The Invention of Nature

by Andrea Wulf

  Their differences were maybe most vividly expressed in the different designs that had been proposed for the new capital, Washington, DC – the brand-new city that had been wrested from the swampy land and wilderness on the Potomac River. The different parties believed that the capital should reflect the government and its power (or its lack of power). The first President of the United States, George Washington, a proponent of a strong federal government, had wanted a grand capital with sweeping avenues criss-crossing the city, a palatial President’s house and imposing gardens. By contrast, Jefferson and his fellow Republicans had insisted that the central government should have as little power as possible. They preferred a small capital – a rural republican town.

  Washington, DC, at the time when Humboldt visited (Illustration Credit 8.2)

  Although George Washington’s ideas had prevailed – and on paper the capital looked magnificent – in reality little had been achieved by the time Humboldt arrived in summer 1804. With only 4,500 inhabitants, Washington was about the same size as Jena when Humboldt had first met Goethe there – and not what foreigners associated with the capital of a huge country such as the United States. The roads were in a terrible state, and so littered with rocks and tree stumps that carriages regularly overturned. Red mud stuck to wheels and axles like glue, and anyone who walked risked sinking knee-deep into the ubiquitous puddles.

  When Jefferson moved into the White House, after his inauguration in March 1801, it had been a building site. Three years later, when Humboldt visited, nothing much had changed. There were workmen’s sheds and dirt in what should have been a presidential garden. The grounds were divided from the neighbouring fields only by a rotting fence on which Jefferson’s washerwoman dried the presidential laundry in full view. Inside the White House the situation wasn’t much better, as many rooms were only half furnished. Jefferson inhabited, as one visitor remarked, only one corner of the mansion with the rest still in a ‘state of uncleanly desolation’.

  Jefferson did not mind. From his first day in office, he had begun to demystify the role of President by ridding the fledgling administration of strict social protocols and ceremonial pomp, casting himself as a simple farmer. Instead of formal levees, he invited guests to small intimate dinner parties which were held at a round table to avoid any issues of hierarchy or precedence. Jefferson deliberately dressed down, and many commented on his dishevelled appearance. His slippers were so worn that his toes poked out, his coat was ‘thread bare’ and the linen ‘much soiled’. He looked like ‘a large-boned farmer’, one British diplomat noted, exactly the image that Jefferson wanted to convey.

  Jefferson regarded himself foremost as a farmer and gardener, and not as a politician. ‘No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth,’ he said. In Washington, Jefferson would ride out every day into the surrounding countryside to escape the tedium of governmental correspondence and meetings. More than anything, he longed to return to Monticello. At the end of his second term, he would claim that ‘never did a prisoner, released from his chains, feel such relief as I shall on shaking off the shackles of power.’ The President of the United States preferred to wade through swamps and climb rocks, and to pick up a leaf or a seed rather than attend Cabinet meetings. No plant, a friend said – ‘from the lowliest weed to the loftiest tree’ – escaped his scrutiny. Jefferson’s love for botany and gardening was so well known that American diplomats sent seeds to the White House from all over the world.

  Jefferson was interested in all sciences – including horticulture, mathematics, meteorology and geography. He was fascinated by fossil bones, and in particular in the mastodon, a giant extinct relative of elephants that had roamed America’s interior only 10,000 years earlier. His library numbered thousands of books and he had written his own, Notes on the State of Virginia, a detailed description about economy and society, about natural resources and plants, but also a celebration of the Virginian landscape.

  Like Humboldt, Jefferson moved across the sciences with ease. He was obsessed with measurements, compiling a huge number of lists that ranged from the hundreds of species of plants he was growing in Monticello to daily temperatures tables. He counted the steps on stairs, ran an ‘account’ of the letters he received from his granddaughters and he always carried a ruler in his pocket. His mind seemed never to rest. With such a polymath as President, Jefferson’s White House had become a scientific nexus where botany, geography and exploration were the favourite dinner topics. He was also the president of the American Philosophical Society, co-founded by Benjamin Franklin before the revolution, and by then the most important scientific forum in the United States. Jefferson was, one contemporary said, ‘the enlightened philosopher – the distinguished naturalist – the first statesman on earth, the friend, the ornament of science … the father of our Country, the faithful guardian of our liberties’. He couldn’t wait to meet Humboldt.

