The Invention of Nature

12

Revolutions and Nature

Simón Bolívar and Humboldt

I was coming along, cloaked in the mantle of Iris, from the place where the torrential Orinoco pays tribute to the God of waters. I had visited the enchanted springs of Amazonia, straining to climb to the watchtower of the universe. I sought the tracks of La Condamine and Humboldt, following them boldly. Nothing could stop me. I reached the glacial heights, and the atmosphere took my breath away. No human foot had ever blemished the diamond crown placed by Eternity’s hands on the sublime temples of this lofty Andean peak. I said to myself: Iris’s rainbow cloak has served as my banner. I’ve carried it through infernal regions. It has ploughed rivers and seas and risen to the gigantic shoulders of the Andes. The terrain had levelled off at the feet of Colombia, and not even time could hold back freedom’s march. The war goddess Bellona had been humbled by the brilliance of Iris. So why should I hesitate to tread on the ice-white hair of this giant on earth? Indeed I shall! And caught up in a spiritual tremor I had never before experienced, and which seemed to me a kind of divine frenzy, I left Humboldt’s tracks behind and began to leave my own marks on the eternal crystals girding Chimborazo.

Simón Bolívar, ‘My Delirium on Chimborazo’, 1822

IT WAS NOT Humboldt but his friend Simón Bolívar who returned to South America. Three years after they had first met in Paris in 1804, Bolívar had left Europe, burning with Enlightenment ideas of liberty, the separation of powers and the concept of a social contract between a people and their rulers. As he had stepped on South American soil, Bolívar had been fuelled by his vow on Monte Sacro in Rome to free his country. But the fight against the Spanish would be a long battle fed by the blood of patriots. It would be a rebellion that saw close friends betray each other. Brutal, messy and often destructive, it would take almost two decades to remove the Spanish from the continent – and it would eventually see Bolívar rule as a dictator.

It was also a fight that was invigorated by Humboldt’s writings, almost as if his descriptions of nature and people made the colonists appreciate how unique and magnificent their continent was. Humboldt’s books and ideas would feed into the liberation of Latin America – from his criticism of colonialism and slavery to his portrayal of the majestic landscapes. In 1809, two years after its first publication in Germany, Humboldt’s Essay on the Geography of Plants had been translated into Spanish and published in a scientific journal founded in Bogotá by Francisco José de Caldas, one of the scientists whom Humboldt had met during his expedition in the Andes. ‘With his pen’ Humboldt had awakened South America, Bolívar later said, and had illustrated why South Americans had many reasons to be proud of their continent. To this day Humboldt’s name is much more widely known in Latin America than in most of Europe or the United States.

Chimborazo and Carquairazo in today’s Ecuador – one of the many striking illustrations in Humboldt’s Vues des Cordillères (Illustration Credit 12.1)

Throughout the revolution Bolívar would use images drawn from the natural world – as if writing with Humboldt’s pen – to explain his beliefs. He talked of a ‘stormy sea’ and described those fighting a revolution as people who ‘ploughed a sea’. As Bolívar rallied his compatriots during the long years of rebellions and battles, he evoked South America’s landscapes. He would talk of magnificent vistas and insist that their continent was ‘the very heart of the universe’, in an attempt to remind his fellow revolutionists what they were fighting for. At times, when only chaos seemed to rule, Bolívar turned to the wilderness to seek meaning. In untamed nature he found parallels to the brutality of humankind – and though this fact didn’t change anything about the conditions of war, it could still be strangely comforting. As Bolívar fought to free the colonies from Spanish shackles, these images, nature metaphors and allegories became his language of freedom.

Forests, mountains and rivers ignited Bolívar’s imagination. He was a ‘true lover of nature’, as one of his generals later said. ‘My soul is dazzled by the presence of primitive nature,’ Bolívar declared. He had always adored the outdoors and as a young man had enjoyed the pleasures of country life and agricultural work. The landscape that surrounded the old family hacienda San Mateo near Caracas, where he had spent his days riding across fields and forests, had been the cradle for this strong bond with nature. Mountains, in particular, held a spell over Bolívar because they reminded him of home. When he had walked from France to Italy, in the spring of 1805, it had been the sight of the Alps that had channelled his thoughts back to his country and away from the gambling and drinking in Paris. By the time Bolívar met Humboldt in Rome that summer, he had started to think in earnest about a rebellion. When he returned to Venezuela in 1807, he said, there was a ‘fire that burned inside me to liberate my country’.

