Humboldt's Cosmos

by Gerard Helferich

  The ash-covered piton was the steepest part of the climb, and would have been virtually impassible except for an old current of lava, which allowed uncertain handholds. When covered in snow, the piton was even more treacherous. As they passed, M. LeGros pointed to the spot where Captain Baudin, making this same climb, had nearly been killed in the winter of 1797, when he’d lost his footing and rolled partway down the mountain before fetching up on a heap of lava.

  They reached the summit at eight A.M. At the top of the piton there was scarcely room to sit, and a circular wall of lava surrounded the crater like a parapet, preventing a view of the volcano’s interior. There was an exquisite vista of the other islands, though, spread out before them like a map. The wind was so strong out of the west that they could scarcely stand, and it roared through the crevices in the rock. The temperature was just above freezing, and the party suffered in their lightweight clothing.

  On the eastern side there was a breach in the lava wall, and the party began their descent into the crater. Humboldt saw that the caldera was elliptical, about three hundred feet by two hundred and only some one hundred feet deep. To the southwest, where the rim was lower, he noticed an enormous mass of cooled lava perched atop the crater. Also in that direction a large opening in the rim gave a spectacular view of the sea beyond. In the bottom of the crater sat great blocks of lava, but it was clear that the volcano had not erupted through the caldera for many years. However, the volcano was emphatically active. Just one year before, lava streams had broken out on the sides of the mountain, there had been occasional subterranean noises like the firing of cannon, and stones the size of houses had been hurled four thousand feet into the air.

  Picking their way through the broken lava, the party passed crevices in the crater where vapor escaped and they heard a curious buzzing. At these vents, they could feel the heat from deep within the earth, and Humboldt measured the temperature of the ground at up to 108 degrees Fahrenheit. He collected some air in a corked vial in order to test the oxygen content later on. The walls of the caldera were bleached snow-white by sulfuric acid, and it was impossible to sit for long, lest the climbers’ clothes be corroded. When Humboldt wrapped some sulfur crystals in paper, thinking to take them back to the ship, the wrapper, and even parts of his journal, were quickly eaten away. There were no insects on the summit, he noted, but he did find some dead bees inside the caldera, apparently carried up the mountain by air currents.

  Climbing back to the piton, the party stopped to admire again the amazing beauty laid out before them. The sky was a stunning cobalt, and arrayed on the island below, in pleasing contrast, were the steep, barren flanks of the volcano, desolate plains, forests, vineyards, gardens, and finally the towns along the coast. In the thin, clear air, they could even make out the masts of the ships anchored off La Orotava. What an incredible place was Tenerife, brimming with tropical plants, vines, fruit trees, even roses. Every road was lined with camellias—and the people actually fattened pigs on apricots. Though he’d scarcely left Europe, Humboldt was tempted to let the Pizarro sail on without him. He would be quite happy, he thought, to settle in the Fortunate Islands, like M. LeGros, the castaway who had never gone home.

  From this vantage point, it was obvious to Humboldt how the island’s vegetation grew in five distinct zones, according to elevation, soil, and availability of water—grasses on top of the peak; then the tall flowering shrubs known as retama; then, in descending order, pines and heaths; verdant forests of laurel, oak, chestnut, myrtle, and other trees, with thick growths of ferns at their trunks; and finally, the cultivated land along the coast, graced with vines, grain, fruit trees, olives, and tropical species such as date palms, figs, and banana trees. Humboldt made a sketch of the various bands. This relationship between altitude and plant life was exactly the sort of observation he’d hoped to make on this journey, just one clue to the coherent, interlocking whole of nature. If, when he was barely out of Europe, such secrets were already presenting themselves, he could only imagine what discoveries waited in the untrammeled wilds of America. Humboldt was shaken out of his reverie by the cold westerly wind, which drove the party to seek shelter behind the piton. Their hands and faces were frozen, and they reluctantly began their descent.