  The journey from Philadelphia took three and a half days, and Humboldt and his travel companions finally reached Washington on the evening of 1 June. The next morning Humboldt met Jefferson at the White House. The President welcomed the thirty-four-year-old scientist in his private study. Here Jefferson kept a set of carpenter’s tools because he had a knack for mechanics and enjoyed making things – from inventing a revolving bookstand to improving locks, clocks and scientific instruments. On the windowsills stood flowerpots planted with roses and geraniums, which Jefferson delighted in tending. Maps and charts decorated the walls, and the shelves were filled with books. The two men liked each other immediately.

  Over the next few days, they met several times. One early evening, just as dusk settled over the capital and the first candles were lit, Humboldt entered the drawing room at the White House to find the President surrounded by half a dozen of his grandchildren, laughing and chasing each other around. It took a moment before Jefferson noticed Humboldt, who was quietly watching the boisterous family scene. Jefferson smiled. ‘You have found me playing the fool,’ he said, ‘but I am sure to you I need make no apology.’ Humboldt was delighted to find his hero ‘living with the simplicity of a philosopher’.

  For the next week Humboldt and Bonpland were passed from meeting to dinner and to yet more meetings. Everybody was excited to meet the intrepid explorers and hear their tales. Humboldt was the ‘object of universal attention’, one American said – so much so that Charles Willson Peale, a painter from Philadelphia and the organizer of the trip to DC, handed out a great number of silhouettes that he had made of Humboldt (and Bonpland), including one for Jefferson. Humboldt was introduced to the Secretary of the Treasury, Albert Gallatin, who thought listening to his tales was an ‘exquisite intellectual treat’. The next day Humboldt travelled to Mount Vernon, George Washington’s estate, some fifteen miles south of the capital. Though Washington had died four and a half years previously, Mount Vernon was now a popular tourist destination and Humboldt wanted to see the home of the revolutionary hero. The Secretary of State, James Madison, hosted a party in Humboldt’s honour, and his wife, Dolley, professed herself charmed and said that ‘all the ladies say they are in love with him’.

  During their days together Jefferson, Madison and Gallatin bombarded Humboldt with questions about Mexico. None of the three American politicians had been to the Spanish-controlled territory but now, surrounded by maps, statistics and notebooks, Humboldt briefed them on the peoples of Latin America, their crops and the climate. Humboldt had worked intensely to improve existing maps by calculating again and again his exact geographical positions. The results were the best maps that could be had at the time – some locations, he boasted to his new friends, had been wrongly placed in the old maps by up to 2 degrees in latitude – around 140 miles. In fact, Humboldt had more information on Mexico than was available on some European countries, Gallatin told his wife, hardly able to contain his excitement. Even better, Humboldt allowed them to transcribe his notes and to copy the maps. His knowledge was ‘astonishing’, the Ameri
cans agreed, and in return Gallatin provided Humboldt with all the information he wanted about the United States.

  For months Jefferson had tried to procure any scrap of information he could get about their new Louisiana Territory and about Mexico, and suddenly he held so much more in his hands than he could ever have hoped for. With the Spanish watching closely over their territories, and rarely granting a foreigner permission even to travel to their colonies, Jefferson had not been able to find out much until Humboldt’s visit. The Spanish colonial archives in Mexico and Havana had remained firmly closed to the Americans and the Spanish Minister in Washington had refused to furnish Jefferson with any data – but now Humboldt delivered plenty.

  Humboldt talked and talked, Gallatin noted, ‘twice as fast as anybody I know’. Humboldt spoke English with a German accent but also German, French and Spanish, ‘mixing them together in rapid Speech’. He was a ‘fountain of knowledge which flows in copious streams’. They learned more from him in two hours than they would from reading books for two years. Humboldt was a ‘very extraordinary man’, Gallatin told his wife. Jefferson agreed – Humboldt was ‘the most scientific man of his age’.

