Empires of Nature

Abstract

It must have been a strange, indeed uncanny, sight to any wanderer accidentally traveling through the area. For there in the clearing, illuminated by the sparkling campfire against the dark masses of the forest and the mountains of the coast fading in the gloomy dusk, the bulk of a human torso bent over the flames where some small game was roasting. But it would not have been so much the man, whose almost certainly dark features now became visible as he looked up again, observing the thicket, who would have made our accidental witness freeze with fear. Much more terrifying, surrounding man and campfire amid a strange array of boxes and bags, would have been the great number of animals, of birds, foxes, and lizards, standing motionless, under a spell that froze them in the midst of a leap, or spreading their wings, as if bewitched in the very moment they were trying to escape from this fearful site—as, almost certainly, our solitary wanderer would have done by now. The dark magic worked on the animals of the coastal woods one fine day in the year of 1820 was, of course, none other than the spell of taxidermy. For it was then that the Museu Real (Royal Museum) of Rio de Janeiro, founded some two years earlier, dispatched its warden, porter, and preparator João de Deus e Mattos on a hunting excursion to the surrounding coastal range in order to end the museum’s notorious shortage of local animal and plant specimens. João deDeus, the presumably black servant whose multiple skills had already been employed by (and, it may be assumed, largely guaranteed the existence of) the Casa de História Natural, more commonly known as the “Casa dos Pássaros” (House of