  During the long climb down, Humboldt had ample opportunity to consider the irony that the visit to El Teide, his first experience of an active volcano, had posed more questions than it had answered. Are volcanoes constructed entirely of lava, he wondered, or do they sit on a base of nonvolcanic rock? Do volcanoes begin as domes of softened rock pushed up by expanding subterranean gases, even before the crater forms and the lava begins to flow? What causes the underground fire that produces a volcano, and why is it sometimes explosive and other times subdued? Is the fire near the surface, or at some immense depth?

  There was maddeningly little data to resolve any of these issues. But whatever the ultimate answers, Humboldt was convinced that they would be the same everywhere on earth. In the past, researchers had focused too narrowly on the specific geological formation in view. Distracted by surface differences—Was this volcano domed or conical? Was it isolated or surrounded by other mountains?—these well-meaning investigations had emphasized superficial contrasts at the expense of underlying truths. Since geological phenomena were subject to regular laws, just like the laws of biology, “the ties which unite these phenomena . . . are discovered only when we have acquired the habit of viewing the globe as a great whole; and when we consider in the same point of view the composition of rocks, the causes which alter them, and the productions of the soil, in the most distant regions.” Such as the New World.

  Altogether, it had been twenty-one hours of walking from La Orotava to the peak and back. Humboldt was disappointed to have so little time to explore the island, but the Pizarro’s master, Captain Cagigal, was eager to resume their journey. Yet when they returned to the ship, they discovered that their departure had been postponed a couple of days, to the twenty-fourth or twenty-fifth, because the English squadron had been sighted again outside the harbor. Humboldt was frustrated—had they known, they could have spent longer on El Teide or perhaps even gone on to Tenerife’s smaller volcano, Chahorra. Instead, he and Bonpland spent the extra time exploring the area around La Orotava.

  Not content to study only the geological and botanical features of the Canaries, Humboldt—as he would throughout his journey—also turned his attention to the islands’ human occupants. What had become of the Guanches, he wondered, the indigenous people of the islands, “whose mummies alone, buried in caverns, have escaped destruction”? The answer was brutally simple: slavery, especially as practiced by Portugal and Humboldt’s nominal patron, Spain. “The Christian religion,” he went on, “which in its origin was so highly favorable to the liberty of mankind, served afterwards as a pretext to the cupidity of the Europeans” who felt no compunction at shipping off to the slave market in Seville any unbaptized person they could lay hands on. Those who escaped capture had gradually intermarried with the Spanish colonists, until the Guanches, as a people, had ceased to exist.

  Yet, despite his obvious sympathy for the Indians, Humboldt was adamant that they not be idealized for their supposed physical prowess and gentle character. Their physical stature had been exaggerated, he observed, judging from the remaining mummies. And prior to the European conquest, the Guanches labored under a violent, feudal society, far from the “perpetual felicity” that jaded Europeans might ascribe to a distant race supposed to be living as “noble savages.”

  Humboldt’s compassion and probity thus rose to the surface at his first encounter with non-European peoples. It is a theme he would sound time and again over the next five years, and indeed, throughout his life. In his culminating work, Cosmos, he would famously write: “While we maintain the unity of the human species, we at the same time repel the depressing assumption of superior and inferior races of men. There are nations more susceptible of cultivation, more highly civilized, mo
re ennobled by mental cultivation than others, but none in themselves nobler than others. All are in like degree designed for freedom. . . .”

  Though he came to the New World by the grace of the Spanish king, Humboldt clearly felt no obligation to support the monarchy’s colonial practices in his writings. He had been well aware of Spain’s American policies before ever setting out for Madrid. Yet, having exhausted all leads in France and desperate to begin a voyage of discovery, Humboldt hadn’t hesitated to accept Spain’s patronage, even if it meant concealing his own views—which, had they become known, would certainly have prevented him from receiving his royal passport. So, even as the Crown was in a sense hoping to manipulate Humboldt, to use his discoveries to tighten its financial and political stranglehold in the New World, Humboldt was secretly withholding his allegiance as well. (The irony that his ship was named after one of the most brutal conquistadors of all couldn’t have been lost on Humboldt.) Though his journey was first and foremost one of scientific discovery, once in South America the young Prussian would have no compunction about exposing—loudly and often—practices and conditions that he found reprehensible, however embarrassing those disclosures would prove to his patrons.

