The Invention of Nature

by Andrea Wulf

  The boat they had acquired in San Fernando de Apure was launched into the Rio Apure on 30 March, heavily loaded with provisions for four weeks – not enough for the entire expedition, but all they could fit into the vessel. From the Capuchin monks they bought bananas, cassava roots, chickens and cacao as well as the pod-like fruits of the tamarind tree which they were told turned the river water into a refreshing lemonade. The rest of the food they would have to catch – fish, turtle eggs, birds and other game – and barter for more with the indigenous tribes with the alcohol they had packed.

  Unlike most European explorers, Humboldt and Bonpland were not travelling with a large retinue: simply four locals to paddle and one pilot to steer their boat, their servant José from Cumaná and the brother-in-law of the provincial governor who had joined them. Humboldt didn’t mind the loneliness. Far from it, there was nothing here to interrupt study. Nature provided more than enough stimulation. And he had Bonpland as his scientific colleague and friend. The past few months had made them trusted travel companions. Humboldt’s instincts when he had met Bonpland in Paris had been correct. Bonpland was an excellent field botanist who didn’t seem to mind the hardships of their adventures, and who remained calm even in the most adverse situations. More importantly, no matter what happened, Bonpland was always cheerful, Humboldt said.

  As they paddled along the Rio Apure and then the Orinoco a new world unfolded. From their boat they had the perfect view. Hundreds of large crocodiles basked on the river shore with their snouts open – many were fifteen feet long or more. Completely motionless, the crocodiles looked like tree trunks until they suddenly slid into the water. There were so many that there was hardly a moment when they didn’t see one. Their large, jagged tail scales reminded Humboldt of the dragons in his childhood books. Huge boa constrictors swam past their boat, but despite such dangers the men bathed every day in careful rotation, with one man washing while the others looked out for animals. Travelling along the river they also encountered great herds of capybaras, the world’s largest rodents, which lived in large family groups and paddled in the water like dogs. The capybaras looked like giant blunt-nosed guinea pigs, weighing around fifty kilograms or more. Even bigger were the pig-sized tapirs, shy and solitary animals that foraged for leaves with their fleshy snouts in the thickets along the riverside, and beautifully spotted jaguars that preyed on them. Some nights Humboldt could hear the snoring sounds of river dolphins against the perpetual background hum of insects. The men passed islands that were home to thousands of flamingos, white herons and pink-coloured spoonbills with their large spatula-shaped beaks.

  A boat on the Orinoco (Illustration Credit 5.3)

  They travelled during the day and camped on the sandy riverbanks at night – always placing their instruments and collections at the centre with their hammocks and several fires forming a protective circle around. If possible they fastened their hammocks to the trees or to the oars which they stuck upright into the ground. Finding wood dry enough for their fires in the dripping wet jungle was often difficult but an essential defence against jaguars and other animals.

  The rainforest made for treacherous travelling. One night one of the Indian oarsmen woke to find a snake curled up under the animal skin on which he had been sleeping. On another the entire camp was woken by Bonpland’s sudden scream. Something furry and with sharp claws had landed on top of him with a heavy thump when he was fast asleep in his hammock. A jaguar, Bonpland thought, as he lay rigid with fear. But when Humboldt crept closer, he saw that it was only a tame cat from a nearby tribal settlement. Then, a couple of days later Humboldt almost walked into a jaguar hiding in the thick foliage. Terrified, Humboldt remembered what the guides had told him. Slowly, without running or moving his arms, he walked backwards away from the danger.

  The animals weren’t the only hazard: on one occasion Humboldt was almost killed when he accidentally touched some curare. It was a deadly paralysing poison that he had collected from an indigenous tribe, and which had leaked from its container into his clothing. The tribes used it as arrow poison for their blowguns and Humboldt was fascinated by the curare’s potency. He was the first European to describe its preparation, but it also almost cost him his life. Had more poison seeped out, he would have suffered an agonizing death by suffocation as the curare paralysed the diaphragm and muscles.

