Humboldt's Cosmos

by Gerard Helferich

  Cultural life had declined along with the economy. By the time of Humboldt’s visit, there was only one theater still open, and the bullring and cockpits provided the dominant pastimes. Yet, despite the failing economy, the Church remained powerful and rich, and ties to the mother country were unusually strong. (Though Peru would win its independence in 1821, Lima’s port, Callao, would stubbornly hold out against the revolutionaries until 1826.) With government sinecures the principal source of income for the city’s elite, political intrigue and sheer idleness had elevated character assassination to a high art. Every visitor to the city seemed to remark on the prevalence of slander and backbiting at the time.

  Humboldt, who had seen many of Spain’s New World capitals, wasn’t favorably disposed toward the city either. “Lima has declined greatly . . . ,” he wrote in a letter. “Here I never saw well-furnished homes or well-dressed women. . . . At night it is impossible to travel the streets by carriage, obstructed as they are by mongrel dogs and donkey carcasses. . . . It would seem to be more distant from the rest of Peru than London is. A cold egotism is found here, so that no one cares about anybody else’s sufferings. . . . We expect to leave in about five or six weeks, and meanwhile we wait patiently [for a ship], battling against mosquitoes.”

  Before he departed, Humboldt was keen to observe the transit of Mercury across the sun predicted for November 9, 1802. In astronomy, a transit is the crossing of a smaller body in front of a larger one. Since Earth is the third planet in the solar system, only the two inner planets, Mercury and Venus, cross the sun from our perspective, appearing as a small, dark dot on the larger, brighter body (Mercury appears about 1/200 the size of the sun; Venus is somewhat larger). On average, Mercury makes a transit every eight years, while it can be more than a century between transits of Venus. The first complete transit of Mercury had been observed in 1677 by the great English astronomer Edmond Halley, and in the intervening years scientists had studied the phenomenon in order to measure the size of the planet. Humboldt, however, was keen to observe this transit because it also provided an excellent means of measuring longitude. Using his chronometer, Humboldt could precisely time the transit at Callao, then later compare his observations to those taken by astronomers in Europe. The difference in time between his measurement and theirs would yield the distance in longitude between the two places.

  That was, if the perpetual overcast allowed him to view the transit at all. Situated on the coastal plain (which had been pushed above the Pacific’s waters by the same tectonic forces that created the Andes), Lima enjoyed a pleasant, mild climate. However, for eight months of the year a thick fog, called garúa, blanketed the city. In this case, though, Humboldt was lucky. As he wrote in Aspects of Nature, “I had, at the critical moment, the rare good fortune of a perfectly clear day, during a very unfavorable season of the year, on the misty coast of Low Peru. I observed the passage of Mercury over the Sun at Callao, an observation which has become of some importance towards the exact determination of the longitude of Lima and of all the south-western part of the New Continent,” since the location of those places had been fixed by their relationship to Lima. Humboldt found that the transit began at Callao five hours, eighteen minutes, and eighteen seconds later than at Paris, putting the port at 77 degrees, 6 minutes, and 3 seconds west longitude. Once again he had left his mark on the maps of South America. “Thus,” he wrote, “in the intricate relations and graver circumstances of life, there may often be found associated with disappointment [over missing the rendezvous with Baudin], a germ of compensation.”

  In 1835, Robert FitzRoy, captain of the Beagle, confirmed Humboldt’s measurements. That ship anchored at Callao for six weeks, but because of political turmoil, Darwin was able to see very little of Lima. As during Humboldt’s stay, the sky was constantly overcast. Darwin complained in The Voyage of the Beagle that conditions had worsened since Humboldt’s visit. “The inhabitants, both here and at Lima, present every imaginable shade of mixture, between European, Negro, and Indian blood. They appear a depraved, drunken set of people. The atmosphere is loaded with foul smells, and that peculiar one, which may be perceived in almost every town within the tropics, was here very strong. . . .”

