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History of Ecological Sciences, part 65: Early Studies in Amazonia, Orellana/Carvajal to Roosevelt

2022; Ecological Society of America; Volume: 103; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1002/bes2.1957

2327-6096

Frank N. Egerton,

Amazonian Archaeology and Ethnohistory

Amazonia’s distinctiveness is widely recognized. The Amazon river carries the greatest volume of water in the world, and is also the longest, at 4345 miles long, vs. the Nile, at 4132 miles. The National Geographic Society has published two fine maps on it: Amazonia: A World Resource at Risk (1992) and Amazonia: the Human Impact (2015). The Smithsonian Institution has sponsored a fabulous Atlas of the Amazon (2003), with text by Michael Goulding, Ronaldo Barthem, and Efrem Ferreira, and maps by Roy Duenas. Some aspects of the history of its scientific study are already available. Robin Chazdon and T.C. Whitmore compiled a sourcebook, Foundations of Tropical Forest Biology (2002), with five of 56 selections from the period discussed below (only three being relevant to Amazonia). Some authors of books on Amazonia, such as English historian-geographer John Hemming (b. 1935), had first-hand knowledge of the setting of their studies. I have not been to Amazonia, but neither have historians of articles on ancient or medieval science been to ancient or medieval settings. The abundant literature on Amazonia, past and present, provides the foundation for this study. The Amazon River (or, at least, the mouth or delta) was first encountered by Europeans in 1500 by Vicente Yañez Pinzón, who had sailed with Columbus (Sterling et al. 1973:116–125). In 1533, Francisco de Orellana (1511–46), from Spain’s poor Extremadura, joined cousin Gonzalo Pizarro’s (1478–1541) army in Peru. In 1541, Pizzaro led an army east from Quito, Ecuador across the Andes in quest of gold and cinnamon (Levy 2011:xv–xvii). Orellana was late in leading his contingent across the Andes (Fig. 1), after being warned in Quito that he had too few men and provisions (Levy 2011:29). He soon discovered the wisdom of that advice, when he lost all his horses in a conflict with native peoples. He sent some men ahead to Pizarro’s army begging for provisions, which Pizarro sent. Having enough food to do so, Orellana and his men hastened to join Pizarro. Pizarro forged ahead, leaving behind Orellana’s contingent to rest from its ordeal. However, Pizarro’s army marched into thick forests, where his food supply became low, and he had a boat built and sent Orellana downriver in it to find more food. After reaching the end of the Coca River, where it flowed into the Napo River, Orellana’s men refused to return upstream; they continued down the Napo. Along the way, they heard of a tribe of women who fought to remain free. The river was afterward called “Amazon,” named for fighting female warriors reported in antiquity by Herodotus. Orellana’s expedition lacked food and robbed tribes on the banks, until they reached the Atlantic Ocean on 26 August 1542. Accompanying the expedition was Jesuit Gaspar de Carvajal (1504–84) as chaplain, who recorded their adventures in Relación del Nuevo Descubrimiento del famoso Río Grande, first published in 1895. They returned to Spain, and a second voyage was organized, leaving Spain on 11 May 1545, reaching the Amazon on 20 December. Orellana died during this exploration. An extract from Carvajal’s Relación was published in English in 1934 and is partly reprinted by von Hagen (1948:31–55). The natural history he recorded was on the habits of tribes they robbed. Almost a century later, 1637–38, Portuguese officer Pedro Teixeira took about 2000 men in 47 boats up the Amazon and later returned to the Atlantic coast. On his return voyage, lasting 10 months, he carried Jesuit missionary Cristobal de Acuña (1592-c. 1676), whose Nuevo Desubrimiento del Gran se las Amazonas (Madrid, 1641, French 1682, English 1698, 1942) was a “vivid, analytical account of the journey” (Sterling et al. 1973:118). He first described the Casiquiare Canal, linking the Amazon and Orinoco Rivers. French nobleman Charles-Marie de La Condamine (1701–74) (Fig. 2) studied philosophy and mathematics in the Jesuit Collège Louis-le-Grand in Paris and then joined the French army (von Hagen 1945, 1949, Laissus 1978). He saw action in a battle with Spain in 1719 and then decided to study science in Paris. Next, he sailed on a French naval vessel to the Levant in May 1731, including 5 months in Constantinople (later, Istanbul). Later, he published an article on his scientific observations on that voyage (La Condamine 1735). A few months later, he participated in a French expedition to Ecuador to test Newton’s hypothesis that the Earth bulges at the Equator and was flattened