Humboldt's Cosmos

by Gerard Helferich

  The Briton also made use of some of Humboldt’s myriad data in constructing his revolutionary theory of natural selection. In marshaling his evidence in On the Origin of Species, Darwin makes two arguments from nature. The first is that the (admittedly incomplete) fossil record shows that older species have, over huge expanses of time, been supplanted by newer species. This conclusion stems from his reading in geology, including Charles Lyell’s monumental Principles of Geology, which he had also packed in his seabag (and which itself borrowed from Humboldt’s work).

  Darwin’s second argument draws more directly from Humboldt, who had previously shown that differences in climate alone were not enough to explain the diversity of species that were seen from place to place. After all, most continents had hot areas, cold areas, and areas in between. So why was the kangaroo found only in Australia and not in the deserts of North America? Why did apes live in Africa but not in the rain forests of South America? Darwin’s solution was migration followed by long isolation: A species wandered into new territory, was cut off from its brethren, and over a vast period, breeding only among itself, evolved into what was eventually recognized as a unique species. Besides providing the conceptual starting point for this part of the argument, Humboldt, by discovering thousands of plant species unique to South America, also provided copious evidence of exactly the process that Darwin was describing. In the midst of this discussion, in fact, Darwin cited “the illustrious Humboldt” for his contribution.

  But it wasn’t just Humboldt’s inspirational example and his powers of observation that had such an effect on Darwin. It was also his worldview. Like Humboldt, Darwin was a synthesizer, one of those iconic figures who propel science forward through their compulsion to create order (cosmos)out of the apparent disarray (chaos)of natural phenomena. The result in Darwin’s case was On the Origin of Species, which, as biologist and writer Steve Jones points out, single-handedly propelled the science of biology from a collection of disparate facts into a “system of knowledge.” Though the crucial insight of natural selection was Darwin’s, the synthesizing impulse behind it owed a debt to Humboldt. In fact, considering the profound influence he exerted on the young Briton, it’s arguable that without Humboldt there would have been no Darwin. Or, as Darwin himself put it: “I shall never forget that my whole course of life is due to having read and re-read as a youth [Humboldt’s] Personal Narrative.”

  Yet, luminary that he was during his lifetime and immediately beyond, Humboldt’s celebrity has been eclipsed over the past century and a half by his scientific successors. Instead of his all-encompassing physique générale, science today is the province of ever more narrowly focused specialists. Even the Humboldt Current, the cold upwelling along the Pacific Coast of South America that he studied, is now apt to be called the Peru Current. Although many North Americans have a vague sense of Humboldt’s name and a hazy recollection that he had something to do with Latin America and perhaps the Avenue of the Volcanoes, most would be hard pressed to give particulars—as I had been before visiting La Ciénega.

  WHAT kind of man would travel thousands of miles to strike into a wilderness where no European had ever ventured before? How does a person develop such an eclectic, obsessive curiosity, ranging from the distribution of the dragon tree, to the origin of basalt, to the grammatical structure of ancient Indian languages? Was Humboldt driven by hubris and self-centeredness (as his brother, Wilhelm, and sister-in-law, Caroline, suspected), or by something more altruistic and heroic? Where did he find the incredible resilience to sustain such a journey for five years, and to accomplish so much during that period? And why was he showered with adulation during his lifetime and immediately after, yet all but forgotten in recent decades?

  Over the course of my research I have come to see Humboldt as a unique commingling of the Enlightenment and the Romantic Era, of intellect and feeling, of contemplation and action. I have also come to see him as a surprisingly modern figure, with quirks and enthusiasms and concerns similar to ours. There is a great deal to admire in him—his intelligence and curiosity, certainly, and his reverence for nature and respect for cultures different from his own. Above all, there is his courage—not just the physical courage required on the journey but the even greater courage needed to leave home in the first place. The courage to give up a responsible profession and comfortable circumstances in order to chase one’s dream, the courage to believe that it’s never too late to reinvent oneself, to discard doubt and convention and to pursue one’s true calling—the courage to become the hero of one’s own life. It was perhaps his individuality and audacity, as much as his scientific prowess and his enlightened politics, that underlay Humboldt’s tremendous popularity. Devouring his Personal Narrative, teachers, shopkeepers, clerks could also leave their everyday life behind and ship out for South America, if only for a while. And perhaps they would return from that vicarious journey a bit changed—a little more adventurous, a little more trusting of their own internal compass. Along with Humboldt, I, too, felt “spurred on by an uncertain longing for what is distant and unknown, for whatever excited my fantasy: danger at sea, the desire for adventures, to be transported from a boring daily life to a marvelous world.”