  As if that weren’t bad enough, “The city of Lima is now in a wretched state of decay: the streets are nearly unpaved; and heaps of filth are piled up in all directions, where the black gallinazos, tame as poultry, pick up bits of carrion.” Still, the city showed evidence of past glory. “The houses have generally an upper story, built on account of the earthquakes, of plastered woodwork; but some of the old ones, which are now used by several families, are immensely large, and would rival in suites of apartments the most magnificent in any place. Lima, the City of the Kings, must formerly have been a splendid town. The extraordinary number of churches gives it, even at the present day, a peculiar and striking character, especially when viewed from a short distance.”

  It was during his stay in Lima that Humboldt came across guano, a natural fertilizer that would play an important role in European and American agriculture for much of the nineteenth century. During those years, the humble substance—the dried droppings of seabirds—would become one of the most coveted natural resources on earth.

  For thousands of years, mankind had been spreading manure on crops to produce more vigorous plants and more bountiful harvests. The practice is still important because, except for carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, which are supplied by water and air, plants must derive all their nutritional needs from the soil in which they grow. These essential nutrients—numbering fourteen, from major ones such as calcium to trace elements such as molybdenum—may be naturally lacking, or may in time be used up by the plants or carried away by water. Fertilizers, including animal excrement, add nutrients back to the soil—especially nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, all of which are needed by plants in substantial quantities. Just as Europeans had long spread manure on their crops, pre-Columbian Indians had for centuries fertilized their fields with guano, which, being more concentrated, is much higher in nutritional value.

  The rocky islands off the coast of Peru, where bird droppings were piled up to 150 feet deep, produced a particularly potent form of guano, since the arid climate allowed it to dry without being leached of its nutrients. Recognizing the substance’s immense potential as a commercial fertilizer, Humboldt introduced guano to Europe, where the French chemists Louis-Nicolas Vauquelin and Antoine-François, comte de Fourcroy, confirmed his assessment. Later, German scientist Justus von Liebig, a protégé of Humboldt and the founder of organic and agricultural chemistry, became an advocate of the fertilizer as well. In 1841, when British chemist John C. Nesbit announced that guano contained thirty-three times the nutrient value of manure, the guano boom was born.

  Over the next four decades, from 1840 to 1880, it’s estimated that twenty million tons of guano were exported from Peru (especially from the Chinchas Islands) for use in the United States and Europe. In 1856, believing that American farmers were being price gouged, the U.S. Congress even authorized individual citizens to seize guano-rich islands anywhere in the world that were not already claimed by a foreign government. An island-hopping land rush ensued to claim the precious guano, and in the coming decades dozens of atolls and cays were annexed to the United States, including Midway and Christmas islands in the Pacific. But by the end of the nineteenth century, the boom was running out, due in part to the depletion of the sources and in part to the invention of less expensive synthetic fertilizers.

  ON Christmas Eve 1802, Humboldt, Bonpland, and Carlos Montúfar sailed from Callao, bound for Guayaquil (in present-day Ecuador), some seven hundred miles to the northwest. During the long voyage on the small ship the Causino, Humboldt followed his usual routine of measuring water temperature and speed. Local fishermen had known for centuries that a powerful, cold current flowed from the tip of Chile to northern Peru, from just offshore to about six hundred miles out to sea. However, no one had ever studied th
e flow, which is now known to produce a number of important climatological and economic effects along the western coast of South America.

  The current originates in the Antarctic, but its coldness is due to the fact that it wells up from deep in the Pacific. The prevailing winds push the warm surface waters away from land, and they are replaced by much cooler, plankton-rich water from far below. By holding warm, moist air offshore, the current is responsible for the South American coastal desert. It also is the reason that Antarctic animals like penguins and fur seals are found in the Galápagos, west of Ecuador. More to the point, the plankton attracts an abundance of fish and birds, making the current the most productive marine ecosystem on the planet, accounting for twenty percent of the world’s fish catch and positioning Peru as one of the leading fishing nations on earth.

