Humboldt's Cosmos

by Gerard Helferich

  Still, there were the spectacular royal palms towering over the skyline and two pleasant public walks where one could escape the bustle of the metropolis. And some elegant houses, mail-ordered from the United States, had been built along the shore. “In the coolness of the night, when the boats cross the bay, and, owing to the phosphorescence of the water, leave behind them long tracks of light, these romantic scenes afford charming and peaceful retreats for those who wish to withdraw from the tumult of a populous city.” But the main public buildings—the cathedral, the government house, the post office, the tobacco factory—were “less remarkable for their beauty than for solidity of structure.” There was also, regrettably, a bustling slave market, a “place fitted to excite at once pity and indignation.”

  Humboldt and Bonpland settled into the house of a Señor Cuesta, wealthy partner in one of the great commercial companies of Spanish America. (The house still stands, now converted into a Humboldt museum.) They stored their instruments and collections at the home of Count O’Reilly, where the terraces were well suited for astronomical observations. For the next three months, Humboldt’s restless curiosity would range over Havana and the Güines Valley south of the city.

  Despite the port’s crucial importance, there was still some disagreement concerning Havana’s longitude, with earlier measurements varying by 1/72 of a degree (ranging from 5 degrees, 38 minutes, 11 seconds, to 5 degrees, 39 minutes, 1 second), or about a mile. Latitude (distance north or south of the equator) could be fixed by measuring the height above the horizon of a pole star or the sun. Determining longitude (east-west position) was more complex, because it must also take account of the earth’s rotation. After John Harrison’s invention of the chronometer in 1735, the standard procedure for fixing longitude was to mark noon, or the sun’s highest point in the sky, at the traveler’s location, then to refer to a precision timepiece that had previously been set to local time at another point, such as Greenwich or Paris. By comparing the time discrepancy between the two places, the navigator could fix his distance relative to the other city, as each hour of difference represented 15 degrees of longitude, or approximately 1,035 miles at the equator.

  An older method of fixing longitude, originated by Galileo in the early seventeenth century, used the eclipses of the moons of Jupiter as a kind of universal timepiece. These eclipses, caused when the moons pass into Jupiter’s shadow, are visible at the same moment from every point on earth and can be predicted with mathematical precision. Therefore, a traveler could note the local time of an eclipse, compare that to published tables giving the time that the eclipse was expected to occur at a given point on earth, then use the time discrepancy to calculate the difference in longitude between the reference point and the traveler’s own location, as with a chronometer.

  Perhaps eager to try out the new navigation tables given to him by the English captain Gamier, this latter method was the one Humboldt chose on this occasion. Working with Dionisio Galeano of the Spanish navy, he netted a mean result of 5 degrees, 38 minutes, 50 seconds, of longitude—which later experts confirmed to within a single second. Finally, three centuries after its founding, the principal port of the Western Hemisphere could be accurately fixed on the world’s maps.

  A highly developed colony, Cuba was critically important to Spain owing to its size, its naval base, and its strategic location atop the Caribbean Sea, all of which made it a timely subject and an area of widespread interest throughout Europe. “I wanted to throw light on facts,” Humboldt explained, “and give precision to ideas by comparing the island’s condition with that of South America.” To accomplish this, he produced a Herculean feat of what today we would call physical and human geography. Surveying the island from north to south and synthesizing a wealth of secondary information besides, he made extensive geological, hydrological, botanical, and meteorological studies, including Cuba’s precise shape and area, its topography, the composition of the soil, the location of mineral deposits, the height and placement of mountain ranges, the availability of water, the distribution of plants, and the state of agriculture (especially the key exports of sugar, coffee, and tobacco). He also examined the island’s population, its commerce, and the state of its finances. Ultimately, these myriad observations—the most extensive, systematic study ever made of the island—were collected into a two-volume compendium, complete with statistical tables and map, entitled the Political Essay on the Island of Cuba, which Humboldt would publish in 1828.