The Spanish colonies in Latin America were divided into four viceroyalties and were home to some 17 million people. There was New Spain which included Mexico, parts of California and Central America, while the Viceroyalty of New Granada stretched across the northern part of South America roughly covering today’s Panama, Ecuador and Colombia, as well as parts of north-western Brazil and Costa Rica. Further south was the Viceroyalty of Peru as well as the Viceroyalty of the Río de La Plata with Buenos Aires as its capital, encompassing parts of today’s Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay. There were also so-called captaincy generals, such as those of Venezuela, Chile and Cuba. The captaincy generals were administrative districts that provided autonomy to those regions, making them like viceroyalties in all but name. It was a vast empire that had fuelled Spain’s economy for three centuries but the first cracks had occurred with the loss of the huge Louisiana Territory which had been part of the Viceroyalty of New Spain. The Spanish had lost it to the French who had then sold it on to the United States in 1803.

The Napoleonic Wars had severely affected the Spanish colonies. British and French naval blockades had reduced trade and resulted in huge losses of revenue. At the same time, wealthy criollos such as Bolívar had realized that Spain’s weakened position in Europe might be used to their own advantage. The British had destroyed many Spanish warships in the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, the most decisive naval victory during the war, and two years later Napoleon had invaded the Iberian Peninsula. He had then forced the Spanish king, Ferdinand VII, to abdicate in favour of Napoleon’s own brother. Spain had no longer been an almighty imperial power but a tool in France’s hands. With the Spanish king deposed and the mother country occupied by a foreign force, some South Americans had allowed themselves to believe in another future.

In 1809, a year after Ferdinand VII’s abdication, the first call for independence had been made in Quito, when the creoles had taken power from the Spanish administrators. A year later, in May 1810, the colonists in Buenos Aires followed suit. A few months after that, in September in the small town of Dolores, 200 miles to the north-west of Mexico City, a priest named Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla had united creoles, mestizos, Indians and freed slaves in their battle cry against the Spanish rule; within a month he had an army of 60,000. As revolt and unrest swept across the Spanish viceroyalties, the creole elite of Venezuela had declared independence on 5 July 1811.

Then, nine months later, nature seemed to side with the Spanish. On the afternoon of 26 March 1812, as the inhabitants of Bolívar’s hometown Caracas crowded into the churches for Easter services, a massive earthquake destroyed the city, killing thousands. Cathedral and churches crumbled, and the air was thick with dust as worshippers were crushed to death. As the tremors shook the ground, Bolívar surveyed the devastation in despair. Many saw the earthquake as a sign of God’s fury against their uprising. Priests shouted at the ‘sinners’ and told them that ‘divine justice’ had punished their revolution. Standing in the rubble in his shirtsleeves, Bolívar remained defiant. ‘If Nature itself decides to oppose us,’ he said, ‘we will fight and force her to obey.’

Eight days later another earthquake struck, bringing the death toll to a shocking 20,000 people, about half the population of Caracas. When slaves on the plantations west of Lake Valencia rebelled, looting haciendas and killing their owners, anarchy descended across Venezuela. Bolívar, who had been put in charge of the strategically important port town of Puerto Cabello on the northern coast of Venezuela, one hundred miles west of Caracas, had five officers and three soldiers and stood no chance when the royalist troops arrived. Within weeks the republican fighters had surrendered to the Spanish forces, and a little more than a year after the creoles had first declared their independence, the so-called First Republic had come to an end. The Spanish flag was hoisted once again and Bolívar fled the country at the end of August 1812 for the Caribbean island of Curaçao.

As the revolutions unfolded the former American President, Thomas Jefferson, bombarded Humboldt with questions: If the revolutionaries succeeded what kind of government would they establish, he asked, and how equal would their society be? Would despotism prevail? ‘All these questions you can answer better than any other,’ Jefferson insisted in one letter. As one of the founding fathers of the North American revolution, Jefferson was deeply interested in the Spanish colonies and genuinely afraid that South America would not establish republican governments. At the same time, Jefferson was also concerned about the economic implications that an independent southern continent would have for his own country. As long as the colonies were under Spanish control, the United States exported huge amounts of grain and wheat to South America. But once they turned away from colonial cash crops their ‘produce and commerce would rivalize ours’, Jefferson told the Minister of Spain in Washington, DC.

Meanwhile Bolívar was plotting his next moves and in late October 1812, two months after he had fled Venezuela, he arrived in Cartagena, a port town on the northern coast of the Viceroyalty of New Granada in today’s Colombia. Bolívar was brimming with ideas for a strong South America where all colonies would fight together rather than separately as before. In command of only a small army but reputedly equipped with Humboldt’s excellent maps, Bolívar now began a bold guerrilla offensive hundreds of miles away from home. He had little military training but as he moved from Cartagena towards Venezuela, he managed to surprise royalist forces in inhospitable environments – on high mountains, in deep forests and along rivers infested with snakes and crocodiles. Slowly Bolívar gained control over the Río Magdalena, the river along which Humboldt had paddled from Cartagena to Bogotá more than a decade earlier.