  But powerful though it is, the current is not immune to ecological threat. The life-giving flow is disrupted by El Niño (“the Child”), the periodic wintertime warming of the Pacific off the coast of Ecuador that is named after the Infant Jesus because the effect occurs near Christmas. During a persistent El Niño pattern, which can last more than a year, warm, nutrient-poor waters devastate the fisheries. Heavy rains and flooding also occur in South America in these years, while Southeast Asia and Africa are struck by drought. In North America, El Niño produces heavy rains across the Southeast, unusually warm weather along the Pacific Coast, and a relatively quiet hurricane season in the Atlantic. Thousands of deaths and tens of billions of dollars in property damage can result worldwide. Though there is no consensus on the reason for these extended El Niños, many scientists suspect that it is caused by air pollution trapping atmospheric warmth through the “greenhouse effect.”

  Though Humboldt did not discover this great upwelling of cold water—“I may claim the merit of having been the first to measure its temperature and rate of flow,” he was still objecting in 1840—it was named after him anyway. Ironically, the Humboldt Current (now also known as the Peru Current) has become the principal means by which the baron’s name has survived into our own time. Even today it is the phenomenon that is most likely to ignite a spark of recognition on the part of those not otherwise familiar with Humboldt’s manifold achievements.

  JUST as his breakthroughs in the hard sciences would transform oceanography, volcanology, plant geography, magnetism, and other fields, Humboldt’s investigations of the native peoples of South America would revolutionize the study of anthropology. As the first prominent European to appreciate the great indigenous cultures of the New World and to suggest that pre-Hispanic peoples were more than brutal savages in need of “civilizing,” Humboldt greatly enhanced the world’s interest in, and recognition of, America’s ancient inhabitants. Indeed, it was largely through their reading of Humboldt that American writers such as John Lloyd Stephens, whose 1841 book Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan drew attention to the Maya culture, and the previously mentioned William Hickling Prescott were inspired to undertake their landmark studies of these great civilizations of the past.

  Humboldt was also among the first to suggest that the earliest Americans had immigrated from Asia, citing similarities in calendars, legends, and religious symbols. “I regard the existence of a former intercourse between the people of western America and those of eastern Asia as more than probable,” he wrote, “though it is impossible at the present time to say by what route and with which of the tribes of Asia this influence was established. . . . We know that adventurers navigated the vaster Chinese seas. . . . May not accident have led to similar expeditions to Alaska and California?” Today, this Asian immigration has been proven by genetic testing, but the question of how and when it occurred is still in question. Though not unanimous, the consensus view has long been that the first Americans migrated out of Asia over a land bridge between Siberia and Alaska, sometime between twenty thousand and fourteen thousand years ago. Recent radiocarbon-dating evidence, however, suggests that the settlement in Siberia thought to be the immigrants’ departure point is actually too recent to have been used for that purpose, fueling speculation that the early settlers of North America may have arrived by boat.

  Moreover, Humboldt’s writings also began to chip away at the assumption of European racial superiority. If the native peoples of South America were not simple heathens but actually the inheritors of a great indigenous culture, by what right did Spain, Portugal, and other powers seize their lands and enslave the Indians under the guise of rescuing them from savagery? “A darker shade of skin color is not a badge of inferiority,” Humboldt argued. “The barbarism of nations is the direct consequence of oppression by internal despotism or foreign conquest. It is always accompanied by progressive impoverishment and a diminution of public fortune. Free and powerful institutions remove such dangers.” That is, any cultural debasement was not the result of an innate failing but rather the consequence of centuries of oppression, first by their own dictatorial rulers and later by paternalistic and self-serving Europeans. The would-be architects of South American independence were Creoles (whites of European descent), not Native Americans, and they certainly didn’t consider the Africans or the Indians their peers. Nevertheless, for Humboldt, the self-proclaimed child of the French Revolution, there was reason to hope that, with national independence, the nonwhite races of South America would also attain the benefits of freedom that were their rightful patrimony.

