The Invention of Nature (16 page)

Humboldt was the first to relate colonialism to the devastation of the environment. Again and again, his thoughts returned to nature as a complex web of life but also to man’s place within it. At the Rio Apure, he had seen the devastation caused by the Spanish who had tried to control the annual flooding by building a dam. To make matters worse, they had also felled the trees that had held the riverbanks together like ‘a very tight wall’ with the result that the raging river carried more land away each year. On the high plateau of Mexico City, Humboldt had observed how a lake that fed the local irrigation system had shrunk into a shallow puddle, leaving the valleys beneath barren. Everywhere in the world, Humboldt said, water engineers were guilty of such short-sighted follies.

He debated nature, ecological issues, imperial power and politics in relation to each other. He criticized unjust land distribution, monocultures, violence against tribal groups and indigenous work conditions – all powerfully relevant issues today. As a former mining inspector, Humboldt had a unique insight into the environmental and economic consequences of the exploitation of nature’s riches. He questioned Mexico’s dependence on cash crops and mining, for example, because it bound the country to fluctuating international market prices. ‘The only capital,’ he said, that ‘increases with time, consists in the produce of agriculture’. All problems in the colonies, he was certain, were the result of the ‘imprudent activities of the Europeans’.

Jefferson had employed similar arguments. ‘I think our governments will remain virtuous for many centuries,’ he said, ‘as long as they are chiefly agricultural.’ He envisaged the opening of the American West as the rolling-out of a republic in which small independent farmers would become the foot-soldiers of the infant nation and the guardians of its liberty. The West, Jefferson believed, would assure the agricultural self-sufficiency of America, and thereby the future for ‘millions yet unborn’.

Jefferson himself was one of the most progressive farmers in the United States, experimenting with crop rotation, manure and new seed varieties. His library was filled with all the agricultural books he could purchase and he had even invented a new mouldboard for a plough (the wooden part that lifts and turns the sod). He was more enthusiastic about agricultural implements than about political events. When he ordered a model of a threshing machine from London, for example, he updated Madison like an excited child: ‘I expect every day to receive it’, ‘I have not yet received my threshing machine’, and it had at last ‘arrived at New York’. He tested new vegetables, crops and fruits at Monticello, using his fields and garden as an experimental laboratory. Jefferson believed that the ‘greatest service which can be rendered any country, is to add an useful plant to its culture’. From Italy he had smuggled upland rice in his coat pockets – under the threat of the death penalty – and he had tried to convince American farmers to plant sugar maple orchards in order to end the nation’s reliance on molasses from the British West Indies. In Monticello, he grew 330 varieties of 99 species of vegetables and herbs.

As long as a man had his own piece of land, Jefferson believed, he was independent. He had even argued that only farmers should be elected as congressmen because he regarded them as ‘the true representatives of the great American interest’, unlike the avaricious merchants who ‘have no country’. Factory workers, merchants and stockbrokers would never feel bound to their country like farmers who worked the soil. ‘The small landholders are the most precious part of a state,’ Jefferson insisted, and had written into his draft for the Virginia constitution that every free person was to be entitled to fifty acres of land (though he had failed to get this provision passed). His political ally, James Madison, argued that the greater the proportion of husbandmen ‘the more free, the more independent, and the more happy must be the society itself’. For both men agriculture was a republican endeavour and an act of nation-building. Ploughing fields, planting vegetables and devising crop rotation were occupations that brought self-sufficiency and therefore political freedom. Humboldt agreed because the small farmers whom he had met in South America had developed ‘the sentiment of liberty and independence’.

For all their agreement, there was one subject on which they differed: slavery. For Humboldt colonialism and slavery were basically one and the same, interwoven with man’s relationship to nature and the exploitation of natural resources. When the Spanish, but also the North American colonists, had introduced sugar, cotton, indigo and coffee to their territories, they had also brought slavery. In Cuba, for example, Humboldt had seen how ‘every drop of sugarcane juice cost blood and groans.’ Slavery arrived in the wake of what the Europeans ‘call their civilization’, Humboldt said, and their ‘thirst for wealth’.

