The Invention of Nature (13 page)

That night Carlos Montúfar became so ill that Humboldt, who was sharing a bed with him, grew very worried. Throughout the night Humboldt rose repeatedly to fetch water and administer compresses. By the morning Montúfar had recovered enough to accompany Humboldt and Bonpland on their final ascent. They made it to almost 18,000 feet – even higher, Humboldt noted with glee, than two French scientists, Charles-Marie de la Condamine and Pierre Bouguer, who had come to this part of the Andes in the 1730s to measure the shape of the earth. They had only reached just under 15,000 feet.

Mountains held a spell over Humboldt. It wasn’t just the physical demands or the promise of new knowledge. There was also something more transcendental. Whenever he stood on a summit or a high ridge, he felt so moved by the scenery that his imagination carried him even higher. This imagination, he said, soothed the ‘deep wounds’ that pure ‘reason’ sometimes created.

1 From Cumaná, in November 1800, Humboldt had already sent two parcels of seeds to Banks for Kew Gardens, as well as some of his astronomical observations. And Banks continued to help Humboldt. Banks would later retrieve one of Humboldt’s boxes filled with rock specimens from the Andes from an English captain who had captured the French vessel.

2 The Spanish Empire in Latin America was divided into four viceroyalties and a few autonomous districts such as the Captaincy General of Venezuela. The Viceroyalty of New Granada encompassed much of the northern part of South America roughly covering today’s Panama, Ecuador and Colombia as well as parts of north-western Brazil, northern Peru and Costa Rica.

7

Chimborazo

FIVE MONTHS AFTER his arrival, Humboldt finally left Quito on 9 June 1802. He still intended to travel to Lima, even though Captain Baudin wouldn’t be there. From Lima Humboldt hoped to find passage to Mexico, which he also wanted to explore. First, though, he was going to climb Chimborazo – the crown of his obsession. This majestic inactive volcano – a ‘monstrous colossus’ as Humboldt described it – was about 100 miles to the south of Quito and rose to almost 21,000 feet.1

As Humboldt, Bonpland, Montúfar and José rode towards the volcano, they passed thick tropical vegetation. In the valleys they admired daturas with their large trumpet-shaped orange blossoms and bright red fuchsias with their almost unreal-looking sculptural petals. Then, as the men slowly ascended, these voluptuous blooms were replaced by open grass plains where herds of small llama-like vicuñas grazed. Then Chimborazo appeared on the horizon, standing alone on a high plateau, like a majestic dome. For several days as they approached, the mountain stood out against the vibrant blue of the sky with no cloud smudging its imposing outline. Whenever they stopped, an excited Humboldt took out his telescope. He saw a blanket of snow on the slopes, and the landscape around Chimborazo appeared barren and desolate. Thousands of boulders and rocks covered the ground, as far as he could see. It was an otherworldly scenery. By now Humboldt had climbed so many volcanoes that he was the most experienced mountaineer in the world but Chimborazo was a daunting prospect even to him. But what appeared unreachable, Humboldt later explained, ‘exerts a mysterious pull’.

On 22 June they arrived at the foot of the volcano where they spent a fitful night in a small village. Early the next morning, Humboldt’s team began the ascent together with a group of local porters. They crossed the grassy plains and slopes on mules until they reached an altitude of 13,500 feet. As the rocks became steeper, they left the animals behind and continued on foot. The weather was turning against them. It had snowed during the night and the air was cold. Unlike the previous days, the summit of Chimborazo was shrouded in fog. Once in a while the fog lifted, granting them a brief yet tantalizing glimpse of the peak. It would be a long day.

Snow-capped Chimborazo (Illustration Credit 7.1)

At 15,600 feet their porters refused to go on. Humboldt, Bonpland, Montúfar and José divided the instruments between them and continued on their own. The fog held Chimborazo’s summit in its embrace. Soon they were crawling on all fours along a high ridge that narrowed to a dangerous two inches with steep cliffs falling away to their left and right – fittingly the Spanish called this ridge the cuchilla, or ‘knife edge’. Humboldt looked determinedly ahead. It didn’t help that the cold had numbed their hands and feet, nor that the foot that he had injured during a previous climb had become infected. Every step was leaden at this height. Nauseous and dizzy with altitude sickness, their eyes bloodshot and their gums bleeding, they suffered from a constant vertigo which, Humboldt later admitted, ‘was very dangerous, given the situation we were in’. On Pichincha Humboldt’s altitude sickness had been so severe that he had fainted. Here on the cuchilla, it could be fatal.

