Henry Walter Bates

English naturalist

• Born: February 8, 1825; Leicester, England
• Died: February 16, 1892; London, England

Nineteenth-century British naturalist and explorer Henry Walter Bates traveled the Amazon River basin for eleven years. He collected over fourteen thousand insect specimens, more than half of which were previously unknown, making a lasting contribution to the theory of evolution.

Primary field: Biology

Specialties: Evolutionary biology; entomology

Early Life

Henry Walter Bates was born and raised in Leicester, England, a center of the textile and footwear industry in early nineteenth-century England. He was the eldest son of Harry Bates, who owned a stocking-making business, and the grandson of Robert Bates, a cloth dyer.

Like the children of other regional tradesmen, Bates received a rudimentary education at a boarding school sufficient to prepare him for entering the business world. At the age of thirteen, he left school and became an apprentice to Alderman Gregory, a colleague of his father’s who owned a large hosiery-manufacturing concern in his hometown. On the job, Bates worked thirteen hours per day, first as warehouse sweeper and later as interim manager after the death of Gregory. Despite the long hours, Bates worked diligently at educating himself, reading voraciously late into the night. Already enamored of biology, particularly the specialty of entomology, Bates spent his scant leisure time prowling Leicester’s neighboring Charnwood Forest to collect insects.

During his mid-adolescence, Bates began taking night courses at the Mechanics Institute of Leicester and later at the Leicester Collegiate School, where he learned Greek and Latin, languages important to scientific study. In 1843, Bates published his initial scientific paper in the first issue of the Zoologist journal: “Notes on Coleopterous Insects Frequenting Damp Places.” At the Leicester Collegiate School, Bates made the acquaintance of a person who would change the course of his life: Alfred Russel Wallace, a young Welshman of similarly modest background, who was equally keen on studying the natural world. Wallace was temporarily employed as an instructor in several subjects. Bates and Wallace corresponded regularly after the teacher left Leicester.

Life’s Work

By the time Bates reached his early twenties, he had landed a position as a clerk at Allsopp & Sons, a large brewery operating at Burton upon Trent in Staffordshire. Though his future seemed secure, Bates was not happy because the work was not challenging and had little to do with his scientific interests. In trading letters with the equally dissatisfied Wallace—then working as a civil engineer—Bates and his correspondent began discussing the possibility of following in the footsteps of earlier naturalist-explorers. They were especially inspired by the travels of an American, William Henry Edwards, who wrote about his adventures in A Voyage up the River Amazon: Including a Residence at Pará (1847).

Soon, Bates and Wallace were making plans to journey to South America on a collecting expedition. Their joint purpose was to expand knowledge of indigenous species, which they hoped would help advance the study of evolution—a subject of great controversy in the nineteenth century—and by so doing, to forge new careers for themselves. To finance the expedition, the two men gathered funding by subscription, arranging to send newfound specimens to natural museums and private collectors in England.

In April 1848, Bates and Wallace left Liverpool aboard a trading ship, the Mischief. They arrived a month later at Pará (present-day Belém), Brazil. For more than a year, the two men lived together while venturing daily into the rainforest to collect insects and other local fauna. At night, they mounted specimens for shipment to England.

In 1850, Bates and Wallace separated in order to cover more territory, occasionally meeting to discuss their individual findings. Wallace worked along the Rio Negro and the Orinoco River. Bates followed the Araguaia-Tocantins Watershed for a time before relocating to Óbidos, where the Amazon River pinches to its narrowest and the water flows swiftly. He later moved farther up the Amazon to Manaus—then a sleepy backwater that experienced a rubber boom late in the century. Bates spent the final four years of his sojourn—during which time he periodically contributed reports to the Zoologist—in the Upper Amazon near the Brazilian-Peruvian border, at sparsely inhabited Ega (later called Tefé) in the Solimões region.

Wallace, meanwhile, who was wracked with fever, left Brazil in 1852 aboard the brig Helen. The ship caught fire, and though Wallace survived, all of the specimens he had collected were lost. Bates eventually succumbed to tropical diseases as well and left Brazil in 1859, suffering from malaria. He had spent eleven productive years in the rainforest. Having learned from Wallace’s painful experience, Bates sent his specimens via three separate vessels, and all specimens—more than fourteen thousand—arrived safely in England.

