The Invention of Nature

16

Russia

THE SKY WAS clear and the air was warm. Empty plains stretched out towards the distant line of the horizon, baking in the summer sun. A convoy of three carriages drove along the so-called Siberian Highway, a road that went several thousand miles east from Moscow.

It was mid-June 1829, and Alexander von Humboldt had left Berlin two months earlier. As the Siberian landscape unfolded, the fifty-nine-year-old stared out of the carriage window, watching as the low-growing grasses of the steppes alternated with endless stretches of forest that mainly consisted of poplars, birches, limes and larch trees. Now and again, a dark green juniper stood out against the peeling white stems of birches. The wild roses were in bloom, as were the small lady’s slipper orchids with their bulging pouch-like blossoms. Though pleasant enough, this was not quite how Humboldt had imagined Russia. The scenery looked a little too similar to the countryside around the Humboldt family estate at Tegel.

It had been the same for weeks now – all vaguely familiar. The roads were made of clay and gravel like those he knew from England, while the vegetation and animals were more or less ‘ordinary’, he thought. There were few animals: sometimes a small rabbit or squirrel, and never more than two or three birds. This was a quiet landscape, with little birdsong. It was all slightly disappointing. A Siberian expedition was certainly ‘not as delightful’, Humboldt said, as one to South America, but at least he was outside and not cooped up at court in Berlin. This was as close as he could get to what he wanted – which was, as he liked to say, a ‘life in wild nature’.

The country rushed past as they sped along. Every ten or twenty miles the horses were changed at way stations in the scattered villages that lined this transit route to the east. The road was wide and well maintained – so good in fact that their coaches raced at an alarming speed. With few taverns or inns along the way, they travelled most nights and Humboldt slept in his carriage as one mile after another rolled by.

Humboldt’s carriage speeding through Russia (Illustration Credit 16.1)

Unlike in Latin America, Humboldt was travelling through Russia with a much larger retinue. He was accompanied by Gustav Rose, a twenty-nine-year-old professor of mineralogy from Berlin, and thirty-four-year-old Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg, an experienced naturalist who had already completed an expedition to the Middle East. Then there was Johann Seifert, who was their huntsman for zoological specimens and who would remain Humboldt’s trusted servant and housekeeper in Berlin for many years, a Russian mining official who had joined them in Moscow, a cook, a convoy of Cossacks for their protection, as well as Count Adolphe Polier – an old French acquaintance from Paris, who had married a wealthy Russian countess with an estate on the western side of the Urals, not far from Yekaterinburg. Polier had joined Humboldt in Nizhny Novgorod, some 700 miles south-east of St Petersburg, on his way to his wife’s property. Between them they had three carriages that were filled up with people, instruments, trunks and their steadily increasing collections. Humboldt had prepared for all eventualities, packing everything from a thickly padded overcoat to barometers, reams of paper, vials, medicine and even an iron-free tent in which to make his magnetic observations.

Humboldt had waited decades for this moment. Once Tsar Nicholas I had given permission at the end of 1827, Humboldt had taken his time to plan meticulously. After some back and forth, he and Cancrin had agreed that the expedition should set off from Berlin in early spring 1829. Humboldt had then postponed his departure by a few weeks because Wilhelm’s wife, Caroline, was in rapid decline, suffering from cancer. He had always liked his sister-in-law but also wanted to be there for Wilhelm during this difficult time. Alexander was ‘loving and affectionate’, Caroline wrote in her last letter. When she died on 26 March, after almost forty years of marriage, Wilhelm was devastated. Alexander stayed for another two and a half weeks but then finally left Berlin to embark on his Russian adventure. He promised his brother that he would write regularly.

Humboldt’s plan was to travel from St Petersburg to Moscow and from there east to Yekaterinburg and Tobolsk in Siberia, and then to turn back in one big loop. Humboldt would avoid the area around the Black Sea where Russia was engaged in a war with the Ottoman Empire. This Russo-Turkish War had begun in spring 1828, and as much as Humboldt would have loved to see the Caspian Sea and the snow-capped inactive volcano of Mount Ararat at today’s Turkish–Iranian border, the Russians had told him that it was impossible. His wish for an ‘indiscreet glance to the Caucasus Mountains and Mount Ararat’ would have to wait for more ‘peaceful times’.

