Victorian Specimen Collector

Writer John Van Wyhe takes Helen and Matt around the world to catch a glimpse of the now obsolete Victorian Specimen collector, He also shares the story of his favorite collector of all, Ida Pfeiffer.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This is Job Slete. I'm Matt beat and I'm Helen Hong,
and today we're talking about specimen collectors. Might sound gross,
but it's not. You know, the past was so different.
They had such different ideas. To go out and shoot
all these exostic animals was a great thing to do.

(00:23):
Most of us like to collect things antiques, vinyl records, stamps, buttons, coins, heck,
even memes. However, while we may go to great lengths
to build up our collection by scouring the internets or
local yard sales to find stuff, but going around the
world that's just way too much work. Work. Well, this

(00:46):
show is about occupations, So how about people who collect
rare stuff to sell it and make a living. More
than a hundred years ago, there were a group of
collectors who went for the most ex bodic from the
far corners of the world in order to make money, yes,
but also to seek adventure. And this episode we're looking

(01:09):
at those who went out searching for the earth's natural treasures,
specimen collectors. I'm not gonna lie when when we were
first told that we were going to do an episode
on specimen collecting, I was like, Oh, that just sounds gross,
Like what kind of specimens are we talking about. But yeah,

(01:31):
I mean, couldn't they have picked a better word than
specimen collector. It sounds like when you go to the
doctor and they give you the peak up and they're like,
pe in the cup and bring it back and that's
your specimen. That's literally what specimen collectors are today. The
specimen collectors today are a way different kind that they
typically it is urine that they collect hair, hair follic cools.

(01:54):
Maybe this is when I wish that our podcast had
a video element, because if you if you could see
my face right now, like you, I had a friend
in college that used to do that, like urine. Yeah,
he would like have a cooler full of of urine
and like, hey, want to check this out? What. I'm
sure that was unethical him doing that, but oh yeah,

(02:16):
unethical for him to be like, hey, yo, check out
the goods and you're like, I don't. Why do I
want to do that? Why? Yeah? I didn't really want
to see it, but he kind of forced it on me.
We're talking about cooler stuff, exotic animals, plants, minerals from
all over the world. Well, you know, I just think

(02:38):
about Indiana Jones, how far he would go, and at
lengths he would go to find the treasures that he
sought after. Right, so this isn't a job like, for instance, Matt,
I genuinely do authentically have a collection of orange shoes,
like cute orange shoes. Remember cute shoes, Matt, Remember when
we would wear cute shoes And you're not You're not

(03:00):
messing with me right now. You really, I really have
a collection of orange shoes because orange is my favorite color.
But like, no one's ever going to see them ever again,
because I'm never leaving this closet ever again because of
the pandemic. Once this is all over, We're totally having
a an orange shoe parade just down your street. Time
invite everybody. Okay, so we're not talking about people who

(03:23):
just like as a hobby collect things. We're talking about
people whose job it was to go out into the
world and collect like butterflies and things like that. Yeah,
so we're going back to the Victorian age for the
height of this occupation of specimen collector, and like everything
the Victorians did, they took it to a whole new level.

(03:44):
It became, you know, a contest to a competition to
get the most ridiculous specimens you could ever find. It
started out, you know, mostly private collections because museums were
still a new thing, but more and more or museums
were like, yeah, hey, what you got. We talked to
somebody who explained how everyone was a collector in the

(04:07):
Victorian ages. I'm John Van Why and I am a
historian of science. In Victorian times, collecting these natural history
objects was in vogue, and you'd have everyone from wealthy
aristocrats to working class tradesmen who liked to collect these objects.

(04:28):
And this meant that there was a market to produce
specimens for people to collect. Right. It was about having
an amazing, impressive collection to show your friends or to
show neighbors that, look, I have completed my collection of
Amazonian butterflies. I have every species. Was about getting a

(04:49):
complete collection of beautiful things and having it preserved. It
was it was a valued treasure for most people. So
even like Joe Schmo would do it. We might have
this perception of these well off people that are just
going out with their butterfly nets and oh what do
we have here? But the people who typically were specimen collectors,

(05:12):
it was mostly men. They definitely loved the adventure of it,
but they had to make money and that was their
way to make money, and so this they were usually
not very wealthy. The ones who actually went out and
did this so not Indiana Jones. So no, it wasn't
just Indiana Jones type folks that had collections. It was everyone.

(05:33):
And so there was a huge demand and so lots
of regular folks just went out and sought after all
this stuff. So like Joe Schmo would be like, Hey,
I need a collection of ladybugs from Brazil. And then
somebody who's job was to go to Brazil and collect
every ladybug in Brazil and bring it back to that

(05:55):
people could be like, look at my collection of Brazilian
ladybugs like that? Yeah, uh well, and again this is
the Enlightenment, so this is a time to try to
one up each other with I am the most sophisticated
and I am the most worldly. If you have that
a giant collection, you know, just imagine the salons you
could have, invide everybody over and you could just impress everyone.

