The Invention of Nature

by Andrea Wulf

  As Napoleon brought Europe under his control, his army returned with carriage-loads of art from their conquests, filling the museums of Paris. The loot poured in: from Greek statues, Roman treasures and Renaissance paintings to the Rosetta Stone from Egypt. A forty-two-metre-high column, the Vendôme Column, in imitation of Trajan’s victory column in Rome, was built as a monument to Napoleon’s victories. Twelve thousand pieces of artillery taken from the enemy were melted to create the bas-relief that spiralled up to the top where a statue of Napoleon dressed as a Roman emperor watched over his city.

  Then, in 1812, the French lost almost half a million men in Russia. Napoleon’s army was decimated by the Russian scorched-earth tactic in which villages and crops were burned so that the French soldiers had no food. With the onset of the Russian winter, what was left of the Grande Armée was reduced to fewer than 30,000 soldiers. It was the turning point of the Napoleonic Wars. When the streets of Paris became filled with invalids – wounded and battered from the battlefields – Parisians realized that France might be losing. It was, as Napoleon’s former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Talleyrand, said, ‘the beginning of the end’.

  By the end of 1813 the British army, under the command of the Duke of Wellington, had driven the French out of Spain and a coalition of Austria, Russia, Sweden and Prussia had beaten Napoleon decisively on German territory. Some 600,000 soldiers met in October 1813 at the Battle of Leipzig, the so-called ‘Battle of the Nations’ – the bloodiest encounter in Europe until the First World War. Russian Cossacks, Mongolian horsemen, Swedish reserve soldiers, Austrian border troops and Silesian militia were among the many who fought and destroyed the French army.

  Five and a half months later, in late March 1814, when the Allies marched down the Champs-Élysées, even the most frivolous Parisians couldn’t ignore the new reality any more. About 170,000 Austrians, Russians and Prussians arrived in Paris and toppled Napoleon’s statue on the Vendôme Column, replacing it with a white flag. British painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, who visited Paris at the time, described the mad carnival that ensued: half-clothed Cossack horsemen with their belts stuffed with guns, next to tall soldiers from the Russian Imperial Guard ‘pinched at the waist like a wasp’. English officers with clean-scrubbed faces, fat Austrians and neatly dressed Prussian soldiers, as well as Tartars in chainmail armour with bow and arrows, filled the streets. They exuded such an aura of victory that it made every Parisian ‘curse within his teeth’.

  On 6 April 1814 Napoleon was exiled to Elba, a small island in the Mediterranean. Within a year, though, he had escaped and marched back to Paris, assembling an army of 200,000 men. It was a last and desperate attempt to bring Europe back under his control, but a few weeks later, in June 1815, Napoleon was beaten by the British and the Prussians at the Battle of Waterloo. Banished to the remote island of St Helena, a tiny fleck of land in the South Atlantic, 1,200 miles from Africa and 1,800 miles from South America, Napoleon never returned to Europe.

  Humboldt had watched how Napoleon had destroyed Prussia in 1806 and now, eight years later, he observed the triumphal entry of the Allies into France, the country that he called his second fatherland. It was painful to see how the ideals of the French Revolution – of liberty and political freedom – seemed to disappear, he wrote to James Madison in Washington, who by now had succeeded Jefferson as the President of the United States. Humboldt’s position was awkward. Wilhelm, who was still the Prussian ambassador in Vienna and who arrived with the Allies in Paris, thought that his brother seemed more French than German. Alexander certainly felt uncomfortable, complaining about ‘fits of melancholy’ and recurring stomach pains. But he stayed on in Paris.

  There were public attacks. An article in the German newspaper Rheinischer Merkur, for example, accused Humboldt of preferring the friendship with the French to the ‘honour’ of his people. Deeply hurt, Humboldt wrote a furious letter to the author of the article but remained in France. As distressing as Humboldt’s balancing act might have been for him, it brought advantages for the sciences. When the Allies arrived in Paris there was much looting and plundering. Some was justified, with the Allies collecting the stolen treasures from Napoleon’s museums to return them to their rightful owners – but more often it was an undisciplined occupying force.

