Humboldt's Cosmos

by Gerard Helferich

  The party pressed on. More than two miles wide here, the river was flowing at about a mile and a half per hour. Humboldt took astronomical measurements wherever he could, but the steady overcast prevented him from fixing many locations. In another two days the expedition arrived at the mission of Uruana, set at the foot of a high granite mountain and graced with a spectacular view of the river, which at that point ran wide and straight, divided into channels by two narrow islands. The missionary, Ramón Bueno, seemed genuinely concerned with the welfare of his charges, the Ottomacs, who made a marginal living from hunting and fishing. Savage, vindictive, ill kempt, overly fond of homemade liquor and intoxicating snuff, the Ottomacs were despised by the other Indians, who had a saying, “Nothing is so loathsome but that an Ottomac will not eat it.”

  Indeed, for two or three months of the year, the Ottomacs reportedly subsisted on nothing but clay, which they called poya, and apparently lost no weight and suffered no ill effects from this strange diet. In the Indians’ huts, Humboldt found balls of fine yellowish-gray earth, five or six inches in diameter, piled into pyramids three or four feet high. To prepare the clay for eating, the Ottomacs would bake the balls in a fire until they formed a hard, reddish crust (owing to the iron oxide in it), then would moisten them with water. Having acquired a taste for the poya, in fact, the Indians would even mix it with other foods during times of plenty. Though earth eating had been documented on every continent (including Europe, where German miners would spread on their bread a fine clay called Steinbutter, or “stone butter”), Humboldt was at a loss to explain the Ottomacs’ apparent health and vigor despite “so extraordinary a regimen” that “furnishes nothing, or probably nothing, to the composition of the organs of man.” Perhaps, he suggests, the Ottomacs had been able to adjust their digestive organs to the practice over the course of many years.

  On June 7, the travelers resumed their downriver journey. The mosquitoes seemed to become less thick with each passing day, and there were other indications that they were reentering more settled territory. The next day, they reached the point where the Orinoco made its great turn from north to east. The forest on the right bank thinned, while vast steppes appeared on the left. The next morning, the lancha encountered several merchant canoes sailing upriver toward the Apure, which was heavily trafficked between Angostura and the port of Varinas. Nicolás Soto took his leave here, boarding one of the merchant boats to return to his family. The population along the river grew more dense as Humboldt and Bonpland, alone again except for their Indian crew, neared Angostura. But the settlements of Alta Gracia, Piedra, Real Corona, and Borbón were miserable-looking places, peopled by whites, blacks, and mestizos, with few Indians to be seen.

  On June 13, the lancha pulled into Angostura (namesake of the bitters still used by bartenders). It was the welcome end of a long and exhausting journey. “It would be difficult for me to express the satisfaction we felt on landing . . . ,” Humboldt wrote. “The inconveniences endured at sea in small vessels are trivial in comparison with those that are suffered under a burning sky, surrounded by swarms of mosquitoes, and lying stretched in a canoe, without the possibility of taking the least bodily exercise.”

  In seventy-five grueling days, the explorers had journeyed some fifteen hundred miles on two of the great river systems of South America. They had ascended the great rapids at Ature and Maipures to penetrate a wilderness seen by only a handful of Europeans. Straining the limits of their endurance, they had survived insects, hunger, and treacherous waters in some of the most dangerous, desolate country in the world. Moreover, they arrived in Angostura with an incredible bounty of scientific data and specimens, which would add hugely to Europe’s trove of knowledge about South America and its rain forests. Humboldt had proved the existence of the Casiquiare Canal, connecting the vast river basins of the Orinoco and the Amazon. Despite the overcast that dogged them, he had fixed the latitude and longitude of more than fifty places—missions, mountains, rivers, streams—on the world’s maps. None of his predecessors had examined the rain forest with such an eclectic, penetrating eye.

  These accomplishments had not been without cost, however. For both Humboldt and Bonpland still suffered from the lethargy that they’d been experiencing for the past three weeks. In fact, with their arrival at Angostura, their symptoms seemed to be growing only worse.

