The Invention of Nature

5

The Llanos and the Orinoco

AFTER THREE WEEKS of intense investigations at Lake Valencia and the surrounding valley, Humboldt finished his observations. It was time to turn south towards the Orinoco, but first they had to cross the Llanos. On 10 March 1800, almost exactly a month after leaving Caracas, Humboldt and his small team entered the bleak tussocky grassland of the Llanos.

The land was crusted in dust. The plains seemed to stretch out for ever and the horizon danced in the heat. They saw clumps of dried grass and palms but not much else. The relentless sun had baked the ground into a cracked hard surface. Sticking his thermometer in the ground, Humboldt recorded a temperature of 50ºC. Having left behind the densely populated Aragua Valley, Humboldt felt suddenly ‘plunged into a vast solitude’. Some days the air stood so still, he wrote in his journal, that ‘everything seems motionless’. With no clouds to shade them as they trekked across the hardened soil, they stuffed their hats with leaves as insulation against the burning heat. Humboldt wore loose-fitting trousers, a waistcoat and simple linen shirts. He had a coat for colder climates and always wore a soft white necktie. He had chosen the most comfortable European clothes available at the time – light and easily washable – but even dressed like this, he found it unbearably hot.

In the Llanos they encountered dust devils, and frequent mirages conjured up cruel promises of cool and refreshing water. Sometimes, they travelled during the night to avoid the scorching sun. They often went thirsty and hungry. One day they came across a small farm – nothing more than a solitary house with a few small huts around it. Covered in dust and burned by the sun, the men were desperate for a bath. With the landowner absent, the foreman pointed them to a nearby pool. The water was murky but at least a little cooler than the air. Excitedly, Humboldt and Bonpland stripped off their dirty clothes, but just as they stepped into the pool, an alligator that had been lying motionless on the opposite bank decided to join them. Within seconds the two men had jumped out and grabbed their clothes, running for their lives.

Humboldt and his team in the Llanos (Illustration Credit 5.1)

Although the Llanos might have been an inhospitable environment, Humboldt was enthralled by the vastness of the landscape. There was something about the flatness and its daunting size that ‘fills the mind with the feeling of infinity’, he wrote. Then, about halfway across the plains, they reached the small trading town of Calabozo. When locals told Humboldt that many of the shallow pools in the area were infested with electric eels, he couldn’t believe his luck. Since his experiments with animal electricity in Germany, Humboldt had always wanted to examine one of these extraordinary fish. He had heard strange tales about the five-foot-long creatures that could deliver electric shocks of more than 600 volts.

The problem was how to catch the eels given that they lived buried in the mud at the bottom of the pools and thus could not be easily netted. The eels were also so highly charged that touching them would mean instant death. The locals had an idea. They rounded up thirty wild horses in the Llanos and drove the herd into the pond. As the horses’ hooves churned up the mud, the eels wriggled up to the surface, giving off enormous electric shocks. Entranced, Humboldt watched the gruesome spectacle: the horses screamed in pain, the eels thrashed beneath their bellies, and the water’s surface boiled with movement. Some horses fell and, trampled by the others, drowned.

The battle between horses and electric eels (Illustration Credit 5.2)

Over time the strength of the electric shocks diminished and the weakened eels retreated into the mud from where Humboldt pulled them with dry wooden sticks – but he hadn’t waited long enough. When he and Bonpland dissected some of the animals, they endured violent shocks themselves. For four hours they conducted an array of dangerous tests including holding an eel with two hands, touching an eel with one hand and a bit of metal with the other, or Humboldt touching an eel while holding Bonpland’s hand (with Bonpland feeling the jolt). Sometimes they stood on dry ground, at others on wet; they attached electrodes, poked the eels with wet sticks of sealing wax and picked them up with wet clay and fibre cords made from palms – no material was left untested. Unsurprisingly, by the end of the day Humboldt and Bonpland felt sick and feeble.

The eels also made Humboldt think about electricity and magnetism in general. Watching the grisly encounter between eels and horses, Humboldt thought of the forces that, variously, created lightning, bound metal to metal and moved the needles of compasses. As so often, Humboldt started with a detail or an observation, and then spun out to the greater context. All ‘flow forth from one source’, he wrote, and ‘all melt together in an eternal, all-encompassing power’.

