The Invention of Nature (7 page)

As he rushed from one learned centre in Europe to another, Humboldt’s letters exuded a breathless energy. ‘This is just the way I am, I do what I do, impetuously and briskly,’ he said. There was no one place where he could learn everything, and no one person could teach him everything.

Humboldtia laurifolia (Illustration Credit 3.1)

After about a year of frantic preparations, it dawned upon Humboldt that although his trunks were stuffed with equipment and his head was filled with the latest scientific knowledge, the political situation in Europe was making his dreams impossible. Much of Europe was embroiled in the French Revolutionary Wars. The execution of the French king, Louis XVI, in January 1793, had united the European nations against the French revolutionaries. In the years following the revolution, France had declared war on one country after another, in a roll-call that included among others Austria, Prussia, Spain, Portugal and Britain. Gains and losses were made on both sides, treaties signed and then overthrown, but by 1798 Napoleon had gained Belgium, the Rhineland from Prussia, the Austrian Netherlands and large parts of Italy for France. Wherever Humboldt turned, his movements were hampered by war and armies. Even Italy – with the tantalizing geological prospects of the volcanoes Mount Etna and Vesuvius – had, thanks to Napoleon, been closed off.

Humboldt needed to find a nation that would let him join a voyage, or which would at least grant him passage to their colonial possessions. He begged the British and the French for help, and then the Danes. He considered a voyage to the West Indies, but found his hopes dashed by the ongoing sea battles. Then he accepted an invitation to accompany the British Earl of Bristol to Egypt, even though the old aristocrat was known as being rather eccentric. But again these plans came to nothing when Bristol was arrested by the French, suspected of espionage.

At the end of April 1798, one and a half years after his mother’s death, Humboldt decided to visit Paris where Wilhelm and Caroline now lived. He hadn’t seen his brother for more than a year and turning his attention to the victorious French also seemed the most practical solution to his travel dilemma. In Paris he spent time with his brother and sister-in-law, but also wrote letters, contacted people, and cajoled, filling his notebooks with the addresses of countless scientists, as well as buying yet more books and instruments. ‘I live in the midst of science,’ Humboldt wrote excitedly. As he made his rounds, he met his boyhood hero, Louis Antoine de Bougainville, the explorer who had first set foot on Tahiti in 1768. At the grand old age of seventy, Bougainville was planning a voyage across the globe to the South Pole. Impressed by the young Prussian scientist, he invited Humboldt to join him.

Aimé Bonpland (Illustration Credit 3.2)

It was also in Paris that Humboldt first ran into a young French scientist, Aimé Bonpland, in the hallway of the house where both were renting a room. With a battered botany box – a vasculum – slung across his shoulder, Bonpland was obviously also interested in plants. He had been taught by the best French naturalists in Paris, and, as Humboldt learned, was a talented botanist, skilled in comparative anatomy, and had also served as a surgeon in the French navy. Born in La Rochelle, a port town on the Atlantic coast, the twenty-five-year-old Bonpland was from a naval family with a love for adventures and voyages in his blood. Bumping into each other regularly in the corridors of their accommodation, Bonpland and Humboldt began to talk and quickly discovered a mutual adoration for plants and foreign travels.

Like Humboldt, Bonpland was keen to see the world. Humboldt decided that Bonpland would be the perfect companion. Not only was he passionate about botany and the tropics, but he was also good-natured and charming. Stoutly built, Bonpland exuded a solid strength that promised resilience, good health and reliability. In many ways, he was Humboldt’s exact opposite. Where Humboldt spread frantic activity, Bonpland carried an air of calmness and docility. They were to make a great team.

In the midst of all the preparations, Humboldt now seemed to experience flashes of guilt about his late mother. There were rumours, Friedrich Schiller told Goethe, that ‘Alexander couldn’t get rid of the spirit of his mother’. Apparently she appeared to him all the time. A mutual acquaintance had told Schiller that Humboldt was participating in some dubious séances in Paris involving her. Humboldt had always been afflicted by a ‘great fear of ghosts’, as he had admitted to a friend a few years previously, but now it had got much worse. No matter how much he cast himself as a rational scientist, he felt his mother’s spirit watching his every move. It was time to escape.