Jefferson’s first childhood memory, reputedly, was of being carried on a pillow by a slave, and as an adult, his livelihood was founded on slave labour. Although he claimed to loathe slavery, he would free only a handful of the 200 slaves who toiled on his plantations in Virginia. Previously Jefferson had thought that small-scale farming might be the solution to ending slavery at Monticello. While still in Europe as the American Minister, he had met hard-working German farmers whom he believed to be ‘absolutely incorruptible by money’. He had considered settling them at Monticello ‘intermingled’ with his slaves on farms of fifty acres each. These industrious and honest Germans were for Jefferson the epitome of the virtuous farmer. The slaves would remain his property, but their children would be free and ‘good citizens’ by having been brought up in the proximity of the German farmers. The scheme was never implemented, and by the time Humboldt met him, Jefferson had abandoned all plans to free his slaves.

Slaves working on a plantation (Illustration Credit 8.3)

Humboldt, though, never grew tired of condemning what he called ‘the greatest evil’. During his visit to Washington he didn’t quite dare to criticize the President himself, but he told Jefferson’s friend and architect William Thornton that slavery was a ‘disgrace’. Of course the abolition of slavery would reduce the nation’s cotton production, he said, but public welfare could not be measured ‘according to the value of its exports’. Justice and freedom were more important than numbers and the wealth of a few.

That the British, French or Spanish could argue, as they did, over who treated their slaves with greater humanity, Humboldt said, was as absurd as discussing ‘if it was more pleasant to have one’s stomach slashed open or to be flayed’. Slavery was tyranny, and as he had travelled through Latin America Humboldt had filled his diary with descriptions of the wretched lives of slaves: one plantation owner in Caracas forced his slaves to eat their own excrement, he wrote, whereas another tortured his with needles. Wherever he had turned Humboldt had seen the scars of whips on the slaves’ backs. The indigenous Indians were not treated any better. In the missions along the Orinoco, for example, he had heard how children were abducted and sold as slaves. One particularly horrendous story involved a missionary who had bitten off his kitchen boy’s testicles as a punishment for kissing a girl.

There had been a few exceptions. As he had crossed Venezuela on his way to the Orinoco, Humboldt had been impressed by his host at Lake Valencia who had encouraged the progress of agriculture and the distribution of wealth by parcelling up his estate into small farms. Instead of running a huge plantation, he had given much of his land to impoverished families – some of them freed slaves, others peasants who were too poor to own them. These families now worked as free independent farmers; they were not rich but they could live off the land. Similarly, between Honda and Bogotá, Humboldt had seen small haciendas where fathers and sons worked together without slave labour, planting sugar but also edible plants for their own consumption. ‘I love to dwell on these details,’ Humboldt said, because they proved his point.

The institution of slavery was unnatural, Humboldt said, because ‘what is against nature, is unjust, bad and without validity.’ Unlike Jefferson, who believed that black people were a race ‘inferior to the whites in the endowment both of body and mind’, Humboldt insisted that there were no superior or inferior races. No matter what nationality, colour or religion, all humans came from one root. Much like plant families, Humboldt explained, which adapted differently to their geographical and climatic conditions but nonetheless displayed the traits of ‘a common type’, so did all the members of the human race belong to one family. All men were equal, Humboldt said, and no race was above another, because ‘all are alike designed for freedom’.

Nature was Humboldt’s teacher. And the greatest lesson that nature offered was that of freedom. ‘Nature is the domain of liberty,’ Humboldt said, because nature’s balance was created by diversity which might in turn be taken as a blueprint for political and moral truth. Everything, from the most unassuming moss or insect to elephants or towering oak trees, had its role, and together they made the whole. Humankind was just one small part. Nature itself was a republic of freedom.

1 In the previous year Napoleon had abandoned the idea of a French colony in North America when most of the 25,000 soldiers whom he had sent to Haiti to quash the slave rebellion there had died from malaria. Napoleon’s original plan had been to transfer his army from Haiti to New Orleans but in the wake of the disastrous campaign and with few men left, he abandoned the strategy – and sold the Louisiana Territory to the United States instead.