Along their warpath Bolívar gave stirring speeches to the people of New Granada. ‘Wherever the Spanish empire rules,’ he said, ‘there rules death and desolation!’ And as he marched, he gained new recruits. Bolívar believed that the colonies of South America had to unite. If one was enslaved, so was the other, he wrote. Spanish rule was a ‘gangrene’ that would affect every part unless ‘hewn off like an infected limb’. It was the colonies’ own disunity, he said, that would be their downfall, not Spanish arms. The Spanish were ‘locusts’ that destroyed the ‘seeds and roots of the tree of freedom’, he said, a pest that could only be destroyed if they united against them. He charmed, bullied and threatened to convince the New Granadans to join him on his way to Venezuela to free Caracas.

If Bolívar didn’t get his way, he could be brash and insulting. ‘March! Either you shoot me or, by God, I will certainly shoot you,’ Bolívar shouted when one officer refused to cross into Venezuelan territory. ‘I must have 10,000 guns,’ he demanded on another occasion, ‘or I shall go mad.’ His determination was infectious.

He was a man full of contradictions, as happy in a hammock slung on the branches amid a thick forest as on a packed dance floor. He would impatiently draft the nation’s first constitution in a canoe paddling along the Orinoco but would also delay military action for his own gain to wait for a lover. He said that dancing was the ‘poetry of motion’, but could also coldly order the execution of hundreds of prisoners. He could be charming when in a good mood but ‘ferocious’ when irritated, with his moods shifting so fast that ‘the change was incredible’, as one of his generals said.

Bolívar was a man of action but also believed that the written word had the power to change the world. On later campaigns he would always travel with a printing press, carrying it up and down the Andes and across the vast plains of the Llanos. His mind was sharp and fast, he often dictated numerous letters at the same time to several secretaries and was known for making snap decisions. There were men, he said, who needed solitude to think but ‘I deliberated, reflected, and mulled best when I was at the centre of the revelry – among the pleasures and clamour of a ball.’

Simón Bolívar (Illustration Credit 12.2)

From the Río Magdalena, Bolívar and his men marched through the mountains towards Venezuela, fighting and defeating royalist troops. By spring 1813, six months after he had landed in Cartagena, Bolívar had freed New Granada but Venezuela was still in Spanish hands. In May 1813 his army descended from the mountains into the high valley where the Venezuelan city of Mérida was situated. When the Spanish heard that Bolívar was approaching, they left Mérida in a panic. Bolívar and his troops arrived with their clothes worn, hungry and ill with fever but to a hero’s welcome. The citizens of Mérida declared Bolívar ‘El Libertador’ and 600 new recruits signed up to his army.

Three weeks later, on 15 June 1813, Bolívar issued a brutal decree that proclaimed a ‘War to the Death’. It condemned all Spaniards in the colonies to death unless they agreed to fight alongside Bolívar’s army. It was ruthless but effective. As Spaniards were executed, royalists defected and joined the republicans – and as Bolívar’s army moved eastwards towards Caracas, their numbers increased. By the time they arrived in the capital on 6 August, the Spanish had fled the city. Bolívar took Caracas without a fight. ‘Your liberators have arrived,’ he told the inhabitants, ‘from the banks of the swollen Magdalena to the flowering valleys of Aragua.’ He talked of the vast plateaux they had crossed and the huge mountains they had climbed – aligning their victories with the rugged wilderness of South American nature.

As Bolívar’s soldiers marched through Venezuela along the War to the Death’s bloody trail, killing almost every Spaniard they found, another army rose: the so-called ‘Legions of Hell’. Made up of rough plainsmen from the Llanos, along with mestizos and slaves, the Legions of Hell were under the command of fierce and sadistic José Tomás Boves, a Spaniard who had lived in the Llanos as a cattle dealer and whose army would eventually kill 80,000 republicans. Boves’s men were fighting against Bolívar’s privileged class of creoles who they claimed were to be feared more than Spanish rule. Bolívar’s revolution descended into a merciless civil war. One Spanish official described Venezuela as a region of death: ‘Towns that had thousands of inhabitants are now reduced to a few hundred or even a few dozens,’ villages were burned, and unburied corpses were decomposing in the streets and fields.

Humboldt had predicted that the South American struggle for independence would be bloody because colonial society was deeply riven. For three centuries the Europeans had done everything to cement the ‘hatred of one caste for another’, Humboldt told Jefferson. Creoles, mestizos, slaves and indigenous people were not a united people but divided and mistrustful of each other. It was a warning that came to haunt Bolívar.

Meanwhile in Europe, Spain had finally been released from Napoleon’s military grip and was able to concentrate on its unruly colonies. Having taken back his throne, the Spanish king, Ferdinand VII, now equipped a huge armada of some sixty ships and dispatched more than 14,000 soldiers to South America – the largest fleet Spain had ever sent to the New World. When the Spanish arrived in Venezuela in April 1815, Bolívar’s army – weakened by the fighting against Boves – didn’t stand a chance. In May, the royalists took Caracas and the revolution seemed to be over for good.