Nothing was quite as Humboldt wanted it. The entire expedition was a compromise. It was a journey paid for by Tsar Nicholas I who hoped to learn what gold, platinum and other valuable metals might be mined more efficiently from his vast empire. Though labelled as an expedition for the ‘advancement of the sciences’, the tsar was more interested in the advancement of commerce. In the eighteenth century Russia had been one of Europe’s greatest exporters of ores and the leading iron producer but industrial England had long overtaken it. Feudal labour systems in Russia and antiquated production methods, as well as a partial depletion of some of the mines, were to blame. As a former mining inspector with an immense geological knowledge, Humboldt was a perfect choice for the tsar. It was not ideal for science but Humboldt didn’t see any other way to achieve his goal. He was almost sixty and time was running out.

He duly investigated the mines along their route through Siberia as agreed with Cancrin, but he also injected some excitement into this laborious task. He had an idea that would prove just how smart his comparative view of the world was. Over the years Humboldt had noted that several minerals seemed to occur together. In the mountains of Brazil, for example, diamonds had often been found in gold and platinum deposits. Equipped with detailed geological information from South America, Humboldt now applied his knowledge to Russia. Since there were similar gold and platinum deposits in the Urals as in South America, Humboldt was sure that there were diamonds in Russia. He was so certain that he had got carried away when he met Empress Alexandra in St Petersburg, boldly promising to find her some.

Whenever they stopped at mines, Humboldt searched for diamonds. Arm-deep in the sand, he sifted through fine grains. Magnifying glass in hand, he pored over the sand, believing that he would find his sparkling treasures. It was just a matter of time, he was convinced. Most people who watched him thought he was utterly mad because no one had ever found diamonds outside the tropics. One of their accompanying Cossacks even called him ‘the crazy Prussian prince Humplot’.

A few of his party were swept along, though, including Humboldt’s old Parisian acquaintance Count Polier. Having accompanied the expedition for several weeks and observed the search for diamonds, Polier departed from Humboldt on 1 July to inspect his wife’s estate near Yekaterinburg where they mined gold and platinum. Fired up by Humboldt’s determination, Polier immediately instructed his men where to look for the gems. A few hours after his arrival they found the first diamond in the Urals. News spread quickly across the country and Europe when Polier published an article about the discovery. Within a month, thirty-seven diamonds had been found in Russia. Humboldt’s predictions were proved correct. Though he knew that his guess had been based on hard scientific data, to many this seemed so mysterious that they believed he had dabbled in magic.

The Urals, Humboldt excitedly wrote to Cancrin, were a ‘true El Dorado’. For Humboldt his accurate prediction might have been an act of beautiful scientific analogy but for the Russians it held the promise of commercial advantage. Humboldt chose to ignore this – and it wasn’t the only detail he brushed aside during the expedition. In Latin America Humboldt had criticized all aspects of Spanish colonial rule, from the environmental exploitation of the natural resources and the destruction of forests to the mistreatment of indigenous people and the horrors of slavery. Back then, he had insisted that it was up to travellers who witnessed grievances and oppressions ‘to bring the laments of the wretched to the ears of those who have the power to assuage them’. Only months before he left for Russia, Humboldt had enthusiastically told Cancrin that he was looking forward to seeing the peasants in the eastern ‘poorer provinces’. But this was certainly not what the Russians had in mind. Cancrin had sternly replied that the only aims of the expedition were scientific and commercial. Humboldt was not to comment on Russian society or serfdom.