at the Poles. The expedition’s measurements, which were only completed in 1743, confirmed Newton’s hypothesis. He began his return journey to France by crossing the Andes and sailing the Amazon River to the Atlantic Ocean, reached in September. In February 1744, he reached Cayenne, capital of French Guiana. France was then fighting the War of Austrian Succession, and he had to wait 5 months for a Dutch ship that sailed to Amsterdam. He reached Paris in February 1745, with natural history specimens and detailed notes. He published his Journal of 10 years in South America in La Condamine (1745) (new edition, 1751, English translation, 1747). He published an abridged edition of the French edition in 1759. Von Hagen reprinted in English La Condamine’s accounts on rubber, quinine, and curare (1948:124–130). Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) and Aimé Bonpland (1773–1858) did not explore Amazonia, which, in 1799, was a Portuguese colony. They had Spanish passports, which allowed them to explore the Orinoco watershed (1799–1804), adjacent to Amazonia (von Hagen 1945, 1949, Egerton 2009, 2012:121–125). However, the publication of their findings was so important that potential Amazonia explorers found it very advantageous to study them. Chazdon and Whitmore’s Foundations (2002:15–21) included a selection from an English edition of Humboldt and Bonpland’s Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent, during the Years 1799–1804 (7 vols., 1818–29). Two following naturalist explorers were, like Humboldt, German. Johann Baptiste von Spix (1781–1826), from Middle Franconia, earned a doctorate in philosophy and an M.D. in 1806 (Sanders 1975, Juniper 2002:13–22). In 1808, Spix received a royal scholarship to go to Paris to study under the renowned zoologist and paleontologist Georges Cuvier. Afterward, Spix began publishing zoological works. In 1810, with support of Bavarian King Maximilian Joseph, he became a member of Bavaria’s Royal Academy of Sciences and put in charge of its natural history exhibits. Spix’s future companion was botanist Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius (1794–1868) (Fig. 3), from Erlangen. His father taught pharmacy at Erlangen University, and Carl earned his M.D. there in 1814 (Sanders 1974). Martius was as diligent as Spix, if not more so, in publishing botanical works. Both were members of an Austrian expedition to Brazil. They left Trieste on 2 April 1817 and returned to Munich in December 1820. They were the first Europeans allowed to travel up the Amazon (Hemming 2015:141–142). They brought back large collections of plants and animals to enrich Munich’s museum and herbarium. Spix published on Brazilian monkeys (1823), reptiles (1824, 1825), and birds (1824–25) (Wood 1931:579–580); Martius published on Brazilian plants (Pritzel 1871–77:205–206). They began writing a joint Reise in Brasilien in 3 volumes + atlas (1823, 28, 31), though Spix died after they published volume 1; Martius completed it. H.E. Lloyd translated volume 1 into English (2 vols., 1824, reprinted in 1981). Martius remained a productive scholar, completing a monograph on palms in 1850 and publication by him and about 60 other authors of Flora Brasiliensis (15 vols. published in 130 fascicles, 1840–1906). Spix had brought back to Munich a significant collection of fish, but he died before publishing on them. Martius, teaching at the University of Munich, was involved in his own Amazonian botanical collection, though also concerned with finding a suitable zoologist to study Spix’s fish collection. Swiss student Louis Agassiz (1807–73) received financial assistance to obtain a university education from a physician uncle, and he was under some pressure to study medicine (Irmscher 2013:42–51). Agassiz began his studies at the University of Zurich, later transferred to the University of Heidelberg, and finally to the University of Munich in 1827, where he was attracted to the courses of Martius. In 1828, Martius suggested to Agassiz that he write his doctoral dissertation (for an M.D.) on Spix’s fish. Agassiz did so, and he published his Selecta genera et species piscium on those fish in 2 volumes, with 97 hand-colored plates (1829–31) (Fig. 4). In 1831, Agassiz went to Paris to study under Cuvier, and did so until Cuvier died, apparently of cholera, on 13 May 1832. English amateur naturalist Charles Waterton (1782–1865) (Fig. 5) was iconoclastic, perhaps encouraged by his being a Roman Catholic in a Protestant nation (Waterton 1838, Moore 1922, Thomas 1976, Blackburn 1989, Edginton 1996, Hemming 2008:133–135). He was also from a landed gentry family and felt no pressure to conform. He was educated at Catholic Stonyhurst College, where he became the unofficial rat-catcher. In 1804, he sailed to Georgetown, British