The Invention of Nature

6

Across the Andes

AFTER SIX MONTHS of strenuous travel in the rainforest and the Llanos, Humboldt and Bonpland returned to Cumaná in late August 1800. They were exhausted but as soon as they had recovered and sorted their collections, they left again. In late November they sailed north for Cuba where they arrived in mid-December. Then, one morning in Havana in early 1801, Humboldt opened the newspapers just as they were preparing to leave for Mexico and read an article that made him change his plans. The newspaper reported that Captain Nicolas Baudin, whose expedition he had tried to join three years earlier in France, was sailing around the world after all. Back in 1798, when Humboldt had tried to find a passage out of Europe, the French government had not been able to finance the voyage but now, so Humboldt read, Baudin had been equipped with two ships – the Géographe and Naturaliste – and was on his way to South America from where he would sail across the South Pacific to Australia.

The most obvious route would be for Baudin to stop in Lima, Humboldt guessed, and calculated that if all went to plan the Géographe and Naturaliste would probably arrive there by the end of 1801. The timing would be tight, but Humboldt now decided to try to join Baudin in Peru and then to continue with him on to Australia instead of going to Mexico. Of course Humboldt had no way of letting Baudin know where and when to rendezvous, nor did he know if the captain was even going to sail via Lima or whether there was any space on the ship for two extra scientists. But the more obstacles that were thrown into his path, ‘the more I hastened their executions’.

To ensure the safety of their collections and to avoid carrying them across the globe, Humboldt and Bonpland now began frantically to make copies of their notes and manuscripts. They sorted and packed up everything they had hoarded over the past one and a half years to send to Europe. ‘It was very uncertain, almost improbable’, Humboldt wrote to a friend in Berlin, that he and Bonpland would survive a voyage around the globe. It made sense to get at least some of their treasures to Europe. All they retained was a small herbarium – a book filled with pressed plant specimens – so that they could compare any new species they found. A larger herbarium would remain in Havana for their return.

With the European nations still at war, sea voyages remained perilous and Humboldt feared that his valuable specimens might be captured by one of the many enemy vessels. To spread the risk, Bonpland suggested splitting the collection. One large delivery was dispatched to France, and another to Germany via England with instructions that if seized by the enemy it was to be forwarded on to Joseph Banks in London. Since his return from Cook’s Endeavour voyage, thirty years previously, Banks had set up such a wide-ranging and global plant-collecting network that sea captains from all nations knew his name. Banks had also always tried to help French scientists by providing them with passports, despite the Napoleonic Wars, in the belief that the international community of scientists transcended war and national interests. ‘The science of two Nations may be at Peace,’ he said, ‘while their Politics are at war.’ Humboldt’s specimens would be safe with Banks.¹

Humboldt dispatched letters home, assuring his friends and family that he was happy and healthier than ever before. He described their adventures in detail, from the dangers of jaguars and snakes to the glorious tropical landscapes and strange blossoms. Humboldt was unable to resist ending a letter to the wife of one of his closest friends with: ‘and you, dearest, how is your monotonous life?’

Once the letters were posted and the collections dispatched, Humboldt and Bonpland sailed in mid-March 1801 from Cuba to Cartagena on the northern coast of New Granada² (now Colombia). They arrived two weeks later, on 30 March. Once again, though, Humboldt added a detour – not only would he try to reach Lima by the end of December to meet Baudin’s expedition, but he would do so overland rather than by taking the easier sea route. On the way, Humboldt and Bonpland would cross, climb and investigate the Andes – the chain of mountains that runs from north to south in several spines along the length of South America, some 4,500 miles from Venezuela and Colombia in the north all the way down to Tierra del Fuego. It was the longest mountain range in the world and Humboldt wanted to climb Chimborazo, a beautiful snow-capped volcano south of Quito, in today’s Ecuador. At almost 21,000 feet, Chimborazo was believed to be the highest mountain in the world.