Tsar Nicholas I’s Russia was one of absolutism and inequalities, not a country that encouraged liberal ideas and open criticism. When the first day of his reign, in December 1825, had seen a revolt, Nicholas I had vowed to control Russia with a tight fist. A network of spies and informers infiltrated every part of the nation. The government was centralized and firmly in the hands of the tsar. Strong censorship restricted every written word from poems to newspaper articles, and a web of surveillance made sure that any liberal ideas were suppressed. Those who spoke out against the tsar or the government were promptly deported to Siberia. Nicholas I regarded himself as the guardian against revolutions.

He was a ruler who adored meticulous order, formality and discipline. Only a few years after Humboldt’s Russia expedition, the tsar would declare the triad of ‘Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationality’ as the ideological doctrine of Russia: orthodox Christianity, the rule of the House of Romanov and a focus on Russian tradition as opposed to westernized culture.

Humboldt knew what was expected of him and had promised Cancrin to focus only on nature. He would avoid anything related to governmental rule and ‘the conditions of the lower classes’, he said, and would not publicly criticize the Russian feudal system – however badly the peasants were treated. Somewhat insincerely, he had even told Cancrin that foreigners who couldn’t speak the language were bound to misunderstand the conditions of a country and would only spread incorrect rumours across the world.

Humboldt quickly discovered just how far Cancrin’s control extended because all along his route officials seemed to have lined up to meet him and to report back to St Petersburg. Though far from Moscow and St Petersburg, this was no untamed wilderness. Yekaterinburg, for example, 1,000 miles east of Moscow and the gateway to the Asian part of Russia, was a large industrial centre – a city of around 15,000 inhabitants, many of whom were employed in the mines and in manufacturing. The region had gold mines, iron works, furnaces, stone-grinding workshops, foundries and forges. Gold, platinum, copper, gems and semi-precious stones were among the many natural resources. The Siberian Highway was the main trade route that connected the manufacturing and mining towns across the vast country. Wherever Humboldt and his team stopped, they were welcomed by governors, city councillors, officers and other officials garlanded with medals. There were long dinners, speeches and balls – and no time to be alone. Humboldt despised these formalities because his every step was watched and he was held by the arm ‘like an invalid’, he wrote to Wilhelm.

At the end of July, more than three months after leaving Berlin, Humboldt reached Tobolsk – 1,800 miles from St Petersburg and the most easterly point on the prescribed route – but it was still not wild enough for his taste. Humboldt had not come this far only to have to turn around. He had other plans. Instead of travelling back to St Petersburg as previously agreed, Humboldt now ignored Cancrin’s instructions and added a detour of 2,000 miles. He wanted see the Altai Mountains in the east where Russia, China and Mongolia met, as the counterpart to his observations in the Andes.

As he had failed to see the Himalaya, the Altai was as close as he could get to collecting data from a mountain range in Central Asia. The results of the Russia expedition, he later wrote, were based on these ‘analogies and contrasts’. The Altai was the reason why he had endured so many uncomfortable overnight rides in the rattling carriage. They had managed to make up so much time that he thought he might just extend the itinerary without getting into too much trouble. He had already written to Wilhelm from Yekaterinburg about his intentions, but he had told no one else. He only informed Cancrin about the ‘small extension’ of their route on the day before they left Tobolsk – well aware that Cancrin, far away in St Petersburg, could do nothing at all about it.

Humboldt tried to placate Cancrin by promising to visit yet more mines, also mentioning that he hoped to find some rare plants and animals. This was his last chance before ‘his death’, he added with melodramatic swagger. Instead of turning back, Humboldt now continued east through the Baraba steppes towards Barnaul and the western slopes of the Altai Mountains. By the time Cancrin received the letter almost a month later, Humboldt had long reached his destination.