Guiana, to manage an uncle’s estates. In 1812, he began the first of four journeys, exploring the backcountry. In 1824, he read Alexander Wilson’s American Ornithology (1808–14); then, he visited the United States. Before that, in 1824, he also walked from Georgetown to Brazil. He was innovative in taxidermy and preserved many specimens after soaking them in a mercury solution. He taught this technique to one of his uncle’s slaves, John Edmonstone, who was later freed and practiced taxidermy in Edinburgh, where he taught it to a teenage Charles Darwin. In Amazonia, Waterton’s main interest was in birds, and his observations would fill his later memoir. His most bizarre antic was to have his men lasso a caiman, pull it up the bank, and then, he hopped onto its back for a very brief ride. He kept a sloth as a pet, and he recorded his observations on sloth behavior for his memoir. He observed native peoples using curare on their arrows, and he brought some of it back to the Royal Society of London, where he showed its anesthetic property, using a cat and a donkey. However, no one realized its medical significance. Two of his positive innovations were to turn his property into a wildlife sanctuary and to sue a nearby soap works for air pollution. He also published his memoirs, Wanderings in South America, the northwest of the United States, and the Antilles, in the Years 1812, 1816, and 1824 (1825), which appealed to teenagers Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. Like Humboldt, whose Personal Narrative of Travels Darwin would study, Darwin (1809–82) did not explore Amazonia, but his Journal of Researches (1839), on other South American regions, was too valuable a resource for later Amazonian explorers to ignore (Egerton 2010, 2012a: index). University graduate Darwin had been supported on his 5-year voyage around the World on British naval ship Beagle by his physician father. He was a diligent collector of specimens, which supported his published accounts. William Henry Edwards (1822–1909) is the first American in this survey (Mallis 1971:288–292, Sorensen 1995:index, Hemming 2015:index). He was from Hunter, north of New York City, founded by his family in 1813. His father was a successful businessman, who managed a large family-owned tannery and a large hemlock forest, from which tanbark was harvested. Edwards grew up beside that forest and developed a lifelong love of nature and natural history. He attended Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts, which included natural history in its offerings. He graduated in 1842 and was admitted to the New York bar in 1846, but never practiced law. He had an uncle who had been U.S. consul in Buenos Aires, and in 1846, they traveled up the Amazon, where Edwards pursued his hobby of studying and collecting butterflies. Afterward, he wrote A Voyage Up the River Amazon (London, 1847:220 pp.), an enthusiastic account of his experience. Two Londoners who read it were Wallace and Bates, who were persuaded by it to go there (Hemming 2015:25–26). Three English explorers of Amazonia were also inspired by Darwin’s Journal (1839): zoologists, Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913; Raby 1996 [in index], Smith 2004a), Henry Walter Bates (1825–92; Moon 1976, Raby 1996: index, Dickenson 2004), and botanist Richard Spruce (1817–93; Spruce 1908, Raby 1996:index, Seaward and FitzGerald 1996, Ayers 2015). All three are discussed in part 41 of this history (Egerton 2012b; also, 2012a:168–172). Previously, Barbara Beddall had compiled Wallace and Bates in the Tropics (1969), and since my 2012 essay appeared, historian-geographer John Hemming wrote an important book on their expeditions (2015). All three explorers lacked higher education, but they were educated enough to become professional collectors of specimens which they sold to institutions and private collectors. Beetle collectors Wallace and Bates had met in England in 1844 and became friends. In 1848, Wallace persuaded Bates to go with him to Amazonia as animal collectors (von Hagen 1948:213–263, Goodman 1972:284–295, Maslow 1996:87–120, Raby 1996:77–121, Rice 1999:260–289, McCalman 2009:221–250, Hemming 2015:20–27). They fortunately found an honest, efficient agent, Samuel Stevens, who received their specimens from Brazil and found buyers. They left Liverpool on 26 April and reached Pará (Belem) on 28 May. After 2 months, they sent Stevens 553 species of Lepidoptera, 450 of beetles, and 400 of other species, many undescribed (Wallace 1890:34) (Fig. 6). Spruce was a shy, introverted child, who became a plant collector focused upon the smallest land plants, mosses, and liverworts. Since he tried, and disliked teaching, Director William Hooker, Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew, sent him to collect