The Invention of Nature

by Andrea Wulf

  At the end of October Humboldt and Bonpland rushed to Marseille ready to leave immediately. But nothing happened. For two months, day after day, they climbed the hill to the old church of Notre-Dame de la Garde to scan the harbour. Every time they saw the white glimmer of a sail on the horizon, their hopes rose. When news reached them that their promised frigate had been badly damaged in a storm, Humboldt decided to charter his own vessel but quickly discovered that regardless of all the money he had, the recent naval battles made it impossible to find a ship. Wherever he turned, ‘all hopes were shattered’, he wrote to an old friend in Berlin. He was exasperated – his pockets full of money and his mind brimming with the latest scientific knowledge, yet still not able to travel. War and politics, Humboldt said, stopped everything and ‘the world is closed’.

  Finally, at the end of 1798, almost exactly two years after his mother’s death, Humboldt gave up on the French and travelled to Madrid to try his luck there. The Spanish were famous for their reluctance to let foreigners enter their territories, but with charm and a string of useful connections at the Spanish court, Humboldt managed to obtain the unlikely permission. In early May 1799 King Carlos IV of Spain provided a passport to the colonies in South America and the Philippines on the express condition that Humboldt financed the voyage himself. In return Humboldt promised to dispatch flora and fauna for the royal cabinet and garden. Never before had a foreigner been allowed such great freedom to explore their territories. Even the Spanish themselves were surprised by their king’s decision.

  Humboldt had no intention of wasting any more time. Five days after they received their passports, Humboldt and Bonpland left Madrid for La Coruña, a port at the north-western tip of Spain, where the frigate Pizarro was waiting for them. In early June 1799 they were ready to sail despite warnings that British warships had been sighted nearby. Nothing – neither cannons, nor a fear of the enemy – could spoil the moment. ‘My head is dizzy with joy,’ Humboldt wrote.

  He had bought a great collection of the latest instruments, ranging from telescopes and microscopes to a large pendulum clock and compasses – forty-two instruments in all, individually packed into protective velvet-lined boxes – along with vials for storing seeds and soil samples, reams of paper, scales and countless tools. ‘My mood was good,’ Humboldt noted in his diary, ‘just as it should be when beginning a great work.’

  In the letters written on the eve of their departure, he explained his intentions. Like previous explorers, he would collect plants, seeds, rocks and animals. He would measure the height of mountains, determine longitude and latitude, and take temperatures of water and air. But the real purpose of the voyage, he said, was to discover how ‘all forces of nature are interlaced and interwoven’ – how organic and inorganic nature interacted. Man needs to strive for ‘the good and the great’, Humboldt wrote in his last letter from Spain, ‘the rest depends on destiny’.

  Tenerife and Pico del Teide (Illustration Credit 3.3)

  As they sailed towards the tropics, Humboldt grew increasingly excited. They caught and examined fish, jellyfish, seaweed and birds. He tested his instruments, took temperatures and measured the height of the sun. One night the water seemed to be on fire with phosphorescence. The whole sea, Humboldt noted in his diary, was like an ‘edible liquid full of organic particles’. After two weeks at sea, they briefly stopped at Tenerife, the largest of the Canary Islands. It was a rather unspectacular arrival at first as the whole island was shrouded in fog but when the thick mist lifted, Humboldt saw the sun illuminating the glistening white summit of the volcano Pico del Teide. He rushed to the bow of their ship, breathlessly catching a glimpse of the first mountain that he was going to climb outside Europe. With their ship scheduled to spend only a couple of days in Tenerife, there was not much time.

  The next morning Humboldt, Bonpland and some local guides set off towards the volcano, without tents or coats, and armed only with some weak ‘fir torches’. It was hot in the valleys but the temperature dropped rapidly as they ascended the volcano. When they reached the peak at more than 12,000 feet, the wind was so strong they could hardly stand. Their faces were frozen but their feet were burning from the heat emanating from the hot ground. It was painful but Humboldt couldn’t care less. There was something in the air that created a ‘magical’ transparency, he said, an enticing promise of what was to come. He could hardly tear himself away but they had to get back to the ship.

