Humboldt's Cosmos

by Gerard Helferich

  When Humboldt was feeling well enough, he and Bonpland borrowed some of the finest saddle horses belonging to their host, Don Pedro, and, with local guides, made an excursion to the hot springs about five miles southeast of town, where they examined the rock formations and investigated the mineral content of the water. They had been warned not to ford the Río Narigual, but on the return trip, finding the crude bridge impassible, they rode their horses into the river. As the animals swam across, Humboldt’s mount suddenly sank from under him, struggled underwater for some time, then vanished. Stunned, the men searched for the horse but could find neither the animal nor an explanation of its disappearance. Crocodiles were numerous in the area, and the guides suggested that the horse had been seized by one of the reptiles and dragged down to its death. Whatever the cause, the accident left Humboldt less concerned about his own near escape than about his awkward position vis-à-vis his host: Having done exactly what he’d been warned not to do, he had lost one of Don Pedro’s prize horses. Worse, decorum would not permit him to even offer reimbursement. The perfect gentleman, Don Pedro tried to allay his guest’s distress by exaggerating the ease with which fine horses were captured on the Llanos and broken to the saddle, but Humboldt was mortified by the whole affair.

  The packet boat from La Coruña was three months overdue in Nueva Barcelona, leading to speculation that it had been caught in the English blockade. With no certainty that the ship would ever arrive, Humboldt searched for a vessel that he could charter as far as the larger port of Cumaná, where he hoped to locate a ship bound for Cuba. What he managed to find was a smuggler, a lancha carrying on a contraband trade with the British island of Trinidad, just to the north. Because the English were actively encouraging such activity to undermine the Spanish mercantile monopoly, and since he held a passport from the governor of Trinidad, the lancha’s captain confidently explained that he had no reason to fear the blockade. So Humboldt, Bonpland, and Fray Juan stacked the animal cages, instruments, specimen boxes, and other gear beside the smuggler’s cargo of cacao, and under a fine sky, the lancha sailed out of the harbor—and straight into hostile gunfire.

  Heaving to, the lancha was boarded by privateers from Halifax, Nova Scotia. In common use at the time, privateers were freelancers (or “pirates,” depending on one’s point of view) authorized by a government to prey on enemy shipping in exchange for a share of the spoils. Having captured a bona fide Spanish vessel, even a modest one like the lancha, the mercenary captain had every intention of towing it to Nova Scotia to claim his reward. One of the boarding privateers happened to be Prussian, and Humboldt interceded in his native language, but to no avail. The passengers were ushered aboard the gunship, still arguing, but the captain was uninterested in political niceties and insisted that the lancha was a legal prize. Humboldt was in the skipper’s cabin, demanding that the passengers and their effects be rowed ashore, when a crewman entered and whispered something to the captain, who hurried topside.

  As it happened, the British sloop Hawk had witnessed the capture and signaled the privateer to heave to. When the order was ignored, the Hawk halted the ship with a cannonball across the bow, then sent a midshipman aboard to investigate. Humboldt and his friends were taken aboard the English vessel to be interviewed. Although all three—a Prussian, a Frenchman, and a Spaniard—were citizens of Britain’s wartime enemies, they were received kindly by the commander, Captain Garnier, who had read of Humboldt’s exploits in the English newspapers. Having served on voyages of exploration himself, including a cruise to the American Northwest with George Vancouver, the captain was eager to hear about the expedition. As a result, the trio spent a festive evening swapping yarns and news with the British officers. In fact, Humboldt “had not, during the space of a year, enjoyed the society of so many well-informed persons. . . . Coming from the forests of the Casiquiare, and having been confined during whole months to the narrow circle of missionary life,” he wrote, “we felt a high gratification at meeting for the first time with men who had sailed around the world, and whose ideas were enlarged by so extensive and varied a course.” The captain lent Humboldt his own stateroom for the night and even presented him with updated astronomical tables, which would permit more accurate geodetic measurements for the remainder of the journey. The next day, to prevent additional interference, the sloop saw the lancha safely to its destination.