  UNDER way once more, the Pizarro cut the Tropic of Cancer on June 27. A few days later, the ship approached the area marked on the chart as “Bank of Maal-strom” and toward nightfall changed course to avoid the region. The original Maelstrom, or Moskenstraumen in Norwegian, was an infamous channel of treacherous currents and unforgiving winds located in the Lofton Sea, off northern Norway. Humboldt strenuously doubted that such a thing existed in these calm tropical waters, but knowing that sailors were a superstitious lot, he kept his thoughts to himself. In any event, a northwest current kept them from altering their course as much as the captain had planned.

  The ship passed 150 nautical miles west of the Cape Verde Islands, which had become a possession of Portugal after Alvise da Mosto, sailing for Henry the Navigator, had claimed them in 1456. Some land birds appeared, driven from shore by a storm, and followed the boat for several days before flying off. North of the Cape Verdes, the ship entered the great mass of floating seaweed called the Sargasso Sea, which Columbus had reported on his first voyage. He had compared the “sea” to an extensive meadow, and the metaphor is apt. A huge, elliptical mass of free-floating brown seaweed (also called “sea holly” because of the berrylike air sacs that hold it afloat and the sawtooth edges on its leaves), the Sargasso Sea was an eerie, oceanic desert of light wind, weak current, warm water, and little life. At latitude 17 degrees, 42 minutes, and longitude 34 degrees, 21 minutes, they came across a ghostly sight—a wrecked and abandoned vessel, mostly submerged and covered with floating seaweed. Since it seemed unlikely that the ship could have sunk in these tranquil waters, Humboldt speculated that it had foundered in the rough North Atlantic and drifted south with the currents. Whatever its source, it was a chilling sight to men in midocean.

  As the Pizarro sailed on, Humboldt and Bonpland continued their painstaking measurements—of latitude and longitude, air and water temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, the purity of the air and its electric charge, the salinity of the ocean, even the color of sky and sea. On very calm days, they were able to use their dip needle to measure the angle of the earth’s magnetic field. All their observations were duly recorded in notebooks for later analysis.

  Humboldt and Bonpland passed the evenings on deck, never tiring of the majestic tropical sky and the new constellations that revealed themselves night by night, replacing the familiar constellations they had known since childhood. They saw the Ship and the Clouds of Magellan drift into view, followed, on the night of July 4-5, by the fabled Southern Cross. Consisting of five stars, the not-quite-symmetrical Cross has been used for centuries to tell time in the Southern Hemisphere, since the constellation grows nearly perpendicular as it passes the meridian each night. Watching in silence, Humboldt found himself in a pensive mood as one of the dreams of his youth was realized. In the solitude of the sea, he hailed the Cross as a long-lost friend—yet the constellation was also a poignant reminder of their distance from Europe. He wrote, “Nothing awakens in the traveler a livelier remembrance of the immense distance by which he is separated from his country than the aspect of an unknown firmament.”

  Overall, the ship had an easy passage to America. It traversed nine hundred leagues (about 2,700 nautical miles) in the next twenty days, following the same route that Columbus and nearly all his successors had taken—almost due south to the Tropic of Cancer, then west to pick up the trade winds, which in the beginning blew from the east-northeast, then due east, propelling them steadily to the New Continent. Since Europeans had been plying these waters for three centuries, the sailors had a good idea of what to expect. En route, they enjoyed the calm seas the Spanish called el Golfo de las Damas (“the Ladies’ Sea”), and as they sped on before the wind, the sailors barely had to touch the sails.

  As they approached the West Indies, the islands encircling the Caribbean, they encountered the dark skies and las brisas pardas (“the dark winds”). Here frequent storms would threaten, and brooding, well-defined clouds would appear in the east. The breeze would die, there would be lightning (but no audible thunder), and a few large raindrops would fall; then the wind would rise, the squall would pass harmlessly, and the crew would unfurl the topsails again. The storms were like nothing Humboldt had ever experienced, but they were common in the tropics in June and July. The constancy of the daily temperatures also made an impression on him: During the day his thermometer fluctuated between about seventy-three and seventy-five degrees, and at night between about seventy-one and seventy-three. “Nothing,” he suggested, “could equal the beauty and mildness of the climate of the equinoctial region on the ocean.”