This journey of around 2,500 miles from Cartagena to Lima would take the men through some of the harshest landscapes imaginable, pushing them to their physical limits. The lure was that they would travel through regions where no scientist had ever been before. ‘When one is young and active’, Humboldt said, it was easy not to think too much about the uncertainties and perils involved. If they wanted to meet Baudin in Lima, they had less than nine months. First they would travel from Cartagena along the Río Magdalena towards Bogotá – today’s capital of Colombia – from where they would march through the Andes to Quito and then further south all the way to Lima. But ‘all difficulties,’ Humboldt told himself, ‘could be conquered with energy.’

On their way south, Humboldt also wanted to meet the celebrated Spanish botanist José Celestino Mutis, who lived in Bogotá. The sixty-nine-year-old Mutis had arrived from Spain four decades earlier and had led many expeditions through the region. No other botanist knew so much about South American flora, and in Bogotá Humboldt hoped to compare his collections with those that Mutis had accumulated during his long career. Though he had heard that Mutis could be difficult and guarded, Humboldt hoped to win him over. ‘Mutis, so close!’ he thought when they arrived in Cartagena from where he sent the botanist ‘a very artificial letter’ laced with praise and flattery. The only reason why he wasn’t sailing to Lima from Cartagena, Humboldt now wrote to Mutis, but had chosen the far more arduous route across the Andes was to meet him in Bogotá on the way.

On 6 April, they left Cartagena to reach the Río Magdalena some sixty miles to the east. They walked through dense forests lit by fireflies – their ‘signposts’ in the dark, as Humboldt said – and spent a few miserable nights sleeping on their coats on the hard ground. Two weeks later they pushed their canoe into the Río Magdalena, travelling south towards Bogotá. For almost two months they paddled upstream against a strong current and along thick forests that ribboned the river. It was the rainy season, and once again they encountered crocodiles, mosquitoes and unbearable humidity. On 15 June they arrived in Honda, a small river port of about 4,000 people, less than 100 miles north-west of Bogotá. They now had to ascend from the river valley along rugged steep paths to a plateau that was almost 9,000 feet high and on which Bogotá was situated. Bonpland was struggling with the thin air – feeling nauseous and feverish. It made for exhausting travelling but their arrival in Bogotá on 8 July 1801 was triumphal.

Greeted by Mutis and the city’s luminaries, the men found themselves rushed from one feast to another. No one had seen such festivities in Bogotá for decades. Humboldt had never enjoyed rigid ceremony, but Mutis explained that it would all have to be endured for the sake of the viceroy and the city’s leading inhabitants. After that, though, the old botanist opened his cabinets. Mutis also had a botanical drawing studio where thirty-two artists, some Indians among them, would eventually produce 6,000 different watercolours of indigenous plants. Even better, Mutis owned so many botanical books, as Humboldt later told his brother, that his collection was only surpassed by Joseph Banks’s library in London. This was an invaluable resource because it had been two years since Humboldt had left Europe, and this was the first time he could leaf through a vast selection of books, checking, comparing and cross-referencing his own observations. The visit brought advantages for both men. Mutis was flattered because he was able to show off that a European scientist had made this dangerous detour just to see him, while Humboldt received the botanical information he needed.

Then, just as they were preparing to leave Bogotá, Bonpland was struck down by a recurrence of his fever. It took him several weeks to recover, leaving them even less time to cross the Andes en route to Lima. On 8 September, exactly two months after their arrival, they finally bade farewell to Mutis who gave them so much food that their three mules struggled to carry it all. The rest of their luggage was divided between another eight mules and oxen but the most delicate instruments were carried by five porters, local cargueros, as well as by José, the servant who had accompanied them for the past two years since their arrival in Cumaná. They were ready for the Andes, even though the weather could not have been worse.

From Bogotá they crossed the first mountain chain along the Quindío Pass, a trail at almost 12,000 feet that was known to be the most dangerous and difficult in all the Andes. Battling thunderstorms, rain and snow, they walked along a muddy path that was often only eight inches wide. ‘These are the paths in the Andes,’ Humboldt wrote in his diary, ‘to which one has to entrust one’s manuscripts, instruments, [and] collections.’ He was amazed how the mules managed to balance along, although it was more a ‘patch-worked falling’, he said, than walking. They lost the fish and reptiles they had preserved from the Río Magdalena when the glass jars containing them were all smashed. Within days their shoes had been torn to shreds by the bamboo shoots that grew in the mud, and they had to continue barefoot.