plant specimens in the Pyrenees Mountains, between France and Spain, from April 1845 until early 1846 (Sandeman 1949, Desmond 1975, 1977:578, Boulger and Locke 2004, Hemming 2015:28–30, von Hagen 1945, 1949, Schultes 1996). Afterward, Spruce wrote a 114-page article, “The Musci and Hepaticae of the Pyrenees” which appeared in the Botanical Society of Edinburg’s Transactions (1850). Since Wallace and Bates wrote of collecting success to their correspondents, Hooker suggested in 1848 that Spruce collect plants in Amazonia. Botanist George Bentham volunteered to become Spruce’s agent to sell his shipments in England. Spruce was accompanied on his voyage by Robert King, his companion assistant, and Herbert Wallace, companion assistant for his older brother, Alfred (Hemming 2015:30, 75). Their ship reached Belém on 12 July 49. For almost 5 months after arriving, Wallace and Bates worked together. Both collected insects and vertebrates, but Wallace’s main interest was vertebrates, and Bates’ was insects. Bates was inclined to collect from one place longer than Wallace was. They decided each would go his own way. Since Spruce collected plants, he saw no reason to accompany either zoologist. However, he and Wallace became good friends. The three naturalists had no means of communicating in Amazonia but occasionally landed in a town at the same time. Spruce was as diligent a collector as these zoologists. However, the heavy Amazonian rains were a serious problem for him, interfering with both his collecting and his keeping specimens dry. The Amazon floods for several months each year, during which ground vegetation is inaccessible, though treetops become more accessible. Spruce was impressed by the largest river in the world running through the largest forest in the world (Hemming 2015:141). Although Martius had collected plants in Amazonia for almost 4 years during the 1820s, Spruce was the first botanist to collect almost everywhere he explored during 15 years, in Brazil, Ecuador, and Peru (Schultes 1970.) Wallace later commented (1852) that Spix had not noticed that monkeys on each side of the lower Amazon were different species. To which John Gray, keeper of zoology at the British Museum, retorted that Wallace had been guilty of the same error for the Rio Negro. In My Life (1905:I, 377), Wallace cited both corrections (Fig. 7). When Wallace left Barra (Manaus) on 31 August 1850, he traveled up Rio Negro to its Falls, reached on 19 October. He found it easy to procure fish there and drew 200 species. At San Carlos in February 1851, he watched native people pulverize roots of timbo (Paullini pinnate) and make poison to put in a stream. Fish floated to the surface and were caught (Wallace 1890:169). Bates saw other native peoples do likewise (Bates 1864:242–243). By April, Wallace had drawn and described 160 species from Rio Negro, and he estimated that its tributaries contained 500–600 species (Wallace 1890:187). Most such species also lived in the Amazon, now estimated to have 1000–3000 species (Géry 1984:353). Wallace noticed that Amazonian rivers were of three different colors: clear, if there was a rocky substrate; yellow, if there was a clay substrate; and black, if containing decaying vegetation (Wallace 1890:282–283). His distinctions are still considered valid and ecologically important (Sioli 1984, Goulding et al. 1996:5–7), and Goulding et al. included each kind of river in their Atlas, mapped by Duena (2003:42–44) (Fig. 8). By July 1852, after 4 years of collecting vertebrates, Wallace departed for London aboard the brig Helen, on 12 July (Wallace 1890:211). On 6 August, Helen burned in the Atlantic, and Wallace was only able to save his papers, including drawings; he lost his live and preserved animals. He and Helen’s crew were rescued on 15 August by an old ship that reached England on 1 October (Wallace 1890:271–277, 1905:I, 302–311). His London agent, Stevens, had insured his specimens, and he received £150 for his losses. That payment allowed him to live in London for 17 months, and he published two books in 1853: A narrative of travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro, with an account of the native tribes, and observations on the climate, geology, and natural history of the Amazon Valley; and a briefer Palm trees of the Amazon and their uses (Wallace 1853). Wallace became active in London natural history societies and became acquainted with London naturalists. However, he also realized he was not ready to settle down, and in March 1854, he sailed to Southeast Asia (Berry 2002). This zoologist’s Palm Trees discussed and illustrated 48 species, but his surviving notes on the lost specimens were incomplete, and he also relied upon memory. His discussions of species uses were more reliable than his botanical details. In