Despite these difficulties, Humboldt still had the energy to set up his instruments every few hundred feet as they ascended. The icy wind had chilled the brass instruments and handling the delicate screws and levers with half-frozen hands was almost impossible. He plunged his thermometer into the ground, read the barometer and collected air samples to analyse its chemical components. He measured humidity and tested the boiling point of water at different altitudes. They also kicked boulders down the precipitous slopes to test how far they would roll.

After an hour of treacherous climbing, the ridge became a little less steep but now sharp rocks tore their shoes and their feet began to bleed. Then, suddenly, the fog lifted, revealing Chimborazo’s white peak glinting in the sun, a little over 1,000 feet above them – but they also saw that their narrow ridge had ended. Instead, they were confronted by the mouth of a huge crevasse which opened in front of them. To get around it would have involved walking across a field of deep snow but by now it was 1 p.m. and the sun had melted the icy crust that covered the snow. When Montúfar gingerly tried to tread on it, he sank so deeply that he completely disappeared. There was no way to cross. As they paused, Humboldt took out the barometer again and measured their altitude at 19,413 feet. Though they wouldn’t make it to the summit, it still felt like being on the top of the world. No one had ever come this high – not even the early balloonists in Europe.

Looking down Chimborazo’s slopes and the mountain ranges in the distance, everything that Humboldt had seen in the previous years came together. His brother Wilhelm had long believed that Alexander’s mind was made ‘to connect ideas, to detect chains of things’. As he stood that day on Chimborazo, Humboldt absorbed what lay in front of him while his mind reached back to all the plants, rock formations and measurements that he had seen and taken on the slopes of the Alps, the Pyrenees and in Tenerife. Everything that he had ever observed fell into place. Nature, Humboldt realized, was a web of life and a global force. He was, a colleague later said, the first to understand that everything was interwoven as with ‘a thousand threads’. This new idea of nature was to change the way people understood the world.

Humboldt was struck by this ‘resemblance which we trace in climates the most distant from each other’. Here in the Andes, for example, grew a moss that reminded him of a species from the forests in northern Germany, thousands of miles away. On the mountains near Caracas he had examined rhododendron-like plants – alpine rose trees, as he called them – which were like those from the Swiss Alps. Later, in Mexico, he would find pines, cypresses and oaks that were similar to those that grew in Canada. Alpine plants could be found on the mountains of Switzerland, in Lapland and here in the Andes. Everything was connected.

For Humboldt, the days they had spent travelling from Quito and then climbing up Chimborazo had been like a botanical journey that moved from the Equator towards the poles – with the whole plant world seemingly layered on top of each other as the vegetation zones ascended the mountain. The plant groups ranged from the tropical species down in the valleys to the lichens that he had encountered near the snow line. Towards the end of his life, Humboldt often talked about understanding nature from ‘a higher point of view’ from which those connections could be seen; the moment when he had realized this was here, on Chimborazo. With ‘a single glance’, he saw the whole of nature laid out before him.

When they returned from Chimborazo, Humboldt was ready to formulate his new vision of nature. In the Andean foothills, he began to sketch his so-called Naturgemälde – an untranslatable German term that can mean a ‘painting of nature’ but which also implies a sense of unity or wholeness. It was, as Humboldt later explained, a ‘microcosm on one page’. Unlike the scientists who had previously classified the natural world into tight taxonomic units along a strict hierarchy, filling endless tables with categories, Humboldt now produced a drawing.

‘Nature is a living whole,’ he later said, not a ‘dead aggregate’. One single life had been poured over stones, plants, animals and humankind. It was this ‘universal profusion with which life is everywhere distributed’ that most impressed Humboldt. Even the atmosphere carried the kernels of future life – pollen, insect eggs and seeds. Life was everywhere and those ‘organic powers are incessantly at work’, he wrote. Humboldt was not so much interested in finding new isolated facts but in connecting them. Individual phenomena were only important ‘in their relation to the whole’, he explained.