Crossing the Andes on heavily loaded mules (Illustration Credit 6.1)

Their progress south towards Quito was slow as they crossed mountains and valleys. Moving up and down in altitude, they marched through fierce snowstorms before descending into the heavy heat of tropical forests. At times, they walked through dark ravines so deep and narrow that they had to grope their way blindly along the rocks, and at others they walked across sunlit meadows in the valleys. Some mornings the snow-capped peaks stood out against a pristine blue cupola and on others they were enveloped in clouds so thick that they could see nothing. High above them, huge Andean condors spread their three-metre-wide wings as they glided alone against the sky – solemnly black except for a necklace of white feathers and their white-fringed wings that shone ‘mirror-like’ against the midday sun. One night, about midway on their journey between Bogotá and Quito, they saw flames licking out of the Pasto volcano against the darkness.

Humboldt had never felt further away from home. If he died now, it would be months or even years before his friends and family found out. And he had no idea what they were all doing. Was Wilhelm still in Paris, for example? Or had he and Caroline maybe moved back to Prussia? How many children did they have by now? Since leaving Spain two and a half years before, Humboldt had only received one letter from his brother and two from an old friend – and that had been over a year ago. Somewhere between Bogotá and Quito, Humboldt’s feeling of loneliness became so strong that he composed a long letter to Wilhelm, describing in great detail their adventures since his arrival in South America. ‘I don’t get tired of writing letters to Europe,’ was his first line. He knew that the letter was unlikely ever to reach its destination but it didn’t really matter. Writing from the remote Andean village in which the men found themselves that night was the closest Humboldt could get to a dialogue with his brother.

The next day, they rose early to continue their journey. Sometimes precipices dropped down hundreds of feet from paths so narrow that the valuable instruments and collections dangled precariously over the abyss from their mules’ backs. These moments were especially tense for José who was responsible for the barometer, the expedition’s most important instrument because Humboldt needed it to determine the height of the mountains. The barometer was a long wooden baton into which a glass tube had been inserted to hold the mercury. And although Humboldt had designed a protective box for this special travel barometer, the glass could still easily break. The instrument had cost him 12 thalers, but by the end of his five-year expedition that price had risen to 800 thalers, Humboldt later calculated, if he added all the money he had spent on wages for the people employed to carry it safely across Latin America.

Of his several barometers, only this one had remained intact. A few weeks earlier, when the penultimate had been smashed on their way from Cartagena to the Río Magdalena, Humboldt had been so depressed that he had collapsed on to the ground in the middle of a small town square. As he lay there on his back and looked up at the sky, so far from home and the European instrument makers, he had declared: ‘Lucky are those who travel without instruments that break.’ How on earth, he wondered, could he measure and compare the globe’s mountains without his tools?

When they finally arrived in Quito in early January 1802, 1,300 miles and nine months after leaving Cartagena, they received news that the reports about Captain Baudin had been wrong. Baudin was not after all sailing to Australia via South America, but instead making for the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa and from there across the Indian Ocean. Any other man would have despaired, but not Humboldt. At least now there was no rush to reach Lima, he reasoned, which gave them time to climb all the volcanoes he wanted to investigate.

A view of Quito, Humboldt’s base for several months (Illustration Credit 6.2)

Humboldt was interested in volcanoes for two particular reasons. The first was to ascertain if they were ‘local’ occurrences or if they were linked subterraneously with each other. If they were not just local phenomena but instead consisted of groups or clusters that stretched across huge distances, it was possible that they were connected through the core of the earth. Humboldt’s second reason was that studying volcanoes might provide an answer to how the earth itself had been created.