reviewing it, William Hooker commented it was “more suited to the drawing room table than to the library of a botanist” (Hooker 1854, quoted from Hemming 2015:297). Darwin lamented that A Narrative of Travels did not provide more natural history details, but Hemming defended it as written for general readers. Wallace devoted 13 chapters (279 pages) to his travels and 4 chapters (82 pages) to geography, geology, vegetation, animals, and aborigines. Bates, who stayed in Amazonia for 11 years, discovered its spectacular insect fauna. He especially studied the saüba (leafcutter ant Oecodoma cephalotes) which was a “great scourge to Brazilians” (Bates 1864:11–18). It damaged foliage of cultivated trees. The saüba’s subterranean galleries were mounds 40 yards in circumference and 2 feet high. He thought they used leaves to thatch domes covering tunnel entrances from rain deluges. However, about 1870, Englishman Thomas Belt discovered in Nicaragua that the ants used leaves as compost, on which they grew their food, fungus Rhozites gonglyophora (Belt 1888 [1985]:71–84, Cutright 1940:30). Bates and Belt were presumably the first naturalists to describe these ants and their habits. In their book, The Leafcutter Ants (2011), Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson cited 3 early books, dated 1925, 1950, and 1956, but the great majority of their citations were to references from the 1980s to 2000s (Fig. 9). On 1 May 1850, Bates, in a borrowed boat with 10 paddlers, landed at a village, Ega (Tefé), off the Solimões River (the Brazilian name for a major tributary of the Amazon), where he resided for several years (Hemming 2015:118). It lay in the heart of the world’s richest ecosystem. I have just finished, after several reads, your Paper. In my opinion it is one of the most remarkable & admirable papers I ever read in my life. The mimetic cases are truly marvelous & you connect excellently a host of analogous facts. When we see leaf-eating insects green, and bark-feeders mottled grey: the alpine ptarmigan white in winter, the red grouse the color of heather, and the black-grouse that of peaty earth, we must believe that those tints are of service to these birds and insects in preserving them from danger (Fig. 10). When Bates had read Darwin’s Origin in 1859, he become a Darwinian. If he had realized that Darwin had published on protective coloration before he did, he would have acknowledged it. If Darwin had realized it, perhaps he would have complained about Bates’ lack of acknowledgment of his priority! Instead, Darwin worried that the full importance of Bates’ paper would be overlooked, and he therefore published a 5-page review of it (Darwin 1863). Right up to the last day of his years in Amazonia, Bates gathered “an uninterrupted succession of curious forms in the different classes of the animal kingdom, but especially insects.” (Bates 1863, quoted from Hemming 2015:128). Bates collected 14,712 animal species, over 8000 of which were new to science—a record that “has probably not been equaled by a field naturalist before or since” (Usinger 1962:vii; Moon 1976, Raffles 2002:136). Bates returned to London in 1859, and he began work on several papers and his book, The Naturalist on the River Amazons (1863). Chazdon and Whitmore included in their Foundations (2002:22–36) a selection from Bates’ The Naturalist (Fig. 11). Spruce lived alone and worked alone (Schultes 1970). However, he was not a hermit; he had a sense of humor, and he was companionable with all kinds of people. That situation began changing somewhat in mid-1859, when he received a letter from Britain’s Secretary of State for India, then a British colony, requesting that he send seeds and seedlings to India of Cinchona, Ecuador’s source for quinine. Natives had discovered this febrifuge and used it to reduce fevers for those sickened with malaria (Hemming 2015:282–293). When Spanish Jesuits and government representatives appeared, native residents applied it to them when stricken. Jesuits realized quinine could be a valuable source of income when sold in Europe at a high price. They, therefore, controlled its production from harvest as bark from Cinchona trees until the sale to Europeans. By the mid-1800s, Jesuits no longer had a monopoly on its preparation and sales; the government then maintained the monopoly, even during Ecuador’s civil war. Spruce’s task would, therefore, seem simple: get saplings and seed and send them to London. There were 10 known species of Cinchona, 4 of which had the active ingredient. Clement Markham in London was in charge of this project, and he organized 3 expeditions to obtain different species from different places in the western Andes. Spruce was in charge of an Ecuador expedition, Markham led an expedition to northern Peru, and