Bolívar once again fled his country – this time to Jamaica from where he tried to drum up international support for his revolution. He wrote to Lord Wellesley, the former British Secretary of State, explaining that the colonists needed help from Britain. ‘The most beautiful half of the earth,’ Bolívar warned, was going to be ‘reduced to a state of desolation’. He was willing to march all the way to the North Pole if he had to, he added – but neither England nor the United States was yet willing to involve themselves in the volatile Spanish colonial affairs.

James Madison, the fourth American President, declared that no US citizen was allowed to enlist in any kind of military expedition against the ‘dominions of Spain’. Former President John Adams thought the prospect of South American democracy a laughable idea – as absurd as establishing democracy ‘among birds, beasts and fishes’. Thomas Jefferson repeated his fears of despotism. How, he asked Humboldt, was a ‘priest-ridden’ society going to establish a republican and free government? Three centuries of Catholic rule, Jefferson insisted, had turned the colonists into ignorant children and ‘enchained their minds’.

From Paris, Humboldt watched anxiously, sending letters to members of the US government in which he asked them to support their southern brethren, and then impatiently complaining when he didn’t receive answers quickly enough. His enquiries should be dealt with as a matter of great urgency, an American general in Paris wrote to Jefferson, because Humboldt’s influence ‘is greater than that of any other man in Europe’.

No one in Europe or North America knew more about South America than Humboldt – he had become the authority on the subject. His books were a treasure trove of information about a continent that until then had been ‘so shamefully unknown’, Jefferson said. There was one publication in particular that attracted attention: Humboldt’s Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain. Published in four volumes between 1808 and 1811, it had rolled off the printing presses at exactly the moment when the world turned its attention to the independence movements in South America.

Humboldt sent Jefferson the volumes in regular consignments as they were published, and the former President studied them carefully to learn as much as he could about the rebelling colonies. ‘We have little knowledge of them,’ Jefferson told Humboldt, ‘but through you.’ Jefferson and many of his political friends were torn between their wish to see free republics spreading, the risk of officially supporting a potentially unstable regime in South America and the spectre of a great economic competitor rising in the southern hemisphere. It was not so much what the United States wished for them but ‘what is practicable’, Jefferson believed. He hoped that the colonies would not unite as one nation but remain separate countries because as a ‘single mass they would be a very formidable neighbor’.

Jefferson was not alone in gleaning information from Humboldt’s books: Bolívar also studied the volumes because most parts of the continent that he wanted to liberate were unknown to him. In the Political Essay of New Spain Humboldt had doggedly woven together his observations on geography, plants, conflicts of race and Spanish exploits with the environmental consequences of colonial rule and labour conditions in manufacturing, mines and agriculture. He provided information about revenues and military defence, about roads and ports, and he included table upon table of data ranging from silver production in mines to agricultural yields, as well as total amounts of imports and exports to and from the different colonies.

The volumes made several points very clear: colonialism was disastrous for people and the environment; colonial society was based on inequality; the indigenous people were neither barbaric nor savages, and the colonists were as capable of scientific discoveries, art and craftsmanship as the Europeans; and the future of South America was based on subsistence farming and not on monoculture or mining. Though focused on the Viceroyalty of New Spain, Humboldt always compared his data with that from Europe, the United States and the other Spanish colonies in South America. Just as he had looked at plants in the context of a wider world and with a focus on revealing global patterns, he now connected colonialism, slavery and economics. The Political Essay of New Spain was neither a travel narrative nor an evocation of marvellous landscapes, but a handbook of facts, hard data and numbers. It was so detailed and overwhelmingly meticulous that the English translator wrote in the preface to the English edition that the book tended to ‘fatigue the attention of the reader’. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Humboldt chose another translator for his later publications.

The man who had been granted rare permission by Carlos IV to explore the Spanish Latin American territories went on to publish a harsh criticism of the colonial rule. His book was filled, Humboldt told Jefferson, with the expressions of his ‘independent sentiments’. The Spanish had incited hatred between the different racial groups, Humboldt accused. The missionaries, for example, treated the indigenous Indians brutally and were driven by ‘culpable fanaticism’. Imperial rule exploited the colonies for raw materials and destroyed the environment as it went along. European colonial policies were ruthless and suspicious, he said, and South America had been destroyed by its conquerors. Their thirst for wealth had brought the ‘abuse of power’ to Latin America.