  Back on the Pizarro, the anchors were lifted and their journey continued. Humboldt was happy. His only complaint was that they were not allowed to light their lamps or candles at night for fear of attracting the enemy. For a man like Humboldt, who only needed a few hours’ sleep, it was torture having to lie in the dark without anything to read, dissect or investigate. The further south they sailed, the shorter the days became and soon he was out of work by six o’clock in the evening. So he observed the night sky and, as many other explorers and sailors who had crossed the Equator, Humboldt marvelled at the new stars that appeared – constellations that only graced the southern sky and that were a nightly reminder of how far he had travelled. When he first saw the Southern Cross, Humboldt realized that he had achieved the dreams of his ‘earliest youth’.

  On 16 July 1799, forty-one days after they had left La Coruña in Spain, the coast of New Andalusia, today part of Venezuela, appeared on the horizon. Their first view of the New World was a voluptuous green belt of palms and banana groves that ran along the shore, beyond which Humboldt could make out tall mountains, their distant peaks peeping through layers of clouds. A mile inland and hugged by cacao trees lay Cumaná, a city founded by the Spanish in 1523, and almost destroyed by an earthquake in 1797, two years before Humboldt’s arrival. This was to be their home for the next few months. The sky was of the clearest blue and there was not a trace of mist in the air. The heat was intense and the light dazzling. The moment that Humboldt stepped off the boat, he plunged his thermometer into the white sand: 37.7°C, he scribbled in his notebook.

  Cumaná was the capital of New Andalusia, a province within the Captaincy General of Venezuela – which itself was part of the Spanish colonial empire that stretched from California all the way to the southern tip of Chile. All of Spain’s colonies were controlled by the Spanish crown and Council of the Indies in Madrid. It was a system of absolute rule where the viceroys and captains-general reported directly to Spain. The colonies were forbidden to trade with each other without explicit permission. Communication was also closely controlled. Licences had to be granted to print books and newspapers, while local printing presses and manufacturing businesses were prohibited, and only those born in Spain were allowed to own shops or mines in the colonies.

  When revolutions had spread through the British North American colonies and France in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the colonists in the Spanish Empire had been kept on a tight leash. They had to pay exorbitant taxes to Spain and were excluded from any government roles. All non-Spanish ships were treated as enemy and no one, not even a Spaniard, was allowed to enter the colonies without a warrant from the king. The result was growing resentment. With relations between the colonies and the mother country so tense, Humboldt knew that he would have to tread carefully. Despite his passport from the Spanish king, local administrators would be able to make his life extremely difficult. If he did not succeed in ‘inspiring some personal interest in those who govern’ the colonies, Humboldt was certain, he would face ‘numberless inconveniences’ during his time in the New World.

  Two pages from Humboldt’s Spanish passport, including signatures of several administrators from across the colonies (Illustration Credit 3.4)

  Yet, before presenting his paperwork to the governor of Cumaná, Humboldt soaked up the tropical scenery. Everything was so new and spectacular. Each bird, palm or wave ‘announced the grand aspect of nature’. It was the beginning of a new life, a period of five years in which Humboldt would change from a curious and talented young man in
to the most extraordinary scientist of his age. It was here that Humboldt would see nature with both head and heart.

  PART II

  Arrival: Collecting Ideas

  4

  South America

  WHEREVER HUMBOLDT AND Bonpland turned during those first weeks in Cumaná, something new caught their attention. The landscape held a spell over him, Humboldt said. The palm trees were ornamented with magnificent red blossoms, the birds and fish seemed to compete in their kaleidoscopic hues, and even the crayfish were sky blue and yellow. Pink flamingos stood one-legged at the shore and the palms’ fanned leaves mottled the white sand into a patchwork of shade and sun. There were butterflies, monkeys and so many plants to catalogue that, as Humboldt wrote to Wilhelm, ‘we run around like fools.’ Even the usually unruffled Bonpland said that he would go ‘mad if the wonders don’t stop soon’.

