At the town of Chayma, the party boarded balsa rafts and drifted down the Río Chayma to its junction with the Amazon (called the Marañon here). In Venezuela, tensions between Spain and Portugal had prevented the explorers from traveling as far as the Amazon itself, but now they lingered seventeen days in the great river’s headwaters, adding to their herbarium and investigating its wild course. Here in the mountains, the Amazon was a rock-filled, rapid-choked torrent that bore little resemblance to its meandering lower reaches. At the Pongo (Rapids) de Manseritche, where the river squeezed through a mountain ravine, Humboldt measured it at less than 160 feet across. “At some points the overhanging rocks and the canopy of foliage forbid more than a very feeble light to penetrate,” he described, “and there all the drift-wood, consisting of a countless number of trunks of trees, is broken and dashed in pieces. . . . “ In places, the untamed, unpredictable river was known to rise more than twenty-five feet in the course of a single day, casting huge boulders before it and incessantly rearranging its channel.
As they left the Amazon Valley, the explorers began the steep ascent up the eastern slope of the Andes. One evening at sundown they arrived at the famous silver mines of Chota, where the mountains’ silhouette was broken by numerous towers and pyramids, creating an effect the mine owner likened to a castillo encantado, or “enchanted castle.” But for the workers, there was nothing magical about the pits: Crude sheds to house the miners had been thrown up wherever a flat surface presented itself, and the men “had to carry down the ore in baskets, by very steep and dangerous paths,” to the smelter below.
Nearby was Micuipampa, a mountain town of three or four thousand inhabitants. Though situated nearly on the equator, the place occupied a barren desert some eleven thousand feet above sea level, and it was so cold at night that pitchers of water froze inside the houses for much of the year. The only crops that could survive were kale and salad greens; every other necessity had to be laboriously carted up from the surrounding valleys. With its boomtown atmosphere of sudden wealth and widespread boredom, gambling was rampant at Micuipampa, reminding Humboldt of “the soldier of Pizarro’s troop who, after the pillage of Cuzco [the Inca capital], complained that he had lost at one night at play ‘a great piece of the sun,’” that is, a large gold plate looted from the Temple of the Sun.
The path leading from Micuipampa to the ancient city of Cajamarca (“Frost Town” in the Quechua language) was nearly impassible even for mules. For almost six hours Humboldt’s party struggled over a succession of barren páramos, at elevations of ten thousand to eleven thousand feet, where they were stung by needles of hail driven before a howling wind. Yet even in these brutal conditions, Humboldt would stop periodically and unload his instruments. It was in this godforsaken terrain that he would make one of his greatest discoveries in South America—the location of the earth’s magnetic equator.
The phenomenon of magnetism had been known for centuries (the term itself comes from Magnesia, the name of an area of Asia Minor where naturally magnetic iron ore had been mined for centuries). The magnetic compass had been invented in ancient China and used in Europe for navigation since the Middle Ages, and it had long been observed that the needle didn’t point precisely toward geographic north. However, by the turn of the nineteenth century, magnetism was still incompletely understood. Today we know that the phenomenon is a form of electricity, and that spinning electrons generate a minute magnetic field. In certain substances, more electrons spin in a particular direction, and these particles tend to line up and reinforce each other. If such a substance is placed within an outside magnetic field, its electrons will align with that field, creating a magnet. Every magnet has a so-called north and a south pole, at the two end points.
At the time of Humboldt’s expedition, geomagnetism—the study of the earth’s magnetic properties—was a young but promising field of research. After 1600, when English physician and physicist William Gilbert published De Magnete, scientists realized that the earth itself was a huge magnet. But it was not known whether the intensity of the planet’s magnetic field varied in any systematic way from place to place. In 1769, French scientist Jacques Mallet-Favre made the first attempt to measure geomagnetism at different latitudes, but his instruments weren’t sufficiently sensitive, leading to the erroneous conclusion that no such variation existed. Skeptical of Mallet’s results, his countryman Jean Borda repeated the experiment on his 1776 journey to West Africa, but his instruments proved deficient as well. After his return to Paris, Borda invented an improved magnetometer, which he presented to Humboldt to take to South America.
