ABSTRACT

W. H . HUDSON BETWEEN ART AND SCIENCE

by Joshua Imhoff

William Henry Hudson is known best as the author of romances set in South America, essays praising the English countryside, and as a devoted bird preservationist. Yet few realize that Hudson spent the first ten years of his adulthood as a bird collector and amateur scientist in the wilds of his homeland, Argentina. Using a biographical approach, this thesis focuses on Hudson’s early career as a naturalist. It will examine his role within the scientific community to contextualize the increased professionalization of science during the mid-nineteenth century, concentrating on the tension between observation- based naturalists and society-based professional scientists.

W. H. Hudson: Between Art and Science

A Thesis

Submitted to the

Faculty of Miami University

in partial fulfillment of

the requirements for the degree of

Masters of Arts

Department of History

by

Joshua L Imhoff

Miami University

Oxford, Ohio

2009

Advisor______Andrew Cayton

Reader______Kimberly Hamlin

Reader______Kevin Armitage

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Introduction 1

Chapter 2: Preparations 7

Chapter 3: Correspondence 16

Chapter 4: Hudson in London 31

Chapter 5: Conclusion 41

Bibliography 43

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Chapter 1: Introduction In 1870, the Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London published a letter by a young naturalist from Argentina, William Henry Hudson. The letter claimed that Charles Darwin, the most eminent naturalist of the age, misrepresented the habits of an Argentine woodpecker in his work The Origin of Species. Darwin wrote that the woodpecker never visited trees and had adapted to life on the treeless Pampas of Argentina. Hudson had contrary experiences with the bird; he had never observed it nest or forage on the ground, only in trees. Hudson stated either Darwin “had purposely wrested the truth” in order to prove his theory of evolution through natural selection, or, more likely in Hudson's mind, Darwin's misstatements on the woodpecker could “be attributed to carelessness.”1 Darwin rarely responded in print to criticisms of his theory but made an exception for the unknown critic from the Pampas in a letter of his own. He was “loath to think that there are many naturalists who, without any evidence, would accuse a fellow worker of telling a deliberate falsehood to prove his theory.” In the end, Hudson was rewarded with a brief footnote in the revised Origin of Species that noted Hudson’s own observations of the bird’s habit, but maintained that Darwin's statement nevertheless held and that the bird may have different habits in different regions.2 Today this encounter is largely unknown, even to those familiar with the history of nineteenth-century science. W. H. Hudson went on to gain literary recognition as the author of South American romances, most famously the novels The Purple Land (1885) and Green Mansions (1904). Late in his life, he wrote books on his rambles through the English countryside fostering the “back-to-nature” movement of the 1920s and 1930s and was a founding member of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. Most of his biographies rightly focus on these later achievements, but they ignore or gloss over his work as an amateur field naturalist working with professional scientific societies who felt able to challenge Darwin. This period of his life, roughly from 1866 to 1874, beginning

1 Hudson's original letter read, “...but as his “Researches”, written before the theory of Natural selection was concieved [sic]—abounds in similar misstatements, when treating of this country, it should rather, I think, be Attributed to carelessness.” The published letter was edited and toned down by the Secretary of the Zoological Society to read, “...and abounds in similar misstatements when treating of this country, the error must be attributed to other causes.” 2 Charles Darwin and Francis Darwin, The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Including an Autobiographical Chapter (New York: D. Appleton and Co, 1911), 135. 1 when Hudson was 25 and ending at the age of 33, is noteworthy not only because it gives a clearer picture of the author of British Birds. It offers a window into the world of science during a period of change, when natural history was fragmenting and the specific roles of ‘naturalist’ and ‘scientist’ were being defined. This thesis uses Hudson’s life to gain a better understanding of science during the tumultuous nineteenth century. Using Hudson as a guide, it examines the formation of the concepts of the ‘amateur’ and ‘professional’ scientist and discusses how Hudson interacted with others within the broader scientific discourse. More importantly, recognizing this division sheds light into how these two groups understood the natural world. Unlike other nature writers in the late nineteenth century, such as the American John Burroughs, Hudson was an early participant in professionalized science. His early letters to the Zoological Society of London were full of romantic depictions of birds and stand in stark contrast to the formulaic descriptions found among his scientific peers. From his mid-teens Hudson desired to put his deep curiosity and admiration of the natural world to practical work by becoming a naturalist. Coming of age in Argentina in the middle of the nineteenth century, however, denied Hudson the formal education that would gain him entry into the elite club of European scientific establishment. He did not attend grammar school or university, had no scientific training, and his knowledge of written English was inhibited by growing up in a Spanish-language society. Nevertheless, he was able to carve out a niche for himself as an expert on the habits of Argentine birds. Yet Hudson desired more; he did not want to be solely an accumulator of tidbits of information to be exported back to London. He wanted to be a full-fledged naturalist who could simultaneously wax poetically on the stunning beauty of birdsong while theorizing on its natural and scientific origin. After working for eight years as a foreign correspondent for the Zoological Society, Hudson left his homeland of Argentina for London in a bid to become a professional scientist. He brought with him a notebook with over twenty year’s worth of his personal observations of nature, hoping to continue writing for the Zoological Society and others. Despite the contacts he had made, notably Phillip Lutely Sclater, the long- standing secretary of the Zoological Society and expert on neotropical ornithology, and

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his election as a Corresponding Member of the Zoological Society shortly before his emigration, he was largely unsuccessful. That he would be removing himself from the wildlife of Argentina —and thus limiting his own utility—was not considered. In William Henry Hudson's time, the distinction between naturalist and scientist,3 and amateur and professional was not well-defined. Even today, these categories are somewhat indistinct and any definition that seeks to be too exact in its labeling is liable to become useless by its sheer specificity. The first dichotomy, that between naturalist and scientist, divides workers within the field as much by chronology as method. From the eighteenth century to the late nineteenth century, naturalists were generally in the majority, but after the mid-nineteenth century they found their role in the mainstream of science diminishing as the role of scientists increased. They were instrumental in gathering the raw data from the natural world and presenting it to the scientific community and the wider public. The other sort, those who became scientists, developed hypotheses and explanations using what would be standardized into the scientific method. They based their theories on either their own or other's work as a naturalist. Naturalists can be said to be employed in asking the question of what existed, while scientists were more concerned with why. These two groups were not wholly separate, either within scientific organizations or within the same person.4 Hudson belonged to the amateur and the naturalist sphere. Even late in life when his book Argentine Ornithology was accepted as the best work on the subject, he existed outside of the scientific establishment. His great talent was that of an observer; few could match him as a describer of nature. In his thirties, he bet everything on his ability to cross the boundaries between naturalist and scientist. His fellow workers chided him for presuming that he, an uneducated provincial, could have any real knowledge of birds, holding that his only contribution to the scientific enterprise was as a contributor of raw data. Marooned in London without the scientific support he thought he would find,

3 The term 'scientist' was coined by William Whewell in 1833 as a unifying term for all those who practice science. Prior to this, practitioners were known as 'men of science.' Whewell's neologism did not gain wide currency until the late nineteenth century. 4 David E. Allen, The Naturalist in Britain: A Social History (London: Penguin Books Ltd, 1976), 176- 178). 3

Hudson turned to literary and artistic devices to express himself. It was only late in life, after he became a successful novelist that he began again to write of birds and nature. In the eighty seven years since his death, a number of biographies of his life and analyses of his work have been published. Hudson was a private person, and in the last years of his life he burned many of his personal letters and destroyed the drafts of his books. He did not wish for any biographies to be written, preferring instead to let his work stand on its own. Two years after Hudson's death, Morley Roberts published W. H. Hudson, A Portrait.5 Roberts knew Hudson the longest of anyone, save Hudson's own wife. A Portrait focuses on Hudson's last forty years of life when Roberts knew him. With its descriptions of Hudson's daily personal life and their conversations on books, the biography is an invaluable resource for any one curious about the personal life of Hudson from the 1890s on. Its lack of anything but traces of Hudson's formative years in Argentina highlights a problem that all successive biographers had: nearly all early references to Hudson's life prior to living in London come from Hudson's published work, and at times he was less than forthcoming. Hudson had kept a journal since his teenage years and four years prior to his death he opened the pages and dove into his memory to produce a memoir of his childhood. Far Away and Long Ago was a literary success and has widely been taken as an accurate depiction by biographers. The majority of Hudson biographies treat Hudson as a literary figure, examining his life for an insight into novels. His early years in Argentina and work within the scientific community are seen as a prologue, something to be mentioned in the first chapter before moving on to the importance of the man.6 Late in his life Hudson wrote that if he had stayed in Argentina he “might have done so much, and then look back at...

5 Morley Roberts, W. H. Hudson: A Portrait (London: Eveleigh Nash & Grayson Ltd., 1924). 6 Perhaps the first biography that seriously examines Hudson's scientific career is Ruth Tomalin's W. H. Hudson: A Biography. Although the focus is on Hudson's literary output, she did consult his letters with the Smithsonian to firmly establish his activities between the ages of 20 and 32. Richard Haymaker's From Pampas to Hedgerows and Downs takes into account Hudson's role as a collector of birds and how that may have influenced his later affiliation with bird protection. The biography that comes closest to appreciating Hudson's role within science is Felipe Arocena's William Henry Hudson. Arocena's contends that Hudson's skills as a writer and observer came about due to the the overlapping of various cultures in his life. See: Felipe Arocena, William Henry Hudson: Life, Literature and Science (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2003); Ruth Tomalin, W.H. Hudson: A Biography (New York: Philosophical Library, 1954); Richard Haymaker, From Pampas to Hedgerows and Downs: A Study of W. H. Hudson (New York: Record Press, 1954). 4

the little I did, . . . I probably made choice of the wrong road of the two then open to me.”7 Why then did Hudson choose the wrong road and leave Argentina? The answer is tied to his love of nature and his ideas of the roads open to him. Had he known of the difficulties that awaited an unprepared man trying to enter the professionalized world of science he likely would have stayed in Argentina, continuing as a correspondent and perhaps playing a part in the scientific community that established itself in Buenos Aires in the mid-1880s. Understanding the changes within the discipline of ornithology during the mid- nineteenth century helps us better understand Hudson's difficulties in establishing himself as a scientist. Paul Farber has argued in The Emergence of Ornithology as a Scientific Discipline that ornithology differentiated itself from the older tradition of natural history in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. As European governments extended their control over more extra-European territory they encountered a great magnitude of previously unknown animal species. The sheer numbers of new species made it nearly impossible for one person to be an expert on anything but a small portion of total. Subsequently naturalists specialized, studying particular taxa of animals. Early ornithology developed out of this specialization by the early nineteenth century and for the first forty or fifty years was a science of classification.8 Prior to 1859, the classifying and naming of birds was important because it allowed ornithologists a way to communicate with one another about particular species. With the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859, classification took on a new urgency in determining the relatedness of various bird species and their geographical distribution. The raw material of this work was bird skins supplied by naturalists like Hudson. The fact that he struggled his entire life with the Latin-based binomial nomenclature in use to name species highlights the obstacles Hudson faced in ornithology. The scientific community also had a vested interest in promoting the esoteric classification system as it created a barrier to entry that limited the kind and number of that could enter the field, preserving their

