The Invention of Nature

by Andrea Wulf

  Some letters, though, brought him joy, and in particular those that arrived from his old travelling companion Aimé Bonpland who had never returned to Europe after his departure to South America in 1816. After an almost ten-year imprisonment in Paraguay, Bonpland had suddenly been released in 1831 but had decided to remain in his adopted home. Now in his early eighties, Bonpland farmed some land in Argentina near the border with Paraguay. There he lived in rural simplicity, growing fruit trees and going on occasional plant hunting trips.

  The two old men corresponded about plants, politics and friends. Humboldt sent his latest books and informed Bonpland about political events in Europe. Life at the Prussian court had not broken his liberal ideals, he assured Bonpland, he still believed in freedom and equality. As both men grew older, their letters became increasingly tender, reminding each other of their long friendship and shared adventures. There was not a week, Humboldt wrote, when he didn’t think of Bonpland. They felt even more drawn to each other as time passed and their mutual friends died one after another. ‘We survive,’ Humboldt wrote after three of their scientific colleagues – including his close friend Arago – had died within three months, ‘but, alas, the immensity of the ocean separates us.’ Bonpland was also longing to see him. How much one needed a close friend to share the ‘secret feelings of one’s heart’, he wrote. In 1854, aged eighty-one, Bonpland was still talking about visiting Europe to embrace Humboldt. Then, in May 1858, Bonpland died in Paraguay, his name almost forgotten back home in France.

  Aimé Bonpland (Illustration Credit 20.1)

  Meanwhile Humboldt had become the most famous scientist of his age, not just in Europe but across the world. His portrait was placed in the Great Exhibition in London and also hung in palaces as remote as that of the King of Siam in Bangkok. His birthday was celebrated as far away as Hong Kong and one American journalist claimed: ‘Ask any schoolboy who Humboldt is, and the answer will be given.’

  The US Secretary of War, John B. Floyd, sent Humboldt nine North American maps that showed all the different towns, counties, mountains and rivers that were named after him. His name, Floyd wrote, was a ‘household word’ throughout the country. In the past it had even been suggested that the Rocky Mountains should be renamed ‘Humboldt Andes’ – and by now several counties and towns, a river, bays, lakes and mountains in the United States carried his name, as did a hotel in San Francisco and the Humboldt Times newspaper in Eureka, California. Half flattered and half embarrassed, Humboldt quipped when he heard that yet another river had been named after him that he was 350 miles long and only had a few tributaries – but ‘I am full of fish,’ he said. There were so many ships that were named after him that he declared them his ‘naval power’.

  Newspapers across the world monitored the health and activities of the ageing scientist. When rumours spread that he was ill and an anatomist from Dresden requested his skull, Humboldt jokingly replied that ‘I need my head for a little while longer, but later I would be only too happy to oblige.’ A female admirer asked if Humboldt could send her a telegraph when he was about to die so that she could rush to his deathbed to close his eyes. With such fame also came gossip, and Humboldt was not pleased when French newspapers reported that he had had an affair with the ‘ugly baroness Berzelius’, the widow of the Swedish chemist Jöns Jacob Berzelius. It was not entirely clear whether he was more offended by the idea of having had an affair or by the assumption that he could have chosen someone so unattractive.

  In his mid-eighties, and feeling like a ‘half-petrified curiosity’, Humboldt remained interested in everything new. For all his love of nature, he was fascinated by the possibilities of technology. He questioned visitors about their journeys on steamboats and was amazed that it took only ten days to travel from Europe to Boston or Philadelphia. Railways, steamships and telegraphs ‘made space shrink’, he declared. For decades he had also been trying to convince his North and South American friends that a canal across the narrow isthmus of Panama would prove an important trade route and a viable engineering project. As early as 1804, during his visit to the United States, he had sent suggestions to James Madison, and later he had persuaded Bolívar to have the area surveyed by two engineers. He continued to write about the canal for the rest of his life.