  In the two centuries since Humboldt’s visit, the former Spanish colonies have become independent nations. Slavery has been abolished. The population of metropolitan Mexico City, which Humboldt called “the City of Palaces,” is approaching twenty million—and palaces aren’t necessarily the first impression of the visitor. Yet many things remain unchanged. Snow-cloaked Chimborazo still towers above the Andean Highlands, and the coastal fog still shrouds Lima from May through October. Though Spanish rule is gone, the sad legacy of colonial misgovernment and malfeasance lingers. Areas of crushing poverty remain, especially among the Indians. Mexico City is still the largest metropolis in the New World, just as it was in Humboldt’s day. Much colonial architecture has been preserved there and elsewhere, and Humboldt would instantly recognize today’s zócalos in the Mexican capital, Lima, Quito, and many other cities. Mexico’s La Valenciana silver mine, which once produced a fifth of the world’s supply of the precious metal, is still in operation, and the fabulous eighteenth-century church built from its wealth, boasting three huge gold altars, still attests to the riches that came out of the earth on the backs of the native people. Humboldt’s world may have passed, but tantalizing traces remain. And even today his spirit is very much alive throughout Latin America—in the respect for cultural heritage, in the striving for modernity, in the spirit of social progress.

  The fact is that Humboldt helped to shape the world as we know it, and his influence is still felt around the globe, even where his name is not widely recalled. The product of a rich intellectual tradition stemming back to the ancient Greeks and encompassing such disparate titans of the Enlightenment as Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, René Descartes, and Immanuel Kant, Humboldt passed that tradition to his own successors in science, including Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Max Planck, and Edwin Hubble. Humboldt’s physique générale is a link in the conceptual chain comprising such touchstone theories as evolution, relativity, quantum mechanics, and the Big Bang.

  Even amid today’s rampant scientific specialization, Humboldt’s search for “the unity of nature” not only survives but thrives, still yielding some of the most provocative areas of contemporary investigation, such as superstrings, complexity, emergence, and the elusive “theory of everything.” In his brilliant, ambitious book Consilience, E. O. Wilson takes the synthesizing impulse to the ultimate, arguing that all tangible phenomena, including human behavior and culture, are ultimately reducible to the laws of physics. “I have argued that there is only one class of explanation,” he says. “It traverses the scales of space, time, and complexity to unite the disparate facts of the disciplines by consilience, the perception of a seamless web of cause and effect.” Though Humboldt’s approach to science differed from Wilson’s in fundamental ways, the peripatetic Prussian u
ndoubtedly would have applauded this latest effort to discover the ultimate “unity of nature.”

  One: Tegel

  BORN in 1769, Alexander von Humboldt grew up in one of the most exciting periods of maritime exploration that Europe had ever seen. Though nearly 250 years had passed since Ferdinand Magellan had set off on mankind’s first voyage around the world, by the middle of the eighteenth century the Pacific Ocean was still a vast unknown. But with the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763, France and Great Britain determined to carry their political, scientific, and commercial rivalry to the farthest corners of the earth. By 1800, they had dispatched half a dozen voyages of circumnavigation, in what would become known as “the Second Great Age of Discovery.”

  Like their predecessors in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (the so-called Great Age of Exploration), these new expeditions were launched primarily in the hope of financial gain from expanding overseas trade. But they were also products of the decidedly rational, secular tenor of the time, and they differed from the earlier voyages in two important respects. First, unmotivated by religious zeal, they did not seek to make converts to any faith. And second, they were undertaken partly out of scientific curiosity, in order to advance discoveries in natural history. Thus, the captains of this era took on board not only sailors and marines, but astronomers and naturalists as well.

