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The Englishman Henry W. Bates, fascinated by entomology since childhood. He
already a diehard beetle collector, became friends with Wallace while they
were both living in the English countryside and then set out with him to
become a professional collector in the Amazon in 1848. When Wallace returned to England and then went on to Indonesia, Bates stayed in the Amazon but continued to correspond, encouraging Wallace's developing theories on organic evolution.
He stayed for 11 years, collecting butterflies and other insects in the Amazon rain forest. Despite ill health and unimaginable difficulties, he collected specimens of more than 10,000 animal species, 8,000 of which were new to Western science.
Bates discovered that closely related species often were separated geographically by rivers, and later realized that this was evidence of geographical speciation.
His 1862
study of color patterns in butterflies established what is now called
Batesian mimicry, in which non-poisonous animals mimic the bright warning
colors of poisonous animals. Bates argued that this kind of mimicry could
not be produced by Lamarckian use-inheritance and was clear evidence of
selection. Elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1881.
Henry Walter Bates was born in 1825, the eldest of four sons of a hosier in Leicester. After winning prizes for Latin and Greek at school, he became interested in insects and at the age of 18 produced his first paper on beetles, which was published in The Zoologist. A Popular Miscellany of Natural History. After finishing his formal education in 1838, Bates worked as an apprentice in his father's business before transferring to Allsopp's Brewery in Burton-on-Trent.
In 1844 he started corresponding with Alfred Wallace, a fellow entomologist, who was two years older and whom he met by chance in the local library in Leicester, when Wallace was teaching at the Collegiate School there. In 1847 Bates visited Wallace at Neath in Wales. In the same year an American called W.H.Edwards published a brief account of his journeys in Brazil entitled A Voyage up the Amazon. This inspired them to travel themselves to South America to collect specimens and as Wallace told Bates in a letter " to solve the problem of the origin of the species."
The two arrived in Brazil in May 1848 on board the Mischief owned by an Englishman, who lived in Par (Belem). In August after several small expeditions around the city, they travelled up the Tocantins with the Canadian manager of a saw mill, who was searching for timber suitable for his mill. This expedition is described in the chapter entitled " The Tocantins and Cameta ".
After their return Bates made a trip alone to the coast of Carnapijo, a peninsula, which extends towards the island of Maraj, returning to Par in February 1849. By then he had collected some 1,200 species of insects as well as birds. In June he set out to explore the lower reaches of the Tocantins around Cameta, while Wallace explored the Guama and Caprim Rivers. After returning once again to Par he departed for the upper Amazon. He reached Manaus in January 1850 where he was joined by Wallace. Later that spring they separated again. Wallace explored the Rio Negro and Uapes River followed by the upper reaches of the Orinoco before returning home to England in 1852.
Bates meanwhile moved onto the upper Amazon and made the little town of Ega, now known as Tefe, his base for the next seven years. By the middle of 1851 he was feeling lonely and travelled back to Par, where he caught yellow fever. After recovering he arranged for his specimens,which were selling well in England, to be shipped, restocked and returned to Santarem.
He returned to Santarem in October 1852 and spent most of the following year around Villa Nova. Then he moved back to Ega, where he remained until 1857. Whilst on an excursion to S ão Paulo de Olivença on the Colombian border he had a severe fever, which left him with " shattered health and dampened enthusiasm."
In January 1858 he returned to Ega, where he remained for a year before departing for Par for the last time. In June 1859 he left Brazil to return to England via New York. He had been in Brazil for eleven years, mostly on his own, and collected 14,000 different insect species and more than 700 specimens of other animals. Before his visit to the upper Amazon little was known about its fauna apart from the specimens collected by Spix and Martius during their visit to Brazil between 1817 and 1820.
Bates went on to marry, father five children, write an account of his travels entitled The Naturalist on the Amazons, the first edition of which was published in 1863, be appointed Assistant Secretary of the Royal Geographic Society in 1864 for the remainder of his life and publish numerous papers and essay on insects. He died in 1892 aged 67 years.
P.S The The Naturalist on the Amazons was prefaced by "An Appreciation by Charles Darwin.