At the end of March 1800, almost two months after leaving Caracas, Humboldt and Bonpland finally reached the Capuchin mission in San Fernando de Apure at the Rio Apure. From here they would paddle east along the Rio Apure and through the rainforest to the Lower Orinoco – a distance of about a hundred miles as the crow flies, but more than double that length along the looping river bends. Once they reached the confluence of the Rio Apure and the Lower Orinoco, their intention was to travel south along the Orinoco and across the great Atures and Maipures rapids, deep into a region where few white men had ever gone. Here they hoped to find the Casiquiare, the fabled link between the great Amazon and Orinoco.

The boat they had acquired in San Fernando de Apure was launched into the Rio Apure on 30 March, heavily loaded with provisions for four weeks – not enough for the entire expedition, but all they could fit into the vessel. From the Capuchin monks they bought bananas, cassava roots, chickens and cacao as well as the pod-like fruits of the tamarind tree which they were told turned the river water into a refreshing lemonade. The rest of the food they would have to catch – fish, turtle eggs, birds and other game – and barter for more with the indigenous tribes with the alcohol they had packed.

Unlike most European explorers, Humboldt and Bonpland were not travelling with a large retinue: simply four locals to paddle and one pilot to steer their boat, their servant José from Cumaná and the brother-in-law of the provincial governor who had joined them. Humboldt didn’t mind the loneliness. Far from it, there was nothing here to interrupt study. Nature provided more than enough stimulation. And he had Bonpland as his scientific colleague and friend. The past few months had made them trusted travel companions. Humboldt’s instincts when he had met Bonpland in Paris had been correct. Bonpland was an excellent field botanist who didn’t seem to mind the hardships of their adventures, and who remained calm even in the most adverse situations. More importantly, no matter what happened, Bonpland was always cheerful, Humboldt said.

As they paddled along the Rio Apure and then the Orinoco a new world unfolded. From their boat they had the perfect view. Hundreds of large crocodiles basked on the river shore with their snouts open – many were fifteen feet long or more. Completely motionless, the crocodiles looked like tree trunks until they suddenly slid into the water. There were so many that there was hardly a moment when they didn’t see one. Their large, jagged tail scales reminded Humboldt of the dragons in his childhood books. Huge boa constrictors swam past their boat, but despite such dangers the men bathed every day in careful rotation, with one man washing while the others looked out for animals. Travelling along the river they also encountered great herds of capybaras, the world’s largest rodents, which lived in large family groups and paddled in the water like dogs. The capybaras looked like giant blunt-nosed guinea pigs, weighing around fifty kilograms or more. Even bigger were the pig-sized tapirs, shy and solitary animals that foraged for leaves with their fleshy snouts in the thickets along the riverside, and beautifully spotted jaguars that preyed on them. Some nights Humboldt could hear the snoring sounds of river dolphins against the perpetual background hum of insects. The men passed islands that were home to thousands of flamingos, white herons and pink-coloured spoonbills with their large spatula-shaped beaks.

A boat on the Orinoco (Illustration Credit 5.3)

They travelled during the day and camped on the sandy riverbanks at night – always placing their instruments and collections at the centre with their hammocks and several fires forming a protective circle around. If possible they fastened their hammocks to the trees or to the oars which they stuck upright into the ground. Finding wood dry enough for their fires in the dripping wet jungle was often difficult but an essential defence against jaguars and other animals.

The rainforest made for treacherous travelling. One night one of the Indian oarsmen woke to find a snake curled up under the animal skin on which he had been sleeping. On another the entire camp was woken by Bonpland’s sudden scream. Something furry and with sharp claws had landed on top of him with a heavy thump when he was fast asleep in his hammock. A jaguar, Bonpland thought, as he lay rigid with fear. But when Humboldt crept closer, he saw that it was only a tame cat from a nearby tribal settlement. Then, a couple of days later Humboldt almost walked into a jaguar hiding in the thick foliage. Terrified, Humboldt remembered what the guides had told him. Slowly, without running or moving his arms, he walked backwards away from the danger.