  The preeminent French explorer of the eighteenth century was the charming, brilliant Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, who, having fought with Montcalm in Canada during the Seven Years’ War, became the first of his countrymen to circle the earth. Sailing from Europe in 1766 with the speedy Boudeuse and L’Étoile, Bougainville called on Tahiti, which, following its recent discovery by Samuel Wallis, had already assumed its place as the prototypical Pacific island paradise. The party stopped at other islands, including Samoa, the New Hebrides, and the Solomons, skirted the Great Barrier Reef, then, barely surviving ferocious storms in the Coral Sea, returned to France three years later with a trove of natural history specimens, including the first marsupials ever seen in Europe. Bougainville was welcomed as a national hero, and his book, Voyage autour du monde, proved a huge best-seller.

  But the greatest navigator of the era was the Englishman James Cook. Having abandoned a promising career commanding coal ships in the North Sea in order to join the Royal Navy at the advanced age of twenty-seven, Cook was known for his good nature, his solicitude toward his men, and his consummate skill at navigation. He specialized in charting coastlines, and his masterful survey of the St. Lawrence River was credited with allowing the British to take Quebec in 1759, during the Seven Years’ War.

  When Cook departed on his first voyage, his express purpose was to sail to Tahiti to observe a rare transit of Venus across the sun, which would allow a more precise calculation of the earth’s distance from our star and provide other astronomical data useful to navigators. However, Cook was also charged with a more politically sensitive, strategic mission—to resolve the two most pressing issues in Pacific exploration. First, he was to determine whether the Great Southern Continent, posited by Ptolemy fifteen hundred years before, actually existed. Second, he was to ascertain whether New Zealand was a cape jutting out from New Holland (Australia) or an island in its own right.

  Choosing the Endeavour, one of the stout but sluggish coal ships he knew well, Cook departed England in August 1768. After observing the transit of Venus from Tahiti, he sailed somewhat beyond 40 degrees south latitude, then, finding no Southern Continent, spent the next six months surveying New Zealand, which he proved to be made up of islands, and charting part of the eastern coast of Australia. He also penetrated the Great Barrier Reef, on which he very nearly lost his ship when it ran aground on the treacherous shoals. With the Endeavour repaired, Cook sailed through the Torres Strait, confirming that New Guinea was also not joined to Australia, then continued back to England.

  Cook’s first circumnavigation has been called the most successful exploration of the Pacific ever conducted, but there was still a great deal to be learned about the world’s largest ocean. From 1772 to 1775, Cook made a second voyage in two more refitted coal ships, the Resolution and the Adventure, during which he became the first person to cross the Antarctic Circle. Making this circumnavigation at the lowest latitude ever attempted, he also disproved once and for all the existence of the Great Southern Continent, at least in any region habitable by humans. (Antarctica wouldn’t be discovered until 1820, by the Britons William Smith and James Bransfield and the American Nathaniel Palmer.) On this voyage, Cook also discovered South Georgia and New Caledonia, among other islands of the South Pacific.

  On his third and final voyage, Cook left England in 1776, again in command of the Resolution and the Adventure. This time he was charged with sailing up the Pacific Coast of North America in search of the supposed Northwest Passage; though he failed to find the elusive waterway, he did make one of his greatest discoveries, the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii), where in 1779 he was killed by indigenous people in a contretemps over a stolen boat. The Resolution and Adventure returned to England in October 1780.

  Cook had explored the Pacific more thoroughly than anyone before him, and his discoveries were unparalleled. In fact, with their improved maps and tremendous trove of natural history specimens, Cook’s voyages were far more successful from a scientific perspective than from a commercial one. Accompanied on his first expedition by famed naturalist Joseph Banks, as well as botanist Daniel Solander and two botanical illustrators, Cook returned to Europe with myriad new species of exotic plants and animals. On his second voyage, he had with him the renowned German naturalist Johann Forster and Forster’s son Georg, as well as Swedish botanist Anders Sparrman and two astronomers. Forster’s resulting book, Observations Made During a Voyage Round the World, was a masterful blend of natural history, anthropology, and travelogue and became an international bestseller, further spurring Europe’s fascination with the exotic lands on the other side of the world.