Humboldt’s criticism was based on his own observations, supplemented with information he had received from the colonial scientists whom he had met during his expedition. All this was then underpinned with the statistical and demographic data from governmental archives, mainly in Mexico City and Havana. In the years after his return, Humboldt evaluated and published these results, first in the Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain and later in the Political Essay on the Island of Cuba. These scathing indictments of colonialism and slavery showed how everything was interrelated: climate, soils and agriculture with slavery, demographics and economics. Humboldt claimed that the colonies could only be liberated and self-sufficient when they were ‘freed from the fetters of the odious monopoly’. It was the ‘European barbarity’, Humboldt insisted, that had created this unjust world.

Humboldt’s knowledge of the continent was encyclopaedic, Bolívar wrote in September 1815 in his so-called ‘Letter from Jamaica’ in which he referred to his old friend as the greatest authority on South America. Written in Jamaica, where he had fled four months previously when the Spanish armada had arrived, the letter was the distillation of Bolívar’s political thought and his vision for the future. In it, he also echoed Humboldt’s criticism about the destructive impact of colonialism. His people were enslaved and confined to cultivating cash crops and mining in order to feed Spain’s insatiable appetite, Bolívar wrote, but even the lushest fields and greatest ores would ‘never satisfy the lust of that greedy nation’. The Spanish destroyed vast regions, Bolívar warned, and ‘entire provinces are transformed to deserts’.

Humboldt had written about soils that were so fertile that they only needed to be raked to produce rich harvests. In much the same vein Bolívar now asked how a land so ‘abundantly endowed’ by nature could be kept so desperately oppressed and passive. And just as Humboldt had claimed in the Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain that the vices of the feudal government had passed from the northern to the southern hemisphere, so Bolívar now compared the Spanish grip on their colonies to ‘a kind of feudal ownership’. But the revolutionaries would continue to fight, Bolívar asserted, because ‘the chains have been broken’.

Bolívar also realized that slavery stood at the centre of the conflict. If the enslaved population was not on his side, as he had painfully experienced during the brutal civil war with José Tomás Boves and his Legions of Hell, they were against him and against the creole plantation owners who relied on slave labour. Without the help of the slaves there would be no revolution. It was a subject that he discussed with Alexandre Pétion, the first President of the Republic of Haiti – the island where Bolívar had escaped to after an assassination attempt on him in Jamaica.

Haiti had been a French colony but after a successful slave rebellion in the early 1790s, the revolutionaries had declared independence in 1804. Pétion, who was mixed race – the son of a wealthy Frenchman and a mother of African ancestry – was one of the founding fathers of the republic. He was also the only ruler and politician who promised to help Bolívar. When Pétion pledged arms and ships in exchange for the promise to free the slaves, Bolívar agreed. ‘Slavery,’ he said, ‘was the daughter of darkness.’

After three months in Haiti, Bolívar sailed for Venezuela with a small fleet of Pétion’s ships, packed with gunpowder, weapons and men. When he arrived in summer 1816, Bolívar declared freedom for all the slaves. This was a first and important step, but he struggled to convince the creole elite. Three years later he said that slavery still shrouded the country in a ‘black veil’ and – once again invoking nature as a metaphor – warned that ‘storm clouds darkened the sky, threatening a rain of fire’. Bolívar liberated his own slaves and promised freedom in exchange for military service, but it was only a decade later when he wrote the Bolivian constitution, in 1826, that the full abolition of slavery became law. It was a bold move at a time when apparently enlightened American statesmen, such as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, still had hundreds of slaves working their plantations. Humboldt, who had been a staunch abolitionist since seeing the slave market in Cumaná shortly after his arrival in South America, was impressed with Bolívar’s decision. A few years later Humboldt praised Bolívar in one of his books for setting an example to the world, particularly in contrast to the United States.

Over the next years Humboldt followed events in South America from Paris. There was much toing and froing – with Bolívar slowly uniting the regional warlords who were fighting the Spanish in their territories. The revolutionaries were in control of some regions, but these were often far apart and the men had certainly not acted as a united force. In the Llanos, for example, José Antonio Páez had, after Boves’s death at the end of 1814, gained the support of the plainsmen – the llaneros – for the republican cause. His 1,100 wild llaneros on horses and barefoot Indians armed only with bows and arrows defeated almost 4,000 experienced Spanish soldiers in the open steppes of the Llanos in early 1818. These tough and rough-mannered men were the most accomplished riders. As a creole and a city-dweller, Bolívar was not someone they would have chosen as their leader but he won their respect. Though extremely thin – at five feet six inches Bolívar weighed only 130 pounds – he displayed an endurance and strength in the saddle that gained him the nickname ‘Iron Ass’. Whether swimming with his hands tied behind his back for a dare or dismounting over his horse’s head (which he had practised after seeing the llaneros doing it), Bolívar impressed Páez’s men with his physical prowess.