Once Humboldt had left Tobolsk and abandoned the imposed itinerary, he finally began to enjoy himself. Age hadn’t calmed him. His team was astounded at how the fifty-nine-year-old could walk for hours ‘without any sign of fatigue’, dressed always in a dark frock coat with a white necktie and a round hat. He walked carefully but determinedly and steadily. The more strenuous the journey, the more Humboldt relished it. At first sight this expedition might not have been as exciting as his South American adventures, but now they were entering much wilder scenery. Thousands of miles away from the scientific centres of Europe, Humboldt now found himself travelling through a harsh landscape. The steppes stretched out east for about 1,000 miles between Tobolsk and Barnaul in the foothills of the Altai range. As they continued along the Siberian Highway, the villages became fewer and further apart – still frequent enough to change their horses – but in between the land was often deserted.

There was a beauty in this emptiness. The summer blossom had turned the plains into a sea of reds and blues. Humboldt saw the tall candle-like reddish spikes of willow herb (Epilobium angustifolia) and the bright blues of delphiniums (Delphinium elatum). Elsewhere the colour came from the vivid reds of Maltese Cross (Lychnis chalcedonica) which seemed to set the steppes on fire, but there were still few wild animals and birds.

The thermometer climbed from 6°C at night to 30°C during the day. Humboldt and his team were plagued by mosquitoes, just as he and Bonpland had been during their Orinoco expedition some thirty years previously. To protect themselves, they now wore heavy leather masks. These masks had a small opening for the eyes covered with mesh made of horsehair to see through – they protected against the pernicious insects but also trapped the air. It was unbearably hot. None of this mattered. Humboldt was in a great mood because he was liberated from the controlling hand of the Russian administration. They travelled day and night, sleeping in their jolting carriages. It felt like a ‘sea voyage on land’, Humboldt wrote, as they sailed across the monotonous plains as if on an ocean. They averaged more than a hundred miles a day, and sometimes covered almost 200 miles in twenty-four hours. The Siberian Highway was as good as the best roads in Europe. They travelled faster, Humboldt proudly noted, than any European express courier.

Then, on 29 July 1829, five days after they had left Tobolsk, everything came to a sudden halt. Locals told them that an anthrax epidemic was spreading through the Baraba Steppe – the ‘Sibirische Pest’ as the Germans called it. Anthrax is usually contracted first by herbivorous animals such as cattle and goats when they ingest the extremely hardy spores of the bacterium that causes the disease. It can then spread to humans – a deadly disease with no cure. There was no other route to the Altai Mountains than to drive straight through the affected region. Humboldt made his decision quickly. Anthrax or not, they would continue. ‘At my age,’ he said, ‘nothing should be postponed.’ All the servants were made to sit inside the carriages, rather than outside, and they packed provisions and water to reduce their contact with possibly contaminated people and food. They would still have to change their horses regularly, however, thereby taking the risk of being given an infected carriage horse.

Humboldt riding through the Baraba Steppe (Illustration Credit 16.2)

As they sat in silence, hot and cramped behind tightly shut windows in their small carriages, they passed through a landscape of death. The ‘traces of the pest’ were everywhere, Humboldt’s companion Gustav Rose noted in his diary. Fires burned at the entrances and exits of the villages as a ritual to ‘clean the air’. They saw small makeshift hospitals and dead animals lying in the fields. In one small village alone, 500 horses had died.

After a few days of uncomfortable travelling, they reached the Obi River which marked the end of the steppes. As this was also the demarcation line of the anthrax epidemic, they only had to cross the river to escape. But as they prepared, the wind picked up and quickly turned into a raging storm. The waves were too high for the ferry that shipped carriages and people across. For once, Humboldt didn’t mind the delay. The past few days had been tense but now it was almost over. They grilled some fresh fish and enjoyed the rain because the mosquitoes had disappeared. Finally, they could take off their suffocating masks. On the other side the mountains were waiting for Humboldt. When the storm calmed, they crossed the river and on 2 August they arrived at the thriving mining town of Barnaul – Humboldt had almost reached his destination. They had travelled the 1,000 miles from Tobolsk in just nine days. They were now 3,500 miles east of Berlin, as far as Caracas was to the west of Berlin, Humboldt calculated.