  Despite the myriad other achievements, Cook’s greatest scientific breakthrough was against scurvy, the wasting disease that had been the bane of sailors for centuries; on his first and second voyages, he experimented with citrus fruits, sauerkraut, fresh vegetables, even grass, and, incredibly, didn’t lose a single man to the illness, which is caused by a deficiency of vitamin C. It was actually for his conquest of scurvy, not his geographic discoveries, that Cook received the Royal Society’s highest award, the Copley Medal, in 1776. Meanwhile, his naturalist, Joseph Banks, became a world-famous advocate of the sciences, serving as president of the Royal Society until his death in 1820.

  BORN in the year that Bougainville completed his circumnavigation, the young Alexander von Humboldt was thrilled by these great voyages of scientific discovery. Though he found himself in a landlocked country known for its mountains and mines—or perhaps because of that accident of birth—he had a passion for the sea from the youngest age, and he longed to sail to far-off places seldom visited by Europeans. As a boy, he would spend rainy afternoons poring over travel books and maps, retracing the routes of Bougainville and especially Cook, and letting his imagination wander over the exotic place names of the Southern Hemisphere. Later, after he became famous, Humboldt would admit that he had seen himself as a land-roving Captain Cook, bent on laying bare the interiors of the continents in the way Cook had mapped the Pacific.

  There were not many other happy memories from those early years. Whereas his older brother, Wilhelm (later a famous linguist, educator, and diplomat, and principal founder of Germany’s Humboldt University), was bright and outgoing, Alexander was quiet, moody, sickly. His tutors pronounced him slow.

  Their father, Major Alexander Georg von Humboldt, came from an old Prussian family. Although family legend had it that their forebears had been noblemen, Alexander was never formally granted a title, and the “Baron” later affixed to his name was a simple courtesy; Wilhelm’s children would be the first Humboldts officially elevated to the nobi
lity, in 1875. The major, an adjutant during the Seven Years’ War to the duke of Brunswick, who was also Alexander’s godfather, was later appointed court chamberlain to the brother of Frederick the Great.

  Thanks to their father’s position, Alexander and Wilhelm made the acquaintance of scholars, courtiers, even royalty. According to one story, when the young Alexander was introduced to Frederick the Great, the king asked him if he’d like to conquer the world like his namesake, Alexander the Great of Macedonia. Humboldt’s prescient reply was: “Yes, Sire, but with my head.” The major hated court routine, however, and whenever he could get away he would take Wilhelm and Alexander to roam their estate, Tegel, two hours by coach from Berlin, where they would inspect the mulberry trees, dig in the sandpits, and swim in the cool, green lake. Those long days, bristling with the wonders of nature and burnished with the companionship of his father and brother, were the sweetest moments of Alexander’s boyhood.

  The major had married well. Alexander and Wilhelm’s mother was Maria Elisabeth von Hollwege, daughter of the Huguenot Colomb family and a wealthy widow. The town house in Berlin was a legacy from her mother, and Tegel was a bequest from her first husband, as was another estate, Ringenwalde, on the banks of the Oder. People often complimented her on her good looks and her education. But while she was cool and reserved, her husband was warm and outgoing. In some ways, it wasn’t an ideal match.

  In January 1780, when Alexander was ten and Wilhelm twelve, came the crushing blow of their father’s death. With him, it seemed, all the warmth went out of the Humboldt household. Burdened with a difficult son from her previous marriage, Frau Humboldt determined to take a firm hand with Wilhelm and Alexander. The boys’ care was turned over to their tutors, who drilled them in German, French, the classics, and history. Their second tutor, Karl Sigismund Kunth, became a lifelong friend and advisor, but even this friendship was no substitute for their father’s affection, and their mother wasn’t able to close the emotional distance with her sons. It was a particularly painful time for Alexander, who’d always been the more sensitive of the boys. It was excruciating, he later wrote a friend, “to be living among people who loved me and showed me kindness, but with whom I had not the slightest sympathy, where I was subjected to a thousand restraints and much self-imposed solitude, and where I was often placed in circumstances that obliged me to maintain a close reserve and to make continual self-sacrifices.” He and Wilhelm clung to each other during this miserable time, and the brothers became inseparable.