  Despite the danger, Humboldt was captivated by the jungle. At night he loved to listen to the monkeys’ choir, picking out the different contributions from the various species – ranging from the deafening bellows of the howler monkeys that ricocheted through the jungle across great distances to the soft almost ‘flute-like tones’ and ‘snorting grumblings’ of others. The forest teemed with life. There are ‘many voices proclaiming to us that all nature breathes’, Humboldt wrote. This, unlike the agricultural region around Lake Valencia, was a primeval world where ‘man did not disturb the course of nature’.

  Here he could truly study animals that he had only seen as stuffed specimens in Europe’s natural history collections. They caught birds and monkeys which they kept in large wide-meshed reed baskets or chained to long ropes in the hope of sending them back to Europe. The titi monkeys were Humboldt’s favourites. Small with long tails and soft greyish fur, they had a white face that looked like a heart-shaped mask, Humboldt noted. They were beautiful and graceful in their movements, easily jumping from branch to branch which gave them their German name, Springaffe – jumping monkey. Titi monkeys were extremely difficult to catch alive. The only way, they discovered, was to kill a mother with a blowgun and a poisoned dart. The titi youngster would not let go of its mother even as she came crashing down the tree. Humboldt’s team had to be quick to catch and tear the young monkey away from its dead mother. One that they had captured was so clever that it always tried to grab at the engravings in Humboldt’s scientific books depicting grasshoppers and wasps. To Humboldt’s amazement the monkey seemed able to distinguish engravings that showed its favourite foods – such as the insects – while pictures of human and mammal skeletons didn’t interest the titi at all.

  There was no better place to observe animals and plants. Humboldt had entered the most magnificent web of life on earth, a network of ‘active, organic powers’, as he later wrote. Enthralled, he pursued every thread. Everything bore witness to the power and the tenderness of nature, Humboldt wrote home with swagger, from the boa constrictor that can ‘swallow a horse’ to the tiny hummingbird balancing itself on a delicate blossom. This was a world pulsating with life, Humboldt said, a world in which ‘man is nothing’.

  One night, when he was yet again woken by a piercing orchestra of animal screams, he unpeeled the chain of reaction. His Indian guides had told him that these outbreaks of noise were simply the animals worshipping the moon. Far from it, Humboldt thought, realizing that the cacophony was ‘a long-extended and ever-amplifying battle of the animals’. The jaguars were hunting in the night, chasing tapirs which escaped noisily through the dense undergrowth, which in turn scared the monkeys sleeping in the treetops above. As the monkeys then began to cry out, their clamour woke the birds and thus the whole animal world. Life stirred in every bush, in the cracked bark of trees and in the soil. The whole commotion, Humboldt said, was the result of ‘some contest’ in the depth of the rainforest.

  Again and again during his travels, Humboldt witnessed these battles. Capybaras rushed from the water to escape the deadly jaws of the crocodiles only to run straight into the jaguars waiting for them at the edge of the jungle. It had been the same with the flying fish that he had observed on their sea voyage: as they had jumped out of the ocean away from the dolphins’ sharp teeth, they were caught mid-air by albatrosses. It was the absence of man, Humboldt noted, that allowed animals to prosper abundantly but it was a development that was ‘limited only by themselves’ – by their mutual pressure.

  This was a web of life in a relentless and bloody battle, an idea that was very different from the prevailing view of natu
re as a well-oiled machine in which every animal and plant had a divinely allotted place. Carl Linnaeus, for example, had recognized the idea of a food chain when he talked of hawks feeding on small birds, small birds on spiders, spiders on dragonflies, dragonflies on hornets, and hornets on aphids – but he had regarded this chain as a harmonious balance. Each animal and plant had its God-given purpose and reproduced accordingly in just the right numbers to keep this balance stable in perpetuity.

  Yet what Humboldt saw was no Eden. The ‘golden age has ceased’, he wrote. These animals feared each other and they fought for survival. And it wasn’t just the animals; he also noted how vigorous climbing plants were strangling huge trees in the jungle. Here it was not the ‘destructive hand of man’, he said, but the plants’ competition for light and nourishment that limited their lives and growth.