The animals weren’t the only hazard: on one occasion Humboldt was almost killed when he accidentally touched some curare. It was a deadly paralysing poison that he had collected from an indigenous tribe, and which had leaked from its container into his clothing. The tribes used it as arrow poison for their blowguns and Humboldt was fascinated by the curare’s potency. He was the first European to describe its preparation, but it also almost cost him his life. Had more poison seeped out, he would have suffered an agonizing death by suffocation as the curare paralysed the diaphragm and muscles.

Despite the danger, Humboldt was captivated by the jungle. At night he loved to listen to the monkeys’ choir, picking out the different contributions from the various species – ranging from the deafening bellows of the howler monkeys that ricocheted through the jungle across great distances to the soft almost ‘flute-like tones’ and ‘snorting grumblings’ of others. The forest teemed with life. There are ‘many voices proclaiming to us that all nature breathes’, Humboldt wrote. This, unlike the agricultural region around Lake Valencia, was a primeval world where ‘man did not disturb the course of nature’.

Here he could truly study animals that he had only seen as stuffed specimens in Europe’s natural history collections. They caught birds and monkeys which they kept in large wide-meshed reed baskets or chained to long ropes in the hope of sending them back to Europe. The titi monkeys were Humboldt’s favourites. Small with long tails and soft greyish fur, they had a white face that looked like a heart-shaped mask, Humboldt noted. They were beautiful and graceful in their movements, easily jumping from branch to branch which gave them their German name, Springaffe – jumping monkey. Titi monkeys were extremely difficult to catch alive. The only way, they discovered, was to kill a mother with a blowgun and a poisoned dart. The titi youngster would not let go of its mother even as she came crashing down the tree. Humboldt’s team had to be quick to catch and tear the young monkey away from its dead mother. One that they had captured was so clever that it always tried to grab at the engravings in Humboldt’s scientific books depicting grasshoppers and wasps. To Humboldt’s amazement the monkey seemed able to distinguish engravings that showed its favourite foods – such as the insects – while pictures of human and mammal skeletons didn’t interest the titi at all.

There was no better place to observe animals and plants. Humboldt had entered the most magnificent web of life on earth, a network of ‘active, organic powers’, as he later wrote. Enthralled, he pursued every thread. Everything bore witness to the power and the tenderness of nature, Humboldt wrote home with swagger, from the boa constrictor that can ‘swallow a horse’ to the tiny hummingbird balancing itself on a delicate blossom. This was a world pulsating with life, Humboldt said, a world in which ‘man is nothing’.

One night, when he was yet again woken by a piercing orchestra of animal screams, he unpeeled the chain of reaction. His Indian guides had told him that these outbreaks of noise were simply the animals worshipping the moon. Far from it, Humboldt thought, realizing that the cacophony was ‘a long-extended and ever-amplifying battle of the animals’. The jaguars were hunting in the night, chasing tapirs which escaped noisily through the dense undergrowth, which in turn scared the monkeys sleeping in the treetops above. As the monkeys then began to cry out, their clamour woke the birds and thus the whole animal world. Life stirred in every bush, in the cracked bark of trees and in the soil. The whole commotion, Humboldt said, was the result of ‘some contest’ in the depth of the rainforest.

Again and again during his travels, Humboldt witnessed these battles. Capybaras rushed from the water to escape the deadly jaws of the crocodiles only to run straight into the jaguars waiting for them at the edge of the jungle. It had been the same with the flying fish that he had observed on their sea voyage: as they had jumped out of the ocean away from the dolphins’ sharp teeth, they were caught mid-air by albatrosses. It was the absence of man, Humboldt noted, that allowed animals to prosper abundantly but it was a development that was ‘limited only by themselves’ – by their mutual pressure.

This was a web of life in a relentless and bloody battle, an idea that was very different from the prevailing view of nature as a well-oiled machine in which every animal and plant had a divinely allotted place. Carl Linnaeus, for example, had recognized the idea of a food chain when he talked of hawks feeding on small birds, small birds on spiders, spiders on dragonflies, dragonflies on hornets, and hornets on aphids – but he had regarded this chain as a harmonious balance. Each animal and plant had its God-given purpose and reproduced accordingly in just the right numbers to keep this balance stable in perpetuity.

Yet what Humboldt saw was no Eden. The ‘golden age has ceased’, he wrote. These animals feared each other and they fought for survival. And it wasn’t just the animals; he also noted how vigorous climbing plants were strangling huge trees in the jungle. Here it was not the ‘destructive hand of man’, he said, but the plants’ competition for light and nourishment that limited their lives and growth.