7 W. H. Hudson, Birds of La Plata (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1920) , xiv. 8 Paul L. Farber, The Emergence of Ornithology as a Scientific Discipline: 1760-1850 (London: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1982), 30-45. 5

position of authority.9 Lynn Merrill argues in The Romance of Victorian Natural History that the division between natural history writers and science writers was fundamentally based on ambiguity over how best to study the natural world. While nature writers had an emotional and sympathetic appreciation for the world, scientists became more detached and objective in their descriptions of the natural world. The evocativeness and emotion of Victorian natural history allied it more closely to literature than to science. As opposed to the scientific literature, which used complex language designed for specialists, natural history publications were more accessible to the average reader. Magazines articles and books on natural history became a central part of Victorian culture in the 1880s and 1890s, coinciding with Hudson’s own transition away from science and into natural history literature.10 The history of William Henry Hudson’s career within the scientific establishment is a valuable look into the way science operated in the Atlantic World during the nineteenth century. Examining his career as a naturalist provides a better understanding of an entire category of amateurs who operated on the periphery of the scientific community. While not all of them became widely published authors, they were just as integral to the development of nineteenth century science. Examining Hudson in the context of the shifts in the nature of scientists and their work makes the causes of his movement both from Argentina to London and from science to literature clearer.

9 Farber, The Emergence of Ornithology, 81-85; Peter Bircham, A History of Ornithology (London: Collins, 2007), 216-225; Pierre Bourdieu, “The Peculiar History of Scientific Reason,” Sociological Forum Vol. 6, No. 1 (1991): 12-15. 10 Lynn L. Merrill, The Romance of Victorian Natural History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). 6

Chapter 2: Preparations William Henry Hudson was born in the province of Buenos Aires in 1841, four months after the death of his namesake, the American president William Henry Harrison. Both of his parents were recent immigrants to Argentina, having left New England in the 1830s, a few years after the United Kingdom recognized Argentina's sovereignty in 1825. The region was previously under the control of the Spanish Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, centered in the city of Buenos Aires. But during the turmoil of the Napoleonic Wars the French took power in Spain, leading to a power vacuum in the La Plata River region. On May 25, 1810, a junta formed in Buenos Aires, setting off a series of conflicts that contributed to the subsequent instability of the region. Juan Manuel de Rosas took control of Buenos Aires Province in 1829, becoming the national leader and ruling the country with dictatorial authority until his supporters turned on him, outing him from power in 1852, and forcing him to live the rest of his days exiled in England. The young Hudson came of age under Rosas's regime, and would follow the dictator's path to England. Hudson's parents left New England to earn a living amongst the gauchos in the 1830s, midway through the regime of Rosas. Daniel and Caroline Hudson were married for only a short time and without children when Daniel suffered a misfortune. While working at a Massachusetts brewery Daniel injured his back, and during his recovery, contracted tuberculosis. The mild climate of Argentina, it was thought, would speed his recovery, so the couple left their Quaker community in New England for Rosas’s Argentina. They spent some time in Buenos Aires before raising the funds to secure a small ranch a few miles outside of the city. By 1837, the couple had two young boys and a small ranch, Los Veinte-cinco Ombues (The Twenty-five Ombú Trees), named for the native trees surrounding the house. The ranch house was brick and situated on a slight promontory overlooking a small creek that emptied into the La Plata River some six miles away. To the front of the house a flat, grassy plain stretched to the horizon, allowing ample grazing for their sheep and cattle. At this ranch, William Henry Hudson was born on August 4, 1841, the was the third son and the fourth child of Daniel and Caroline Hudson’s six children. While William Henry only lived at Los Veinte-cinco Ombues for five years, his

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memories of the ranch in later life were still vivid. In his memoirs, written in his seventies, he states: The picture that most often presents itself is of the cattle coming home in the evening; the green quiet plain extending away from the gate to the horizon; the western sky flushed with sunset hues, and the herd of four or five hundred cattle trotting homewards with loud lowings and bellowings, raising a great cloud of dust with their hoofs, while behind gallop the herdsmen urging them on with wild cries. 11

This seventy-year-old memory from a time when the author must have been around age five presents a picture of a successful ranch with hundreds of head of cattle and a number of ranch hands. The truth, however, was that the ranch was never very successful. The family moved in 1846 when Hudson was five years old to a smaller ranch, Las Acacias, approximately seventy miles from the city of Buenos Aires. Here the family owned and operated a dry goods store in addition to ranching which proved more successful than the previous ranch. It was at Las Acacias where the young William Henry Hudson received the education that would both allow him to be published by a learned society in Europe and prevent him from being a professional scientist. Until his sixth birthday, William Henry and the rest of the children were in his words, “permitted to run absolutely wild.”12 This changed shortly after the family moved into Las Acacias. The new dwelling was closer to other English-speaking settlers, particularly those from the British Isles, for few Americans had followed the Hudson’s example and moved to Argentina. Here, in a community of fellow Anglophones, they hired a live-in tutor for their six children, Mr. Trigg. Trigg stayed for two years, much longer than his usual tenure with most families. William Henry suggests that Trigg’s stay with his family was due to the semi-intellectual milieu of the household: “he found himself in a very comfortable house, where there were books to read and people to converse with who were not quite like the rude sheep-and cattle-farmers he had been accustomed to live with.”13 After two years of faithful service to the family, teaching the

11 W. H. Hudson, Far Away and Long Ago: A History of My Early Life (New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1918), 10. 12 Hudson, Far Away and Long Ago, 25. 13 Hudson, Far Away and Long Ago, 27. 8 students simple mathematics and instructing them in reading and writing, Mr. Trigg was released when his temperament got the best of him. Caroline Hudson caught him taking a cattle-whip to the children for misbehaving, something that cut against her Quaker beliefs. The man's temper led her to fire him on the spot. Over the course of the next ten years the family employed only two other tutors for their six children, each lasting a considerably shorter time than Mr. Trigg. Iin total, their terms amounted to less than three years of formal education that William Henry Hudson would receive—less than three year’s worth. Hudson did not grow up in an educationally deprived household. His mother’s insistence that all her children should have at least the fundamentals of education set her apart from her neighbors, especially the native ones. Hudson recalls an old woman who owned a ranch nearby asking him, “if it was true that all us children, even the girls, when big enough were going to be taught to read the almanac.”14 Caroline was interested in her children learning more than just to read the almanac. Yet the only English-language school in the country, in Buenos Aires, was discounted by the Hudson family because it "was a nest of fevers and every sort of ailment incidental to boys herded together in an unhealthy boarding-school.”15 The family was unable to send their children abroad to be educated due to their continuing precarious grasp on economic solvency. So it was with a combination of private tutors and self instruction that the Hudson children were educated. Caroline Hudson brought with her from America an “entire collection of three or four hundred volumes” constituting the family library. The library was certainly out of place on the green pampas of Argentina. Hudson remarked that “it was always a puzzle to me how we came to have so many.”16 English neighbors, scattered across the Pampas more than a half day’s ride, were infamous among the household for borrowing books, and just as notorious for not returning them. But unlike the neighbors, and much to his mother’s disappointment, for much of his boyhood William Henry “had no inclination to do anything with books...books were lessons, therefore repellent, and that any one should

14 Hudson, Far Away and Long Ago, 134. 15 Hudson, Far Away and Long Ago, 250. 16 Hudson, Far Away and Long Ago, 298. 9

read a book for pleasure was inconceivable.”17 Books were of little interest to him; he preferred to spend his days in the wild Pampas, becoming familiar with the habits of its creatures and developing an almost mystical appreciation for it. It was his time spent out of doors, observing nature which would lay the foundations for his career as a naturalist. Hudson’s perpetual delight in nature was cultivated from a young age by his long excursions alone on the vast green Pampas. As a child as young as six William Henry reported that he could ride a pony bare-backed at full gallop as well as any Gaucho boy across the Pampas. He took great pains describing the playground of his youth, inviting the reader to mount an imaginary horse along with him to witness what he saw: We see all round us a flat land, its horizon a perfect ring of misty blue colour where the crystal-blue dome of the sky rests on the level green world. Green in late autumn, winter, and spring, or say from April to November, but not all like a green lawn or field: there were smooth areas where sheep had pastured, but the surface varied greatly and was mostly more or less rough. In places the land as far as one could see was covered with a dense growth of cardoon thistles, or wild artichoke, of a bluish or grey-green colour, while in other places the giant thistle flourished, a plant with big variegated green and white leaves, and standing when in flower six to ten feet high.18

The level green world stretched hundreds of miles to the west, ending further than a boy could hope to travel, when it met the foothills of the Andes Mountains. It was here that Hudson became intimately familiar with Argentine fauna. As the third youngest son, William Henry was not required to work on the ranch and was able to devote a significant amount of time wandering the plain on his own. During this time Hudson, gained an affinity for the nature that would last him all his days and ready him for a career as a naturalist. Hudson remembered his time alone on the Pampas fondly. He “rejoiced in [the] colours, scents, sounds, in taste and touch…” of the still wild land that surrounded him; the “mere feel of a blade of grass made [him] happy.”19 While all wild things including

