Humboldt's Cosmos

by Gerard Helferich

  In typical fashion, Humboldt responded to this new celebrity with a relentless commitment to his work. “He was awfully busy in the first eight days,” Caroline reported. “He is with Kohlrausch [the Prussian ambassador] quite a bit, meets him as early as six in the morning, works and talks all the time.” Humboldt himself wrote of this period, “I am working with greater effort than ever, and trust that my publications will turn out to be less immature than my last. My health is better than it has ever been,” he added, despite a partial paralysis in his right arm, which he attributed to rheumatism contracted in the rain forest; the condition would trouble him for the rest of his life. To a friend Humboldt admitted feeling overwhelmed by the extent of what he had taken on. “I’ve really bitten off more than I can chew,” he confessed.

  In mid-October, Humboldt presented the first reports of his journey at a crowded, highly anticipated meeting of the Institut National des Sciences et Arts, the organization created by the French government in 1795 to promote science, the beaux arts, and literature. Also in October, the first exhibition of Humboldt’s botanical collection opened at the Jardin des Plantes, where it proved a sensation. Meanwhile, the Bureau of Longitude Studies and the Observatory were reviewing his copious barometric and astronomical measurements, and artists had been hired to begin copying his sketches of plants and ancient Indian monuments. As in Washington, everyone was amazed by Humboldt’s intellectual scope. “This man combines an entire academy in him,” marveled great French chemist Claude-Louis Berthollet.

  However, one contemporary who didn’t share the general excitement over Humboldt’s return was the first consul himself. Suspicious of Humboldt’s Prussian nationality, the emperor-to-be was also aware of his liberal politics. Perhaps he was even jealous of his fame, which was said at the time to be second only to Bonaparte’s own. Though Napoleon was a member of the Institut National, he declined to attend Humboldt’s lecture there. And when the two met at a gala in the Tuileries following the emperor’s coronation on December 2, 1804, Napoleon remarked coolly, “I understand you collect plants, monsieur.” Humboldt confirmed the supposition, whereupon the emperor replied, “So does my wife,” and turned his back.

  “The Emperor Napoleon,” Humboldt worried, “behaved with icy coldness to Bonpland and seemed full of hatred towards me.” But the antipathy between the two men (who had been born in the same year) was mutual, and Humboldt made a point of avoiding the emperor’s weekly receptions. In fact, the abrupt meeting at the coronation gala was their only face-to-face encounter. Convinced that the other was an enemy spy, Napoleon had him followed by the secret police and once even ordered him expelled from France. When Humboldt persuaded a friend to intercede, the emperor asked, “But doesn’t he devote his time to politics?” “No,” was the reply, “I’ve never heard him talk about anything but science.” Bonaparte reluctantly rescinded his order.

  It was at Napoleon’s coronation that Humboldt also met Simon Bolívar. Bolívar had been a boy of sixteen when Humboldt and Bonpland had arrived in his native city of Caracas, Venezuela, in 1799. The two hadn’t met at the time, because young Simon, son of one of the city’s wealthiest Creole families, had been sent to Europe to give his education a final polish. A child of the Enlightenment and a student of Rousseau, Voltaire, and Jefferson, Bolívar (like Humboldt) deplored Napoleon as a perversion of the principles of the French Revolution. But at the same time he couldn’t help admiring the Corsican’s martial acumen and personal charisma—qualities he would later strive to emulate—and it was perhaps for this reason that he chose to attend the installation of the new emperor.

  When Humboldt and Bonpland were introduced to Bolívar at the gala, the conversation quickly turned to politics. Humboldt suggested that, following Spain’s revocation of its liberalized trade policy two years before, Venezuela was ripe for revolution—if only the right leader would step forward to focus the opposition. Bonpland was also encouraging, expressing the view that “revolutions themselves bring forth great men who are worthy of carrying them out.” In August 1805, Humboldt and Bolívar met again in Rome, and again discussed South American independence. Then, on August 15, Bolívar climbed Rome’s Aventine Hill and made his famous vow to dedicate himself to freedom.

