Humboldt's Cosmos

by Gerard Helferich

  Mounts were always on call to take Humboldt into the countryside, and he often availed himself of the opportunity. Over the coming months, he systematically climbed every volcano on the plateau outside Quito—Pichincha, Cotopaxi, Antisana, Tunguragua, Illiniza, Chimborazo, and others besides—sometimes with Bonpland and sometimes with only his inexperienced Indian guides. As he climbed, he was constantly observing, measuring, collecting, seeking to glean the mountains’ secrets. What types of rock were they made of? What gases spewed from their craters? What geologic process had formed them? How were they different from and similar to the volcanoes of Europe and each other? Did they fit into any natural patterns that might elucidate their structure or history?

  Typical of Humboldt’s climbing efforts during this time were his three attempts on the active volcano Pichincha, which, rising above Quito at nearly 15,700 feet above sea level, had been previously climbed only by La Condamine. But the Frenchman had gone up without his instruments, so he was unable to perform any meaningful scientific analysis, and he had lingered over the crater only fifteen minutes before being driven down by the biting cold. Humboldt resolved to give the volcano a more thorough look. His first effort was a complete failure. High up on the side of the volcano, he was stricken with dizziness, passed out, and had to be carried down; if he had gone up alone, he might well have frozen to death.

  Not long after, on May 26, he tried again, accompanied by an Indian porter named Aldas. “Since Condamine had approached the crater from the snow-covered side of the rim,” Humboldt wrote his brother, “I followed . . . in his footsteps. That was nearly the end of us.” When the porter sank up to his chest in a crevasse above the crater, they realized to their horror that they were standing on an unstable snow bridge. “Frightened but undeterred,” as Humboldt wrote, they climbed a rocky outcropping where the snow had been melted by steam from below. On top of this tiny perch, he discovered a cantilevered stone that formed a kind of balcony. Though the stone was rocked by tremors every twenty to thirty seconds, Humboldt and the porter erected the instruments there. “We lay down flat to get a better look at the bottom of the crater,” Humboldt recorded; “nobody can imagine anything more sinister, mournful, and deathly than what we saw there. The gorge of the volcano forms a circular hole of about one mile in circumference; the broken edge is covered with snow and the interior a dull black in color. But the depth is so enormous that it contains several mountains whose peaks can be just discovered. They seemed to be perhaps 1,900 feet below us. How far down can it be to the bottom?” he wondered. “I believe that the bottom of the crater lies at the same height as the town of Quito. La Condamine found the crater extinct and covered with snow. We were forced to tell the people the sad news that their nearby volcano is on fire. The unmistakable signs did not leave any doubts. We were nearly suffocated by sulfurous vapors at the approach to the opening. We saw bluish flames flicker in the depths and felt violent tremors every two or three minutes. They shook the rim of the crater. . . . It seems that the catastrophe of 1797 has relit the fires of Pichincha.”

  From the top of the mountain, Humboldt eagerly searched in the west for the Pacific, the fabled ocean discovered by Balboa and once sailed by Cook, Bougainville, and the other heroes of Humboldt’s boyhood. But however much he strained, he found that “no sea horizon can be clearly distinguished, by reason of the too great distance of the coast and height of the station: it is like looking down from an air-balloon into vacancy. One divines, but one does not distinguish.”

  Humboldt didn’t return to Quito till well beyond midnight, after more than eighteen hours of climbing. But, just two days later, on May 28, he climbed the mountain again, this time lugging an even greater armamentarium of scientific instruments. As he struggled up the peak, he recorded fifteen seismic shocks within thirty-six minutes—an observation which, when reported in the town below, would give rise to rumors that he was hurling gunpowder into the crater in order to set off the mountain.

  Less than two weeks after the third climb up Pichincha, Humboldt turned his sights to Chimborazo, the tallest peak in the northern Andes and at the time thought to be the tallest mountain in the world. “After the long rains of winter,” he wrote in Researches Concerning the Institutions and Monuments of the Ancient Inhabitants of America, “when the transparency of the air has suddenly increased we see Chimborazo appear like a cloud at the horizon; it detaches itself from the neighboring summits, and towers over the whole chain of the Andes, like that majestic dome, produced by the genius of Michael Angelo, over the antique monuments, which surround the Capitol.” Chimborazo’s height and remoteness proved an irresistible challenge, and on June 9, the travelers left Quito to begin the eighty-mile trek south, following the road that would later become the Pan-American Highway.