  The explorers’ arrival at Cumaná seemed like a homecoming. “We gazed with interest at the shore,” Humboldt wrote, “where we first gathered plants in America. . . . Every part of the landscape was familiar to us; the forest of cactus, the scattered huts and that enormous ceiba, beneath which we loved to bathe at the approach of night. Our friends at Cumaná came out to meet us: men of all castes, whom our frequent herborizations had brought into contact with us, expressed the greater joy at the sight of us, as a report that we had perished on the banks of the Orinoco had been current for several months,” due to stories either of their illness in Angostura or their earlier near capsize.

  Their old friend Governor Vicente Emparán found Humboldt, Bonpland, and Gonzáles a spacious house in the center of town, with lovely views of the sea and with terraces ideal for setting up their instruments. Pleasant though the accommodations were, Humboldt was eager to continue on. But with Cumaná tightly blockaded, there was little traffic entering or leaving the harbor. His impatience growing, he considered making a dash for a group of Danish islands nearby, but in the end decided it wasn’t worth the risk: Given the uncertain political climate, he couldn’t be assured of reentry into Spain’s possessions, despite his royal passport, in which case, he would have no alternative but to return to Europe.

  During this second stay at Cumaná, Humboldt and Bonpland occupied themselves with more geological investigations on the Araya peninsula, checked and rechecked their measurements of the town’s latitude and longitude, and conducted experiments on refraction, evaporation, and atmospheric electricity. They also spent countless hours organizing their huge botanical collection, which, having now grown to some twelve thousand specimens, was by far the largest New World herbarium ever made. Even so, Humboldt was frustrated by its incompleteness. “We were barely able to collect a tenth of the specimens met with,” he complained in a letter to the botanist Willdenow. “I am now perfectly convinced of a fact that I would never admit while visiting with botanists in England . . . that we do not know three fifths of all the existing plants on earth!”

  As during their first visit, the naturalists were often interrupted in their work by curious townspeople eager to get a glimpse of their menagerie. Especially popular was the humanlike capuchin monkey (so named because its black head, sitting atop a black-and-white body, was reminiscent of the cowl worn by the Capuchin monks), as was the sleeping monkey, a variety never before seen on the coast. Humboldt intended to donate the monkeys and birds to the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, and when a French squadron arrived in Cumaná for refitting after a failed attack on nearby Curacao, the commander agreed to transport the creatures to the French island of Guadeloupe, whence they could be conveyed to France. Humboldt was later disappointed to learn that the animals, which the travelers had nursed through some of the most challenging terrain on earth, died on Guadeloupe, perhaps after failing to receive there the cosseting to which they’d become accustomed. However, some of the skins did eventually make the journey to Paris and were installed in the Jardin des Plantes.

  The arrival of their French allies created a sensation at Cumaná, with the populace gawking at the elaborate uniforms and peppering the officers with questions. Alarmed by the outpouring of interest in the foreign visitors—and especially by the pointed inquiries about the extent of self-government permitted on nearby Guadeloupe—the Spanish authorities rushed to reprovision the squadron and see it on its way. “These contrasts,” Humboldt wrote, “between the restless desires of the colonists [against Madrid’s restrictive rule], and the distrustful apathy of the government, throw some light on the gr
eat political events which, after long preparation, have separated Spain from her colonies.” There had been sporadic uprisings in the Spanish colonies before Humboldt’s arrival, and Venezuela would be engulfed in open rebellion just seven years later.

  Losing hope of finding a Spanish ship to break the blockade, Humboldt managed to secure passage on a neutral United States vessel laden with an odiferous cargo of salted meat. On November 16, the travelers finally sailed from Cumaná—not to Havana, but back to Nueva Barcelona, where the trader was being loaded. “The night was cool and delicious,” Humboldt reports. “It was not without emotion that we beheld for the last time the disc of the moon illuminating the summit of the cocoa-trees that surround the banks of the Manzanares. The breeze was strong, and in less than six hours we anchored near the Morro of Nueva Barcelona, where the vessel which was to take us to the Havannah was ready to sail.” The travelers were back where they had started ten exasperating weeks before.