  The following year, Francisco Miranda, another native of Caracas, led a British-supported revolt in Venezuela. But most of his countrymen remained loyal, the coup faltered, and Miranda fled to England. By 1807, Bolívar was back in Venezuela, still bent on revolution. Three years later, the republicans’ moment finally arrived, after France had invaded Spain and taken King Ferdinand VII prisoner. When Spain’s final defeat seemed imminent, Miranda returned to Venezuela, deposed the Spanish viceroy, and installed himself as dictator. On July 5, 1811, the cabildo, or legislature, declared the country’s independence. But in 1812 a devastating earthquake struck Caracas, and in its aftermath the city was reoccupied by loyalists. Miranda was imprisoned, and his aide, Simon Bolívar, took his place at the head of the movement.

  Over the next decade, Bolívar and his troops persevered through several seemingly fatal reversals, finally ousting the Spanish for good in 1822. That year, he was named president of the newly formed Gran Colombia, a federation of present-day Colombia, Panama, Ecuador, and Venezuela. But the distances proved too vast and the political and social differences too great, and even El Libertador was unable to hold the federation together. After Gran Colombia was disbanded in 1830, Caracas became the capital of independent Venezuela. Bolívar died of tuberculosis on December 17 of that year, a virtual outcast in the nation he had liberated. As he commented bitterly, “Independence is the only benefit we have gained, at the cost of everything else.” But to the end Bolívar counted himself a friend and admirer of Humboldt, whom he lauded as “the true discoverer of South America” for exploring more of the continent’s six million square miles than anyone before, for captivating the world with his depictions of the region’s aesthetic and scientific wonders, and, most important, for inspiring South Americans to recognize the vast resources of their own continent and to utilize them for social and political progress.

  PREOCCUPIED though he was with his publications after his return to Paris, Humboldt traveled to Switzerland to conduct a series of experiments on atmospheric physics with his new friend French chemist Joseph-Louis Gay-Lussac. Afterward, he went on to Italy for a delayed reunion with his brother, Wilhelm. Then, grudgingly, he journeyed to Berlin to pay his respects to King Friedrich Wilhelm III. Thus it was 1807 before Humboldt’s hugely ambitious publication program finally began to see the light of day.

  The first to appear was Aspects of Nature, which, though based only in part on his travels on the New Continent, would prove one of the most popular of all his books, as well as his personal favorite. Consisting of eight essays, ranging from the physiognomy of plants to the perils of the Llanos, from the structure of volcanoes to the majesty of the Orinoco, the work was meant to capture the direct experience of nature, as though the reader himself were enjoying the magnificent view from atop a tall mountain or hearing the rain forest come alive at night. The book was intended to provide the wider public with the same deep pleasure that Humboldt had always found in the aesthetic and intellectual enjoyment of nature’s wonders. As he wrote in the preface, “To minds oppressed with the cares or the sorrows of life, the soothing influence of the contemplation of Nature is peculiarly precious. . . . May they, ‘escaping from the stormy waves of life,’ follow me in spirit with willing steps to the recesses of the primeval forests, over the boundless surface of the Steppe, and to the higher ridges of the Andes.”

  Also in 1807, Humboldt released the first of his American publications. Originally planning only eleven works, he confidently wrote a friend, “Considering the remarkable energy of my disposition, I expect to see the whole thing out of my hands in a couple of years, or at most in two and a half years, as I’m now impatient to discharge my cargo in order to embark on something new.” In reality, the monumental set
, published under the collective title Voyage to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent, Made in 1799-1804, would run to thirty volumes and wouldn’t be completed for more than three decades. Prepared with the aid of various collaborators and sporadic help from Bonpland (who was listed as coauthor), the books were by far the most ambitious publication program of the period.