  On the morning of June 23, 1802, Humboldt, Bonpland, and the young Montúfar set out from the house of the alcade, or mayor, of Calpi. They had been preparing for this ascent for months, refining their climbing skills and testing their stamina on the smaller peaks nearby. “Fortunately, the attempt to reach the summit of Chimborazo had been reserved for our last enterprise among the mountains of South America,” Humboldt wrote, “for we had by then gained some experience and knew how far we could rely on our own strength.” Indeed, by this point in his journey, Humboldt was one of the most experienced climbers in the world.

  From the base of the mountain, Humboldt squinted up the slope before him, hoping for a glimpse of the great Chimborazo, or Urcorazo (“Snow Mountain”) in the Quichua Indian language. But he saw only clouds. How ironic that the tallest peak in the world should lie hidden in mist, massive yet invisible. The going was relatively easy for the first six thousand feet, but after that the terrain got progressively rougher. Leaving the mules behind, the men continued on foot.

  Keeping close so as not to lose sight of each other, the party made slow progress in the reduced visibility. The ridge snaked up the eastern side of the mountain and narrowed in some places to a width of only eight or ten inches. To the left was a snow-covered slope of about thirty degrees. On the right lay an abyss a thousand feet deep, with huge rock formations projecting from the bottom. They had no climbing equipment, and at some places the ridge rose so steeply that they had to pull themselves up with their bare hands, which bled on the sharp rocks. Everyone was gasping in the thin air.

  One by one the climbers began to feel the nausea and giddiness of soroche, the altitude sickness that had first been reported by Pizarro’s men in Peru. Eventually their noses were streaming blood as the vessels began to rupture. The temperature had been dropping by one degree for every three hundred feet of altitude, and they were all shivering in their lightweight clothing. Still they struggled up the narrow ledge, stopping to take temperature and barometric measurements as they went. At the snow line, all but one of the Indian porters deserted them.

  Abruptly, the mist cleared and the dome-shaped summit loomed very close in front of them. “What a grand and solemn spectacle!” Humboldt declared. “The very sight of it renewed our strength.” The rocky, snow-covered ridge became somewhat wider. They hurried on.

  Not long after, they came to an abrupt halt before a ravine some four hundred feet deep and fifty feet wide. The snow that filled the crevasse was soft and flaky, certainly too soft to climb. Unable to scale the walls, freezing, weakened from loss of blood, they had no choice but to turn back. They had climbed as high on Chimborazo as they would be able. Humboldt took his watch out of his pocket. It was one o’clock in the afternoon.

  The naturalists unpacked their instruments. The thermometer read three degrees below freezing, but it felt colder. Setting up the barometer with great care, Humboldt computed their altitude at 19,286 feet. The summit was a tantalizing 1,300 feet above.

  Standing in the clear, cold air above the clouds, Humboldt “felt as isolated as in a balloon.” He was exhilarated, for though they hadn’t reached the summit, they had tasted the mountain’s majesty and isolation. Indeed, th
e little party had achieved what few in their age had even believed possible. They had ventured higher into the atmosphere than anyone in the history of mankind. They had climbed to the putative roof of the world. Humboldt bent over and picked up a few stones; he knew his colleagues in Paris would be wanting to see them.

  Reluctant but grateful, the party began their descent. On the way down, they fought through violent hail and a snowstorm that concealed the trail. Then the weather passed just as abruptly, and they could feel themselves reentering the familiar terrestrial realm. At 16,920 feet, they encountered their first sign of life, a lichen growing on a rock above the snow line. At 16,600 feet, they saw a fly, and at 15,000 feet Bonpland captured a yellow butterfly—apparently the first time insects had even been reported on a snowfield. At a few minutes past two, they reached the spot where they had left the mules.