  Eight days later, Humboldt, Bonpland, and Juan Gonzáles departed Venezuela at last. Planning to continue to Mexico and then on to the Philippines, Humboldt believed he was leaving South America for good.

  The first five days at sea passed uneventfully, with the naturalists charting their location, observing the passing islands, measuring the temperature of air and water, and recording anything else that seemed noteworthy. But by noon on November 29, all signs indicated a change of weather. The temperature dropped precipitously, bands of black clouds appeared to the north, and though the breeze remained light, the seas grew high. The next day, the wind veered to the northeast, the surge grew heavier, and their small vessel began to roll violently. That night the cook managed to set the deck on fire, and though the flames were soon extinguished, the incident heightened the sense of foreboding on board. But on the morning of December 1, the sea gradually calmed and the wind subsided.

  Two days later, the sentries called out a pirate ship on the horizon, and passengers and crew rushed to the rail. Eventually, they were able to read the name on the hull of the approaching vessel: Balandra del Frayle (Sloop of the Monk). Not a pirate ship at all, the sloop was operated by a Franciscan missionary who had grown rich carrying on an illegal, lucrative trade with the Danish islands nearby. The smuggler monk was harmless, but the false alarm unsettled the captain, who now determined to take the most direct, but also potentially most hazardous, route to Cuba—over the Pedro Shoals, a maze of reefs occupying an area almost as large as Puerto Rico.

  On December 4, as the trader picked its way through the shoals, it was buffeted by heavy rain, thunder, and increasingly violent gusts from the north-northwest. Then on the night of the sixth, with the storm still raging, the passengers heard the unmistakable roar of breakers. The gale had driven the ship dangerously out of position, and now it was speeding straight for the reef. Peering through the rain at the looming, phosphorescent surf, Humboldt had a flashback to all the rapids they had negotiated on the Orinoco. Their little lancha had survived those encounters, but the outcome of this mismatch was anything but certain. As the shoals grew closer, the terrified passengers waited for the violent shudder of keel on reef. But the captain managed to bring the helm around in time and guide the ship through an opening in the barrier. A quarter of an hour later, the trader was in open water once more. The next day the storm abated, and as the ship neared Cuba, a “delicious aromatic odor” announced the proximity of the island. Finally, on December 19, after an interminable passage of twenty-five days in bad weather and heavy seas, the trader dropped anchor in Havana harbor.

  CUBA was booming at the time of Humboldt’s arrival, but the economy hadn’t always been so vital. The big island, the largest in the Antilles (slightly smaller than England), had been “discovered” by Columbus on October 28, 1492, on his first voyage, after Indians had alerted him to its presence. Sailing along the northeast coast, he first believed that he’d found Japan, then decided the region must be part of China. Columbus averred that he “never saw a lovelier sight: trees everywhere, lining the river, green and beautiful. They are not like our own, and each has its own flowers and fruit. Numerous birds, large and small, singing away sweetly. . . . It is a joy to see all the woods and greenery, and it is difficult to give up watching all the birds and come away. It is the most beautiful island ever seen, full of fine harbors and deep rivers. . . .” Then he added prophetically, “The Indians tell me that there are gold mines and pearls on this island. . . .” He christened the land Juana, after the daughter of his sponsors, Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. On his second voyage, in 1494, Columbus investigated Cuba’s southern shore, concluded that the landmass was too vast to be an island, and, threatening dissenters with a huge fine and the removal of their tongue, compelled all his men to sign an oath to that effect. Then the explorer sailed on to Hispañola, never to return to the island (at least in life; remains that some believe to be Columbus’s were later reinterred on Cuba, but the body has never been positively identified).

  In 1508, the Spanish explorer Sebastian Ocampo sailed the entire coastline, proving Cuba to be an island. Then, just three years later, responding to rumors of gold there, King Ferdinand directed Diego Columbus, Christopher’s son and governor general of Hispañola, to conduct the conquest of Cuba. Diego Columbus dispatched Diego Velásquez with a force of three hundred men (including Hernán Cortés, the future conqueror of Mexico), and despite an inspired resistance under the cacique Hatuey, Velásquez succeeded in subduing the island. As related by the sympathetic Dominican friar Bartolomé de Las Casas, when Hatuey was captured he was offered the choice of converting to Catholicism before he was burned at the stake, so that his soul might be conveyed to heaven.