Three days later, on 5 August, Humboldt saw the Altai Mountains for the first time, rising in the distance. In the foothills there were more mines and foundries which they investigated as they pressed on to Ust-Kamenogorsk, a fortress near the border of Mongolia – Oskemen, in today’s Kazakhstan. From there the paths into the mountains became so steep that they left their carriages and most of the baggage behind at the fortress, continuing on small narrow flat carts that the locals used. Often they went on foot as they climbed higher, passing gigantic granite walls and caves where Humboldt examined the rock strata, scribbling notes and drawing sketches. Sometimes when his scientific travel companions Gustav Rose and Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg were collecting plants and rocks, Humboldt became impatient and dashed ahead to climb even higher or to reach a cave. Ehrenberg became so distracted by the plants that the accompanying Cossacks had regularly to search for him. Once they found him soaking wet, standing in a bog with some grasses in one hand and in the other some moss-like specimen which he declared bleary-eyed was the same as the one that ‘covered the bottom of the Red Sea’.

Humboldt was back in his element. Crawling into deep shafts, chiselling off rocks, pressing plants and scrambling up mountains, he compared the ore veins he found with those in New Granada in South America, the mountains themselves with those of the Andes, and the Siberian steppes with the Llanos in Venezuela. The Urals might have been important in terms of commercial mining, Humboldt said, but the ‘real joy’ of the expedition had only begun in the Altai Mountains.

In the valleys the grasses and shrubs were so high that they couldn’t see each other even when only a couple of steps apart; higher up there were no trees at all. The huge mountains rose like ‘mighty domes’, Rose noted in his diary. They could see the summit of Belukha which at almost 15,000 feet was about 6,000 feet lower than Chimborazo but the highest mountain of the Altai, its twin peaks entirely covered in snow. By mid-August they had penetrated deep enough into the mountain range that the highest peaks were tantalizingly close. The problem was that they were too late in the season – there was just too much snow to go higher. Some had melted in May but by July the mountains had been covered again. Humboldt had to admit defeat, although the sight of Belukha enticed him to go further. There was no way that they would be able to climb in these conditions – in fact it would take until the second decade of the twentieth century before Belukha was conquered. The high peaks of Central Asia were beyond reach. Humboldt could see them but would never scale their summits. The season was against him, as was his age.

Despite this disappointment, Humboldt felt that he had seen enough. His trunks were filled with pressed plants and long tables of measurements as well as rocks and samples of ores. When he found some hot springs, he deduced that they were linked to the gentle earthquakes in the region. No matter how much they walked and climbed during the day, he still had enough energy to set up the instruments at night for his astronomical observations. He felt strong and fit. ‘My health,’ he wrote to Wilhelm, ‘is excellent.’

As they marched on, Humboldt decided that he would like to cross the Chinese–Mongolian border. A Cossack was dispatched to prepare and announce their arrival to the officials who were patrolling the region. On 17 August Humboldt and his team arrived at Baty where they found the Mongolian border post on the left bank of the Irtysh River and the Chinese on the right. There were some yurts, a few camels, herds of goats and about eighty ruffian soldiers dressed in ‘rags’, as Humboldt described them.

Humboldt started with the Chinese post, visiting the commander in his yurt. There, seated on cushions and rugs, Humboldt presented his gifts: cloth, sugar, pencils and wine. Expressions of friendship were conveyed through a chain of interpreters, first from German to Russian, then from Russian to Mongolian, and finally from Mongolian to Chinese. Unlike the dishevelled soldiers, their commander, who had arrived only a few days previously from Beijing, looked impressive in his long blue silk coat and a hat that was decorated with several magnificent peacock feathers.

After a couple of hours Humboldt was rowed across the river to meet the Mongolian officer in the other yurt. All the while the audience was growing. The Mongolians were fascinated by their foreign guests, touching and prodding Humboldt and his companions. They poked bellies, lifted coats, and nudged them – for once Humboldt was the exotic specimen but he loved every minute of the strange encounter. He had been to China, the ‘heavenly kingdom’, he wrote home.