  Then, as the Pizarro neared the Antilles, on the northeast edge of the Caribbean, an event occurred that shattered the peaceful voyage: A typhus epidemic broke out on board.

  Common aboard ships of the time (and wherever people were packed together in unsanitary conditions) typhus is caused by a bacterium transmitted to humans by louse feces. An infected louse bites its host, and the host scratches the bite and breaks the skin, allowing the bacterium to enter the bloodstream. After an incubation period of one to two weeks, the first symptoms appear—headache, fever, body aches, nausea, prostration, and a characteristic rash. If the victim survives, the disease runs its course in another two weeks, after which the fever suddenly breaks and a long convalescence begins. If the fever fails to subside, delirium and coma set in, followed by death.

  On the first day of the outbreak, two sailors and several passengers were stricken. By the second day, the victims were delirious and totally prostrated. But Captain Cagigal was unconcerned with anything that didn’t directly affect the ship’s operation or its schedule, and he refused to fumigate (with woodsmoke) to try to stop the epidemic. The ship’s unnamed surgeon, whom Humboldt found an ignorant, unpleasant man, ascribed the disease to a “corruption of the blood” brought on by the tropical heat; he bled the patients, to no avail. Crowded together with no means of escape and without our modern understanding of disease, the other passengers and crew were naturally terrified. Humboldt had particular reason for concern, since his own health had never been robust. He tried to persuade himself that the fever wasn’t highly contagious, but he regretted that, in all their boxes of equipment and supplies, he and Bonpland had neglected to pack any quinine bark, on the assumption that the ship’s surgeon was certain to have adequate provisions.

  By July 8, one of the sailors had become so ill that death seemed imminent. He was taken from his hammock and brought on deck, where he was placed on a small piece of sailcloth in an airy spot near a hatchway, so that the ship’s company could gather round while he received last rites. The sacrament was administered, but, away from the heat and stagnant air of the middle deck, the man began to show steady progress and eventually recovered.

  A young Span
iard from Asturias contracted a particularly virulent case of the disease as well. Though Humboldt doesn’t mention any of the other passengers up to this point, he had clearly gotten to know the young man over the course of the voyage, because he describes him as intelligent and mild mannered. Nineteen and the only son of a poor widow, the boy hadn’t wanted to make this journey, but his mother had prevailed upon him to travel to Cuba to work for a wealthy relative, accompanied by a young friend who was also hoping to find a job there. For three days, the Asturian lay in a lethargic, delirious state, his friend always at his side. Then he succumbed, leaving the other not only grief stricken but also despairing of his own future, since his introduction to his prospective employer had expired along with his friend. “It was desperate,” Humboldt wrote, “to see this young man abandon himself to deep grief and curse the advice of those who had sent him to a distant land, alone and without support.”

  That evening found Humboldt in a melancholy frame of mind, watching the hilly, desolate islands slip past. The moon drifted in and out of the clouds, and low waves lapped at the hull as the ship cut through the phosphorescence. The sea was utterly quiet, except for the cries of a few seabirds flying toward the coast. At eight o’clock the dead man’s knell was tolled on the ship’s bell, and the crew stopped work and knelt to pray. The body was brought on deck in the night, and the next morning the priest recited some prayers and the corpse was buried at sea.

  After the young Asturian’s death, the master of the Pizarro was finally stirred to action. The ship’s first stop was to have been Havana, the largest port in the Western Hemisphere and one of the jewels of Spain’s New World empire, where Humboldt and Bonpland had intended to disembark. But with the fever still raging, the captain was eager to complete the voyage as soon as possible. He decided to forego their landing in Cuba and to proceed directly to their final destination, Cumaná, in present-day Venezuela. So all the passengers had no choice but to continue across the Caribbean to the coast of South America.