17 Hudson, Far Away and Long Ago, 243. 18 W. H. Hudson, Far Away and Long Ago: A History of My Early Life (New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1918), 64. 19 W. H. Hudson, Far Away and Long Ago: A History of My Early Life (New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1918), 227. 10 serpents, spiders, and flowers mesmerized him, early in his life Hudson took a fondness to the birds of his country. His first encounter with a colony of flamingos, a flamboyant riverine bird, at the age of five was etched colorfully in his memory. Hudson was eager to observe all manner of birds. While he was still young, an immense flock of doves settled on the ground around the ranch to scavenge food, seemingly disinterested in his advance. Hudson was determined to catch one of the outwardly tame birds. After several attempts at grabbing a bird with the hands met with failure, William Henry asked an adult how one caught birds and was told that the only sure method was by putting salt on their tails. Armed with this knowledge and a pocket full of coarse salt, the future naturalist spent a full two hours lobbing salt at the doves, but the birds would not cooperate. It was only later that he discovered the truth—he had been tricked.20 The pastoral idyll of William Henry Hudson youth ended, as all childhoods must. A series of illnesses and the death of his beloved mother troubled him for four years starting at the age of fourteen in 1855. He was confronted with the harsh realities of life and forced to choose a direction, a purpose. Buenos Aires received its name, meaning “good air,” in 1536. By 1855 the air quality was anything but good in “the chief pestilential city of the globe,” which suffered numerous outbreaks of cholera and yellow fever.21 Hudson spent four weeks of autumn in the city marveling at the orange orchards and large markets where all manner of exotic birds were traded. He began to feel tired and languid and returned to the family ranch. He was found unconscious one night on the house’s porch; he had succumbed to typhus, a disease uncommon in Europe at the time but widespread throughout Latin America. Hudson's loving mother nursed him back to health for five silent weeks—for the fever had taken his power of speech. Winter’s cold subsided, and so too did Hudson’s fever. The illness affected Hudson dearly, but it allowed him to reflect on his life, to think about his future and what he wished to do with it. His eldest brother had recently decided to leave home to study mathematics abroad in the United States. Hudson looked to this brother to decide what he would like to do in the world. The answer came back: I want only to keep what I have; to rise each morning and look out on the

20 Hudson, Far Away and Long Ago, 79-82. 21 Hudson, Far Away and Long Ago, 289. 11

sky and the grassy dew-wet earth from day to day, from year to year. To watch every June and July for spring, to feel the same old sweet surprise and delight at the appearance of each familiar flower, every new-born insect, every bird returned once more from the north... To climb trees and put my hand down in the deep hot nest of the Bien-te-veo and feel the hot eggs—the five long pointed cream-coloured eggs with chocolate spots and splashes at the larger end. To lie on a grassy bank with the blue water between me and beds of tall bulrushes, listening to the mysterious sounds of the wind and of hidden rails and coots and courlans conversing together in strange human-like tones.22

Hudson was expressing his wish to continue to carry the essence of his childhood into his adulthood. This troubled him for the next few years of his life, for he saw his older brothers “putting away childish things as they grew up,” but he refused to give up his boyhood obsession with nature.23 Hudson was not aware of such a thing as field naturalists at this time, or he might have decided to develop the skills that would be helpful for such a vocation —keeping notes of observations, learning scientific names, and the art of sketching. Instead, he came to the idea of being a naturalist in a round about way. While recovering from his illness Hudson looked upon the family’s library as if for the first time. The books were old tomes; Hudson remarked that almost every book was at least a century old. An exception to this rule was a book on the habits of birds by Scottish naturalist James Rennie, published in 1835, that Hudson had long loved. But now he turned his eyes to other, neglected books. Starting with Charles Rollin’s Ancient History, Hudson was enamored by the stories of bygone civilizations—the Egyptians, Babylonians, Persians, and Greeks. This led him to a multi-volume History of Christianity and then to Carlyle’s French Revolution and finally to the first volumes of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall. These prosaic works planted in Hudson a fondness for reading. His new broad literary and intellectual perspective was useful when a family friend brought him a peculiar book by the eighteenth century Anglican priest Gilbert White. 24 White was born in Selborne, a small village in Hampshire, England, in 1730. As a

22 Hudson, Far Away and Long Ago, 293-294. 23 Hudson, Far Away and Long Ago, 298. 24 Hudson, Far Away and Long Ago, 298-300. 12

child he was as enthralled by nature as Hudson, spending days roaming the wilderness of southern and central England. Memorably, he planted an oak and ash tree in the family garden to commemorate his tenth birthday. At the age of 20, he was admitted to Oriel College, Oxford, as an undergraduate, staying to earn his master of arts. After serving as dean of Oriel and then a curate at a number of villages, he returned to Selborne in 1751 where he started performing the parochial offices. White’s fame is due to a single book, The Natural History of Selborne, published four years before his death. White was an avid observer of the natural world of his parish of Selborne; neither earthworm nor turtle escaped his notice. He was concerned about intimately knowing all the flora and fauna of Selborne, endeavoring to understand the connections present between various creatures and the yearly patterns they exhibited. He was helped in this task by the copious notes he made to the point where he was an expert of his microcosm. After making the acquaintance of two fellows of the Royal Society, Thomas Pennant and Daines Barrington, he began writing the series of letters to his two correspondents that would become The Natural History of Selborne. At the age of sixteen, while Hudson was again recovering from a near fatal illness, a merchant from Buenos Aires, an old family friend, brought a gift from Europe for William. While in a bookshop, the merchant happened across The Natural History of Selborne and decided that, "it was just the right thing to get for that bird-loving boy out on the pampas.”25 Hudson read it many times because “nothing so good of its kind had ever come” to him.26 The ideas presented by White stuck with him for a long time. Hudson’s own books have a scattering of references to White and Selborne. One chapter of Birds and Man details his pilgrimage to White’s parish where "every feature in the surrounding landscape, and every object, living or inanimate, and every sound, became associated” in Hudson’s mind with Gilbert White and his book.27 In the last work that Hudson wrote, the posthumous A Hind in Richmond Park, he states that a passage from The Natural History of Selborne comforted him in the knowledge that he was not alone in his deep appreciation of nature; another soul could appreciate the chirps of common birds

25 Hudson, Far Away and Long Ago, 323. 26 Hudson, Far Away and Long Ago, 323. 27 W. H. Hudson, Birds and Man (New York: Knopf, 1920), 228. 13 as deeply as him.28 Besides the interesting activities of the parish’s animal denizens, Hudson found within The Natural History of Selborne an answer to the question that continued to haunt him: how could he continue “to feel the same old sweet surprise and delight at the appearance of each familiar flower” and yet make a living? From White, Hudson learned that it was not enough to be a good observer, one also had to record what one saw. After reading White, Hudson became a prolific recorder of his observations—his way of “remembering not to forget.”29 In the following years he would not go anywhere without a journal, to the point where he could write in Nature in Downland that, “I did only that which it is customary for me to do in all places...to note down every interesting fact I came across in my field naturalist's journal."30 With his journal, Hudson’s time spent studying nature took on a new cause. His musings recorded, he could see more clearly what he knew and share his findings with others. Recording his observations also gave him much needed practice as a writer. He had written little prior to this time and only under the tutelage of his tutors. He now wrote on the topic most dear to his heart, the Argentine Pampas, his “parish of Selborne.”31 If reading Gilbert White’s The Natural History of Selborne gave Hudson a model to follow, it was another famed work that cemented his desire to become a naturalist. At the age of eighteen or nineteen Hudson's brother returned from his studies abroad bearing a book especially for Hudson, Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, making Hudson one of the first in Argentina to read this monumental book.32 Origin of Species was the culmination of Darwin's research, in which Latin America figured prominently. This book argued that species arose from other species through a process of natural selection by appealing to various observations that Darwin had made in Argentina, and elsewhere, many of which were familiar to Hudson as well. Regardless, Hudson, like others who read the work, was not persuaded initially by its thesis.

28 W. H. Hudson, A Hind in Richmond Park (New York: E.P. Dutton and Co., 1923), 151. 29 W. H. Hudson, The Book of a Naturalist (New York: George H. Doran Company , 1919), 249. 30 W. H. Hudson, Nature in Downland (Teddington, Middlesex: Echo Library, 2006), 3. 31 W. H. Hudson, The Naturalist in La Plata (London: J. M. Dent & Co, 1903), 4., 32 Thomas F. Glick, Miguel Angel Puig-Samper, and Rosaura Ruiz, The Reception of Darwinism in the Iberian World: Spain, Spanish America, and Brazil (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 2001), 2-3. 14

Hudson read The Origin of Species with a “hostile spirit,” finding a point of contention—“that no new species had ever been produced in that way.” His brother rebuked him, asking him to read it again, this time “as a naturalist.”33 For the next year this book weighed on Hudson's mind. He was unready to accept fully Darwin's conclusions, which for him meant abandoning religion. But he also could no longer look at nature without seeing the truth in the relatedness of species. Every animal was brought into the argument, and was a type, representing a group marked by a family likeness... the entire group in its turn related to another group, and to others, still further and further away, the likeness growing less and less. What explanation was possible but that of community of descent?34

By degrees he began to accept aspects of Darwinism, particularly that it was necessary to view species as related, that the ordering supplied by evolution was unparalleled and useful for his own purposes. He even wondered why the “almost self-evident truth” was not discovered until the middle of the nineteenth century. But Hudson never fully integrated Darwinism into his own outlook on life. He never fully accepted natural selection as the only possible explanation of change in species. And much of his later writing proves this point; constantly Hudson quibbles with Darwin's writing. Hudson ends his memoir of his early life by describing the above encounter with The Origin of Species. For Hudson this signaled the end of his childhood and the start of his adult life. As a rule Hudson seldom wrote about his private life and his memoir and a few other scattered scraps of writing buried in his various published books and personal letters are as much evidence of this time that he left. But it is clear that the image he paints of his childhood is that of one who was caught up with the wonder of nature. During the next phase of his life he positioned himself to act on that wonder. That the boy of nineteen who had apprehensions with The Origin of Species would find himself ten years later offering his criticisms to the man himself would seem inconceivable, yet it would come to pass.