  The first volume to appear was the Essay on the Geography of Plants, the seminal work that Humboldt had started immediately after his descent of Chimborazo. Dedicated to his old friend Goethe, the Essay would prove one of Humboldt’s most enduring contributions to natural history, correlating plant growth with physical factors such as soil type, exposure to sun and wind, temperature, and especially height above sea level. Just as vegetation changes predictably with latitude, Humboldt demonstrated, plant distribution also varies systematically with altitude: From the ocean to 3,000 feet above sea level (on the equator) is found the zone of palms, followed by those of ferns (to 4,900 feet), oaks (to 9,200 feet), evergreen shrubs (to 10,150 feet), herbs (to 12,600 feet), and finally grasses and lichens (to 14,200 feet). By codifying how geographic features influence plant growth, Humboldt created a whole new branch of science, still known by the name he gave it, plant geography, which has had a huge impact not only on our understanding of botanical processes, but on horticulture and commercial agriculture as well.

  In 1810 appeared the two-volume, oversized, lavishly illustrated Researches Concerning the Institutions and Monuments of the Ancient Inhabitants of America, the work that established Native American cultural studies—including art, architecture, language, astronomy, and religion. Though the book would prove tremendously influential, not everyone in Europe was ready to receive its message. As the reviewer for the conservative British Quarterly Review put it, “We cannot admit with our author that a nation so barbarous as the Mexicans had any knowledge of the cause of eclipses. . . . A picture language or such rude representation of the objects of sense as village children chalk on walls and barn-doors, are the first and rudest efforts to record ideas, . . . and with both of these even the wild Hotentots, . . . the very lowest perhaps of the human race, appear to be acquainted. . . . The Mexicans may have advanced but, we believe, not a great way, beyond the village children. . . .” The reviewer continued, “We have dwelt but little, and that little will perhaps be thought too much on those cycles and calendars, those chronologies and cosmogonies extracted out of the—to us, at least—unintelligible daubings designated under the name of the ‘Codices Mexicani.’ To M. de Humboldt, however, they would appear to be of first-rate importance. . . .” Fortunately, not everyone was so dismissive of American indigenous culture.

  Next came the three-volume Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain, the first comprehensive study of Mexico, which, published in 1811, the year after the colony’s unsuccessful revolt against Spain, proved particularly timely. Incorporating Humboldt’s original research as well as a wealth of information culled from government archives, the book became the prototype work of political geography, exploring the intricate connections between the physical and man-made worlds.

  In 1814 began publication of the long-awaited series of books intended for a general audience, the Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent. Ultimately comprising three volumes, this was the chronicle that would thrill the young Charles Darwin. However, the work didn’t prove to be the breezy adventure story that the public was anticipating. Packed with scientific data and technical digressions, the books were more a physical description of South America and an account of the social and political conditions that Humboldt had found there. With the prepublication destruction of Volume Four, dealing with the Andes, the work was also incomplete.

  The Quarterly Review praised Humboldt’s Personal Narrative, for “seeing every thing, and leaving nothing unsaid of what he sees;—not a rock nor a thicket, a pool or a rivulet,—nay, not a plant nor an insect, from the lofty palm and the ferocious alligator, to the humble lichen and half-animated polypus, escapes his scrutinizing eye, and they all find a place in his book. . . . he is so deeply versed in the study of nature, and possessed of such facility in bringing to bear, that we may say of him . . . that he never quits a subject until he has exhausted it.” The review went on, in a less laudatory vein, “But this very facility . . . becomes a fault in the personal narrative of voyages or travels; at least the bulk of readers will be very apt to lay down the book on finding the thread of the story perpetually interrupted by a learned disquisition of a dozen pages on the geognostical constitution of a chain of mountains, or the lines of isothermal temperature.” Humboldt’s dear friend the French mathematician and physicist Dominique Francois Arago was more succinct: “Humboldt, you really don’t know how to write a book. You write endlessly, but what comes out of it is not a book, but a portrait without a frame.”