  As Humboldt and Bonpland continued their journey up the Orinoco, their Indian crew often paddled for more than twelve hours in the sweltering heat. The current was strong and the river was almost two and a half miles wide. Then, three weeks after they had first launched their boat into the Rio Apure and after ten days on the Orinoco, the river narrowed. They were coming closer to the Atures and Maipures rapids. Here, more than 500 miles south of Caracas, the Orinoco forged through a mountain chain in a series of small river passages of around 150 yards wide, surrounded by huge granite boulders covered in dense forest. Over several miles the rapids descended in hundreds of rocky steps, the water roaring and whirling and throwing up a perpetual mist that hovered over the river. The rocks and islands were clothed in lush tropical plants. These were ‘majestic scenes of nature’, Humboldt wrote. Magical it was, but also dangerous.

  One day a sudden gale almost capsized their boat. As one end of the canoe began to sink, Humboldt managed to grab his diary but books and dried plants were catapulted into the water. He was certain they were going to die. Knowing that the river was alive with crocodiles and snakes, everybody panicked – except for Bonpland who remained calm and began to bail out the water with some hollow gourds. ‘Do not worry, my friend,’ he said to Humboldt, ‘we’re going to be safe.’ Bonpland displayed ‘that coolness’, Humboldt later noted, that he always had in difficult situations. As it was, they lost only one book and were able to dry their plants and journals. Their pilot, though, was bemused about the white men – the ‘blancos’ as he called them – who seemed to worry more about their books and collections than their lives.

  The greatest nuisance was the mosquitoes. No matter how fascinated Humboldt was by this strange world, it was impossible not to be distracted by the insects’ relentless attacks. The explorers tried everything but neither protective clothing and smoking helped, nor their constant waving of arms and palm leaves. Humboldt and Bonpland were bitten all the time. Their skin was swollen and itchy, and whenever they talked, they started to cough and sneeze because the mosquitoes were flying straight into their mouth and nostrils. It was torture to dissect a plant or observe the skies with their instruments. Humboldt wished that he had a ‘third hand’ to fend off the mosquitoes; he always felt that he had to drop either his sextant or a leaf.

  Under permanent assault from the mosquitoes, Bonpland found it impossible to dry the plants out in the open, and took to using the native tribes’ so-called ‘hornitos’ – small window-less chambers that they used as ovens. He crept on all fours through a low opening into the hornito in which a small fire of wet branches and leaves created a great deal of smoke – fabulous against the mosquitoes but awful for Bonpland. Once inside, he closed the narrow entrance and spread out his plants. The heat was suffocating and the smoke almost unbearable but anything was better than being eaten alive by the mosquitoes. Their expedition was not exactly a ‘pleasure cruise’, Humboldt said.

  During this part of the journey – deep in the rainforest and at the section of the Orinoco that runs along today’s Venezuelan–Colombian border – they saw few people. When they passed one mission, a missionary there, Father Bernardo Zea, was so excited to meet them that he offered to join them as a guide, which they happily accepted. Humboldt acquired a few more ‘team members’ including a stray mastiff, eight monkeys, seven parrots, a toucan, a macaw with purple feathers and several other birds. Humboldt called them his ‘travelling menagerie’. Their unsteady boat was small, and to make space for their animals as well as for their instruments and trunks, they built a platform of woven branches that extended out over the edge. Covered with a low thatched roof, it created extra space but was claustrophobic. Humboldt and Bonpland spent many days cooped up and lying flat on this extended platform with their legs exposed to vicious insects, rain or burning sun. It felt like being buried alive, Humboldt wrote in his diary. For a man as restless as him, it was agony.

  As they went further, the forest came so close to the river that it was difficult to find any space for their nightly camps. They were running low on food and they filtered the fetid river water through linen cloth. They ate fish, turtle eggs and sometimes fruit, as well as smoked ants crushed up in cassava flour which Father Zea declared an excellent ant pâté. When they couldn’t find food they suppressed their hunger by eating small portions of dry cacao powder. For three weeks they paddled south on the Orinoco and then further south for another two weeks on a network of tributaries along the Rio Atabapo and Rio Negro. Then, as they reached the most southerly point of their river expedition, with their supplies at their lowest, they found huge nuts which they cracked open for their nutritious seeds – the magnificent Brazil nut that Humboldt subsequently introduced to Europe.