In the late eighteenth century scientists had begun to suggest that the earth must be older than the Bible, but they couldn’t agree on how the earth had formed. The so-called ‘Neptunists’ believed that water had been the main force, creating rocks by sedimentation, slowly building up mountains, minerals and geological formations out of a primordial ocean. Others, the ‘Vulcanists’, argued that everything had originated through catastrophic events such as volcanic eruptions. The pendulum was still swinging between those two concepts. One problem that European scientists encountered was that their knowledge was almost entirely limited to the only two active volcanoes in Europe – Etna and Vesuvius in Italy. Now Humboldt had the chance to investigate more volcanoes than anyone before him. He became so fascinated with them as the key to understanding the creation of the earth that Goethe later joked, in a letter that introduced a female friend to Humboldt: ‘since you belong to the naturalists who believe that everything was created by volcanoes, I’m sending you a female volcano who completely scorches and burns whatever is left.’

With his plan to join Baudin’s expedition dashed, Humboldt used his new base in Quito to climb systematically every reachable volcano, no matter how dangerous. He was so busy that he caused some consternation in the parlours of Quito’s high society. His good looks had attracted the attention of several young unmarried women, yet ‘he never remained longer than was necessary,’ at dinner or other social events, said Rosa Montúfar, the daughter of the provincial governor and a noted beauty. Humboldt seemed to prefer to be outdoors, she complained, rather than in the company of attractive women.

The irony was that Rosa’s handsome brother, Carlos Montúfar, now became Humboldt’s companion – a pattern of friendship that repeated itself in Humboldt’s life. He never married – in fact, he once said that a married man was always ‘a lost man’ – nor did he ever seem to have had any intimate relationships with women. Instead Humboldt had regular infatuations with his male friends to whom he wrote letters in which he confessed his ‘undying’ and ‘fervent’ love. And though he lived at a time when it was not uncommon for men to declare passionate feelings in their platonic friendships, Humboldt’s declarations tended to be strong. ‘I was tied to you as by iron chains,’ he wrote to one friend, and cried for many hours when he left another.

There had been a couple of particularly intense friendships in the years before South America. Throughout his life Humboldt had such relationships in which he not only declared his love but also showed, for him, an unusual submissiveness. ‘My plans are subordinated to yours,’ he wrote to one friend, and ‘you can order me, like a child, and you will always find obedience without grumble.’ Humboldt’s relationship with Bonpland, by contrast, was very different. Bonpland was a ‘good person’, Humboldt had written to a friend on the eve of his departure from Spain, but ‘he has left me very cold for the past six months, that means, I only have a scientific relationship with him.’ Humboldt’s explicit remark that Bonpland was only a scientific colleague may have been an indication how differently he felt about other men.

Contemporaries noted Humboldt’s ‘lack of true love for women’ and a newspaper later insinuated that he might be homosexual when an article wrote of his ‘sleeping partner’. Caroline von Humboldt said that ‘nothing will ever have a great influence on Alexander that doesn’t come through men.’ Even twenty-five years after Humboldt’s death, the German poet Theodor Fontane complained that a Humboldt biography he had just read did not mention the ‘sexual irregularities’.

At twenty-two, Carlos Montúfar was ten years younger than Humboldt and, with dark curly hair and almost black eyes, carried himself tall and proud. He was to remain at Humboldt’s side for several years. Montúfar was no scientist but a quick learner, and Bonpland certainly didn’t seem to mind the new addition to their team. Others, though, viewed the friendship with some jealousy. The South American botanist and astronomer José de Caldas had met Humboldt a few months earlier on their way to Quito and had politely been rebuffed when he had asked to join the expedition. Annoyed, Caldas now wrote to Mutis in Bogotá that Montúfar had become Humboldt’s ‘Adonis’.

Humboldt never explicitly explained the nature of these male friendships but it’s likely that they remained platonic because he admitted that ‘I don’t know sensual needs.’ Instead he escaped into the wilderness or threw himself into strenuous activity. Great physical exertion cheered him up and nature, he declared, calmed the ‘wild urges of passions’. And once again, he was exhausting himself. Humboldt was climbing dozens of volcanoes – sometimes with Bonpland and Montúfar, and sometimes without – but always with José carefully carrying the precious barometer. For the next five months, Humboldt scaled every reachable volcano from their base in Quito.