  Between 1814 and 1834, Humboldt published a three-volume history of the early voyages of discovery to the Americas, called Critical Examination of the History of Geography of the New Continent and of the Progress of Nautical Astronomy in the 15th and 16th Centuries. Particularly notable in this work was his solution of the riddle of how the New Continent had come to be named America, after Florentine explorer and mapmaker Amerigo Vespucci. For centuries, Vespucci had been suspected of appropriating the name himself, in what would have been one of history’s most blatant acts of self-promotion. But through original bibliographic research, Humboldt proved that the honor had actually been bestowed by sixteenth-century German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller on his 1507 map (which was also the first to depict North and South America as independent continents and not part of Asia). Indeed, it is doubtful that Vespucci, who died in 1512, ever even saw the map that made him famous.

  In 1828, Humboldt published the two-volume Political Essay on the Island of Cuba, another pioneering work of political geography, which was noteworthy, in addition to being the most comprehensive study ever made of the island, as Humboldt’s most extensive, impassioned argument for the abolition of slavery throughout the world.

  During these years, Humboldt published works of a more technical nature as well—on geology, zoology, barometric and astronomic measurements, and his new graphic technique of isothermal lines. As Humboldt immersed himself in these various projects, it became clear that his earlier estimate of a few years to complete his American books had been wildly optimistic. It also became apparent that the books would cost far more than his original estimate. Encompassing more than fourteen hundred illustrations, many of them hand colored, the works were in fact the most costly publication program ever undertaken by a private individual, with no expense spared in design, artwork, and printing. Humboldt also advanced generous fees to his various collaborators, specialists who ensured the scientific accuracy of the publications. His own perfectionism added further to the huge cost—when he was dissatisfied with the illustrations, he destroyed them, along with their printing plates, and had them redone at enormous personal expense. Moreover, while some of the works were meant for a general readership, sales of the more specialized volumes were predictably modest. With huge production costs and uneven sales, the massive undertaking gave rise to the pinched financial circumstances in which Humboldt, once independently wealthy, would find himself for the rest of his life. The American journey itself had taken more than a third of his inheritance; the publications it produced would consume the remainder.

  Other factors besides financial worries were weighing on Humboldt during this time. In some ways, the years after his return to Europe should have been the most satisfying of his life, as he reveled in worldwide celebrity and reaped the scientific windfall from his expedition to the New World. But this period, coming after his greatest adventure, was also tinged with a sense of anticlimax. And Europe’s wars and political turmoil took a toll on him as well. In fact, for the rest of his life, the fervent republican would find himself in treacherous circumstances, making uncomfortable compromises w
ith monarchs for whom he had little respect and with whom he shared little common philosophical ground.

  When Humboldt visited Berlin in 1805 to pay his respects to Friedrich Wilhelm III, the king appointed him a chamberlain to the royal court. The republican Humboldt was uncomfortable with the title from the beginning. “Pray do not mention that . . . I was made a chamberlain!” he implored in a letter to a friend. But he didn’t feel he could decline the honor, and in any event, he needed the modest stipend that went with it. Worse yet, the retainer wasn’t nearly enough to cover his expenses, which, in addition to producing his publications, included maintaining a standard of living appropriate to someone of his class, complete with coach and personal servant. Thus, Humboldt was forced to swallow his convictions and approach the king for periodic additional grants.

  Though Friedrich Wilhelm was eager to have Humboldt in Berlin, where his presence would add to the luster of the royal court, Humboldt managed to beg off, on the grounds that only in Paris could he find the technical, artistic, and editorial assistance he needed to complete his books. Then in early 1813, Prussia, having been defeated by Napoleon at Jena and forced to sign the humiliating Treaty of Tilsit, rejoined the coalition against France. Humboldt’s brother, Wilhelm, and Wilhelm’s son, Theodor, joined the army, as did German patriots of all ages. Wilhelm felt Alexander should do the patriotic thing and rush home to join the volunteers, but even at that time of national crisis, the younger Humboldt remained in the comfort of the enemy capital. “I must confess quite candidly . . . ,” Wilhelm wrote Caroline, “that I cannot endorse Alexander’s stay in Paris. It is true that he could not do anything for the war comparable in importance to what he did in Paris. . . . But the honorable thing is not to weigh profits. To value one’s own personality so highly and spare oneself is beyond all my estimation of a good character.”