It was time to turn back. Since Cancrin had given him absolutely no permission to go further east than Tobolsk, Humboldt wanted to make sure that he would at least arrive in St Petersburg at the time they had agreed. They had to pick up their carriages at the fortress in Ust-Kamenogorsk and then turn west along the southern edge of the Russian Empire, passing Omsk, Miass and Orenburg, a journey of around 3,000 miles, following the border that separated Russia from China. The border, a long line of 2,000 miles dotted with stations, watchtowers and small fortresses manned by Cossacks along the Kazakh Steppe, was the home of the nomadic Kyrgyz.¹

In Miass, on 14 September, Humboldt celebrated his sixtieth birthday with the local apothecary, a man whom history would remember as Vladimir Lenin’s grandfather. The next day Humboldt dispatched a letter to Cancrin, recounting that he had reached a turning point in his life. Though he hadn’t achieved all he wanted before old age diminished his strength, he had seen the Altai and the steppes which had given him the greatest satisfaction and also the data he needed. ‘Thirty years ago,’ he wrote to Cancrin, ‘I was in the forests of the Orinoco and in the Cordilleras.’ Now he had finally been able to assemble the remaining ‘great bulk of ideas’. The year 1829 was ‘the most important in my restless life’.

From Miass they continued west to Orenburg where Humboldt once again decided to deviate from their route. Instead of turning north-west towards Moscow and then St Petersburg, he now went south to the Caspian Sea – another lengthy unauthorized detour. As a young boy he had dreamed of travelling to the Caspian Sea, he wrote to Cancrin on the morning of his departure. He had to see this huge inland sea before it was too late for him.

It was probably the news of Russia’s victory against the Ottomans that encouraged Humboldt to change his plans. Cancrin had kept Humboldt up to date throughout by express courier. Over the past months, Russian soldiers had marched towards Constantinople from both sides of the Black Sea, defeating the Ottoman army time and again. As more Turkish strongholds fell, Sultan Mahmud II had realized that victory was on Russia’s side. On 14 September the Treaty of Adrianople was signed and the war ended – an enormous region that had been inaccessible and too dangerous for Humboldt opened up. Only ten days later Humboldt informed his brother that they would now travel to Astrakhan on the banks of the Volga, where the great river discharged into the northern end of the Caspian Sea. The ‘peace outside the gates of Constantinople’, Humboldt wrote to Cancrin, was ‘glorious’ news.

In mid-October, they reached Astrakhan and boarded a steamer to explore the Caspian Sea and the Volga. The Caspian Sea was known for its fluctuating water levels – a fact that fascinated Humboldt much as he had been intrigued three decades previously by Lake Valencia in Venezuela. He was convinced, he later told scientists in St Petersburg, that measuring stations should be set up around the lake to record the water’s rise and fall methodically but also to investigate a possible movement of the ground; volcanoes and other subterraneous forces might be the reason for the changes, he suggested. Later he speculated that the Caspian Depression – the region around the northern part of the Caspian Sea, which lay more than ninety feet below sea level – might have sunk in tandem with the rising of the high plateaux in Central Asia and the Himalaya.

Today we know that there are multiple reasons for the changing water levels. One factor is the amount of water coming in from the Volga which is tied to the rainfall of a huge catchment region – all of which in turn relates to the atmospheric conditions of the North Atlantic. Many scientists now believe that these fluctuations reflect climatic changes in the northern hemisphere, making the Caspian Sea an important field of study for climate change investigations. Other theories claim that the water levels are affected by tectonic forces. These are exactly the kinds of global connections that interested Humboldt. To see the Caspian Sea, Humboldt wrote to Wilhelm, was one of the ‘highlights of my life’.