  The most pressing question for Jefferson was the disputed border between Mexico and the United States. The Spanish claimed it was marked by the Sabine River, which runs along today’s eastern border of Texas, while the Americans insisted it was the Rio Grande, which forms part of today’s western border of Texas. The ownership of a huge swathe of land was at issue, because in between those two rivers lies the whole of modern Texas. When Jefferson asked about the native population, soils and mines in the area ‘between those lines’, Humboldt had no qualms about passing on the observations he had made under the protection and exclusive permission of the Spanish crown. Humboldt believed in scientific generosity and in the free exchange of information. The sciences were above national interests, Humboldt insisted, as he handed over vital economic information. They were part of a republic of letters, Jefferson said, paraphrasing Joseph Banks’s words that the sciences were always at peace even if ‘their nations may be at war’; the sentiment no doubt suited the President perfectly in this instance.

  If the Spanish would hand over the territory that Jefferson claimed for the United States, Humboldt told him, it would be the size of two-thirds of France. It wasn’t the richest spot on earth, Humboldt said, because there were only a few scattered small farms, a lot of savanna, and no known port along the coast. There were some mines and a few indigenous people. This was the kind of intelligence that Jefferson needed. The next day the President wrote to a friend that he had just received ‘treasures of information’.

  Humboldt gave Jefferson nineteen tightly filled pages of extracts from his notes, sorted under headings such as ‘table of statistics’, ‘population’, ‘agriculture, manufacturers, commerce’, ‘military’ and so on. He also added two pages that focused on the border region with Mexico and in particular on the disputed area that so interested Jefferson, between the Sabine River and the Rio Grande. This was the most exciting and fruitful visit Jefferson had received in years. Less than a month later, he held a Cabinet meeting about US strategy towards Spain in which they discussed how the data they had received from Humboldt might influence their negotiations.

  Humboldt was happy to assist because he admired the United States. The country was moving towards a ‘perfection’ of society, Humboldt said, while Europe was still gripped by monarchy and despotism. He didn’t even mind the unbearable humidity of the Washington summer, because the ‘best air of all is breathed in liberty’. He loved this ‘beautiful land’, he said repeatedly, and promised to return in order to explore.

  During this one week in Washington, the men talked about nature and politics – about crops and soils and the shaping of nations. Humboldt, like Jefferson, believed that only an agrarian republic brought happiness and independence. Colonialism, by contrast, brought destruction. The Spanish had arrived in South America to obtain gold and timber – ‘either by violence or exchange’, Humboldt said, and motivated only by ‘insatiable avarice’. The Spanish had annihilated ancient civilizations, native tribes and stately forests. The portrait that Humboldt brought back from Latin America was painted in the vivid colours of a brutal reality – all underpinned by hard facts, data and statistics.

  When he had visited mines in Mexico, Humboldt had not only investigated their geology and productivity, but also the crippling effect that mining was having on large parts of the population. At one mine, he had been shocked to see how indigenous labourers were made to climb some 23,000 steps laden with huge boulders in one shift alone. They were used like a ‘human machine’, slaves in all but name because of a labour system – the so-called repartimiento – that made them work for little or nothing for the Spanish. Forced to buy over-priced goods from the colonial administrators, the labourers were sucked into an escalating spiral of debt and dependency. The Spanish king even enjoyed a monopoly on snow in Quito, Lima and other colonial towns, so that it could be used for the production of sorbet for the wealthy elites. It was absurd, Humboldt said, that something that ‘fell from the sky’ should belong to the Spanish crown. To his mind the politics and economics of a colonial government were based on ‘immorality’.

  During his travels Humboldt had been amazed at how colonial administrators (as well as their guides, hosts and missionaries) had constantly encouraged him – the former mining inspector – to search for precious metals and stones. Many times Humboldt had explained to them how misguided this was. Why, he asked, would they need gold and gems, when they lived on land that had only to be ‘slightly raked to produce abundant harvests’? That was surely their avenue to freedom and prosperity?