  Brazil nut (Bertholletia excelsa) (Illustration Credit 5.4)

  Though food was scarce, the floral riches abounded. Wherever they turned, there was something new, but collecting plants was more often than not frustrating. What they could pick up on the forest floor were trifles compared to the sculptural blossoms they could see swaying high above them in the canopy – tantalizingly close but too far away for them to reach. And what they could collect often disintegrated before their eyes in the humidity. Bonpland lost most of the specimens that he had so painfully dried in the hornitos. They heard birds they never saw and animals they couldn’t catch. They often failed to describe them properly. The scientists in Europe, Humboldt mused, would be disappointed. It was a shame, he wrote in his diary, that the monkeys didn’t open their mouths as their canoe passed them so that they could ‘count their teeth’.

  Humboldt was interested in everything: the plants, the animals, the rocks and the water. Like a wine connoisseur, he sampled the water of the various different rivers. The Orinoco had a singular flavour that was particularly disgusting, he noted, while the Rio Apure tasted different at various locations and the Rio Atabapo was ‘delicious’. He observed the stars, described the landscape and was curious about the indigenous people they met and always wanted to learn more. He was fascinated by their worship of nature and thought them ‘excellent geographers’ because they could find their way even through the densest jungle. They were the best observers of nature he had ever encountered. They knew every plant and animal in the rainforest, and could distinguish trees by the taste of their bark alone – an experiment that Humboldt tried and failed miserably. All fifteen of the trees he sampled tasted exactly the same to him.

  Unlike most Europeans, Humboldt did not regard the indigenous people as barbaric, but instead was captivated by their culture, beliefs and languages. In fact, he talked about the ‘barbarism of civilised man’ when he saw how the local people were treated by colonists and missionaries. When Humboldt returned to Europe, he brought with him a completely new portrayal of the so-called ‘savages’.

  His only frustration came when the Indians failed to answer his many questions – questions that were often posed through a chain of interpreters, as one local language had to be translated into another, and then another until someone knew that language as well as Spanish. Often the content was lost in translation and the Indians would just smile and nod in affirmati
on. That was not what Humboldt wanted, accusing them of an ‘indolent indifference’, although he accepted that they must be ‘tired with our questions’. To these tribal societies, Humboldt said, Europeans must seem as if always in a rush and ‘chased by demons’.

  One night, as the rain fell in torrents, Humboldt lay in his hammock fastened to palm trees in the jungle. The lianas and climbing plants formed a protective shield high above him. He looked up into what seemed like a natural trellis decorated with the long dangling orange blossoms of heliconias and other strangely shaped flowers. Their campfire lit up this natural vault, the light of the flames licking the palm trunks up to sixty feet high. The blossoms whirled in and out of these flickering illuminations, while the white smoke of the fire spiralled into the sky which remained invisible behind the foliage. It was bewitchingly beautiful, Humboldt said.

  He had described the rapids of the Orinoco which were ‘illuminated by the rays of the setting sun’ as if a river made of mist were ‘suspended over its bed’. Though he always measured and recorded, Humboldt also wrote of how ‘coloured bows shine, vanish, and reappear’ at the great rapids and of the moon ‘encircled with coloured rings’. Later, he delighted in the dark river surface which during the day reflected like a perfect mirror the blossom-loaded plants of the riverbanks and at night the southern star constellations. No scientist had referred to nature like this before. ‘What speaks to the soul,’ Humboldt said, ‘escapes our measurements.’ This was not nature as a mechanistic system but a thrilling new world filled with wonder. Seeing South America with the eyes that Goethe had given him, Humboldt was enraptured.

  Less pleasing was the news he received from the missionaries whom they met en route: apparently the fact that the Casiquiare connected the Amazon and the Orinoco had been well known in the region for several decades. The only thing left for Humboldt was to map the course of the river properly. On 11 May 1800 they finally found the entrance to the Casiquiare. The air was so saturated with humidity that Humboldt could see neither the sun nor the stars – without which he would not be able to determine the geographical position of the river, and hence his map would not be precise. But when their Indian guide predicted clear skies, they pressed on north-east. During the nights they tried to sleep in their hammocks along the riverbanks but found rest almost impossible. One night they were chased out by columns of ants marching up the ropes of their hammocks, and on others they were tormented by the mosquitoes.