It was now the end of October and the Russian winter was almost upon them. Humboldt was expected first in Moscow and then in St Petersburg to report on his expedition. He was happy. He had seen deep mines and snow-capped mountains as well as the largest dry steppe in the world and the Caspian Sea. He had drunk tea with the Chinese commanders at the Mongolian border as well as fermented mare’s milk with the Kyrgyz. Between Astrakhan and Volgograd, the learned khan of the Kalmyk people had organized a concert in Humboldt’s honour during which a Kalmyk choir sang Mozart overtures. Humboldt had watched Saiga antelopes chasing across the Kazakh Steppe, snakes sunbathing on a Volga island and a naked Indian fakir in Astrakhan. He had correctly predicted the presence of diamonds in Siberia, had against his instructions talked to political exiles and had even met a Polish man who had been deported to Orenburg and who proudly showed Humboldt his copy of Political Essay of New Spain. During the previous months Humboldt had survived an anthrax epidemic and had lost weight because he found the Siberian food indigestible. He had plunged his thermometer into deep wells, carried his instruments across the Russian Empire and taken thousands of measurements. He and his team returned with rocks, pressed plants, fish in vials and stuffed animals as well as ancient manuscripts and books for Wilhelm.

As before, Humboldt was not just interested in botany, zoology or geology but also in agriculture and forestry. Noting the rapid disappearance of the forests around the mining centres, he had written to Cancrin about the ‘lack of timber’ and advised him against using steam engines to drain flooded mines because doing so would consume too many trees. In the Baraba Steppe, where the anthrax epidemic had raged, Humboldt had noted the environmental impact of intense husbandry. The region was (and is) an important agricultural centre of Siberia, and the farmers there had drained swamps and lakes to turn the land into fields and pastures. This had caused a considerable desiccation of the marshy plains which would continue to increase, Humboldt concluded.

Humboldt was searching for the ‘connections which linked all phenomena and all forces of nature’. Russia was the final chapter in his understanding of nature – he consolidated, confirmed and set into relation all the data he had collected over the past decades. Comparison not discovery was his guiding theme. Later, when he published the results of the Russian expedition in two books,² Humboldt wrote about the destruction of forests and of humankind’s long-term changes to the environment. When he listed the three ways in which the human species was affecting the climate, he named deforestation, ruthless irrigation and, perhaps most prophetically, the ‘great masses of steam and gas’ produced in the industrial centres. No one but Humboldt had looked at the relationship between humankind and nature like this before.³

Humboldt finally arrived back in St Petersburg on 13 November 1829. His endurance had been astonishing. Since their departure from St Petersburg on 20 May, his party had travelled 10,000 miles in less than six months, passing through 658 post stations and using 12,244 horses. Humboldt felt healthier than ever, strengthened by being outdoors for so long and by the excitement of their adventures. Everybody wanted to hear about his expedition. He had already suffered a similar spectacle in Moscow a few days earlier when half the city seemed to have turned up to meet him, dressed in gala uniforms and decorated in ribbons. In both cities parties were held in his honour and speeches were given, hailing him as the ‘Prometheus of our days’. No one seemed to mind that he had deviated from his original route.

These formal receptions irritated Humboldt. Rather than talking about his climate observations and geological investigations, he found himself forced to admire a plait made of Peter the Great’s hair. Whereas the royal family wanted to learn more about the spectacular discovery of diamonds, the Russian scientists were keen to see his collections. And so it continued with Humboldt being handed on from one person to another. No matter how much he disliked these moments, he remained charming and patient. The Russian poet Alexander Pushkin was smitten by Humboldt. ‘Captivating speeches gushed from his mouth,’ Pushkin said, much like the water spouting from the marble lion in the fountain of the Grand Cascade in the royal palace in St Petersburg. In private Humboldt complained about the ceremonial pomp. ‘I’m almost collapsing under the burden of duties,’ he wrote to Wilhelm, but he also tried to exploit some of his fame and influence. Though he had refrained from publicly criticizing the conditions of the peasants and labourers, he now asked the tsar to pardon some of the deported people he had met during his travels.