  Eight: Cuba

  WHEN it was founded in 1764, the principal city of the Orinoco Delta was christened Santo Tomé de la Nueva Guayana. But the official designation proved cumbersome, and the town soon became known simply as Angostura, the Spanish word for “strait.” Strategically situated between the rain forest and the coast, the port developed an active trade with Spain and the West Indies, and by the time of Humboldt’s arrival, thirty-seven years after its founding, the city had grown to nearly seven thousand souls. Angostura’s streets were laid out parallel to the river and lined with high, pleasant houses built of stone. Above the town rose a barren slate outcropping, and behind, to the southeast, lay fetid marshes. Though Humboldt found little in the monotonous landscape to recommend it, Angostura did afford an undeniably majestic view of the Orinoco, which here formed a vast canal running southwest to northeast. During the rainy season, when the quays flooded, crocodiles were a hazard even in the center of town. While Humboldt was there, an Indian man was killed by one of the creatures while mooring his canoe in less than three feet of water.

  Though their clothes were in tatters from the long river journey, Humboldt and Bonpland presented themselves to Governor Felipe de Ynciarte, who received them cordially and offered them accommodations. After the wild, desolate country they’d grown accustomed to, Angostura seemed a metropolis and the townfolk urbane citizens of the world. “We admired the conveniences which industry and commerce furnish to civilized man,” Humboldt wrote. “Humble dwellings appeared to us magnificent; and every person with whom we conversed, seemed to be endowed with superior intelligence. Long privations give a value to the smallest enjoyments; and I cannot express the pleasure we felt, when we saw for the first time wheaten bread on the governor’s table.”

  In the days after their arrival, Bonpland went to work organizing the surviving two thirds of their herbarium, while Humboldt took measurements to fix Angostura’s latitude and longitude. But the travelers continued to experience the fatigue and weakness they’d felt on the river, and it wasn’t long before both men, plus a servant who’d been with them since Cumaná, contracted a severe fever. Humboldt wasn’t surprised by the delayed onset. “It is common enough for travelers to feel no effects from miasma till, on arriving in a purer atmosphere, they begin to enjoy repose,” he explained. “A certain excitement of the mental powers may suspend for some time the action of pathogenic causes.” He suspected typhoid, which was long confused with typhus (the disease that had swept through the Pizarro) but is now known to be a distinct illness.

  It would be another eighty years before the cause of typhoid was discovered, a bacterium of the Salmonella genus that enters the body through contaminated food or water. After an incubation period ranging from ten days to four weeks, the victim feels the early symptoms of lethargy, headache, body aches, fever, and restlessness, which may be followed by a cough, nosebleeds, red spots on the trunk, and digestive symptoms such as loss of appetite, constipation, or diarrhea. The fever gradually rises over the course of about a week, till it plateaus around 104 degrees, where it holds steady for another week or more. In the next week, the fever gradually declines and the long recuperation begins—unless the sufferer has already succumbed to complications, which could include heart failure, a perforated intestine, pneumonia, encephalitis, or meningitis.

  The servant’s symptoms advanced alarmingly, and the man was soon prostrate. Humboldt’s fever also rose precipitously, and he was advised to take a concoction of honey and angostura bark, a bitter, aromatic substance similar to cinchona, the source of quinine. That night his fever worsened, but it broke the following day. Meanwhi
le, Bonpland, fearing he wouldn’t be able to tolerate the potent angostura bark, prescribed for himself other herbal remedies that he considered better suited to his constitution. But his fever continued unchecked, now accompanied by dysentery.

  Through the course of his illness, Bonpland never lost “that courage and mildness of character, which never forsook him in the most trying circumstances,” Humboldt explains, while Humboldt himself brooded obsessively over his companion’s condition. “I can barely describe to you the worry I suffered during his illness,” he wrote his brother, Wilhelm. “Never could I have hoped to meet again with a friend as loyal and devoted as he. I shall never forget how he saved my life in a storm that overtook us on the Orinoco . . . when he offered to swim ashore from the boat with me on his back.” We can forgive Humboldt’s exaggeration under the circumstances, when he was tortured by self-recrimination. “It was I who had chosen the path of the rivers,” he confessed in the Personal Narrative. “Instead of going up the Orinoco, we might have sojourned some months in the temperate and salubrious climate of the Sierra Nevada de Mérida [in western Venezuela].” The missionaries had warned of the perils waiting beyond the rapids of Ature and Maipures, but he had obstinately pressed ahead, and now “the danger of my fellow-traveler presented itself to my mind as the fatal consequence of this imprudent choice.”