Immediately after leaving Europe, Humboldt began taking regular measurements of the earth’s magnetic field, using a kind of vertical compass called a dip needle. During the course of his journey, he made 124 magnetic observations ranging over 115 degrees of longitude and 64 degrees of latitude, also recording in every case the geodetic coordinates, height above sea level, and distance from any mountains or prominent rocks that might influence the results. As he traveled south toward the geographic equator, he noted with increasing excitement a steady decrease in the earth’s magnetic field.
Even after Humboldt crossed the geographic equator in Ecuador, the magnetic dip—the angle with which the magnetic needle was attracted downward, toward the earth, continued to decline. But now, as the party traversed the Cajamarca Plateau, he finally registered a dip of zero: He had located the magnetic equator—the line where the vertical component of earth’s magnetic force is zero—at 7 degrees, 27 minutes south latitude and 81 degrees, 8 minutes west longitude.
To gauge the intensity of the earth’s magnetic force, Humboldt invented a unit of measurement that would become the standard for fifty years, until supplanted by the gauss, named in honor of Carl Gauss, the great German mathematician and protégé of Humboldt. In 1804, Humboldt published the results of his measurements—a map showing five zones of equal geomagnetic strength in the Northern Hemisphere and one in the Southern. He also invented isogonics (lines connecting points with equal magnetic variation from true north), isoclines (lines connecting points with equal magnetic dip), and isodynamics (lines connecting points with equal magnetic strength), all of which are still in standard use in the field of geomagnetism.
Humboldt’s discovery of the magnetic equator on the desolate Cajamarca Plateau was a landmark achievement, not only proving that the earth’s magnetic field varies predictably with latitude but pinpointing the exact location where there is no vertical dip at all. “I have considered the law of the decrease of the magnetic forces from the pole to the equator as the most important result of my American journey,” Humboldt wrote. But his contributions to the field did not end even after his return to Europe.
From May 1806 to June 1807, in a rented potting shed outside Berlin, he made more than six thousand measurements demonstrating the daily fluctuations in a compass’s variation from true north. He also discovered the phenomenon of the magnetic storm (another term he coined), a disturbance in the earth’s magnetic field caused by the sudden release of ultraviolet radiation from the sun. Indeed, Humboldt would continue to study and advance the field of geomagnetism for the rest of his life.
FROM the last of the barren páramos, Humboldt “looked down with increased pleasure on the fertile valley of Cajamarca,” which, despite its altitude of nearly nine thousand feet, was graced with wheat fields and orchards and etched by avenues of willows and flowering trees. Occupying a high plain reminiscent of the one around Bogotá, the ancient city of Cajamarca, with a population of seven or eight thousand, enjoyed good soil, ample water, and, thanks to the protection of the surrounding mountains, a relatively mild climate. In the distance, Humboldt could see puffs of steam drifting up from los Baños del Inca (the Baths of the Emperor), the hot-water springs where the Inca Atahualpa had built a palace before the coming of the conquistadors. According to local legend, his golden throne had been cast into the hot springs to keep it out of the Spaniards’ hands, but after centuries o
f searching, it had never been discovered. Though their capital was at Cuzco, more than six hundred miles to the southeast, it was here at Cajamarca that the mighty Inca Empire had fallen to the Europeans. Humboldt was captivated by their story.
About A.D. 1400, the Inca had begun a period of rapid expansion, and over the next century, through a deft mix of diplomacy and conquest, they managed to subsume nearly a hundred distinct peoples into their realm, which they called Tahuantinsuyu, or “the Four Quarters of the World.” At its high-water mark, after Inca Huayna Capac’s conquest of the neighboring Kingdom of Quito about 1515, the empire stretched from Ecuador to Chile, taking in snow-covered peaks, coastal desert, and dense rain forest.