33 Hudson, Far Away and Long Ago, 328. 34 Hudson, Far Away and Long Ago, 329. 15

Chapter 3: Correspondence By his early twenties, Hudson’s fondness for the natural world led him to pursue the career of a naturalist. Argentina, though not known for producing naturalists, attracted those from across Europe with a special interest in nature . The Spanish naturalist Félix de Azara had studied the region between Paraguay and Argentina in the late eighteenth century. Not long after him, the German Alexander von Humboldt walked the land, documenting its geological features. Perhaps the best known was the Englishman Charles Darwin who in the 1830s became familiar with Argentina during his famous voyage on the HMS Beagle, using the writings of his two predecessors as guides. In the 1860s, Dr. Burmeister, a well-published and respected German naturalist emigrated to Argentina to manage the provincial Museo Público. Burmeister became the first naturalist that Hudson knew personally. The relationship between the two men—the naturalist and the would-be-naturalist—was mutually beneficial. Burmeister was supplied with animal and geologic specimens for his museum and Hudson picked up the practical skills he needed. This experience, combined with the network of naturalists Burmeister put Hudson in touch with, allowed him to put his boyhood curiosity about nature to work in the cause of imperial science. The Museo Público was founded in 1812 during a tumultuous time in all of Latin America. The wars of independence shortly beforehand had disrupted established scientific networks of natural history put in place by Spain at the beginning of the eighteenth century. The newly independent liberal governments of South America founded many similar museums and other scientific projects in an effort to create and reinforce national identity. Argentina was no different. In the fifty years prior to Burrmeister's arrival the museum grew with no clear direction—collections of Gaucho artwork were displayed next to fossils of antediluvian beasts, while modern leather goods and the bones of prehistoric man co-mingled. Burmeister brought with him a unifying vision of what the museum could become: a gallery of the natural treasures of the new nation and a place to conduct scientific research, emulating the national museums of natural history prevalent in Europe.35 To this end, Burmeister collected in the museum

35 During this time Argentina was not formally a nation and the Museo Público de Buenos Aires was 16 examples of the country’s natural products, especially its fossils and minerals.36 In 1864 he started the Anales del Museo Publico de Buenos Aires to publicize the discoveries made by the museum. The Anales was similar to journals published by European museums.37 Dr. Hermann Burmeister (1807-1892), a disciple of Humboldt, became the director of the Museo Público in Buenos Aires in 1862 after his own expedition of discovery through Argentina and Brazil. Burmeister’s works on the geology and paleontology of Argentina were widely read in Europe. When he moved to Buenos Aires, he brought the scientific practices of his home continent with him to the museum, “making a scientific institution out of a curiosity cabinet.”38 To start with he donated much of the museum’s artistic and historical collection to other Argentine institutions, making space available for collections of natural history specimens. It was here, at the Museo Público with its new scientific mission, that Hudson was first exposed to the scientific establishment.39 Hudson approached Burmeister bearing a collection of bird skins in 1865. The twenty-four year old Hudson was interested in a position at the museum. While Burmeister was impressed with Hudson’s collection of bird skins and notes on their habits, he did not have sufficient funds to hire Hudson.40 Instead, Burmeister suggested that Hudson approach the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C. about becoming a collector for that museum. He also introduced Hudson to the American consul in Buenos Aires. The consul wrote to Dr. Spencer Fullerton Baird, the assistant secretary of the Smithsonian and in charge of explorations in North and South America, describing Hudson as “a sort of amateur ornithologist” who was recommended by Dr. Burmeister for the job of bird collector. Nine months later Hudson sent his first shipment of collected

funded by the province of Buenos Aires. In 1880, when Buenos Aires was made the nation’s capital the Museo Público was renamed the Museo Nacional de Buenos Aires. 36 Burmeister was really more of a 'geologist' than anything at heart. 37 Maria Margaret Lopes and Irina Podgorny, “The Shaping of Latin American Museums of Natural History, 1850-1990,” Osiris 15 (2000): 111-113. 38 Quoted in Jens Andermann, The Optic of the State: Visuality and Power in Argentina and Brazil. Illuminations (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007), 34. 39 Thomas Adam, Germany and the Americas Culture, Politics, and History, Transatlantic relations series, (Santa Barbara, Calif: ABC-CLIO, 2005), 196-197. 40 During this time the Museo Público had only three staff besides Burmeister. 17 bird specimens to Washington.41 Hudson sent his first bird specimens and entered the intercontinental trade of natural objects on September 5, 1866. With his shipment of preserved bird skins, he sent an accompanying letter to Dr. Baird, starting a correspondence with the Smithsonian that would last four years. He wrote that he had hoped to collect 200 or 300 specimens, but evidently his enthusiasm over his first position as a collector was greater than his ability to collect suitable specimens. The number of birds sent in this first shipment was not recorded. Still, Hudson wrote that he was confident he would be able to send more birds to the Smithsonian, and the following year he sent two hundred birds.42 This collection, one of the 163 collections that arrived at the Smithsonian in 1867, was one of the eight most important received in that year. According to the Smithsonian’s report for 1867, “an important Smithsonian exploration has been made in the Province of Buenos Ayres by Mr. W. H. Hudson, who transmitted large collections of birds.”43 Working for the Smithsonian as a collector was not lucrative. The sixty dollars the museum paid him per shipment barely covered his expenses. Unlike in more tropical regions of South America where many different species lived in close proximity, the vast expanse of Argentina meant that Hudson had to travel great distances to collect the various birds of the region, raising his expenses. Nevertheless, the cost of travel did not dissuade Hudson, for as he explained to Baird, “It is not from want of other employment I desire to collect but purely from a love of nature.”44 It is clear that for Hudson collecting was more of a pastime than an occupation, although he wanted to make money. During this time, he was staying at his brother’s ranch in Conchitas and it is likely that he worked for him when not collecting. He told Baird, “I would prefer collecting altogether could I get a living by it.”45 And later, “I still cherish the hope that I will soon be able to give my

41 Ruth Tomalin, W.H. Hudson: A Biography (New York: Philosophical Library, 1954), 50-52. 42 Hudson to Spencer F. Baird, Conchitas, September 5, 1866, in The Unpublished Letters of W.H. Hudson, the First Literary Environmentalist, 1841-1922, ed. Dennis Shrusball (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2006), 5-6. 43 Quoted in, Tomalin, W.H. Hudson, 54. 44 Hudson to Spencer F. Baird, Conchitas, September 5, 1866, in The Unpublished Letters of W.H. Hudson, 6. 45 Hudson to Baird, Conchitas, March 15, 1868, in The Unpublished Letters of W.H. Hudson, 10. 18

whole time to a pursuit that affords me so much pleasure.”46 To help make collecting profitable Hudson began to collect birds for several gentlemen in Buenos Aires. Hudson was able to travel further from his home district with their patronage. He could now afford to collect at Ensenada de Barragán, on the Atlantic coast forty kilometers south of Buenos Aires. The region's vast marshes were home to many species of birds new to Hudson; after four months around the bay collecting Hudson sold “a considerable number of duplicates of the more common species” in Buenos Aires and shipped about a hundred birds from this region to Washington. 47 William Henry Hudson acted as an intermediary between the untamed nature found in the Pampas and the scientific institutions developing in the scientific centers of the Americas. A new institution, the Smithsonian, was not yet the center of science in North America. That distinction belonged to the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, founded in 1812 to act as the scientific center of the young republic. During the latter half of the nineteenth century, the United States, as well as various Latin American countries, created national museums of natural history to act as the center of scientific research and collection in their territories. The Academy of Natural Sciences was interested in collecting and documenting the natural history of the North American continent, particularly the American West. The Smithsonian, while dedicated to this mission, also cast its gaze further a field, embracing both American continents. By centering American scientific understanding of Latin America in Washington, it was hoped a closer relationship would form between the two continents. While Hudson began collecting with an expert knowledge of the habits of birds, he had scant experience preserving them. The proper preservation of collected birds was of utmost importance to museums and scientific institutions. Key to the system of classification was the color of birds' plumage. Improperly cleansed or mounted birds risked becoming discolored during transit, making identification based on these characteristics extraordinarily difficult. Poorly mounted birds could not be displayed to the public in museums or private collections. The process of creating a bird skin in the nineteenth century was rather simple, but it took experience and skill to create a lifelike

46 Hudson to Baird, Conchitas, June 3, 1868, in The Unpublished Letters of W.H. Hudson, 12. 47 Hudson to Baird, Buenos Ayres, January 28, 1869, in The Unpublished Letters of W.H. Hudson, 13. 19

product. An incision was made starting at the breast down to the bird's legs. The wing and leg bones were snapped to allow the body to be extracted from the slit, while the inside of the bird rinsed with arsenical soap. Cotton padding replaced the flesh and the bird’s feathers were positioned to look as it did in life.48 Some of Hudson’s bird skins were still on display in the Smithsonian as late as the 1950s. Ruth Tomalin records an observer being able to distinguish Hudson’s birds due to their improper style; the legs were folded forward instead of backward as was standard.49 Hudson warned Baird in his first letter that he was unsure in what state the birds would reach Washington.50 By the time that he sent his second shipment, he was better pleased with his second shipment, but was still afraid that the smaller birds had an untidy appearance. It is likely that Hudson eventually learned of the proper technique of mounting bird skins and sharpened his skill. In his tenure as a collector he sent over 600 specimens to London and Washington and an untold number stayed within the country in the hands of private collectors. In 1867, Hudson integrated himself further into the international community of scientists. In that year the Smithsonian sent 265 of Hudson’s specimens to Dr. Phillip L. Sclater, the neotropical ornithology expert and secretary of the Zoological Society of London. Ninety-six species were represented in the collection, fourteen of which interested Sclater, for they were not included in Burmeister’s modern list of birds, but were a part of the earlier Spanish naturalist Azara’s list. Sclater and another fellow of the society published a report of the birds in the society’s Proceedings, with a few notes on the birds' coloration and size. Sclater was happy with the collection, stressing the importance that “this district should be thoroughly worked out, in order that the whole of Azara’s species may be reidentified.” He hoped “Mr. Hudson will continue his collections in this interesting locality, and that we may again have the pleasure of calling the Society’s attention to this subject.”51 Hudson’s role as a valuable member of the scientific community was established. The Zoological Society of London hoped to use Hudson to