  It was to Humboldt that the French naturalist Georges Cuvier turned when the Prussian army planned to turn the Jardin des Plantes into a military camp. Humboldt used his contacts and convinced the Prussian general in charge to locate the troops elsewhere. A year later, when the Prussians returned to Paris after the victory against Napoleon at Waterloo, Humboldt once again saved the valuable collections in the botanical garden. When 2,000 soldiers camped next to the garden, Cuvier began to worry about his treasures. They were disturbing the animals in the menagerie, he told Humboldt, and touching all sorts of rare items. After a visit to the Prussian commander, Humboldt received assurances that the plants and animals were not in danger.

  The Jardin des Plantes in Paris which encompassed a large botanical garden, a menagerie and a natural history museum (Illustration Credit 11.1)

  Not only soldiers arrived in Paris. Close behind were tourists – especially those from Britain who had not been able to come to Paris during the long years of the Napoleonic Wars. Many came to see the treasures in the Louvre because no other European institution contained so much art. Students sketched the most famous paintings and sculptures before workmen arrived with wheelbarrows, ladders and ropes to remove and pack them, so that they could be returned to their owners.

  British scientists also came to Paris, and whenever they arrived, they knocked on Humboldt’s door. A former secretary of the Royal Society, Charles Bladgen, visited, as did a future president, Humphry Davy. Maybe more than anybody else, Davy lived what Humboldt was preaching because he was a poet and a chemist. In his notebooks, for example, Davy filled one side with the objective accounts of his experiments, while on the other page he wrote his personal reactions and emotional responses. His scientific lectures at the Royal Institution in London were so famous that the streets around the building were jammed on the days he performed. The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge – another great admirer of Humboldt’s work – attended Davy’s lectures, as he wrote, to ‘enlarge my stock of metaphors’. Like Humboldt, Davy believed that imagination and reason were necessary to perfect the philosophic mind – they were the ‘creative source of discovery’.

  Humboldt enjoyed meeting other scientists to exchange ideas and share information, but life in Europe increasingly frustrated him. Throughout these years of political upheaval he had remained restless and, with Europe so deeply torn, he felt that there was little holding him. ‘My view of the world is dismal,’ he told Goethe. He missed the tropics and was only going to feel better ‘when I live in the hot zone’.

  1 In 1810 Humboldt moved into an apartment that he shared with Karl Sigismund Kunth, the nephew of his former tutor and a German botanist, whom he had commissioned to work on the botanical publications, relieving – after some discussions and rows – Bonpland from the task.

  12

  Revolutions and Nature

  Simón Bolívar and Humboldt

  I was coming along, cloaked in the mantle of Iris, from the place where the torrential Orinoco pays tribute to the God of waters. I had visited the enchanted springs of Amazonia, straining to climb to the watchtower of the universe. I sought the tracks of La Condamine and Humboldt, following them boldly. Nothing could stop me. I reached the glacial heights, and the atmosphere took my breath away. No human foot had ever blemished the diamond crown placed by Eternity’s hands on the sublime temples of this lofty Andean peak. I said to myself: Iris’s rainbow cloak has served as my banner. I’ve carried it through infernal regions. It has ploughed rivers and seas and risen to the gigantic shoulders of the Andes. The terrain had levelled off at the feet of Colombia, and not even time could hold back freedom’s march. The war goddess Bellona had been humbled by the brilliance of
Iris. So why should I hesitate to tread on the ice-white hair of this giant on earth? Indeed I shall! And caught up in a spiritual tremor I had never before experienced, and which seemed to me a kind of divine frenzy, I left Humboldt’s tracks behind and began to leave my own marks on the eternal crystals girding Chimborazo.