The Imperial Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg (Illustration Credit 16.3)

Humboldt also delivered a speech at the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg that would trigger a huge international scientific collaboration. For decades Humboldt had been interested in geomagnetism – just as he was in climate – because it was a global force. Determined to learn more about what he called the ‘mysterious march of the magnetic needle’, Humboldt now suggested the establishment of a chain of observation stations across the Russian Empire. The aim was to discover whether the magnetic variations were terrestrial in origin – generated, for example, by climatic changes – or caused by the sun. Geomagnetism was a key phenomenon in order to understand the correlation between the heavens and the earth because it could ‘reveal to us’, Humboldt said, ‘what passes at great depths in the interior of our planet or in the upper regions of our atmosphere’. Humboldt had long investigated the phenomenon. In the Andes he had discovered the magnetic equator, and during his enforced stay in Berlin in 1806, when the French army in Prussia had prevented his return to Paris, he and a colleague had made magnetic observations every hour on the hour – day and night – an experiment that he had then repeated on his return in 1827. After his expedition in Russia, Humboldt also recommended that his fellow Germans, along with the British, French and American authorities, should all work together to collect more global data. He appealed to them as the members of a ‘great confederation’.

Within a few years a web of magnetic stations laced the globe: at St Petersburg, Beijing and Alaska, Canada and Jamaica, Australia and New Zealand, Sri Lanka and even the remote island of St Helena in the South Atlantic where Napoleon had been incarcerated. Almost two million observations would be taken in three years. Like today’s climate change scientists, those who worked at these new stations were collecting global data, participating in what we would now call a Big Science Project. This was an international collaboration on a vast scale – the so-called ‘Magnetic Crusade’.

Humboldt also used his St Petersburg speech to encourage climate studies across the vast Russian Empire. He wanted data related to the effects of the destruction of forests on the climate – the first large-scale study to investigate the impact that man had on climatic conditions. It was the duty of scientists, Humboldt said, to examine the changeable elements in the ‘economy of nature’.

Two weeks later, on 15 December, Humboldt departed from St Petersburg. Before he left, he returned one-third of the money he had been given for expenses, asking Cancrin to use it to fund another explorer – the acquisition of knowledge was more important than his personal financial gain. His carriages were filled with the collections he had made for the Prussian king – so loaded with specimens that they were a ‘natural history cabinet’ on wheels, Humboldt said. Packed in between were his instruments, his notebooks and an opulent seven-foot vase on a plinth that the tsar had given him along with an expensive sable fur.⁴

It was freezing cold as they raced towards Berlin. Near Riga, Humboldt’s coachman lost control on a treacherously icy road and the carriage crashed full speed into a bridge. When the impact broke the railing, one of their horses fell into the river eight feet below, pulling his freight along. One side of the carriage was completely shattered. Humboldt and the other passengers were catapulted out, landing just four inches from the edge of the bridge. Amazingly only the horse was injured but the carriage was so damaged that the repairs delayed them for a few days. Humboldt was still excited. Dangling close to the edge, they must have looked rather ‘picturesque’, he mused. He also joked that with three learned men in the carriage, they had of course come up with a great many ‘contradictory theories’ about the causes of the crash. They spent Christmas in Königsberg (today’s Kaliningrad) and on 28 December 1829 Humboldt arrived in Berlin, fizzing with so many ideas that he was ‘steaming like a pot full of boiling water’, a friend reported to Goethe.

This was Humboldt’s last expedition. He would not travel the world any more himself, but his views on nature were already spreading through the minds of thinkers in Europe and America with seemingly unstoppable force.

¹ The Kazakh Steppe is the largest dry steppe in the world, stretching from the Altai mountain range in the east to the Caspian Sea in the west.

² The two books were Fragmens de géologie et de climatologie asiatiques (1831) and Asie centrale, recherches sur les chaînes de montagnes et la climatogie comparée (1843).

³ Humboldt’s views were so new and different from what was generally believed at the time that even his translator questioned the arguments. The translator added a footnote in the German edition which stated that the influence of deforestation as presented by Humboldt was ‘questionable’.

⁴ Humboldt gave the vase to the Altes Museum in Berlin. Today it is in the Alte Nationalgalerie.