  Humboldt’s admiration for telegraphs, for example, was also so widely known that one acquaintance dispatched to him from America a small section of a cable – ‘a piece of Sub-Atlantic Telegraph’. For two decades Humboldt corresponded with inventor Samuel Morse, after seeing his telegraphic apparatus in Paris in the 1830s. In 1856 Morse, who also developed the Morse code, wrote to Humboldt to report on his experiments regarding a subterranean line between Ireland and Newfoundland. Humboldt’s interest was unsurprising since a communication line between Europe and America would have allowed him to get instant answers from scientists on the other side of the Atlantic about a missing fact for Cosmos.3

  Despite all the attention, Humboldt often felt removed from his contemporaries. Loneliness had been his loyal companion throughout his life. Neighbours reported that they saw the old man on the street, feeding the sparrows in the early morning hours, and that a solitary light flickered from the window of his study deep into the night as he worked on the fourth volume of Cosmos. Humboldt still liked to walk every day, and could be seen with his head bowed, slowly meandering in the shadow of the great lime trees of the grand avenue of Unter den Linden in Berlin. And whenever he stayed with the king in the palace in Potsdam, Humboldt liked to wander up the little hill – ‘our Potsdam Chimborazo’ as he called it – to the observatory there.

  The famous boulevard Unter den Linden – with the university and the Academy of Sciences to the right (Illustration Credit 20.2)

  When Charles Lyell visited Berlin in 1856, shortly before Humboldt’s eighty-seventh birthday, the British geologist reported that he found him just as ‘I knew him more than thirty years ago, quite up to all that is going on in many departments’. Humboldt was still quick and sharp, he had few wrinkles and his white hair was full. There was ‘nothing flabby about the face’, another visitor remarked. Though he had become ‘meagre with age’, Humboldt’s whole body was animated when he was talking and people forgot how old he was. There was still ‘all the fire and spirit’ of a man of thirty in Humboldt, one American said. He remained as restless as he had been as a young man. Many noticed how impossible it was for Humboldt just to sit. One moment he was standing at his shelves searching for a book, and at another bending over a table to roll out some drawings. He was still able to stand for eight hours if he had to, he boasted. His only concession to age was the admission that he was no longer agile enough to climb the ladder to reach for a book from the top shelf in his study.

  Humboldt still lived in his rented apartment in Oranienburger Straße and his finances remained precarious. He didn’t even possess a complete set of his own books because it was too expensive. Humboldt was living above his means but continued to support young scientists. By the 10th of the month he had usually run out of money and sometimes had to borrow from his devoted servant Johann Seifert, who had been in Humboldt’s service for three decades. Seifert had accompanied Humboldt to Russia and now ran the household at Oranienburger Straße together with his wife.

  Most visitors were surprised by the simplicity of Humboldt’s living arrangements: an apartment in a plain house not far from the university that his brother Wilhelm had founded. Whenever visitors arrived, they were welcomed by Seifert. He would take them to the second-floor flat where they would walk through a room filled with stuffed birds, rock specimens and other natural history objects, then on through the library and into the study where the walls were lined with yet more bookcases. The rooms overflowed with manuscripts and drawings, scientific instruments and more stuffed animals, as well as folios filled with pressed plants, rolled-up maps, busts, portraits and even a pet chameleon. There was a ‘magnificent’ leopard skin on the plain wooden floor. A parrot interrupted conv
ersations when it shouted Humboldt’s most common instruction to his servant: ‘Much sugar, much coffee, Mr Seifert.’ Boxes cluttered the floor and the desk was surrounded by piles of books. A globe stood on one of the side tables in the library, and whenever Humboldt talked about a particular mountain, river or town he would get up and spin it.

  Humboldt hated the cold and kept his apartment at an almost unbearable level of tropical heat, which his visitors quietly suffered. When conversing with foreigners, Humboldt spoke in several languages at the same time, switching within a sentence between German, French, Spanish and English. Although he was losing his hearing, he had lost none of his wit. First comes deafness, he joked, and then ‘imbecility’. The only reason for his ‘celebrity’, he told an acquaintance, was because he had lived to such an old age. Many visitors commented on his boyish humour, such as his much repeated joke about his chameleon which was like ‘many clerics’, he said, in its ability to look with one eye to the heavens and with the other to the earth.

