Off the Map

by Fergus Fleming

  At Caracas – where they accumulated yet more data and climbed the Silla, at 8,000 feet the highest of the city’s surrounding peaks – Humboldt finally outlined their plan of action. They would travel over the llanos, the extensive plains of the interior, until they reached the Orinoco. From there they would go upriver to find its undiscovered source. At the same time they would investigate a strange phenomenon that Condamine had reported: a waterway, the Casiquiare, a channel that purportedly connected the Orinoco and the Amazon to produce a river that ‘flowed both ways’. He did not enter the llanos, however, without making critical comments on the Spanish system of land management, particularly the wholesale destruction of forests to make way for indigo. ‘By felling the trees that cover the tops and sides of the mountains,’ he wrote, ‘men in every climate prepare at once two calamities for future generations: the want of fuel and a scarcity of water.’ He also noted that deforestation caused flash floods and eroded the soil. It would be almost 200 years before anyone took his warnings seriously.

  Humboldt was impressed by the llanos: ‘the plains seemed to reach to the sky, and this vast and profound solitude looked like an ocean covered with seaweed’. But he did not enjoy the traverse. The temperature reached 106° F, the mirages were so extreme that two suns rose at dawn and the flat plain swam with illusory mountains, lakes and trees. Once they came across a cattle ranch, whose half-naked peons rode with lances across the plains to inspect their herds. ‘Their food is meat dried in the air and a little salted,’ Humboldt recorded, ‘and of this even their horses sometimes eat. Always in the saddle, they fancy they cannot make the slightest excursion on foot.’ The water was foul and ‘we asked in vain for a bowl of milk’.

  At the trading station of Calabozo, they found an unexpected source of intellectual refreshment. A local inventor, Señor del Pozo, had read Benjamin Franklin’s Memoirs and had constructed an electrical apparatus to his own design that was almost as sophisticated as those to be found in Europe. He was delighted to meet men of his own ilk and acceded happily when the foreigners asked if he could help them catch an electric eel. Humboldt had long been fascinated by these creatures, whose bodies, up to nine feet long, contained an organ capable of delivering 650 volts that could paralyse and even kill a man from a distance. Understandably, he had not yet obtained a specimen and, despite offering large sums of money, had been unable to persuade anybody to help him. Señor del Pozo, however, had a solution: they would go fishing with horses.

  This barbaric but effective procedure involved driving 30 horses and mules into a pool and keeping them there while the eels elecrocuted them. Humboldt watched in fascination: ‘These yellowish and livid eels, resembling large aquatic serpents, swim on the surface of the water and crowd under the bellies of the horses and mules. A contest between animals of such different organisation furnishes a very striking spectacle ... Several horses sink beneath the violence of the invisible strokes, which they receive from all sides in organs the most essential to life, and, stunned by the force and frequency of the shocks, disappear under the water. Others, panting, with mane erect and haggard eyes expressing anguish, raise themselves and endeavour to flee from the storm by which they are overtaken. They are driven back by the Indians into the middle of the water ... In less than five minutes two horses were drowned.’ The struggle seemed so unequal that he expected all 30 beasts would die. But the eels could not cope with such a mass of horseflesh. After a while they had discharged their batteries and were harmless. ‘The mules and horses appear less frightened,’ Humboldt wrote, ‘their manes are no longer bristled, and their eyes express less dread. The gymnoti [eels] approach timidly the edge of the marsh, where they are taken by means of small harpoons fastened to long cords.’

  At the end of it Humboldt and Bonpland had five eels which they poked, prodded, pulled and, occasionally, stepped upon. ‘I do not remember having received from the discharge of a large Leyden jar a more dreadful shock than the one I experienced when I very stupidly placed both my feet on an electric eel that had just been taken out of the water,’ Humboldt recorded. ‘I was affected for the rest of the day with a violent pain in the knees and almost every joint.’ However frequently they put them to the test, the eels did not register on the electrometer and made no impact at all on their magnetic equipment. Dishearteningly, they were later classified as a distant relative of the minnow.

