Those fish hooks Inés mentions bought more than rubber. She traded them for specimens too, jars of spirit going home to the British Museum, and three species ended up carrying her name. One's a climbing perch, Ctenopoma kingsleyae, still in the drawers at the Natural History Museum, still labelled. A fish that can haul itself overland when the water goes. Fitting enough.
The skirt first. Long, black, heavy, the same thing she'd have worn in a London parlour, and she went up the Ogooué in it. Fell into a game pit in Gabon — about fifteen feet, spiked at the bottom — and the skirt took the spikes instead of…
The spirit does the work — alcohol fixes the tissue and keeps the water out, so a fish put up in the 1890s can still be opened and read today. People are getting usable DNA out of jars that old now, which is more than the collectors could have hoped for. Good drawers, Kit.
Sixty-five species of fish and eighteen of reptile back to London, and somebody had to carry all that glass and spirit down to the coast in a canoe. Kit, the packing alone — jars, cork, crates, and a river that doesn't care.