Humboldt's Cosmos

by Gerard Helferich

  Humboldt’s stay in Cuba had been brief and had included only a narrow corridor from Havana due south, plus a few southern coastal towns and islands. However, well into the twentieth century he would still be remembered with affection and gratitude by the Cuban people for his thoughtful study of the island—and for his insistent, courageous condemnation of slavery. In 1939, the University of Havana would present a statue of Humboldt to the city of Berlin, citing him as “the second discoverer of Cuba.” In 1969, the two hundredth anniversary of his birth, Cuba would issue a commemorative Humboldt stamp. In 1989, a one-peso coin would be minted in his honor. And in 2001, the Alexander von Humboldt National Park on the eastern end of the island would be designated a World Heritage Site. By any standard it was a remarkable string of honors for a Prussian aristocrat who had visited the island for only three months, nearly two centuries before.

  WITH the wind freshening from the northeast, the sloop was driven relentlessly off course, toward the Cayman Islands. On the morning of March 17, it came within sight of Cayman Brac, the westernmost island of the archipelago. On account of the dangerous reefs, the captain kept the sloop a half mile from shore, but Humboldt could see that the south and southeast coastline formed a bare, rocky wall, while the north and northwest were low and sandy, with scrubby vegetation. Huge sea turtles followed the boat, and the sailors were about to dive in after the animals, before they noticed an accompanying school of sharks.

  The wind turned to the southeast and continued to strengthen, dipping the trader’s gunwale underwater. Soon after they passed the shoals of La Víbora, the weather became fine, the wind shifted to the north-northwest, and the water turned cobalt. On March 24, the ship entered the Gulf of Santa Marta, on the Colombian coast, known for its violent gales. The next day the wind rose out of the northeast with increasing force. The sea became exceptionally rough during the night, and in the morning the captain sought shelter in the Río Sinú, west of Cartagena, just as a violent rain began to fall on the unsheltered passengers. After a miserable passage of nearly three weeks, Humboldt and Bonpland had again reached the shores of South America, but by all indications they had landed in a wild area rarely visited by outsiders.

  At the tiny village of Zapote, the residents regarded the European visitors with suspicion, asking pointed questions concerning their itinerary, their books, and their instruments, and trying to intimidate them with tales of jaguars and poisonous snakes. But their long weeks in the rain forest had inured the travelers to such exaggerations, which, Humboldt believed, “arise less from the credulity of the natives, than from the pleasure they take in tormenting the whites.” To find some peace, the naturalists retreated to the forest for some botanizing.

  After about an hour’s walk, they came upon a clearing where a group of workers were making palm wine by cutting the trees and allowing the sap to collect, then ferment, in the hollowed trunk. Among the dark-skinned people was a slight man incongruous for his fair hair and pale complexion. At first Humboldt suspected the stranger was a deserter from a North American ship, but he soon discovered that the man was a fellow German who had served in the Danish navy before coming to the Río Sinú, he explained, “Para ver tierras, y pasear, no más.” (“To see other lands and to walk about, nothing more.”) During his five years in the New World, Humboldt met exactly two persons with whom he could speak his native German; the first had been a hand on the privateer that had wanted to tow their trader to Nova Scotia as a prize of war, and the second was this man on the nearly uninhabited coast of Colombia. Humboldt quizzed the stranger on the surrounding territory, but the man only smiled enigmatically and replied “that the country was hot and humid; that the houses in the town of Pomerania [in Germany] were finer than those of Santa Cruz de Lorica; and that, if we remained in the forest, we should have the tertian [every-other-day] fever from which he had long suffered.” When Humboldt tried to give him some money, the man refused with hauteur, explaining that he could never accept anything “in the presence of those vile colored people.”

  Faced with thick forest and oppressive humidity, the naturalists returned to the boat before sunset, laden with mosses, lichens, and other botanical specimens. The wind was still blowing furiously when they weighed anchor the next morning, and it continued to rage all day. That evening, waves began to wash over the deck, and the captain was again forced to seek shelter along the coast. Unable to find a likely cove, he dropped anchor in shallow water, but, discovering the area to be a coral reef, decided to take his chances in the open sea. At length, it began to rain, the wind abruptly diminished, and the boat was able to pull up to a small island for the night.