Presiding over this huge territory and everything in it was the all-powerful Inca, or emperor. Believed to be descended from the sun itself, the emperor lived in almost unbelievable luxury. Adjoining his palace at Cuzco was a magnificent walled garden with fantastic plants shaped from silver and gold, according to sixteenth-century chronicler Garcilaso de la Vega, “with their leaves, flowers, and fruit; some just beginning to sprout, others half grown, others having reached maturity. They made fields of maize, with their leaves, mazorcas [ears of corn], canes, roots, and flowers, all exactly imitated. The beard of the mazorca was gold, and all the rest of silver. . . . They did the same thing with other plants, making the flowers, or any other part that became yellow, of gold, and the rest of silver.” Inside the capital’s Temple of the Sun, “all four of the walls . . . were covered, from roof to floor, with plates and slabs of gold. . . . On either side of the image of the Sun were the bodies of the dead kings, arranged according to priority as Children of the Sun, and embalmed so as to appear as if they were still alive. They were seated on chairs of gold, placed upon the golden slabs on which they had been used to sit.”
To Humboldt, the emperor was a tyrant, and it is true that Inca society was rigidly structured, with laws to govern every aspect of public and private behavior. Unquestioning obedience was expected from all quarters, from the various levels of nobility down through the great mass of common subjects, and transgressions were severely punished. Garcilaso reproduced the Inca Pachacuti’s uncompromising ethical code in his Royal Commentaries of the Inca:
When subjects, captain, and curacas [lords] cordially obey the king, then the kingdom enjoys perfect peace and quiet.
Envy is a worm that gnaws and consumes the entrails of the envious.
He that envies another, injures himself.
He that kills another without authority of just cause condemns himself to death.
It is very just that he who is a thief should be put to death.
Adulterers, who destroy the peace and happiness of others, ought to be declared thieves, and condemned to death without mercy.
The noble and generous man is known by the patience he shows in adversity.
Judges who secretly receive gifts from suitors ought to be looked upon as thieves and punished with death as such.
The physician herbalist who is ignorant of the virtues of herbs or who, knowing the uses of some, has not attained to a knowledge of all, understands little or nothing. He ought to work until he knows all, as well the useful as the injurious plants, in order to deserve the name to which he pretends.
He who attempts to count the stars, not even knowing how to count the marks and knots of the quipus, ought to be held in derision.
Drunkenness, anger, and madness go together; but the first two are voluntary and to be removed, whereas the last is perpetual.
Every subject, of whatever station, was guaranteed food, shelter, and the other necessities of life, but by the same token private property was severely restricted. Tribute to the Inca was carefully delineated, as recorded by the sixteenth-century Spanish monk Blas Valera:
Tribute was to consist solely of time, or skill as a workman or artisan. . . .
Except for work as a husbandman or as a soldier, for which any puric might be called upon, no man was compelled to work at any craft save his own.
If tribute took the form of merchandise produced by the payer’s labor, only the produce of his own region could be demanded of him, it being held to be unjust to demand from him fruits that his own land did not yield.
Every craftsman who labored in the service of the Inca or of his curaca must be provided with all the raw materials for his labor, so that his contribution consisted only of his time, work, or dexterity. His employment in this way was not to be more than two or three months in the year.
A craftsman was to be supplied with food, clothes, and medicine at need while he was working, and his wife and children were aiding him, they were to be supplied with those things also. . . .
As in many other cultures of the time, the secular and spiritual realms were inextricably intertwined, and religion played a central role in daily life. The chief deity in the Inca pantheon was Viracocha, who had created mankind in his own image on the shore of Lake Titicaca, then walked westward over the surface of the Pacific Ocean. Serving Viracocha were a multitude of lesser gods, including planets, stars, thunder and lightning, some rivers and mountains (such as Cotopaxi), and other natural phenomena. Preeminent among these secondary deities was Inti, the sun god, ancestor of the Inca rulers, who was presented with tremendous works of gold, which was called “the sweat of the sun.” (Inti’s consort, the moon, was honored with silver, or “the tears of the moon.”)
Taking pity at the benighted lives led by men, the sun had sent one of his sons, Marco Capoc, and one of his daughters, Mama Oello Huaco, to civilize mankind and to teach them useful arts such as agriculture and weaving. These divine intermediaries had carried with them a great golden wedge, which, it was prophesied, would sink deep into the ground at the spot where they were to establish their city. The miracle occurred at Cuzco, and the Inca capital was duly founded there.