Humboldt would probably not have recognized Bolívar any more. The dashing young man who had promenaded through Paris in the latest fashion now dressed simply in jute sandals and a plain coat. Though only in his mid-thirties, Bolívar’s face was already lined and his skin jaundiced, but his eyes radiated a piercing intensity and his voice had the power to rally his soldiers. During the previous years Bolívar had lost his plantations and been exiled from his country several times. He was relentless with his men but also with himself. He often slept, just wrapped in a cape, on the bare floor or spent all day driving his horse across rough terrain but retained enough energy to read French philosophers in the evening.

The Spanish still controlled the northern part of Venezuela including Caracas as well as much of the Viceroyalty of New Granada, but Bolívar had gained territories in the eastern provinces of Venezuela and along the Orinoco. The revolution was not progressing as swiftly as he had hoped, but he believed that it was time to encourage elections in the liberated regions and to have a constitution. A congress was called to assemble at Angostura (today’s Ciudad Bolívar in Venezuela) on the banks of the Orinoco, the town where Humboldt and Bonpland had been struck down with fever almost two decades previously after their gruelling weeks to find the Casiquiare River. With Caracas in the hands of the Spanish, Angostura was the temporary capital of the new republic. On 15 February 1819, twenty-six delegates took their seats in a simple brick building that was the government house to listen to Bolívar’s vision of the future. He presented them with the constitution that he had drafted on the river journey along the Orinoco and once again talked about the importance of unity between race and class as well as between the different colonies.

In his speech in Angostura Bolívar described South America’s ‘splendour and vitality’ to remind his fellow countrymen why they were fighting. No other place in the world had been ‘so bountifully provided by nature’, Bolívar said. He talked of his soul climbing to great heights so that he could perceive the future of his country from the perspective that it demanded – a future that united this vast continent that stretched from coast to coast. He himself, Bolívar said, was only a ‘plaything of the revolutionary hurricane’ but he was ready to follow the dream of a free South America.

At the end of May 1819, three months after his speech to the congress, Bolívar drove his entire army with single-minded determination from Angostura across the continent towards the Andes to free New Granada. His troops consisted of Páez’s horsemen, Indians, freed slaves, mestizos, creoles, women and children. There were also many British veterans who had joined Bolívar at the end of the Napoleonic Wars when hundreds of thousands of soldiers had returned home from the battlefields with no jobs or income. Bolívar’s unofficial ambassador in London had not only tried to get international support for the revolution but was also busy recruiting the unemployed veterans. Within five years more than 5,000 soldiers – the so-called British Legions – arrived in South America from Britain and Ireland together with some 50,000 rifles and muskets as well as hundreds of tons of munitions. Some were motivated by political beliefs, others by money, but whatever their reasons, Bolívar’s fortunes were turning.

Bolívar’s strange mix of troops achieved the impossible over the next weeks as they trudged west through torrential rains across the flooded plains of the Llanos towards the Andes. By the time they climbed the magnificent mountain range at the small town of Pisba, some 100 miles to the north-east of Bogotá, their shoes had long been shredded and many wore blankets instead of trousers. Barefoot, hungry and freezing, they battled on against ice and thin air, climbing to a height of 13,000 feet before descending down into the heart of enemy territory. A few days later, at the end of July, they surprised the royalist army with the bravery of the spear-wielding llaneros, the calm determination of the British soldiers and Bolívar’s almost god-like ability seemingly to appear everywhere.

If they survived the march across the Andes, they believed they would be able to crush the royalists. And so they did. On 7 August 1819, fired up by their victory a few days previously, Bolívar’s troops defeated the Spanish at the Battle of Boyacá. As Bolívar’s men charged down the slopes, the terrified royalists just ran. The road to Bogotá was open for Bolívar and he now rode to the capital like a ‘lightning bolt’, one of his officers said, his coat open to his bare chest and his long hair dancing in the wind. Bolívar took Bogotá and with that wrested New Granada from the Spanish. In December Quito, Venezuela and New Granada joined to form the new Republic of Gran Colombia with Bolívar as President.

Over the next few years Bolívar continued his battle. He won Caracas back in the summer of 1821, and a year later, in June 1822, he arrived triumphantly in Quito. He rode through the same rugged landscape that had stirred Humboldt’s imagination so profoundly two decades previously. Bolívar himself had never seen this part of South America before. In the valleys the fertile soil produced luxurious trees covered in exquisite blossoms and banana trees laden with fruit. On the higher plains herds of the small vicuñas were grazing, and above them condors were gliding effortlessly with the winds. South of Quito one volcano after another lined the valleys almost like an avenue. At no other place in South America, Bolívar thought, had nature been so ‘generous in gifts’. But as beautiful as the scenery here was, it also made him reflect on what he had given up. After all, he could have lived peacefully, working his fields surrounded by glorious nature. Bolívar was deeply touched by this monumental landscape – emotions he put into words when he wrote a rapturous prose poem called ‘My Delirium on Chimborazo’. It was his allegory for the liberation of Latin America.