  Having always prided himself on his systematic approach, Humboldt found it difficult to come up with a rational method of studying his surroundings. Their trunks filled so quickly that they had to order more reams of paper on which to press their plants, and sometimes they found so many specimens that they could hardly carry them back to their house. Unlike other naturalists, Humboldt was not interested in filling taxonomic gaps – he was collecting ideas rather than just natural history objects, he said. It was the ‘impression of the whole’, Humboldt wrote, that captivated his mind more than anything.

  Humboldt compared everything he saw with what he had previously observed and learned in Europe. Whenever he picked up a plant, a rock or an insect, his mind raced back to what he had seen at home. The trees that grew in the plains around Cumaná, with their branches forming parasol-like canopies, reminded him of Italian pines. When seen from a distance, the sea of cacti created the same effect as the grasses in the marshes in the northern climates. Here was a valley that made him think of Derbyshire in England, or caverns similar to those in Franconia in Germany, and those in the Carpathian Mountains in eastern Europe. Everything seemed somehow connected – an idea that would come to shape his thinking about the natural world for the rest of his life.

  Humboldt in South America (Illustration Credit 4.1)

  Humboldt had never been happier and healthier. The heat suited him and the fevers and nervous afflictions from which he had suffered in Europe disappeared. He even put on some weight. During the day he and Bonpland collected, in the evening they sat together and wrote up their notes and at night they took astronomical observations. One such night they stood awed for hours as a meteor shower drew thousands of white tails across the sky. Humboldt’s letters home burst with excitement and brought this wondrous world into the elegant salons of Paris, Berlin and Rome. He wrote of huge spiders that ate hummingbirds and of thirty-foot snakes. Meanwhile he amazed the people of Cumaná with his instruments; his telescopes brought the moon close to them and his microscopes transformed the lice in their hair into monstrous beasts.

  There was one aspect that dampened Humboldt’s joy: the slave market opposite their rented house, in Cumaná’s main square. Since the early sixteenth century the Spanish had imported slaves to their colonies in South America and continued to do so. Every morning young African men and women were put on sale. They were forced to rub themselves with coconut oil to make their skin shiny black. They were then paraded for prospective buyers, who jerked open the slaves’ mouths to examine their teeth like ‘horses in a market’. The sight made Humboldt a life-long abolitionist.

  Then, on 4 November 1799, less than four months after their arrival in South America, Humboldt for the first time felt the danger that might threaten his life and his plans. It was a hot and humid day. At midday dark clouds rolled in and by 4 p.m. thunderclaps reverberated across the town. Suddenly the ground began to tremble, almost knocking Bonpland to the floor as he was leaning over a table to examine some plants, and violently rocking Humboldt in his hammock. People ran screaming through the streets as houses crumbled, but Humboldt remained calm and climbed out of his hammock to set up his instruments. Even with the earth shaking nothing would prevent him from conducting his observations. He timed the shocks, noted how the quake rippled from north to south and took electric measurements. Yet for all his outward composure, Humboldt experienced inner turmoil. As the ground moved beneath him, it destroyed the illusion of a whole life, he wrote. Water was the element of motion, not the earth. It was like being woken, suddenly and painfully, from a dream. Until that moment he had felt an unwavering faith in the stability of nature, but he had been deceived. Now ‘we mistrust for the first time a soil, on which we had so long placed our feet with confidence,’ he said, but he was still determined to continue his travels.

  He had waited for years to see the world and knew that he was putting his life in danger, but he wanted to see more. Two weeks later and after an anxious wait to draw money with his Spanish credit note (when it failed, the governor gave Humboldt money from his private funds), they left Cumaná for Caracas. In mid-November Humboldt and Bonpland – together with an Indian servant called José de la Cruz – chartered a small open thirty-foot local trading boat to sail westwards. They packed their many instruments and trunks, which were already filled with more than 4,000 plant specimens as well as insects, notebooks and tables of measurements.