  On the ninth day, the servant’s death was announced. Rushing to his bedside, Humboldt discovered that the man wasn’t dead, however, only comatose. After several hours, the servant regained his senses, and soon afterward his temperature peaked, then started to subside. Bonpland never experienced a similar crisis, and as the days wore on, his fever and dysentery gradually abated. To Humboldt’s immeasurable relief, his companion’s condition began to improve, and before long he was asking from his sickbed to see the branches and flowers of the tree that had cured Humboldt, which the naturalists realized constituted a previously unknown genus. (When Humboldt later shipped the specimen to the famed German botanist Karl Ludwig Willdenow for classification, he asked that the plant be named in his friend’s honor. Willdenow complied, and the new genus was called Bonplandia.)

  Though Bonpland continued to recover, it would be nearly a month before he’d be well enough to travel. It was not until July 10, with their mule train packed with instruments, botanical and geological specimens, Indian skeletons, and caged monkeys and birds, that the explorers would set out once more for the Venezuelan coast.

  After the misery and illness of the past twelve months, it wouldn’t have been surprising if Humboldt had decided to return to Europe at this point. And indeed, with their magnificent herbarium and the map of the Casiquiare, the expedition would have been acclaimed a resounding success even if it had concluded here. But having finally realized his lifelong dream of scientific exploration, Humboldt had no intention of terminating it so soon. As he wrote his brother, “I could not possibly have been placed in circumstances more highly favorable for study and exploration than those which I now enjoy. I am free from the distractions constantly arising in civilized life from social claims. Nature offers unceasingly the most novel and fascinating objects for learning. The only drawbacks to this solitude are the want of information on the progress of scientific discovery in Europe and the lack of all the advantages arising from an interchange of ideas.” Humboldt had lost himself in the jungles and mountains of the New World, just as in childhood he had immersed himself in the fields and forests of the family estate at Tegel.

  From Venezuela Humboldt elected to visit Havana. The city was Spain’s principal port in the Americas, and having missed it on the outbound journey due to the typhus outbreak aboard the Pizarro, he was eager to see it now. Then from Cuba he planned to resume their original itinerary, through North America and the Philippines, before sailing across the Pacific and back to Europe. But first they had to recross the Llanos.

  STIFLING even during the rainy season, the eastern Llanos were as wild and forbidding as those farther west, which the travelers had traversed en route to the Orinoco. But with the coming of the rains, the vegetation had emerged from its annual dormancy. The grass now formed a thick turf, and the stubby Mauritia palms bore enormous clusters of red fruits, of which Humboldt’s monkeys were exceedingly fond. Always seeking to tease out the tangled skein of cause and effect, Humboldt was struck by the enormous influence a lone palm tree could exert on the landscape: “We observed with astonishment how many things are connected with the existence of a single plant,” he wrote. “The winds, losing their velocity when in contact with the foliage and branches, accumulate sand around the trunk. The smell of the fruit, and the uprightness of the verdure, attract from afar the birds of passage, which love to perch on the slender, arrow-like branches of the palm-tree. . . . If we examine the soil on the side opposite to the wind, we find it remains humid long after the rainy season. Insects and worms, everywhere else so rare in the Llanos, here assemble and multiply.” Indeed, “this one solitary and often stunted tree, which would not claim the notice of the traveler amid the forests of the Orinoco, spreads life around it in the desert.”

  On their third day out of Angostura, the travelers rested at the mission of Cari. As they prepared to depart again, there was some trouble with the Indian muleteers. Reloading the animals, the teamsters discovered the skeletons that Humboldt had taken from the cavern of Ataruipe. The men refused to load “the bodies of their old relations,” for fear the mules would be struck dead on the road, and nothing Humboldt said could persuade them otherwise. Finally, the missionary came to the rescue (as had so many other missionaries throughout their journey), mustering his ecclesiastical authority and ordering the Indians to pack the skeletons and get under way.