The immediate problem, though, was that the command of Bougainville’s expedition was given to a younger man, Captain Nicolas Baudin. Though Humboldt received reassurances that he could join Baudin on his voyage, the whole expedition foundered due to a lack of government funds. Humboldt refused to give up. He now wondered if he could join the 200 scholars who accompanied Napoleon’s army which had left Toulon in May 1798 to invade Egypt. But how to get there? Few, Humboldt admitted, ‘have had greater difficulties’.

As the quest for a ship continued, Humboldt contacted the Swedish consul in Paris who promised to procure him a passage from Marseille to Algiers, on the North African coast, from where he could travel overland to Egypt. Humboldt also asked his London acquaintance, Joseph Banks, to obtain a passport for Bonpland in case they encountered an English warship. He was prepared for all eventualities. Humboldt himself travelled with a passport issued by the Prussian ambassador in Paris. Along with his name and age, the document gave a rather detailed, though not exactly objective, description stating that he had grey eyes, a large mouth, a big nose and a ‘well-formed chin’. Humboldt scribbled in the margins in jest: ‘large mouth, fat nose, but chin bien fait’.

At the end of October Humboldt and Bonpland rushed to Marseille ready to leave immediately. But nothing happened. For two months, day after day, they climbed the hill to the old church of Notre-Dame de la Garde to scan the harbour. Every time they saw the white glimmer of a sail on the horizon, their hopes rose. When news reached them that their promised frigate had been badly damaged in a storm, Humboldt decided to charter his own vessel but quickly discovered that regardless of all the money he had, the recent naval battles made it impossible to find a ship. Wherever he turned, ‘all hopes were shattered’, he wrote to an old friend in Berlin. He was exasperated – his pockets full of money and his mind brimming with the latest scientific knowledge, yet still not able to travel. War and politics, Humboldt said, stopped everything and ‘the world is closed’.

Finally, at the end of 1798, almost exactly two years after his mother’s death, Humboldt gave up on the French and travelled to Madrid to try his luck there. The Spanish were famous for their reluctance to let foreigners enter their territories, but with charm and a string of useful connections at the Spanish court, Humboldt managed to obtain the unlikely permission. In early May 1799 King Carlos IV of Spain provided a passport to the colonies in South America and the Philippines on the express condition that Humboldt financed the voyage himself. In return Humboldt promised to dispatch flora and fauna for the royal cabinet and garden. Never before had a foreigner been allowed such great freedom to explore their territories. Even the Spanish themselves were surprised by their king’s decision.

Humboldt had no intention of wasting any more time. Five days after they received their passports, Humboldt and Bonpland left Madrid for La Coruña, a port at the north-western tip of Spain, where the frigate Pizarro was waiting for them. In early June 1799 they were ready to sail despite warnings that British warships had been sighted nearby. Nothing – neither cannons, nor a fear of the enemy – could spoil the moment. ‘My head is dizzy with joy,’ Humboldt wrote.

He had bought a great collection of the latest instruments, ranging from telescopes and microscopes to a large pendulum clock and compasses – forty-two instruments in all, individually packed into protective velvet-lined boxes – along with vials for storing seeds and soil samples, reams of paper, scales and countless tools. ‘My mood was good,’ Humboldt noted in his diary, ‘just as it should be when beginning a great work.’

In the letters written on the eve of their departure, he explained his intentions. Like previous explorers, he would collect plants, seeds, rocks and animals. He would measure the height of mountains, determine longitude and latitude, and take temperatures of water and air. But the real purpose of the voyage, he said, was to discover how ‘all forces of nature are interlaced and interwoven’ – how organic and inorganic nature interacted. Man needs to strive for ‘the good and the great’, Humboldt wrote in his last letter from Spain, ‘the rest depends on destiny’.