  He advised travellers where they should go, suggested books to read and people to meet. He talked about science, nature, art and politics, never tiring of asking those who came from the United States about slavery and the oppression of Native Americans. It was a ‘stain’ on the American nation, he said.4 He was particularly furious when a pro-slavery southerner published an English edition of his Political Essay on the Island of Cuba, in 1856, in which all his criticism of slavery had been edited out. Outraged, Humboldt issued a press release that was published in newspapers across the United States, denouncing the edition and declaring that the deleted sections were the most important in the book.

  Most visitors were impressed at how alert the old man remained, with one recalling how an ‘uninterrupted stream of the richest knowledge’ poured out of Humboldt. But all this attention drained his strength. It didn’t help that he was now receiving up to 4,000 letters a year and still writing 2,000 himself, feeling ‘unrelentingly persecuted by my own correspondence’. Luckily, his constitution had been remarkably strong in the past decades. He had suffered only from the occasional stomach complaint, colds and an uncomfortably itchy skin rash.

  In early September 1856, just days before his eighty-seventh birthday, he told a friend that he was becoming weaker. Two months later, during a visit to an exhibition in Potsdam, he nearly got seriously injured when a painting fell off the wall and crashed on to him – luckily his sturdy top hat took most of the impact. Then, during the night of 25 February 1857, his servant Johann Seifert heard a noise and rose to find Humboldt lying on the floor. Seifert called the doctor who came rushing to the apartment. Humboldt had had a minor stroke and the doctor announced that there was not much hope of recovery. Meanwhile the patient was recording all his symptoms with his usual meticulousness: temporary paralysis, pulse unchanged, sight preserved and so on. For the next few weeks Humboldt was confined to bed which he hated. Being ‘much unoccupied in my bed’, he wrote in March, increased his ‘sadness and discontent with the world’.

  To everybody’s surprise Humboldt did get better, although he never quite regained his full strength. The ‘machinery’, he said, was ‘rusty, at my age’. Friends commented that his walking had become unsteady but out of pride and vanity he refused to use a stick. In July 1857 Friedrich Wilhelm IV had a stroke that left him partially paralysed and unable to rule – the king’s brother Wilhelm became regent – and with that Humboldt could finally retire from his official position at court. He continued to visit Friedrich Wilhelm IV, but wasn’t expected to be there all the time.

  In December the fourth volume of Cosmos, which focused on the earth and carried the rather cumbersome subtitle ‘Special Results of Observation in the Domain of Telluric Phenomena’, finally rolled off the printing press. It was a dense scientific book with little similarity to Humboldt’s earlier publications. It was still printed as an edition of 15,000 but the sales were nothing like those of the first two volumes which had appealed to a more general readership. But Humboldt nevertheless felt compelled to add another volume – a continuation, as he explained, with yet more information about the earth and the distribution of plants. The writing of the fifth volume was a race against death, he admitted, as he bombarded the librarian at the royal library with constant requests for books. But it was all getting to be a bit much. With his short-term memory now declining, Humboldt found that he was constantly searching through his notes or mislaying books.

  Humboldt in 1857 (Illustration Credit 20.3)

  That year, when two of the three Schlagintweit brothers returned from their Himalaya expedition, they were shocked to see just how old Humboldt had become. They were excited to tell him that they had verified his controversial hypothesis about the different heights of the line of permanent snow on the northern and southern slopes of the Himalaya. To their surprise, though, Humboldt insisted that he had never said such a thing. To prove that he had indeed come up with the theory, the brothers went to his study and pulled from the shelves Humboldt’s own essay on the subject that he had written in 1820. With tears in their eyes, they realized that Humboldt simply could not remember.

  At the same time Humboldt continued to be ‘unmercifully tormented’ by the volume of letters which had now reached almost 5,000 a year, but he refused any help. He disliked private secretaries, he announced, because dictated letters were too ‘formal and business-like’. In December 1858 he was again confined to bed – this time with flu, feeling ill and miserable.