  The next morning a dangerous gale blew up. “The sea was fearfully rough,” Humboldt wrote. “Our tiny craft could not master the waves, and suddenly was thrown on her beam-ends. A tremendous wave broke over us and threatened to engulf the ship. The man at the helm remained undismayed at his post. All of a sudden he called: ‘No gobierna el timón!’ [‘The rudder won’t steer!’]. We all gave ourselves up for lost. In this, as it seemed to us, our utmost danger, we cut away a sail that had been flapping loosely, when the ship righted herself on top of another wave, enabling us to find refuge behind the promontory. . . .” It was Palm Sunday, and, as they waited out the storm, Humboldt’s servant reminded him that it was one year to the day since their lancha had nearly capsized in that other dangerous gale, on the Orinoco.

  A lunar eclipse was predicted for that evening, and the next night there was to be an eclipse of one of the moons of Jupiter, which would be very useful in determining the longitude of nearby Cartagena. Humboldt urged the captain to allow one of the four crew members to make the five-mile overland trek with him to the foot of Boca Chica (Little Mouth), the smaller of the two openings to Cartagena harbor, so he could fix the port’s longitude. But to Humboldt’s annoyance, the captain refused, citing the lack of a village or even a path through the jungle. So instead Humboldt and Bonpland paddled the ship’s canoe to shore to collect plants in the moonlight.

  As they landed, the Europeans were approached by a young, powerfully built black man, who emerged from the forest wearing only chains and carrying a machete. The young man directed them to land at a protected mangrove thicket, where he offered to guide them inland in exchange for some clothing. But, alarmed by the man’s “cunning and wild appearance, the often-repeated question whether we were Spaniards, and certain unintelligible words which he addressed to some of his companions who were concealed amidst the trees,” the Europeans leaped into the canoe and fled back to the ship. Humboldt concluded that the men were escaped slaves hoping to steal their boat; though he pitied them, he also knew enough to fear them, for “they ha[d] the courage of despair, and a desire of vengeance excited by the severity of the whites.”

  Still, Humboldt was deeply moved by the encounter. “The aspect of a naked man,” he wrote, “wandering on an uninhabited beach, unable to free himself from the chains fastened round his neck and the upper part of his arm, was an object calculated to excite the most painful impressions.” The captain and crew didn’t share his sympathy. “Our sailors wished to return to the shore for the purpose of seizing the fugitives,” Humboldt continued, “to sell them secretly at Cartagena. In countries where slavery exists, the mind is familiarized with suffering, and that instinct of pity which characterizes and ennobles our nature, is blunted.” But the captain had clearly been right to forbid the excursion to Boca Chica, which, Humboldt had to admit, could have had fatal consequences. For the rest of the evening, he satisfied himself with observing the lunar eclipse from the safety of the boat. The next morning, the ship sailed to Boca Chica, where she took on a práctico, or pilot, to conduct her the seven or eight miles to the anchorage near town.

  Humboldt and Bonpland stayed six days at Cartagena, confirming earlier determinations of the town’s latitude and longitude and exploring the surrounding mountains and coast. The city was one of the principal ports in the Spanish colonies, and the aut
horities had long worried over the difficulty of defending a harbor with two openings. In 1741, the British had invaded the port and destroyed three forts along the coast before being forced out. As a result, a dike had been erected across Boca Grande in 1795, in order to seal off the wider entrance. But the sea continued its assault, and in the few years since, the water had already started to erode the dike, while at the same time filling Boca Chica with silt.