  Simón Bolívar, ‘My Delirium on Chimborazo’, 1822

  IT WAS NOT Humboldt but his friend Simón Bolívar who returned to South America. Three years after they had first met in Paris in 1804, Bolívar had left Europe, burning with Enlightenment ideas of liberty, the separation of powers and the concept of a social contract between a people and their rulers. As he had stepped on South American soil, Bolívar had been fuelled by his vow on Monte Sacro in Rome to free his country. But the fight against the Spanish would be a long battle fed by the blood of patriots. It would be a rebellion that saw close friends betray each other. Brutal, messy and often destructive, it would take almost two decades to remove the Spanish from the continent – and it would eventually see Bolívar rule as a dictator.

  It was also a fight that was invigorated by Humboldt’s writings, almost as if his descriptions of nature and people made the colonists appreciate how unique and magnificent their continent was. Humboldt’s books and ideas would feed into the liberation of Latin America – from his criticism of colonialism and slavery to his portrayal of the majestic landscapes. In 1809, two years after its first publication in Germany, Humboldt’s Essay on the Geography of Plants had been translated into Spanish and published in a scientific journal founded in Bogotá by Francisco José de Caldas, one of the scientists whom Humboldt had met during his expedition in the Andes. ‘With his pen’ Humboldt had awakened South America, Bolívar later said, and had illustrated why South Americans had many reasons to be proud of their continent. To this day Humboldt’s name is much more widely known in Latin America than in most of Europe or the United States.

  Chimborazo and Carquairazo in today’s Ecuador – one of the many striking illustrations in Humboldt’s Vues des Cordillères (Illustration Credit 12.1)

  Throughout the revolution Bolívar would use images drawn from the natural world – as if writing with Humboldt’s pen – to explain his beliefs. He talked of a ‘stormy sea’ and described those fighting a revolution as people who ‘ploughed a sea’. As Bolívar rallied his compatriots during the long years of rebellions and battles, he evoked South America’s landscapes. He would talk of magnificent vistas and insist that their continent was ‘the very heart of the universe’, in an attempt to remind his fellow revolutionists what they were fighting for. At times, when only chaos seemed to rule, Bolívar turned to the wilderness to seek meaning. In untamed nature he found parallels to the brutality of humankind – and though this fact didn’t change anything about the conditions of war, it could still be strangely comforting. As Bolívar fought to free the colonies from Spanish shackles, these images, nature metaphors and allegories became his language of freedom.

  Forests, mountains and rivers ignited Bolívar’s imagination. He was a ‘true lover of nature’, as one of his generals later said. ‘My soul is dazzled by the presence of primitive nature,’ Bolívar declared. He had always adored the outdoors and as a young man had enjoyed the pleasures of country life and agricultural work. The landscape that surrounded the old family hacienda San Mateo near Caracas, where he had spent his days riding across fields and forests, had been the cradle for this strong bond with nature. Mountains, in particular, held a spell over Bolívar because they reminded him of home. When he had walked from France to Italy, in the spring of 1805, it had been the sight of the Alps that had channelled his thoughts back to his country and away from the gambling and drinking in Paris. By the time Bolívar met Humboldt in Rome that summer, he had started to think in earnest about a rebellion. When he returned to Venezuela in 1807, he said, there was a ‘fire that burned inside me to liberate my country’.

  The Spanish colonies in Latin America were divided into four viceroyalties and were home to some 17 million people. There was New Spain which included Mexico, parts of California and Central America, while the Viceroyalty of New Granada stretched across the northern part of South America roughly covering today’s Panama, Ecuador and Colombia, as well as parts of north-western Brazil and Costa Rica. Further south was the Viceroyalty of Peru as well as the Viceroyalty of the Río de La Plata with Buenos Aires as its capital, encompassing parts of today’s Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay. There were also so-called captaincy generals, such as those of Venezuela, Chile and Cuba. The captaincy generals were administrative districts that provided autonomy to those regions, making them like viceroyalties in all but name. It was a vast empire that had fuelled Spain’s economy for three centuries but the first cracks had occurred with the loss of the huge Louisiana Territory which had been part of the Viceroyalty of New Spain. The Spanish had lost it to the French who had then sold it on to the United States in 1803.