  HUMBOLDT would be proven wrong in believing Chimborazo to be the highest mountain in the world. Indeed, at 20,600 feet, it isn’t even the highest mountain in the Andes, where nine peaks surpass 22,000 feet. But all those mountains, like the Himalayas themselves, wouldn’t be surveyed for decades to come.

  And in some ways, Humboldt wasn’t so far wrong in his estimation of Chimborazo. For one thing, the mountain used to be much taller, before its main crater was blown away in an eruption. For another, there is no higher peak north of Chimborazo in the New World, as its Andean superiors are all found in the southern part of the chain. And the mountain is the world’s “tallest” in the sense that its summit is farthest from the center of the earth—because it is near the equator, where, as La Condamine demonstrated, the planet is at its widest. As a result, one weighs less on top of Chimborazo than anywhere else on earth, and one rotates through space faster than anywhere else on the globe. More to the point, no one would climb higher than Humboldt’s band did that day for decades to come. Chimborazo itself wouldn’t be conquered until 1880, by the renowned British mountaineer Edward Whymper.

  Humboldt always took great pride in his altitude record. “All my life,” he later wrote, “I prided myself on the fact that of all mortals I had reached the highest point on earth, I mean on the slopes of Chimborazo!” When, three decades after his climb, European surveyors ventured into Tibet to take the first accurate measurements of the mountains there, Humboldt expressed good-natured envy that he couldn’t go along. But he didn’t begrudge his young, largely English successors their Himalayan adventures. Indeed, Humboldt would manage to secure Prussian state support for three of his own protégés—the brothers Emil, Hermann, and Adolph Schlagintweit—to explore the region. Comforting himself with the Andes’ preeminence in the New World, he also felt a sense of pride that his own exploits in South America had helped to inspire Whymper and the others first to conquer Europe’s Alps, then to turn their attention to Asia’s great mountains. “I have consoled myself over the achievements in the Himalayas in the justified assumption that my labors in America gave the English a first impulse to pay more attention to these snow mountains than had been accorded them over the last century and a half,” he wrote.

  The birth of mountain climbing is generally fixed at 1760, the year that Swiss scientist Horace Benedict de Saussure offered a reward to the first person to scale Mont Blanc, at 15,771 feet the tallest peak in Europe. The prize wasn’t claimed for twenty-six years, when physician Michel-Gabriel Paccard and his guide, Jacques Balmat, summitted the peak. The Jungfrau was successfully climbed in 1811, and the Finsteraarhorn (the highest peak in Switzerland’s Bernese Oberland) in 1829. Dominated by the Swiss, these early climbs were motivated, like Humboldt’s own ascent of Chimborazo, primarily by scientific interest. But by the mid-nineteenth century, the dawn of the so-called Golden Age of Alpine Climbing, the torch had passed to the British, who were inspired instead by the pure challenge of the pursuit, and mountaineering evolved into more of a sport and less of a scientific undertaking. Within the next decade virtually all the major Alpine peaks were conquered. (Whymper successfully climbed the Matterhorn in 1865.) It would be the 1920s before the first assault was made on Everest, by the British again. And it wouldn’t be for three decades after that, until 1953, that Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay would finally stand atop the true roof of the world. However, in straddling Everest, Hillary was in a very real sense standing on Humboldt’s shoulders. For, by being the first to penetrate the world’s highest places, Humboldt and his party had, on that June day in 1802, helped set into motion a chain of events that would stretch all the way to Hillary, and beyond.

  It was also Humboldt’s ascent of Chimborazo, reported months afterward in the French scientific journals, that completed Humboldt’s transformation into an international celebrity. An audacious, unprecedented achievement, the climb proved that man could attain altitudes previously thought unsurvivable, and it captured the public imagination in the same way that Hillary’s conquest of Everest would a century and a half later. Yet Humboldt’s interest in climbing didn’t stem so much from a yearning for adventure as from a restless curiosity. And though it was his daring on Chimborazo that attracted the admiration of the world, it was the quality of his mind that held and deepened that veneration over the course of his long life and after his death.