48 Barbara and Richard Mearns, The Bird Collectors (San Diego, Calif: Academic Press, 1998), 45-56. 49 Tomalin, W.H. Hudson, 54. 50 Hudson to Spencer F. Baird, Conchitas, September 5, 1866, in The Unpublished Letters of W.H. Hudson, 5. 51 Phillip L. Sclater and Osbert Salvin, “List of Birds collected at Conchitas, Argentine Republic, by William H. Hudson” Proceedings of the Scientific Meetings of the Zoological Society of London (February 13 1868): 138. 20

catalog and document that the birds of Argentina. Hudson received the society’s report on his birds sometime in early 1869. In Aril of that year he wrote to Dr. Sclater about one specific bird, Lichinops perspicillatus, to correct a mistake he had made in labeling it. In the first report, Sclater wrote of the controversy surrounding the identification of this bird: Three specimens of this bird in black plumage, and two in the rufous plumage (L. erythropterus), which Mr. Darwin considers to be distinct species, but which is usually regarded as the same bird in female dress. Two of Mr. Hudson's black-plumaged birds are marked females; but so are also both his red-plumaged ones, so that we can offer no additional evidence upon this disputed point. We may remark that Azara (Apunt. ii. p. 250) described these two birds as sexes, although he had already described (l. c. p. 117) the female as a different species.52

The sexual dimorphism of the bird led naturalists to disagree on its proper classification. Some, such as Charles Darwin and Azara, concluded that the red and black-plumaged birds were two separate but closely related species. Hudson identified two of the black- colored birds as female, implying that the black and the red were two separate species. However, in Hudson’s letter, dated April 30, 1869, he corrects himself. Through “pure carelessness,” Hudson had “made so great a mistake as to mark as females two of the three black-plumaged Silver-bills." Hudson contradicted his labeling of the birds, confirming that the red-plumaged birds were indeed females of the same species and that all of the black-plumaged birds were the males. He knew this because he “watched them pairing and building their nests...though the country-people here regard them as of different species.” In Hudson’s first published writing, he “set at rest” a “much vexed question” of ornithology. Through his first-hand experience of living among the birds of the Pampas, Hudson resolved a point of contention among ornithologists. 53 In the following year, from December 1869 to September 1870, Hudson wrote a dozen more letters to Sclater detailing the Ornithology of Buenos Ayres Province. Sclater, as secretary of the Zoological Society and an expert on neotropical ornithology, personally edited these letters, read them aloud at the society’s meetings, and published

52 Ibid. 142. 53 W. H Hudson, “Letter from Mr. W. H. Hudson,” Proceedings of the Scientific Meetings of the Zoological Society of London (June 24, 1869): 432. 21

them in the Proceedings. The twelve letters correspond to roughly 36 pages and in these few pages of text Hudson’s voice as an expert observer becomes clear. Hudson originally proposed writing these letters in a private message to Sclater in September, 1869, stating, “I have from time to time made notes on the habits of the birds, etc, of the Pampas and would like much to know if they would be of any importance to naturalists.” 54 Sclater’s answer in the affirmative led to these twelve letters, which take the form of the musings of a naturalist. They adhere to no strict, formal style while describing the birds of the district around the city of Buenos Aires. Close care is given to the physical and behavioral descriptions of the various birds. While other contributors to the Proceedings during this time described the natural world in a not quite natural way (for example, discussing at length where in the hierarchy of binomial nomenclature certain creatures belonged), Hudson wrote about the behaviors of the birds he observed, and how these behaviors related to aspects of the animal’s surroundings. The inclusion of such data was rare among the Proceedings, owing to the fact that ornithology at the time was concerned with physical attributes of birds, less with their habits, and even less with their music. One example shows how unusual Hudson’s style of writing was when compared to the standard fare of the Proceedings. Describing the Glossy Ibis’s plumage in flight Hudson writes, “Now soaring high in the air, displaying the deep chestnut hue of their breasts, now descending with a graceful curve towards the earth, as if to exhibit the beautiful metallic green of their plumage.”55 Compared with Sclater’s description of a similar bird, the Ringed Teal—“This sex differs from the male in the absence of the dark chestnut on the scapularies, which are of a dull brown, in the brown head and nape, in the absence of the black collar, and in the pure white throat and irregular superciliary stripe”— Hudson’s description is poetry.56 What can account for the vast differences in style? Hudson had the advantage of observing the living bird, not the stiff bird skins Sclater examined in London; Hudson was vividly describing a living animal while Sclater

54 W. H. Hudson, Letters on the Ornithology of Buenos Ayres, ed. David R Dewar (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1951), xiii-xiv. 55 W. H. Hudson, “Letter from Mr. W. H. Hudson,” Proceedings of the Scientific Meetings of the Zoological Society of London (December 6, 1870): 800. 56 P. L. Sclater and Osbert Salvin, “Third List of Birds Collected at Conchitas, Argentine Republic,” Proceedings of the Scientific Meetings of the Zoological Society of London (Dec. 9, 1869): 635. 22 was merely classifying a dead specimen. That Hudson’s writing makes the birds he describes come alive in vibrant colors and actions is undeniable. The birds thus detailed are very different from the stiff bird skins Sclater examined at the Zoological Society of London. There is no clear inclination of how the Society’s members reacted when Hudson’s letters were read aloud at meetings. Hudson, the amateur, wrote of birds in a way that professional fellows of the society did not. Established, professional science saw fewer and fewer contributions from writers such as Hudson as the nineteenth century went on. Hudson, with his skills as a keen observer of nature and his personal connection to a land not fully documented by science, continued in the Romantic tradition of the nature writing he had read since a boy. His letters, while displaying his skill as an observer of nature, also demonstrated a shortcoming of his self-education. They show a man not completely at home writing in English, as the common misspellings and grammatical oddities demonstrate. This is not to say that he was more comfortable with Spanish. As mentioned above, his family spoke English at home and the considerable library his mother brought from the United States was almost entirely in English. Rather, it is safer to say that during his first thirty years of life, as a boy, a rancher, and a sheep-shearer, he had little practice writing but for his own eyes. This contrasts greatly with other contributors to the Proceedings. Sclater himself enrolled at Winchester College at the age of thirteen; it is likely that the education he received before then was still greater than all that Hudson had received at thirty. It was Sclater to whom Hudson’s letters were addressed and it was Sclater who edited them before reading them to the society and publishing them in the Proceedings. Sclater removed the countless commas that Hudson used haphazardly and added letters to the words missing them. Importantly he left out key sentences in Hudson’s letters, most notably in the third letter where Sclater toned down the vitriol Hudson directed toward Darwin, discussed below. Between March 17, 1870 and March 22, 1870, word reached Hudson that the four letters he sent to the Zoological Society were being published. With this news, he took special care to improve his writing. Dewar notes that the “capitals are endowed with elegant flourishes, and the punctuation and spelling have improved.”57

57 W. H. Hudson, Letters on the Ornithology of Buenos Ayres, ed. David R. Dewar (Ithaca, NY: Cornell 23

Around this time, Hudson was awarded the title of Corresponding Member of the Zoological Society (C.M.Z.S) and in his subsequent publications, both articles and books, this title was affixed to the end of his name. It is interesting that the first letter of his as a corresponding member was a letter that contained a particularly fierce attack on Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution as presented in On the Origin of Species. Hudson was one of the first in Argentina to read Darwin’s influential book at the age of 18.58 While initially rejecting the doctrine of evolution out of hand, Hudson slowly came to accept portions of the theory, while not fully considering himself an evolutionist. Hudson wrote in reference to Darwin that “however close an observer a naturalist may be, it is not possible for him to know much of a species from seeing perhaps one or two individuals in the course of a rapid ride across the pampas.”59 Hudson, of course, knew the Pampas of Argentina well. His American parents had settled on their ranch outside Buenos Aires at the same time Darwin was first observing the Pampas woodpecker. With nearly thirty years of observation of Pampan wildlife, Hudson was more than confident that Darwin had mischaracterized the habits of the woodpecker and that his own observations were more legitimate than Darwin's. Hudson attacked The Origin of Species not on the merits of the theory of evolution as others had done, but on Darwin’s competence as an observer of nature. In constructing this minor criticism of Darwin, Hudson earned the distinction of being only one of the few critics to whom Darwin replied to in print and gained a mention in the second edition of The Origin of Species. Darwin claimed that the Colaptes agricola, commonly called the Carpintero in Argentina, was a woodpecker that “never climbs trees”; it had adapted through natural selection to forage grubs from the ground and to build its nest on the side of hills in the nearly treeless Pampas. Hudson used his own observations of the Carpintero against “the erroneous account of its habits in Mr.

University Press, 1951), 34. 58 Thomas F. Glick, Miguel Angel Puig-Samper, and Rosaura Ruiz, The Reception of Darwinism in the Iberian World: Spain, Spanish America, and Brazil, Boston studies in the philosophy of science, v. 221 (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 2001), 2. 59 W. H. Hudson, “Letter from Mr. W. H. Hudson,” Proceedings of the Scientific Meetings of the Zoological Society of London (March 24, 1870): 158. 24

Darwin’s work.”60 Hudson noted that the Pampas was not a treeless plain, but supported stands of trees along the River Plate and was dotted by the Ombú tree, which Hudson described as the bird’s favorite place to rest. Hudson goes on to claim that the bird lacks the features of the other birds equipped to live on the Pampas without care of trees: the Carpintero “never roosts on the ground... never builds a nest or burrows in banks… nor ventures onto those vast and treeless plains that border on its habitat.”61 In this manner Hudson challenged Darwin’s argument of evolution through natural selection based on his own observations that contradicted those of Darwin. Hudson’s disapproval was answered seven months later by Darwin himself. Darwin noted that Hudson has a geographically limited view of the woodpecker and that it may behave as Hudson proclaims in some regions but over most of its range it lives primarily on the ground. Darwin solidified his claims by citing the eighteenth century Spanish naturalist Félix de Azara as coming to the same conclusions about the bird.62 With this, the matter was closed in the pages of the Proceedings. The manuscript for Hudson's eighth letter, printed in the Proceedings late in 1870 however, contain a renewed attack on Darwin over the same territory that was edited out for publication. Outside the Proceedings, little record of this disagreement exists. The sixth edition of Origin of Species, published three years after the original letter, is the only time this issue is brought to a wider audience. Now the passage which so troubled Hudson had the ground-living habits of the woodpecker buttressed with the observations of other naturalists, while stating that in some habitats it can be seen living in trees.63 Hudson's mistrust of Darwin's observation was only the beginning of a larger mistrust harbored by Hudson of scientists in general, that would grow as Hudson came into contact with them in London. Later in the revised edition of Origin of Species, when discussing Argentine cowbirds, Darwin refers to Hudson as “an excellent observer,” a