The Inca had no writing; though they did have the quipu, a system of knotted, color-coded cords used to count and perhaps to send simple nonnumerical messages. They also had no wheeled vehicles, no iron, and no money. Yet they skillfully administered a vast empire and conducted an incredibly ambitious program of public works, including land terraces, irrigation systems, roads, palaces, fortresses, and temples. All these projects, some requiring decades of work, were accomplished through an arrangement called mita (Quechua for “turn”), under which each community throughout the empire was required to send a quota of young people to work for the state for a limited period. Far from a time of drudgery, some historians suggest, the mita (which survived in modified form through the colonial period) was for many of these participants a high point of their lives, giving them their only taste of the wider world outside their own village.
The Inca were able to undertake such enormous engineering works (and support activities such as gold making, fine weaving, sculpting, painting, oral poetry, and music) because of an efficient agricultural system, which produced huge surpluses of food and freed labor for other purposes. The most important crop was corn, followed by potatoes and other roots, beans, and a wide variety of other vegetables, some of which were dried for future use. The Inca apparently made a scientific study of agriculture, and as nations were brought into the empire, the newcomers’ farming methods and other technologies were examined and the most promising methods adapted throughout the realm. The Inca are even believed to have had agricultural research stations, where new crops were tested and improved.
Though the Inca never discovered the arch, they were able to build palaces and other large structures from great blocks of stone. It’s not known how workers managed to transport such tremendous weights and set them precisely in place, but Inca stonework was so finely wrought that it required no mortar, and many stunning examples remain today. However, of all the Inca’s engineering feats, it was the network of roads constructed for governmental and military use that particularly struck Humboldt (and many other European observers). “The impressions produced on the mind by the natural characteris
tics of these wildernesses of the Cordilleras,” Humboldt found, “are heightened, in a remarkable and unexpected manner, from its being in those very regions that we still see admirable remains of the gigantic work, the artificial road of the Inca, which formed a line of communications through all the provinces of the Empire. . . .”
With a total of perhaps ten thousand miles of paving, this vast highway system consisted of two main north-south arteries, one along the coast and another along the eastern flank of the Andes, each about two thousand miles long and linked by numerous east-west connecting routes. Bridges and aqueducts were also constructed where needed, and every several miles could be found a tambo, or way station, some of which incorporated natural hot springs. Masterfully engineered, the roads were as good, Humboldt decided, as any of the Roman roads he had seen in Italy or France. And just as the Roman roads had all led to their capital, so the Inca’s all led to the main square in Cuzco.
It is thought that, using these highways, relays of runners could cover the fifteen hundred miles between the capital and Quito in just five days. Intended solely for pedestrian traffic and llamas, the roads were occasionally broken by long flights of vertical steps, which would later prove a serious impediment to the Spaniards’ horses, before they adopted the more surefooted mules. Francisco Pizarro, the conqueror of Peru, wrote of these thoroughfares, “In the whole of Christendom there are nowhere such fine roads as those which we here admire.” Yet by the time of Humboldt’s arrival, the roads, like the other monuments to the great Inca culture, were in a state of ruin, having been looted by the Spanish for materials with which to construct their own cities, fortresses, and places of worship.
Some of these scavenged stones had been used to construct the fine churches in Cajamarca, as well as the state prison and the cabildo (town hall), which had been built on the hill that had been the site of the Inca’s palace. Humboldt was shown steps cut into the rock known as the Inca’s Footbath, where the ruler’s feet had supposedly been washed, accompanied, as Humboldt phrased it, “by some inconvenient usages of court etiquette.” That is, the Inca, owing to his majesty, would spit not on the ground, but into the hands of one of the ladies in waiting. In the palace’s principal building, Humboldt viewed the room where one of the great perfidies of history had been committed, when the Inca Atahualpa had been held prisoner by Francisco Pizarro.
Humboldt's Cosmos Page 30
