The Feather Thief Read online

  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 color 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, 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, rumors 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.

  I.

  DEAD BIRDS AND RICH MEN

  1

  THE TRIALS OF ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE

  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. 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. Thousands of miles of sea spread in every direction.

  Four years of being soaked to the bone beneath the ceaseless downpour of the Amazonian rain forest, 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 toward 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. 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 an 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 River. 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. 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—fossilized sixty-six million years ago—were revealed in the deep history of the earth. The precocious boy devoured introductory works on mechanics and optics and located the satellites of Jupiter through 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 industrialization and urbanization. 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. Embracing the biblical 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.

  Mosses and seaweeds were presse
d 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. Microscopes became more powerful and affordable, exacerbating the frenzy: what was once common and unremarkable to the naked eye—a backyard 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. Pteridomania followed, as the British obsessively uprooted ferns from every corner of the isles for their fern albums. There was status in owning something rare, and parlor 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.

  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. 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.” 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 cataloged 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 opinion that some definite results might be arrived at.”

  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 tantalizing 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.”

  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 traveled to the Bates estate in Leicester to learn how to shoot and skin birds.

  * * *

  • • •

  On April 20, 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. 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.”

  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 toward the Andes. Periodically, Wallace sent boxes of specimens downriver, intending for them to be shipped by intermediaries to London.

  In 1851 Wallace was stricken with yellow fever 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.” 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. 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 onto the Helen, which set sail on the twelfth of July, four years after he had first arrived in Brazil.

  * * *

  –

  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 ax before fleeing for fresh air.

  When the captain finally gave the order to abandon ship, the crew descended down 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. 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. 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. 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.”

  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 swoll
en enough to seal off the leaks. Captain Turner surveyed his charts. Under favorable 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!”

  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. 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.