  The work was important for the way it interrelated, in true Humboldtian fashion, physical characteristics (such as weather and soil) to human issues (such as population and economic development). It is also remembered as Humboldt’s most comprehensive condemnation of slavery—excised, to Humboldt’s fury, from the first British translation of the work—which he called “the greatest evil that afflicts human nature. . . . It is for the traveler who has been an eyewitness of the suffering and the degradation of human nature,” he wrote, “to make the complaints of the unfortunate reach the ear of those by whom they can be relieved.” Since blacks comprised more than eighty percent of the population of the West Indies, Humboldt argued, it was foolish to think they could be subjugated forever by the white minority. The Caucasians would either voluntarily grant the slaves their freedom, or the oppressed masses would eventually take it by force: “If the legislation of the West Indies and the state of the men of color do not shortly undergo a salutary change,” he warned, “if the legislature continues to employ itself in discussion instead of action, the political preponderance will pass into the hands of those who have strength to labor, will to be free, and courage to endure long privations.”

  Cuba was in a unique position to avoid such a racial catastrophe, since an unusually high proportion of the island’s population, about seventy-five percent, were already free, including substantial numbers of blacks. In addition, Cuba had a strong tradition of manumission, owing (among other reasons) to more liberal Spanish laws, more intense religious sentiment, and greater opportunities for slaves to earn money with which to purchase their freedom. But time was running out, Humboldt warned, and it could not be left to the planters and slave owners to regulate themselves. Direct legislative action was needed to ameliorate the misery of slavery and gradually to eliminate it. First, the illegal importation of slaves must be halted, as more slaves only exacerbated the problem. Also, various laws could be enacted that would, say, free slaves after a prescribed period of service, or set them free with the condition that they work a certain number of days for their previous master, or give them a certain percentage of a plantation’s profit, or set aside a fixed amount from the public budget for buying slaves’ freedom. Humboldt suggested that by these or other incremental measures, the manumission of the slaves could proceed at a measured pace, avoiding the sort of bloodshed seen on Hispañola—until all enchained men, women, and children were liberated.

  Such warnings were lost on Madrid, and as the nineteenth century wore on, the issue of slavery became intrinsically linked with the struggle for independence on the part of Cuba’s Creoles, who saw in the practice a stark reminder of the unsavory prerogatives of the wealthy as well as a symbol of colonial oppression. A bloody revolution (the Ten Years’ War) would erupt from 1868 to 1878, in which more than fifty thousand Cubans and two hundred thousand Spaniards gave their lives. Though the rebellion was unsuccessful, Spain did ultimately outlaw slavery on the island in 1886 (leaving Brazil as the last country in the New World to sanction slaveholding, until 1888). Nine years later another revolt was led by José Martí, and, after the intervention of the United States, the island would finally win its independence in 1898.

  AT the end of April, Humboldt was preparing to sail to Veracruz, on the eastern coast of Mexico, when he saw a newspaper report that would profoundly affect his journey—not to mention the course of his future life and even the history of the sciences. The French government had finally funded Captain Baudin’s scientific voyage around the world,
the same expedition that Humboldt and Bonpland had been recruited for the previous year. Baudin’s two ships, the Geographe and the Naturaliste, had already left for Cape Horn, on the tip of South America, and intended to sail up the Pacific Coast before continuing to Australia. The year before, as he was leaving Europe, Humboldt had written Baudin promising to join the admiral’s voyage en route. Now he was excited by the prospect of being able to realize at last all the plans that he and Bonpland had made back in Paris. Instantly, Humboldt decided to forego the journey to Mexico and to return to South America, to intercept Baudin’s expedition at Peru the following year.

  There was no guarantee, of course, that the ships would have room for two more naturalists on board. If that were the case, Humboldt now assured Baudin by letter, he would understand. “I shall never grumble over events that lie beyond our control,” he wrote. “Such frankness in your decision will be to me the most cherished proof of your friendship. In this event I would simply continue my journey from Lima to Acapulco and Mexico, thence to the Philippines, Persia, and Marseilles. I would much prefer, however, to be a member of your party.”

