The Invention of Nature

3

In Search of a Destination

AS HUMBOLDT TRAVELLED across the vast Prussian territory, inspecting mines and meeting scientific friends, he continued to dream of faraway countries. That longing never disappeared but he also knew that his mother, Marie Elisabeth von Humboldt, had never shown any patience with his adventurous dreams. She expected him to climb the ranks of the Prussian administration and he felt ‘chained’ to her wishes. All that changed when she died of cancer in November 1796 after battling the disease for more than a year.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, neither Wilhelm nor Alexander grieved much for their mother. She had always found fault in whatever her sons did, Wilhelm confided to his wife, Caroline. No matter how successfully they had completed their studies or excelled in their careers, she had never been satisfied. During her illness, Wilhelm had dutifully moved from Jena to Tegel and Berlin to look after her, but he had missed the intellectual stimulation in Jena. Oppressed by his mother’s dark presence, he couldn’t read, work or think. He felt paralysed, Wilhelm had written to Schiller. When Alexander briefly visited, he had left as soon as possible, leaving his brother in charge. After fifteen months Wilhelm had not been able to bear the vigil any longer and returned to Jena. Two weeks later their mother died, with neither son at her bedside.

The brothers did not attend her funeral. Other events seemed of greater importance; Alexander was more excited about the attention that his new miner’s lamps were receiving, along with his experiments in Galvanism. Four weeks after his mother’s death, Alexander was announcing his preparations for his ‘great voyage’. Having waited for years for the opportunity to control his own destiny, he finally felt unshackled at the age of twenty-seven. Her death didn’t affect him much, he confessed to his old friend from Freiberg, because they had been ‘strangers to each other’. Over the previous few years Humboldt had spent as little time as possible at the family home and whenever he left Tegel, he had been relieved. As one close friend wrote to Humboldt: ‘her death … must be particularly welcomed by you.’

Within a month Alexander had resigned as a mining inspector. Wilhelm waited a little longer but moved a few months later to Dresden and then to Paris where he and Caroline turned their new house into a salon for writers, artists and poets. Their mother’s death had left the brothers wealthy. Alexander had inherited almost 100,000 thalers. ‘I have so much money,’ he bragged, ‘that I can get my nose, mouth and ears gilded.’ He was rich enough to afford to go anywhere he liked. He had always lived relatively simply because he was not interested in luxuries – lavishly printed books, yes, or expensive new scientific instruments, but he had no interest in elegant clothing or fashionable furniture. An expedition, on the other hand, was something very different, and he was willing to spend a large part of his inheritance on it. He was so excited that he couldn’t decide where to go and mentioned so many possible destinations that no one knew what his plans were: he spoke of Lapland and Greece, then Hungary or Siberia, and maybe the West Indies or the Philippines.

The precise destination didn’t yet matter because first he wanted to prepare, and now did so with pedantic drive. He had to test (and buy) all the instruments he needed, as well as travel through Europe to learn everything he could about geology, botany, zoology and astronomy. His early publications and growing network of contacts opened the doors – and he had even had a new plant species named after him: Humboldtia laurifolia, a ‘splendid’ tree from India, he wrote to a friend, ‘isn’t that fabulous!!’

Over the next months he interviewed geologists in Freiberg and learned how to use his sextant in Dresden. He climbed the Alps to investigate mountains – so that he might later compare them, as he told Goethe – and, in Jena, he conducted more electrical experiments. In Vienna he examined tropical plants in the hothouses of the imperial garden, where he also tried to convince the young director, Joseph van der Schot, to accompany him on his expedition, declaring that their future together would be ‘sweet’. He spent a cold winter in Salzburg, Mozart’s birthplace, where he measured the height of the nearby Austrian Alps and tested his meteorological instruments, braving icy rains as he held his instruments in the air during storms to detect the electricity of the atmosphere. He read and reread all the travellers’ accounts he could get hold of, and pored over botanical books.

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.