English botanist George J. Pritchett was in charge ofthe third expedition to southern Peru (Markham 1862). Spruce expected no difficulties when he set out to find Cinchona trees, but when he went to areas where he expected to find them, he instead found only stumps and a few saplings. Native people, over the years, had been recruited for the Cinchona harvest and had cut down all those trees as the most convenient way to get the required bark. Spruce finally sought it on the slopes of Mount Chimborazo, Ecuador’s highest peak, which Humboldt had explored and illustrated. He found what he wanted and then had to pay property owners for the privilege of gathering plants and seeds. Markham sent a Kew gardener to assist Spruce, which was a wise move, since Spruce’s plants were the only ones to survive the trip to India. (Seeds sent by the other 2 expeditions were presumably viable when they arrived) (Fig. 12). When Spruce returned to England in May 1864, he was in poor health. Yet, he lived another 27 years. He published “Notes on Some Insect and Other Migrations Observed in Equatorial America” (1867), “Palmae Amazonicae” (1869), “Hepaticae Amazonicae et Andinae” (1884), and Spruce (1885), and so he had plenty of time to write a memoir on his South American experiences. However, he was too self-effacing to do so. Fortunately, he had a busy friend who finally found time to write it for him: Wallace. He gathered Spruce’s careful and extensive notes to produce in 1908 “a truly great tribute to Spruce” in 2 volumes. Even then, Spruce’s fame remained limited to botanists. His fame was given an important boost when Mark Seaward and Sylvia FitzGerald edited Richard Spruce (1817–1893): Botanist and Explorer (1996). Yet, its target audience was only botanists and historians of biology. A potentially important Amazon exploration occurred in 1865–66. Louis Agassiz, at Harvard University, had a wealthy Boston friend, banker Nathaniel Thayer II, who financed his expedition to the Amazon, which included four assistant naturalists from Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ), 6 Harvard students, and Agassiz’s wife, Elizabeth Cary Agassiz (1822–1907), who was the first president of Radcliffe College and author of two books on natural history (Lurie 1960: index, Lurie 1970, Irmscher 2013: index). This was a sequel to an expedition which Agassiz had led in summer 1848 to Lake Superior, in which some expedition members contributed chapters to a volume he edited and authored (Agassiz 1850, Lurie 1960: index, Egerton 2011:165–166, 2012a:150–151, 2018:80, 94, Irmscher 2013:95–98). Presumably, some assistant naturalists and Harvard students hoped to contribute to an Amazonia volume. However, after returning from Amazonia, Louis and Elizabeth Agassiz published A Journey in Brazil (1868, xix + 540 pages; Agassiz 1885:II, 625–644), and he resumed running MCZ. His naturalist assistants collected zoological specimens for the MCZ, and they may have published accounts of those specimens (Fig. 13). Canadian American Charles F. Hartt (1840–78) was born in Fredericton, New Brunswick, and graduated from Acadia College, Wolfville, Nova Scotia. He was a student assistant for Agassiz, 1861–64, served on New Brunswick Geological Survey for some months, then accompanied Agassiz to Brazil. He liked Brazil and spent 15 months exploring its coast. He was the founder and director of the Geology Section of the National Museum of Rio de Janeiro, 1866–67. In 1868, he accepted a position at Cornell University. He led four Morgan Expeditions to Brazil, 1870–78, dying of yellow fever on the last expedition. Accompanying Hartt on the 1870 expedition was naturalist Herbert H. Smith (1851–1919), from Manlius, New York, who had attended Cornell University, 1868–70 (Cattell 1910:436). Smith returned to Santarém, on the Amazon, 1874–76 and then spent another year exploring the Amazon and Tapajós Rivers. He worked for Scribner’s Magazine and wrote on Brazil. In 1880, he married fellow naturalist Amelia (Daisy) W. Woolworth. In 1880–86, they lived in Chapada dos Guimarães, collecting insects. His insect collections were bought by William Jacob Holland and Frederick DuCane Godman. Godman supported his collecting insects in Mexico in 1889, followed by the Royal Society of London hiring him to collect insects in West Indies, 1889–95. Smith then became Curator of the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburg. Nevertheless, the American Museum of Natural History hired him to collect insects in Columbia, 1898–1902. He remained in Pittsburg until 1910, when he became Curator of the Alabama Museum of Natural History. He died after being hit by a train. Daisy, his wife, then became acting curator of the Alabama Museum. Herbert H. Smith wrote 2 books: Brazil, the Amazons and the Coast (1879:664 pp.), and a posthumous Do Rio de Janeiro á Cuyabá de un Naturalsita (1922:376 pp.). His Brazil was similar to William Edwards’s Voyage up the Amazon (1847:220 pp.), but three times longer, and so having greater detail (Fig. 14). New Yorker Theodore Roosevelt (TR, 1858–1919) developed a strong interest in nature as a child, which lasted a lifetime (Brands 1997, Jeffers 2003, Lunde 2016). He graduated from Harvard College and became a Republican politician. In 1901, he began serving as U.S. Vice President under President William McKinley, who was shot on 6 September and died on 14 September. President Roosevelt was reelected in 1904, and in March 1909, when William Taft became president, Roosevelt’s tenure had been almost 8 years. In 1907, Catholic priest John Augustine Zahm had toured Amazonia and the Andes, and when he returned to the USA, he invited TR on another trip once he left office (Jeffers 2003:211–212). However, TR ran against Taft in 1912, and when Republicans stuck to Taft, TR ran as a third candidate, which enabled Democrat Woodrow Wilson to become president. Also in 1912, Father Zahm renewed his invitation to explore Amazonia, and the Historical and Geographical Society of Rio de Janeiro invited Roosevelt to come there in spring 1913 and deliver three lectures for $6000 in U.S. currency (Jeffers 2003:213–214). In 2013, TR’s son Kermit wrote him a letter, telling of a hunting trip he had taken to South America. The American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York recommended two veteran naturalists to take on Zahm’s expedition, whom TR welcomed. AMNH then became one sponsor of the expedition. Other passengers included Kermit and his mother, Edith. Their ship departed for Rio on 4 October. TR repeated his Rio lectures in other South American cities. Then, Brazilian army officer Colonel Candido Mariano de Salva Rondon led the expedition down an unexplored (by Europeans or North Americans) tributary in Amazonia (Brands 1997:738–743). He had first visited its headwaters in 1909. Their expedition had to travel in canoes. Roosevelt had an agreement with Scribner’s Magazine to send a series of articles to publish, which he would later collect as Through the Brazilian Wilderness (1914). Edith departed for home before they began. While TR was on his lecture tour, the AMNH naturalists had been left in Corumbá. When he retrieved them, they had already collected 800 birds and mammals for the AMNH (Jeffers 2003:221). As the expedition progressed, TR wrote about both details of travels and animals observed—for Scribner’s and his subsequent book. In one stretch, they encountered indigenous peoples who had not had missionaries or government intrude upon their lives. TR was as fascinated with them as with natural history, and he recorded their situation and customs (Millard 2005). Larger birds and mammals collected and served for 2 purposes: first as food and then as museum specimens. The expedition’s total specimens collected were over 2500 birds and nearly 500 mammals for the AMNH. The zoological and botanical results of the expedition were published in a number of contributions by American and Brazilian specialists. The trip encountered a number of difficulties, including large waterfalls and rapids, shortage of food, loss of canoes, and TR’s leg injury—which he shared with his Scribner’s readers. By the time TR returned to Washington, Europe was close to World War I. Kermit soon afterward married, but eventually, he became an alcoholic and committed suicide in 1943 (Jeffers 2003:279) (Fig. 15). Throughout the half-millennium covered in this survey, Amazonia had seemingly inexhaustible resources. For Europeans, however, a formidable challenge was convenient transportation. Yet, slow transportation provided opportunities to observe plants and animals that naturalists wanted to observe and collect. Publication of observations provided later naturalists with opportunity to know what had already been discovered, but dissemination of relevant literature was limited, and in practice later, naturalists went to Amazonia with incomplete awareness of that literature. That early picture of Amazonia was gradually transformed by the growth of Brazil’s population and the introduction of modern technology for resource extraction. Naturalists continued collecting observations and specimens, as the known compared with unknown remained small. However, naturalists necessarily took on a new responsibility, of reporting environmental changes that came with modern extraction of natural resources from Amazonia. This survey ends as the latter development began (Smith 2004b). I thank Professor Gregory C. Mayer, the University of Wisconsin-Parkside, for comments on a draft of this essay and Marybeth Zuhlke for assistance with illustrations.