  Situated 3,000 feet above sea level, Caracas was home to 40,000 people. Founded by the Spanish in 1567, it was now the capital of the Captaincy General of Venezuela. Ninety-five per cent of the city’s white population were criollos, or as Humboldt called them ‘Hispano-Americans’ – white colonists of Spanish descent but born in South America. Though a majority, these South American creoles had been excluded from the highest administrative and military positions for decades. The Spanish crown had sent Spaniards to control the colonies, many of whom were less educated than the creoles. The wealthy creole plantation owners found it infuriating to be ruled by merchants dispatched from a distant mother country. The Spanish authorities treated them, some creoles complained, ‘as if they were vile slaves’.

  Caracas lay nestled in a high valley skirted by mountains, near the coast. Once again Humboldt rented a house as a base from which to launch shorter excursions. From here Humboldt and Bonpland set out to scale the double-domed Silla, a mountain so close that they could see it from their house but which, to Humboldt’s surprise, no one he met in Caracas had ever climbed. On another day they rode into the foothills where they found a spring of the clearest water tumbling down a wall of shimmering rock. Observing a group of girls there, fetching water, Humboldt was suddenly struck by a memory of home. That evening he wrote in his journal: ‘Memories of Werther, Göthe and the king’s daughters’ – a reference to The Sorrows of Young Werther, in which Goethe had described a similar scene. On other occasions it was the particular shape of a tree, or a mountain, that gave him an immediate sense of familiarity. One glimpse of the stars in the southern sky or of the shape of the cacti against the horizon, was proof of how far away he was from his homeland. But then, all it took was the sudden tinkle of a cow bell or the roaring of a bull, and he was back in the meadows of Tegel.

  Humboldt – far right, between the trees – sketching Silla (Illustration Credit 4.2)

  ‘Nature every where speaks to man in a voice,’ Humboldt said, that is ‘familiar to his soul’. These sounds were like voices from beyond the ocean that transported him in an instant from one hemisphere to another. Like the tentative pencil lines in a sketch, his new understanding of nature based on scientific observations and feelings was beginning to emerge. Memories and emotional responses, Humboldt realized, would always form part of man’s experience and understanding of nature. Imagination was like ‘a balm of miraculous healing properties’, he said.

  Soon it was time to move on – inspired by the stories Humboldt had heard about the mysterious Casiquiare River. More than half a century earlier a Jesuit priest had reported that the Casiquiare connected the two great river systems of South America: the Orinoco and the Amazon. T
he Orinoco forms a sweeping arc from its source in the south near today’s border between Venezuela and Brazil to its delta on the north-eastern coast of Venezuela where it discharges into the Atlantic Ocean. Almost 1,000 miles further south along the coast is the mouth of the mighty Amazon – the river that crosses almost the entire continent from its source in the west in the Peruvian Andes less than 100 miles from the Pacific coast to the Brazilian Atlantic coast in the east.

  Deep in the rainforest, 1,000 miles to the south of Caracas, the Casiquiare reputedly linked the network of tributaries of these two great rivers. No one had been able to prove its existence and few believed that major rivers such as the Orinoco and the Amazon could in fact be connected. All the scientific understanding of the day suggested that the Orinoco and Amazon basins had to be separated by a watershed because the idea of a natural waterway linking two large rivers was against all empirical evidence. Geographers had not found a single instance where it occurred elsewhere on the globe. In fact, the most recent map of the region showed a mountain range – the suspected watershed – exactly in the location where Humboldt had heard rumours that the Casiquiare might be.

  There was much to prepare. They had to choose instruments that were small enough to fit into the narrow canoes in which they would be travelling. They needed to organize money and goods to pay for guides and food even in the deepest jungle. Before they set off, though, Humboldt dispatched letters to Europe and North America, asking his correspondents to publish them in newspapers. He understood the importance of publicity. From La Coruña in Spain, for example, Humboldt had written forty-three letters just before their departure. If he died during the voyage, he would at least not be forgotten.