  All too often Humboldt had seen how the population was starving and how once fertile land had been relentlessly over-exploited and turned barren. In the valley of Aragua at Lake Valencia, for example, he had observed how the world’s lust for colourful clothing brought poverty and dependency to the local people because indigo, an easily grown plant that produced blue dye, had replaced maize and other edible crops. More than any other plant, indigo ‘impoverishes the soil’, Humboldt had noted. The land looked exhausted and in a few years, he predicted, nothing would grow there any more. The soil was being exploited ‘like a mine’.

  Later, in Cuba, Humboldt had noticed how large parts of the island had been stripped of their forests for sugar plantations. Wherever he went, he had seen how cash crops had replaced ‘those vegetables which supply nourishment’. Cuba produced not much other than sugar, which meant that without imports from other colonies, Humboldt said, ‘the island would starve’. This was a recipe for dependency and injustice. Similarly, the inhabitants of the region around Cumaná cultivated so much sugar and indigo that they were forced to buy food from abroad which they could easily have grown themselves. Monoculture and cash crops did not create a happy society, Humboldt said. What was needed was subsistence farming, based on edible crops and variety such as bananas, quinoa, corn and potatoes.

  Humboldt was the first to relate colonialism to the devastation of the environment. Again and again, his thoughts returned to nature as a complex web of life but also to man’s place within it. At the Rio Apure, he had seen the devastation caused by the Spanish who had tried to control the annual flooding by building a dam. To make matters worse, they had also felled the trees that had held the riverbanks together like ‘a very tight wall’ with the result that the raging river carried more land away each year. On the high plateau of Mexico City, Humboldt had observed how a lake that fed the local irrigation system had shrunk into a shallow puddle, leaving the valleys beneath barren. Everywhere in the world, Humboldt said, water engineers were guilty of such short-sighted follies.

  He debated nature, ecological issues, imperial power and politics in relation to each other. He criticized unjust land distribution, monocultures, violence against tribal groups and indigenous work conditions – all powerfully relevant issues t
oday. As a former mining inspector, Humboldt had a unique insight into the environmental and economic consequences of the exploitation of nature’s riches. He questioned Mexico’s dependence on cash crops and mining, for example, because it bound the country to fluctuating international market prices. ‘The only capital,’ he said, that ‘increases with time, consists in the produce of agriculture’. All problems in the colonies, he was certain, were the result of the ‘imprudent activities of the Europeans’.

  Jefferson had employed similar arguments. ‘I think our governments will remain virtuous for many centuries,’ he said, ‘as long as they are chiefly agricultural.’ He envisaged the opening of the American West as the rolling-out of a republic in which small independent farmers would become the foot-soldiers of the infant nation and the guardians of its liberty. The West, Jefferson believed, would assure the agricultural self-sufficiency of America, and thereby the future for ‘millions yet unborn’.

  Jefferson himself was one of the most progressive farmers in the United States, experimenting with crop rotation, manure and new seed varieties. His library was filled with all the agricultural books he could purchase and he had even invented a new mouldboard for a plough (the wooden part that lifts and turns the sod). He was more enthusiastic about agricultural implements than about political events. When he ordered a model of a threshing machine from London, for example, he updated Madison like an excited child: ‘I expect every day to receive it’, ‘I have not yet received my threshing machine’, and it had at last ‘arrived at New York’. He tested new vegetables, crops and fruits at Monticello, using his fields and garden as an experimental laboratory. Jefferson believed that the ‘greatest service which can be rendered any country, is to add an useful plant to its culture’. From Italy he had smuggled upland rice in his coat pockets – under the threat of the death penalty – and he had tried to convince American farmers to plant sugar maple orchards in order to end the nation’s reliance on molasses from the British West Indies. In Monticello, he grew 330 varieties of 99 species of vegetables and herbs.