In 1861, Bates married Sarah Ann Mason of Leicester. He eventually fathered three sons, two of whom later moved to New Zealand. After losing out to a less-qualified but well-connected individual for a position at the Zoological Department at the British Museum of Natural History, Bates spent two years writing his only full-length work, the two-volume book The Naturalist on the River Amazons: A Record of Adventures, Habits of Animals, Sketches of Brazilian and Indian Life, and Aspects of Nature under the Equator, during Eleven Years of Travel (1863). The memoir-travelogue was enthusiastically received, and English naturalist Charles Darwin, who proofed the original manuscript, wrote glowingly of the finished product. The book has been reprinted numerous times since its initial publication.

Three years after his return from the Amazon, Bates was named assistant secretary of the Royal Geographical Society. He remained in the post for the rest of his life, editing the printed Transactions of the society; overseeing the publication of several important books the society sponsored; and contributing chapters in his specialty to comprehensive scholarly reference works, including Insecta (1879–86, Volume V), Biologia Centrali-Americana: Insecta (1881–84, Volume I), and Insecta (1886–90, Volume II).

During the 1870s, Bates returned to his first love, the study of beetles, and as a consequence he sold much of his collection of butterflies and moths to the British naturalists Osbert Salvin (1835–98) and Frederick DuCane Godman (1834–1919), coauthors of the massive, multivolume Biologia Centrali-Americana. In 1871, Bates became a fellow of the prestigious Linnean Society of London. He served twice as the president of the Entomological Society of London, first from 1868 to 1869, and then from 1878 to 1879. The recipient of the Brazilian Order of the Rose from Emperor Pedro II, Bates was also elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1881.

Bates died of respiratory ailments shortly after his sixty-seventh birthday. His remaining butterflies were bequeathed to the British Museum. French entomologist Charles Oberthür (1845–1924) bought the bulk of Bates’s extensive beetle collection.

Impact

The prototype of the single-minded, net-wielding butterfly hunter, Bates was a significant if lesser-known member of a remarkable succession of nineteenth-century scientist-explorers who greatly contributed to human understanding of the natural world. Bates complemented, supplemented, or expanded upon the work of such contemporary figures as Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), Aimé Bonpland (1773–1858), Charles Lyell (1797–1875), Charles Darwin (1809–82), Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817–1911), Richard Spruce (1817–93), Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), Johann “Fritz” Müller (1821–97), William Henry Edwards (1822–1909), Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913), and Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95).

During more than a decade spent in Brazil in the mid-nineteenth century, Bates traveled—often alone, sometimes barefoot, after his shoes disintegrated in the tropical rainforest climate—over 1,400 miles along the Amazon River and its tributaries. He collected and preserved tens of thousands of indigenous animal species, including more than 50 different types of mammals, 360 birds, 140 reptiles, 120 fish, and 35 mollusks. His primary emphasis, however, was insects. Of the more than fourteen thousand varieties he brought back to England, over eight thousand had never been seen or classified before. Bates has been credited with identifying several new genera of Cicindelinae (tiger beetles), including Metaglymma, Pentacomia, and Pronyssa.

More than merely a dedicated collector, Bates was also a keen observer. His written works, though few in number, were of great importance in reinforcing the key concepts of Darwin’s theory of evolution. In particular, his discovery of an insect’s ability to develop adaptations solidified the ideas of natural selection and the survival of the fittest. This would come to be known as “Batesian mimicry.”

Bibliography

Bates, Henry Walter. The Naturalist on the River Amazons: A Record of Adventures, Habits of Animals, Sketches of Brazilian and Indian Life, and Aspects of Nature under the Equator, during Eleven Years of Travel. Oxford, Eng: Beaufoy, 2009. Print. A reprint of Bates’s 1863 narration of his Amazon River exploration and collection of insect species.

Crawforth, Anthony. The Butterfly Hunter: The Life of Henry Walter Bates. Buckingham, Eng.: U of Buckingham P, 2009. Print. Delves into Bates’s observational skills, his talents as a self-taught scientist, his writing abilities, and his philosophical approach to his subject matter.

Kricher, John. Tropical Ecology. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2011. Print. Presents an overview of the ecology and biodiversity of rainforests, including the effects of climate, the evolution of plant and animal physiology and behavior, and the impact of humans on the environment.

Purser, Bruce. Jungle Bugs: Masters of Camouflage and Mimicry. Somerville: Firefly, 2003. Print. Shows numerous examples from around the world of how insects have evolved the ability to hide or imitate other species to avoid predators.

Waldbauer, Gilbert. How Not to Be Eaten: The Insects Fight Back. Berkeley: U of California P, 2012. Print. Deals with the relationship between predator and prey, discussing the various survival mechanisms insects have developed over evolutionary history, including camouflage, mimicry, escape, and defense.