One such was Pichincha, a volcano to the west of Quito, where poor José suddenly sank and almost disappeared into a snow bridge that covered a deep crevasse. Luckily he managed to pull himself (and the barometer) out. Humboldt then continued to the summit where he lay flat on a narrow rock ledge that formed a small natural balcony over the deep crater. Every two or three minutes violent tremors shook this little platform, but he remained unperturbed and crawled to the edge to peer over into Pichincha’s deep crater. Bluish flames flickered inside, and Humboldt was almost suffocated by the sulphuric vapours. ‘No imagination would be able to conjure up something as sinister, mournful, and deathly as we saw there,’ Humboldt said.

He also attempted to climb Cotopaxi, a perfectly cone-shaped volcano which, at more than 19,000 feet, is the second highest mountain in Ecuador. But snow and steep slopes prevented him from going any higher than 14,500 feet. Though he failed to reach the summit, the sight of snow-covered Cotopaxi standing alone against the azure ‘vault of Heaven’ remained one of the most majestic views he had ever seen. Cotopaxi’s shape was so perfect and its surface appeared so smooth, Humboldt wrote in his diary, that it was as if a wood turner had created it on his lathe.

On another occasion Humboldt and his small team followed an ancient congealed stream of lava that filled a valley below Antisana, a volcano that rose to 18,714 feet. As they moved higher the trees and shrubs became smaller until they reached the tree line and walked into the so-called páramo above. The tufted brownish stipa grass that grew here gave the landscape an almost barren look, but on closer inspection they could see that the ground was covered in minute colourful flowers held tightly within little rosettes of green leaves. They found small lupins and tiny gentians which formed soft, moss-like cushions. Wherever the men turned, delicate purple and blue blossoms dotted the grass.

It was also bitterly cold, and so windy that Bonpland was knocked off his feet several times as he bent down to pick flowers. Gales blasted ‘ice needles’ into their faces. Before their final climb to the summit of Antisana, they had to spend the night in what Humboldt called the ‘highest dwelling place in the world’, a low thatched hut at 13,000 feet which belonged to a local landowner. Nestled in the folds of a gently undulating plateau, with Antisana’s peak rising behind them, the hut’s location was stunning. But ill with altitude sickness, cold, and without food or even candles, the men endured one of their most miserable nights ever.

That night Carlos Montúfar became so ill that Humboldt, who was sharing a bed with him, grew very worried. Throughout the night Humboldt rose repeatedly to fetch water and administer compresses. By the morning Montúfar had recovered enough to accompany Humboldt and Bonpland on their final ascent. They made it to almost 18,000 feet – even higher, Humboldt noted with glee, than two French scientists, Charles-Marie de la Condamine and Pierre Bouguer, who had come to this part of the Andes in the 1730s to measure the shape of the earth. They had only reached just under 15,000 feet.

Mountains held a spell over Humboldt. It wasn’t just the physical demands or the promise of new knowledge. There was also something more transcendental. Whenever he stood on a summit or a high ridge, he felt so moved by the scenery that his imagination carried him even higher. This imagination, he said, soothed the ‘deep wounds’ that pure ‘reason’ sometimes created.

¹ From Cumaná, in November 1800, Humboldt had already sent two parcels of seeds to Banks for Kew Gardens, as well as some of his astronomical observations. And Banks continued to help Humboldt. Banks would later retrieve one of Humboldt’s boxes filled with rock specimens from the Andes from an English captain who had captured the French vessel.

² The Spanish Empire in Latin America was divided into four viceroyalties and a few autonomous districts such as the Captaincy General of Venezuela. The Viceroyalty of New Granada encompassed much of the northern part of South America roughly covering today’s Panama, Ecuador and Colombia as well as parts of north-western Brazil, northern Peru and Costa Rica.