  “And to heaven the Christians also go?” the chief supposedly asked.

  “Yes,” the priest responded, “they go to heaven if they are good and die in the grace of God.”

  “If the Christians go to heaven, I do not want to go to heaven,” the cacique told his executioners. “I do not wish ever again to meet such cruel and wicked people as Christians who kill and make slaves of the Indians.”

  Settlement began immediately, and over the next few decades, tens of thousands of Native Americans followed Hatuey into an untimely grave, slaughtered by Spanish soldiers, stricken by European diseases, or worked to death in the gold mines. At the time of Columbus’s landing, the Indian population of Cuba was estimated at one hundred thousand; by 1550, less than sixty years later, it had dwindled to just three thousand. The gold soon petered out, and over the next two centuries Cuba languished under a weak economy dominated by small-scale tobacco farming. Then in the early 1700s came the increased importation of African slaves and the establishment of large plantations of coffee and, especially, sugar (still the mainstay of the Cuban economy three hundred years later), and the island finally began to come into its own. The British occupation of 1762-63 has been called a watershed because the English introduced a taste for free trade and a liberal approach to government, both of which would help to enflame the Cuban independence movement. And in 1796, just a few years before Humboldt’s arrival, Cuba was able to seize a greater share of the world sugar market after the slave rebellion on Hispañola disrupted production there; the colony also received a surge in population and an infusion of expertise from the thirty thousand white refugees who fled from Hispañola to Cuba at that time.

  But Havana had been bustling even during the years when the rest of the island had been struggling. Thanks to its strategic location, the harbor was the principal Spanish naval base in the Western Hemisphere. It was also the busiest commercial port in the Americas, “the Gateway to the New World,” which for centuries had been a port of call for ships arriving from Spain (just as Humboldt’s ship, the Pizarro, was supposed to have landed there before the typhus outbreak). Similarly, it was the customary port of departure for vessels returning to Spain, with ships reprovisioning there and collecting into convoys for the dangerous voyage across an Atlantic awash with British privateers. Wi
th a steady influx of transients filling its streets, Havana boasted shipyards, chandlers, slaughterhouses, boardinghouses, bars, brothels, and every other establishment catering to a ship’s captain and crew. On Humboldt’s arrival, the city was a colorful, expensive, freewheeling port.

  In 1800, Havana proper had a population of forty-four thousand, including twenty-six thousand blacks and mixed-bloods, and another forty thousand or so inhabitants in the two outlying arrabales (suburbs) of Jesú-Maria and La Salud (Health). With a narrow neck of harbor guarded by two fortresses, El Morro and San Salvador de la Punta, the port of Havana was, Humboldt found, “one of the gayest and most picturesque on the shore of equinoctial America, north of the equator. . . . It boasts not the luxuriant vegetation that adorns the banks of the river Guayaquil, nor the wild majesty of the rocky coast of Rio de Janeiro; but the grace which in those climates embellishes the scenes of cultivated nature, is at the Havana mingled with the majesty of vegetable forms, and the organic vigor that characterizes the torrid zone.”

  Inside the city things were different. Crammed onto a slim promontory with less than a square mile inside its walls, Havana was cramped, noisy, dirty. The streets were narrow and for the most part unpaved, owing to a lack of stone. Not long before, the city had experimented with mahogany logs for paving, and now great trunks jutted up through the mud, vestiges of the aborted effort. In some places, the mire reached the pedestrians’ knees, which—along with the many carts loaded with barrels of sugar, the jostling porters, and the ever-present odor of tasajo (jerked beef)—made walking through the streets a disagreeable and even hazardous affair. “At the time of my sojourn there,” Humboldt decided, “few towns of Spanish America presented, owing to the want of a good police, a more unpleasant aspect.”