(06:19):
And today we we can't imagine, like imagine someone going
to a national forest and then just taking whatever plants.
And so this was a different time, so like, for instance,
the British Empire. At the time, the British Empire was
still the British Empire, and they had you know, kind

(06:40):
of ownership and rulership over like other parts of the world,
and they would send like you could just be like
a British person and go to these other parts of
the world and they like like India for instance, and
be like, you know what, I'm going to take every
monkey that I could shove in this bag and take
it back to England. Nowadays, of course, lets would be

(07:00):
mostly illegal in most countries because exotic clients and animals
are usually protected. But in Victorian times, of course, there
were no rules, no regulations. You know, the past was
so different. They had such different ideas. To go out
and shoot all these exotic animals was a great thing
to do. Around nine the California Academy of Sciences sent

(07:24):
out an expedition to the Galapas Islands and one of
the things they found was the tortoises that they were
almost extinct. Now to us modern people, we'd think, oh,
you better save them, But back then they didn't have
such conservation as thinking. They're thinking was oh we better
preserve these for science before they're gone. So what they

(07:48):
did was they collected them all and killed them. They thought, so,
we'd better take the opportunity now to collect them and
preserve their bodies for science. That is what they've was
the noble thing to do. But today we are horrified.
It's it's an important lesson because we don't understand how

(08:08):
people in the past thought so differently from us. They
thought in a way we just don't get. And this
just shows you that what we consider important in conservation
and so on, it's not a timeless idea, it's a
very modern idea. He's right about modern people being horrified,

(08:28):
because I was gasping in horror the entire time he
was telling that story, Like about the Galapagos tortoises, like, hey,
there's only five left, let's shoot them all. Well, their
logic was they have to shoot them so that they
can bring them back so they can study them. Because
they knew that if they went back home and came back,
that the tortoises would be gone, would be extinct. And

(08:50):
so this is our last chance to actually actually see
what they look like. And that was their way of thinking.
Does that make sense? Kind of it. There's a twisted logic.
I get it, but to be like, hey, they're going extinct,
let's just speed up the process. This started out just
as mostly for collectors, but then more and more scientists

(09:13):
became interested in collecting specimens for research purposes. Collectors came
in various sizes, so some of them were simply hired
by a company to go out and collect, for example, orchids.
They got no fame or notoriety. It was just doing
a job. Whereas other people were young men who were ambitious,

(09:35):
who knew about science. They went out on their own initiative,
and they explored new places and they made discoveries, and
these were published from time to time in the newspapers
or the scientific journals. And some of these collectors who
came home with gigantic collections, they became quite rich and
were set up for life. So it was a profession

(09:56):
that if you were competent, if you were skilled, you
could really make a chilling Pardon, I'm glad, he said,
pardon the pun. I love puns. I just bring bring them.
I do it with my intro sometimes and I apologize.

(10:28):
I would say. Two different types of specimen collectors that
emerged throughout the eighteen hundreds, and that would be the
scientist and the adventurer. Oh so like Indiana Jones was
both that's so dreamy. Yes, I may come on, I
love those movies. Sure he was afraid of snakes, but
he was bold and he went out there. But he

(10:51):
also knew the history and the background. Wasn't he a
history professor writer or an anthropology professor? Ayah, So he's
like a professor and he's like knows his stuff, but
he's also like going to put on the hat and
the cool leather jacket and just jump on a ship
and go out there and almost get killed multiple times.
So this person that we're going to start off with,

(11:13):
I would say, is not that much like Indiana Jones,
but more just straight up scientist. Actually, one of the
most famous British scientists in history, Alfred Russell Wallace. There's
another person who he's associated with named Charles Darwin. I'm
sure you've heard of that person. They both came up

(11:33):
with the theory of evolution through natural selection pretty much
independently at the same time. Like Darwin, Alfred Wallace went
out there and he did his own field work, and
unlike Charles Darwin. He didn't have much wealth and so
he literally had to go out and collect stuff to
sell to museums to make money because he had financial difficulties.

