There is no shortage of books about Amazon exploration and natural history, but few are of this quality in both storytelling and scholarship. In Naturalists in Paradise: Wallace, Bates and Spruce in the Amazon, Amazon expert, author and former director of the Royal Geographical Society John Hemming (Tree of Rivers: The Story of the Amazon) tells the intertwined stories of three great British naturalists, key supporters of the theory of evolution, who studied the Amazon region between 1848 and 1862. Hemming writes with sympathetic enthusiasm for his predecessors and occasionally drops in a brief anecdote of his own.
Henry Walter Bates, Alfred Russel Wallace and Richard Spruce were all young and mostly self-taught scientists who had never traveled outside England. Bates became known for his entomological work, Wallace for a theory of evolution that spurred Darwin on and Spruce for cultivating a tree that produced anti-malarial quinine.
At a time when the Amazon was still mostly unknown to Europeans, these naturalists plunged into it fearlessly, in Spruce's case going as far as Peru, collecting shiploads of specimens and enjoying the generous hospitality of townspeople and Indians. Despite frequent and severe illnesses, misadventures and technical difficulties, they stressed the "beauty, healthiness and relative safety" of the tropical forests. In addition to identifying thousands of plant, insect and bird species, they took a strong interest in indigenous culture, languages, artifacts, hallucinogens and archeology, and documented it all. Their letters and journals certainly display their prejudices, but also their joyful and tireless curiosity. --Sara Catterall