  ON February 15, 1803, Humboldt and Bonpland sailed from Guayaquil for Mexico. As their small ship pulled away from shore, the travelers could hear Cotopaxi booming, as if in a final salute, some 150 miles inland. Humboldt didn’t record his thoughts on departing South America. Yet leave-takings and ocean voyages typically put him in a melancholy mood, and from the trail of wistful comments he left on departing other locales, we can assume that this one was also tinged with regret. It had been an incredible two-and-a-half-year odyssey, through dense rain forests, down great rivers, across barren páramos, and over snowcapped mountains, to places where few if any men had ever gone before. Everywhere, Humboldt had opened himself totally to the environment, registering impressions, making connections, and formulating new ideas that would push our thinking in unprecedented directions—in the sciences, history, and even the fine arts. The most important articles he would bring back from the New Continent would be ideas, he had said. And: “Whether in the Amazonian forests or on the ridge of the high Andes, I was ever aware that one breath, from pole to pole, breathes one single life into rocks, plants and animals, and into the swelling breast of man.” Thanks to his unique, unifying vision of the world, no one would ever look at South America, or nature, or mankind, in the same way again.

  But his journey was not yet over. There would be more than another year of discovery before Humboldt left America for good. Before him lay Mexico.

  Eleven: New Spain

  AS the Atlante approached New Spain, its passengers and hands scoured the eastern horizon. It had been thirty-three miserable, squall-filled days since the corvette had left Guayaquil, and everyone on board was eager to sight dry land. But as the captain held his course, expecting to intercept the coast at any time, Humboldt—taking his own sightings, as always—realized that the ship’s charts had misplaced the port of Acapulco. It was an important error, since not only was the city the hub of Spain’s trade with the Far East, but the coordinates of many other places had been reckoned from there; if Acapulco had been mischarted, then so had much of Mexico’s Pacific Coast.

  At last, the shout went up from the lookout, and on March 23, 1803, the ship dropped anchor. Humboldt found the port of Acapulco (“Place of the Reeds” in the Aztecs’ Náhuatl language) “one of the finest natural harbors in the known world . . . , forming an immense basin cut in granite rocks open towards the south-southwest, and possessing from east to west more than six thousand meters in breadth [about three and a half miles].” Whereas Havana was cheerful and welcoming, on first sight Acapulco was brooding and forbidding, owi
ng to the great cliffs guarding the western side of the bay. “I have seen few situations in either hemisphere of a more savage aspect,” Humboldt ventured. “I would say at the same time more dismal and more romantic. This rocky coast is so steep that a vessel of the line [the largest class of warship] may almost touch it without running the smallest danger, because there is everywhere from ten to twelve fathoms [about sixty to seventy feet] of water.”

  The place had been occupied by Native Americans for thousands of years. The Spanish had arrived in 1512, and Hernán Cortés had established a port there in 1523. But by the turn of the nineteenth century, Acapulco had become a forlorn backwater, with a population of only about four thousand and a reputation for sheltering escaped convicts and slaves. At the time of Humboldt’s visit, the city was receiving scarcely ten ships a year—mainly coming up the coast from Guayaquil and Lima with commodities such as copper, oil, wine, quinine, sugar, and cocoa, and loading up for the return passage with woolens, a little cochineal (dried insects used to made a red dye), and perhaps some contraband goods from Asia.

  By far the most important of these arrivals—the highlight of the year in Acapulco—was the annual nao, or galleon, from Manila. For 250 years, Acapulco had been the only Spanish city in the Western Hemisphere permitted by the Crown to trade with the Orient. Sometime from the middle of July to early August, the nao would depart the Philippines, laden with textiles and spices, and arrive in New Spain in November or December. “Whenever the news arrives at Mexico that the galleon has been seen off the coast,” Humboldt wrote, “the roads are covered with travelers, and every merchant hastens to be the first to treat with the supercargos. . . .” Most of these dealers would be disappointed, since the lion’s share of the merchandise had already been sold by previous arrangement to the great mercantile houses in Mexico City. From the capital, the goods would be distributed throughout Mexico, and some would even find their way to Spain, via Veracruz on Mexico’s Gulf Coast. Then in February or March, the galleon would begin its six-thousand-mile return trip to the Philippines, loaded mainly with Mexican silver but also with cochineal, cocoa, wine, oil, and wool. In addition to trade goods, the ship would be crowded with passengers in each direction. In 1804, the year of Humboldt’s visit, the galleon took on a contingent of seventy-five monks bound for the Far East.