The Invention of Nature (41 page)

Humboldt was deeply disappointed with revolutions and revolutionaries. During his lifetime the Americans had declared independence, yet they continued to spread what he called the ‘pest of slavery’. In the months before the 1848 events in Europe, Humboldt had followed news of the war that the United States had waged with Mexico – shocked, as he said, by America’s imperial behaviour which reminded him of ‘the old Spanish Conquista’. As a young man he had witnessed the French Revolution but also Napoleon crown himself emperor. Later, he had watched Simón Bolívar liberate the South American colonies from Spanish tyranny, only then to see ‘El Libertador’ declare himself dictator. And now his own country had failed miserably. At the age of eighty, he wrote in November 1849, he was reduced to the ‘worn-out hope’ that the people’s desire for reforms had not disappeared for ever. Though it may seem ‘to be asleep’ periodically, he still hoped that their wish for change was in fact ‘eternal as the electromagnetic storm which sparkles in the sun’. Perhaps the next generation would succeed.

As so often before, he now buried himself in work to escape these ‘endless oscillations’. When one delegate from the Frankfurt National Assembly asked Humboldt how he could possibly work through such turbulent times, he stoically replied that he had seen so many revolutions during his long life that the novelty and excitement were wearing off. Instead he concentrated on finishing Cosmos.

When Humboldt had published the second volume of Cosmos in 1847 – which he had originally intended as the final one – he had quickly realized that he had yet more to say. Unlike the first two, though, the third volume would be a more specialized tome about ‘cosmical phaenomena’, ranging from the stars and planets to the velocity of light and comets. As the sciences advanced, Humboldt struggled to be a ‘master of the materials’ but he never had problems admitting when he failed to understand a new theory. Determined to include all the latest discoveries, he simply asked others to explain them to him, urging speed because at his age he was running out of time – ‘those half dead are riding fast,’ he said. Cosmos was like a ‘goblin on his shoulder’.

On the back of the success of the first two volumes of Cosmos, Humboldt also published a new and extended edition of his favourite book, Views of Nature – first in German and then, in quick succession, two competing English editions. There was also a new but unauthorized English translation of Personal Narrative. And in order to make some extra money, Humboldt tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to sell the idea of a ‘Micro-Cosmos’ – a more affordable and shorter one-volume digest of Cosmos – to his German publisher.

In December 1850 Humboldt published the first half of the third volume of Cosmos, and a year later the other half. In the introduction he wrote that ‘it remains for the third and last volume of my work to supply some of the deficiencies of the earlier ones.’ But no sooner had he written that, than he started the fourth volume, this time focusing on the earth, covering geomagnetism, volcanoes and earthquakes. It seemed as if he might never stop.

Age had not slowed him. Besides his writing and his duties at court, Humboldt also welcomed a never-ending string of visitors. One was Simón Bolívar’s former aide-de-camp, General Daniel O’Leary, who called at Humboldt’s Berlin apartment in April 1853. The two men spent an afternoon reminiscing about the revolution and Bolívar who had died of tuberculosis in 1830. By now Humboldt was so famous that it had also become a rite of passage for Americans to visit the old man. One American travel writer said that he had come to Berlin not to see museums and galleries but ‘for the sake of seeing and speaking with the world’s greatest living man’.2

Humboldt also continued to assist young scientists, artists and explorers, often helping them financially despite his own debts. The Swiss geologist and palaeontologist Louis Agassiz, who emigrated to the United States, profited several times from Humboldt’s ‘usual benevolence’, for example. On another occasion Humboldt gave a young mathematician a hundred thalers and also organized free meals at the university for the royal coffee maker’s son. He brought artists to the king’s attention and encouraged the director of the Neues Museum in Berlin to purchase paintings and drawings. Humboldt told a friend that, since he had no family of his own, these young men were like his children.

As the mathematician Friedrich Gauß said, the zeal with which Humboldt helped and encouraged others was ‘one of the most wonderful jewels in Humboldt’s crown’. It also meant that Humboldt ruled over the destinies of scientists across the world. Becoming one of Humboldt’s protégés could make one’s career. It was even rumoured that he now controlled the outcome of elections at the Académie des Sciences in Paris, with candidates first auditioning at Humboldt’s Berlin apartment before they went to the Académie. A letter of recommendation from Humboldt could determine their future, and those who opposed him came to fear his sharp tongue. Humboldt had studied venomous snakes in South America ‘and learned a lot from them’, one young scientist claimed.

Despite the occasional sneer, Humboldt was mostly generous, and explorers, in particular, profited. He encouraged his old acquaintance and Darwin’s friend, the botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker, to travel to the Himalaya, and used his London contacts to convince the British government to finance the expedition – as well as equipping Hooker with copious instructions on what to measure, observe and collect. A few years later, in 1854, Humboldt helped three German brothers, Hermann, Rudolph and Adolf Schlagintweit – the ‘shamrock’, as he nicknamed them – to travel to India and the Himalaya where they were to study the earth’s magnetic fields. These explorers became Humboldt’s small army of researchers, providing the global data he needed to complete Cosmos. Although he had accepted that he was too old to see the Himalaya himself, his failure to climb those great mountains remained his greatest disappointment – ‘nothing in my life has filled me with a more intense regret.’

He also encouraged artists to travel to the remote corners of the globe, helping them to secure funding, suggesting routes and sometimes complaining when they failed to follow his recommendations. His instructions were exact and detailed. One German artist was equipped with a long list of plants that Humboldt had asked him to paint. He was to depict ‘real landscapes’, Humboldt wrote, rather than idealized scenes as artists had done for the past centuries. He even described where exactly the painter should position himself on a mountain in order to capture the best view.

He wrote hundreds of letters of recommendation. And whenever a letter of support from Humboldt arrived at its destination, the ‘business of deciphering’ began. His handwriting – impossible ‘microscopic-hieroglyphic lines’, as he himself admitted – had always been appalling but with age it deteriorated further. Letters were passed between friends, with each one decrypting another word, phrase or sentence. Even when magnifying glasses were applied to his tiny scrawl, it often took days to work out what Humboldt had written.

In return Humboldt received even more letters. In the mid-1850s, he estimated that 2,500 to 3,000 letters arrived each year. His apartment in Oranienburger Straße, he complained, had become a trading place for addresses. He didn’t mind the scientific letters but he was pestered by what he called his ‘ludicrous correspondence’ – midwives and schoolteachers who hoped for royal medals, for example, or autograph hunters and even a group of women who pursued his ‘conversion’ to their particular religious denomination. He received enquiries about hot-air balloons, requests for help with emigration and ‘offers to nurse me’.

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.