  After a dangerous ford through the high waters and quicksand of the apparently misnamed Río de Agua Clara, the party reached the little town of Pao, where the small reed huts were roofed with leather and the peones llaneros guarded herds of cattle, horses, and mules. Even at this time of year, the heat was unbearable. The travelers would have preferred to ride at night, as they had done on the southbound crossing, but bandits had been reported in the area, robbing and killing anyone who fell into their hands. So the group pressed on during the day, their skin burned by the blazing sun and chafed by the windblown sand. As they went, Humboldt kept a nervous eye on Bonpland, to see how his friend was bearing the rigors of the journey.

  Despite the heat, Humboldt greeted the open spaces of the Llanos with a sense of euphoria. “After having passed several months in the thick forests of the Orinoco,” he wrote, “in places where one is accustomed, when at any distance from the river, to see the stars only in the zenith, as through the mouth of a well, a journey in the Llanos is peculiarly agreeable and attractive. The traveler experiences new sensations; and, like the Llanero, he enjoys the happiness ‘of seeing well around him.’” But this enjoyment was short lived. “There is doubtless something solemn and imposing in the aspect of a boundless horizon, whether viewed from the summits of the Andes or the highest Alps, amid the expanse of the ocean, or in the vast plains of Venezuela. . . . Infinity of space, as poets in every language say, is reflected within ourselves; it is associated with ideas of a superior order; it elevates the mind, which delights in the claim of solitary meditation. . . .” Nevertheless, “the dusty and creviced Llano, throughout a great part of the year, has a depressing influence on the mind, by its unchanging monotony. . . . After eight or ten days’ journey, the traveler . . . loves again to behold the great tropical trees, the wild rush of torrents, or hills and valleys cultivated by the hand of the laborer.”

  The travelers trudged on toward the coast. On the night of July 16—the first anniversary of their arrival in the New World—they slept at the mission of Santa Cruz de Cachipo. Soon after, they were delighted to see the mountains of Cumaná rising in the distance, at first hazy and broken like a bank of fog, then gradually growing more solid and real. Finally, on the twenty-third, the party arrived at the coastal city of Nueva Bar
celona, where they settled into the home of a wealthy merchant of French extraction named Pedro Lavié.

  Founded in 1637 by Spanish conquistador Juan Urpín, Nueva Barcelona had grown over the past decade from ten thousand inhabitants to more than sixteen thousand. The town was celebrated for a miraculous image of the Virgin Mary, which had been discovered inside the trunk of an old tutumo (calabash tree) at the nearby Indian village of Cumanagoto. The Virgen del Tutumo had been carried in a solemn procession to Nueva Barcelona, but whenever the residents there had incurred the displeasure of the padres, the image would miraculously return by night to the tree where it had been found. This phenomenon continued for years, until a fine monastery was built for the Franciscans and the nocturnal peregrinations abruptly ceased.

  Despite Humboldt’s worries, Bonpland had borne the journey across the Llanos remarkably well. Unfortunately, the same couldn’t be said of Humboldt himself. Nueva Barcelona was extremely damp, and after getting caught in a tropical rainstorm, Humboldt came down with a fever even more severe than the one he’d recently suffered. Typically, the Personal Narrative doesn’t linger over the severity of his symptoms or the depth of his concern over his health. But from the fact that he and Bonpland rested in Nueva Barcelona for nearly a month, we can infer that Humboldt was seriously ill, his constitution perhaps still weakened by the weeks of privation in the rain forest and by his earlier siege in Angostura.

  During their forced stay, the Europeans became friendly with a young Franciscan monk named Juan Gonzáles, whom Humboldt found “cheerful, intelligent, and obliging.” Interested in natural history, Gonzáles had earlier made his own journey into the Upper Orinoco, and he now examined the explorers’ animal and plant specimens with a relish tinged with nostalgia. Since Fray Juan was preparing to return to Europe, he arranged to accompany his new friends as far as Cuba, where he could find passage across the Atlantic. Altogether, the three men would spend the next seven months in each other’s company.