A Boy Naturalist in the Amazon

Starting in 1875, at age nineteen, Ernest T. Morris of Indianapolis began a series of seven trips to the Amazon Valley to collect bird, butterfly, beetle, and orchid specimens for wealthy patrons in the United States. He gained fame from his second journey, made in 1876-1877, in which he ventured to the remote highland villages of the Munduruku people and bartered with them for eleven ornamented human trophy heads. In the early 1880s, Morris served as a Special Correspondent for the New York World newspaper, producing columns that introduced thousands of readers to the discomforts, dangers, and beauty of the vast South American rainforest. From this exposure, Morris earned the epithet “The Boy Naturalist.” He soon disappeared from public notice, causing wild rumors about his fate. Morris’s unpublished manuscript and journals of his travels, along with contemporary newspaper accounts of his exploits, provide the source material for this never-before-told story from the age of the last naturalists.