Tenerife and Pico del Teide (Illustration Credit 3.3)

As they sailed towards the tropics, Humboldt grew increasingly excited. They caught and examined fish, jellyfish, seaweed and birds. He tested his instruments, took temperatures and measured the height of the sun. One night the water seemed to be on fire with phosphorescence. The whole sea, Humboldt noted in his diary, was like an ‘edible liquid full of organic particles’. After two weeks at sea, they briefly stopped at Tenerife, the largest of the Canary Islands. It was a rather unspectacular arrival at first as the whole island was shrouded in fog but when the thick mist lifted, Humboldt saw the sun illuminating the glistening white summit of the volcano Pico del Teide. He rushed to the bow of their ship, breathlessly catching a glimpse of the first mountain that he was going to climb outside Europe. With their ship scheduled to spend only a couple of days in Tenerife, there was not much time.

The next morning Humboldt, Bonpland and some local guides set off towards the volcano, without tents or coats, and armed only with some weak ‘fir torches’. It was hot in the valleys but the temperature dropped rapidly as they ascended the volcano. When they reached the peak at more than 12,000 feet, the wind was so strong they could hardly stand. Their faces were frozen but their feet were burning from the heat emanating from the hot ground. It was painful but Humboldt couldn’t care less. There was something in the air that created a ‘magical’ transparency, he said, an enticing promise of what was to come. He could hardly tear himself away but they had to get back to the ship.

Back on the Pizarro, the anchors were lifted and their journey continued. Humboldt was happy. His only complaint was that they were not allowed to light their lamps or candles at night for fear of attracting the enemy. For a man like Humboldt, who only needed a few hours’ sleep, it was torture having to lie in the dark without anything to read, dissect or investigate. The further south they sailed, the shorter the days became and soon he was out of work by six o’clock in the evening. So he observed the night sky and, as many other explorers and sailors who had crossed the Equator, Humboldt marvelled at the new stars that appeared – constellations that only graced the southern sky and that were a nightly reminder of how far he had travelled. When he first saw the Southern Cross, Humboldt realized that he had achieved the dreams of his ‘earliest youth’.

On 16 July 1799, forty-one days after they had left La Coruña in Spain, the coast of New Andalusia, today part of Venezuela, appeared on the horizon. Their first view of the New World was a voluptuous green belt of palms and banana groves that ran along the shore, beyond which Humboldt could make out tall mountains, their distant peaks peeping through layers of clouds. A mile inland and hugged by cacao trees lay Cumaná, a city founded by the Spanish in 1523, and almost destroyed by an earthquake in 1797, two years before Humboldt’s arrival. This was to be their home for the next few months. The sky was of the clearest blue and there was not a trace of mist in the air. The heat was intense and the light dazzling. The moment that Humboldt stepped off the boat, he plunged his thermometer into the white sand: 37.7°C, he scribbled in his notebook.

Cumaná was the capital of New Andalusia, a province within the Captaincy General of Venezuela – which itself was part of the Spanish colonial empire that stretched from California all the way to the southern tip of Chile. All of Spain’s colonies were controlled by the Spanish crown and Council of the Indies in Madrid. It was a system of absolute rule where the viceroys and captains-general reported directly to Spain. The colonies were forbidden to trade with each other without explicit permission. Communication was also closely controlled. Licences had to be granted to print books and newspapers, while local printing presses and manufacturing businesses were prohibited, and only those born in Spain were allowed to own shops or mines in the colonies.

When revolutions had spread through the British North American colonies and France in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the colonists in the Spanish Empire had been kept on a tight leash. They had to pay exorbitant taxes to Spain and were excluded from any government roles. All non-Spanish ships were treated as enemy and no one, not even a Spaniard, was allowed to enter the colonies without a warrant from the king. The result was growing resentment. With relations between the colonies and the mother country so tense, Humboldt knew that he would have to tread carefully. Despite his passport from the Spanish king, local administrators would be able to make his life extremely difficult. If he did not succeed in ‘inspiring some personal interest in those who govern’ the colonies, Humboldt was certain, he would face ‘numberless inconveniences’ during his time in the New World.

Two pages from Humboldt’s Spanish passport, including signatures of several administrators from across the colonies (Illustration Credit 3.4)

Yet, before presenting his paperwork to the governor of Cumaná, Humboldt soaked up the tropical scenery. Everything was so new and spectacular. Each bird, palm or wave ‘announced the grand aspect of nature’. It was the beginning of a new life, a period of five years in which Humboldt would change from a curious and talented young man into the most extraordinary scientist of his age. It was here that Humboldt would see nature with both head and heart.