  Humboldt’s scientific achievements in the Andes are among the most important and far reaching of his entire South American odyssey. In the Alps and on Tenerife, he had already seen how plant life changes with altitude. But by compressing many different climate zones into a tight geographical area, the much taller Andes provided a vertical laboratory ideal for studying the influence on plants of a host of physical factors, including altitude, atmosphere, rainfall, and soil type. Humboldt, who pioneered the study of such factors, named this new science “plant geography.”

  After his climb of Chimborazo, Humboldt sat down literally at the foot of the mountain and started to draft his Essay on the Geography of Plants, the work that established the discipline. Always searching for connections between physical phenomena, Humboldt was the first to systematically study why different plants grew where they did—palms on the tropical coast, broadleaf trees on the cooler hills, conifers in the mountains, and so on. In fact, Humboldt considered the Essay so fundamental to his researches in South America that he planned to use it as the introduction to the entire corpus of scientific writings growing out of the journey.

  Included in the Essay’s pages was a complex fold-out engraving entitled “The Physical Table of the Andes,” which, depicting an east-to-west cross-section of the entire range at the latitude of Chimborazo, condensed much of the information that Humboldt had gathered over his months in the mountains—geological formations, temperatures, locations of plant and animal species, crops grown. Thus, in one data-rich, visually stunning illustration, Humboldt captured for a specific region both the surface complexity and the deep interconnectedness of the natural world. Recognizing the tremendous power of showing such correlations graphically, Humboldt became a pioneer in the visual presentation of scientific data. Thus, in addition to revolutionizing meteorology with the invention of isotherms (lines connecting places of the same average mean temperature), he transformed geography with the introduction of these geographic profiles depicting the relative elevation of neighboring landmasses.

  These new techniques proved invaluable to other researchers (the isotherm remains an essential instrument of meteorology to this day), but to Humboldt they were far more than technical tools. It was one thing to be told that vegetation varies predictably with altitude; it was another entirely to be able to see those changes for oneself, via a compelling representation. In all these graphic techniques, the intent was to present apparently discordant data with such visual force that their fundamental interrelations were inescapable. That is, Humboldt’s breakthroughs in the visual presentation of data were meant as literal portraits of the underlying unity of nature.

  But Humboldt’s contributions in the Andes went far beyond new ways of depicting scientific data. During hi
s ascents of the mountains around Quito, he revolutionized the science of geology, especially vulcanology. As he trekked the various peaks, Humboldt was forced to conclude that the harsh, patently volcanic landscape could not be adequately explained by the neptunist theory of his mentor at Freiberg, Abraham Gottlob Werner. From the abundant lava and pumice, it was clear that the Andes had been created by heat, not sedimentation. Moreover, the land-forms were obviously recent—and still in the forming, as witnessed by the frequent earthquakes and dozens of active volcanoes—not the product of a one-time, long-ago process of creation. In fact, everywhere he looked, the landscape seemed to support the vulcanist model and to contradict the School of Freiberg, of which, until now, Humboldt had considered himself a member.

  In addition, volcanoes could not be the purely local phenomena that the neptunists believed—the result of subterranean coal fires—but must result from far more extensive, interconnected phenomena. Why else would volcanic peaks congregate together as in the Andes? “It seems probable,” Humboldt wrote his brother, “that the whole of the more elevated portion of the province [of Quito] is but one huge volcano, of which the peaks of Cotopaxi and Pichincha rise as giant summits whose craters are only vents for the subterranean lava.” In Aspects of Nature, he elaborated this idea: “These assemblages of volcanoes, whether in rounded groups or in double lines, show in the most conclusive manner that the volcanic agencies do not depend on small or restricted causes, in their proximity to the surface of the earth, but that they are great phenomena of deep-seated origin . . . ,” he began. “The subterranean fire breaks forth sometimes through one and sometimes through another of these openings, which it has been customary to regard [incorrectly] as separate and distinct volcanoes. . . . Even the earthquakes which occasion such dreadful ravages in this part of the world afford remarkable proofs of the existence of subterranean communications.” He concludes, “All volcanic phenomena are probably the result of a communication either transient or permanent between the interior and exterior of the globe.” Isolated coal fires clearly had nothing to do with it.