The Invention of Nature (32 page)

From Miass they continued west to Orenburg where Humboldt once again decided to deviate from their route. Instead of turning north-west towards Moscow and then St Petersburg, he now went south to the Caspian Sea – another lengthy unauthorized detour. As a young boy he had dreamed of travelling to the Caspian Sea, he wrote to Cancrin on the morning of his departure. He had to see this huge inland sea before it was too late for him.

It was probably the news of Russia’s victory against the Ottomans that encouraged Humboldt to change his plans. Cancrin had kept Humboldt up to date throughout by express courier. Over the past months, Russian soldiers had marched towards Constantinople from both sides of the Black Sea, defeating the Ottoman army time and again. As more Turkish strongholds fell, Sultan Mahmud II had realized that victory was on Russia’s side. On 14 September the Treaty of Adrianople was signed and the war ended – an enormous region that had been inaccessible and too dangerous for Humboldt opened up. Only ten days later Humboldt informed his brother that they would now travel to Astrakhan on the banks of the Volga, where the great river discharged into the northern end of the Caspian Sea. The ‘peace outside the gates of Constantinople’, Humboldt wrote to Cancrin, was ‘glorious’ news.

In mid-October, they reached Astrakhan and boarded a steamer to explore the Caspian Sea and the Volga. The Caspian Sea was known for its fluctuating water levels – a fact that fascinated Humboldt much as he had been intrigued three decades previously by Lake Valencia in Venezuela. He was convinced, he later told scientists in St Petersburg, that measuring stations should be set up around the lake to record the water’s rise and fall methodically but also to investigate a possible movement of the ground; volcanoes and other subterraneous forces might be the reason for the changes, he suggested. Later he speculated that the Caspian Depression – the region around the northern part of the Caspian Sea, which lay more than ninety feet below sea level – might have sunk in tandem with the rising of the high plateaux in Central Asia and the Himalaya.

Today we know that there are multiple reasons for the changing water levels. One factor is the amount of water coming in from the Volga which is tied to the rainfall of a huge catchment region – all of which in turn relates to the atmospheric conditions of the North Atlantic. Many scientists now believe that these fluctuations reflect climatic changes in the northern hemisphere, making the Caspian Sea an important field of study for climate change investigations. Other theories claim that the water levels are affected by tectonic forces. These are exactly the kinds of global connections that interested Humboldt. To see the Caspian Sea, Humboldt wrote to Wilhelm, was one of the ‘highlights of my life’.

It was now the end of October and the Russian winter was almost upon them. Humboldt was expected first in Moscow and then in St Petersburg to report on his expedition. He was happy. He had seen deep mines and snow-capped mountains as well as the largest dry steppe in the world and the Caspian Sea. He had drunk tea with the Chinese commanders at the Mongolian border as well as fermented mare’s milk with the Kyrgyz. Between Astrakhan and Volgograd, the learned khan of the Kalmyk people had organized a concert in Humboldt’s honour during which a Kalmyk choir sang Mozart overtures. Humboldt had watched Saiga antelopes chasing across the Kazakh Steppe, snakes sunbathing on a Volga island and a naked Indian fakir in Astrakhan. He had correctly predicted the presence of diamonds in Siberia, had against his instructions talked to political exiles and had even met a Polish man who had been deported to Orenburg and who proudly showed Humboldt his copy of Political Essay of New Spain. During the previous months Humboldt had survived an anthrax epidemic and had lost weight because he found the Siberian food indigestible. He had plunged his thermometer into deep wells, carried his instruments across the Russian Empire and taken thousands of measurements. He and his team returned with rocks, pressed plants, fish in vials and stuffed animals as well as ancient manuscripts and books for Wilhelm.

As before, Humboldt was not just interested in botany, zoology or geology but also in agriculture and forestry. Noting the rapid disappearance of the forests around the mining centres, he had written to Cancrin about the ‘lack of timber’ and advised him against using steam engines to drain flooded mines because doing so would consume too many trees. In the Baraba Steppe, where the anthrax epidemic had raged, Humboldt had noted the environmental impact of intense husbandry. The region was (and is) an important agricultural centre of Siberia, and the farmers there had drained swamps and lakes to turn the land into fields and pastures. This had caused a considerable desiccation of the marshy plains which would continue to increase, Humboldt concluded.