  Before they could depart Havana, Humboldt and Bonpland had to finish organizing their huge botanical collection and other specimens and preparing them for shipment to Europe. Considering the vicissitudes of war and weather, Humboldt decided not to risk the priceless artifacts to a single ship, but to divide them into three roughly comparable lots, keeping only a small herbarium for their own reference. “In this journey around the world,” he wrote Willdenow from Havana, “when the seas are infested with pirates, and when passports of neutral nations are as little respected as ships of non-warring countries, nothing makes me more anxious than the safety of manuscripts and herbariums. It is really quite uncertain, almost unlikely, that both of us, Bonpland and myself, will ever return alive. . . . How sad if by such misfortune the fruits of all our labors should be lost forever!”

  Humboldt determined that one part of the collection would remain at Havana for safekeeping, one would be sent with their friend Juan Gonzáles to Spain and thence to Paris, and the third would travel to London with Scottish botanist John Fraser, who had been shipwrecked off the Cuban coast and stranded in Havana without passport or money until Humboldt had come to his rescue; from London, this latter portion would be forwarded to Willdenow in Germany as soon as military and political conditions allowed. So much for the specimens, but what about the copious notes and data that the expedition had generated thus far? Humboldt considered entrusting his only copy to Gonzáles but in the end decided to hold on to it himself. It was a crucial decision, for the manuscripts were to be the irreplaceable basis of Humboldt’s extensive program of publications, which he had already begun to lay out in his mind.

  In the event, Gonzáles’s ship was wrecked off the coast of Africa. Their young friend was lost, along with a third of the botanical specimens, the entire insect collection, and the troublesome skeletons from the cavern of Ataruipe. Gonzáles was also carrying letters to family and colleagues detailing Humboldt and Bonpland’s new itinerary. In consequence, the pair didn’t receive a single letter from Europe over the next two years, and they would have no idea of the fate of the other precious specimens they had dispatched.

  While Bonpland labored around the clock to put the collections in order, Humboldt tried to secure transportation back to South America. There were no vessels in port traveling in that direction, and the men he asked “seemed to take pleasure in exaggerating the difficulties of the passage of the isthmus, and the dangerous voyage [around the tip of South America] from Panama to Guayaquil, and from Guayaquil to Lima and Valparaiso.” Finally, unable to find a neutral vessel, Humboldt made arrangements with the captain of a small Spanish freighter docked at Batabano, some forty miles below Havana on Cuba’s southern coast, and on March 6, the travelers set out across the island. The road from Havana to Batabano ran through uncultivated, partially forested country, and as they walked, the naturalists stopped often to add to their now empty specimen boxes. Among their discoveries was a species of palm with fan-shaped fronds; though it was common along the island’s southern shore, the tree had never been recorded by science.

  Batabano was a poor village surrounded by bleak, crocodile-infested marshes. The ciénaga, or swamp, reminded Humboldt of the Llanos at flood stage. “Nothing can be more gloomy than the aspect of these marshes around Batabano,” he found. “Not a shrub breaks the monotony of the prospect: a few stunted trunks of palm-trees rise like broken masts. . . .” He was keen to investigate the two types of crocodiles living in the marshes, which he suspected were different species from the ones they had seen in the Orinoco, but their one night in Batabano left no time to test this hypothesis.

  On March 9, their vessel, a trader of forty tons, left Batabano bound for either Cartagena (in present-day Colombia) or Portobelo (in present-day Panama), depending on the weather they would meet. The ship had no cabin, only a hold barely large enough for the passengers’ instruments and provisions. The only sleeping accommodations were on deck. “Luckily,” Humboldt assures us, “these inconveniences lasted only twenty days. But those twenty days and nights would be spent in all types of weather! Our several voyages in the canoes of the Orinoco, and a passage in an American vessel laden with several thousand arrobas [one arroba equals twenty-five pounds] of salt meat dried in the sun had rendered us not very fastidious.”