Depicting Chimborazo in cross-section, the Naturgemälde strikingly illustrated nature as a web in which everything was connected. On it, Humboldt showed plants distributed according to their altitudes, ranging from subterranean mushroom species to the lichens that grew just below the snow line. At the foot of the mountain was the tropical zone of palms and, further up, the oaks and fern-like shrubs that preferred a more temperate climate. Every plant was placed on the mountain precisely where Humboldt had found them.

Humboldt’s first sketch of the Naturgemälde (Illustration Credit 7.2)

Humboldt produced his first sketch of the Naturgemälde in South America and then published it later as a beautiful three-foot by two-foot drawing. To the left and right of the mountain he placed several columns that provided related details and information. By picking a particular height of the mountain (as given in the left-hand column), one could trace connections across the table and the drawing of the mountain to learn about temperature, say, or humidity or atmospheric pressure, as well as what species of animals and plants could be found at different altitudes. Humboldt showed different zones of plants, along with details of how they were linked to changes in altitude, temperature and so on. All this information could then be linked to the other major mountains across the world, which were listed according to their height next to the outline of Chimborazo.

This variety and richness, but also the simplicity of the scientific information depicted, was unprecedented. No one before Humboldt had presented such data visually. The Naturgemälde showed for the first time that nature was a global force with corresponding climate zones across continents. Humboldt saw ‘unity in variety’. Instead of placing plants in their taxonomic categories, he saw vegetation through the lens of climate and location: a radically new idea that still shapes our understanding of ecosystems today.

From Chimborazo they travelled 1,000 miles south to Lima. Humboldt was interested in everything, from plants and animals to Inca architecture. Throughout his travels across Latin America, Humboldt would often be impressed by the accomplishments of the ancient civilizations. He transcribed manuscripts, sketched Inca monuments and collected vocabularies. The indigenous languages, Humboldt said, were so sophisticated that there wasn’t a single European book that could not be translated into any one of them. They even had words for abstract concepts such as ‘future, eternity, existence’. Just south of Chimborazo, he visited an indigenous tribe who possessed some ancient manuscripts that described volcano eruptions. Luckily, there was also a Spanish translation which he copied into his notebooks.

As they continued, Humboldt also investigated the cinchona forests in Loja (in today’s Ecuador) and once again recognized how humankind devastated the environment. The bark of the cinchona tree contains quinine which was used to treat malaria, but once the bark was removed, the trees died. The Spanish had stripped huge swathes of wild forest. Older and thicker trees, Humboldt noted, had now become scarce.

Humboldt’s enquiring mind seemed inexhaustible. He studied layers of rocks, climate patterns and the ruins of Inca temples, and was also fascinated with geomagnetism – the study of the magnetic fields of the earth. As they climbed across mountain chains and descended into valleys, he set up his instruments. Humboldt’s curiosity originated in his urge to understand nature globally, as a network of forces and interrelationships – just as he had been interested in vegetation zones across continents and the occurrences of earthquakes. Since the seventeenth century scientists had known that the earth is itself a gigantic magnet. They also knew that the needle of a compass doesn’t show the true north, because the magnetic North Pole is not the same as the geographic North Pole. To make matters even more confusing, the magnetic north and south move, which caused great navigational problems. What scientists didn’t know was whether the intensity of magnetic fields across the world varied randomly, or systematically, from location to location.

As Humboldt had moved south along the Andes from Bogotà to Quito, coming closer to the Equator, he had measured how the earth’s magnetic field decreased. To his surprise, even after they had crossed the Equator near Quito the intensity of the magnetic field had continued to drop, until they reached the barren Cajamarca Plateau in Peru which was more than 7 degrees and about 500 miles south of the geographic Equator. It was only here that the needle turned from north to south: Humboldt had discovered the magnetic equator.

They arrived in Lima at the end of October 1802, four and a half months after they had departed from Quito and more than three years after they had left Europe. Here they found passage to sail north to Guayaquil on the west coast of today’s Ecuador from where Humboldt intended to travel to Acapulco in Mexico. As they sailed from Lima towards Guayaquil, Humboldt examined the cold current that hugs the western coast of South America from southern Chile to northern Peru. The current’s cold, nutrient-loaded water supports such abundance of marine life that it is the world’s most productive marine ecosystem. Years later, it would be called the Humboldt Current. And though Humboldt was flattered to have it named after him, he also protested. The fishing boys along the coast had known of the current for centuries, Humboldt said, all he had done was to have been the first to measure it and to discover that it was cold.