  The Napoleonic Wars had severely affected the Spanish colonies. British and French naval blockades had reduced trade and resulted in huge losses of revenue. At the same time, wealthy criollos such as Bolívar had realized that Spain’s weakened position in Europe might be used to their own advantage. The British had destroyed many Spanish warships in the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, the most decisive naval victory during the war, and two years later Napoleon had invaded the Iberian Peninsula. He had then forced the Spanish king, Ferdinand VII, to abdicate in favour of Napoleon’s own brother. Spain had no longer been an almighty imperial power but a tool in France’s hands. With the Spanish king deposed and the mother country occupied by a foreign force, some South Americans had allowed themselves to believe in another future.

  In 1809, a year after Ferdinand VII’s abdication, the first call for independence had been made in Quito, when the creoles had taken power from the Spanish administrators. A year later, in May 1810, the colonists in Buenos Aires followed suit. A few months after that, in September in the small town of Dolores, 200 miles to the north-west of Mexico City, a priest named Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla had united creoles, mestizos, Indians and freed slaves in their battle cry against the Spanish rule; within a month he had an army of 60,000. As revolt and unrest swept across the Spanish viceroyalties, the creole elite of Venezuela had declared independence on 5 July 1811.

  Then, nine months later, nature seemed to side with the Spanish. On the afternoon of 26 March 1812, as the inhabitants of Bolívar’s hometown Caracas crowded into the churches for Easter services, a massive earthquake destroyed the city, killing thousands. Cathedral and churches crumbled, and the air was thick with dust as worshippers were crushed to death. As the tremors shook the ground, Bolívar surveyed the devastation in despair. Many saw the earthquake as a sign of God’s fury against their uprising. Priests shouted at the ‘sinners’ and told them that ‘divine justice’ had punished their revolution. Standing in the rubble in his shirtsleeves, Bolívar remained defiant. ‘If Nature itself decides to oppose us,’ he said, ‘we will fight and force her to obey.’

  Eight days later another earthquake struck, bringing the death toll to a shocking 20,000 people, about half the population of Caracas. When slaves on the plantations west of Lake Valencia rebelled, looting haciendas and killing their owners, anarchy descended across Venezuela. Bolívar, who had been put in charge of the strategically important port town of Puerto Cabello on the northern coast of Venezuela, one hundred miles west of Caracas, had five officers and three soldiers and stood no chance when the royalist troops arrived. Within weeks the republican fighters had surrendered to the Spanish forces, and a little more than a year after the creoles had first declared their independence, the so-called First Republic had come to an end. The Spanish flag was hoisted once again and Bolívar fled the country at the end of August 1812 for the Caribbean island of Curaçao.

  As the revolutions unfolded the former American President, Thomas Jefferson, bombarded Humboldt with questions: If the revolutionaries succeeded what kind of government
would they establish, he asked, and how equal would their society be? Would despotism prevail? ‘All these questions you can answer better than any other,’ Jefferson insisted in one letter. As one of the founding fathers of the North American revolution, Jefferson was deeply interested in the Spanish colonies and genuinely afraid that South America would not establish republican governments. At the same time, Jefferson was also concerned about the economic implications that an independent southern continent would have for his own country. As long as the colonies were under Spanish control, the United States exported huge amounts of grain and wheat to South America. But once they turned away from colonial cash crops their ‘produce and commerce would rivalize ours’, Jefferson told the Minister of Spain in Washington, DC.

  Meanwhile Bolívar was plotting his next moves and in late October 1812, two months after he had fled Venezuela, he arrived in Cartagena, a port town on the northern coast of the Viceroyalty of New Granada in today’s Colombia. Bolívar was brimming with ideas for a strong South America where all colonies would fight together rather than separately as before. In command of only a small army but reputedly equipped with Humboldt’s excellent maps, Bolívar now began a bold guerrilla offensive hundreds of miles away from home. He had little military training but as he moved from Cartagena towards Venezuela, he managed to surprise royalist forces in inhospitable environments – on high mountains, in deep forests and along rivers infested with snakes and crocodiles. Slowly Bolívar gained control over the Río Magdalena, the river along which Humboldt had paddled from Cartagena to Bogotá more than a decade earlier.