As Humboldt and Bonpland continued their journey up the Orinoco, their Indian crew often paddled for more than twelve hours in the sweltering heat. The current was strong and the river was almost two and a half miles wide. Then, three weeks after they had first launched their boat into the Rio Apure and after ten days on the Orinoco, the river narrowed. They were coming closer to the Atures and Maipures rapids. Here, more than 500 miles south of Caracas, the Orinoco forged through a mountain chain in a series of small river passages of around 150 yards wide, surrounded by huge granite boulders covered in dense forest. Over several miles the rapids descended in hundreds of rocky steps, the water roaring and whirling and throwing up a perpetual mist that hovered over the river. The rocks and islands were clothed in lush tropical plants. These were ‘majestic scenes of nature’, Humboldt wrote. Magical it was, but also dangerous.

One day a sudden gale almost capsized their boat. As one end of the canoe began to sink, Humboldt managed to grab his diary but books and dried plants were catapulted into the water. He was certain they were going to die. Knowing that the river was alive with crocodiles and snakes, everybody panicked – except for Bonpland who remained calm and began to bail out the water with some hollow gourds. ‘Do not worry, my friend,’ he said to Humboldt, ‘we’re going to be safe.’ Bonpland displayed ‘that coolness’, Humboldt later noted, that he always had in difficult situations. As it was, they lost only one book and were able to dry their plants and journals. Their pilot, though, was bemused about the white men – the ‘blancos’ as he called them – who seemed to worry more about their books and collections than their lives.

The greatest nuisance was the mosquitoes. No matter how fascinated Humboldt was by this strange world, it was impossible not to be distracted by the insects’ relentless attacks. The explorers tried everything but neither protective clothing and smoking helped, nor their constant waving of arms and palm leaves. Humboldt and Bonpland were bitten all the time. Their skin was swollen and itchy, and whenever they talked, they started to cough and sneeze because the mosquitoes were flying straight into their mouth and nostrils. It was torture to dissect a plant or observe the skies with their instruments. Humboldt wished that he had a ‘third hand’ to fend off the mosquitoes; he always felt that he had to drop either his sextant or a leaf.

Under permanent assault from the mosquitoes, Bonpland found it impossible to dry the plants out in the open, and took to using the native tribes’ so-called ‘hornitos’ – small window-less chambers that they used as ovens. He crept on all fours through a low opening into the hornito in which a small fire of wet branches and leaves created a great deal of smoke – fabulous against the mosquitoes but awful for Bonpland. Once inside, he closed the narrow entrance and spread out his plants. The heat was suffocating and the smoke almost unbearable but anything was better than being eaten alive by the mosquitoes. Their expedition was not exactly a ‘pleasure cruise’, Humboldt said.

During this part of the journey – deep in the rainforest and at the section of the Orinoco that runs along today’s Venezuelan–Colombian border – they saw few people. When they passed one mission, a missionary there, Father Bernardo Zea, was so excited to meet them that he offered to join them as a guide, which they happily accepted. Humboldt acquired a few more ‘team members’ including a stray mastiff, eight monkeys, seven parrots, a toucan, a macaw with purple feathers and several other birds. Humboldt called them his ‘travelling menagerie’. Their unsteady boat was small, and to make space for their animals as well as for their instruments and trunks, they built a platform of woven branches that extended out over the edge. Covered with a low thatched roof, it created extra space but was claustrophobic. Humboldt and Bonpland spent many days cooped up and lying flat on this extended platform with their legs exposed to vicious insects, rain or burning sun. It felt like being buried alive, Humboldt wrote in his diary. For a man as restless as him, it was agony.

As they went further, the forest came so close to the river that it was difficult to find any space for their nightly camps. They were running low on food and they filtered the fetid river water through linen cloth. They ate fish, turtle eggs and sometimes fruit, as well as smoked ants crushed up in cassava flour which Father Zea declared an excellent ant pâté. When they couldn’t find food they suppressed their hunger by eating small portions of dry cacao powder. For three weeks they paddled south on the Orinoco and then further south for another two weeks on a network of tributaries along the Rio Atabapo and Rio Negro. Then, as they reached the most southerly point of their river expedition, with their supplies at their lowest, they found huge nuts which they cracked open for their nutritious seeds – the magnificent Brazil nut that Humboldt subsequently introduced to Europe.