(11:56):
But he was I would call him a a specimenal actor.
He's like Indiana Jones. If Indiana Jones was like hawking
his stuff on the street. Yeah, well, but two museums.
I mean, how was Indiana Jones selling all the stuff
that he brought back? I believe so, So, you know what,
there's a lot of Maybe there is more in common

(12:18):
with Indiana Jones Alfred Wallace, but I'm sure he didn't
carry a whip though, No, there was no whip, no
cool hat. But don't forget about Wallace. Man Darwin gets
all the love, but Alfred Russell Wallace should be right
up there. Don't sleep on Wallace. You know there's another
person we shouldn't sleep on either, who is probably even
more amazing. She is one of John's favorite. Perhaps the

(12:41):
most unusual collector was Ida Pfeiffer, a Austrian widow who
decided to travel the world by herself at a time
when this had never happened before. No woman had ever
gone around traveling alone. But she it's so starting in
the eighteen forties, and she discovered thousands of species that

(13:04):
were not previously known, and she was the first woman
to travel around the world. And then she did it
again that she traveled around the world a second time.
And she became so famous because of her best selling
travel books that she was being followed by the newspapers
of the world. So you could read in a newspaper

(13:25):
in New York or London or Australia about her latest exploits.
And at the same time she had seen more of
the Earth than any woman who had ever lived. Wow,
I had a fighter. She So she was an Austrian
widow and she was like, I'm going to go travel

(13:46):
the world. Even though women are not allowed to do that,
I'm just doing it. And she was like, oh and
look at this butterfly. Oh and look at these birds,
and look at these ants along the way. Yeah, so
we're talking the eighteen fifties. No woman had ever done this,
like traveled is far and wide as Phifer. And she
was also a journalist, a travel writer. But I think

(14:09):
what drove her more than anything is her curiosity. She
just would just love to get out there. Well, I'm
a fan of like BBC Earth documentaries. I love those,
and especially the ones that are hosted by David Attenborough.
And every time I watched one of those, there's like
some animal or bird or something that I'm like, whoa,

(14:32):
like I've never And then and this is in you know,
like these are modern times where you can sort of
see everything you could possibly want to see on the internet.
I can't imagine being this idea fier woman in like
the eighteen hundreds when nobody, you know that you couldn't
see anything on the internet and you're just like out
in the world seeing things in their natural environment that

(14:54):
are so mind blowing. Yeah. Do you see that picture
of her that I posted. It's pretty lit if I
don't mind saying so. So you just look at her
and you like, you know that she's not messing around.
She has her net, she's out there, she's up in
the jungles. She's older than I imagined she she looks
in this picture to be in her fifties. Maybe she's

(15:16):
wearing not a Victorian lady's outfit, which I love. She's
got like short pants and and like she is wearing
a skirt, but it's short but she's wearing pants under
the skirts, so she can kind of like move around
very sensible shoes. I mean, she looks like a lady
who's like, you know what, I don't care if you
want me to wear a course in a dress. I'm

(15:37):
wearing whatever the hell I want. And also I'm holding
this butterfly net. The Natural History Museum Vienna bought seven
one specimens from her collection when she went to Madagascar
and Mauritius. I can never say, Marti, how do you say,

(15:58):
Mark Marchius, Mauritius, Mauritius. The bigger part of the story,
I think is she it's estimated she journeyed thirty kilometers
by lands and two d kilometers by sea, literally all
over the world two times. If I knew what a
kilometer was, I'm sure i'd be really impressed. You're not

(16:19):
one of those Americans, are you? Come on now there,
everyone listening knows what a kilometer is. To be a
collective was sometimes very dangerous because you might be living
amongst people who are not very friendly, and you might
be collecting things that they themselves found valuable. So, for example,

(16:40):
if you were in the islands around New Guinea and
you wanted to collect birds of paradise. Well, these were
also valued by the local people. They were a form
of wealth, form of money. But if a form collector
king and wanted to collect the same birds, well there
could be a conflict there. Perhaps the most usual collector

(17:01):
was Ida Phifer, so she had many close calls in Brazil.
She was traveling there to see the forests and the
flowers and so on. But unexpectedly a man jumped out
of the forest with a huge knife trying to rob her,
and she had only her parasol to defend herself, so

(17:22):
she tried to push him back. He grabbed it and
it broke off at the handle and he dropped his
huge knife. She took out her pocket knife and tried
to parry him away and she cut his fingers, but
he stabbed at her and she held up her left
arm and received a huge gash on her arm and

(17:43):
was almost killed. But fortunately just then some riotous came
around the corner and the robber ran away. Oh my god,
this Ida character sounds more and more amazing the more
that I hear about her. She's just this random Austrian
widow and she's out in the world collecting specimen here,
and now she's in a knife fight with some rando
dude in Brazil. I mean, come on, why is there

(18:06):
no Indiana Jones movie based on this woman? I think
the Indiana Jones movies were based on her, and they
just didn't admitted yes, yes, and of course they had
to change her to a man. I think we all
can appreciate the idea that she fought off the enemy
with a small umbrella. It's just how victorian is that,

(18:28):
you know, because she's because she has cojonez, but she
still as stylish Victorian lady who like obviously doesn't want
to get sunburned. So but let's see what it was

(18:56):
like for those specimen collectors in the Victorian age out
there in the what was it like. Well, for a
specimen collector, they would probably sleeping in a native hut
or village, and they would go out in the forest
and try to find as many animals or plants that
they were collecting and fill their baskets or their bottles.