  Cartagena was bordered on the north and east by marshes, which were separated from the town by a chain of low hills. Crowning the hills were a fort and monastery, the latter built on such unstable land that its continued existence was taken as a literal miracle, attributed to the image of the Virgin housed there. The hills were covered with cactus, and while herborizing in the area, Humboldt and Bonpland were shown a large, infamous acacia tree covered with huge biting ants as well as sharp thorns two inches long. There, the guides related, “a woman, annoyed by the jealousy and well founded reproaches of her husband, conceived a project of the most barbarous vengeance. With the assistance of her lover she bound her husband with cords, and threw him, at night, into [the tree]. The more violently he struggled, the more the sharp woody thorns of the tree tore his skin. His cries were heard by persons who were passing, and he was found after several hours of suffering, covered with blood, and dreadfully stung by the ants. This crime is perhaps without example in the history of human turpitude,” Humboldt concluded: “It indicates a violence of passion less assignable to the climate than to the barbarism of manners prevailing among the lower class of people.”

  Under his revised itinerary, Humboldt planned to sail from Cartagena to the eastern coast of Panama. Then he intended to cross the isthmus, taking topographical measurements and charting a route for a possible canal, a superhuman undertaking that had been suggested as far back as the sixteenth century and had been advocated by Benjamin Franklin and other luminaries. From Panama’s Pacific coast, Humboldt proposed to sail south to Guayaquil, in present-day Ecuador, where he hoped to intercept the Baudin expedition.

  However, once in Cartagena, he discovered that this plan had two serious flaws. First, though the journey across Panama would be a relatively simple matter, he would probably have a long wait for a ship traveling south at this time of year. And, second, even if he were lucky enough to find a vessel, he would be in for an exceptionally long, uncomfortable journey down the Peruvian coast, against strong currents and seasonally unfavorable winds. Rather than risk missing the rendezvous with Baudin due to forces outside his control, Humboldt decided to travel overland. Not only did his sources at Cartagena assure him that this would be more practicable, he realized that the route through the Andes would provide an unparalleled opportunity for scientific exploration. In Bogotá, he would even be able to call on José Celestino Mutis, a former student of Linnaeus and the world’s leading authority on South American plants, who could help him and Bonpland make taxonomic sense of the thousands of species they had collected thus far. (The change in plans meant that Humboldt never did make it to Panama. But he did eventually obtain detailed topographical data of the isthmus and propose various courses for a canal to be built there; one of his suggested routes was later chosen by the French engineers who began the project in 1881. An American team would finally complete the massive undertaking in 1914.)

  Thus, for the third time since leaving Europe, serendipity had swept Humboldt’s journey in a novel direction—just as it had when the typhus outbreak on the Pizarro had redirected him, against all expectation, to the coast of Venezuela and thence to the Orinoco and Amazon; and again when news of Baudin’s expected arrival in Peru had turned Humboldt away from his anticipated voyage to Mexico and the Philippines and back to South America. Had Humboldt realized what would be entailed in such an overland expedition, he might have reconsidered yet again. But, fortunately for science, he was still ignorant of the time and incredible effort required for a trek through the Andes, some of the highest, most rugged mountains in the world. And he was right about one thing: The cordillera did indeed provide an “immense field for exploration.” In fact, his travels through this scientifically virginal region would revolutionize many disciplines, including geology, geography, and anthropology—and even influence the fine arts. Through a potent combination of happenstance and daring, Humboldt was about to embark on a segment of his journey that, though totally unanticipated, would prove one of the most original and influential of his entire five-year odyssey. It would also make him world famous.

  Nine: Chimborazo

  ON April 21, 1801, Humboldt and Bonpland boarded an Indian canoe on the Río Magdalena to begin the long journey from Cartagena to the foot of the Andes. The rainy season had begun. The tropical storms were torrential, the insects voracious. Struggling against the swift current, the Indian paddlers were able to average only a little over ten miles a day.

  For Humboldt and Bonpland, conditions must have been depressingly reminiscent of their excruciating expedition up the Orinoco and Río Negro. As on those other rivers, the rain forest here hung in a dense curtain along the unpopulated banks, crocodiles dozed in the mud, and long-legged water birds stalked their prey. Humboldt passed the days recording meteorological data and, wielding his compass, making the first chart of the river, while Bonpland went ashore at every opportunity to add to their herbarium. After six agonizing weeks, their canoe finally landed at the tiny river port of Honda, some four hundred miles inland. Towering above was the Cordillera Oriental, the eastern spur of the mighty Andes.