9

Europe

IN LATE JUNE 1804, Humboldt left the United States on the French frigate Favorite, and in August, a few weeks before his thirty-fifth birthday, he arrived in Paris to a hero’s welcome. He had been away for more than five years and returned with trunks filled with dozens of notebooks, hundreds of sketches and tens of thousands of astronomical, geological and meteorological observations. He brought back some 60,000 plant specimens, 6,000 species of which almost 2,000 were new to European botanists – a staggering figure, considering that there were only about 6,000 known species by the end of the eighteenth century. Humboldt had assembled more, he boasted, than anyone else.

‘How I long to be once more in Paris!’ Humboldt had written to a French scientist from Lima almost two years previously. But this Paris was different from the city that he had last seen in 1798. Humboldt had left a republic and found a nation ruled by a dictator on his return. After a coup d’état in November 1799, Napoleon had declared himself First Consul and with that had become the most powerful man in France. Then, just a few weeks before Humboldt’s arrival, Napoleon had announced that he would be crowned Emperor of France. The sound of tools ricocheted through the streets as the building works for Napoleon’s grand vision for Paris began. ‘I’m so new that I need to orientate myself first,’ Humboldt wrote to an old friend. Notre Dame Cathedral was being restored for Napoleon’s coronation in December and the city’s timber-framed medieval houses were razed to make room for public spaces, fountains and boulevards. A canal, one hundred kilometres long, was dug to bring fresh water to Paris and the Quai d’Orsay was constructed to prevent the Seine from flooding.

Most of the newspapers that Humboldt had known had been closed or were now run by editors loyal to the new regime, while caricatures of Napoleon and his reign were forbidden. Napoleon had established a new national police force as well as the Banque de France which regulated the nation’s money. His rule was centralized in Paris and he kept all aspects of national life under his tight control. The only thing that didn’t seem to have changed was that war still raged throughout Europe.

Humboldt on his return to Europe (Illustration Credit 9.1)

The reason why Humboldt had chosen Paris as his new home was simple – no other city was so deeply steeped in science. There was no other place in Europe where thinking was allowed to be so liberal and free. With the French Revolution the role of the Catholic Church had diminished, and scientists in France were no longer bound by religious canon and orthodox beliefs. They could experiment and speculate free from prejudice, questioning all and everything. Reason was the new religion, and money was flooding into the sciences. At the Jardin des Plantes, as the former Jardin du Roi was now known, new glasshouses had been built and the Natural History Museum was expanding with collections that had been pillaged from all over Europe by Napoleon’s army – herbaria, fossils, stuffed animals and even two live elephants from Holland. In Paris Humboldt found like-minded thinkers, along with engravers as well as scientific societies, institutions and salons. Paris was also Europe’s publishing centre. In short, it was the perfect place for Humboldt to share his new ideas with the world.

The city was buzzing with activity. It was a true metropolis with a population of around half a million, the second largest city in Europe after London. In the decade after the revolution, Paris had been plunged into destruction and austerity, but now frivolity and gaiety prevailed again. Women were addressed as ‘Madame’ or ‘Mademoiselle’ instead of ‘citoyenne’, and tens of thousands of exiled French were permitted to return home. There were cafés everywhere, and since the revolution the number of restaurants had burgeoned from one hundred to five hundred. Foreigners were often surprised how much of Parisian life happened outside. The whole population seemed to live in public ‘as if their houses are only built to sleep in’, the English Romantic poet Robert Southey said.

Along the banks of the Seine, near the small apartment that Humboldt rented in Saint-Germain, hundreds of washerwomen with rolled-up sleeves scrubbed their linen watched by those crossing the city’s many bridges. The streets were lined with stalls offering everything from oysters and grapes to furniture. Cobblers, knife grinders and pedlars offered their services noisily. Animals performed, jugglers played, and ‘philosophers’ lectured or perfected experiments. Here was an old man playing the harp, and there a small child beating the tambourine and a dog treading an organ. ‘Grimaciers’ contorted their faces into the most hideous shapes, while the smell of roasted chestnuts mingled with other less pleasurable scents. It was, one visitor said, as if the whole city were ‘devoted solely to enjoyment’. Even at midnight the streets were still full, with musicians, actors and conjurors entertaining the masses. The whole city, another tourist noted, seemed in ‘eternal agitation’.