  On 5 April the explorers reached the Orinoco, where they hired canoes and crews for the trip upriver. Humboldt was awed by the scale of everything: the river was the size of a lake; the beaches were so extensive that they had their own mirages; the waves were several feet high, like those of the sea. On one island the turtles (today nearly extinct) were so prodigiously abundant that the Indians harvested some 33 million eggs per annum. Further up, they encountered the Great Cataracts, at 40 miles one of the longest rapids in the continent, where the flies were so thick it was hard to breathe and the locals swatted themselves automatically even in their sleep. Different varieties emerged at different times and, as Humboldt wrote wearily, ‘we might guess blindfold the hour of the day or night by the hum of the insects, and by their stings’.

  Above the Great Cataracts they were in virgin territory. Few white men had entered Venezuela’s interior in the three centuries since Spain had claimed it as a colony. The only ones living there now were a handful of missionaries. Nobody had ever written about it, and wild rumours circulated of men with heads in the middle of their chests and eyes in their foreheads. Humboldt and Bonpland entered this terra incognita with excitement. Their plan, following the directions of a missionary who had previously made the journey, was to follow the Orinoco to the mouth of its tributary, the Atabapo. At the top of the Atabapo they would make a portage across the watershed to the Negro, tributary to the Amazon, and then take the Casiquiare back to the Orinoco.

  The journey, in a 40-foot-long canoe hollowed out of a single tree trunk, was uncomfortable but not particularly dangerous. There was plenty for the scientists to record: trees more than 100 feet tall, a school of freshwater dolphins, a tribe of cannibals whose favourite cut was the palm of a man’s hand, immense depths of untouched forest humus, and an extraordinary abundance of flora and fauna. ‘The earth is loaded with plants,’ Humboldt noted. ‘The crocodiles and the boas are masters of the river; the jaguar, the peccary, the tapir, and the monkeys traverse the forest without fear and without danger; there they dwell as in an ancient inheritance.’ By 10 May they were at the Casiquiare, where Humboldt was quietly complacent about their achievements. ‘We had been confined thirty-six days in a narrow boat, so unstable that it would have been overset by any person rising imprudently from his seat... we had suffered severely from the sting of insects ... we had withstood the insalubrity of the climate; we had passed without accident the great number of falls of water and bars that impede the navigation of the rivers and often render it more dangerous than long voyages by sea. After all we had endured, I may be permitted, perhaps, to speak of the satisfaction we felt in having reached the tributary systems of the Amazon.’ There was satisfaction, too, in having reached the channel that everyone believed to be a chimera. Only a year before they had set out, a French geographer had remarked: ‘The long supposed connection between the Orinoco and the Amazon is a monstrous error in geography.’ Well, it wasn’t any longer.

  The 12-day journey through the Casiquiare was unpleasant. The humidity was so great that they could not light a fire, the water was foul, and food was so scarce that they were reduced to eating ants. In the overhanging jungle ‘we could see the jaguars – large jaguars I may add – up in the trees, because the dense undergrowth prevented them walking along the ground’. Nor did their spirits improve markedly when they reached ‘a remote and terrible place called Esmeralda’, at the junction of the Casiquiare and the Orinoco. ‘By now all of us had reached a stage of desperate hunger and exhaustion,’ Humboldt wrote. ‘Here the insects are still more cruel and voracious than elsewhere on the Orino
co – Esmeralda gives the traveller the impression of having arrived at the end of the world.’

  The return journey down the Orinoco was uneventful – if one excluded their experimental quaffing of a cup of curare, and the discovery of a tribe that ate earth – and on 15 June they were at Angostura (now Ciudad Bolívar), in Guiana. Here they caught typhoid fever and, though Humboldt treated himself successfully with a bitter concoction for which Angostura would later become famous, Bonpland nearly died. It was a month before he was well enough to toil across the llanos to the coast. From there the two men caught a ship to Cumaná, where they landed at the end of August (en route being captured by a Nova Scotian privateer, then rescued by the Royal Navy). From Cumaná they sailed for Cuba, and on 19 December 1800 disembarked at Havana, having finally reached the destination for which they had embarked 18 months earlier aboard the Pizarro.