  No one knows the origin of the name Andes, but it is thought to derive from either of two Indian words—anti, for “east,” or anta, for “copper.” Whatever the source of their name, the mountains, like the Amazon, which rises among their peaks, constitute one of the geographical wonders of earth. Snaking in a multibranched spine along the western coast of the continent, the chain runs for 5,500 miles, from Tierra del Fuego in the south all the way to the Caribbean in the north. Though Asia’s Himalayas are taller, the Andes are more than three times as long. They comprise the highest peaks in the Western Hemisphere and some of the greatest mountains in the world. Aconcagua in Argentina, at 22,834 feet the tallest point outside Asia, is just one of many Andean peaks over 20,000 feet high. (By contrast, the tallest mountain in North America, Alaska’s Denali, or Mount McKinley, is 20,320 feet.)

  The Andes were formed over millions of years, as the South American Tectonic Plate shifted westward and forced itself into the adjoining Pacific Plate, buckling the earth’s surface along the leading edge. The theory of plate tectonics—the idea that the planet’s landmasses were once united in a huge supercontinent, which gradually broke up as the continents drifted into their current locations—was suggested around 1920 by the German geologist Alfred Wegner. Though the theory was at first considered absurd, in the latter half of the century, it revolutionized our understanding of the history of the earth. It’s not known for certain why the twenty or so tectonic plates located on the planet’s rocky outermost layer, each up to sixty miles thick, roam over the more pliant stratum beneath, but the process is thought to be due to differences in temperature between the earth’s core and the cooler mantle above. As the plates shift and collide, they trigger earthquakes, open ocean trenches, raise mountain ranges, and otherwise reshape the surface of the planet.

  Geological violence on such a grand scale has produced an extremely complex mountain system in South America. Just as the Amazon can be seen not as one river but as a network of interconnected waterways, the geologically young Andes can be viewed as a labyrinth of ranges that converge and diverge as they wend their way up the long Pacific Coast. Like the various segments of the Amazon—the Manañon and Solimões rivers, for instance—these ranges are called by different names in various regions, and each boasts its own characteristics of height, width, vegetation, snow cover, and so on. In their southernmost zone, the Andes form a single, relatively narrow range that, while not among the highest in South America (aver
aging only about 6,500 to 8,500 feet), are rugged and covered with glaciers and ice fields. As the range travels up the coast, it widens, becomes more arid and taller, then diverges into eastern, central, and western spurs, with high plateaus, called altiplano, in between. In the eastern, older region, the mountains are lower, having had more time to erode. The newer, geologically active western region includes the tallest peaks, as well as the greatest concentration of volcanoes. It was to this area that Humboldt naturally turned.

  In Humboldt’s day, before the Himalayas had been surveyed, the Andes were believed to be the highest mountains in the world. Always sensitive to the grand spectacle of nature, Humboldt was deeply moved by the range’s majesty—it would become the yardstick by which he gauged every other geographical feature he encountered in South America, from the Llanos to the Orinoco. Though he found several phenomena that approached the mountains for splendor, he would never find any to surpass them.

  Humboldt’s first destination en route to Quito and Lima was Santa Fe de Bogotá, located on a high plain southwest of Honda. Though the city (today’s Bogotá, capital of Colombia) was only fifty miles from the Río Magdalena, it lay nearly nine thousand feet higher, over incredibly rugged roads that hadn’t been improved since the time of the Incas. In fact, in places the route wasn’t a proper road at all, just crude steps carved between the steep rock faces, so narrow that a laden mule could barely slip through. The explorers hadn’t been at such altitude since their climb up el Pico del Teide, in the Canaries, two years before. As they made the arduous ascent now, Bonpland experienced severe headache and nausea, along with a fever possibly from malaria contracted on the coast.