60 Ibid., 158. 61 Ibid., 160. 62 Charles Darwin, “Note on the Habits of the Pampas Woodpecker (Colaptes campestris),” Proceedings of the Scientific Meetings of the Zoological Society of London (November 1, 1870): 705-706. 63 Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection: or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (London: John Murray, 1873), 142. 25

phrase he uses frequently throughout the book.64 Darwin's description of Hudson as an excellent observer is apt. Hudson was an observer—but merely an observer who sought to be more. He wanted to theorize on the origin of birdsong, to discover unknown species, and discover why birds migrate. The transformation of Hudson from a mere observer and recorder to something more was a slow and haphazard process and in the end not completely as Hudson envisioned. The obstacles put in his path were numerous. His education was dwarfed by those he sought to emulate; he was without any great wealth or means; and his isolation in Argentina, away from his cohorts at the Zoological Society, prevented him from the comradeship that develops when people work close together. Hudson's mistrust of Darwin's observation was only the beginning of a larger mistrust harbored by Hudson of scientists in general, that would grow as Hudson came into contact with them in London. One of Hudson’s greatest ambitions as a collector was to discover some unknown species, a bird that had escaped the gaze of the naturalists before him. Almost as soon as Hudson started collecting, he thought that he had found two unknown species. In his third letter to Dr. Baird, Hudson singles out one of his collected birds, a blackbird, to be closely examined: “It is not a rare bird, but I have always known it to be a distinct species, having observed its habits, but thinking others might have confused it with the common Blackbird.”65 Here Hudson sets himself apart from previous observers of the bird; others might have seen it but assumed it was a common bird. Hudson makes the point that he always knew it as different because he has paid close attention to its habits. Even Burmeister at first “persisted that it was the common species, but soon discovered his mistake.”66 The following year Hudson still had this blackbird on his mind. He wrote, “I was much disappointed at their [sic] being no mention made in your letter of the black- birds [sic] I said I thought [were] a new species, and presume you had written about them in the letter you say you sent me dated Nov. 9 which I have not received.”67 This letter contains the last mention of Hudson’s blackbird. It is likely that the authorities of the

64 Darwin, The Origin of Species, 215. 65 Hudson to Spencer F. Baird, Conchitas, June 12, 1867, in The Unpublished Letters of W.H. Hudson, 8. 66 Hudson to Spencer F. Baird, Conchitas, June 12, 1867, in The Unpublished Letters of W.H. Hudson, 8. 67 Hudson to Baird, Conchitas, March 15, 1868, in The Unpublished Letters of W.H. Hudson, 10. 26

Smithsonian responded unfavorably to Hudson’s claim because the blackbird was not new to science. Hudson had not discovered a new species. This blackbird was not Hudson’s only bid at uncovering a new species. In the paragraph, following the first mention of the blackbird Hudson writes of “a strange and beautiful hummingbird that he [Burmeister] tells me is not known to science. I have only seen it three or four times during my lifetime and am positive it is the smartest of the ‘jewls [sic] of ornithology.’”68 Hudson was not able to secure a specimen of this hummingbird and it is unknown if it truly was a jewel of ornithology or a previously described bird. In 1870, when the house Hudson lived in flooded, he wrote that the waters claimed his entire collection of birds: “Some of them never before obtained here, and others probably unknown to naturalists.”69 Whether any of those lost birds were genuinely unknown, or if it was an exaggeration, will never be known, but during this time, Hudson was never credited with discovering any new species. This failure did not tarnish his reputation as a collector though; he continued to provide bird specimens and accounts of the still-living birds in their natural habitat. Hudson’s obsession with finding new species of animals was common among bird collectors during the time. Discovering an unknown species meant prestige and the right to name the species. However, for Hudson his desire likely went beyond the notoriety he would gain; he was equally interested in gazing upon a bird few others had. In later years, when Hudson was far from his Argentine home he reflected on his desire to find an elusive bird during his twelve month expedition to Patagonia: It was also my hope to find some new species, some bird as beautiful, let us say, as the wryneck or wheatear, and as old on the earth, but which had never been named and never ever seen by any appreciative human eye. I do not know how it is with other ornithologists at the time when their enthusiasm is greatest; of myself I can say that my dreams by night were often of some new bird, vividly seen; and such dreams were always beautiful to me, and a grief to wake from; yet the dream-bird often as not appeared in a modest gray coloring, or plain brown, or some other equally sober tint.70

68 Hudson to Spencer F. Baird, Conchitas, June 12, 1867, in The Unpublished Letters of W.H. Hudson, 8. 69 Hudson to P. L. Sclater, Buenos Ayres, April 11, 1870, in Letters on the Ornithology of Buenos Ayres, 40. 70 W.H. Hudson, Idle Days in Patagonia (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1917), 5-6. 27

Hudson wanted deeply to find his bird unknown to ornithology, to look upon it with the appreciative eyes of a naturalist and to give it a name. Interestingly it was not brilliant colors or wonderfully strange plumage of his dream-bird that stirred emotion in him. While the bird was modest and sober, for Hudson the true beauty came from its uniqueness, and the fact that he would be able to describe something new. It was during Hudson’s trip to Patagonia, that cold, southern extreme of Argentina, that his dream of finding a ‘jewl of ornithology’ bore fruit. Hudson, having traveled many times to the far edges of his province of Buenos Aires, sought his unknown bird in unknown lands. Dr. Burmeister, at the end of 1868, selected Hudson for the post of collector and naturalist for an expedition to explore the passes of the Andes west of the country supported by the Argentine government. The expedition came at a time when people living in Buenos Aires saw the Andean region of Argentina as untamed and wild. The integration of the region into the newly forming federated nation was not yet completed. It was common enough for naturalists to accompany such government expeditions, to catalog nature’s bounty so that the state could better make use of its resources. However, the Argentine government itself was resource strapped and could not pay for Hudson or any collector to travel, instead offering only “part of the specimens obtained in payment for the other part.”71 Hudson instead traveled on his own, through unknown funding, to Patagonia the following year. Hudson boarded a ship from Buenos Aires and traveled the Atlantic Coast to the Rio Negro, entering Patagonia in the summer of 1870-1871.72 He planned to travel nonstop for twelve months, documenting the avifauna of the cool, dry desert distinct from that of his boyhood Pampas and also the summer breeding grounds of those migratory birds he only knew as winter guests. A gunshot wound held his ambition in check. A short time after arrival a fellow traveler’s pistol went off in Hudson’s hand, and a bullet lodged in his knee. This accident kept the naturalist immobile for at least two months. By

71 Hudson to Spencer F. Baird, Conchitas, January 28, 1869, in The Unpublished Letters of W.H. Hudson, 13. 72 The Southern summer of December-March. Hudson’s writings in Idle Days in Patagonia do not clearly document the exact chronology of his expedition to Patagonia, but he arrived around December and states that he spent twelve months there. 28

February, Hudson managed to leave the mission house where he was recuperating but the pain made him rely on his horse more than previously and made travel slow. The resilient Hudson, however, stayed in Patagonia the remainder of his twelve months collecting 48 species of Patagonian birds.73 Just as Magellan followed the footprints of giants in Patagonia, Hudson found the footprints of the only two other naturalists who had previously collected specimens in Patagonia, Alcide d'Orbigny in 1829 and Charles Darwin four years later. Hudson’s goal of discovering an unknown bird was nearly hopeless. “One or other of his predecessors were fortunate enough to obtain specimens of nearly all the birds peculiar to the district,”74 save one, Cnipolegus hudsoni (Hudson’s Black-tyrant).75 Hudson sent four males of this bird which was named “after its energetic discoverer.”76 In Argentine Ornithology Hudson writes of his bird namesake, “All of the movements of the bird are eccentric to a degree.”77 The same could be said of Hudson. In April of 187478 Hudson boarded a small steamship in Buenos Aires, never to return. He disembarked in Southampton79 less than a month later before he made his way to his new home, London. Hudson was drawn to the British capital, undoubtedly, by the prospect of working more closely with Sclater and other Fellows of the Zoological Society. But removed from Argentina, his utility decreased. No longer could he be a corresponding member, sending specimens and tales of remote creatures. Whatever his plans were upon reaching London they did not turn out well, because Hudson soon became penniless. A few more letters were published in the Proceedings after his arrival, but separated from

73 Hudson, Idle Days in Patagonia, 22-30. 74 Phillip L. Sclater, in “On the Birds of the Rio Negro of Patagonia. By W. H. Hudson, C.M.Z.S. With Notes by P. L. Sclater, M.A., Ph.D., F.R.S., Secretary to the Society,” Proceedings of the Scientific Meetings of the Zoological Society of London (April 16, 1872): 549. 75 Now given the name Knipolegus hudsoni 76 Phillip L. Sclater, in “On the Birds of the Rio Negro of Patagonia. By W. H. Hudson, C.M.Z.S. With Notes by P. L. Sclater, M.A., Ph.D., F.R.S., Secretary to the Society,” Proceedings of the Scientific Meetings of the Zoological Society of London (April 16, 1872): 542. 77 Philip L. Sclater and W. H. Hudson, Argentine Ornithology: A Descriptive Catalogue of the Birds of the Argentine Republic (London: R.H. Porter, 1888), 127. 78 The Encyclopædia Britannica and a few other references state that he emigrated to England in 1869. This date is patently wrong as letters from Hudson during this time were addressed from Buenos Aires and his diary of the voyage is clearly marked 1874. 79 It is interesting that Rosas, the deposed Argentine leader was living here at the time. Hudson’s father was a supporter of Rosas and knew one of his younger brothers. Hudson makes no comment about Rosas in his travel diary; it is not clear if he knew Rosas was living in Southampton 29 their fountainhead, they quickly dried up.

