"Birds With No Feet" in Ship Fever (1996)
By Andrea Barrett
Historical fiction; Short story; Speciation
Explorer who sees parallels between his life and Alfred Wallace's imagines a rivalry between them as each hopes to uncover the secret of fabled feetless birds.
In the 1850s, Alec Carrière left the United States to travel the globe, collecting specimens of unique species never before seen in his country. During his travels, he encounters another collector named Alfred Wallace, who like Alec is attempting to make his fortune by collecting. Like Wallace, Carrière suffers a tragic loss when his ship burns mid-ocean, causing him to lose his entire collection. Because of this coincidence, Alec begins a correspondence with Wallace, and over the next decade, traces his career trajectory against that of the British scientist. At each milestone, Alec finds himself wanting; when both men contract malaria, for instance, Wallace manages to write a paper on his discoveries between bouts of fever while Alec only considers his next source of income. Their final sea voyages arrive virtually simultaneously on their respective shores, with each explorer carrying the reputed “birds with no feet” onboard, yet ultimately Wallace receives the fame and Carrière resigns himself to a life as a foot soldier in the Civil War.
What distinguishes Alec from Wallace is the latter’s scientific spirit; Wallace collects for the love of the discovery, rather than the desire to return home with bragging rights and access to wealth. The historical moment also plays some role in his capacity to develop evolutionary theories; the American Civil War interrupts Alec’s studies, indicating the influence of sociopolitical caprice in scientific developments. This story presents Wallace in a unique light, as he is typically cast as Darwin’s competitor in the race to articulate an evolutionary theory. Like Wallace, Alec considers the impermanence of species when he realized that the sheer volume of creatures collected could not come from one moment of creation, and ironically he determines that only focused attention on a single genus or species could illuminate the grander design.
Evaluation: The relationship between science, scientists and those who study the discoveries is subtly illustrated in this collection. Rather than focusing on specific genetic issues, Barrett forces us to consider the impact of these theorists in nontraditional, seemingly non-scientific scenarios.
– Natalie Champ