Brazil nut (Bertholletia excelsa) (Illustration Credit 5.4)

Though food was scarce, the floral riches abounded. Wherever they turned, there was something new, but collecting plants was more often than not frustrating. What they could pick up on the forest floor were trifles compared to the sculptural blossoms they could see swaying high above them in the canopy – tantalizingly close but too far away for them to reach. And what they could collect often disintegrated before their eyes in the humidity. Bonpland lost most of the specimens that he had so painfully dried in the hornitos. They heard birds they never saw and animals they couldn’t catch. They often failed to describe them properly. The scientists in Europe, Humboldt mused, would be disappointed. It was a shame, he wrote in his diary, that the monkeys didn’t open their mouths as their canoe passed them so that they could ‘count their teeth’.

Humboldt was interested in everything: the plants, the animals, the rocks and the water. Like a wine connoisseur, he sampled the water of the various different rivers. The Orinoco had a singular flavour that was particularly disgusting, he noted, while the Rio Apure tasted different at various locations and the Rio Atabapo was ‘delicious’. He observed the stars, described the landscape and was curious about the indigenous people they met and always wanted to learn more. He was fascinated by their worship of nature and thought them ‘excellent geographers’ because they could find their way even through the densest jungle. They were the best observers of nature he had ever encountered. They knew every plant and animal in the rainforest, and could distinguish trees by the taste of their bark alone – an experiment that Humboldt tried and failed miserably. All fifteen of the trees he sampled tasted exactly the same to him.

Unlike most Europeans, Humboldt did not regard the indigenous people as barbaric, but instead was captivated by their culture, beliefs and languages. In fact, he talked about the ‘barbarism of civilised man’ when he saw how the local people were treated by colonists and missionaries. When Humboldt returned to Europe, he brought with him a completely new portrayal of the so-called ‘savages’.

His only frustration came when the Indians failed to answer his many questions – questions that were often posed through a chain of interpreters, as one local language had to be translated into another, and then another until someone knew that language as well as Spanish. Often the content was lost in translation and the Indians would just smile and nod in affirmation. That was not what Humboldt wanted, accusing them of an ‘indolent indifference’, although he accepted that they must be ‘tired with our questions’. To these tribal societies, Humboldt said, Europeans must seem as if always in a rush and ‘chased by demons’.

One night, as the rain fell in torrents, Humboldt lay in his hammock fastened to palm trees in the jungle. The lianas and climbing plants formed a protective shield high above him. He looked up into what seemed like a natural trellis decorated with the long dangling orange blossoms of heliconias and other strangely shaped flowers. Their campfire lit up this natural vault, the light of the flames licking the palm trunks up to sixty feet high. The blossoms whirled in and out of these flickering illuminations, while the white smoke of the fire spiralled into the sky which remained invisible behind the foliage. It was bewitchingly beautiful, Humboldt said.

He had described the rapids of the Orinoco which were ‘illuminated by the rays of the setting sun’ as if a river made of mist were ‘suspended over its bed’. Though he always measured and recorded, Humboldt also wrote of how ‘coloured bows shine, vanish, and reappear’ at the great rapids and of the moon ‘encircled with coloured rings’. Later, he delighted in the dark river surface which during the day reflected like a perfect mirror the blossom-loaded plants of the riverbanks and at night the southern star constellations. No scientist had referred to nature like this before. ‘What speaks to the soul,’ Humboldt said, ‘escapes our measurements.’ This was not nature as a mechanistic system but a thrilling new world filled with wonder. Seeing South America with the eyes that Goethe had given him, Humboldt was enraptured.

Less pleasing was the news he received from the missionaries whom they met en route: apparently the fact that the Casiquiare connected the Amazon and the Orinoco had been well known in the region for several decades. The only thing left for Humboldt was to map the course of the river properly. On 11 May 1800 they finally found the entrance to the Casiquiare. The air was so saturated with humidity that Humboldt could see neither the sun nor the stars – without which he would not be able to determine the geographical position of the river, and hence his map would not be precise. But when their Indian guide predicted clear skies, they pressed on north-east. During the nights they tried to sleep in their hammocks along the riverbanks but found rest almost impossible. One night they were chased out by columns of ants marching up the ropes of their hammocks, and on others they were tormented by the mosquitoes.