Humboldt was searching for the ‘connections which linked all phenomena and all forces of nature’. Russia was the final chapter in his understanding of nature – he consolidated, confirmed and set into relation all the data he had collected over the past decades. Comparison not discovery was his guiding theme. Later, when he published the results of the Russian expedition in two books,2 Humboldt wrote about the destruction of forests and of humankind’s long-term changes to the environment. When he listed the three ways in which the human species was affecting the climate, he named deforestation, ruthless irrigation and, perhaps most prophetically, the ‘great masses of steam and gas’ produced in the industrial centres. No one but Humboldt had looked at the relationship between humankind and nature like this before.3

Humboldt finally arrived back in St Petersburg on 13 November 1829. His endurance had been astonishing. Since their departure from St Petersburg on 20 May, his party had travelled 10,000 miles in less than six months, passing through 658 post stations and using 12,244 horses. Humboldt felt healthier than ever, strengthened by being outdoors for so long and by the excitement of their adventures. Everybody wanted to hear about his expedition. He had already suffered a similar spectacle in Moscow a few days earlier when half the city seemed to have turned up to meet him, dressed in gala uniforms and decorated in ribbons. In both cities parties were held in his honour and speeches were given, hailing him as the ‘Prometheus of our days’. No one seemed to mind that he had deviated from his original route.

These formal receptions irritated Humboldt. Rather than talking about his climate observations and geological investigations, he found himself forced to admire a plait made of Peter the Great’s hair. Whereas the royal family wanted to learn more about the spectacular discovery of diamonds, the Russian scientists were keen to see his collections. And so it continued with Humboldt being handed on from one person to another. No matter how much he disliked these moments, he remained charming and patient. The Russian poet Alexander Pushkin was smitten by Humboldt. ‘Captivating speeches gushed from his mouth,’ Pushkin said, much like the water spouting from the marble lion in the fountain of the Grand Cascade in the royal palace in St Petersburg. In private Humboldt complained about the ceremonial pomp. ‘I’m almost collapsing under the burden of duties,’ he wrote to Wilhelm, but he also tried to exploit some of his fame and influence. Though he had refrained from publicly criticizing the conditions of the peasants and labourers, he now asked the tsar to pardon some of the deported people he had met during his travels.

The Imperial Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg (Illustration Credit 16.3)

Humboldt also delivered a speech at the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg that would trigger a huge international scientific collaboration. For decades Humboldt had been interested in geomagnetism – just as he was in climate – because it was a global force. Determined to learn more about what he called the ‘mysterious march of the magnetic needle’, Humboldt now suggested the establishment of a chain of observation stations across the Russian Empire. The aim was to discover whether the magnetic variations were terrestrial in origin – generated, for example, by climatic changes – or caused by the sun. Geomagnetism was a key phenomenon in order to understand the correlation between the heavens and the earth because it could ‘reveal to us’, Humboldt said, ‘what passes at great depths in the interior of our planet or in the upper regions of our atmosphere’. Humboldt had long investigated the phenomenon. In the Andes he had discovered the magnetic equator, and during his enforced stay in Berlin in 1806, when the French army in Prussia had prevented his return to Paris, he and a colleague had made magnetic observations every hour on the hour – day and night – an experiment that he had then repeated on his return in 1827. After his expedition in Russia, Humboldt also recommended that his fellow Germans, along with the British, French and American authorities, should all work together to collect more global data. He appealed to them as the members of a ‘great confederation’.

Within a few years a web of magnetic stations laced the globe: at St Petersburg, Beijing and Alaska, Canada and Jamaica, Australia and New Zealand, Sri Lanka and even the remote island of St Helena in the South Atlantic where Napoleon had been incarcerated. Almost two million observations would be taken in three years. Like today’s climate change scientists, those who worked at these new stations were collecting global data, participating in what we would now call a Big Science Project. This was an international collaboration on a vast scale – the so-called ‘Magnetic Crusade’.

Humboldt also used his St Petersburg speech to encourage climate studies across the vast Russian Empire. He wanted data related to the effects of the destruction of forests on the climate – the first large-scale study to investigate the impact that man had on climatic conditions. It was the duty of scientists, Humboldt said, to examine the changeable elements in the ‘economy of nature’.

