The Girl Who Drew Butterflies: Chapter 11–"The Woman in Her World"

Inside the three-masted sailing ship, their berths were tiny and cluttered with luggage and supplies.

Meals were meager and repetitive: salt pork, stale biscuits, and whatever fish could be caught by the crew.

In this grim but lucrative “Trade Triangle,” Dutch ships (among others) sailed from the Netherlands to the western coast of Africa, full of goods such as cloth, rum, and guns, which they bartered for gold and slaves.

Still, Maria’s main purpose in Surinam was recording insects, and the sheer number of them was staggering.

“One day I wandered far out into the wilderness...I took this caterpillar home with me and it rapidly changed into a pale wood-colored chrysalis, like the one here lying on the twig; two weeks later...this most beautiful butterfly emerged, looking like polished silver overlaid with the loveliest ultramarine green and purple, and indescribably beautiful; its beauty cannot possibly be rendered with the paintbrush.”

Would she be able to organize, sketch, and gather enough specimens to recoup all the hard-earned money spent on this voyage?

Though exhausted, ill, and anxious about the voyage ahead, they carried evidence of a vast, teeming, interconnected ecosystem of plants and insects, the likes of which the great European academies had never seen.

Instead, spurred by her irrepressible enthusiasm, she invited friends and colleagues to view her precious Surinam sketches and specimens, which she had “dried and well displayed in boxes where they can be seen by all.”

This book was too important to scrimp on details.

Reviews praised “the great passion for investigation and tireless diligence of this woman,” and wealthy collectors immediately snapped up the more expensive copies, which had been hand-colored in Maria’s workshop.

In an unprecedented acknowledgment of Maria’s experiment-based research, the Royal Society of London, a famed scientific group (which would not admit women to its membership for another 250 years), mentioned her in their publication Philosophical Transactions...

While working on her Surinam book, Maria painted a beautiful series of seashells on commission to bolster her dwindling funds.

Others criticized her lack of insect classification and the seemingly haphazard organization of her books.

Later editions of her Surinam book were needlessly reorganized according to different classification systems, garbling and misrepresenting her findings.

Many have called her the world’s first ecologist.