  Their unplanned excursion had been exceptionally productive. They had covered 1,500 miles and collected 12,000 specimens, many of them new to science. They had mapped a large part of Venezuela’s hinterland and had proved the existence of a natural canal linking two major river systems. They had provided Western science with its most thorough study to date of the wonders that South America contained. And, as they had hoped, they had made many observations on the unity of nature, their only depressing discovery being how insignificant a role humankind played in it. ‘In that interior part of the New Continent,’ Humboldt wrote, ‘we almost accustomed ourselves to regard men as not being essential... This aspect of animated nature, in which man is nothing, has something in it strange and sad ... Here in a fertile country adorned with eternal verdure, we seek in vain the traces of the power of man; we seem to be transported into a world different from that which gave us birth.’

  Humboldt’s new-found humility did not quench his desire for exploration. He filed as much information as he could in Cuba, and despatched it to Europe along with his records of Venezuela – to ensure his findings were not lost he made three copies: one for France, one for Germany and, in case the ships foundered, one that he left in Havana – then arranged a trip via Mexico to the Philippines. Before he departed, however, he learned that Bougainville’s much-delayed expedition would at last be leaving France. Thereupon he cancelled his plans and hauled Bonpland on a journey over the Andes to Lima, the capital of Peru, where he hoped to meet members of the French squadron.

  They stopped first at Trinidad, where Humboldt was immediately fascinated by the local practice of keeping fireflies in a hollowed-out gourd, pierced with holes, which, when shaken, acted as a lantern. From Trinidad they sailed to Cartagena in Colombia, and then travelled overland to the Ecuadorian capital of Quito. Here they saw a number of interesting peaks, mostly volcanic and by no means dormant. Despite having no mountaineering experience, they went up them. They climbed the 15,672-foot-high Pichincha, its summit a mile-wide crater that flickered ominously with blue flames. They also ascended Chimborazo to an altitude of 19,000 feet. They might even have reached the top had not the ridge they were following been bisected by a 400-foot-deep chasm. As it was, they had stood higher than anyone else on earth, a record that would not be beaten for 30 years.

  At Quito they learned that Bougainville would not, after all, be passing by South America. Nevertheless, they continued to Peru, following ancient Inca highways through the Andes, now dipping east to make a quick map of the upper Amazon, now investigating a Peruvian silver mine, now visiting the cell in which the Spanish conquistadores had imprisoned the Inca Atahuallpa for nine months until his subjects had filled the room with gold (after which they had killed him). As they went, they amassed case upon case of botanical and geological specimens. ‘The conveyance of these objects, and the minute care they required, occasioned us such embarrassments as would scarcely be conceived, even by those who have travelled the most uncultivated parts of Europe,’ Humboldt later wrote. ‘Our progress was often retarded by the three-fold necessity of dragging after us, during expeditions of five or six months, twelve, fifteen and sometimes twenty loaded mules, exchanging these animals every eight or ten days, and superintending the Indians who were employed in leading so numerous a caravan.’

  On 22 October 1802 they reached Lima, where they spent two months preparing their specimens for shipment to Paris. In their spare time they measured the transit of Mercury and took samples of a bird manure that the Peruvians had long valued as a fertilizer but which was barely known outside South America, enclosing these findings with their others. (When the manure was analysed, and found to be 30 times richer than the standard farmyard variety, it prompted a guano rush by European entrepreneurs.) On Christmas Eve they sailed via Guayaquil to Mexico,* where again they were indefatigable in their studies. They were drawn irresistibly to the volcano of Jorullo, which less than 50 years before had been a flat field of indigo and sugar cane. In June 1759, however, the area had been hit by 60 days of earthquakes; hardly had the tremors subsided than, on 28 September, four square miles of earth began to rise, producing hundreds of fuming cones, the largest of which was several thousand feet high. Humboldt scaled the world’s youngest volcano, saw that it was still alight, and promptly climbed into the crater, descending 250 feet before the smoke and heat drove him back.

