The Fish That Took a Century to Name

On the morning of Friday Aug. 6, 1852, Alfred Russel Wallace was summoned to the deck of the brig Helen. The boat was in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, and Wallace had already been at sea for 26 days. He was used to hardship. He’d spent the previous four years in the Amazon rainforest, exploring uncharted territory and collecting natural history specimens for his own collection and for museums back home in England. The hold was filled with his valuable specimens—many were new to science and irreplaceable. The 29-year-old Welsh-born naturalist had even stowed several live specimens: there were parrots and parakeets, some monkeys, and a wild forest dog on board.

The captain said to Wallace, “I’m afraid the ship’s on fire. Come and see what you think.”

Ten months earlier, in the depths of the rainforest, Wallace had contracted a fever that almost killed him. Still sick, he now stood with Captain Turner on the deck of the Helen and watched as smoke billowed from the forecastle. The small crew frantically threw buckets of water into the hold, but the fire was unstoppable and engulfed the ship. The captain gathered up his chronometer, sextant, compass, and charts, and the crew began to prepare the rescue boats: a longboat and the captain’s gig.

“I got up a small tin box containing a few shirts,” Wallace recounted in a letter to his friend, the botanist Richard Spruce, “and put in it my drawings of fishes and palms,