  In February 1859 Humboldt had recovered enough to join seventy Americans in Berlin to celebrate George Washington’s birthday. He was still weak but determined to finish the fifth volume of Cosmos. Finally, on 15 March 1859, six months before his ninetieth birthday, Humboldt placed an advertisement in the newspapers: ‘Labouring under extreme depression of spirits, the result of a correspondence which daily increases’, he was asking the world ‘to try and persuade the people of the two continents not to be so busy about me’. He begged the world to allow him to ‘enjoy some leisure, and have time to work’. A month later, on 19 April, he dispatched the manuscript of the fifth volume of Cosmos to his publisher. Two days later, Humboldt collapsed.

  When his health didn’t improve the newspapers in Berlin began to publish daily bulletins: on 2 May it was reported that Humboldt was ‘very weak’, the next day that his condition was ‘in a high degree doubtful’, then ‘critical’ with violent coughing fits and breathing difficulties, and by 5 May that his weakness was ‘increasing’. On the morning of 6 May 1859 it was announced that the strength of the patient was failing ‘from hour to hour’. That afternoon, at 2.30 p.m., Humboldt opened his eyes one more time as the sun caressed the walls of his bedroom and uttered his last words: ‘How glorious these sunbeams are! They seem to call Earth to the Heavens!’ He was eighty-nine when he died.

  The shock rippled across the world, from the European capitals to the United States, from Panama City and Lima to small towns in South Africa. ‘The great, good and venerated Humboldt is no more!’ wrote the United States ambassador to Prussia in a dispatch to the State Department in Washington, DC, which took more than ten days to arrive in America. A telegraph from Berlin reached London’s newsrooms only hours after Humboldt had died, announcing that ‘Berlin is plunged in sorrow’. On the same day, but unaware of the events in Germany, Charles Darwin wrote from his home in Kent to his publisher in London informing him that he was going to send the first six chapters of Origin of Species shortly. In perfect reverse synchronization, as Humboldt had slowly declined, Darwin had been speeding up, finishing the manuscript of the book that would shake the scientific world.

  Two days after his death, English newspapers ran long obituaries and reports about Humboldt. The first line of a long article in The Times in London simply stated: ‘Alexander von Humboldt is dead’. On the same day, as the British picked up their newspapers and read about Humboldt’s death, hundreds of people in New York were queuing to see a magnificent painting that had been ins
pired by him: The Heart of the Andes, by the young American painter Frederic Edwin Church.

  The painting was so sensational that long lines of keen visitors snaked around the block, waiting for hours to pay a 25 cent entrance fee to see the five-by-ten-foot canvas that depicted the Andes in all their glory. The river rapids in the centre of the painting were so realistic that people could almost feel the spray of the water. Trees, leaves and flowers were all rendered so accurately that botanists were able to identify them precisely, while the snow-capped mountains stood majestically in the background. More than any other painter Church had answered Humboldt’s appeal to unite art and science. He admired Humboldt so much that he had followed his hero’s route through South America on foot and mules.

  The Heart of the Andes combined beauty with the most meticulous geological, botanical and scientific detail – it was Humboldt’s concept of interconnectedness writ large on canvas. The painting transported the viewer into the wilderness of South America. Church was, the New York Times declared, the ‘artistic Humboldt of the new world’. On 9 May, and unaware that Humboldt had died three days earlier, Church wrote to a friend that he planned to send the painting to Berlin to show the old man the ‘scenery which delighted his eyes sixty years ago’.

  The next morning in Germany, tens of thousands of mourners followed Humboldt’s state funeral procession from his apartment along Unter den Linden to Berlin Cathedral. Black flags fluttered in the wind and the streets were lined with people. The king’s horses pulled the hearse with the simple oak coffin which was decorated with two wreaths and escorted by students who carried palm leaves. It was the grandest funeral that the citizens of Berlin had ever seen for a private individual. University professors and members of the Academy of the Sciences came, as did soldiers, diplomats and politicians. There were craftsmen, tradesmen, shopkeepers, artists, poets, actors and writers. As the hearse slowly progressed, Humboldt’s relatives and their families followed with his servant Johann Seifert. The line of mourners stretched for a mile. Church bells rang through the streets and the royal family waited in Berlin Cathedral for the final goodbyes. That night the coffin was brought to Tegel where Humboldt was buried in the family cemetery.