  From Mexico they went to Havana and then to the United States where, their fame having preceded them, they were wined and dined by President Thomas Jefferson. By this time Humboldt had run through a third of his capital and felt it was time to go home. They landed at Bordeaux on 3 August 1804, and were soon in Paris where they unleashed their findings on the French intelligentsia. Over the course of five years and 6,000 miles they had collected 60,000 plants – at a stroke doubling the number of species known to European science – had calculated the position of hundreds of South American towns and mountains with greater precision than ever before, had gathered rocks from the highest altitude on record, had studied the insides of volcanoes, had taken magnetic, meteorological and oceanographic readings. In fact, they had done so much that it would be decades before the scientific community absorbed the impact of their extraordinary journey. They capped it all by an ancillary trip to the Alps, where Humboldt took further magnetic observations to augment those he had taken in the Andes. That done, the two men went their separate ways.

  Humboldt parted sorrowfully with Bonpland, of whom he wrote, ‘I could never have hoped to meet again with such a loyal and brave and hardworking friend’. The Frenchman stayed in Paris for ten years as a companion to Napoleon’s wife, Josephine, married a young prostitute and, when the marriage failed, returned to South America where he was offered a professorship at Buenos Aires. He moved in with a Brazilian girl and never returned to Europe – thanks largely to nine years’ imprisonment in Paraguay, on suspicion of espionage – becoming progressively enfeebled until he died in 1858 at the age of 85.

  Humboldt did not abandon his research: between May 1806 and June 1807 he took 6,000 magnetic readings from a cottage outside Berlin and, thanks to a freak appearance of the Northern Lights, was the first person to describe a magnetic storm. In later years he devoted himself exclusively to the journals of his time in South and Central America. His three-volume Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Region was a bestseller when it was published in 1814. He became one of the most widely revered scientists of his time, inspiring many followers, among them a young Englishman named Charles Darwin. His Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain earned him lucrative directorships that he turned down in favour of writing Voyage of Humboldt and Bonpland, whose 35-volumes took him 30 years to perfect and which he self-published at the cost of his remaining inheritance. By 1829, aged 60, he was near destitute, but could not resist an invitation to explore the Urals, which he did within the year. He then began a new tome, Cosmos, a Vision of the Nature of the World and the Forces of Earth, in which he tried to unite his discoveries into a single philosophical creed. It followed exactly the same Enlightenment ethos that he had espoused when he first l
eft Spain for South America, and which he had later tried in vain to explain to a missionary in the middle of the jungle: ‘The most important result of all thoughtful exploration ... is to recognise in the apparent confusion and opulence of nature a quintessential unity – to study each detail thoroughly yet never be defeated by the contradictions of a mass of fact, to remember the elevated destiny of homo sapiens and thereby to grasp the spirit of nature, its essential meaning which lies concealed under a blanket of multifarious manifestations.’

  The first volume came out in 1845 and the fourth in 1858, by which time he was receiving 3,000 letters per annum and answering, personally, 2,000 of them. Eventually he had to place a notice in the press, asking his fans to give him ‘a little rest and spare time for my own work, at a time when my physical and intellectual powers are anyway decreasing’. He was 85 pages into the fifth volume when he died, aged 90, on 6 May 1859. Perhaps it was as well he did not finish it. In the very year of Humboldt’s death Charles Darwin published his revolutionary On the Origin of Species, a work that would shatter the Enlightenment dream of uniting man and Nature within a perfectible, orderly system.

  The Great Trigonometrical Survey (1800–66)

  In 1800 Britain wanted to know two things about India. First, and rather basically, it wanted to know how big it was; second, and more abstrusely, it wanted to know if its north-south curvature differed from that of the northern hemisphere, a calculation that would allow scientists to determine the shape of the earth. It had already been confirmed by Newton, Condamine and others that the planet bulged outwards at the equator. But it was still a matter of conjecture whether the globe was a mirror-image either side of the equator or whether, as some suspected, it was flatter on the top than at the bottom. India, rather than Africa or America, was chosen because it was mostly under British rule. And William Lambton was selected for the job because he seemed to have nothing better to do.