Two weeks later, on 15 December, Humboldt departed from St Petersburg. Before he left, he returned one-third of the money he had been given for expenses, asking Cancrin to use it to fund another explorer – the acquisition of knowledge was more important than his personal financial gain. His carriages were filled with the collections he had made for the Prussian king – so loaded with specimens that they were a ‘natural history cabinet’ on wheels, Humboldt said. Packed in between were his instruments, his notebooks and an opulent seven-foot vase on a plinth that the tsar had given him along with an expensive sable fur.4

It was freezing cold as they raced towards Berlin. Near Riga, Humboldt’s coachman lost control on a treacherously icy road and the carriage crashed full speed into a bridge. When the impact broke the railing, one of their horses fell into the river eight feet below, pulling his freight along. One side of the carriage was completely shattered. Humboldt and the other passengers were catapulted out, landing just four inches from the edge of the bridge. Amazingly only the horse was injured but the carriage was so damaged that the repairs delayed them for a few days. Humboldt was still excited. Dangling close to the edge, they must have looked rather ‘picturesque’, he mused. He also joked that with three learned men in the carriage, they had of course come up with a great many ‘contradictory theories’ about the causes of the crash. They spent Christmas in Königsberg (today’s Kaliningrad) and on 28 December 1829 Humboldt arrived in Berlin, fizzing with so many ideas that he was ‘steaming like a pot full of boiling water’, a friend reported to Goethe.

This was Humboldt’s last expedition. He would not travel the world any more himself, but his views on nature were already spreading through the minds of thinkers in Europe and America with seemingly unstoppable force.

1 The Kazakh Steppe is the largest dry steppe in the world, stretching from the Altai mountain range in the east to the Caspian Sea in the west.

2 The two books were Fragmens de géologie et de climatologie asiatiques (1831) and Asie centrale, recherches sur les chaînes de montagnes et la climatogie comparée (1843).

3 Humboldt’s views were so new and different from what was generally believed at the time that even his translator questioned the arguments. The translator added a footnote in the German edition which stated that the influence of deforestation as presented by Humboldt was ‘questionable’.

4 Humboldt gave the vase to the Altes Museum in Berlin. Today it is in the Alte Nationalgalerie.

17

Evolution and Nature

Charles Darwin and Humboldt

HMS BEAGLE WAS riding the valleys and crests of the waves with relentless regularity as the wind ruffled the swelling canvas of the sails. The ship had left Portsmouth on the south coast of England four days previously, on 27 December 1831, on a voyage across the globe to survey coastlines and measure the exact geographical positions of ports. On board was twenty-two-year-old Charles Darwin who felt ‘wretchedly out of spirits’. This was not how he had envisaged his adventure. Instead of standing on deck and watching the wild sea as they crossed the Bay of Biscay towards Madeira, Darwin was feeling more miserable than he ever had before. He was so seasick that the only way to bear it was to hide out in his cabin, eat dry biscuits and remain horizontal.

The small poop cabin that he shared with two crew members was so crammed that his hammock was strung above the table where the officers worked on sea charts. The cabin was about ten by ten feet, lined with bookshelves, lockers and a chest of drawers along the walls and the large surveying table in the middle. At around six feet tall, Darwin didn’t have the headroom to stand. Cutting through the midst of the small space was the ship’s mizzenmast like a large column next to the table. To move around in the cabin the men had to clamber over the bulky wooden beams of the ship’s steering gear which crossed the floors. There was no window, only a skylight through which Darwin watched the moon and the stars as he lay in his hammock.

On the small shelf next to his hammock were Darwin’s most precious possessions: the books that he had carefully chosen to accompany him. He had a number of botanical and zoological volumes, a brand-new Spanish–English dictionary, several travel accounts written by explorers and the first volume of Charles Lyell’s revolutionary Principles of Geology which had been published the previous year. Next to it was Alexander von Humboldt’s Personal Narrative, the seven-volume account of the Latin American expedition and the reason why Darwin was on the Beagle.1 ‘My admiration of his famous personal narrative (part of which I almost know by heart),’ Darwin said, ‘determined me to travel in distant countries, and led me to volunteer as naturalist in her Majesty’s ship Beagle.’