As they paddled on, the vegetation grew denser. The embankment was like a living ‘palisade’, as Humboldt described it, green walls covered in leaves and lianas. Soon they couldn’t find a place to sleep at all any more, nor even get out of the canoe to go ashore. At least the weather was improving and Humboldt could take the necessary observations for his map. Then, ten days after they had first entered the Casiquiare, they reached the Orinoco again – the missionaries had been correct. It had not been necessary to travel all the way south to the Amazon, because Humboldt had proved that the Casiquiare was a natural waterway between the Orinoco and the Rio Negro. Since the Rio Negro was a tributary of the Amazon, it was clear that the two great river basins were indeed connected. And though Humboldt had not ‘discovered’ the Casiquiare, he had made a detailed map of the complex tributary system of these rivers. This map was a great improvement on all previous ones, which, he said, were as imaginary as if they ‘had been invented in Madrid’.

On 13 June 1800, having raced downstream towards the north and then east along the Orinoco for three more weeks, they arrived in Angostura (today’s Ciudad Bolívar), a small bustling town on the Orinoco, a little less than 250 miles south of Cumaná. After 1,400 miles and seventy-five days of gruelling river travelling, Angostura with its 6,000 inhabitants seemed like a metropolis to Humboldt and Bonpland. Even the humblest dwelling appeared magnificent and the smallest convenience became a luxury. They cleaned their clothes, sorted their collections and prepared for their ride back across the Llanos.

They had survived mosquitoes, jaguars, hunger and other dangers but, just as they thought the worst was over, Bonpland and Humboldt were suddenly struck down by a violent fever. Humboldt recovered quickly, but Bonpland was soon fighting for his life. When the fever slowly ebbed after two long weeks, it was replaced by dysentery. Embarking on the long journey across the Llanos in the middle of the rainy season would be too dangerous for Bonpland.

They waited a month in Angostura until Bonpland had regained enough strength for the journey to the coast from where they intended to catch a boat to Cuba and from there to Acapulco in Mexico. Once again their trunks were loaded on to mules, with cages of monkeys and parrots dangling off their sides. The new collections had added so much weight to their luggage that progress was now tediously slow. At the end of July 1800, they stepped out of the rainforest into the open space of the Llanos. After weeks in the dense jungle where the stars appeared as if viewed from the bottom of a well, it was a revelation. Humboldt felt a sense of freedom that made him want to gallop across the wide plains. The sensation of ‘seeing’ everything around him felt completely new. ‘Infinity of space, as poets have said in every language,’ Humboldt now mused, ‘is reflected in ourself.’

In the four months since they had first seen the Llanos, the rainy season had transformed the formerly bleak steppes into a partial seascape in which huge lakes and newly filled rivers were surrounded by carpets of fresh grass. But as the ‘air turned into water’, it was even hotter than it had been during their first crossing. The grasses and blooms spread their sweet fragrance across the expanse, jaguars hid in the high grass and thousands of birds sang in the early morning hours. The flatness of the Llanos was only interrupted by an occasional Mauritia palm. Tall and slender, these palms spread out their fingered fronds like huge fans. They were now loaded with shiny reddish edible fruits that reminded Humboldt of fir cones, and which seemed to possess a particular allure for their monkeys who stretched out to grab them through the bars of their cages. Humboldt had seen the palms already in the rainforest but here in the Llanos they had a unique function.

Mauritia palms (Mauritia flexuosa) (Illustration Credit 5.5)

‘We observed with astonishment,’ he reported, ‘how many things are connected with the existence of a single plant.’ The Mauritia fruits attracted birds, the leaves shielded the wind, and the soil that had blown in and accumulated behind the trunks retained more moisture than anywhere else in the Llanos, sheltering insects and worms. Just the sight of these palms, Humboldt thought, produced a feeling of ‘coolness’. This one tree, he said, ‘spreads life around it in the desert’. Humboldt had discovered the idea of a keystone species, a species that is as essential for an ecosystem as a keystone is to an arch, almost 200 years before the concept was named. For Humboldt the Mauritia palm was the ‘tree of life’ – the perfect symbol of nature as a living organism.