(19:18):
The local people often just could not understand what on
earth these foreigners were doing, and sometimes they would ask them, what,
what are you really doing? What's the real purpose of this?
Are they going to come back to life in your country,
so local people often didn't understand what was going on.

(19:39):
But they also made collecting possible because they told people
about where you could find wildlife. Often they collected the
things themselves. So collectors, if they were clever, would employ
local people to really maximize the size and scope of
their collections. That was more local people just getting duped.

(20:03):
They had no idea that these white Victorian people were
just coming in a ruin. Everything just shows you, like
kind of how radically different the cultures were. Yeah, the
concept of just like going out into the wilderness and
just plucking things out of nature and dragging them back
to fill your museum. Yeah, it doesn't sound very cool now,

(20:24):
all right, So would you do this? Would you go
out there if you have the opportunity. Absolutely no, no, no,
no no, no, absolutely not no. A. I don't really
like to do anything physical walking. My dog is about
as active as I want to get. And do I

(20:45):
want to go out into the middle of like jungles
with creepy crawley things of unknown origin crawling around me. No, no, no,
no no no. I will see it in a museum.
I will watch it on TV. I will see the
docs on Netflix and be like, Wow, that's so cool
while I'm in the safety of my living room eating

(21:07):
popcorn to see that's now. See back then they didn't
have Planet Earth, you know, so this is your only
chance to see it all, to see what it's you know,
you don't even really probably get a photograph of most
of this stuff. Do you still want to do it? No? No,
definitely not, especially if she's going to places where they
are orb spiders. No, ye, nope. I think part of

(21:33):
me would want to do this, But like you said,
some locations I have no desire to go to, like
the rainforest. Rainforests freaked me out. There's just so many
creatures all around, so many creatures. I cannot deal with creatures.
There were so many specimen collectors bringing in so much
stuff that today when you go to museums, like if
you go to the basements of museums, they are filled

(21:54):
with the brim and they don't have enough time or
they don't have enough people to sort through all of it.
There were so many things that were brought to them
by these specimen collectors. I could see how if everyone
was collecting and everyone is like, hey, do you want
to see my box of butterflies, and everyone's like, no,
I have my own box of butterflies. Like it's probably

(22:15):
the same box of butterflies you have. That it just
becomes less and less cool if everybody's doing it. It's
just it's became too common. Yeah, it did fade away.
Are there people whose job it is still to go
and bring stuff back to museums? Like is that just
does that just never happen anymore? Well? They still, Yeah,

(22:38):
museums still collect things. I would say that for the
most part, museums they get inanimate objects today like that. Yeah,
So it's like it's an anthropologist who's like or or
like like you know, someone who like digs around for
fossils and and you know old old like artifacts from
human history. But nobody's job is to like go at

(23:00):
the go get me this crazy glow in the dark world. Yeah,
I mean, like I said, though, the market kind of
killed itself as well because the demand just went way
down because collectors weren't collecting this stuff anymore. It wasn't
cool anymore to collect this. Yeah, it was like beanie
babies back in the day, right, Like there was a
hot moment of Beanie babies where people were like, oh

(23:21):
my god, I need to get the latest Beanie baby.
But then that then everybody had beanie babies and people
were like, why do I have Why do I have
this pile of Beanie babies? Dang, that means I can
never get rid of my collection. I was hoping to
sell those. So if you want to learn more about
Ida Phifer, John Van why are expert in this episode,

(23:46):
has actually written an entire book about her. You can
check it out. It's called Wanderlust The Amazing Ida Phifer,
the first female tourist. And guess what we have a
Twitter handle. It is at job Sleete pod on Twitter.
Please follow us and if you have any questions, you

(24:06):
can tweet at us. If you have any comments, you
can tweet at us. If you read John's book about
the Amazing idea fight for which she is amazing, I
mean she was one coheneasy lady. That's a very technical term,
but you know what I mean, like, she sounds really badass.
So if you do read the book and you have
any insight, tweet at us at job Sleete pod. Job

(24:27):
Slete is produced for I Heart Radio by Zealots Manufacturing
hand Forge Podcast for You. It's hosted by us Helen
Hong That's Me and Mattie That's Me. The show was
conceived and produced by Steve Za Markey, Anthony Savini, and
Jason Elliott. Our editor is Tommy Nicole, our researcher is
Amelia Paulka, our production coordinator is Angie Hymis, and theme

(24:51):
music is by the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. Special thanks to
our I Heart Radio team led by Nikki Etre, Katrina Norvell,
Ali Can't or Mangesh, Hattie Khador, Will Pearson, Connell Burne
and Bob Pittman.