In Darwin's Shadow: The Life and Science of Alfred Russel Wallace ...

66 / In Darwin’s Shadow
Cramp’d and confined in tightly-fitting clothes;
I’d be an Indian here, and live content
To fish, and hunt, and paddle my canoe,
And see my children grow, like young wild fawns,
In health of body and in peace of mind,
Rich without wealth, and happy without gold! 26
Wallace was no twenty-first-century politically correct liberal, but he was
far ahead of most of his contemporaries in showing respect for indigenous
peoples whose Otherness, for the most part, filled him with admiration. “They
were all going about their own work and pleasure which had nothing to do
with white man or their ways; they walked with the free step of the independent
forest-dweller,” he wrote in his narrative. The contrast with European
colonialists was especially striking to him: “I could not have believed that
there would be so much difference in the aspect of the same people in their
native state and when living under European supervision. The true denizen
of the Amazonian forests...isunique and not to be forgotten.” 27
In some cases such supervision included slavery, which Wallace railed
against even at this early stage of his career, appealing not to a moral argument,
but a pragmatic one grounded in what appears to be a nascent evolutionary
argument of what is natural and unnatural. In observing the slave
system on a large plantation on the lower Amazon, in which the slaves were
well kept by their owner, Wallace began by noting that his evaluation was of
slavery in “its most favourable light.” Despite such conditions in which families
were kept intact, the ill were treated medically, and working conditions
were tolerable, Wallace asks, “Can it be right to keep a number of our fellowcreatures
in a state of adult infancy, of unthinking childhood?” To achieve
maturity an individual, like a species, must exercise its full powers against
nature. “It is the responsibility and self-defence of manhood that calls forth
the highest powers and energies of our race. It is the struggle for existence,
the ‘battle for life,’ which exercises the moral faculties and calls forth the
latent sparks of genius. The hope of gain, the love of power, the desire of
fame and approbation, excite to noble deeds, and call into action all those
faculties which are the distinctive attributes of man.” Slavery, then, withholds
this natural evolution by keeping the individual in a state of perpetual immaturity.
“Childhood is the animal part of man’s existence, manhood the
intellectual; and when the weakness and imbecility of childhood remain, without
its simplicity and pureness, its grace and beauty, how degrading is the
spectacle! And this is the state of the slave when slavery is the best it can
be.” 28
These were some of Wallace’s earliest anthropological observations, out of
which he also branched off into and began yet another field of study—phi-