30

Chapter 4: Hudson in London On the first of April, 1874, William Henry Hudson boarded the 1,500 ton steamship that would forever separate him from the land of his youth. He had spent much of his life wandering the green Pampas observing its wildlife. For the past six years he was a collector of birds and correspondent to scientific societies in Washington and London. But he chose to leave Argentina for good so that he could be closer to his fellow scientific workers. Financially he could not afford to stay in Argentina and still collect birds; the wages paid by the Smithsonian and the Zoological Society barely met his expenses. Bouts of ill-health, which plagued him since his teen-aged years, made it impossible to start his own ranch as two of his brothers did. So as winter neared he packed his belongings, including his many field naturalist's journals, and embarked on a month's long journey to England. Hudson first set foot to England in May of 1874 in Southampton. His ultimate destination was London, where the Zoological Society and his only contacts were, but he did not proceed there directly. He tarried for a while in the country surrounding Southampton. He was impressed with Southampton and fascinated by the birds he observed, birds that he had only read about. He wrote home to his brother: Compared even with this town of 55,000 souls, Buenos Ayres now seems to me a poor, filthy rough, ugly disagreeable city. Southampton is a beautiful place: wide clean macadam streets, grand old elm and horse- chestnut trees—parks covered with velvety turf—Gothic churches and ancient stone buildings, covered to their summits with ivy. Even a Rookery in the middle of town and Rooks cawing and quarreling in their nigh nests. The town is full of sparrows and their incessant chirping sounds precisely like the swallows at daybreak in Buenos Ayres... I heard thrushes, wrens and many others I have heard so much about. I also, to my delight, heard the Cuckoo, and listened to him for half an hour, warbling his mysterious lay from grove to grove—one bird I thought might be the nightingale, but I could not be sure.80

He was so aware of every creature in his own homeland that he was disappointed when the villagers he encountered could not tell him the name of every bird he encountered. In

80 W. H. Hudson, William Henry Hudson's diary concerning his voyage from Buenos Aires to Southampton on the Ebro, from 1 April 1874 to 3 May 1874, written to his brother, Albert Merriam Hudson (Hanover, N. H.: Westholm Publications, 1958), 28-29. 31

time, though, he left the countryside for London, the destination of his transatlantic journey. In London he met with Phillip L. Sclater, the secretary of the Zoological Society and the editor of Hudson's Proceedings letters. While continents apart the two kept a steady professional correspondence, however their first meeting was less than warm. Sclater was well entrenched in the scientific community. In addition to his role of Secretary of the Zoological Society, he was also the founder of British Ornithologists' Union's journal The Ibis, and for a time the president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Hudson found that he lacked the skills and knowledge to be of much use in London, his skill set was geared at observing wild creatures, not meticulously noting the details of corpses. What they discussed at their meeting is unrecorded, likely the prospect of work that Hudson could do for the Zoological Society. Hudson continued to write on the birds of Argentina until the end of the year. In the last three months of 1875 he sent three separate articles to the Proceedings, which would be the last of such letters published in the Proceedings. Sclater introduced Hudson to elder naturalist John Gould, the long- famed bird collector who had mounted Darwin's birds from his research expeditions. Gould hired Hudson as a lab assistant mounting and preserving birds, but this relationship did not last long. Hudson was working for one of the most respected ornithologists in London but was entirely unsatisfied with the kind of work he was required of him. Hudson thought the poses he was instructed to mount the birds were not based on the bird's true habit and thus unnatural. He “had just left tropical nature behind [him] across the Atlantic,” and was surprised to see the birds he knew so well in life now, “pellets of dead feathers, which had long ceased to sparkle and shine, stuck with wires.”81 He mistrusted Gould's expertise, thinking it had come mostly from books and hours in a laboratory, holding his own vision of how the bird should be mounted as superior. Gould mocked Hudson's pretension that his knowledge of birds picked up as a child in the wilderness surpassed Gould's own. And Hudson's ambition to write about them further infuriated Gould. Hudson quit his job owing to these personal and professional

81 W. H. Hudson, “Concerning Eyes,” in The Gentleman's Magazine Volume CCLVIII January to June, ed. Sylvanus Urban (London: Spottiswoode and Co., 1885), 384. 32 differences.82 The episode with Gould was Hudson's last direct link with scientific society for nearly ten years. He harbored a distrust of scientists for the remainder of his career. These sentiments were expressed countless times in his published writing and in his letters to friends. In 1892, ten years after Gould's death, Hudson wrote of him, "it can only be supposed that he regarded natural history principally as a 'science of dead animals—a necrology,' and collected humming-birds just as others collect Roman coins.."83 Hudson held the majority of scientists he encountered in London in the same esteem. He thought that their preoccupation with physical characteristics of birds, observed while spread motionless on an examining room table, prevented them from holding the actual bird— the living creature in its natural habitat—in high esteem. The charge of necrology is not entirely fair on Hudson's part. Gould and his ilk were interested in amassing details of all the birds of the world. The classification systems which needed details of the various birds of the world in order to be filled out gained new urgency with the publication of Origin of Species. Comparison of species across the globe provided insights into the mechanism of natural selection and it could not be expected that any one scientist would be able to travel to every remote island to personally make the observations necessary to prove the theory of evolution. It was not just the methodology of science that Hudson grew to resent, but also restraints put on knowledge. Sclater once chided Hudson in response to one his articles he wrote in London, “Let a man be as humorous and witty as he likes, but he must keep all that out of a scientific paper.”84 For Hudson nature was full of humor and folly. This underlines the most noted difference in the way Hudson approached nature. He was happy to observe and to smile at the antics of nature without being overly serious. He compared the scientific mind to a stoat “on the track of its quarry... The difference is that the stoat makes no mistakes, and the seeker after truth makes many.”85 Hudson's own method was rambling, concerned not with any goal, but with the process. Often in his nature essays a

82 Tomalin, W.H. Hudson, 74-75., Richard Haymaker, From Pampas to Hedgerows and Downs: A Study of W. H. Hudson (New York: Record Press, 1954), 34-35. 83 Hudson, The Naturalist in La Plata, 210. 84 W. H. Hudson, Men, Books, and Birds (Chesterfield, Derbyshire: Grayson, 1932), 133. 85 W. H. Hudson, A Hind in Richmond Park (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1922) 265. 33

particular tangent enters his mind and after exploring it for several paragraphs he apologizes to his readers before resuming the main thrust of the essay. His subject matter is also at times slightly outside the realm of science. He devotes nearly an entire chapter of A Hind in Richmond Park to speculations of telepathy between humans and animals. He is not entirely sure of the veracity of various telepathic claims, but does not dismiss them either. He finishes this section with a disclaimer that he is “an amateur, practically an outsider, one who is rightly anxious not to incur the displeasure of his masters in science and psychology, and of all those who have exalted themselves to the seats of wisdom.”86 The disenchantment Hudson experienced had profound consequences. For the remainder of 1875 he continued to send letters to the Zoological Society on the habits of Argentine birds, but stopped in December of that year. He came to London near- penniless, hoping that the connections he established in the Zoological Society would provide for him. His dreams now dashed with neither the means nor the will to return to Argentina in defeat, he looked for other means of supporting himself in London. Hudson wrote that, “success in almost any calling in England, unless the aspirant happens to be endowed with energies and talents almost superhuman, depends in a great measure on the possession of money.”87 Hudson's family was never rich, or even well-to-do, and he was used to being alone for long stretches of time while riding his horse across the Pampas. But here, in unfamiliar London, Hudson was worse off than he had ever been. In the months after his short stint as Gould's assistant he worked for a short time with an amateur genealogist compiling family trees of questionable authenticity to wealthy Americans who sought to trace their lineage to England. When the man confessed that he did not have the money to pay him, Hudson threw the papers he was working on in the man's face and promptly left.88 Hudson's life during the next few years are clouded in a self-imposed mystery. He did not like dwelling on his years of extreme poverty, hesitantly telling friends that at times he was forced to sleep in parks and crudely forage for food just to stay alive. He

86 Hudson, A Hind in Richmond Park, Chapter 8. 87 W. H. Hudson El Ombú (London: Duckworth, 1902) 185. 88 Morley Roberts, W. H. Hudson: A Portrait (London: Eveleigh Nash & Grayson Ltd., 1924), 28. 34

spoke very little about this time in his life with even his closest of friends and recorded even less. In March of 1875 Hudson had his first literary piece published, “Wanted—A Lullaby,” which was published in Cassell's Family Magazine late in 1874 or early 1875.89 “Wanted—A Lullaby” was a short poem attributed to a feminine Maud Merryweather musing on the fact that there were so few English lullabies, while they are plentiful in Spanish. Hudson survived privation by writing similar short poems and articles in popular magazines—what his friends later described as hack work. Yet this “hack work” would prove to be good experience for Hudson. It allowed him to explore a less scientific genre of writing , enabling him to use more flowery language than was permitted in the Proceedings. The lack of steady income and a precarious living situation did not suit one who sought to make a living by writing. Hudson rectified this situation by marrying his landlady. In 1876, having spent less than two years in his adopted country, Hudson married former opera singer, Emily Wingrave. Emily's days singing at the Crystal Palace and the theaters were passed, she being at least 15 years older than him, but her voice was still pure to Hudson's ear. Her main asset besides her voice, which moved Hudson “as no voice had ever done before,”90 was her boarding house, which brought in a modest income. The relationship was one of convenience for both, based more on companionship than lust. As Hudson was nearing death he admitted to a friend that, “I was never in love with my wife, nor she with me. But we became friends.”91 The two remained loyal, if not entirely faithful, companions for the remainder of her life, 45 years. Emily continued to run her boarding house while Hudson had the economic stability to read and to write. A series of short essays and poems appeared in a variety of popular magazines such as Merry England, Home Chimes, The Gentleman's Magazine. But times were hard on the newlywed couple and William Henry branched beyond the medium of essay or poem to try to gain a greater income.