In his poem Bolívar follows Humboldt’s footsteps. As he ascends the majestic Chimborazo, Bolívar uses the volcano as an image of his fight to free the Spanish colonies. As he climbs up further, he leaves behind Humboldt’s tracks and imprints his own into the snow. Then, as he battles with each step in the oxygen-deprived air, Bolívar has a vision of Time itself. Overcome by a feverish delirium, he sees the past and future emerging before him. High above him against the vaulted sky lay infinity: ‘I grasp the eternal with my hands,’ he cries, and ‘feel the infernal prisons boiling beneath my footsteps’. With the land rolled out below, Bolívar used Chimborazo to place his life within the context of South America. He was Gran Colombia, the new nation he had wrought, and Gran Colombia was in him. He was El Libertador, the saviour of the colonies and the man who held their destiny in his palms. Here on the icy slopes of Chimborazo, ‘the tremendous voice of Colombia cries out to me’, Bolívar ends his poem.

It wasn’t surprising that Chimborazo became Bolívar’s metaphor for his revolution and destiny – even today the mountain is depicted on the Ecuadorian flag. As so often, Bolívar turned to the natural world to illustrate his thoughts and beliefs. Three years previously, Bolívar had told the congress in Angostura that nature had bestowed great riches on South America. They would be showing the Old World ‘the majesty’ of the New World. More than anything else, Chimborazo – which had become famous across the world through Humboldt’s books – became the perfect articulation for the revolution. ‘Come to Chimborazo,’ Bolívar wrote to his former teacher Simón Rodríguez, to see this crown of earth, this staircase to the gods and this unassailable fortress of the New World. From Chimborazo, Bolívar insisted, one had unobstructed views of the past and the future. It was the ‘throne of nature’ – invincible, eternal and enduring.

Bolívar was at the height of his fame when he wrote ‘My Delirium on Chimborazo’ in 1822. Almost 1 million square miles of South America were under his leadership – an area much bigger than Napoleon’s empire had ever been. The northern South American colonies – much of the area covering modern Colombia, Panama, Venezuela and Ecuador – had been freed with only Peru remaining under Spanish control. But Bolívar wanted more. He dreamed of a pan-American federation that would stretch down from the isthmus of Panama to the southern tip of the Peruvian Viceroyalty, and from Guayaquil at the Pacific coast in the west to the Caribbean Sea on the Venezuelan coast in the east. Such a union would be like ‘a colossus’, he said, and would ’cause the earth to quake with a glance’ – the mighty neighbour that Jefferson so worried about.

In the previous year Bolívar had written a letter to Humboldt that underlined how important his descriptions of South America’s nature had been. It had been Humboldt’s evocative writing that had ‘uprooted’ him and his fellow revolutionaries from ignorance, Bolívar wrote; it had made them proud of their continent. Humboldt was the ‘discoverer of the New World’, Bolívar insisted. And it may well have been Humboldt’s obsessive interest in South American volcanoes that also inspired Bolívar’s rallying call to unite his country in their fight: ‘a great volcano lies at our feet … [and] the yoke of slavery will break.’

Bolívar continued to use metaphors drawn from the natural world. Liberty was a ‘precious plant’, for example, or later, as chaos and disunity descended on the new nations, Bolívar warned that the revolutionaries were ‘tottering on the edge of an abyss’ and about to ‘drown in the ocean of anarchy’. One of his most used metaphors remained that of a volcano. The danger of a revolution, Bolívar said, was like standing on one that was ‘ready to explode’. He declared that South Americans were marching along a ‘volcanic terrain’, evoking at the same time the splendour and hazards of the Andes.

Humboldt had been wrong about Bolívar. When they had first met in Paris in the summer of 1804, and then a year later in Rome, he had dismissed the excitable creole as a dreamer – but as he watched his old friend succeed, he had changed his mind. In July 1822 Humboldt wrote a letter to Bolívar, praising him as the ‘founder of your beautiful fatherland’s freedom and independence’. Humboldt also reminded him how South America was his own second home. ‘I reiterate my vow for the glory of the people of America,’ he told Bolívar.

Nature, politics and society formed a triangle of connections. One influenced the other. Societies were shaped by their environment – natural resources could bring riches to a nation, or, as Bolívar had experienced, an untamed wilderness such as the Andes could inspire strength and conviction. This idea, however, could also be applied quite differently, as several European scientists had done. Since the mid-

eighteenth century some thinkers had insisted on the ‘degeneracy of America’. One such was the French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, who in the 1760s and 1770s had written that in America all things ‘shrink and diminish under a niggardly sky and unprolific land’. The New World was inferior to the Old World, Buffon asserted in the most widely read natural history work of the second half of the century. According to Buffon, plants, animals and even people were smaller and weaker in the New World. There were no large mammals or any civilized people, he said, and even the savages there were ‘feeble’.

