amazon, he was encouraged by his entomologist friend, Henry Walter Bates. Bates joined Wallace on the expedition in 1848, much to the regret of his parents who felt he'd make a better living in manufacturing than in collecting exotic specimens. Bates guessed (correctly) that his parents were wrong.

Bates and Wallace soon fell into a routine in their field work in Brazil, rising at dawn, looking for birds, breakfasting at midmorning, then turning to insects until stopped by midday heat. They often spent the evenings preparing and mounting their specimens. Far away from the stratified Victorian society of England, the lowborn Bates was able to make a decent living doing what he liked.

Although Bates and Wallace remained good friends throughout their lives, they had different dispositions. Whereas Wallace was intellectually driven and socially reserved, Bates was more relaxed, willing to absorb knowledge gradually (and also more willing than his buddy to admire the feminine beauties of the Amazon). Perhaps due to differences in temperament, but more likely to cover a greater area, Bates and Wallace soon split up and began exploring different regions. Although Wallace returned to England after four years in South America, Bates stayed on for 11 years, and his contributions to biology were remarkable. He collected nearly 15,000 species, about 8,000 of which were new to science. Among his many achievements was confirming the disturbing observation, originally made about 150 years earlier by Maria Sibylla Merian, that really big spiders will kill and eat little birds.

Prolonged exposure to sun, heat and tropical disease eventually took its toll, and Bates was obliged to return to England. Lacking the financial resources of a gentleman like Charles Darwin, Bates had to return to the family business of hosiery manufacturing to pay the bills. Within the first few years of his return to England, he published a ground-breaking scientific paper on what became known as Batesian mimicry. Birds, he found, find certain butterflies tasty and other butterflies disagreeable if not dangerous to eat. After one or two scary experiences in bad butterfly cuisine, birds learn to avoid similar looking bugs. However, some palatable butterflies bear a remarkable resemblance to butterflies that the birds have learned to avoid. These mimics escape the birds' culinary interest by imitating distasteful prey. Bates's insight was warmly welcomed by Darwin, but Darwin still had relatively few symphathizers in British academia, so Bates's paper didn't get him a job. The book he published in 1863 about his travels, The Naturalist on the River Amazons, received a much better reception.

Bates eventually found work as an assistant secretary of the Royal Geographical Society where he edited the society's Transactions and organized expeditions. This paid the bills handsomely, but Bates was able to make little use of his skills as a natural historian. In 1881, however, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.

For more information:
Voyages of Discovery by Tony Rice
Alfred Russel Wallace: A Life by Peter Raby
Song of the Dodo by David Quammen
Charles Darwin: The Power of Place by Janet Browne
Chrysalis by Kim Todd
The Naturalists by Stephen R. Bown