  Sailing southeast, the sloop entered the greenish-brown water of the Gulf of Batabano, bordered by a low and marshy coast. At the gulf’s southern entrance, like a stopper in a basin, lay the large island known as Isla de Pinos, for its forested mountains. (It had been christened El Evangelista by Columbus and would later be called Isla de Santa María and Isla de la Juventud.) The gulf was generally plied by smugglers, euphemistically known as “traders” in these parts, but theirs was the only vessel in sight. For the next three days, the ship negotiated the maze of islands known as los Jardines y Jardinillos (“Gardens and Bowers”), which Columbus had named in 1494, on his second voyage, when he found them “verdes, llenos de arboledas y graciosos” (“green, pleasant, and filled with trees”). But, prepossessing though it was, to a mariner the archipelago was a nightmare. It had taken Columbus fifty-eight days, battling contrary winds and currents, to sail from El Evangelista to Cuba’s eastern tip, a distance of less than five hundred miles. And in 1518, Hernán Cortés had fared even worse: His navy had been wrecked on one of these bars, causing the invasion of Mexico to be delayed till the following year.

  As the sloop weaved through the archipelago, Humboldt occupied himself with measuring the latitude and longitude of the various islands and with studying the relationship between bottom composition and the color and temperature of the water. The surface of the gulf was like glass, and he found, “The most absolute solitude prevails in this spot, which, in the time of Columbus, was inhabited and frequented by great numbers of fishermen.” There was no village between Batabano and the town of La Trinidad, some 150 miles to the east.

  Pausing at the tiny islets for geologizing and botanizing, the boat made slow progress. At one stop, the crew fished for lobsters and, disappointed in their luck, took revenge on a flock of pelicans roosting in a mangrove tree. “The young birds defended themselves valiantly with their enormous beaks, which are six or seven inches long,” Humboldt reported with disgust; “the old ones hovered over our heads making hoarse and plaintive cries. Blood streamed from the tops of the trees, for the sailors were armed with great sticks and cutlasses. In vain we reproved them for this cruelty. Condemned to long obedience in the solitude of the seas, this class of men feel pleasure in exercising a cruel tyranny over animals, when occasion offers. The ground was covered in wounded birds struggling in death. At our arrival a profound calm prevailed in this secluded spot; now, everything seemed to say: ‘Man has passed this way.’”

  On March 12, the sea turned indigo and the breakers disappeared, indicating that the trader had finally found
open water. Running before favorable winds, the ship continued eastward toward La Trinidad in order to gain a more beneficial tack for the remainder of the voyage. La Trinidad had been founded in 1514 by Spanish conquistador Diego Velásquez, following the discovery of gold in the valley nearby. The day of their arrival, Humboldt stayed up most of the night making astronomical readings to fix the town’s location. The next evening, the lieutenant governor, a nephew of the noted Spanish astronomer Antonio Ulloa, hosted a gala dinner in the visitors’ honor, where Humboldt met some French immigrants from Hispañola, a few of the thousands of refugees who had fled the bloody slave revolt there in 1791.

  Another night, Humboldt and Bonpland were the guests of Antonio Padrón, one of the city’s wealthiest residents, who introduced them to the cream of local society. On this occasion, Humboldt and Bonpland “were again struck with the gaiety and vivacity that distinguish the women of Cuba. These are happy gifts of nature, to which the refinements of European civilization might lend additional charms, but which, nevertheless, please in their primitive simplicity.” The travelers departed La Trinidad on the night of March 15, amid a strange spectacle. A fine carriage with damask seats was hired to conduct them to their boat, and on the dock, a priest, “the poet of the place,” dressed in a velvet suit despite the tropical heat, recited an original sonnet immortalizing the naturalists’ journey up the Orinoco. The mortified Humboldt was delighted to escape back to the little trader.

  Navigating south-southeast, the travelers gradually “lost sight of the palm-covered shore, the hills rising above the island of Cuba.” A natural-born traveler, Humboldt developed quick affinities to places and generally left them wistfully. Cuba was no exception. “There is something solemn,” he found as they sailed away from the island, “in the aspect of land from which the voyager is departing, and which he sees sinking by degrees below the horizon of the sea.”