As Buffon’s theories and arguments had spread over the past decades, the natural world of America had become a metaphor for its political and cultural significance or insignificance – depending on the point of view. Besides economic strength, military exploits or scientific achievements, nature had also become an indicator of the importance of a country. During the American Revolution, Jefferson had been furious about Buffon’s assertions and had spent years trying to refute them. If Buffon used size as a measure of strength and superiority, Jefferson only needed to show that everything was in fact larger in the New World in order to elevate his country above those in Europe. In 1782, in the midst of the American War of Independence, Jefferson had published Notes on the State of Virginia in which the flora and fauna of the United States became the foot-soldiers of a patriotic battle. Under the banner of the-bigger-the-better, Jefferson listed the weights of bears, buffalos and panthers to prove his point. Even the weasel, he wrote, was ‘larger in America than in Europe’.

When he moved to France as the American Minister four years later, Jefferson had boasted to Buffon that the Scandinavian reindeer was so small that it ‘could walk under the belly of our moose’. Jefferson had then, at great personal expense, imported a stuffed moose from Vermont to Paris, an enterprise that in the end failed to impress the French because the moose had arrived in Paris in a sorry state of decay with no fur on the skin and exuding a foul smell. But Jefferson had not given up and had asked friends and acquaintances to send him details of ‘the heaviest weights of our animals … from the mouse to the mammoth’. Later, during his presidency, Jefferson had dispatched huge fossil bones and tusks from the North American mastodon to the Académie des Sciences in Paris to show the French just how enormous North American animals were. At the same time, Jefferson was hoping that one day they would find living mastodons roaming somewhere in the yet unexplored parts of the continent. Mountains, rivers, plants and animals had become weapons in the political arena.¹

Humboldt did the same for South America. Not only did he present the continent as one of unrivalled beauty, fertility and magnificence, but he also attacked Buffon directly. ‘Buffon was entirely mistaken,’ he wrote, and later questioned how the French naturalist could have dared to describe the American continent when he had never even seen it. The indigenous people were anything but feeble, Humboldt said; one look at the Carib nation in Venezuela rebutted the wild musings of the European scientists. He had encountered the tribe on his way from the Orinoco to Cumaná and thought they were the tallest, strongest and most beautiful people he had ever seen – like bronze statues of Jupiter.

Humboldt also dismantled Buffon’s idea that South America was a ‘new world’ – a continent that had only just risen from the ocean without history or civilization. The ancient monuments he had seen and then depicted in his publications bore testimony to cultured and refined societies – palaces, aqueducts, statues and temples. In Bogotá, Humboldt had found some old pre-Inca manuscripts (and read their translations) which revealed a complex knowledge of astronomy and mathematics. Equally, the Carib language was so sophisticated that it included abstract concepts such as future and eternity. There was no evidence of the poverty of language that previous explorers had remarked on, Humboldt said, because these languages brought together richness, grace, power and tenderness.

These were not wild savages as the Europeans had portrayed them for the past three centuries. Bolívar, who owned several of Humboldt’s books, must have been delighted when he read in Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain that Buffon’s theories on degeneracy had only become popular because they ‘flattered the vanity of Europeans’.

Humboldt continued to educate the world about Latin America. His views were repeated across the globe through articles and magazines that were peppered with comments such as ‘M. de Humboldt observes’ or ‘informed us’. Humboldt had ‘done America more good than all of the conquerors’, Bolívar said. Humboldt had presented the natural world as a reflection of South America’s identity – a portrait of a continent that was strong, vigorous and beautiful. And that was exactly what Bolívar was doing when he used nature to galvanize his compatriots or to explain his political views.

Rather than be inspired by abstract theory or philosophy, Bolívar reminded his countrymen that they should learn from forests, rivers and mountains. ‘You will also discover important guides to action in the very nature of our country which includes the lofty regions of the Andes and the burning shores of the Orinoco,’ he told the congress in Bogotá. ‘Study them closely, and you will learn there,’ he urged, ‘what Congress should decree for the happiness of the people of Colombia.’ Nature, Bolívar said, was the ‘infallible teacher of men’.

¹ Jefferson was not the first American to take up the dispute. In the 1780s Benjamin Franklin, during his time as the American Minister in Paris, had attended a dinner party together with Abbé Raynal, one of the offending scientists. Franklin noted that all the American guests were sitting on one side of the table with the French opposite. Seizing the opportunity, he offered his challenge: ‘Let both parties rise, and we will see on which side nature had degenerated.’ As it happened all the Americans were of the ‘finest stature’, Franklin later told Jefferson, while the French were all diminutive – in particular Raynal who was ‘a mere shrimp’.