89 It seems to have been published in March 1875 according to Dennis Shrubsall in W. H. Hudson: Writer and Naturalist. John R. Payne lists February 1874 in W. H. Hudson: A Bibliography, but this date seems unlikely since Hudson was still in Argentina. Biographer Ruth Tomalin says it was published in December 1874 in W. H. Hudson which is plausible. 90 Tomalin, W.H. Hudson, 80. 91 Felipe Arocena, William Henry Hudson: Life, Literature and Science (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2003), 53. 35

In 1880 Hudson made the acquaintance of a young Londoner lately back from Australia who became hugely influential on Hudson's literary career. Morley Roberts was twenty-three when he knocked at the door of Hudson's London house. Although he was from London and educated at Owens College, he had spent the previous three years in colonial Australia working on sheep farms. This likeness in their experience perhaps ingratiated the young man to Hudson. Morley was a prospective novelist, in his later years earning a place among minor English authors. The young man was also deeply interested in plants and animals, an interest that surely won over Hudson. Their friendship grew throughout the 1880s. They spent evenings together discussing books and laying the foundations of a lifelong friendship. It was Morley who first saw promise in Hudson's writing. Hudson's first story of substantial length, “Tom Ranger,” was a three chapter story published in the August 1884 editions of the weekly Home Chimes. . It was met with mild reviews, prompting Hudson to publish his first true novel, The Purple Land that England Lost. The story follows the adventures of Richard Lamb, an Englishman who traveled the Banda Oriental of Uruguay. The Purple Land was a commercial failure; the publisher lost a substantial amount of money on the project and reviewers panned the book. One review in the Saturday Review of November 14, 1885 said, “The Purple Land is no record of genuine travel performed by a real traveler, but a very silly story of the imaginary adventures of an imaginary Mr. Lamb...We feel bound to say that we have seldom been called upon to express an opinion on more vulgar farrago of repulsive nonsense than is contained in the volumes to which the author has given so misleading a title.”92 The failure of The Purple Land deeply affected Hudson. His next book was a fantastical story set in the future and published anonymously, and the one after that, Fan, was published under a pseudonym. Although The Purple Land was not a success upon release, it slowly found an audience in literary circles, and when it was reissued in 1904 it sold in the tens of thousands. In 1919 he met T. E. Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia, who confessed that he had read The Purple Land at least a dozen times. Hudson quipped that his book was, “exactly the type of book that a young adventurer like this would enjoy,

92 Quotes in Arocena, William Henry Hudson, 67. 36 since Lawrence is himself a kind of Richard Lamb.” Another adventurer, the protagonist of Hemingway's The Sun also Rises, has his life change dramatically after reading The Purple Land. He refers to the book as, "a very sinister book if read too late in life" and that it "recounts splendid imaginary amorous adventures of a perfect English gentleman in as intensely romantic land."93 These accolades, however, were still a distance off. For the time being, Hudson's works went largely unnoticed and were commercial failures. With literary success not achieved, Hudson returned to the Zoological Society. In 1887, Sclater approached Hudson about working together on an ornithological handbook on the birds of Argentina. No such book since Azara's eighteenth century handbook had been published on the birds of Argentina. Hudson had been away from the Pampas for fourteen years but had more knowledge of the birds of that region than nearly anyone. Sclater arranged a forty pound grant from the Royal Society to allow Hudson to devote the majority of his time on the project. The two volume book consisted of an entry for each of the 434 known birds of Argentina. Sclater contributed to each entry the names, both Latin and common, of the birds, followed by a short physical description of the birds that employed highly technical language and also s a bibliography of scientific papers about the birds. After Sclater's contribution, Hudson described of the behavior and habits of the birds. These descriptions are as rich in artistry as any he wrote for the Proceedings and make up the lion's share of the entries. Most of the descriptions are written in first person and speak of specific observations of specific individuals Hudson had observed, not over generalizations of a platonic, idealized bird. The first volume of Argentine Ornithology was punished in 1888 with the second following the year after. They were met with wide acclaim. Nature called it, an “event of considerable importance to every lover of neotropical zoology.”94 It was the definitive work on the birds of Argentina well into the twentieth century and was cited in future bibliographies of the birds it contained. While Sclater's name got top billing and most of the royalties, it was Hudson's descriptions that won over the reviews. Much of the material for several birds (among these are the swallow, the cowbird, and the woodpecker) are based upon his earlier letters to the Proceedings, and were written in the

93 Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (New York: Scribner, 2006 ), 17. 94 “Argentine Ornithology,” Nature 41 (1889): 7-8. 37 same style, but these new descriptions had the clarity of a mature writer who was comfortable with the English language. His association with Sclater helped him pare out the more 'unscientific' material—fewer of Hudson's personal feeling towards the birds were enumerated—while still keeping the charm of one who truly knew and cared for what he was describing. It had been twelve years since Hudson had written anything about the birds of his homeland, and Argentine Ornithology showed him concretely that people were interested in his writing on those subjects even if they did not care for his novels. In 1892 and 1893 Hudson published two books that would cement him as a popular author. The first was The Naturalist in La Plata, a collection of 24 'open-air essays' loosely connected in that they are Hudson's observations in the district of La Plata, Argentina. The second, Idle Days in Patagonia, recounts his voyage down the Rio Negro of Patagonia, and follows a narrative structure. The Naturalist in La Plata was Hudson's first success as a writer. One reviewer proclaimed that "has taken his place beside Darwin and Wallace and Bates and Belt as a naturalist of the very first rank.”95 The reviewer enjoyed the depth of knowledge presented in both books. Hudson, like Alfred Wallace to whom he was compared, spent years observing the animals he wrote about, he wasn't merely an interloper that came into the country for half a year and left with only fleeting impressions. The two books were praised as much for their style as for their content. The public enjoyed reading vignettes on the various South American animals Hudson knew so well. Moreover, they could understand the language he used. While up until the 1880s the scientific laity read scientific journals for knowledge, increasingly these journals became more jargonistic and focused on other scientists for readership. Prior to this time the journals depended on subscriptions from non-scientists, but with the increased number of professionalized scientists they could focus on their core audience, and this is reflected in the language. Hudson's played to this audience and filled the void of books about nature that the public at large could understand and enjoy. 96 The success of these two books showed Hudson that the public at large were

95 “The Naturalist in La Plata and Patagonia,” The London Quarterly and Holborn Review 82 (1894): 223. 96 David E. Allen, The Naturalist in Britain: A Social History (London: Penguin Books Ltd., 1976), 182- 184. 38

interested in his tales of nature, even if they were not scientific. In the same year that The Naturalist in La Plata came out, Hudson's last foray into novels for some time was published. Fan: The Story of a Young Girl's Life was published in 1892 with a title page marking the author as Henry Harford—Hudson's pseudonym. Evidently he did not want to risk another yet another set of poor reviews or tarnish the reputation he had gained since Argentine Ornithology. Modern critics agree with Hudson's contemporaries: Fan has almost no literary merits. The story of a young girl in London was seen as trite, and not filled with the wonderful descriptions of nature found in his other novels. His other novels would eventually find their audience. The Purple Land was republished nineteen years after its original publication to find a ready audience. In Hudson's last years, when his wife was ill and he was seeking to raise money, he consented to have all of his previous work republished—except Fan. 1892 was another parting of the ways for Hudson. His popular natural history book proved successful while yet another novel was met with derision. The path for Hudson was clear. His next several publications followed the path made clear by the success of The Naturalist in La Plata. Famed naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace called The Naturalist in La Plata “altogether unique among books on natural history" and hoped that it would "form the first of a series of volumes."97 Hudson did produce a series of volumes based on the archetype of Naturalist in La Plata. Over the next ten years Hudson wrote six such books containing similar essays. The money from the sales of The Naturalist in La Plata and Idle Days in Patagonia allowed Hudson for the first time to afford to travel outside London. The material in these books reflect this fact. No longer did he solely write books concerning Argentina, but quickly became an expert in the wildlife of the English countryside—so much so that one reviewer claimed Hudson as the best nature writing England ever produced. These books occupied a niche between art and science. He described Nature in Downland as “a small unimportant book, not entertaining enough for those who read for pleasure only, not sufficiently scientific and crammed with facts for readers who thirst

97 Alfred Russell Wallace, “A Remarkable Book on the Habits of Animals,” Nature 45 (1892): 553. 39 after knowledge.”98 Hudson may have been overly modest in this respect. The public bought and read his books at an astonishing rate. They were hungry for the descriptions of nature, both Argentine and English that Hudson crafted. His background as a naturalist and experience working with scientists combined with his deep appreciation of nature to form an artistry that was too-little seen in works on nature in late nineteenth century Britain. In previous decades Hudson's descriptions might have found home within the mainstream of scientific publications. But due to the ever increasing professionalized nature nineteenth century science—which actively sought to erect language barriers between it and the public—Hudson's writings was squeezed out of the journals and into the realm of popular non-fiction.99

98 Hudson, Nature in Downland, 6-7. 99 Allen, The Naturalist in Britain, 234-239. 40

Chapter 5: Conclusion William Henry Hudson died at his residence in 1922 at the age of eighty-one. Three years later a large group of his friends and fans gathered in Hyde Park, London. Soon after Hudson's death a committee was arranged to construct a suitable memorial to that lover of birds. On May 19, 1925 a stone sculpture was unveiled and a bird sanctuary was dedicated to Hudson. A bird sanctuary was a fitting touch to honor a man who spent his life studying birds. In the last years of his life continued to write books on birds. In the 1890s he joined the Society for the Protection of Birds (later Royal Society for the Protection of Birds) in its infancy. He wrote dozens of pamphlets arguing against the millinery industry and in favor of preservationist laws that the society published and distributed. At the time of his death his will left nearly all of his eight thousand pound estate to the society to fund its educational programs. Hudson's love of birds took him far from his birthplace outside of Buenos Aires. His early reading of Gilbert White and Charles Darwin led him to make a vocation of his pastime observing nature. He worked as a collector supplying the raw data needed by scientists in London. From there he himself went to London to gain a closer working relationship with fellow workers. But this never happened. He was denied access to the increasingly exclusive profession. The way he approached the natural world was different than the mainstream scientists of his day. He rebelled against Gould and his 'necrology,' preferring instead to write what he referred to as 'bread and cheese' works, essays or short stories for various magazines that were uninteresting to write, but allowed him to buy bread and cheese. After over a decade in London, Hudson found a way to communicate his knowledge of birds to the wider world. His language was too colorful, his opinions too cheerful for a standard scientific monograph or journal. He developed a style of writing in between art and science. By closely examining his early life a fully understanding of Hudson's late success becomes clearer. Hudson based his expectations of what it meant to be a naturalist or scientists on an older model gleaned from the writings of Gilbert White. Concerns over taxonomy and rigorous reporting were foreign to him. He left Argentina believing that he

41 would find in London a community of scientists not unlike himself. Instead he was disenchanted by their seemingly callousness for the objects of their work. Understanding how Hudson interacted with the scientific profession answers questions of Hudson's life that other biographies have not sufficiently answered. His switch from writing fictional novels to writing nature essays in the 1890s and the age of fifty is never fully explained because Argentine Ornithology—a scientific work—is given little treatment by literary biographers. But it seems clear that the success of Argentine Ornithology emboldened Hudson to return to writing of nature. It showed him that if his descriptions were not highly regarded by science, then they were by the public at large. In 1920 he republished his contributions to Argentine Ornithology as Birds of La Plata. This latter was a republication of the former with all of Sclatter's contributions removed.

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